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

remembering why you practice, why when you go home you might try to set up a space where you can meditate each day and just be fully with yourself the way you have been here for a month. Why even bother to wake up rather than go to sleep? Why spend the rest of your life sowing seeds of wakefulness, aspiring to take a leap and open up more and become a warrior? Why? When there are all these financial worries, marital problems, problems with friends, problems with communication, problems with everything, and you feel trapped, why bother to go and sit? Why bother to look up at the sky and try to find a gap or some space in that thick discursiveness? We ask ourselves these very basic questions all the time.
    The teachings on the four reminders address these questions. You can reflect on them any time, whether you live at Gampo Abbey or in Vancouver or in Minnesota, Chicago, New York City, the Black Hole of Calcutta, the top of Mount Everest, or the bottom of the ocean. Whether you’re a naga (water-being) or a ghost or a human or a hell-being or a god-realm person – whatever you are – you can reflect on these four reminders of why you practice.
    The first reminder is our precious birth. All of us sitting here have what is traditionally called a good birth, one that is rare and wonderful. All you have to do is pick up Time magazine and compare yourself to almost anyone on any page to realize that, even though you do have your miseries, your psychological unpleasantnesses, your feelings of being trapped, and so on, they’re kind of rarefied compared with how it could be in terms of being run over by tanks, starving to death, being bombed, being in prison, being seriously addicted to alcohol or drugs or anything else that’s self-destructive. The other day I read about a nineteen-year-old girl addicted to crack, nine months pregnant, whose life consists of shooting up and then going out to prostitute herself so she can get enough money to shoot up again. She was about to give birth to a baby who was going to be addicted to crack. That was her whole life; she would continue to do that until she died. On the other hand, living a cushy life in which everything is totally luxurious is also not at all helpful. You don’t have the opportunityto develop much understanding about how people suffer or much sense of an open heart. You’re all caught up in the good feeling of having two or three hundred pairs of shoes in your closet, like Imelda Marcos, or a beautiful home with a swimming pool, or whatever it is you have.
    The basic thing is to realize that we have everything going for us. We don’t have extreme pain that’s inescapable. We don’t have total pleasure that lulls us into ignorance. When we start feeling depressed, it’s helpful to reflect on that. Maybe this is a good time to read the newspapers a lot and remember how terrifying life can be. We’re always in a position where something might happen to us. We don’t know. We’re Jews living in France or Germany or Holland in 1936, we’re just leading our ordinary lives, getting up in the morning, having our two or three meals a day, having our routines, and then one day the Gestapo comes and takes us away. Or maybe we’re living in Pompeii and all of a sudden a volcano erupts and we’re under a lot of lava. Anything could happen. Now is a very uncertain time. We don’t know. Even at the personal level, tomorrow, any one of us might find that we have an incurable disease or that someone we love very much does.
    In other words, life can just turn upside down. Anything can happen. How precious, how really sweet and precious our lives are. We are in the midst of this beauty, we have our health and intelligence and education and enough money and so forth, andyet every one of us has had our bout of depression during this dathun, every single one of us has had that feeling in the pit of our stomach. That definitely happens. One thing that Rinpoche taught and also really