Live Session Summary, Sunday, March 19, 2023: It was good to be with you today for our Live session on ‘Getting Unhooked.’ Here is a summary of the key points, quotes and poems from today’s session: We all experience feeling that things are not going the way we want them to—we’re not getting what we want or we’re experiencing something we don’t like and want to change or we’re confused, worried, stressed out and want things to be different. The Buddha spoke about this as the first noble truth—the truth of suffering. Helpful metaphors for this experience include getting entangled, being stuck, being attached (in a problematic way) to what we’re experiencing. The American-born, Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron uses the metaphor of ‘being hooked’ as a translation of the Tibetan term 'shenpa'. She speaks about shenpa as like poison ivy: “We humans are like children who have a bad case of poison ivy. Because we want to relieve the discomfort, we automatically scratch, and it seems a perfectly sane thing to do. In the face of anything we don’t like, we automatically try to escape.” It’s the scratching of the itch that keeps us tied to suffering—whether it’s the itch of craving something, wanting someone or something to be different, being hooked in stress and worry, or avoiding our experience by checking out or trying to escape what we are feeling. In Buddhist teachings, recognizing our own unskillful relationship to our experience—clinging, resisting, escaping—is a key to finding our way out of suffering. It allows us to let go of clinging and experience greater freedom. Here’s Pema Chodron’s description of how we work with the discomfort of being hooked: “In practicing with shenpa, first we try to recognize it… We do this by not following after the thoughts and learning to come back to the present moment. We learn to stay with the uneasiness, the tightening, the itch of shenpa. We train in sitting still with our desire to scratch. This is how we learn to stop the chain reaction of habitual patterns that otherwise will rule our lives… We label the spinoff ‘thinking’ and return to the present moment.” She describes the process in terms of four ‘R’s: “recognizing the shenpa, refraining from scratching, relaxing into the underlying urge to scratch and then resolving to continue to interrupt our habitual patterns like this for the rest of our lives.” The way out of suffering is ‘through’—being willing to stay with the unpleasantness, to stay with the urge to seek short-term comfort without acting on it, to “ride the waves” of emotional discomfort or unpleasant sensations. This is expressed in these quotes from Frankl, Jung, Ajahn Chah, and Mingyur Rinpoche: • “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” (Viktor Frankl) • “What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.” (Carl Jung) • “There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and so become free.” (Ajahn Chah) • “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” (Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche) Poems I shared today included ‘I will not die an unlived life’ by Dawna Markova; ‘Clearing’ by Martha Postlethwaite; and ‘Ten thousand flowers in spring…’ by Wu Men. I hope the summary is helpful. Please let me know if I missed anything important or if you have any questions… I’ll see you for the April Live sessions: Sundays, April 9 and April 23 at 9am Eastern.
