Pema Chödrön

“Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.”

In keeping with the spirit of Pema Chödrön's work, I’ve decided to break my usual rules (one book - one review) and write a single reflection encompassing The Wisdom of No Escape, When Things Fall Apart, The Places That Scare You, and Living Beautifully. Because you can take the girl out of school, but you can never fully take school out of the girl.

Chödrön’s overarching themes are that we should be kind (not least toward ourselves) and be present. If we can manage those imperatives, everything else will fall into place. To accomplish this, we must learn to let go. Let go of our ideas about ourselves, about other people, about the past (i.e., no regrets), and the future, and most of all about life and how it ‘should’ be. To do these things, we must forge a path that allows for the confidence to live life without a game plan, to surrender to life when our plans are upset and to instead embrace the possibilities of what – and who – might appear in our mandala (LB).

More than esoteric advice (honestly, even four books in, the various vows, commitments, meditation postures, and spiritual teachers form an indistinguishable mass), I appreciated Chödrön most in storytelling mode. She cites everyone and everything from ancient Chinese proverbs (“The truth is like a dog yearning over a bowl of burning oil. He can’t leave it, because it is too desirable, and he can’t lick it because it is too hot.” WTFA) to Steve Jobs: (“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of think you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” LB)

Chödrön also pulls broadly from the Native American tradition, both old and new (advice from Hopi elders: we are in a fast flowing river and must not cling to the shore, but push off into the middle of the river, see who else is with us, and celebrate and from Chief Seattle “Our planet is in great trouble, and if we keep carrying old grudges and do not work together, we will all die.”- LB) I think he – and she – means dies sooner, but that’s beside the point. 

Where others can come across as harsh (yes, Tolle, you), Chödrön is both practical and ever gentle. For example, she readily acknowledges that “none of what we’ve learned seems very relevant when our lover leaves us, when our child has a tantrum in the supermarket, when we’re insulted by our colleague” (WTFA). In gentle mode, Chödrön reminds her reader of the importance of putting one foot in front of the other and not being discouraged by falling flat (PTSY). 

For with her, the goal is not change, per se, but acceptance. “Our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to,” she reminds us. “It’s who we are right now and that’s what we can make friends with and celebrate.” (WNE) It’s not that she doesn’t want her reader to become a better version of themselves; she does. It’s just that Chödrön also recognizes that when we fight our true selves, we lose every time. We can try to be more peaceful, more calm, more anything, but at the end of the day, we each have an essential nature. Failure to recognize that – to listen to our intuition – exacts a steep price. (WTFA)

Hope and fear are two of her consistent themes. Specifically, Chödrön addresses the need to both overcome fear in order to live a more authentic life and to leave hope aside, for when we hold on to hope, we are robbed of the present moment. Our fears she classifies regularly as demons or dragons and reminds us that we are destined to fight those same demons and dragons until we learn the lessons they have come to teach us. (WNE) Hope and fear – opposite sides of the same coin – are my chief currency. HMU, baby.

Chödrön never uses the term inertia, but as I think of her urgings to confront fear and not be the baby bird, remaining in the nest long past time (PTSY), I’m reminded how, in my first real job, as I debated whether to take a different role, an older colleague took me aside and said, “inertia is a powerful force – you always need to fight it.” It’s the best advice I’ve ever received, and I think of that colleague every time I make a hard decision against the pull of inertia. 

In Living Beautifully, Chödrön writes “We can dance with life when it’s a wild party completely out of control, and we can dance with life when it’s as tender as a lover.” And while I like the imagery, what it doesn't capture is that, at least in my experience, life can often be simultaneously tender and wild....and that, just as sneaking off with a lover into the corner while the party rages all around heightens both experiences, so does the confluence of tender and wild make for some of the most textured moments in life.

And so: accept ourselves and our lives as we and they are. Start with our well laid plans, but know that sooner or later life will blow them apart (PTSY). Avoid the trap that there is ample time to do things later and recognize that we will never get it all together, whatever ‘all’ may be. After all, “Anything could happen. Now is a very uncertain time.” (WNE) To which I say: tell me about it.

