Mindfulness Meditation Group, Roanoke, Virginia

The Wisdom of No Escape November 28, 2011

During the early months of 2011 we read Pema Chodron’s book, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving Kindness. Following are brief summaries of the chapters.

Chapter 18: The Four Reminders
The reminders of why to make a continual effort to return to the present moment are:
1) Our precious human birth: Realizing how precious life is becomes one of your most powerful tools. No matter how bad it gets, this feeling of gratitude for your life takes you into any realm.
2) The truth of impermanence: We don’t know if we have 30 more years to live, or 30 days, or 3 minutes; this heightens our sense of gratitude for our life. With mindfulness practice, we can see every little movement and change of the mind and of the body, and sense how amazing that is.
3) The law of karma: It’s important how we live. Every time you are willing to come back just to nowness, you are sowing seeds for your own future, cultivating wakefulness by letting go of habitual ways to do something fresh.
4) The futility of continuing to wander in samsara: The essence of samsara is the tendency to seek pleasure, security and comfort, and avoid pain, groundlessness and discomfort. That’s how we keep ourselves miserable, unhappy, and stuck. Samsara is preferring death to life; but when we break out of its cycle, the walls fall down, the cocoon disappears, and we are totally open to whatever may happen, replacing our preference for death with life.

Chapter 16: Sticking to One Boat
You can hear the Dharma from many different places, but you are uncommitted until you hear it in a particular way that rings true in your heart and you decide to follow it. It’s best to stick to one boat; otherwise, the minute you really begin to hurt, you’ll just leave or look for something else. It’s best to stick with one thing and let it put you through your changes. When you have really connected with the essence of that and are on the journey, everything speaks to you and educates you.

Chapter 15: The Dharma that is Taught and the Dharma that is Experienced
The Dharma that is taught has been transmitted continuously in books and lectures in a pure and fresh way since the time of the Buddha: in many flavors, but the essence has remained the same. It is like a precious jewel brought out into the light and shown to everyone, or like a beautiful golden bell, rung so everyone can hear it. The Dharma that is experienced is not different, though it may feel different. When you hear the teachings, they may resonate in your heart and inspire you, but you may not see what they have to do with your everyday life. But as you continue to study, you will discover that nothing you have heard is separate from your life. Dogen said, “To know yourself or study yourself is to forget yourself, and if you forget yourself then you become enlightened by all things.” That’s all we need: to realize that the Dharma and our lives are the same thing. The Dharma doesn’t tell you what is true or false; it just encourages you to find out for yourself, to use your life to wake you up rather than put you to sleep. If you spend your life trying to find out what awake means and what asleep means, Pema says she thinks you might attain enlightenment.

Chapter 14: Not Preferring Samsara or Nirvana
There are two common forms of neurosis: in the first, we get caught up in worry, fear, and hope over things, activities, relationships, and politics. This is samsara: continually trying to get away from pain by seeking pleasure and going around and around and around in the process. In the second, we get caught up in nirvana: peace and quiet, liberation or freedom. Experiencing clarity or bliss, we want to keep it going forever, resisting and resenting any kind of noise or change. A glimpse of sacred outlook causes some to become completely dissatisfied with ordinary life. The ego can use anything to re-create itself, whether it’s samsara or nirvana. Ultimate perfection must be some complete realization that samsara and nirvana are one, living fully with both, preferring neither, holding both in one’s heart.

Chapter 13: Taking Refuge
When we were infants we were totally dependent on others to take care of us. Whether we feel we weren’t nurtured properly or we feel we were fortunate that we were, in the present moment now we can realize that the ground is to develop loving-kindness for ourselves. In meditation, we create that ground. Taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha does not mean taking consolation in them; rather, it’s an aspiration to leap out of the nest, ready or not, to be an adult with no hand to hold, to take off all our armor, to feel the ground of loving-kindness and respect for yourself even in the midst of the ongoing process of cultivating the openness and good-heartedness that allow us to be less dependent.

