Page: 5. These qualities [basic to all human beings] are natural intelligence, natural warmth, and natural openness.
Page: 7. But as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds. We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves. When we’re in a tight spot, we can experiment with not strengthening the aggressive habit and see what happens.
Page: 8. pausing becomes something that nurtures you; you begin to prefer it to being all caught up. People who have found this helpful create ways of interjecting pausing into their busy lives. For instance, they’ll put a sign on their computer. It could be a word, or a face, an image, a symbol—anything that reminds them. Or they’ll decide, “Every time the phone rings, I’m going to pause.” Or “When I go to open my computer, I’m going to pause.” Or “When I open the refrigerator, or wait in line, or brush my teeth. . . .” You can come up with anything that happens often during your day. You’ll just be doing whatever you’re doing, and then, for a few seconds, you pause and take three conscious breaths.
Blue highlight | Page: 14. All kinds of things happen when we meditate—everything from thoughts to shortness of breath to visual images, from physical discomfort to mental distress to peak experiences. All of that happens, and the basic attitude is, “No big deal.” The key point is that, through it all, we train in being open and receptive to whatever arises.
Blue highlight | Page: 14. What I’ve noticed about the people whom I consider to be awake is this: They’re fully conscious of whatever is happening. Their minds don’t go off anywhere. They just stay right here with chaos, with silence, with a carnival, in an emergency room, on a mountainside: they’re completely receptive and open to what’s happening. It’s at the same time the simplest and the most profound thing—rather like one continual pause.
Blue highlight | Page: 15 In the face of anything we don’t like, we automatically try to escape. In other words, scratching is our habitual way of trying to get away, trying to escape our fundamental discomfort, the fundamental itch of restlessness and insecurity, or that very uneasy feeling: that feeling that something bad is about to happen.
Blue highlight | Page: 15 With meditation we train in settling down with whatever we're feeling, including the addictive urge to scratch [here, the metaphor is about kids with poison ivy], the addictive urge to avoid discomfort at any cost. We train in just staying present, open, and awake, no matter what’s going on.
Blue highlight | Page: 16. The three classic styles of looking for relief in the wrong places are pleasure seeking, numbing out, and using aggression: we either zone out, or we grasp. Or perhaps we develop the style of scratching in which we obsess and rage about other people or indulge in self-hatred.
Blue highlight | Page: 17 There is a deep-seated tendency, it’s almost a compulsion, to distract ourselves, even when we’re not consciously feeling uncomfortable. Everybody feels a little bit of an itch all the time. There’s a background hum of edginess, boredom, restlessness. As I’ve said, during my time in retreat where there were almost no distractions, even there I experienced this deep uneasiness.
Blue highlight | Page: 19. Everything I did, the way I smiled, the way I talked to people, the way I tried to please everybody—it was all to avoid feeling this way. I realized that our whole façade, the little song and dance we all do, is based on trying to avoid the groundlessness that permeates our lives.
Blue highlight | Page: 19. One way to practice staying present is to pause, look out, and take three deep breaths. Another way is to simply sit still for a while and listen. Simply listen to the sounds in the room. For one minute, listen to the sounds close to you. For one minute, listen to the sounds at a distance. Just listen attentively. The sound isn’t good or bad. It’s just sound.
Blue highlight | Page: 20 when you notice that your mind has wandered off, you gently come back. You come back because the present is so precious and fleeting, and because without some reference point to come back to, we never notice that we’re distracted—that once again we’re looking for an alternative to being fully present, an alternative to being here with things just exactly as they are rather than the way we would prefer them to be.
Blue highlight | Page: 23 The fundamental, most basic shenpa is to ego itself: attachment to our identity, the image of who we think we are. When we experience our identity as being threatened, our self-absorption gets very strong, and shenpa automatically arises. Then there is the spin-off—such as attachment to our possessions or to our views and opinions. For example, someone criticizes you.
Blue highlight | Page: 26 Not acting out, or refraining, is very interesting. It’s also called renunciation in the Buddhist teachings. The Tibetan word for renunciation is shenluk, and it means turning shenpa upside down, shaking it up completely. It means getting unhooked. Renunciation isn’t about renouncing food, or sex, or your lifestyle. We’re not referring to giving up the things themselves. We’re talking about loosening our attachment, the shenpa we have to these things.
Blue highlight | Page: 26 In general, Buddhism encourages us never to reject what is problematic but rather to become very familiar with it. And so it is here: we are urged to acknowledge our shenpa, see it clearly, experience it fully—without acting out or repressing.
