Book Report: Taking the Leap

12. Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears (2009) (5/12/19)

I have a set of CDs by Pema Chödrön, Getting Unstuck: Breaking Your Habitual Patterns and Encountering Naked Reality, that I once listened to, on repeat, while driving. She is so friendly and soothing, and every statement, every idea, made perfect sense. And yet, once I was finished, I couldn't have begun to tell you what she'd said!

This book covers essentially the same territory (I'm pretty sure). I do remember that in the CDs she discussed shenpa, aka "attachment" or as she likes to call it, "getting hooked." Shenpa is at the root of all our unhappiness; it is the charge behind negative or uncomfortable emotions. It is the things that trigger us, the stories we tell ourselves about uncomfortable feelings, or about "who we are" (causing, respectively, deflection or rigidity); it's what keeps us from being simply present, what causes us to bolt. She characterizes it as a tightening, a pulling back, in response to a stimulus—or perhaps that sense of dread or discomfort that can sweep over us for no identifiable reason. She says the way to address shenpa is "simple": (1) acknowledge that you're hooked (with humor, if possible); (2) pause, take three conscious breaths, and lean into the energy (open, curious, intelligent); (3) relax and move on. Easy, right? Well, she does acknowledge that it becomes easier with practice . . . She suggests trying it out while driving: learning how to shake off our irritation at inconsiderate drivers is a way of confronting shenpa.

In this book, she also discusses the three qualities of being human, of our essential goodness: natural intelligence, natural warmth, and natural openness. Natural intelligence occurs when we aren't caught in the traps of hope and fear. If we're not obscuring our natural wisdom with anger, self-pity, or craving, we intuitively know what's the right thing to do, what will help and what will make things worse. Natural warmth is the whole gamut of what are often called heart qualities: our shared capacity to love, to have empathy, to have a sense of humor, and to feel gratitude and appreciation and tenderness. And natural openness she describes as "the spaciousness of our skylike minds," expansive, flexible, and curious.

The key to all this—of confronting shenpa, of reclaiming our inherent goodness—is learning how to stay. Just that. If you manage to notice moments of happiness and comfort, and cherish those moments as precious, they will continue to grow as you continue to practice. Contrarily, if you notice that you've fallen back into shenpa, pain and discomfort, it's okay: you've gotten the gift of having noticed, which is a form of attention and consciousness right there, part of our natural intelligence. Rather than beating yourself up, simply take note, and move on. Maybe next time (or the next, or the next) you'll be able to, as they say, avoid the hole.

And a way of practicing staying is to stop, frequently, as we go about our lives, take three deep breaths, being as fully present (and out of our thoughts) as possible, and then move on. She really believes in those three deep breaths. And moving on. The act, the process, gives us access to our natural openness, and hence to "the vastness and timelessness and magic of the place in which you find yourself," wherever you are.

The themes of the book are expressed in the chapter titles: the habit of escape, the natural movement of life, getting unstuck, the notion that we all have what we need, rejoicing in things as they are, the importance of pain (without which, there would be no joy, its opposite), and unlimited friendliness, or compassion, for ourselves and for others.

Here's something she says that I strongly believe, and that I believe is part of what is wrong with the world right now:

Usually when we're all caught up, we're so engrossed in our storyline that we lose our perspective. The painful situation at home, in our job, in prison, in war, wherever we might find ourselves—when we're caught in the difficulty, our perspective usually becomes very narrow, microscopic even. We have the habit of automatically going inward. Taking a moment to look at the sky or taking a few seconds to abide with the fluid energy of life, can give us a bigger perspective—that the universe is vast, that we are a tiny dot in space, that endless, beginningless space is always available to us. Then we might understand that our predicament is just a moment in time, and that we have a choice to strengthen old habitual responses or to be free.

I still have the CDs. Maybe I'll listen to them again, while driving.