Ane Pema Chodron, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown. She studied Buddhism in the French Alps and London, where she was ordained. She worked with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche from 1974 until 1987. She was ordained in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong. Since 1984 she served as the director of Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She has taught lectured widely and has written several books on meditation practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Ani Pema first met her root guru, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1972. Lama Chime encouraged her to work with Rinpoche, and it was with him that she ultimately made her most profound connection, studying with him from 1974 until his death in 1987. At the request of the Sixteenth Karmapa, she received the full bikshuni ordination in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong.

Ani Pema served as the director of the Karma Dzong, in Boulder until moving in 1984 to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to be the director of Gampo Abbey. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche gave her explicit instructions on establishing this monastery for western monks and nuns.

Ani Pema currently teaches in the United States and Canada and plans for an increased amount of time in solitary retreat under the guidance of Venerable Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche.

Ani Pema is interested in helping establish Tibetan Buddhist monasticism in the West, as well in continuing her work with western Buddhists of all traditions, sharing ideas and teachings. She has written several books: “The Wisdom of No Escape”, “Start Where You Are”, “When Things Fall Apart”, “The Places that Scare You”, “No Time to Lose”, “Practicing Peace in Times of War” and most recently “Taking the Leap – Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears”. All are available from Shambhala Publications.

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BODHICITTA AND ASPIRATION

City Retreat | Berkeley Shambhala Center
Fall 1999

The general subject that we’re exploring here is bodhichitta and the awakening and nurturing of bodhichitta, which is said to have these four qualities [maitri, compassion, joy and equanimity]. Or by awakening these four qualities or nurturing these four qualities, we’re simultaneously contacting and encouraging and expanding what’s called bodhichitta.

Bodhichitta is essentially a quality of warmth, an experience of our connection with all beings and with all things. It’s said traditionally that it’s expressed as a wish or an aspiration, initially expressed as a strong longing or wish that nobody suffer, and that we could in some way in the course of our lifetime, as much as possible, help to alleviate suffering in the world.

When a person begins to feel more and more strongly about this, they take the bodhisattva vow, which is a vow based on one’s wish to alleviate suffering in the world. And when you take this vow, nobody is kidding anyone. We know that we’re not there yet, that we could even wish to alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings. You know, abstractly, sure. We’ve been working with this for two short weeks, or whatever it is. I think it’s two weeks, right, going into the third? And already you kind of realize what you’re up against when you even try to receive love. That would be called, you know, the easiest thing of all, to receive love, let alone give it anyone, let alone give it to difficult people or neutral people or yourself. How about, then, all sentient beings? You begin to get real when you do this practice, you know.

I think in The Wisdom of No Escape or one of the other books, someone was recently telling me that in the book I talked about reading the bodhisattva vow and reading about awakening the bodhichitta and reading about wanting to alleviate suffering and getting so impassioned about it and feeling so inspired. And I was sitting in a bus, apparently, at the time coming back from my teaching job and I was crying, I was so moved by the suffering in the world and that I could want so much to alleviate it.

Then I walked into the San Francisco Shambhala Center, which was a residence at that time, and I was living there. The phone rang. It was someone saying, Could you lead the meditation tonight? And I said No, I’m tired, or something (laughter). And it was just like, I put down the phone and it was like ooh! There’s a big gap between this wish to save all sentient beings and the reality of coming back from work, being tired, and someone asking you to extend yourself.

When we work with bodhichitta and go so far as to take the bodhisattva vow– but even if we’re not taking the vow– we know that our capacity at this point is fairly limited, and yet we enter in at the level of aspiration. That’s why we’re doing these aspiration practices, because you enter in at the level of aspiration. It’s actually called aspiration bodhichitta, aspiring bodhichitta.

It’s this compassionate recognition of where we’re at, that we all have some capacity to love and to be with the pain of other beings, and to rejoice, we all have some equanimity. We all have some of it, and a part of this practice is contacting it. And I’ve said that again and again, contacting it and encouraging it with the aspiration. A lot of what we’re doing here is contacting and encouraging with the aspiration, and then noticing what happens.

And this noticing– I probably need to say it over and over again– noticing the effects is such a crucial part of this. Because it’s not just about opening up. It’s also about a full, compassionate recognition of closing. And then we train in expanding it further. And as Jesse pointed out at the nyinth�n, those of you who heard that. Last week in the class I came up with CEEN: contact and encourage and expand and notice the effects. But actually more accurately you contact the experience at best you can of what you already have– and we’ve been working with love– and you encourage it with the aspiration and then you notice the effect. So it’s like CEN, then you expand, you move on to something more challenging, like you move from the beloved to yourself and then to neutrals and difficult people and so forth.

