Opening the door reflects our intention to remove our armor, to take off our mask, to face our fears. It is only to the degree that we become willing to face our own feelings that we can really help others. So we make a commitment that for the rest of our lives, we'll train in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of our own reactivity, our own survival mechanisms, our own propensities to be hooked...
It's the troublemakers in your life who cause you to see that you've shut down, that you've armored yourself, that you've hidden your head in the sand. If you didn't get angry at them, it you didn't get fed up with them, you would never be able to cultivate patience. If you didn't envy them, if you weren't jealous of them, you would never think to stretch beyond your mean-spiritedness and try to rejoice in their good fortune. If you never met your match, you might think you were better than everybody else and arrogantly criticize their neurotic behavior rather than do something about your own.
We make this commitment, we begin an ongoing training in loving kindness and compassion. One way to do this is to continually ask ourselves: How can I be of service? We can make this an everyday practice...
Often it is the seemingly irresolvable relationship that teaches us the most, once we're willing to connect with what Chögyam Trungpa called "the genuine heart of sadness." As warriors in training we do our best to hold the person in our heart without hypocrisy.... We can send the person forgiveness and caring. Believe me, that feels a whole lot better than poisoning ourselves with bitterness...
With the warrior commitment we gradually become a vehicle for connecting others with their unfettered mind, with their intrinsic goodness, so that they, too, can begin to embrace the groundlessness of being human as a source of inspiration and joy. Our wish for all beings, including ourselves, is to live fearlessly with uncertainly and change. The compassion and kindness required for this are limitless, but we start with whatever we have right now and build on that...
This commitment challenges us to question our conventional mind-set, question reality as we usually assume it to be. Each of us lives in a reality we take to be the real one. This is how it is, we insist. End of story. But isn't even the consensus reality we share as human beings just a projection of our human sense perceptions? Animals don't have the same perceptions as we do; therefore, they don't share the same reality. So what is the "real" reality? Is it ours? Is it a dog's? A bird's? A fly's? The answer is there isn't one "real" reality. Reality is wherever we find ourselves in the moment, and it's not as solid, not as certain, as we think.
One of the astronauts who went to the moon later described the experience looking back at Earth from that perspective. Earth looked so small, he said. Just a single sphere hanging in space. It made him very sad to realize that we have divided the world arbitrarily into countries that we're fiercely attached to, with borders we keep waging wars to protect. What we do just doesn't make sense, he realized. We have just this one Earth with one people to take care of it, and the way we're going about it is crazy.
Chief Seattle had the same insight more than a hundred years ago: "We are all Child of the Great Spirit. We all belong to Mother Earth. Our planet is in great trouble, and if we keep carrying old grudges and do not work together, we will all die."
... If your mind is expansive and unfettered, you will find yourself in a more accomodating world, a place thast's endlessly interesting and alive. That quality isn't inherent in the place but in your state of mind. The warrior longs to communicate that all of us have access to our basic goodness and that genuine freedome comes from going beyond labels and projections, beyond bias and prejudice, and taking care of each other.
- Pema Chödrön, excerpted from Living Beautifully
with Uncertainty and Change
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment