Greet your demons

Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart:

That is what we are doing when we sit down to meditate. That attitude spreads into the rest of our lives. It’s like inviting what scares us to introduce ourselves and hang around for a while. As Milarepa sang to the monsters he found in his cave, “It is wonderful you demons came today. You must come again tomorrow! From time to time we should converse.”

We start by working with the monsters in our mind. Then we develop the wisdom and compassion to communicate sanely with the threats and fears of our daily life.

This is an example of “no more struggle”, the first of her “three techniques for working with chaos”. Whatever arises in our minds, look at directly. Fear magnifies the objects of our anxiety; seeing them clearly may not eliminate our fear, but it does give fear a shorter leash. And we must accept the reality of what we see, even if we wish eventually to change it. A common source of panic for me—of feeling stuck or trapped—is the feeling that some reality should not be happening, an impossible situation. While we may wish reality to be different, a necessary precondition for changing it is accepting the fact of what it is today.

And by making friends with our demons, we can learn what they have to teach us:

The Tibetan yogini Machig Labdrön fearlessly trained with this view. She said that in her tradition, they did not exorcise demons—they treated them with compassion. The advice she was given by her teacher and passed on to her students was “approach what you find repulsive, help the ones you think you cannot help, and go to places that scare you. This begins when we sit down to meditate and practice not struggling with our own mind.

This reminds me of how challenges are opportunities.

Soundtrack

All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend by Aurora