Hi everyone,
It's Judy Cohen and this is Wake Up Call 420.
I hope you are enjoying the holiday season or if it's a difficult time for you.
I hope you're making your way through with as much ease as you can.
On the last Wake Up Call,
I talked about Pema Chodron's thoughts on the three marks of existence impermanence,
Egolessness,
And suffering from her book,
The Places That Scare You.
The focus was on impermanence and egolessness and today I want to talk a little bit about what she says about suffering.
My understanding is that in one way of thinking about it,
Suffering is really just about being human.
We're so frail,
Living in these soft,
Breakable bodies.
We get injured by tripping by sharp edges.
We get sick,
We die.
Everyone we love is frail as well,
Eventually we either lose them or they lose us.
And everything we own and surround ourselves with falls apart,
Including our identities,
Professional and otherwise,
Although we might delude ourselves that this isn't true,
Or at least I do.
I'm a lawyer,
But am I really since I don't practice anymore?
When someone asks me if I'm a lawyer,
Considering the work that I do,
I always say,
Yes,
But I don't practice anymore,
But I teach,
You know,
My way of holding,
Trying to hold on to that identity.
I'm also Jewish and although for decades,
My spiritual life has been Buddhist,
I deeply identify with my Jewishness.
The earth is unstable,
The earth beneath our feet here in California,
The climate everywhere.
And yet the minute I'm upset,
I plant my feet as if they're on solid ground.
So things coming apart and coming together and falling apart,
Coming together and falling apart,
It's just the way things are.
And yet,
Not only do I delude myself that they're not doing that,
But also when I fall or get sick,
I feel like I shouldn't have,
Like I've done something wrong,
Like I've forgotten my mask or I haven't exercised enough or I've eaten too much sugar.
Or when my house starts to shake,
I feel like I should have bolted it more securely to its foundation or I should live in a safer place.
Or when I feel insecure,
I get irritated with myself because I feel like surely by now,
I should have an unchanging positive identity.
So you can see it,
Can't you?
The suffering isn't the frailty or the impermanence or the lack of an enduring and solid identity.
It's not the being human.
It's the fact that we live our lives or so much of our lives,
Or at least I do,
Wanting reality to be different and blaming ourselves when it's not.
And Pema talks about this as the three tragic misunderstandings.
So the first tragic misunderstanding is that she says,
We expect what is always changing to be graspable and predictable.
We are born with a craving for resolution and security that governs our thoughts,
Words,
And actions.
We are like people in a boat that is falling apart,
Trying to hold on to the water.
So okay,
Let's test that out.
We're the humans.
We'll say we.
The we is all the humans.
And I know I want resolution and security.
Don't you?
I mean,
Don't you want your home and your office to be secure and your loved ones to feel secure and for the people and things around you to be predictable?
I do.
I also want to know that when I know something,
I know it for sure that it's a fact.
And when there's a dispute,
Honestly,
I don't know if that sense of living surrounded by conflict of existing deep inside the battle of things and yet yearning for resolution,
It ever disappears.
I don't know.
It hasn't for me.
I always want things settled and clear and explicable and complete.
And yet the truth is that we are all just floating along,
Fundamentally insecure and unresolved,
Trying to hold on to the water.
And the end of suffering isn't about changing that.
It's about making deep abiding peace with it.
The second misunderstanding that causes us so much pain and suffering,
Pema says,
Is that we proceed as if we were separate from everything else,
As if we were a fixed identity when our true situation is egolessness.
And what comes up for me is this question of,
As lawyers,
Can we ever really believe this?
You know,
Our whole world is about taking sides,
Marketing our identities and spending most of our waking professional hours differentiating ourselves or our clients or our cases,
Which Pema not so gently reminds us is really just wasting precious time.
In a phrase she writes that makes me both unfathomably sad,
I would say,
And also genuinely hopeful all at the same time.
She says,
We mistake the openness of our being,
The inherent wonder and surprise of each moment for a solid,
Irrefutable self.
And because of this misunderstanding,
We suffer.
We mistake the openness of our being,
The inherent wonder and surprise of each moment for a solid,
Irrefutable self.
And because of this misunderstanding,
We suffer.
The third misunderstanding she offers us is that we mistake temporary pleasure for durable happiness.
So we have a glass of wine,
Not to enjoy the taste,
We have a glass of something,
Not to enjoy the taste,
The texture,
The sensation in the moment,
But to take the edge off instead of learning to sit on the edge.
We go for a walk,
Not to enjoy the chill,
The air,
But to outpace our frustrations and worries instead of developing a compassionate relationship with frustration and worry.
We close our eyes,
Not to observe the present moment,
But to change our minds.
And yet none of these strategies works for me anyway,
I may feel temporarily better after a glass or a walk,
But durable happiness,
The end of suffering,
Is to continually turn towards and face this very challenging experience of being human with a loving,
Benevolent gaze.
So it sounds like an obvious choice,
But for me anyway,
Grasping for permanence and stability and forgetting that we belong to one another and avoiding being hostile,
Avoiding or being hostile towards my own experiences,
It's often so ostensibly successful,
It's just not actually successful.
So I have to continually remind myself to turn towards,
Turn towards,
Turn towards,
Turn towards,
Because in the end,
What else can we do?
As Pema says,
And I love this,
There is no cure for life.
There is no cure for hot and cold.
Everything that arises will pass away.
All living things are frail and will age,
Become ill and die.
Our most precious possessions are breakable,
Or as the Tibetans say,
They're already broken.
All relationships dissolve in the end,
And the question is not what am I doing wrong to be encountering these difficulties,
Or how can I change them?
The question is,
How can I be with them in a loving way,
And in doing that,
Suffer just a little bit less?
So let's sit.
So finding the posture that best supports you today,
In this moment,
Settling in as best you can,
As well as being settled is available to you right now,
Taking a few intentional breaths to encourage,
To encourage settling,
Feeling the body sitting or standing or lying down,
Or for those of you on the phone,
Maybe feeling the body driving,
Whatever is happening for you in the moment,
Attending to it.
And then beginning to turn the attention on purpose to whatever is here for you in the present moment,
Hot or cold,
Good or bad,
Difficult or easy.
The inherent wonder and surprise of each moment,
And maybe you can notice as the moments arise and pass away,
Different they are,
Noticing how some are pleasant and some are not,
But whatever is happening,
Whatever you're noticing,
The invitation is to turn towards it,
And to turn towards it with kindness,
With benevolence,
Even with amusement.
This is what's happening right now.
And now this,
Maybe with the inquiry of how can I develop more of a commitment to turning towards,
More of a practice of turning towards,
More of a resilience to turning,
Not to turning towards,
But a resilience when I turn towards,
And all of that with a lot of love for myself and self-compassion,
This inquiry we can invite ourselves into,
The inherent wonder and surprise of each moment,
Each moment not being easy,
But can we be easeful in our relationship to it,
The end of grasping,
The end of clinging,
The end of suffering,
Like a light that we can invite to fuse our whole being when we remember what Pema calls the openness of our being,
And really the invitation is to take it with us,
Off the cushion,
Back to our office and our family and our home and all the things happening in the world,
The season and the parties and the holidays,
The openness of our being.
Thanks everyone for being on the Wake Up Call today.
It's really sweet to see you.
Be safe out there and enjoy what is there for you to enjoy and be easeful when you can.
And I'll see you next Thursday.