The Power of Now

The bad news first: Eckhart Tolle’s Practicing the Power of Now suffers by comparison to other, similar books I’ve read lately (Alan Watts and Pema Chodron, I’m looking at you). The question and answer format he uses throughout can have the (presumably unintentional) effect of coming across as patronizing, and the joviality (Watts) and kindliness (Chodron) are missing. Additionally, the writing itself is frequently less accessible and a demands an intensity of focus (Tolle would undoubtedly argue a ‘presence’) and a level of interest I didn’t always feel. And, because it has to be said, it’s hard to take advice from a man who decrees menstruation can (should?) become a joyful and fulfilling time. Yes, seriously: “Menstruation will then become not only a joyful and fulfilling expression of your womanhood, but also a sacred time of transmutation.” (WTF? Where did this come from? Why is this even here?)

That said, there’s plenty of good to be found here, particularly in the form of highly practical, concrete advice for focusing on the present, assuming responsibility for one’s life and choices, and the tangled nature of life such that “good” and “bad” are often tightly twined. (Do you truly know what is positive and what is negative? There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. … Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time.” So everything in life happens for a reason, even if we’re sometimes blind to the reason, or unable to discern it for many years hence. No wonder I liked this book, criticisms aside. But I digress.)

Tolle is consistent in advising that, whatever one is doing, one lean into it, starting with posing the question early, “Is there something that you should be doing but are not?” and then advising the reader “Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment.” It seems so simple and so obvious, but confronting the slippery notion of “should” head-on was one of my favorite aspects of the book.

Like Watts, Tolle wants his reader to proclaim their life with gusto, writing, “Speak up or do something to bring about a change in the situation – or remove yourself from it. Take responsibility for your life.”  In case readers missed it the first time (and admittedly one of Tolle’s more grating habits is his tendency to reminder readers that he has, in fact, been over this before), another passage declares, “Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find you’re here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses.” 

Somewhat perplexingly, especially for such a slim volume, the writing alternates between thick knots (I still don’t get the Manifested and Unmanifested nonsense but maybe that’s just me), and astounding simplicity and clarity of direction. For example: “If the overall situation is unsatisfactory or unpleasant, separate out this instant and surrender to what is. Ask yourself, “Is there anything I can do to change the situation, improve it, or remove myself from it?” … Focus not on the one hundred things that you will or may have to do at some future time but on the one thing that you can do now. … If there is no action you can take, and you cannot remove yourself from the situation either, then use the situation to make you go more deeply … into the Now…when you enter this timeless dimension of the present, change often comes about in strange ways without the need for a great deal of doing on your part. Life becomes helpful and cooperative.” It’s seems so simple, this idea of not allowing oneself to go too deep into the weeds, or to make sure that the trees are still visible within the forest. Yet, it’s  actually the opposite of the issue so frequently raised of “not being able to see the forest for the trees.” To which Tolle might say, good – without those trees there would be no forest.) In any event, it’s a great reminder that when you’re lost, it’s the individual trees along the path that will lead you to the trail, not the contours of the full forest.

Speaking of being lost, Tolle may accept that not all who wander are lost, but perhaps a goodly number of those who wander his way were, are, or (despite his extortions against worrying about the future) expect soon to be so. “Acute unhappiness can be a great awakener” he tells his reader, also reminding them “You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure.” Or both – ouch.

Not to fear, though, for Tolle also wants his reader to remember that all they “ever have to deal with, cope with, in real life – as opposed to imaginary mind projections – is this moment. Ask yourself what “problem” you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment? You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future – nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before not after.” It’s the step-by-step guide for those who need more than simply “breathe.”

Obviously a book titled The Power of Now stresses just that, and in fact, in these ruminations Tolle is at his best in terms of straightforward writing that captures and holds attention and feels purposeful. “. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.” … “If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.” As Tolle might say, we’ve been over this before: everything in life happens for a reason, even if the entire reason is for you to learn from a particular mistake. Don’t blow the opportunity presented by the moment.

Still the Mind

To say Still the Mind is a book about meditation, or how to meditate, is to say that language is an arrangement of words: it misses the point entirely. Although there’s some repetition from other Watts books, such as the idea of existing between two eternal darknesses or the question of where each of us was before we were born, there’s plenty of additional material to ponder.