Chapter 12: Sending and Taking
This title chapter defines tonglen, the practice of cultivating fearlessness and bodhicitta, or opening the heart. Pema tells of how she had used her shamatha practice to shield herself against hurt and pain. Tonglen requires a lot of courage, but also gives you a lot of courage.  The essence of tonglen practice is that on the in-breath you are willing to feel the pain and suffering of the world; and on the out-breath you connect with joy, well-being, tenderheartedness, and send them out into the world to be experienced by everyone, saying, “Let me give away anything good or true that I ever feel, any sense of humor, any sense of enjoying the sun coming up and going down, any sense of delight in the world at all, so that everybody else may share in this and feel it.”

Chapter 11: Renunciation
The word “renunciation” seems negative, but it can be seen to mean letting go of holding back, or opening up to the teachings of the present moment. Or it can be thought of as a return to our original selves, which are fundamentally good and healthy. So renunciation is seeing clearly how we hold back, pull away, shut down, or close off, and then learning how to open. The journey of renunciation is, first, realizing you’ve come up against your edge, saying no to everything, and then softening, providing an opportunity to develop loving-kindness for yourself, resulting in playfulness – learning to play like a raven in the wind.

Chapter 10: Not Too Tight, Not Too Loose
The “Middle Way” may differ for each of us. Buddhism doesn’t tell you, but rather encourages you to find out for yourself, what is false and what is true. Trungpa Rinpoche gave us nine teachings to help us find the balance between “not too tight and not too loose.” They are resting the mind; continually resting; naively, or literally, resting; thoroughly resting; taming the mind, or a basic attitude of friendliness; pacifying, or dealing with negativity; thoroughly pacifying, about obstacles and antidotes; one-pointedness; and resting evenly.

Chapter 9: Weather and the Four Noble Truths
Instead of resisting the weather-changes of our suffering , we can use the energy of the earthquakes, the hurricanes, the wildness of earth, water, fire, and air to open up to the full experience of our interconnections with all life.

Chapter 8: No Such Thing as a True Story
Each of us creates our world according to what we think and believe in; holding on to beliefs limits our own experience of life. The beliefs or ideas that are not the problem. It is our stubbornness in insisting things be our own way. We choose to be blind, deaf, and dead rather than to see, hear, and be alive.

Chapter 7: Taking a Bigger Perspective
Practice brings us happiness because it gives us this bigger perspective on our whole life: that we are always at the center of the universe within a sacred space — a circle of precision, gentleness,  and mindful loving-kindness. To reiterate: this is our whole life. Everything that comes into this circle comes to teach us what we need to know.

Chapter 6: Joy
Each of us has in our heart a joy that is big, unobstructed, and always accessible to us; by focusing on our suffering and on the unpleasant, unacceptable, embarrassing, and painful things we do, we subtly forget this joy that is always there.

Chapter 5: The Wisdom of No Escape
Both brilliance and suffering are here all the time, interpenetrating each other. We see the beauty and wonder; and amazed, we are caught up in it all. An interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff, it’s us: humanness.

Chapter 4: Precision, Gentleness, and Letting Go
The key to feeling more whole and less shut off is to see our limitations or hindrances with precision and gentleness; then, having seen them fully, by letting go and opening further, we begin to find that the world is more vast, refreshing, and fascinating than we realized. This chapter describes a specific meditation technique for working with precision, gentleness and letting go.

Chapter 3: Finding Our Own True Nature
The excellent horse moves before the whip touches its back. The good horse runs at the lightest touch of the whip. The poor horse doesn’t go until it feels pain. The worst horse doesn’t budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. It’s best to be the really terrible horse; then we are inspired to try harder to find our own true nature, which is what our practice is about.

Chapter 2: Satisfaction
This body, this mind, these emotions, wherever we are, whatever we are doing, whatever we have is exactly what we need to be fully awake, fully alive, fully human. Satisfaction in this is the ground of loving-kindness.

Chapter 1:  Loving-Kindness
Our meditation practice isn’t about self-improvement or trying to get rid of our egos or our pain or all the other things about ourselves we don’t like.  It is about looking at and accepting ourselves with curiosity and maitri -- loving-kindness.