..續本文上一頁ou”ve got, and then you”re breathe out what you would rather keep. This is just amazing. I mean, it really shakes you up. I”m sure there are many people who can”t believe that you”re being asked to breathe in the dark, breathe in the heavy, breathe in the hard and the hot. They want to breathe in the white light. But the time has come for all of us to breathe in what is the most difficult, to own it, to get to know it, to feel it out. And then to really think about what the world needs, and to try to send that out. I think that”s the transformation.

　　Question from the audience: So it”s the courage to face the suffering and the darkness

　　Alice Walker: To bring it into yourself. Think of all the people who don”t think that there is any darkness in them. There are millions of people who think they don”t have any darkness. But it”s something that we all have, and part of the problem is that we”ve been pushing all this stuff away and denying it, so of course it”s the biggest shadow you can imagine. That”s what”s clobbering us, everything we pushed away.

　　Pema Chödrön: My feeling is that it”s like taking off something that”s been covering your eyes and hindering your ability to see. It”s overcoming your fear of what”s painful, although actually you”re training in opening to both joy and suffering, You see if it”s just aimed at joy, then suffering always seems like then you blew it, like this poor woman who didn”t come tonight because she felt she wasn”t living up to the instructions. That”s very common. People want it all on the joy side or the success side or the victory side. Then when it”s just naturally is part of life just naturally flips, or the mood changes, or the energy changes, you feel that you”ve made some mistake or you”re a failure. So it has to include all of that.

　　One of the basic tonglen instructions, sort of like the tonglen outlook, is that when anything is delightful in your life, you wish that other people could have it. That heightens your awareness of even those fleeting moments of appreciate you usually don”t notice. You start catching the moments of delight and pleasure, just the smallest kinds of happiness and contentment.

　　The other part of the instruction is that when you feel suffering, you also think of all the other people who are suffering. It covers everything: you share what”s good and you also realize we”re in the same boat with the suffering. So it”s all bigger. Some kind of joy comes from that, strangely.

　　Judy Lief: Pema, how do you avoid the trap that has come up in these questions—wanting to be the perfect practitioner and feeling worse and worse because you can”t accomplish it

　　Pema Chödrön: You could do tonglen with that feeling of failure and include all the other imperfect failure people. So there”s nothing that can happen to you that you can”t use. It takes a while to get the hang of that, but when you start to hear yourself saying “bad dog” or whatever, you stop right there and acknowledge what you”re feeling and the billions of other people feeling the same way. Somehow that shakes up our ways of getting stuck.

　　When I”m teaching, I”m so aware that most people are hearing with a filter of turning it against themselves. I try very hard, as do most Western teachers, to address that, but it still keeps happening. You just have to keep addressing it. You know, it takes practice. That”s why it”s called practice.

　　Alice Walker: It”s also important to accept and even embrace the fact of our imperfection. Our imperfection is probably our one perfection. Also I think it”s really good, when you have periods of happiness, to say , I am happy. I think that focuses you in the moment of being happy, and you really know that you”re happy. Otherwise, especially in this culture where you”re always being told to buy something or go somewhere or do something, you lose that moment of being happy because you”re projecting happiness as being somewhere or something else. So when you feel happiness, you just say it, even to yourself, maybe especially to yourself, but aloud, I think it helps to say it aloud, Just say, I”m happy.

　　Pema Chodron: I hadn”t thought of making it so simple, but that”s right, just say it. Then you could also say, could other people have this, too. Words are powerful in terms of brainwashing ourselves. (laughter)

　　Pema Chodron is director of Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She is the author of When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

　　Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple. She is the author of By the Light of My Father”s Smile.

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