Intimate with the World

There is something indescribably intimate about total strangers from halfway across the continent coming into your home and hauling all of your ruined possessions out to the curb. In the process, they become acquainted with every facet of your everyday private existence. You have opened your life completely to the scrutiny of others.

These are people who have voluntarily interrupted their lives in order to help other human beings they will never know personally. Lives meeting lives, out on the edge, where all pretense, all pride drop away.

The point at which [all spiritual teachings] agree is to let go of holding on to yourself. That's the way of becoming at home in the world. Ego is not sin. Ego is not something you get rid of. Ego is something you come to know - that you befriend by not acting out or repressing all the feelings that you feel.

[...]

[T]he more you try to get life to come out so that it will always suit you, the more your fear of other people and what's outside your room grows. Rather than becoming more relaxed, you start pulling down the shades and locking the door. You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever. The more you just try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.

To begin to develop compassion for yourself and others, you have to unlock the door. You don't open it yet, because you have to work with your fear that somebody you don't like might come in. Then as you begin to relax and befriend those feelings, you begin to open it. Sure enough, in come the music and the smells that you don't like. Sure enough, someone puts a foot in and tells you you should have a different religion or vote for someone you don't like or give money that you don't want to give. Now you begin to relate with those feelings. You develop some compassion, connecting with the soft spot.

It helps to realize that the Nelson Mandelas and Mother Teresas of the world also know how it feels to be in a small room with the windows and the doors closed. They also know anger and jealousy and loneliness. They're people who made friends with themselves and therefore made friends with the world. They're people who developed the bravery to be able to relate to the shaky, tender, fearful feelings in their own hearts and therefore are no longer afraid of those feelings when they are triggered by the outside world.

Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living


I am aware of feeling a sense of both violation and gratitude. I’m doing my best to remain open and not shut down against all of this ("this" being the entire Katrina experience); instead, letting it act on me; allowing myself to go through the hard parts and feel whatever I’m feeling, without giving in to the temptation to run away from it; and seeing where it takes me. Total non-resistance, as much as possible.

I started to say "that means hard things sometimes" but I guess that's kind of a resistant statement.

Comments

[Sharon]

This is the third reference to this author I have read in the last couple weeks. That's it - I need to get the book.

[Kitty]

Pema Chödrön's books have been invaluable to me. Most of them are also on audiotape (CDs now; that shows you how long I've been listening to them.) I used to drive a lot in my job, and I spent countless hours listening to them while on the road.