The fifth chapter of Pema’s book about Taking the Leap is entitled “Getting Unstuck”
TINKERING WITH THE THERMOSTAT
It’s helpful to understand that regardless of where you are in life, each one of us, we are all trying to be happy and trying to avoid suffering—we are genetically designed to do so. Science can now help us understand what the Buddha discovered long ago. Within each of us is a physiological, psychological and emotional thermostat that we are constantly trying to regulate. If it’s too hot or too cold, your body reacts. If you feel lonely or tired, your body and mind react, trying to find a way to relieve this suffering, that’s what your body and mind are designed to do.
However, what the Buddha discovered 2000 years ago, is that all this tinkering with our physical comfort, our psychological comfort, our emotional comfort, leaves us with the feeling of nothing ever quite being right, at least not for long. Most of us have found a myriad of methods to adjust our thermostat to get some temporary relief. Those methods may be skillful, like taking a moment to be grateful for the good in our lives, or those methods might be unskillful, like smoking or drinking or over-eating or over-shopping or enabling or all the other unskillful ways we try to be happy or try to relieve our suffering.
A SHOE FOR THE MIND
A common method of relief is to try and fix the outside world. Get a different job, find a new partner, etc., but making the world “just right” is ultimately a futile process. There is a Buddhist story about the man whose feet were hurt by walking barefoot everywhere. He got the idea that he would find enough leather to cover the entire earth, so his feet would never feel pain again. Of course, the much simpler answer is to get enough leather to just cover your own feet.
Stretching this analogy a little further, Buddhism is like making a special shoe for your mind. You train your mind so that the outside world isn’t always pushing your buttons.
What are your buttons that get “pushed”? This teaching is encouraging us to find out what is the trigger that causes us to want to mess with our internal thermostat. What is happening right before we think, say or act in some unskillful way?
SHENPA
The Tibetan term for that moment of being triggered is called shenpa. Generally the Tibetan word shenpa is translated as “attachment,” but Pema Chodron says that is a little too vague. She prefers the translation “hooked”— what it feels like when we get hooked. She uses the poison-ivy metaphor—our fundamental habit of unskillful 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.” But shenpa can take many many forms, shenpa can cause us to overwork, can cause us to be an enabler, can cause us to want to be the hero, when being the hero isn’t the most skillful choice.
PPATIENCE
There’s a moment when you decide to respond in an old unskillful way. That is the moment when you have an opportunity to respond differently. How do we increase the possibility that we will catch that moment?
Practicing patience helps us be present for that very special moment, We work at increasing the time before responding by strengthening patience. There is a scholarly book by an 8th century Buddhist teacher named Shantideva entitled A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life: How to Enjoy a Life of Great Meaning and Altruism. Shantideva has an entire chapter devoted to the practice of patience.
When we start to examine our unskillful habits, we begin to be more patient, the first thing that happens is being uncomfortable. If you’ve always grabbed that drink, you've always been the enabler, if you’ve always worked too much….when you try NOT to respond in habitual ways, the first thing you will experience is the pain, however subtle, in just trying to stop for that moment.
MINDFULNESS AND MEDITATION
Pema’s advice is to simply take a few deep breaths when we feel the urge to adjust the thermostat. Sometimes that can sound too simple, but try it for a few days—when you are in the midst of an argument with your partner or your child or your parent, saying nothing for a moment and just breathing can sometimes feel like torture.
Sitting in meditation is like training wheels for patience, we are training our bodies and our minds to be still, to get used to resting in the neutral position, so that taking those three deep breaths becomes a little easier in the heat of the moment.
People often describe how painful it sometimes feels to meditate—our bodies and our minds want to keep moving, keeping doing, keep adjusting the thermostat. But putting up with the minor discomfort of meditation has been found to build patience. Your body starts to get comfortable with being in the neutral position, of doing nothing, so that when you make a decision, you can do so with greater insight.
What is the best way to get started? We are encouraged by Shantideva and by Pema Chodron to practice on the little shenpas--when someone cuts in line ahead of us or when we lose our keys and feel frustrated. These small shenpas are the best training ground to catch the bigger shenpas later on.
SHENPA’S SHENPA
The last thing I want to mention is shenpa’s shenpa. When we realize that we are having that feeling of being hooked, and now we know about shenpa, and now we feel guilty/ashamed/sad/depressed that we have been shenpa’d again. Pema encourages us to see that moment when we realize we’ve been hooked as a moment of enlightenment. I encourage you to think of enlightenment NOT as something that will happen lifetimes from now, but as something that starts to happen in that simple moment of recognizing that we’re hooked.
It’s also helpful to have some humor about the whole thing. Make a funny voice in your head that points out when you’re hooked—“you got some shenpa going on!”
Patience and laughter—some of the best medicine for overcoming our unskillful habits.