Some of the ideas are small – the pinch of rascality that imbues each (interesting) person on the planet. The idea that technology may not be an improvement in the long run (hahahaha – again, a man ahead of his time). The repeated illusion to the butterfly effect, or what Watts refers to as the unintended consequence of turning glass to gold. (For what it’s worth, the butterfly effect has been one of the guiding principles of my life, and for many years was the principle that allowed me to hold any surging regret into place. For as tempting as the notion that we can change one wee little aspect of life and otherwise hold the remainder steady is, it’s also a fallacy, one strong enough to allow me consistently to find my feet.) 

As I read though, a curious shape shift occurred in my mind and somewhere before the half way point the reading morphed from the enlightenment and reassurance I felt with my introduction to Watts to, essentially, thought porn. That is, I transformed from a person seeking new ideas and perspectives to a red-stater seeking reassurance of my worldview from the talking heads on Fox.

This shift was as unexpected as it was surreal and I trace it to the eloquent statement that there is nothing anyone can do to be anyone else than who they are, or to feel any other way than the way the feel at this moment. These words crystallized an idea that has been bouncing through my head for ages, that the world contains but two types of people, the curious and the incurious. This delineation might be said to largely account for my divorce…from an inherently good but genuinely incurious man, to whom it would never occur, as Watts writes, that you swim to experience the water rippling past you and for the shifting net of sunlight underneath. (I have not been swimming in four months now, which is undoubtedly the longest stretch in my life. While I can dissect what I miss ad nauseum, it boils down to “what he said.”) Obviously then, when Watts avers “sometimes life is telling you that the course you are on is not the way to go, and the message underlying all of this is that you cannot transform yourself,” it feels a little too confirmational, a little too much like hearing, say, that facemasks are ineffective against coronoavirus, if that is what you really believe. (But you, dear reader, do not believe that, I'm certain. My God, don’t get me started.)

Yes, yes, Watts does ultimately come around to the mechanics of meditation, although – blessedly – his methods are far more palatable than those of the Japanese monks to whom I have taken my students for years. He does mention both sitting zazen and the big stick with which meditators are not-so-gently prodded back to the proper form – but disdainfully, it must be said. Here again, I felt a natural alignment with Watts’s thinking – meditation, for him, largely boils down to the quiet space where one feels the gentle brush of air current upon the skin, where birdsong fills space that active thought normally occupies, where clouds and contrails move through the mind.

When I was 15, a childhood friend was killed in a car crash. The funeral program ended with a poem, which has long seared itself into my subconscious, and has – perhaps not so subtly influenced my views on death. The poem was not written by Alan Watts, but it is in the same vein of thought:

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

In other words, we are each of us, an integral part of the universe, born of starlight and sunlight; gentle breeze and pounding rain. We can but return from whence we came.

Five stars.

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman

To say this is a book about Chani Kaufman's wedding is to miss the mark entirely. Yes, the ultra orthodox wedding of Chani to Baruch Levi is the central element around which the story flows, but The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is about the wedding the same way a person is "about" their skeleton. No essence, in other words.

No, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is about listening to the inner self, sometimes even after a pause of many years. It is about the ability to forge new identities, even when our life circumstances challenge that notion. It is about the idea of love taking many forms, and the centrality of our core values to who each of us truly is. It is about new beginnings, but also about not being afraid to write a new ending.

It is about the moment "she remembered what she had given up and what she had become." And, yes, there is a wedding.

Four stars.

Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek

Inside of five minutes with this book, Alan Watts gave voice to one of the inherent contradictions within me – I am both goo and prickly, it seems. Scientific terms, clearly. Watts states early, and somewhat often, that there are two kinds of philosophy – goo and prickles, with prickly people liking precision and logic (yes, please!) and goo people liking things vague. I’m generally not in favor of the vague…..but wait, goo people are also idealists, and how many times have I been asked in my life how I could be both an idealist and such a structured realist? My mind’s eye could see the location and context for that very exchange with a colleague not more than two years ago. Egads. And so it is that I was forced to wonder yet again how Watts could understand what made me tick.

