Pema Chödrön, Don’t Bite the Hook Part 4 of 6: Situational Happiness
November 11, 2009 by dr. lam · 13 Comments
Chödrön has been approached many times with deep questions of how to achieve happiness. Should I marry this person? Should I pursue this job opportunity? Why? Because she is a revered teacher. However, as a teacher she always explains that these questions stem from a nervous energy of tying one’s happiness upon external circumstances. We are forced to believe that if we have this job we will be happy. If we marry this person, all our woes will be subsumed.
I like the saying by Oscar Wilde, “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.” Brilliant insight. In short, we want something so badly and remorse that we don’t have it. Once we get it, we are bored with it and want something else. When we tie our happiness upon defined events, circumstances, or people, we are not really seeing happiness but a transient shell that will flit away at a blink. Using the techniques discussed in this blog series, we can escape false happiness and enter true bliss.
Pema Chödrön, Don’t Bite the Hook Part 3 of 6: Cycling Down
November 10, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
In any situation that we encounter, we can choose to disengage or we can “bite the hook” and escalate it. Chödrön talks about the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird when the lawyer Atticus Finch portrayed by Gregory Peck gets spit on by someone who did not like his words. Instead of raising in a fit of anger, Peck turns with his children and says, “Come on children, let’s move along.” Did he have the right to engage with this man? Perhaps. But should he have? What would engaging have meant to his ongoing temperament and that of his children? It would have meant ongoing negativity.
Instead in that situation, he saw that this man’s anger was his own business. Finch was at a different place in his life that allowed him to control his response and move forward. He did not “cycle down”. He did not “bite the hook”. He stayed firm with his emotions and in control of himself. As Viktor Frankl talks about, when all freedoms are taken from you, you have one left, attitude and that can mean more than anything else in life.
Another example, Chödrön gives is when she was at a meditation retreat and an adobe brick fell and hit her head. Fortunately, the adobe was soft and did not cause harm. However, the woman next to her immediately responded that some children must have been wrecking havoc from above and unleashed an unsettling anger in her voice and demeanor. Chödrön interpreted this to be like Newton who gained enlightenment when the apple bonked his head. Instead of cycling down, she cycled up and disengaged from what would have seemingly been a negative experience. She was a product of years of self conditioning to free herself from what would otherwise appear as travails and tribulations.
Pema Chödrön, Don’t Bite the Hook Part 2 of 6: Bourgeois Suffering
November 6, 2009 by dr. lam · 3 Comments
I love this concept. Bourgeois suffering occurs when we get the middle seat on the airplane instead of or preferred aisle seat. Or, it arises when a fast-moving car darts in front of us causing a near accident and forcing us to slow down. In other words, it is not real suffering but minor events that we interpret to be insufferable. Now, why would we do that? Because we steadily condition ourselves to respond in such a manner.
However, we can escape this response by conditioning ourselves toward the reverse. When we get the middle aisle, we focus on patience of being there and rather enjoy our situation. When we are in a traffic jam, we test our patience. In fact, Chödrön talks about using traffic situations as a metaphor for life in that if we can steadily deal with seemingly hard situations that test our patience in the arena of driving, we can then become more patient in life.
You know the person in life who is always griping: negative about his job, his wife, the smell of your perfume, the taste of his food, the weather, basically everything. That attitude may not have come about over night. Instead, it came about slowly through years of self conditioning that led to one’s current temperament and outlook. Just as much as we condition ourselves toward a perhaps less than ideal attitude, we can free ourselves from this encumbered view slowly and stepwise. We can always begin with the small things, the bourgeois suffering, as Chödrön calls it.
Pema Chödrön, Don’t Bite the Hook Part 1 of 6 : Anger
November 5, 2009 by dr. lam · 8 Comments
Pema Chödrön, formerly Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, is a Tibetan Buddhist nun, who was alluded to in the book Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser, which we covered a few months ago. I was fascinated enough with the introduction to her thoughts that I wrote a cursory blog on it and now found myself exploring more of her teachings and thoughts. Her seminar/audiobook, Don’t Bite the Hook, references what happens when a fish gets tempted to be ensnared by the bait and gets carried away to an undesirable place. The subtitle for this seminar is Finding Freedom from Anger, Resentment, and Other Destructive Emotions perhaps describes the intent more directly than the metaphoric main title.
The Tibetan Buddhist concept of a “hook” is known as shempa, which describes a thought or an idea that gets buried further and further into our heart, mind, and soul so that we cannot let go of it. The shempa gets hooked into us and we get carried away like an unsuspecting fish by a hook. This seminar focuses on how to recognize and let go of our shempas.
She opens the book with how the power of anger can be such an emotion that shatters all that is good up until the point that it occurs. We may be happily going our way until something provokes us, then we “cycle down” from anger shattering everything that came before. Is anger ever justified? Well perhaps. However, most oftentimes it only leads to regret that we engaged in it and it blankets all good emotions from that point forward. When we engage in anger we cause mutual destruction and lower all energies downward.
We must also begin to believe that anger is almost never or never justified. When we start to see it all around us as a righteous response to a situation, we will then enlist it in such a way that it will become more ingrained in us as a character response. When we start to see the emotion as an alien one we will begin to disengage from it as an unhealthy response so that when times come that we would say that it would be justified, we actually find that was a rationalization so that we could behave in that fashion. Like everything in life, it takes practice, over days, months, and years. Tomorrow we will talk about ways to release anger among other negative forces that can pervade our life.