Blue highlight | Page: 31Our energy and the energy of the universe are always in flux, but we have little tolerance for this unpredictability, and we have little ability to see ourselves and the world as an exciting, fluid situation that is always fresh and new. Instead we get stuck in a rut—the rut of “I want” and “I don’t want,” the rut of shenpa, the rut of continually getting hooked by our personal preferences.
Blue highlight | Page: 31 The source of our unease is the unfulfillable longing for a lasting certainty and security, for something solid to hold on to. Unconsciously we expect that if we could just get the right job, the right partner, the right something our lives would run smoothly. When anything unexpected or not to our liking happens, we think that something has gone wrong.
Blue highlight | Page: 31 Even at the most mundane level, we get so easily triggered—someone cuts in front of us, we get seasonal allergies, our favorite restaurant is closed when we arrive for dinner. We are never encouraged to experience the ebb and flow of our moods, of our health, of the weather, of outer events—pleasant and unpleasant—in their fullness. Instead we stay caught in a fearful, narrow holding pattern of avoiding any pain and continually seeking comfort. This is the universal dilemma.
Blue highlight | Page: 32 The approach here is radical. We are encouraged to get comfortable with, begin to relax with, lean in to, whatever the experience may be. We are encouraged to drop the storyline and simply pause, look out, and breathe. Simply be present for a few seconds,
Blue highlight | Page: 39 There is a formal practice for learning to stay with the energy of uncomfortable emotions—a practice for transmuting the poison of negative emotions into wisdom. It is similar to alchemy, the medieval technique of changing base metal into gold. You don’t get rid of the base metal—it isn’t thrown out and replaced by gold. Instead, the crude metal itself is the source of the precious gold.
Blue highlight | Page: 41 Pete was obsessed with the Star Wars series at that time, so one day when this was happening, I asked him, “Pete, what would Obi-Wan Kenobi do?” Pete got a curious, receptive look on his face. I could see him contemplating my question, and he began to sit up very straight and smile. He suddenly manifested as a powerful person who trusted in himself. But then he couldn’t resist—
Blue highlight | Page: 41 If we choose to work with this kind of practice, it’s wise to start by practicing with little bouts of shenpa, the small irritations that happen all the time. If we become familiar with catching ourselves, acknowledging that we’re hooked, and pausing in these ordinary everyday situations, then when major upheavals come, the practice will be available to us automatically.
Blue highlight | Page: 46 In meditation we train in letting our thoughts go again and again, over and over, and go right to the root of our discontent. We allow the space to see the very mechanics of how we keep ourselves stuck.
Blue highlight | Page: 47 Our attitude can be that we keep getting another chance, rather than that we’re just getting another bad deal. For just a moment or two, pause and contact whatever you are feeling right now. If you can precede this by recollecting something that’s bothering you, that will be even more helpful. If you can contact feelings such as worry, hopelessness, impatience, resentment, righteous indignation, or craving, that will be especially rewarding.
Orange highlight | Page: 47 For a moment or more, touch the quality, the mood, the bodily felt sensation free of the storyline.
Orange highlight | Page: 48 If we can get curious about this emotional reaction, if we can relax and feel it, if we can experience it fully and let it be, then it’s no problem. We might even experience it as simply frozen energy whose true nature is fluid, dynamic, and creative—just an ungraspable sensation free of our interpretation.
Blue highlight | Page: 48 Our repetitive suffering does not come from this uncomfortable sensation but from what happens next, what I’ve been calling following the momentum, spinning off, or getting swept away. It comes from rejecting our own energy when it comes in a form we don’t like.
Blue highlight | Page: 49 Instead of getting better and better at avoiding, we can learn to accept the present moment as if we had invited it, and work with it instead of against it, making it our ally rather than our enemy.
Orange highlight | Page: 50. This is a work in progress, a process of uncovering our natural openness, uncovering our natural intelligence
Orange highlight | Page: 50 and warmth. I have discovered, just as my teachers always told me, that we already have what we need. The wisdom, the strength, the confidence, the awakened heart and mind are always accessible, here, now, always. We are just uncovering them.
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We are rediscovering them. We’re not inventing them or importing them from somewhere else. They’re here. That’s why when we feel caught in darkness, suddenly the clouds can part. Out of nowhere we cheer up or relax or experience the vastness of our minds. No one else gives this to you. People will support you and help you with teachings and practices, as they have supported and helped me, but you yourself experience your unlimited potential.