You keep going through that process of contacting whatever you already feel, encouraging it with the aspiration, noticing the effect, and then you expand it. What this is called is mind training. At the level of our minds, we work with aspiration. We’re acknowledging that we have some love and compassion and so forth. But we need to encourage it, and then it will expand. It will expand by itself if we keep encouraging it this way with these practices. The notion of aspiration is a very, very powerful one.

I think sometimes people belittle it or think it’s a kind of sentimental practice, something like this.But from my own experience of working with this, it’s a very gutsy kind of practice. It’s also extremely honest. Because a lot of times we do have the wish to alleviate suffering in the world and we want to jump right in. And often we jump right in and then we drown. We jump into a profession, for instance, and then after a very short time we burn out. Or we take on more than we can handle in our family situation, or whatever it might be. And we quickly learn that sometimes . . . It’s like that expression about your eyes being bigger than your stomach. What you want to do is currently more than you are able to do. And so by doing these aspiration practices, you get very real about where you are right now and you respect where you are right now. And there’s no problem with being where you are right now.

This is a very important point. There’s no problem with being where you are right now. And the fact that we encourage it and expand it at the level of mind training is just to say that we respect and have appreciation for where we currently are. And at the same time we leave wide open the possibility of being able to expand way beyond where we currently are in the course of our lifetime. But, you know, the expansion never happens through greediness or pushing through or striving. It just never happens that way. All practice grows and flourishes by learning to relax with where you are already. So some combination of learning to relax where you are already and, at the same time, holding a big vision or keeping the possibility open that really your capacity, my capacity, the capacity of all beings is limitless, absolutely limitless. This is such a powerful thing.

And it’s actually very primary to the view of this practice or the view of Buddhism altogether that the possibility of human birth is enormous. And when we say, “May I have happiness” or “May I be free of suffering” or “May any individual have happiness and be free of suffering,” actually we are saying something that is in accord with our potential and their potential.

We’re actually saying something that is in accord with the potential of a human being to expand our capacity for opening and caring limitlessly. It starts out with our love for an individual or our compassion for an individual. And it can expand to include more and more individuals, until finally there is a stage that people have reached throughout history, generations and generations of people, have reached the full capacity of connecting with love and compassion which is limitless. Which is to say, it almost doesn’t even have a reference point. It’s just connecting with this free-flowing warmth-connected energy, flee-flowing, dynamic, alive, connected energy. It’s connecting with the true state of affairs.

The Natural Warmth of the Heart
Quotations

In the difficulties of your life, says Pema Chödrön, you will discover your natural love and warmth.

Before we can know what natural warmth really is, often we must experience loss. We go along for years moving through our days, propelled by habit, taking life pretty much for granted. Then we or someone dear to us has an accident or gets seriously ill, and it’s as if blinders have been removed from our eyes. We see the meaninglessness of so much of what we do and the emptiness of so much we cling to.

When my mother died and I was asked to go through her personal belongings, this awareness hit me hard. She had kept boxes of papers and trinkets that she treasured, things that she held on to through her many moves to smaller and smaller accommodations. They had represented security and comfort for her, and she had been unable to let them go. Now they were just boxes of stuff, things that held no meaning and represented no comfort or security to anyone. For me these were just empty objects, yet she had clung to them. Seeing this made me sad, and also thoughtful. After that I could never look at my own treasured objects in the same way. I had seen that things themselves are just what they are, neither precious nor worthless, and that all the labels, all our views and opinions about them, are arbitrary.

This was an experience of uncovering basic warmth. The loss of my mother and the pain of seeing so clearly how we impose judgments and values, prejudices, likes and dislikes, onto the world, made me feel great compassion for our shared human predicament. I remember explaining to myself that the whole world consisted of people just like me who were making much ado about nothing and suffering from it tremendously.

From Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves From Old Habits and Fears, by Pema Chödrön. ©2009 by Pema Chödrön. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications.

Excerpted from the November 2009 issue of the Shambhala Sun

Choosing Peace

By
Pema Chödrön

There is a key moment, says Pema Chödrön, when we make the choice between peace and conflict. In this new teaching from her program Practicing Peace in Times of War, she describes the practice we can do at that very moment to bring peace for ourselves, for others, and for the world.

If we want to make peace, with ourselves and with the world at large, we have to look closely at the source of all of our wars. So often, it seems, we want to “settle the score,” which means getting our revenge, our payback. We want others to feel what we have felt. It means getting even, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with evenness at all. It is, in fact, a highly charged emotional reaction.

