The Inner Battle to Open the Heart and Mind and Find Compassion

Though she would have no way to know it, Pema Chodron has been an important teacher for me. I first got acquainted with her when I picked up a copy of “When Things Fall Apart”--perhaps her best-known work--pretty much at random in a bookshop in Ojai several years ago. Having only recently found myself curious about the teachings of Buddhism, I had not previously encountered the work of this Tibetan-trained American nun. Yet my hands seemed mysteriously guided, and I bought the book without question or hesitation.

I did not regret it. Chodron’s powerful, no-nonsense approach to the practice of meditation has helped to nudge me and many others into a deeper understanding of where we stand as human beings in the whole context of incurably suffering humanity, and of how that suffering might be made more tolerable in simple, practicable ways.

Of course, given our present dire circumstance as a civilization, the title and subtitle of her new book have peculiar relevance today. Here in America, times are indeed difficult. We know fear in our bones, perhaps as we have never known it. Too often for our own good, it translates into anger, distrust and a defensive closing-down of thought and feeling. On the global policy front, it translates into war.

Chodron’s guidance offers an alternative: She teaches the practice of the spiritual warrior, an awakening to bodhichitta, which she describes as the opening of the heart and mind to self and others, finding what she calls “the soft spot” in our hearts, “a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound.” She invites us to embark on the search for “that genuine heart of sadness [that] can teach us great compassion.” Christian teachings enjoin us to love our neighbor as ourselves; Chodron teaches specific ways in which we can train ourselves to do it.

She uses the metaphor of the warrior advisedly. The warriors at work in the world today are sadly, for the most part, of the old kind. They dedicate the innate combative energy of our species to attack and counterattack, to mutual hatred, destruction, vengeance, terror. For Chodron’s warrior, the battle is first within: We need the courage to fearlessly explore those places that scare us, bring our own shadows into the light of day and recognize in them the lessons that we need to learn in order to accept our flawed humanity--and the humanity of those we believe to be our enemies without.

The spiritual warrior learns that this enemy is likely his best friend, and certainly his teacher. The battle site is the meditation cushion. “Sitting meditation,” writes Chodron, “also known as mindfulness-awareness practice, is the foundation of bodhichitta training. It is the natural seat, the home ground of the warrior-bodhisattva.”

Chodron walks us through the basic meditation techniques that help us to experience the “four limitless qualities” that lie at the heart of the Buddhist quest for inner peace--loving-kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity--and adds appendixes that reduce these practices to easy-to-follow steps. She exposes the familiar pretexts of our desires and aversions, and ways in which we are able to quiet their distracting voices.

From these basics, Chodron leads her reader into the really scary place of “groundlessness”--the place where we can now consciously “keep pulling out our own rug” with the realization that “nothing--including ourselves--is solid or predictable.”

With no comforting sense of personal identity to fall back on, and an understanding that everything that seems so real around us is subject to change without notice or apparent reason, we may arrive finally at the goal of the warrior--that place where we are curious about everything and judgmental of nothing. “To the extent that we stop struggling against uncertainty and ambiguity,” writes Chodron, “to that extent we dissolve our fear. The synonym for total fearlessness is full enlightenment--wholehearted, open-minded interaction with our world.”

“The Places That Scare You”--it’s short, and so beautifully written that the reading is a pleasure--speaks to people of all religious persuasions. There’s no need to be Buddhist to implement and benefit from the core practices it describes. The clearsighted practicality of Chodron’s approach to the practice of meditation is a persuasive introduction to its benefits in our daily lives. Her voice is as sweet and firm as a first-grade teacher’s, understanding, gently humorous, always kind and seemingly infinitely wise.

The skeptical reader will scoff at the notion that humans are capable of greeting adversity and evil with the compassionate equanimity Chodron proposes. One part of me, too, wants to quarrel with her serenity, even as she enthralls me with the example of her own all-embracing love.