Blue highlight | Page: 50 Our devotion to a teacher has nothing to do with his or her lifestyle or worldly accomplishments. It’s their state of mind, the quality of their heart that we resonate with.
Blue highlight | Page: 51 spiritual toolbox.
Blue highlight | Page: 51 He described the basic practice as being completely present. And emphasized that it allowed the space for our neuroses to come to the surface. It was not, as he put it, “a vacation from irritation.”
Blue highlight | Page: 53 we’re in this interesting middle state, somewhere between not always caught and not always able to resist biting the hook. This is called “the spiritual path.” In fact, this path is all there is. How we relate moment by moment to what is happening on the spot is all there really is. We give up all hope of fruition and in the process we just keep learning what it means to appreciate being right here.
Blue highlight | Page: 54 Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves.
Blue highlight | Page: 55 When we begin to see clearly what we do, how we get hooked and swept away by old habits, our usual tendency is to use that as a reason to get discouraged, a reason to feel really bad about ourselves. Instead, we could realize how remarkable it is that we actually have the capacity to see ourselves honestly, and that doing this takes courage. It is moving in the direction of seeing our life as a teacher
Blue highlight | Page: 55 stay present, but learning to stay with a sense of humor, learning to stay with loving-kindness toward ourselves and with the outer situation, learning to take joy in the magic ingredient of honest self-reflection. Chögyam Trungpa called this “making friends with ourselves.” This friendship is based on knowing all parts of ourselves without prejudice. It’s an unconditional friendliness.
Blue highlight | Page: 56 In the Buddhist teachings on compassion there’s a practice called “one at the beginning, and one at the end.” When I wake up in the morning, I do this practice. I make an aspiration for the day. For example, I might say, “Today, may I acknowledge whenever I get hooked.” Or, “May I not speak or act out of anger.” I try not to make it too grandiose, as in, “Today, may I be completely free of all neurosis.” I begin with a clear intention, and then I go about the day with this in mind. In the evening, I review what happened. This is the part that can be so loaded for Western people. We have an unfortunate tendency to emphasize our failures. But when Dzigar Kongtrül teaches about this, he says that for him, when he sees that he has connected with his aspiration even once briefly during the whole day, he feels a sense of rejoicing. He also says that when he recognizes he lost it completely, he rejoices that he has the capacity to see that.
Blue highlight | Page: 58 when we review our day, it’s common to perceive it all as bleak, as if we didn’t get anything right. But maybe if somebody else is there, a partner for example, he or she might say, “What about the fact that you were getting all worked up, and you went out for a walk and came back calmed down?” Or, “I saw you smile at that man who was sitting in the corner all hunched over and depressed, and I saw him brighten up.” Sometimes other people have to point this out to us.
Orange highlight | Page: 59
our most ordinary days we have moments of happiness, moments of comfort and enjoyment, moments of seeing something that pleased us, something that touched us, moments of contacting the tenderness of our hearts. We can take joy in that. I find that it’s essential during the day to actually note when I feel happiness or when something positive happens, and begin to cherish those moments as precious. Gradually we can begin to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is, with its ups and downs, its failures and successes, its roughness and smoothness.
Blue highlight | Page: 59 Until we start this journey of acknowledging when we’re being hooked, little things unconsciously trigger us all the time. The slightest setback or annoyance will trigger us and we’ll be blind to what’s going on. Life just becomes increasingly more of a struggle and we never can figure out why. Once we start seeing, of course we still get triggered, but there’s a very important difference: the magic of recognition, the miracle of compassionate acknowledgment. It’s the miracle of being conscious rather than unconscious. The more we do it, the more our ability to do it grows.
Blue highlight | Page: 61 We have this mistaken idea that either we have regret or we get rid of it. Trungpa Rinpoche talked about holding the sadness of life in our heart while never forgetting the beauty of the world and the goodness of being alive. There comes a time when we are able to be pierced to the heart by our own suffering, and the suffering of others, and by our own regrets, without it dragging us down. The Dalai Lama went on to say that being dragged down by regrets or held back by them would be to no one’s benefit, so he learns from his mistakes and goes forward doing all he can to help others.
