Pema Chödrön
Editor’s note: Pema Chödrön is one of the great spiritual voices of our time. In her classic style that both soothes and startles, she teaches here on some of the key Mahayana Buddhist teachings, providing down-to-earth yet transformative instructions for opening the heart, expanding compassion, and widening one’s perspective.
Many people, including longtime practitioners, use meditation as a means of escaping difficult emotions. No matter how many times we’ve been instructed to stay open to whatever arises, we still can use meditation as repression. Transformation occurs on when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche describes emotion as a combination of self-existing energy and thoughts. Emotion can’t proliferate without our internal conversations. If we’re angry when we sit down to meditate, we are instructed to label the thoughts “thinking” and let them go. Yet below the thoughts something remains—a vital, pulsating energy. There is nothing wrong, nothing harmful about that underlying energy. Our presence is to stay with it, experience it, to leave it as it is.
There are certain advanced techniques in which you intentionally churn up emotions by thinking of people or situations that make you angry or lustful or afraid. The practice is to let the thoughts go and connect with the energy, asking yourself, “Who am I without these thoughts?” What we do with meditation practice is simpler than that, but I consider it equally daring. When emotional distress arises uninvited, we let the story line go and abide with the energy. This is a felt experience, not a verbal commentary on what is happening. We can feel the energy in our bodies. If we can stay with it, neither acting it out nor repressing it, it wakes us up. People often say, “I fall asleep all the time in meditation. What shall I do?” There are lots of antidotes to drowsiness, but my favorite is, “Experience anger!”
In Vajrayana Buddhism it is said that wisdom is inherent in emotions. When we struggle against our energy we reject the source of wisdom. Anger without the fixation is none other than clear-seeing wisdom. Pride without fixation is experienced as equanimity. The energy of passion when it’s free of grasping is wisdom that sees all the angles.
We welcome the living energy of emotions. When our emotions intensify, what we usually feel is fear. This fear is always lurking in our lives. In sitting meditation we practice dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves and leaning into the emotions and the fear. Thus we train in opening the fearful heart to the restlessness of our own energy. We learn to abide with the experience of our emotional distress
