Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears (3 page)

As many of us know, particularly those of us who have had strong addictions, it can take a very long time to learn to be with the itch. Nevertheless, it’s the only way. If we keep scratching, not only does the itch get worse but we find ourselves more and more in hell. Our lives become more out of control and uncomfortable. The three classic styles of looking for relief in the wrong places are pleasure seeking, numbing out, and using aggression: we either zone out, or we grasp. Or perhaps we develop the style of scratching in which we obsess and rage about other people or indulge in self-hatred.

In the Buddhist teachings, it is said that the root of our discontent is self-absorption and our fear of being present. We can easily go from being open and receptive—an alive, awake feeling—to withdrawing. Again and again, we run from discomfort and go for short-term symptom relief, which never addresses the root of the problem. We’re like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand in hopes of finding comfort. This running away from all that is unpleasant, this continual cycle of avoiding the present, is referred to as self-absorption, self-clinging, or ego.

One of the metaphors for ego is a cocoon. We stay in our cocoon because we’re afraid—we’re afraid of our feelings and the reactions that life is going to trigger in us. We’re afraid of what might come at us. But if this avoidance strategy worked, then the Buddha wouldn’t have needed to teach anything, because our attempts to escape pain, which all living beings instinctively resort to, would result in security, happiness, and comfort, and there would be no problem. But what the Buddha observed is that self-absorption, this trying to find zones of safety, creates terrible suffering. It weakens us, the world becomes more terrifying, and our thoughts and emotions become more and more threatening as well.

There are many ways to discuss ego, but in essence it’s what I’ve been talking about. It’s the experience of never being present. There is a deep-seated tendency, it’s almost a compulsion, to distract ourselves, even when we’re not consciously feeling uncomfortable. Everybody feels a little bit of an itch all the time. There’s a background hum of edginess, boredom, restlessness. As I’ve said, during my time in retreat where there were almost no distractions, even there I experienced this deep uneasiness.

The Buddhist explanation is that we feel this uneasiness because we’re always trying to get ground under our feet and it never quite works. We’re always looking for a permanent reference point, and it doesn’t exist. Everything is impermanent. Everything is always changing—fluid, unfixed, and open. Nothing is pin-down-able the way we’d like it to be. This is not actually bad news, but we all seem to be programmed for denial. We have absolutely no tolerance for uncertainty.

It seems that insecurity is ego’s reaction to the shifting nature of reality. We tend to find the groundlessness of our fundamental situation extremely uncomfortable. Virtually everybody knows this basic insecurity, and often we experience it as horrible. With me in that same three-year retreat was a woman with whom I’d once been close friends. Something had happened between us, though, and I felt now that she hated me. We were in a very small building together, we had to pass each other in the narrow corridors, and there was no way to get away from each other. She was very angry and wouldn’t talk to me, and that brought up feelings of profound helplessness. My usual strategies were not working. I was continually feeling the pain of no reference point, no confirmation. The ways I had always used to feel secure and in control had fallen apart. I tried all the techniques I had been teaching for years, but nothing really worked.

So one night, since I couldn’t sleep, I went up to the meditation hall, and sat all through the night. I was just sitting with raw pain with almost no thoughts about it. Then something happened: I had a completely clear insight that my whole personality, my whole ego-structure, was based on not wanting to go to this groundless place. Everything I did, the way I smiled, the way I talked to people, the way I tried to please everybody—it was all to avoid feeling this way. I realized that our whole façade, the little song and dance we all do, is based on trying to avoid the groundlessness that permeates our lives.

By learning to stay, we become very familiar with this place, and gradually, gradually, it loses its threat. Instead of scratching, we stay present. We’re no longer invested in constantly trying to move away from insecurity. We think that facing our demons is reliving some traumatic event or discovering for sure that we’re worthless. But, in fact, it is just abiding with the uneasy, disquieting sensation of nowhere-to-run and finding that—guess what?—we don’t die; we don’t collapse. In fact, we feel profound relief and freedom.

One way to practice staying present is to pause, look out, and take three deep breaths. Another way is to simply sit still for a while and listen. Simply listen to the sounds in the room. For one minute, listen to the sounds close to you. For one minute, listen to the sounds at a distance. Just listen attentively. The sound isn’t good or bad. It’s just sound.

Maybe in that experience of listening you found that you have the capacity for attention. The capacity to be present with alertness. On the other hand, your mind may have wandered off. When that happens—whether the object of meditation is the breath, a sound, a sensation or a feeling—when you notice that your mind has wandered off, you gently come back. You come back because the present is so precious and fleeting, and because without some reference point to come back to, we never notice that we’re distracted—that once again we’re looking for an alternative to being fully present, an alternative to being here with things just exactly as they are rather than the way we would prefer them to be.

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t seems we all have the tendency to move away from the present moment. It’s as if this habit is built into our DNA. At the most basic level, we think all the time and this takes us away. In his teachings on the difference between fantasy and reality, Chögyam Trungpa said that being fully present, having contact with the immediacy of our experience, is reality. Fantasy he described as being lost in thought. All those people driving on the freeway at 85 miles per hour: most of them are distracted. Apparently we have some kind of automatic pilot that keeps us on the road, or keeps us multitasking, or eating, or all the other things we do quite mindlessly. This pattern of distracting ourselves, of not being fully present, of not contacting the immediacy of our experience is considered normal.

