The thesis of the book, Real Life, which I wrote some years ago, was based on an experience I had during the height of the pandemic and isolation. I was watching an online program about a Passover Seder—a Jewish ritual dinner I had grown up with. In the program, there was an explanation of the word Egypt because the Passover story is a symbolic journey from confinement, imprisonment, and slavery to freedom and liberation.
The word Egypt, it turns out, literally means a narrow place—a place of constriction or constraint.
That fascinated me. The journey is from constriction, tightness, not being able to breathe, being closed down, seeing no options, feeling imprisoned—to freedom. And within freedom, there is also a sense of connection rather than isolation. I thought, there’s a whole description of the path we wish to be following. There are so many states we might start out with, or encounter along the way, that feel like being locked in and locked down. You can’t breathe. Everything feels narrow.
And yet there is movement. Interestingly enough, the path is not to dismiss what may be coming up emotionally, or in terms of thoughts or sensations in the body. The movement comes through relating to those experiences differently. In that different relationship comes expansiveness, the ability to see options, and the ability to feel free.
From Fixed to Growth
This reminds me of the psychological distinction between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset says: here you are. You have a certain kind of conditioning, and that’s it. You can hide it or display it, but you’re not going to change it.
A growth mindset sees conditioning and recognizes: I don’t have to be defined by that. It may come up because it’s a habit, but it doesn’t have to guide my life or determine my choices. There are ways to seek change that are actually very effective.
For a long time, people have asked me what my favorite passage from the Buddha is, and I always have the same answer. The Buddha said: Abandon that which is unskillful.
The unskillful doesn’t make us bad people. Even if certain habits arise again and again, they don’t make us bad. But they cause suffering. They are painful in themselves and often lead to more pain.
The Buddha continued: You can abandon the unskillful. If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it.
And if abandoning the unskillful would lead to more suffering, he said, he would not ask us to do it. But because it leads to freedom, he encouraged it.
Then he said: Cultivate the good.
You can cultivate the good. If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it.
These are states that are expansive by their very nature. They are opening, connecting, and freeing.
For a long time in my early practice, I lived buoyed up by those words: If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it. I used to think, “Who thinks I can do it?” I often wondered if I could. But look at that—the Buddha thinks I can do it.
These descriptions of the path are very real. They’re not abstract or theoretical.
Suffering—and the End of Suffering
The Buddha also said: I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.
We have so much capacity and potential as human beings. It’s breathtaking. And yet we can be so conditioned, so deceived by the messages we’ve received, that we don’t even recognize our capacity to bring suffering to an end.
Of course, this does not mean an end to painful experience. Life is life. There is a continual rotation of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. These are what the Buddha called the eight vicissitudes. This is reality.
Painful things happen. But we may also be making them worse.
A friend of mine tells a story about her granddaughter helping prepare a Passover meal. She was asked to place a piece of gefilte fish on each plate and add a large spoonful of horseradish. The granddaughter replied, “I never knew you could take something truly terrible and make it even worse.”
The lesson is simple. Painful things happen, and we might be making them even worse. Suffering exists, but what we don’t need is extra suffering. There is a path that allows us to breathe freely, even when life is disappointing or frightening.
Building Inner Resources
One way to understand stress is as a dynamic between pressure and resource. There is the pressure—the circumstance, the event, the difficulty. And there is the resource with which it is met.
Imagine you didn’t sleep well. You had an argument over breakfast. Then you go to work or school and overhear a distressing comment. It pierces you. You take it to heart.
Now imagine you had a beautiful night’s sleep and a warm breakfast with loving friends. You hear the exact same comment. You might think, “Wow, that person is having a really bad day.”
The circumstance hasn’t changed. The relationship to it has changed.
Sometimes people hear this and think it means we never try to change circumstances or improve systems. I don’t think that’s true at all. What I usually say is: Why seek change from a place of maximum exhaustion? Why not build up a sense of resource within ourselves so we can meet difficulty differently?
Perhaps we can seek change more effectively because we don’t feel so impoverished or undone inside.
The path from narrowness and overwhelm to freedom and openness is not through abolishing difficult feelings. It is through learning to relate to them differently. That’s realistic.
A Realistic Path
My friend Bob Thurman often used the word “realistic” when talking about Buddhist practice. At first I didn’t know what to make of it. Why get up an hour earlier in the morning just to become more realistic?
But over time I appreciated the term. When we’re not realistic, we’re living out of harmony with the truth. It’s not fun to bang our heads against the wall. It’s not fun to live in defiance of reality—to deny change, to cling desperately, to imagine we can control what we cannot control.
A realistic path is the path from narrowness to freedom.
No one has only pleasure and no pain. No one has only gain and no loss. This is simply the nature of life. The question is: How can we be free anyway?
The Buddha was taught as a human being, not a supernatural being. He asked profound questions: What does it mean to be born into a human body? To be vulnerable? To grow older? To become sick? To die?
And what does it mean to have a human mind, with its cascade of changing emotions? We wake up afraid. Then confident. Then full of faith. Then full of doubt. Then angry. Then regretful. The states keep changing.
The Buddha’s question was whether there is a happiness, a peace, a harmony that is not tossed around by all these changing conditions. And the answer he arrived at was yes. There is a wellspring of happiness and peace available to us. There are methods, practices, and a path. Just as he discovered through the power of awareness, so can we.
That is the adventure. We learn to recognize the forces that constrict us and cause suffering. We learn to relate differently to them. We learn to appreciate and trust the forces that are expansive and opening—qualities like loving-kindness and compassion.
In doing so, we discover something essential: we can grow and change.
The Seed of Freedom
I remember a retreat in 1979 when the Dalai Lama visited our retreat center.
During a question-and-answer period, a young man stood up and said, “I’ve been meditating for two weeks, and I’ve realized I can’t do it. I can’t make progress. I don’t have the capacity for love, connection, wisdom, or freedom.”
The Dalai Lama looked at him and said, “You’re wrong.”
Then he explained that every human being has the capacity for wisdom, growth, understanding, and freedom. It’s like a seed. In Buddhist language, it is sometimes called Buddha Nature.
No matter what we’ve gone through, no matter what we’ve done, that potential is never destroyed. It may be hidden. It may be covered over. It may be difficult to trust. But it is there.
We practice because of that possibility. We undertake the exploration to discover both what binds us and what might free us.
Naming Experience Before It Names Us
Classically, what binds us is described as greed, hatred, and delusion. The traditional Pali word kilesa is often translated as “defilement,” which literally means torment of the mind.
It’s not the arising of an emotion that’s the problem. It’s when we latch onto it, and when it fills us completely.
Think about a time you were overwhelmingly afraid. Or a time you were consumed with self-hatred. Being filled with those states is tormenting. It’s confusing, and we forget about the possibility of change. We feel trapped.
At a memorial service, I once heard a recording of a meditator describing his practice of mental noting. When an experience arose, he would quietly name it: joy, sorrow, anger, love.
Then he said something I’ll never forget: The goal is to name it before it names me.
Before it fills me. Before it overcomes me, defines me, and drives my actions.
We all know what it’s like to be so angry that we say something and later think, “Whoops.”
We may want to know what we’re feeling while we’re feeling it—not after we’ve already sent an email we regret. Life doesn’t always offer us an unsend button. We may want to make choices not only with awareness of our emotions, but also with wisdom, clarity, and compassion.
We want to name our experience before it names us.
That is part of the movement from narrowness to freedom. And that movement is what real life is all about.
Thank you for reading,
Sharon