“We must be willing to open ourselves to all the obstacles… What we’re looking at here is the human condition. When you’re willing to relate with your anger, say, your own addictedness, your own incompleteness, then you’re relating to everyone’s anger, everyone’s addictions, everyone’s insecurities. What we find in ourselves helps us to see others.
You’d be amazed how powerful this genuine compassion is. You’d be amazed how this perspective of not being caught in your own private sense of burden helps you realize it’s your link to humanity. We identify so much with our ‘problem.’ But if we can have some kindness toward this ‘problem’ and realize it’s the human problem, that it’s your kinship with other people, then very interestingly we discover that we’re very attached to that problem…We don’t realize how identified we are with this problem. It’s familiar. And it hurts, but there’s a lot invested in our sense of being the one who’s screwed up. And the method is to go into it. Go into it.
Suffering is as much a part of life as happiness. And it’s not to be feared and it’s not to be avoided. But we put so much energy into running away…And that’s what’s called neurosis, psychosis…And all that is like a defense mechanism against not wanting to feel [the pain]. This practice is about kindly holding pain and working at not running away… This is where the real humanness comes from.”
-Pema Chodron
on Tonglen meditation, 1994