..續本文上一頁nto the history of how I got here. I just say, “I am feeling this.” At this point, I have a chance for the buck to stop here. This stimulus does not need to be the cause of evening the score in the usual pain-causing way.

　　Instead, at this point you could apply a meditation method that would circumvent the habitual score settling. Whatever practice you use, the point is to stay with the underlying uneasiness and lean into it. Connect with the natural openness of your mind. You can feel at that point that “this debt has just been paid.” At that point, there isn”t going to be any further debt to somebody else or to yourself, no further repercussions from this exchange except further awakening, further connecting with the natural openness and intelligence of mind, further connecting with warmth and loving-kindness toward yourself, further connecting with compassion and love for other beings. Those are the kind of results that our uncomfortable situations could give birth to. That”s a notion of settling the score that is much different from the habitual approach that gives birth to terror and war.

　　I offer an example from my own life of karmic debt, not because it is in any way special but because it helps to illustrate how intimate our experience of pain is, and how it becomes our teacher. After all, it is our own pain, the many gifts of shenpa that our lives offer, that give us the opportunity to settle the score in the way the Buddha understood. I left my first husband in a very unkind way. I left with the children and went off with another man. It was really sudden and shocking for him, pretty brutal. I was about twenty-five years old and really unconscious about the effect this was having on him, my family, my children, and an array of other people. Ultimately, it was the right decision, but the way I went about it was pretty childish.

　　Then, guess what

　　 Eight years later my second husband left me suddenly, in a scenario that was eerily, awesomely similar. At that point, I knew I was experiencing what I put my first husband through. The first thing I did was to get together with him and say, “I”ve said I”m sorry before, but now I really am sorry, because I am now feeling what you felt.”

　　Many people have stories like this. They put someone through something and then they experience it themselves, and somehow they know that they are paying back a debt. It has nothing whatsoever to do with punishment. It”s more like a law of physics. There”s no one punishing you. There is no master planner making sure you get it. There is no vengeance. It is just a principle that you sooner or later start to feel in your bones.

　　Always at a crossroads

　　This approach to settling the score is that whenever something bad comes your way, it is always an opportunity for further healing. When things happen to you that you don”t like, you can either open the wound further or you can heal the wound. Instead of getting strongly hooked into thoughts like “I don”t like,” “I don”t want,” “It isn”t fair,” “How could they do this to me

　　,” “I don”t deserve this,” or “They should know better,” it”s possible that you could train yourself so that the natural intelligence becomes stronger than your reactivity.

　　For most of us most of the time, our emotional reactivity obscures our natural intelligence. But if we become motivated to start contemplating the approach of seeing pain and discomfort as opportunities for healing—for becoming “one-with” and bringing people closer rather than splitting—our intelligence actually will get stronger than our emotional reactivity. If we take those opportunities for healing, the momentum of the intelligence will gradually start to outweigh the momentum of the reactivity.

　　In my experience, the emotional reactivity does not stop.…

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