Rev. Danny Fisher

Last night, I had the opportunity to watch Acharya Ani Pema Chödrön on the PBS series Bill Moyers On Faith & Reason. As I suspected, the conversation made for a remarkable hour of television.

I thought that Moyers and Ani Pema had an especially helpful conversation about what Tibetan Buddhists refer to as shenpa, or the quality of “getting hooked” on a particular feeling and becoming so caught up in it that we cannot be present to our moment-to-moment experience.

Although Ani Pema has done quite a bit of eloquent writing about this quality, I thought the interview afforded her a special opportunity to speak about this and other issues in a rough and robust sort of way that writing does not always allow. Her voice and body language and gestures conveyed as much about the quality of shenpa as the words she used to describe it.

Moyers and Ani Pema also had a rich conversation about Shantideva’s quote that sentient beings “shrink from suffering, but love its causes.” Not only was I struck by their candidness about their experience of this quote, but, as someone who finds great satisfaction in work and especially writing, this exchange resonated deeply:

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: …What Shantideva is really getting at is, generally speaking, nobody wants to suffer. But our means of going about getting happy are not in sync with our desire to not suffer. A basic Buddhist teaching is that sentient beings, none of them want to suffer. But their way of going about getting happy escalates the suffering. So yelling when you’re angry would be an example. And I tell this story, like last year I knew that if I kept working on a project I was working on I could feel my physical health starting to deteriorate. But the adrenaline for wanting to keep writing, I was writing an article, and it was taking a long time. And the adrenaline to want to keep working was driving me beyond what was sensible in terms of long hours and so forth. And I could feel that it was making me sick. And somewhat fragile health. And so, I stopped, and I said to myself, I got up in the morning and I had said to myself before, “I’m not going to start on this project until 1:30 in the afternoon. I’m going to spend the morning meditating, walking, calming kind of things. But I got up in the morning and I found myself at the desk with the pen. First thing, you know. So I sat there, and I said, “Why are you doing this?” And then so I’m having a dialogue with myself. “I’m doing this because I equate it with satisfaction. I’ll finish this paper. And that makes me feel good to think that it will be finished.’ So then I said to myself, “And if you start writing now, will you feel better?” “No, I won’t, because my health is starting to go.” “So why are you doing it?” So I just sat there with this feeling like someone is going to have come up bodily and gag me and put a mask on me, and drag me out of the house for me not to just start. Despite the fact that I knew it wasn’t good. And then I came down just ’cause I want to. You know, I already knew I was doing it for this imagined satisfaction that I knew I wouldn’t get. You see, so we’re kind of stuck in that place.

BILL MOYERS: Did my colleagues get to you to tell you how to get to me? How to do a public diagnosis of me? I mean did they come to you and say, “You can get him if you talk about work”? You know? No, I’m the same way.

PEMA CHÖDRÖN: Yeah. Of course. I’m fascinated by that seductive pull. That urge to keep doing, as the Buddha would say, where your desire for satisfaction and happiness are not in sync with the methods you go about using. And then you could say the consequences, you know, of war and prejudice and so forth, they all come from that moment of the urge to do the same thing you’ve already done.

As I mentioned before, you can check your local listings for showtimes and reruns of the program. The podcast version is also available for downloading here, and you can order a DVD recording of the program here.

In addition to all of that, PBS has made the full transcipt of Moyers and Ani Pema’s conversation available here. I will say again, though, that I think you get the full effect from watching the interview if you are able.

PBS was gracious enough to put a clip from the program on YouTube.com. For a sample of what I’m talking about, just press play…