Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears (5 page)

In this process of exploring shenpa, I’ve understood that it is crucial to drop the storyline. It’s the conversations we have with ourselves in that neutral moment when we acknowledge we’re hooked that turn a slight feeling of unease, a vague tightening of our jaw or stomach, into unkind words, dismissive gestures, or even violence. But it will remain an ember and gradually die out, the energy will ebb and then it will naturally flow on, if we don’t fuel it, if we don’t freeze it, with our storylines.

In meditation we’re instructed to acknowledge when we’re thinking and then to let the thoughts go and come back to being fully present—back to what Chögyam Trungpa called square one. Just keep coming back to square one, and if square one feels edgy and restless and filled with shenpa, still you just come back there. The shenpa itself is not the problem. The ignorance that doesn’t acknowledge that you’re hooked, that just goes unconscious and allows you to act it out
—that’s
the problem. To counteract it, we try to bring our full compassionate attention to being hooked and what follows—the familiar chain reaction. We train in letting the storyline go, letting the fuel of shenpa go.

This is hard to do because then for sure you’re left in a very uncomfortable place. When you don’t do the habitual thing, you’re bound to feel some pain. I call it the detox period. You’ve been doing the same predictable thing to get away from that uneasy, uncomfortable, vulnerable feeling for so long, and now you’re not. So you’re left with that queasy feeling. This requires some getting used to and some ability to practice kindness and patience. It requires some openness and curiosity to see what happens next. What happens when you don’t fuel the discomfort with a storyline? What happens when you abide with this shifting, fluid, universal energy? What happens if you pause and embrace the natural movement of life?

What you learn very quickly in this process is what happens when you
don’t
abide with the energy. You learn, as I’ve said, that the storyline feeds the shenpa, that it comes with an undertow, and that there will be consequences.

The undertow can be very strong. As Dzigar Kongtrül says, one of the qualities of shenpa is that it’s very difficult to let go of. The urge to get even, the power of craving, the potency of sheer habit is like a magnetic force pulling us in a familiar direction. So we opt again and again for short-term gratification that in the long run keeps us stuck in the same cycle. If you’ve done this enough—especially if you’ve gone through this cycle consciously—you know that the consequences are easily predictable.

When we pause and breathe and abide with the energy, we can foresee quite clearly where biting the hook will lead. Gradually this understanding, this natural intelligence, supports us in our journey of abiding with the restless energy, our journey of fully partaking in our experience without being seduced by the shenpa of “I like it” or “I can’t bear to feel this.” Dzigar Kongtrül once pointed out that you may find a particular feeling intolerable, but instead of acting on that you could come to know intolerableness very, very well. Shantideva, the eighth-century Buddhist master, compares this to willingly undergoing a painful medical treatment in order to cure a long-term disease.

There is a formal practice for learning to stay with the energy of uncomfortable emotions—a practice for transmuting the poison of negative emotions into wisdom. It is similar to alchemy, the medieval technique of changing base metal into gold. You don’t get rid of the base metal—it isn’t thrown out and replaced by gold. Instead, the crude metal itself is the source of the precious gold. An analogy that’s commonly used by Tibetans is of the peacock who eats poison with the result that its tail feathers become more brilliant and glowing.

This transmutation practice is specifically one of remaining open and receptive to your own energy when you are triggered. It has three steps.

Step One. Acknowledge that you’re hooked.

Step Two. Pause, take three conscious breaths, and lean in. Lean in to the energy. Abide with it. Experience it fully. Taste it. Touch it. Smell it. Get curious about it. How does it feel in your body? What thoughts does it give birth to? Become very intimate with the itch and urge of shenpa and keep breathing. Part of this step is learning not to be seduced by the momentum of shenpa. Like Ulysses, we can find our way to hear the call of the sirens without being seduced. It’s a process of staying awake and compassionate, interrupting the momentum, and refraining from causing harm. Just do not speak, do not act, and feel the energy. Be one with your own energy, one with the ebb and flow of life. Rather than rejecting the energy, embrace it. This leaning in is very open, very curious and intelligent.

Step Three. Then relax and move on. Just go on with your life so that the practice doesn’t become a big deal, an endurance test, a contest that you win or lose.

The biggest challenge in doing this practice is to embrace the restless energy, to stay awake to it rather than automatically exiting. When we first start experimenting with this, we find that we can abide with the unpleasantness and pull ourselves out of the tailspin for only brief moments, after which, automatically, habit takes over again.

My beloved seven-year-old grandson, Pete, is a great example of this. He frequently melts down about the unfairness of life. Pete has a wonderful open quality and a great sense of humor, but when he’s having one of his meltdowns, he temporarily loses all his brilliance and lets the storyline take over, as in: “My younger brother gets everything and I never get anything.” “The world is unfair and I’m a victim.” Reasoning with him definitely doesn’t help. He quickly starts crumbling and gets so worked up that he shakes with rage.

Pete was obsessed with the
Star Wars
series at that time, so one day when this was happening, I asked him, “Pete, what would Obi-Wan Kenobi do?” Pete got a curious, receptive look on his face. I could see him contemplating my question, and he began to sit up very straight and smile. He suddenly manifested as a powerful person who trusted in himself. But then he couldn’t resist—he started the storyline again. It was all about how his brother got this, and his brother got that, he never got anything, and he began to crumble again. I took a chance and once more reminded him of Obi-Wan Kenobi. And very, very, very briefly he once again pulled himself up and connected with his innate nobility.

