The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World by Pema Chödrön

and prostrating again to make a path. At times they would go all the way up to the tops of mountains, only to find that they had made a mistake and would have to come all the way back down. They didn’t have much food, and not only that, had they been discovered, they would have been shot by the Chinese. At one point they had to go through a river, and their clothes froze on them. Rinpoche said that if they tried to sit down, their chubas (dresses) and their robes cut their skin because the ice was so sharp. Not very convenient. Rinpoche said that as they walked along, they made a kind of clinking sound. He joked, ‘Oh, I hope the Chinese don’t hear us, they might think it’s some kind of code: clink, clink, clink.’ He said nobody else thought it was funny. (He tells stories again and again of making jokes about what was going on, and then he always says, ‘But nobody else thought it was funny.')
    When this journey was finished, the refugees found themselves in India, homeless, in a completely alien climate. Many of them got tuberculosis right away from moving from a high, cold, clear place to a low, hot, dry, dusty place. Eventually Nehru’s government was verykind to the Tibetans, but when they first came and even when the people were hospitable, the refugees were still homeless. Nobody knew who they were. There was no difference between a tülku or the head of a monastery and an ordinary person. Everyone’s identity was somehow leveled.
    Refugee: that’s what it means to become a Buddhist, that’s what it means to become one who wholeheartedly is using one’s life to wake up instead of to go to sleep. It’s very inconvenient. Trungpa Rinpoche was a man who appreciated the lessons of inconvenience; he was also a man who lived wholeheartedly. It didn’t matter if it was convenient or inconvenient. There was some sense of wholehearted journey in his life. Once you know that the purpose of life is simply to walk forward and continually to use your life to wake you up rather than put you to sleep, then there’s that sense of wholeheartedness about inconvenience, wholeheartedness about convenience.
    Rinpoche emphasized inconvenience. For instance, he always kept everybody waiting for his talks, I don’t think through any plan on his part, but simply because he was who he was. There was an abhisheka (empowerment ceremony) for which he kept people waiting for three days. It was often the case that when he would finally do something, you had so completely given up that you didn’t think that it would ever really happen. When he wanted everyone to move to Nova Scotia, he used to tease peopleabout their comfort orientation. He said, ‘Oh, you’re not going to want to do it because it might mean leaving your nice house or your nice job. You might not have an easy time finding a job in Nova Scotia.’ Sometimes I think he wanted people to move to Nova Scotia just because it was so inconvenient. Comfort orientation murders the spirit – that was the general message. Opting for coziness, having that as your prime reason for existing, becomes a continual obstacle to taking a leap and doing something new, doing something unusual, like going as a stranger into a strange land.
    Rinpoche’s oldest son, the Sawang Ösel Mukpo, told me that Rinpoche told him that he liked to arrange the furniture in his rooms so that it was just slightly uncomfortable to reach for a glass. Instead of putting the table close so that everything was comfortable, he liked it to be about half an inch too far away so that you had to reach. Rinpoche also said many times that it was good to wear your clothes a little too tight. He himself used to wear an obi, the wide belt that goes with a kimono, underneath his clothes, really tight, so that if he slouched, he would be uncomfortable – he had to keep his ‘head and shoulders.’ He designed uniforms. I remember one he designed to be worn at a certain ceremony: it was made of scratchy wool with a