..續本文上一頁through. That”s a flash of bodhichitta.

　　That flash, though, feels fragile and fleeting. Meditators describe it often: “I felt like every time I meditated I was waking up more, and then I seemed to lose it." That”s the fragility Shantideva is referring to: there”s a flash of lightning, you suddenly understand that the sun is always shining, but then the clouds cover over it. At some point, though, something shifts and you begin to have confidence that the underlying quality of your being is open and warm and radiant. You know that the sun is always shining.

　　So the more you practice and study, the more you begin to view your emotional upheavals like weather changes. They can be captivating and convincing—they can hook you and drag you under—but at the same time, you begin to know they”re passing clouds. You”ve seen the sun and you have no doubt that it”s there behind the clouds. That makes your motivation to practice stronger, because you feel there”s nothing that could happen to you that wouldn”t be a doorway through these clouds, these temporary weather conditions.

　　Take grief, for instance. Grief is completely pregnant with bodhichitta—it”s full of heart, love and compassion. But we tend to freeze or harden against grief because it”s so painful. We bring in the clouds. In fact, we”re good at bringing in the clouds and keeping them in place. We”re good at fixating on them.

　　But when you practice the teachings that say, “Stay with the grief, see it as your link to all humanity,” you begin to understand that grief is a doorway to realizing that the sun is always shining. You begin to understand that the weather is transient like clouds in the sky. You begin to have more trust in the underlying goodness—the underlying “sun quality”—of your being.

　　In this way, any experiences you have, particularly very strong emotions, are doorways to bodhichitta. The trick is to stay with the soft spot—the bodhichitta—and not harden over it. That”s the basic bodhichitta instruction: stay with the soft spot.

　　How does this work

　　 You”re going along, and your mind and heart are open. Then someone says something and you find yourself either frightened or starting to get angry. You feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, and something in you closes down. You”re on your way to becoming all worked up. At this point, you become unreasonable, and all your wisdom goes out the window. You”re hooked. This is what we work with as practitioners, as aspiring bodhisattvas: we have to be able to see where we get hooked like this. It”s easy to see. To interrupt the flow of it, though, is another matter.

　　When you”re doing sitting practice, and you label your thoughts as “thinking,” and go back to your breath, you”re interrupting the momentum of fixation. Sometimes when you”re doing sitting practice, you can see that the thoughts themselves are like clouds in the sky—they just come and go and they”re no threat to us. So in terms of bodhichitta, when you get hooked or fixated and you”re off and running, it”s actually possible to touch the soft spot of what it is you”re trying to cover over—the anger, rage, frustration, grief, despair. Because inside what you”re trying to cover over is bodhichitta: the soft spot, the tender spot, the vulnerable, open heart and loving mind.

　　The only thing that leads us to supreme joy is to interrupt the flow of fixation and to touch the soft spot of bodhichitta. None of us should turn our backs on bodhichitta, on learning how to contact this soft spot.

　　“Should bodhichitta come to birth in one who suffers in the dungeons of samsara” is a description of ego. It”s like you”re enclosed in a cocoon and there”s no fresh air. But what if someone takes a penknife and slits the cocoon and suddenly light comes in through the darkness

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