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

high collar, and the temperature outside was about ninety degrees with high humidity as well. He contended that those inconveniences actually perk you up, keep you awake,present gaps in your cozy, seamless reality of centralizing into yourself.
    When I was feeling a little off these last couple of days, it was like a prod to figure out, ‘What am I going to do, just cave in? Yeah, I’ll just cave in. Who cares?’ Then I noticed that other people began to feel uneasy because I had snapped at them. They hadn’t done anything wrong; I was just feeling irritable. You realize that how you feel affects people, and yet you don’t want to pretend that you feel good when actually you feel horrible. It’s like a koan and you’re left with it. If you’re really wholehearted, you’re continually left with this koan of inconvenience. It’s so inconvenient to find that you’re irritable, that you have a headache. It’s inconvenient to get sick, so inconvenient to lose your great radiating presence and be just a normal shmuck. It’s so inconvenient to have people not regard you as wonderful, so inconvenient to have people see that you have egg in your beard, that in the middle of the oryoki ceremony there’s dental floss stuck to the bottom of your foot. It’s so inconvenient to find yourself embarrassed, so inconvenient to find yourself not measuring up.
    The very first teaching I ever got that I can remember was at a dharmadhatu, one of the centers Rinpoche established. One of the older students was giving a talk, and he began by saying, ‘If you are interested in these teachings, then you have to accept the fact that you’re never going to get it all together.’ It was a shocking statement to me. Hesaid with a lot of clarity. ‘You are never going to get it all together, you’re never going to get your act together, fully, completely. You’re never going to get all the little loose ends tied up.’
    Life is so inconvenient. It’s so inconvenient running this abbey, I can’t tell you. You just get the kitchen together and the bookkeeper leaves. You just get the books together and the housekeeper leaves. You just get a good housekeeper and a good kitchen and a good bookkeeper, and suddenly there are no monks or nuns in the monastery. Then maybe everything’s working and the water goes off for a week and there’s no electricity and the food starts rotting. It’s so inconvenient.
    Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably. In doing that, you again and again encounter your own uptightness, your own headaches, your own falling flat on your face. But in wholeheartedly practicing and wholeheartedly following that path, this inconvenience is not an obstacle. It’s simply a certain texture of life, a certain energy of life. Not only that, sometimes when you just get flying and it all feels so good and you think, ‘This is it, this is the path that has heart,’ you suddenly fall flat on your face. Everybody’s looking at you. You say to yourself, ‘What happened to that path that had heart? This feels like the path full of mud in my face.’ Since you are wholeheartedly committed to the warrior’s journey, itpricks you, it pokes you. It’s like someone laughing in your ear, challenging you to figure out what to do when you don’t know what to do. It humbles you. It opens your heart.
* An intermediate state. The term usually refers to the period between death and the next rebirth.

eighteen
the four reminders
    T he traditional four reminders are basic reminders of why one might make a continual effort to return to the present moment. The first one reminds us of our precious human birth; the second, of the truth of impermanence; the third, of the law of karma; and the fourth, of the futility of continuing to wander in samsara. Today I’d like to talk about these four ways of continually waking yourself up and