Whether it's ourselves, our lovers, bosses, children, a local Scrooge, or the political situation, it's more daring and real to not shut anyone out of our hearts and not make the other into an enemy. If we begin to live like this, we'll find that we actually can't make things completely right or completely wrong anymore, because things are a lot more slippery and playful than that. Everything is ambiguous; everything is always shifting and changing, and there are as many different takes on any given situation as there are people involved. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable...
If we are wholehearted about wanting to be there for other people without shutting anybody or anything out of our hearts, our pretty little self-image of how kind or compassionate we are gets completely blown. We're always being tested and we're always meeting our match. The more you're willing to open your heart, the more challenges come along that make you wan to shut it.
You can't do this work in a safety zone. You have to go out into the market place and live your life like everybody else, but with the added ingredient of not wanting to shut anything out of your heart. Maitri ― loving-kindness ― has to go very deep, because when you practice it, you're going to see everything about yourself. Every time your buttons get pushed is like a big mirror showing you your own face, and like the evil stepmother in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," you want the mirror to tell you what you want to hear ― even if it's that you haven't been kind or that you're selfish. Somehow you can even use your insight into your limitations to keep yourself feeling all right.
What we don't want is any unforeseen feedback from the mirror. What we don't want is to be naked, exposed. We have blind spots, and we put a lot of energy into staying blind. One day the wicked stepmother went to the mirror and said, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" and instead of, "You are, sweetheart," the mirror said, "Snow White." And just like us, she didn't want to hear it. Nevertheless, I think we all know that there's no point in blaming the mirror when it shows you your own face, and there's certainly no point in breaking the mirror...
It was Pogo, a cartoon character created by Walt Kelly, who said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." This particular slogan now appears a lot in the environment movement. It isn't somebody else who's polluting the rivers ― it's us. The cause of confusion and bewilderment and pollution and violence isn't really someone else's problem: it's something we can come to know in ourselves. But in order to do that we have to understand that we have met the friend and his is me. The more we make friends with ourselves, the more we can see that our ways of shutting down and closing off are rooted in the mistaken thinking that the way to get happy is to blame someone else.
It's a little uncertain who is "us" and who is "them." Bernard Glassman Roshi, who does a lot of work with the homeless in New York, said that he doesn't work with the homeless because he's such a great guy but because going into the areas of society that he has rejected is the only way to make friends with parts of himself that he's rejected. It's all interrelated. We work on ourselves in order to help others, but we also help other in order to work on ourselves. That's a very important point.
― Pema Chödrön
From The Pocket Pema Chödrön
Also found in Start Where You Are
and When Things Fall Apart
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