“Take an interest in your pain and your fear. Move closer, lean in, get curious; even for a moment, experience the feelings without labels, beyond being good or bad. Welcome them. Invite them. Do anything that helps melt the resistance.” –Pema Chödrön
I’m in the middle of writing my second book and I’m finding every excuse to avoid “going there.” My resisting behaviors are kicking up like crazy!
Guess it’s no surprise really, given that this book is about deepening the clearing practice and experience – allowing (being present with, “leaning into”) the uglier, more uncomfortable parts of our (cluttered) selves with ease and grace. What amazes me is how this book is already working its magic on me before it’s even finished.
This fabulous piece by Pema Chödrön showed up on Facebook the other day – just what I needed most when I needed it. Perhaps it will inspire you to hang in there too, when the going gets tough…
…and your squirmy stuff rattles your cage.
p.s. I blog a lot of about feeling as a pathway to clearing. Posts like this one.
Dakini’s Bliss
by Pema Chodron on Friday, April 23, 2010 at 12:30pm
A few years ago, I was overwhelmed by deep anxiety, a fundamental, intense anxiety with no storyline attached. I felt very vulnerable, very afraid and raw. While I sat and breathed with it, relaxed into it, stayed with it, the terror did not abate. It was unrelenting after many days, and I didn’t know what to do.
I went to see my teacher Dzigar Kongtrül, and he said, “Oh, I know that place.” That was reassuring. He told me about times in his life when he had been caught in the same way. He said it had been an important part of his journey and had been a great teacher for him. Then he did something that shifted how I practice. He asked me to describe what I was experiencing. He asked me where I felt it. He asked me if it hurt physically and if it was hot or cold. He asked me to describe the quality of the sensation, as precisely as I could. This detailed exploration continued for a while, and then he brightened up and said “Ani Pema, that’s the Dakini’s Bliss. That’s a high-level of spiritual bliss.” I almost fell out of my chair. I thought, “Wow, this is great!” And I couldn’t wait to feel that intensity again. And do you know what happened? When I eagerly sat down to practice, of course, since the resistance was gone, so was the anxiety.
I now know that at a nonverbal level the aversion to my experience had been very strong. I had been making the sensation bad. Basically, I just wanted it to go away. But when my teacher said “Dakini’s bliss,” it completely changed the way I looked at it. So that’s what I learned: take an interest in your pain and your fear. Move closer, lean in, get curious; even for a moment, experience the feelings without labels, beyond being good or bad. Welcome them. Invite them. Do anything that helps melt the resistance.
Then the next time you lose heart and you can’t bear to experience what you are feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in. That’s basically the instruction that Dzigar Kongtrül gave me. And now I pass it on to you. 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. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering – yours, mine, and that of all living beings.
Excerpted from “Taking the Leap”, by Pema Chodrön
Photo Credit: “Downstream,” by Tomáš Záhumenský, 5th january, 2007, High Tatras, Slovakia
Photo by Tomáš Záhumenský, Panasonic fz20
EXIF: High Tatras, Slovakia; go to page: http://www.lightharmony.com/fotografie/416/en/author/
