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The first time I met Trungpa Rinpoche was with a class of fourth graders who asked him a lot of questions about growing up in Tibet and about escaping from the Chinese Communists into India. One boy asked him if he was ever afraid. Rinpoche answered that his teacher had encouraged him to go to places like graveyards that scared him and to experiment with approaching things he didn't like.
Then he told a story about traveling with his attendants to a monastery he'd never seen before. As they neared the gates, he saw a large guard dog with huge teeth and red eyes. It was growling ferociously and struggling to get free from the chain that held it. The dog seemed desperate to attack them.
As Rinpoche got closer, he could see its bluish tongue and spittle spraying from its mouth. They walked past the dog, keeping their distance, and entered the gate. Suddenly the chain broke and the dog rushed at them. The attendants screamed and froze in terror. Rinpoche turned and ran as fast as he could--straight at the dog. The dog was so surprised that he put his tail between his legs and ran away.
We can meet our match with a poodle or with a raging guard dog, but the interesting question is--what happens next?"
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Those last three words are a key to a door that opens, and opens, and opens to Life. What happens next? When we bump up against hard stuff--do we freeze, run away, or lean in?
Pema reminds her readers that the 'safest way' to begin to work with this 'leaning in' is in meditation (not in actually running toward rabid dogs)! Even if we meditate 5 minutes a day we will regularly meet unpleasant stuff. When we do, what happens next?
The purpose and gift of meditation is to train us for 'what happens next?' Just sitting still paying attention to our thoughts and feelings we routinely 'face' the whole range of our humaness. Facing means not turning away. Not turning away takes discipline, patience, and courage. Doing this a little bit every day develops discipline, patience, and courage.
Meditation also comes with the instruction to 'hold' all the stuff that comes up with kindness--which means we don't just see what we see but also learn to care about it. This seeing and caring is slowly and surely transformative.
Pema concludes this section of When Things Fall Apart by saying, "We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we'll be more awake in our lives."
As I wrote yesterday, meditation--living mindfully, learning to not turn away from what scares me--helps me follow Jesus. Meeting challenges conscious that 'what happens next?' never has to be a hypothetical question continues to light up the reality that the Kingdom of God is always at hand.
