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Holding Your Seat When The Going Gets Rough
By Pema Chödrön
The most straightforward advice on how to discover your true nature is this: practice not causing harm to anyone—neither yourself nor others—and every day, do what you can to help.
If you take this instruction to heart and begin to use it, you will probably find very quickly that it is not so easy. Often, before you know it, someone has provoked you and either directly or indirectly, you've let them have it.
Therefore, when the intention is sincere but the going gets rough, most of us could use some help. We could use further instruction on how to lighten up and turn around our well-established habits of striking out and blaming.
The four methods for holding your seat provide just such support for developing the patience to stay open to what's happening, instead of acting on automatic pilot. These four methods are:
1) not setting up the target for the arrow;
2) connecting with the heart;
3) seeing obstacles as teachers;
4) regarding all that occurs as a dream.
First, if you have not set up the target it cannot be hit by an arrow. This is to say that each time you retaliate with words and actions that hurt, you are strengthening the habit of anger. Then, without doubt, plenty of arrows will always be coming your way.
The pattern of striking out may already be very strong; however, each time you are provoked you are given a chance to do something different. The choice is yours: you can further strengthen your painful and crippling habit or you can shake it up a bit by holding your seat.
Each time you sit still with the restlessness and heat of anger—neither acting it out nor repressing it—you are tamed and strengthened. Each time you act on the anger or suppress it, you are weakened; you become more and more like a walking target. Then, as the years go by, almost everything makes you mad.
So this is the first method: remember that you set the target up yourself, and only you can take it down. Understand that if you hold your seat when you want to retaliate—even for 1.5 seconds longer than ever before—you are starting to dissolve a pattern of aggression that, if you let it, will continue to hurt you and others forever.
Second is the instruction for connecting with the heart: in times of anger, you can contact the kindness and compassion that you already have.
When someone who is insane starts to harm you, there is the possibility of understanding that they don't know what they are doing. There is the possibility of contacting your heart and feeling sadness that this poor being is out of control and is harming themselves by hurting others. There is the possibility that even though you feel fear, you do not feel hatred or anger— you might even wish to help this person if you can.
Actually, a lunatic is far less crazy than a sane person who harms you, for so-called sane people have the potential to realize that they are sowing seeds of their own misery, their own confusion, their own dissatisfaction. Their present aggression is producing further and more intense patterns of aggression. The life of one who is always angry is painful and generally very lonely. The one who harms you is under the influence of patterns that could continue to produce suffering forever.
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