Underlying all of these thoughts and emotions is our basic intelligence, our basic wisdom. We all have it and we can all uncover it. It can grow and expand and become more accessible to us as a tool of peacemaking and a tool of happiness for ourselves and for others. But this intelligence is obscured by emotional reactivity when our experience becomes more about us than about them, more about self than about other. That is war.

I have often spoken of shenpa, the Tibetan term for the hook in our mind that snags us and prevents us from being open and receptive. When we try to settle the score, we cover over our innate wisdom, our innate intelligence, with rapidly escalating, highly charged, shenpa-oozing emotionality. We produce one hook after another.

What are we to do about that? We could say that this emotionality is bad and we have to get rid of it. But that brings problems, because it’s really the same approach as getting even with other people. In this case we’re basically saying that we have to settle the score with ourselves, get even with ourselves, as it were, by ridding ourselves of our emotionality.

Since this approach will not work, what we need to do is to neither reject nor indulge in our own emotional energy, but instead come to know it. Then, as Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche taught, we can transmute the confusion of emotions into wisdom. In simple terms, we must gain the capacity to slowly, over time, become one with our own energy instead of splitting off. We must learn to use the tools we have available to transform this moment of splitting in two. Splitting in two is the moment when peace turns into war, and it is a very common experience.

Let’s say you’re having a conversation with someone. You’re one with the whole situation. You’re open and receptive and there and interested. Then there is a little shenpa pulling-away, a kind of uneasy feeling in the stomach—which we usually don’t notice—and then comes our big thought. We are suddenly verbalizing to ourselves, “How am I looking here? Did I just say something stupid? Am I too fat? That was a stupid thing to say, wasn’t it, and I am too fat….”

Some thought or other causes us to split off, and before we know it we’re completely self-absorbed. We’re probably not even hearing the words of the person we’re conversing with, because we have retreated into a bubble of self-absorption. That’s splitting off. That’s dividing in two.

The Buddha taught about this basic split as the birth of dualism, the birth of self versus other, of me versus you. It happens moment after moment. When we start out, we are “one-with.” We have a sense of our interconnectedness, though we might not use that fancy word. We’re simply listening and there. And then, split! We pull back into our own worry or concern or even our own elation. Somehow we’re no longer together. Now it’s more about me and self, rather than them and other. By contrast, being “one-with” is neither about other nor about self. It’s just totally open, present, there.

Settling the Score

If the path of the peacemaker, of happiness, is being open and receptive and one with your experience, then settling the score is the path of making war, whereby aggression gives birth to aggression and violence gives birth to violence. Nothing is settled. Nothing is made even. But the mind of settling the score does not take that into consideration. When you are caught by that mind, because of the highly charged and ever-expanding emotionality you’re going through, you do not see what settling the score is really doing. You probably don’t even see yourself trying to settle the score.

If we started to think about and talk about and make an in-depth exploration of the various wars around the world, we would probably get very churned up. Thinking about wars can indeed get us really worked up. If we did that, we would have plenty of emotional reactivity to work with, because despite all the teachings we may have heard and all the practice we may have done, our knee-jerk reaction is to get highly activated. Before long, we start focusing on those people who caused the whole thing. We get ourselves going and then at some irrational level, we start wanting to settle the score, to get the bad guy and make him pay. But what if we could think of all of those wars and do something that would really cause peace to be the result? Where communication from the heart would be the result? Where the outcome would be more together rather than more split apart?

In a way, that would really be settling the score. That would really be getting even. But settling the score doesn’t usually mean that. It means I want my side to win and the other side to lose. They deserve to lose because of what they’ve done. The side that I want to lose can be an individual in my life or a government. It can be a type or group of people. It can be anything or anyone I point the finger at. I get quite enraged thinking about how they’re responsible for everything, so of course I want to settle the score. It’s only natural.

We all do this. But in so doing we become mired in what the Buddhist teachings refer to as samsara. We use a method to relate to our pain. We use a method to relate to the underlying groundlessness and feelings of insecurity. We feel that things are out of control, that they are definitely not going the way we want them to go. But our method to heal the anguish of things not going the way we want them to is what Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche calls pouring kerosene on the fire to put it out.

We bite the hook and escalate the emotional reactivity. We speak out and we act out. The terrorists blow up the bus and then the army comes in to settle the score. It might be better to pause and reflect on how the terrorists got to the place where they were so full of hatred that they wanted to blow up a bus of innocent people. Is the score really settled? Or is the very thing that caused the bus to be blown up in the first place now escalating? Look at this cycle in your own life and in your own experience. See if it is happening: Are you trying to settle the score?