This very moment is the perfect teacher.

“Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors--people who have a certain hunger to know what’s true--feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teaches where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are."

So this chapter is about how we want to escape from discomfort, from the things that we fear, from the things that have made us reach our limit. We run away through addiction, materialism, even hopes and fears. But she says the important thing is to continue meditating through all of these emotions and allow these feelings to be diagnostic.

“The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may just be to keep moving. Usually, when we reach our limit, we feel exactly like Rinpoche’s attendants and freeze and terror. Our bodies freeze inside our minds. How do we work with our minds when we meet our match? Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we’re feeling, pierce us to the heart. This is easier said than done, but it’s a noble way to live. It’s definitely the path of compassion, the path of cultivating human bravery and kindheartedness. “

“The safest and most nurturing place to begin working with this way is during formal meditation. On the cushion, we begin to get the hang of not indulging or repressing and of what it feels like to let the energy just be there. That is why it’s so good to meditate every single day and continue to make friends with our hopes and fears again and again. This shows the seeds that enable us to be more awake in the midst of every day chaos. It’s a gradual awakening, and it’s cumulative, but that’s actually what happens. We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation, so that will be more awake in our lives. “

So in meditation, we basically start to see ourselves clearly. We acknowledge whatever arises without judgment, “letting the thoughts, simply dissolve, and then go back to the openness of this very moment. That’s what we’re actually doing in meditation. Up-and-coming all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsessed with them, we acknowledge them and let them go. Then we come back to just being here. So girl room Pache puts it, we simply bring our mind back home. After a while, that’s how we relate with hope and fear in our daily lives. Out of nowhere, we stopped, struggling and relaxed. We stopped talking to ourselves and come back to the freshness of the present moment.… In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal-quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that, sometimes we have some kind of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then that’s our experience. If sometimes we can approach what scares us, and sometimes we absolutely can’t, then that’s our experience.“This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us. “is really a most profound instruction. Just seeing what’s going on – that’s the teaching right there. We can be with what’s happening and not disassociate. Weakness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives. “