Pema Chödron: Giving Up in the Face of Adversity as a Way of Persisting

Pema Chödron, in one of her books entitled When Things Fall Apart, explains how discomfort can be a great opportunity. Indeed, although it may always seem like bad news, for practitioners of the path or "spiritual warriors" —as she calls people who seek to know the truth— all feelings classified as negative, such as disappointment, anger, envy, resentment or fear, are fantastic news! According to Chödron these moments are in fact a focus of great clarity, since they show us where we are holding on.

Indeed, one of the most decisive moments of her life, as she herself explains it in the article "How to Move Forward Once You've Hit Bottom", was when she hit rock bottom and went to seek the advice of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who later became her principal teacher.

The interview was about to end when Pema opened up and said: "My life is over. I have hit bottom. I don't know what to do. Please help me." And in response to this plea, Trungpa answered with a metaphor: "Well, it's like walking along the ocean and a big wave comes and knocks you over. Then you find yourself lying on the bottom with sand in your nose and mouth. You're lying there and you have a choice. You can stay there or you can get up and keep walking out of the sea."

The waves will keep coming, but cultivating courage and a sense of humour are crucial for facing them. This is good advice for life, says the Buddhist teacher. "It's not that the waves stop coming, it's that by training to keep the vulnerability in your heart, the waves simply seem to get smaller and smaller and no longer knock you down. "Losing better". Losing better, failing better, is linked to the ability to keep the rawness of vulnerability in the heart.

This way of welcoming discomfort and suffering is fruitful, since we start from the certainty that we cannot escape it:

The spiritual path does not consist in trying to reach heaven and finally gain access to some magnificent place. In fact, this way of looking at things is what makes us unhappy. Thinking that we can find lasting pleasures and avoid pain is what Buddhism calls samsara, an endless cycle that goes round and round and causes us great suffering. The first of the Buddha's noble truths points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we think that things are lasting, that they do not disintegrate, that we can rely on them to meet our need for security. From this point of view, the only time we can be fully certain of what is happening is when the rug is pulled out from under our feet and we find no place to land.

So, in the meantime, in the face of adversity the message that Chögyam Trungpa passed on to Pema was to learn to fail better and to give up as a way of persisting.

We recall Samuel Beckett in his work Worstward Ho!, where we find the following very famous passage:

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.

In both cases we work with a feeling of failure, of doing something about the absurdity that presents itself, and this is: giving up and sustaining the rawness of vulnerability instead of fighting it or denying it, and it also means acquiring a way of seeing that transforms the object of suffering:

Failing better means that when these things happen in your life, they become a source of growth, a source for moving forward, a source of that part of rawness that you can genuinely communicate to other people.

Pema Chödron explains that the reason the waves seem less and less significant is that it depends entirely on how we look at them, and if we do not face them with a shield they will no longer stop us, they will no longer be a "slap in the face", although "it is not that failure stops hurting. All sorts of things will break your heart, but you can hold failure and loss as part of your human experience that connects you with other people."

Bibliography
Chödron, Pema (2010). When Things Fall Apart. Grupo Gaia: Madrid.
Chödron, Pema (2017) Lion's Roar. "How to move forward once you've hit the bottom". Online: https://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-move-forward-once-youve-hit-bottom/?utm_content=buffer9d91a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer