Choosing Kindness Over Fear
When Pema Chödrön was a young girl, an elderly neighbor gave her a piece of advice that would define her understanding of the human spirit. The neighbor explained that life’s difficulties can either harden us with resentment or soften us into greater kindness. This choice is the foundation of "bodhichitta," a term that describes a completely open, awake heart and mind. It is often called the soft spot, representing a place of natural vulnerability and tenderness that exists within every living being. Even in the most guarded individuals, this capacity for love remains, acting as a crack in the defensive walls we build to protect ourselves from pain.
We often try to shield ourselves from suffering by using opinions, anger, or indifference as armor. However, true healing comes from leaning into the raw feeling of a broken heart rather than running from it. This genuine sadness is not a weakness, but rather a shared human link that connects us to everyone who has ever loved. By staying present with uncomfortable feelings like loneliness or inadequacy, we can transform our personal pain into a deep sense of compassion for others. This awakened state is our true nature, always present like the blue sky, even when it is temporarily hidden by the clouds of our confusion.
Human beings often live under a persistent illusion that we are separate from the rest of the world. Albert Einstein once described this as an optical delusion of consciousness, suggesting that our true task is to free ourselves by widening our compassion to include all living things. When we begin to dismantle the walls of our personal isolation, we tap into a natural spring of goodness that has always been there. Finding this inner openness is like hitting a crack in bedrock while digging a foundation; at first, there is only a drip, but eventually, a steady stream of water emerges.
Most of us instinctively build protective layers to shield ourselves from insecurity, much like an elderly couple in Florida who lived in a gated community with electric fences and guard dogs. They hoped to keep out everything scary, but their extreme isolation only made them more fearful of the outside world. They became too terrified to visit the beach and grew paranoid even of the people hired to help them. The more we try to wall ourselves off from the unpredictability of life, the less we are able to cope with the world, and the more our anxiety grows.
To find the strength to step outside these walls, we must recognize the three common ways we try to provide ourselves with a false sense of security. The first involves looking to external things like shopping, alcohol, or constant busyness to escape loneliness. The second strategy is using rigid beliefs to feel certain and right, using convictions as a way to avoid the unease of not knowing. The third strategy is seeking special or altered states of mind to avoid ordinary life, which becomes a problem when we try to cling to those peak experiences. True openness comes from stopping these habitual escapes and allowing the natural force of our heart to emerge.
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