Pema Chodron on Why We Should Be Aware, Even When We Are in Pain

Only a day after writing the last post, on awareness, I stumbled on an O (the Oprah Magazine) interview with Pema Chodron. An accomplished Buddhist monk, Chodron recounts to Oprah how she discovered Buddhism while going through a painful divorce. And she speaks right to the question I was debating earlier, which is whether there really is value in being totally aware during a upsetting experience.

Chodron describes first learning about Buddhism from a magazine article she found:

…the article was called “Working with Negativity.” And its first line was, there’s nothing wrong basically with what you feel, like the negativity in this case; the problem is that you don’t stay with the underlying emotion. You don’t stay with the feeling, you spin off and try to escape it in some kind of way. And in that way, all the, you know, suffering for yourself and for other people comes from the spin-off. But if you could stay present, then you’d really learn something.

And this is her warning about what happens when one tries to avoid pain:

Of what it feels like, which is always—feels really bad, and it’s usually in the throat or the heart or the solar plexus. And it feels like a tightening. If you can stay with that feeling and breathe very deeply in and very deeply out, and say to yourself, millions of people all over the world share this kind of fear, discomfort what—I don’t even have to call it anything—they share this not wanting things to be this way. And it’s my link with humanity. And why—and it gives birth to a chain reaction which causes people to strike out and hurt other people or self-destruct. In other words, not staying with the feeling cuts you off from your compassion for others, your empathy for others, and also from the largeness of your own heart and mind.