Editor’s Note: Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel has a fresh, clear, no-nonsense approach to the Buddhist teachings. But don’t just take my word for it: Pema Chödrön calls Elizabeth’s book “bold, playful, and invigorating.” Elizabeth is a longtime student and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism under her husband, the Tibetan master Dzigar Kongtrul. Here she boils the teaching down to one core instruction: learn how to digest your life.

As we study the life of the Buddha we realize that he asked basic human questions about happiness, suffering, freedom from suffering, compassion, interdependence, death, life, and the nature of things. But if we were to pare all these questions down into one essential question, we might come up with something like this: how do we take in the world of “things”? That is, how do we process the continuous stream of occurrences that arise in our life? How do we digest experience?

When we eat, we ingest, process, and eliminate food. Our bodies use food as fuel for life and eliminate what is no longer useful. It would be great to say that we digested our experience with such ease. But there is something about being human that doesn’t come naturally to us. We can’t seem to take experience in, let it work on us, and then let it go. Either we refuse to ingest experience–in which case our life doesn’t nourish us–or we hold on to experience until it turns toxic. The struggle we have with experience gives us mental and emotional indigestion. Our relationship to experience is all about fighting the world, rejected the unwanted, trying to fix things, and creating strategies for living around experience.

Life presents itself to us, but we’d often prefer to live in fantasy. We’d rather not ingest our experience–eat our life–in the way that it presents itself to us. We’d rather be someone else, somewhere else, having a different experience. We may wonder: Why should we take in the fullness of life? That means we have to take in sadness, uncertainty, and fear. Why can’t we just take in whatever makes us comfortable? Yet this very attitude toward our experience points to the struggle we have with our world.

There is no life without experience. Life and experience are synonymous. Life just unfolds, so we can’t reject experience the way we can food. But we can fight it tooth and nail. And this is what I am talking about here. We can turn on the news and not really hear the names of the soldiers who died in Iraq that day. We can blame others for all the conflict in our lives and never learn to self-reflect or resolve a situation creatively. We can vent our emotions all over the place–and in doing so we may imagine that we are responding directly to life. But do we really let life in this way? Or, in reacting, are we keeping life at bay? And if we keep our life at a distance, how can it nourish us? How can it move through us? How can we absorb it and let it work its magic?

When we look at any of the accomplished masters of our lineage, we never see them struggle with conceptual or emotional indigestion in the way we do. They take in all experience with one taste, utilizing everything as food for realization. Experience moves through their bodies, through their awareness, and nourishes them. The great masters are always “eating,” and whatever they eat generates boundless energy, intelligence, and compassion. It turns out that practice accomplishment is nothing more than learning to be natural with our experience–not unlike the body’s natural ability to digest food.

As practitioners we might wonder: What would it be like to be so natural, so ordinary? We should ask this question again and again, because it does away with all the fluffy fantasies we have about spirituality; all this waiting for something special to happen; all the excitement we feel when something unexplainable occurs; all the disappointment we encounter when nothing special comes our way. It directs us to the point of practice: finding contentment in being fully human, natural, and ordinary.

From The Power of an Open Question: The Buddha’s Path to Freedom by Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyal (Shambhala, 2010).