The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron

Author:Pema Chodron [Pema Chödrön]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780834821095
Publisher: Shambhala Publications

13

Taking Refuge

TODAY I WANT to talk about taking refuge in the three jewels—the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha—and what that really means.

When we’re helpless infants, we totally depend on others to take care of us; oterwise we couldn’t eat and we wouldn’t be clean. If it were not for our helplessness, there would be no nurturing. Ideally, that period of nurturing is one in which maitri, loving-kindness, can be fostered in us. The Shambhala teachings tell us that the young warrior, the baby warrior, is placed in a cradle of loving-kindness. Ideally, among people striving to create an enlightened society, in the period of nurturing, individuals would naturally develop loving-kindness and respect toward themselves and a sense of feeling relaxed and at home with themselves. That would be a ground. In an enlightened society, there would be some ceremonial rite of passage, such as many traditional peoples have had, in which the child formally becomes a young man or a young woman. It seems that too often we’re victims of not enough nurturing in the beginning, and we don’t know when we’ve grown up. Some of us at the age of fifty or sixty or seventy are still wondering what we’re going to be when we grow up. We remain children in our heart of hearts, which is to say, fundamentally theists.

In any case, whether we feel that we weren’t nurtured properly, or whether we feel fortunate that we were—whatever our situation—in the present moment we can always realize that the ground is to develop loving-kindness toward ourselves. As adults, we can begin to cultivate a sense of loving-kindness for ourselves—by ourselves, for ourselves. The whole process of meditation is one of creating that good ground, that cradle of loving-kindness where we actually are nurtured. What’s being nurtured is our confidence in our own wisdom, our own health, and our own courage, our own goodheartedness. We develop some sense that the way we are—the kind of personality that we have and the way we express life—is good, and that by being who we are completely and by totally accepting that and having respect for ourselves, we are standing on the ground of warriorship.

I’ve always thought that the phrase “to take refuge” is very curious because it sounds theistic, dualistic, and dependent “to take refuge” in something. I remember very clearly, at a time of enormous stress in my life, reading Alice in Wonderland. Alice became a heroine for me because she fell into this hole and she just free-fell. She didn’t grab for the edges, she wasn’t terrified, trying to stop her fall; she just fell and she looked at things as she went down. Then, when she landed, she was in a new place. She didn’t take refuge in anything. I used to aspire to be like that because I saw myself getting near the hole and just screaming, holding back, not wanting to go anywhere where there was no hand to hold.

In every human life (whether there are puberty rites or not) you are born, and you are born alone.

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