Live Session Summary, Sunday, May 8, 2022: The theme of Sunday's Live session was ‘Trusting in the Difficult’. I spoke about the way we tend to habitually respond to difficulties by trying to push them away, avoid them, blame ourselves or others for them, or repress them. While it can be wise to move away from what is threatening to us, often, responding with aversion—for example, anger, judgment or blame—to what we don’t like or want is a way of resisting the experience of unpleasant feelings or emotions. Turning towards and opening to the difficult can be a powerful doorway to freedom of the heart.
I quoted one of Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ where he advises the young man to ‘always trust in the difficult… Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love…’
When we ‘trust in the difficult’, what appears as a problem can be experienced as an opportunity to free ourselves from unhelpful habitual responses. I shared some of Pema Chodron’s reflections on the Tibetan word shenpa, which means a ‘hook’ or ‘being hooked’, and that shenpa is like an itch that we habitually want to scratch—but scratching only makes the itch worse. She says, ‘…the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives…’
I spoke of how ‘trusting in the difficult’ is at the heart of the Buddha’s core teaching of the Four Noble Truths—a shorthand statement of this teaching might be, when we cling, we suffer. When we let go of clinging, we experience freedom from suffering—and when we let go completely, we experience complete freedom. Being willing to stay with and experience what is difficult or unpleasant, as both Rilke and Pema Chodron discuss, provides a path to letting go and finding freedom.
In Zen Buddhism, they say: ‘The obstacle is the path’. If we chose to go through our days treating what’s difficult not as a problem to be avoided or resisted but as an opportunity to open and be present with the difficult or unpleasant experience, this way of seeing can transform our life and lead us to ever deeper levels of freedom.
The poems I shared included Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’; Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’. and Martha Postlethwaite’s ‘Clearing’. I also recommended two books on the Buddha’s ‘heart practices’ of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity: Sharon Salzberg’s ‘Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness’ and Christina Feldman’s ‘Boundless Heart: The Buddha’s Path of Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity.’
