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Excerpt from Pema Chodron's "The Fearless Heart"

BetterListen! — 2012-01-30T07:47:10-08:00

In this wonderful transcribed exerpt from Pema Chodron's talk on "The Fearless Heart: The Practice of Living with Courage and Compassion", Pema tells us how we may begin to work with fear by not shutting down or running away from it, as is our first inclination, but by going into the fear.

This morning I wanted to begin with a short teaching on working with emotions that comes from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and if you would like to write this down, the name of the teaching is “The Lion’s Roar” and it appears in the March 1997 edition of the Shambhala Sun, which had a picture of me on the cover. So maybe there is some way you can locate that article and read it.

This is a teaching that has influenced me a lot over the years, and I was re-reading the article last night and I thought that I would begin this morning with this instruction that comes from Trungpa Rinpoche. One of the opening sentences is that enlightenment is not just for pacifists,

but it also means relating with energy, strong, intense, waves and waves of energy. So enlightenment is not just a peaceful experience as some of us may be wishing. It is not just the ultimate chill out, but it also means relating or rather being comfortable with or relaxing with or joining with waves and waves of energy. So needless to say, this is something that has had a great influence on me on my own practice and in my teaching.

So, even talking about abiding in the experience of discomfort, abiding in the experience of fear or any other kind of discomfort, fear as it manifests and how it manifests in many different forms. And in some sense it doesn’t really matter what the energy is or what the emotion is. The instruction is on abiding in that experience without believing in the judgments and opinions about it. This is very important because it is quite predictable if you were to do a poll of the entire human race, what you would find is that when energy arises that is uncomfortable, it triggers our conditioning and we forget about any kind of rational approach at all. We go sort of nuts. So this is to say even very wonderful people such as us who perhaps have been listening to this kind of teaching for years and trying to apply it and something happens in our life. It might be a phobia; perhaps we have strong fears that are phobic. Fear of heights -- that has been one that I’ve worked with in my life. Fear of flying, fear of elevators. There are different kinds of fears that we have. And when the phobia hooks in, we somehow just shut down and the last thing that occurs to us is to go into the fear.

People who work with phobia, they actually encourage this approach. Not to necessarily have to get up on top of the highest, you know, walk across a tightrope across the Niagara Falls if you are afraid of heights, but to get used to the feeling of fear that arises with heights or with flying or elevators or spiders, snakes, whatever it might be, space -- there are a lot of phobias. And many of us have them. So the approach is to go into the feeling and to do it in a situation where you are not right on the spot, on the brink of the Grand Canyon, or going down the Grand Canyon on these donkeys. If anyone has ever done that who is afraid of heights, it is a very uncomfortable experience. The donkeys get very close to the edge and the bottom is a long way down. So going into the fear like, getting in touch with the feeling and going into it, abiding in the experience without feeding it with our opinions and judgments about it.

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Pema Chodron on BetterListen!

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Publisher — 2012-01-26T07:41:12-08:00

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Excerpt 1 from "Transformation of a Man" - Ram Dass

BetterListen! — 2012-01-26T07:31:44-08:00

In this fascinating and delightful transcribed exerpt from "Transformation of a Man", Ram Dass -- author of the seminal work Be Here Now -- describes some of his experiences as he travels around and explores India in the early 1960s, giving us true insight into the life and times of a spiritual seeker. Part of our ongoing partnership with The Love Serve Remember Foundation.

His big feet were just paddling along like a camel, and he was looking every other way, and he was always stepping around all of this stuff, and I could never figure it out. Now, as we got out of the big cities… in the big cities, you know, people look at you like, what kind of a nut are you? Barefoot in a cloth -- we know you’re a westerner, you know. Like, who are you kidding? But as you get out into the villages it’s much purer in India, and they still respect the spiritual endeavor, and the people would call, “Hey Babaji!” Which is, well, Baba means grandfather. It also means holy man. It’s usually given to Vaishnavites, which is the white cloth. And Babaji is sort of the affectionate title. In Yiddish it would be bubbala. [laughter] It’s the same thing. And so they call, “Babaji!” and I would always be embarrassed because I wasn’t a holy man. I was just wearing a white cloth. I was a western intellectual overage hippy looking to see what was going on in India. That’s who I was in my head, in my fixed model of myself.

And we got to these caves at Baneshwar;

we had gone to the Ramakrishna Mission, which had not been a very spiritual experience unfortunately, although the Gunga was very beautiful, quite fine. We had gone to the sun temple at Konark, which was the use of sexual tantric. And a very high temple, very extraordinarily beautiful temple. So we got to these caves at Baneshwar, these Buddhist caves in the rock, beautifully cut in the rock, almost by hand, very soft inside, little caves maybe 30 or 40 of them. And it was empty now and we thought, well, we had come walking this long way; we would meditate in these caves for maybe an hour or so. And so I found a little cave way up on a ledge and I went inside there and I sat down and it was a warm afternoon and I closed my eyes and I sort of went off into a revery, I guess you’d call it. I felt very calm, eyes closed. And I opened my eyes about 20 minutes later and I noticed -- there was only the light from the door -- that there was a pile right over by the door and I assumed this pile was a pile of stones and that since I came in from the bright light I was not dark adapted, I must have stepped over and not seen. But I looked forward and they were a pile of coins. See, religious pilgrims had passed and they had seen this sadhu meditating and because it is the responsibility of the grusto, or the householder in India to support the holy men, they had left this money for me. And that really shook me up.

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Ram Dass Bio and Links