Do you remember the last time someone said or did something you didn’t like?
Did you notice how quickly you felt the desire to lash out at the person? At that moment, it’s easy to do something regrettable.
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Buddhist nun Pema Chodron reveals a simple way to avoid this outcome. In her book “Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears,” she advises us “to stop, breathe deeply, and slow the process down.” If we do, we allow ourselves the necessary time to assess the situation at hand and remain unprovoked by the unconscious behavior of our opponent. Pema Chodron writes:
When we pause, our natural intelligence often comes to our rescue. We have time to reflect: why do we want to make that nasty phone call, say that mean word, or for that matter, drink the drink or smoke the substance or whatever it might be?
It’s undeniable that we want to do these things because in that heated state we believe it will bring us some relief. Some kind of satisfaction or resolution or comfort will result: we think we’ll feel better at the end. But what if we paused, and asked ourselves, ‘Will I feel better when this is over?’
Allowing that openness, that space, gives our natural intelligence a chance to tell us what we already know: that we won’t feel better at the end. And how do we know this? Because, believe it or not, this is not the first time we’ve gotten caught in the same impulse, the same automatic-pilot strategy. If we were to do a poll, probably most people would say that in their personal lives aggression breeds aggression. It escalates anger and ill will rather than bringing peace.
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She concludes by advising us to resist our reactive habits and approach every situation as an experiment in patience and self-control:
If right now our emotional reaction to seeing a certain person or hearing certain news is to fly into a rage or to get despondent or something equally extreme, it’s because we have been cultivating that particular habit for a very long time.
But as my teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds.
We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves. When we’re in a tight spot, we can experiment with not strengthening the aggression habit and see what happens.
Complement this advice from “Taking the Leap,” with Pema Chodron on how to deal with distracting thoughts during meditation and how to practice tonglen meditation.
I’m a freelance writer and mindfulness advocate behind this blog. I started my meditation practice in 2014, and in 2017 I launched this website to share what I learn with others. Here are the three things you can do here:
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