Blue highlight | Page: 63 If you are inclined to train in being open-endedly present to whatever arises—to life’s energy, to other people, and to this world—after a while you’ll realize you’re open and present to something that’s not staying the same. For example, if you are truly open and receptive to another person, it can be quite a revelation to realize that they aren’t exactly the same on Friday as they were on Monday, that each of us can be perceived freshly any day of the week. But if that person happens to be your parent or sibling, your partner or your boss, you are usually blinded and see them as predictably always the same. We have a tendency to label one another as an irritating person, a bore, a threat to our happiness and security, as inferior or superior; and this goes way beyond our close circle of acquaintances at home or at work.
Blue highlight | Page: 71 Instead of being not here, instead of being caught up, absorbed in thinking, planning, worrying—caught in the cocoon where you’re cut off from your sense perceptions, cut off from the sounds and the sights, cut off from the power and magic of the moment—instead of that you could choose to pause. When you go out for a walk in the country, in the city, anywhere at all, just stop now and then. Punctuate your life with these moments.
Blue highlight | Page: 75 The natural warmth that emerges when we experience pain includes all the heart qualities: love, compassion, gratitude, tenderness in any form. It also includes loneliness, sorrow, and the shakiness of fear. Before these vulnerable feelings harden, before the storylines kick in, these generally unwanted feelings are pregnant with kindness, with openness and caring. These feelings that we’ve become so accomplished at avoiding can soften us, can transform us.
Blue highlight | Page: 76 Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight, she points to scientific evidence showing that the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again. Our usual process is that we automatically do revive it by feeding it with an internal conversation about how another person is the source of our discomfort. Maybe we strike out at them or at someone else—all because we don’t want to go near the unpleasantness of what we’re feeling. This is a very ancient habit. It allows our natural warmth to be so obscured that people like you and me, who have the capacity for empathy and understanding, get so clouded that we can harm each other. When we hate those who activate our fears or insecurities, those who bring up unwanted feelings, and see them as the sole cause of our discomfort, then we can dehumanize them, belittle them, and abuse them.
Blue highlight | Page: 84 I’ve known many people who have spent years exercising daily, getting massages, doing yoga, faithfully following one food or vitamin regimen after another, pursuing spiritual teachers and different styles of meditation, all in the name of taking care of themselves. Then something bad happens to them and all those years don’t seem to have added up to the inner strength and kindness for themselves that they need to relate with what’s happening. And they don’t add up to being able to help other people or the environment. When taking care of ourselves is all about me, it never gets at the unshakable tenderness and confidence that we’ll need when everything falls apart. When we start to develop maitri for ourselves, unconditional acceptance of ourselves, then we’re really taking care of ourselves in a way that pays off. We feel more at home with our own bodies and minds and more at home in the world. As our kindness for ourselves grows, so does our kindness for other people.
Blue highlight | Page: 88 One of the most helpful methods I’ve found is the practice of compassionate abiding. This is a way of bringing warmth to unwanted feelings. It is a direct method for embracing our experience rather than rejecting it. So the next time you realize that you’re hooked, you could experiment with this approach. Contacting the experience of being hooked, you breathe in, allowing the feeling completely and opening to it. The in-breath can be deep and relaxed—anything that helps you to let the feeling be there, anything that helps you not push it away. Then, still abiding with the urge and edginess of feelings such as craving or aggression, as you breathe out you relax and give the feeling space. The out-breath is not a way of sending the discomfort away but of ventilating it, of loosening the tension around it, of becoming aware of the space in which the discomfort is occurring. This practice helps us to develop maitri because we willingly touch parts of ourselves that we’re not proud of. We touch feelings that we think we shouldn’t be having—feelings of failure, of shame, of murderous rage; all those politically incorrect feelings like racial prejudice, disdain for people we consider ugly or inferior, sexual addiction, and phobias. We contact whatever we’re experiencing and go beyond liking or disliking by breathing in and opening. Then we breathe out and relax. We continue that for a few moments or for as long as we wish, synchronizing it with the breath. This process has a leaning-in quality. Breathing in and leaning in are very much the same. We touch the experience, feeling it in the body if that helps, and we breathe it in.
Orange highlight | Page: 96 This book has been an attempt to look closely at how we stay stuck in this kind of narrow, self-absorbed vision. It has also been an attempt to pass on some of what my teachers have taught me about how to get unhooked. The motivation for presenting this material, however, is not solely the wish that each of us might become happier. The primary intention is that we might follow the advice contained here in order to prepare ourselves to look beyond our own welfare and consider the great suffering of others and the fragile state of our world. As we change our own dysfunctional habits, we are simultaneously changing society. Our own awakening is intertwined with the awakening of enlightened society. If we can lose our personal appetite for aggression and addiction, the whole planet will rejoice.
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