It’s like this for all of us initially. We can contact our inner strength, our natural openness, for short periods before getting swept away. And this is excellent, heroic, a huge step in interrupting and weakening our ancient habits. If we keep a sense of humor and stay with it for the long haul, the ability to be present just naturally evolves. Gradually we lose our appetite for biting the hook. We lose our appetite for aggression.

If we choose to work with this kind of practice, it’s wise to start by practicing with little bouts of shenpa, the small irritations that happen all the time. If we become familiar with catching ourselves, acknowledging that we’re hooked, and pausing in these ordinary everyday situations, then when major upheavals come, the practice will be available to us automatically. If we think we can wait until a major crisis arrives and then it will spontaneously click in, we’re wrong.

Traffic is a great place to work with shenpa. Consider the unreasonable amount of charge that arises around other people’s driving habits, or someone taking the parking place you thought was yours. Instead of just mindlessly feeding the irritation, you can recognize this as a perfect opportunity to do the transmutation practice.

Acknowledge you’re hooked (with humor, if possible).

Pause, take three conscious breaths, and lean in to the energy (with kindness, if possible).

Relax and move on.

The wisest approach is that we try out this practice. We try it out in our lives today, tomorrow, right now—as long as we’re alive, we practice this way of living.

Sometimes the only way we learn is the hard way. We might acknowledge that we’re hooked but go ahead and do what we always do anyway—but we can do this as a conscious experiment to see where it will lead. When we’re conscious, it allows us to learn from our mistakes.

I have an example of how painful this can be. Once I was staying at my daughter’s house and for some reason I was feeling raw and out of sorts. In that prickly mood I received an upsetting e-mail, and the shenpa, which was already percolating, kicked in with a vengeance. You have probably all had that e-mail or voice mail experience. It was Sunday night, so I decided to avoid talking directly to the woman who sent the e-mail by calling her work number and leaving an angry message. When she came into the office on Monday, she was going to get my call. I felt justified because I knew that I was in a position of power, that basically I was going to get what I wanted because this particular company needed my cooperation.

I let that storyline blind me and I thought, “I am just going to tell it like it is, I’m going to set her straight!” I cringe now when I think of some of the obnoxious, arrogant things I said, practically to the degree of “Do you know who you’re talking to?”

Then I hung up the phone, and of course I was still in the throes of shenpa, convincing myself that I was right to have called and stubbornly fueling my righteous indignation. My daughter had been sitting there listening to the whole thing, and the look on her face, I’d never seen anything like it. She was absolutely flabbergasted, and what she said next I considered a great compliment since I was at the time sixty-eight years old and she was in her mid-forties. She said, “Mom, I have never seen you lose it like that.” I thought that was pretty good. But still I let shenpa take over and kept justifying what I had done. Seeing my daughter’s total astonishment at my outburst finally brought me to my senses. I thought to myself, “Hmmm, well, it’s done. and let’s see what happens next.”

What happened was I
did
get exactly what I wanted—you could say, in worldly terms, that I won. But this woman could never see me in the same light again. To this day, she’s very polite and businesslike, but something shifted in her heart because she had always seen me as a spiritual teacher and someone who had it together, and then she got a voice mail from this neurotic witch. It didn’t do any good to say I’m sorry, which I definitely said. I said it for a year almost every time we talked, but there was no way to change what had happened. So I received a valuable lesson from that; sometimes we just have to learn the hard way.

Shantideva reminds us that by “putting up with little cares,” with minor annoyances, when the shenpa is lightweight, “we train ourselves to work with great adversity.” By putting up with learning to keep our nobility, to not spin off, to not reject our own energy when the challenge is fairly workable, we train for difficult times. This is how we prepare ourselves to work with any highly charged situations that may come our way in the near or distant future.

Of course, neither you nor I know what adversity might or might not be coming—either in our personal or collective experience. Things could get better or they could get worse. We could inherit a fortune, or we or those we love could get an incurable illness. We could move into the house we’ve always wanted, or the house we live in could burn down. We could experience perfect health, or overnight we could become disabled. And at the global level, things could improve or deteriorate. The condition of the natural environment and the economy could stabilize, or disasters might occur. We never know for certain where present conditions will lead or what will happen next. There is, however, no need to be a prophet of doom or for us to go around living in constant dread. Our situation is definitely workable. By learning not to bite the hook now, with the little annoyances of an ordinary day, we’ll be preparing ourselves to work with
whatever
lies ahead with compassion and wisdom.

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I
n the Buddhist teachings we’re encouraged to work with the wildness of our minds and emotions as the absolute best way to dissolve our confusion and pain. Rather than getting so caught in the drama of who did what to whom, we could simply recognize that we’re all worked up and stop fueling our emotions with our stories. It’s not so easy to do, but it’s the key to our well-being. In meditation we train in letting our thoughts go again and again, over and over, and go right to the root of our discontent. We allow the space to see the very mechanics of how we keep ourselves stuck.

The teachings on multiple lifetimes are interesting in this regard. In this lifetime, perhaps a particular person harmed us, and it can be helpful to know that. But on the other hand, possibly ours is a far more ancient wound; perhaps we’ve been carrying these same tendencies, these same ways of reacting, from lifetime to lifetime, and they keep giving birth to the same dramas, the same predicaments.