Perhaps most revelatory was the way in which Out of Your Mind made me (re)consider myself. Specifically, although I would long agree with the assertion that I am smart, perhaps, depending on the topic, even wicked smart, I would never have agreed with the statement that I was in any way a deep thinker or philosophizer. I have always held the butterfly effect as a self-evident truth, and so to see Watts argue for the same idea as a type of philosophy (“if a given star out in the universe didn’t exist, you would be different from who you are now”) was startling. This is not, it seems, a given for all. Likewise, although I have tried six ways to Sunday, I know with every fiber of my being that there is pure veracity in the succinct assertion that you “can’t love on purpose.” Seeing so many of my beliefs printed in black and white by a man known for the quality of his thoughts, I am reconsidering whether the various friends who lean on me for advice might know something about me that I did not.

Watts also provided the anecdote that largely solves for me one on the enduring mysteries of self I’ve never understood. For many, many years, Americans and foreigners alike have proclaimed me “not really American.” Given that I have tendencies to be opinionated, forthright, loquacious, and often a bit loud, I’ve never quite understood…and no one has ever provided me a satisfactory response. Watts, though, ah, he has given me a response. For he writes of the Zen koans for exploring questions like, “if your parents never met, would you be here? If your parents met other people and had children, would one of those children be you?” And questions like these, well these are simply my favorite rabbit holes of all time. Since no one else I know falls down the same holes, I figured I was just weird or crazy (or both), but then to see in print that this is actually a thing….the lightbulb went off and I finally understood why so many people have declared me not really American. Closer to home, this one anecdote illuminated why life at home was such a challenge: he cannot stand when I ponder such questions, but such musings are an inherent part of my nature. Suppressed or explored, one of us always felt the tension. Or, as Watts writes elsewhere, “people who are interesting are people who are interested.” (Touché?)

When I read that we spend an awful lot of energy trying to make our lives fit images or what life is or should be, I nearly cried: would that someone had prepared me for that reality 20 years ago. Likewise, when Watts asks “who said you could get the better of life,” I was dumbstruck by the simplicity of a notion I have spent most of my adulthood fighting – you can’t outwit the universe. And although it’s easy to wish I had known and understood these pearls of wisdom years ago, I am wise enough now to appreciate that only the present is real, and grateful that I’ve figured this out at 40 rather than 80.

For many years, I was too focused on the front of the embroidery – that neat, tidy picture, to consider how the back of the embroidery was eating away at me. As Watts might say, the messiness required for the beautiful picture was a game not worth the candle. My one disagreement with him, though was where he urged his reader not to be caught looking at the back of the embroidery. It seems to me that such close examination – of a duration such that one is almost sure to be caught – is a necessary precursor to being able to “claim your life and proclaim with gusto, ‘I’m responsible.’” For, yes, I had created the beautiful embroidery, but it wasn’t until I was willing to take ownership of the mess underneath that I could even begin to extract myself from it….even at the cost of unmaking a goodly chunk of that beautiful and much-admired image on the front.

And when you’ve a lot of messiness underneath your life, regardless of whether others see it or know that it’s there, it’s hard to have fun. I laughed out loud when I read that “people get terribly compulsive doing things they think they have to do” because that revelation, for me was the revelation that set me on a new path. I needn’t divulge all the gory details here, but suffice it to say, from setting a quota on the number of books to be read in a year; to miles to be run, swum, or biked; to calories to be consumed (or not), I’ve known my share of compulsions. All have one thing in common: they suck the fun out of whatever activity is in play, so that each new outlet becomes a new chore, one more task to be marked off the long list of daily activities.

Watts writes that to spread joy, you need to have joy, and that is the emotion that leaks from each page. Out of Your Mind is not written to be humorous, but again and it again, Watts’s approach filled me with warmth and appreciation. He’s not advocating “being flabby.” It’s “taboo to scream in a hospital.” (Someone should have told me before I did just that the last time I was in one. Admittedly, through the fog of many sedatives I did notice mine were the only shrieks rending the air.)

It was his closing that seared me though. “When you discover that there is nothing to cling to and there isn’t anybody to cling to them, everything is quite different. … You feel almost that you are walking on air.” In case anyone is confused, America is a bit of a dumpster fire these days. And yet, personally, I’ve never felt lighter or happier. This feels like a dangerous admission, but I somehow feel Watts would understand. 

Five stars.