Start Where You Are



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Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living PDFDrive

Reproach. The fourth strength is called reproach.
This one requires talking to yourself: “Ego, you’ve
done nothing but cause me problems for ages. Give
me a break. I’m not buying it anymore.” Try it in the
shower. You should talk to yourself all the time with-
out embarrassment. When you see yourself starting
to spin off in frivolity, say to yourself, “Begone, you
troublemaker!”
This approach can be slightly problematic because
we don’t usually distinguish between who we think
we are and our ego. The more gentleness that comes
up, the more friendliness you feel for yourself, the
more this dialogue is fruitful. But to the degree that
you actually are hard on yourself, then this dialogue
could just increase your self-criticism.
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Teachings for Life and Death


Over the years, with encouragement from wonder-
ful teachers, I have found that, rather than blaming
yourself or yelling at yourself, you can teach the
dharma to yourself. Reproach doesn’t have to be a
negative reaction to your personal brand of insanity.
But it does imply that you see insanity as insanity,
neurosis as neurosis, spinning off as spinning off. At
that point, you can teach the dharma to yourself.
This advice was given to me by Thrangu Rinpoche.
I was having anxiety attacks, and he said that I should
teach the dharma to myself, just good simple
dharma. So now I say, “Pema, what do you really
want? Do you want to shut down and close off, do
you want to stay imprisoned? Or do you want to let
yourself relax here, let yourself die? Here’s your
chance to actually realize something. Here’s your
chance not to be stuck. So what do you really want?
Do you want always to be right or do you want to
wake up?”
Reproach can be very powerful. You yourself teach
yourself the dharma in your own words. You can
teach yourself the four noble truths, you can teach
yourself about taking refuge—anything that has to do
with that moment when you’re just about to re-create
samsara as if you personally had invented it. Look
ahead to the rest of your life and ask yourself what
you want it to add up to.
Each time you’re willing to see your thoughts as
empty, let them go, and come back to your breath,
Teachings for Life and Death
121


you’re sowing seeds of wakefulness, seeds of being
able to see the nature of mind, and seeds of being
able to rest in unconditional space. It doesn’t matter
that you can’t do it every time. Just the willingness,
the strong determination to do it, is sowing the seeds
of virtue. You find that you can do it more sponta-
neously and naturally, without its being an effort. It
begins with some sense of exertion and becomes your
normal state. That’s the seed of bodhichitta ripening.
You find out who you really are.
Aspiration. The last strength, aspiration, is also a
powerful tool. A heartfelt sense of aspiring cuts
through negativity about yourself; it cuts through the
heavy trips you lay on yourself. The notion of aspira-
tion is simply that you voice your wishes for enlight-
enment. You say to yourself, for yourself, about
yourself, and by yourself things like, “May my com-
passion for myself increase.” You might be feeling
completely hopeless, down on yourself, and you can
voice your heartfelt aspiration: “May my sense of
being obstructed decrease. May my experience of
wakefulness increase. May I experience my funda-
mental wisdom. May I think of others before myself.”
Aspiration is much like prayer, except that there’s no-
body who hears you.
Aspiration, yet again, is to talk to yourself, to be an
eccentric bodhisattva. It is a way to empower your-
self. In fact, all five of these strengths are ways to em-
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