From a Buddhist perspective, lifetime after lifetime we’ve been strengthening this habit of distraction. If you don’t buy the idea of rebirth, just this lifetime is enough to see how we do it. Since we were children, we’ve strengthened the habit of escape, choosing fantasy over reality. Unfortunately, we get a lot of comfort from leaving, from being lost in our thoughts, worries, and plans. It gives us a sense of false security and we enjoy it.

There’s a very useful teaching, which I heard from Dzigar Kongtrül, that allows us to take a closer look at this knee-jerk pattern of moving away from being present. This is the teaching on
shenpa
. Generally the Tibetan word
shenpa
is translated “attachment,” but that has always seemed too abstract to me, as it doesn’t touch the magnitude of shenpa and the effect it has on us.

An alternate translation might be “hooked”—what it feels like to get hooked—what it feels like to be stuck. Everyone likes to hear teachings on getting unstuck because they address such a common source of pain. In terms of the poison-ivy metaphor—our fundamental itch and the habit of scratching—shenpa is the itch and it’s also the urge to scratch. The urge to smoke that cigarette, the urge to overeat, to have one more drink, to say something cruel or to tell a lie.

Here’s how shenpa shows up in everyday experiences. Somebody says a harsh word and something in you tightens: instantly you’re hooked. That tightness quickly spirals into blaming the person or denigrating yourself. The chain reaction of speaking or acting or obsessing happens fast. Maybe, if you have strong addictions, you go right for your addiction to cover over the uncomfortable feelings. This is very personal. What was said gets to you—it triggers you. It might not bother someone else at all, but we’re talking about what touches your sore place—that sore place of shenpa.

The fundamental, most basic shenpa is to ego itself: attachment to our identity, the image of who we think we are. When we experience our identity as being threatened, our self-absorption gets very strong, and shenpa automatically arises. Then there is the spin-off—such as attachment to our possessions or to our views and opinions. For example, someone criticizes you. They criticize your politics, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your dearest friend. And shenpa is right there. As soon as the words have registered—boom, it’s there. Shenpa is not the thoughts or emotions per se. Shenpa is preverbal, but it breeds thoughts and emotions very quickly. If we’re attentive, we can feel it happening.

If we catch it when it first arises, when it’s just a tightening, a slight pulling back, a feeling of beginning to get hot under the collar, it’s very workable. Then we have the possibility of becoming curious about this urge to do the habitual thing, this urge to strengthen a repetitive pattern. We can feel it physically and, interestingly enough, it’s never new. It always has a familiar taste. It has a familiar smell. When you begin to get in touch with shenpa, you feel like this has been happening forever. It allows you to feel the underlying insecurity that is inherent in a changing, shifting, impermanent world—an insecurity that is felt by everyone as long as we continue to scramble to get ground under our feet.

When someone says something that triggers you, you don’t really have to go into the history of why you’re triggered. This is not self-analysis, an exploration of what the trauma was. It’s just, “Uh-oh,” and you feel yourself tightening. Generally speaking, we don’t catch it when it first arises. It’s more common to be well into acting out or repressing by the time we realize that we’re caught.

Dzigar Kongtrül says that shenpa is the charge behind emotions, behind thoughts and words. For instance, when words are imbued with shenpa, they easily become hate words. Any word at all can be transformed into a racial slur, into the language of aggression, when it has the force and charge of shenpa behind it. You say the shenpa word and it produces shenpa in others, who then respond defensively. When left unchecked, shenpa is similar to a highly contagious disease and it spreads rapidly.

There’s a word that is currently used to dehumanize people in the Middle East. I’ve heard that United States soldiers are taught it before they go there. The word is
haji
. One serviceman told me it’s common to hear, “It’s OK, they’re just haji,” as a justification for mistreating or killing innocent civilians. The poignant thing is that in Islamic culture the word has a very positive connotation. It is the honorific term for one who has made the pilgrimage to the sacred site of Mecca. So words themselves are neutral, it’s the charge we add to them that matters. When there’s shenpa, the word
haji
dehumanizes people. It becomes the language of hatred and violence. Without that charge, without that heat, the same word produces completely different reactions in the hearts and minds of those who hear it.

We all use shenpa words. We may try never to use those that are outright racial slurs, but we have our ways of deriding others. When you don’t like someone, even their name can become a shenpa word. For instance, when you speak of your lifelong rival, Jane, or your brother, Bill, whom you loathe, the very tone of voice with which you say their name conveys disdain and aggression.

You can notice shenpa very easily in other people. You’re having a conversation with somebody and they are right with you, listening. Then, after something you say, you see them tense. Somehow you know you just touched a sensitive area. You’re seeing their shenpa, but they may not be aware of it at all.

When we see clearly what’s happening to another person, we have access to our natural intelligence. We know instinctively that the important thing we are trying to communicate will not get through right now. The person is shutting down, he or she is closing off because of shenpa. Our natural wisdom tells us to be quiet and not push our point; we intuitively know that no one will win if we spread the virus of shenpa.

Whenever there’s discomfort or restlessness or boredom—whenever there’s insecurity in any form—shenpa clicks in. This is true for us all. If we become familiar with it, we can fully experience that unease. We can fully experience the shenpa and learn over time that it’s in everyone’s best interest not to act it out.

Not acting out, or refraining, is very interesting. It’s also called renunciation in the Buddhist teachings. The Tibetan word for renunciation is
shenluk
, and it means turning shenpa upside down, shaking it up completely. It means getting unhooked. Renunciation isn’t about renouncing food, or sex, or your lifestyle. We’re not referring to giving up the things themselves. We’re talking about loosening our attachment, the shenpa we have to these things.