What the Pandemic Can Teach Us

Preparing to interview the legendary Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chödrön, I looked over some of her book titles: When Things Fall Apart, Welcoming the Unwelcome, Comfortable with Uncertainty, The Wisdom of No Escape. It felt to me like she’s been trying to prepare us for this moment for decades. So, at the beginning of our hour-long conversation together, which is now streaming on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I asked her a simple question: In the context of the pandemic, how do I welcome the unwelcome? How do I become comfortable with uncertainty? Here, compiled by Ten Percent Weekly editor Jay Michaelson, is some of what she said in response. – Dan Harris

The basic foundation is to have a meditation practice in which you become increasingly self-aware. You're able to self-reflect, you're conscious of your own habitual patterns and your own tendencies towards fear or aggression or whatever it might be. So you can acknowledge what's happening with you. 

The point is not to make yourself feel bad. Don't turn the mind into some kind of enemy. Instead, cultivate a kind attitude toward your own habitual patterns. Don't act them out, but don't repress them. Just be there. Get to know their energies very well with a kind and open heart and mind.

Now, you might ask again, well, how do I do that? You do it by starting to meditate, which cultivates an open acceptance of whatever arises without getting caught in it. That’s where you start: with acknowledging what's happening with you. And then the expression we usually use is something like “making friends with that” or “being friendly towards that” or “welcoming that.” I try not to use language that's too corny, but I end up using quite a bit of it.

So that's the basis.

Now, as time goes on, you begin to have confidence that, fundamentally, you are a good person and that you have habitual patterns to work on. It takes a lot of patience and a sense of humor to do that, but you work with yourself that way. And gradually, you do get comfortable with uncertainty, or unpleasantness, or the fear-producing quality of seeing yourself so clearly. You do learn to make friends even with that. You become more and more, if not comfortable, at least very familiar with, and not running away from, uncomfortable feelings of all kinds. Over time, this process builds a kind of resilience and confidence.

This, of course, is a difficult time, with so much suffering. So, you try to keep your heart open to the situation, to the degree that you're able. Of course, that ebbs and flows: some days yes, some days no. Some hours, yes. Some hours, no. But if you’ve already spent some time befriending the difficult emotions that we all experience, that allows you, for instance, to coexist with what people are experiencing now, from rage to just being irritable, to being very afraid, to loneliness. You can have a kind of warmth toward whatever is arising, rather than thinking you're a bad person or you're not doing it right or there's something wrong with you.

In addition, throughout the centuries, when things got really, really bad, people have had the realization that up until then they had been living on the facade, they had been living on the surface of life, not valuing the fleeting quality of our lives as something very precious. And then some crisis happens, and for many people over the centuries, that's been a big turning point of realizing something that's been true all along: that the human situation is fundamentally groundless. And our plans are like that bumper sticker, “If you want to make God laugh, make plans.” 

And so many people today have the feeling that even after this is over, they're not going to live on the surface anymore. That they'll have some more profound connection with the true facts of life. It’s not that impermanence and change, for instance, are bad news; they’re just being part of what it means to be a human being. It's all impermanent.

A situation like this pandemic also makes you much more able to be touched deeply by the suffering of other people and the losses that people are experiencing. That feeling of interconnectedness can be so strong and so vivid. That's another of the truths that's inescapable right now: how interconnected we are.

Now, when things are extreme, people either grow from it or their denial, fear, and even fundamentalism gets stronger. So, you know, for someone like myself, I find that frightening. If I had to make a prediction, I would say that things will get more polarized, that people will either become more fundamentalist or more open-hearted and open-minded, more closed or more open. 

Even so, I personally have a lot of sympathy for someone who wants to close down and dig in their heels and hold onto something desperately. Because it's just an attempt to be happy. It's just that it causes so much more suffering. That's the problem, right? Because one's fear grows rather than diminishes and one's sense of danger grows rather than diminishes.

Whereas if you're opening more and more, you feel more and more comfortable with uncertainty, more comfortable with what life is presenting to you, or at least more flexible or ready to work with whatever might come. 

You know, something like that!