Free How to Meditate by Pema Chödrön Page B

pleasant emotion.

    No amount of talking on the part of a teacher is going to stop you from following the trail of your emotions as it moves from emotion to thought to escalating emotion. You need to go into your emotions; you need to sit in meditation with them yourself so you can begin to realize how they are obstructing you. Emotions are like the fluid, dynamic, living quality of water, but we freeze our emotions into ice by pushing them away or letting them escalate. We turn our emotions into frozen objects and invest them with truth, and as a result they have so much power over us. So we train again and again in coming back to the object of meditation as a way of interrupting that fixated quality. The grasping and fixation—that’s really what we’re interrupting.
    I hope that as the years go on you become more and more motivated to do this whenever you notice that your monkey mind has been trailing off in dozens of directions. I hope that you feel strongly motivated to come back and uncover the true nature of mind. You’re allowing yourself to connect with the natural, open state of your mind, and you’re beginning to dissolve this ancient habitual pattern of fixating and grasping. Meditation helps us to interrupt this fixation with our emotions in a very nonaggressive, gentle, friendly way, because we invite relaxation and spaciousness into this process. We learn to recognize the fluidity of our emotions by going into them and letting them pass through like clouds in the sky.

15
    GETTING OUR HANDS DIRTY
    I was reading a transcript of a talk by Ponlop Rinpoche, and he said, “In the process of uncovering buddha nature, in the process of uncovering our open, unfixated quality of our mind, we have to be willing to get our hands dirty.” In other words, he was saying that we need to be willing to work with our disturbing emotions, the ones that feel entirely dark.
    We all have emotional experiences that feel terrifying, and in order to experience our natural state, we have to be willing to experience these emotions—to actually experience our ego and our ego clinging. This may feel disturbing and negative, or even insane. Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, would like meditation to be a chill-out session where we don’t have to relate to unpleasantness. Actually, a lot of people have the misunderstanding that this is what meditation is about. They believe meditation includes everything except that which feels bad. And if something does feel bad, you’re supposed to label it “thinking” and shove it away or hit it on the head with a mallet. When you feel even the slightest hint of panic that you’re about to feel or experience something unpleasant, you use the label “thinking” as a way to repress it, and you rush back to the object of meditation, hoping that you never have to go into this uncomfortable place.
    But Ponlop Rinpoche added something really important to this statement. He said that without having a direct experience of our emotions, we can never touch the heart of buddha nature. We can never actually hear the message of awakening. The only way out, so to speak, is through. But what does this word “experiencing” mean? And how can we experience emotions? How can we experience this negative, disturbing, unsettling stuff that we generally avoid? How do we get our hands dirty with them?
    Ponlop Rinpoche says, “It’s only by really tasting your experience of emotions that you get a taste of enlightenment.” Buddha nature and the natural state are not just made up of happy, sweet emotions; buddha nature includes everything. It’s the calm, and the disturbed, and the roiled up, and the still; it’s the bitter and the sweet, the comfortable and the uncomfortable. Buddha nature includes opening to all of these things, and it’s found in the midst of all of them.
    Because we perceive dualistically and have this black-or-white thinking where we label things either “good” or “bad,”