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When the
Going Gets Rough
by Pema
Chodron
Shambhala Sun Magazine | July 1998
The most
straightforward advice on how to discover your true
nature is this:
practice not causing harm to anyone neither yourself
nor others and
every day, do what you can to help.
If you take this instruction
to heart and begin to use it,
you will probably find very quickly that
it is not so easy.
Often, before you know it, someone has provoked you
and either directly or indirectly, you've let them have it.
Therefore, when the intention is sincere but the going
gets rough,
most of us could use some help. We could
use further instruction on
how to lighten up and turn
around our well-established habits of
striking out and blaming.
The four methods for holding your seat
provide just such
support for developing the patience to stay open to
what's
happening, instead of acting on automatic pilot. These four
methods are:
1.. Not setting up the target for the arrow
2.. Connecting with the heart
3.. Seeing obstacles
as teachers
4.. Regarding all that occurs as a dream
First,
if you have not set up the target it cannot
be hit by an arrow. This
is to say that each time you
retaliate with words and actions that
hurt, you are
strengthening the habit of anger. Then, without doubt,
plenty of arrows will always be coming your way.
The pattern
of striking out may already be very strong;
however, each time you are
provoked you are given a
chance to do something different. The choice
is yours:
you can further strengthen your painful and crippling habit
or you can shake it up a bit by holding your seat. Each time
you
sit still with the restlessness and heat of anger neither
acting it
out nor repressing it you are tamed and strengthened.
Each time you
act on the anger or suppress it, you are weakened;
you become more and
more like a walking target. Then, as the
years go by, almost
everything makes you mad.
So this is the first method: remember
that you set the target
up yourself, and only you can take it down.
Understand that if
you hold your seat when you want to retaliate even
for 1.5
seconds longer than ever before you are starting to dissolve
a pattern of aggression that, if you let it, will continue to hurt
you and others forever.
Second is the instruction for
connecting with the heart:
in times of anger, you can contact the
kindness and
compassion that you already have. When someone who
is
insane starts to harm you, there is the possibility of
understanding
that they don't know what they are doing.
There is the possibility of
contacting your heart and feeling
sadness that this poor being is out
of control and is harming
themselves by hurting others. There is the
possibility that even
though you feel fear, you do not feel hatred or
anger you might
even wish to help this person if you can.
Actually, a lunatic is far less crazy than a sane person
who
harms you, for so-called sane people have the potential
to realize
that they are sowing seeds of their own misery,
their own confusion,
their own dissatisfaction. Their present
aggression is producing
further and more intense patterns of
aggression. The life of one who
is always angry is painful
and generally very lonely. The one who
harms you is under
the influence of patterns that could continue to
produce suffering
forever.
So this is the second method:
remember that the one who
harms you does not need to be provoked
further and neither
do you. You can connect with your heart and
recognize that,
in this very moment, millions are burning with the
fire of
aggression just as you two are. Sit still with the
restlessness
and pain of the anger, neither acting it out nor
repressing it,
and let the searing quality of the energy tame you and
strengthen
you and make you kinder.
Third is the instruction
on seeing difficulties as teachers.
If there is no teacher around to
give you direct personal
guidance on how to stop causing harm, never
fear! Life
itself will provide the opportunities for learning how to
hold
your seat. The troublemaker, for instance, who so disturbs
you without this person how could you ever get the chance
to
practice patience? How could you ever get the chance
to know the
energy of anger so intimately that it loses its power?
There is a
saying that the teacher is always with us. The
teacher is always
showing us precisely where we are at
and encouraging us to relax and
open our hearts and minds,
encouraging us to not speak and act in the
same old stuck
ways, encouraging us also not to repress or dissociate.
So with this one who is scaring you or insulting you, do
you
retaliate as you have one hundred thousand times
before, or do you
start to get smart and do something
different?
Right at the
point when you are about to blow your top,
remember this: you are a
disciple being taught how to
sit still with the edginess and
discomfort of the energy.
You are a disciple being challenged to hold
your seat
and open to the situation with as much courage and as
much kindness as you possibly can.
Of course, like countless
students before you, you may
often feel, I'm not ready for this. So
sometimes you will
run away, and sometimes you will kick and scream,
and
sometimes you will hold your seat. Somehow, gradually,
all of
this becomes part of your ability not to cause harm
and part of your
ability to understand the pain and confusion
of others and to help
them.
The problem with these or any instructions is that we have
a tendency to get serious and rigid about them. We get tense
and
uptight about trying to relax and be patient. This is where
the fourth
instruction comes in: it is helpful to contemplate
that the one who is
angry, the anger itself, and the recipient
of that anger are all
happening as if in a dream.
You can regard your life as a movie in
which you are
temporarily the leading player. You can reflect on the
essencelessness of your current situation rather than
putting such
big importance on everything. This big-deal
struggle, this big-deal
problematic (or self-righteous) me,
and this big-deal person who
opposes you, could all be
lightened up considerably.
When you
awaken from sleep you know that the enemies
in your dreams are an
illusion. That realization does a lot
to cut through the drama. In the
same way, instead of acting
out of impulse, you could slow down and
ask yourself, Who
is this monolithic me that has been so offended? And
who is
this other person that they can trigger me like this? What is
this
praise and blame that it can hook me like a fish, that it can
burn me like a flame burns a moth? What is going on here
that
outer things have the power to propel me from hope to
fear, from happy
to miserable, like a ping-pong ball?
Contemplate that these outer
things, as well as these emotions,
as well as this huge sense of me,
are passing and essenceless,
like a memory, like a movie, like a
dream.
When you find yourself captured by aggression, remember
this: there is no basis for striking out or for repressing. There
is no basis for hatred or for shame. Whether awake or asleep,
we
are simply moving from one dreamlike state to another.
Recalling
this instruction, you just might find it helps you
to loosen your grip
and open your mind.
These four methods for turning around anger
and for learning
a little patience come to us from the Kadampa masters
of
eleventh-century Tibet. These instructions have provided
encouragement for practitioners in the past and they are
just as
useful in the present. These same Kadampa masters
advised that we not
procrastinate. They urged us to use
these instructions immediately on
this very day and not say
to ourselves, "I will do it in the future
when the days are longer."
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