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sabrinamari"At Gampo Abbey it's a small community. We're thirty monks and nuns there. You have a pretty intimate relationship there, living in community. People were finding that in the dining room, someone would come and sit down next to them and they could feel the shenpa just because this person sat down next to them, because they had some kind of thing going about this person. Then they feel this closing down and they're hooked. If you catch it at that level, it's very workable. And you have the possibility, you have this enormous curiosity about sitting still right there at the table with this urge to do the habitual thing, to strengthen the habituation, you can feel it, and it's never new. It always has a familiar taste in the mouth. It has a familiar smell. When you begin to get the hang of it, you feel like this has been happening forever.
Generally speaking, however, we don't catch it at that level of just open space closing down. You're open- hearted, open-minded, and then... erkk. Right along with the hooked quality, or the tension, or the shutting down, whatever... I experience it, at the most subtle level, as a sort of tensing. Then you can feel yourself sort of withdrawing and actually not wanting to be in that place. It causes you to feel a fundamental, underlying insecurity of the human experience that is inherent in a changing, shifting, impermanent, illusory world, as long as we are habituated to want to have ground under our feet. So someone says this thing, which obviously triggers our conditioning and so forth. We don't really have to go into the history of why it happens so this is not self- analysis of why, or what the trauma was, or anything. It's just, "Oh." And you feel yourself tightening. Generally speaking, it's more common that you are already well into the scratching by the time you notice it."
Pema Chodron
Generally speaking, however, we don't catch it at that level of just open space closing down. You're open- hearted, open-minded, and then... erkk. Right along with the hooked quality, or the tension, or the shutting down, whatever... I experience it, at the most subtle level, as a sort of tensing. Then you can feel yourself sort of withdrawing and actually not wanting to be in that place. It causes you to feel a fundamental, underlying insecurity of the human experience that is inherent in a changing, shifting, impermanent, illusory world, as long as we are habituated to want to have ground under our feet. So someone says this thing, which obviously triggers our conditioning and so forth. We don't really have to go into the history of why it happens so this is not self- analysis of why, or what the trauma was, or anything. It's just, "Oh." And you feel yourself tightening. Generally speaking, it's more common that you are already well into the scratching by the time you notice it."
Pema Chodron
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Chewing
Date: 2005-02-18 02:29 pm (UTC)Re: Chewing
Date: 2005-02-18 06:43 pm (UTC)