Rose Reviews: Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chodron
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
I came across this book earlier this year when I was struggling with an intense feeling of overwhelm. Life appeared to be going well, yet I couldn’t shake a deep feeling of discomfort. Cue frustration. I deployed my usual tactics: I started trying to think my way through the discomfort, doing everything I could to ‘fix’ it. I felt shame and anger at myself – I was happy and everything was going well, so why did I also feel deeply unsettled? Why couldn’t I just enjoy the moment instead of ruminating about imagined distress that hasn’t even happened and is not certain to happen anyway?
For two weeks, I was regularly falling down vortexes of ‘cognitive distortions’ such as black-and-white thinking and emotional reasoning (‘if I feel uncomfortable, something must be wrong!’). In my attempts to figure out what I was feeling so that I could ‘fix’ it, I stumbled across this book. And I’m so glad I did.
Pema Chodron is a well-known American Buddhist teacher who has written almost 30 books on the topic of spirituality and wellness. While the messages in this book are grounded in Stoicism and Buddhism, Pema’s writing is refreshingly accessible and avoids coming across as preachy. Essentially, she discusses how to accept the complexity of our human experience, cultivate compassion towards ourselves, and experience the present moment with openness and curiosity rather than resistance.
When I tell you this book gave me so much comfort. Pema talks about how fundamentally ungrounded life is for everyone, even the people who seem to have it all together. Life is inherently grey and complex - everything shifts, both good things and bad. The tricky thing is, the ego part of our brain doesn’t like grey area or pain, and will go to all sorts of lengths to avoid them. But that’s just part of the experience – we absolutely shouldn’t shame ourselves for feeling anything other than ‘good’. Whatever you’re feeling is simply your experience right now.
There were a few concepts that I found particularly helpful in this book:
The ego or ’fixed identity’ – much of the discomfort we feel is when something challenges our sense of ‘fixed identity’ or ego, which is a combination of how we see ourselves, the script we have for our lives, our fears, our core beliefs and our worldview. For example, if a large part of our fixed identity is founded on being ‘good’ and ‘perfect’, then our ego will resist negative experiences and emotions that make it feel ‘imperfect’. The Buddhist term for this visceral ego-clinging is ‘shenpa’.
‘Exit routes’ – Pema talks about the strategies the ego has for avoiding discomfort and keeping itself alive, much like a living thing. She calls these strategies ‘exit routes’. We all have them, and they will be different from person to person. These can be things like addiction, over-achievement, perfectionism, people-pleasing, workaholism, control, overthinking, abuse/violence, etc.
Looking your emotions in the eye - if you sit with your emotions - especially the ones we classify as ‘negative’ - and look them dead in the eye rather than avoiding them, they will either dissolve or change shape (though we don’t get to decide what they will change into).
‘Charnel ground practice’ – this one stood out to me the most. The term ‘charnel ground’ refers to the places in ancient India where dead bodies were left to decompose or be consumed by scavengers. The point of these places were to serve as stark reminders of mortality and the impermanence of physical existence. The idea of ‘charnel ground practice’ is to help us let go of attachments and confront the reality of our present-moment experience. This requires us to look our pain in the eye with curiosity and compassion, resisting our exit routes and feeling gratitude for the very fact that we exist. Reassuringly, Pema notes that charnel ground practice can be extremely hard and humbling, no matter how experienced a Buddhist you are or how much pain you’ve felt before.
I highly recommend Pema’s book to anyone who feels fear, particularly those of us with the default ‘exit routes’ of overthinking, avoidance or perfectionism. I looked my emotions in the eye and sure enough, after a week, the negative emotions shifted shape. As Pema puts it, the best thing we can do is embrace the ungroundedness of life and practise sitting in the charnel ground. Because discomfort is inevitable no matter how much we try to avoid it – it’s simply the human experience.