Pema Chödrön is one of my favorite writers about Buddhism. She's an American Buddhist nun and one of the foremost students of Chogyam Trungpa, a renowned meditation master. Here's some excerpts from a wonderful little book by Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape.
I love how she describes meditation as simply attending to who we are right now, with no intent of improving ourselves.
The book is a collection of talks she gave during a one-month practice period in 1989, which explains some repetition in what I've shared below, which come from the first eight of eighteen talks in the book.
When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are.
...But loving kindness -- maitri -- toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness.
The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whatever we are right now, just as we are.
...Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have.
Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn't do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.
We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we're doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are and what we're doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves.
While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world's greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecation, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight.
Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.
...The path is a sense of wonder, becoming a two- or three-year-old child again, wanting to know all the unknowable things, beginning to question everything.
We know we're never really going to find the answers, because these kinds of questions come from having a hunger and a passion for life -- they have nothing to do with resolving anything or tying it all up into a neat little package.
This kind of questioning is the journey itself.
...The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.
...The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there's a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.
That is the innocent, naive misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.
Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It's about seeing how we react to all these things.
It's seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It's not about trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.
...No one else can really sort out for you what to accept -- what opens up your world -- and what to reject -- what seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery. This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn't have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject.
...Now. That's the key. Now, now. now. Mindfulness trains you to be awake and alive, fully curious, about what? Well, about now, right? You sit in meditation and the out-breath is now and waking up from your fantasies is now and even the fantasies are now, although they seem to take you into the past and into the future.
...Whatever you're given can wake you up or put you to sleep. That's the challenge of now: What are you going to do with what you have already -- your body, your speech, your mind?
...There isn't any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life.
...Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems.
...There are wars all over the world because people are insulted that someone else doesn't agree with their belief system. Everybody is guilty of it. It's what is called fundamental theism. You want something to hold on to, you want to say, "Finally I have found it. This is it, and now I feel confirmed and secure and righteous."
Buddhism is not free of it either. This is a human thing. But in Buddhism there is a teaching that would undercut all this, if people would only listen to it. It says, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha."
This means that if you can find Buddha and say, "It's this way; Buddha is like this," then you had better kill that "Buddha" that you found, that you can say is like this. Contemplative and mystical Christians, Hindus, Jews, people of all faiths and nonfaiths can also have this perspective: if you meet the Christ that can be named, kill that Christ. If you meet the Muhammad or the Jehovah or whoever that can be named and held on to and believed in, smash it.
..."When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha" means that when you see that you're grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it's called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself.
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