The Places That Scare You

“Going to the places that scare you cannot happen without a compassionate inquiry into the workings of the ego.  You must examine how you run away.” Pema Chodron.

In her book The Places That Scare You Pema Chodron touches the heart of facing our insecurities by identifying our patterns of avoidance.  She describes Bodhichita as the healing power that leads to a path of understanding and acceptance.  Bodhichitta means “completely open heart.”  It’s where we arrive when we take down all of the walls and erase all of the strategies that keep us from facing our fears.  It’s a place of total exposure and vulnerability that allows us to fully feel the pain that links us to every other living being. 

When we first step into this state of exposure it feels terrifying and uncomfortable.  We want to run back to all of the things that protected us from feeling these intense emotions.  Our strategies of avoidance come knocking at the door telling us that we were safer back behind the closed doors of indifference.  We crave whatever it was that numbed our senses and allowed us to remain detached.  We associate an open heart with pain and vulnerability and prefer to be in control of what we are feeling.  

But, if we stay long enough, the fear dissipates and leaves us in a state of open hearted bliss.  With the help of self-compassion we start to see our vulnerable moments as an opportunity to deepen our self-awareness.  We use the intense feelings of love, sadness, loss, inadequacy, gratitude, and loneliness as tools to heal our wounded hearts.  Underneath all of the resentment, hatred, anger, and denial that we develop after heart break is the tender truth of sadness that softens us and develops our compassion for all other beings who have felt that same raw pain. 

All of our strategies of avoidance simply prevent us from using vulnerability as a source of awakening.  Pain is indifferent to the walls that we build.  It will find us no matter how far down the path of avoidance we travel.  The only way to weaken its piercing sting is to look bellow ego’s reaction and find the underlying truth of sadness that humbles us to the human condition.  The first noble truth is that there is suffering.  No one can avoid it.  The only thing that we can do is understand it, accept it and see it as the string that ties us to all other beings.