Most of us carry some quiet fantasy of the person we think spiritual practice will eventually turn us into. We don’t always admit it directly, because it sounds faintly ridiculous when said aloud. But somewhere in the background, there’s often an image of a calmer future self. Someone less reactive. Someone who receives criticism without immediately preparing a defence inside their head. Someone who can be rejected, misunderstood, delayed, ignored, or mildly inconvenienced without briefly becoming a small creature made entirely of grievance and caffeine.
It’s an attractive fantasy because it suggests that growth will eventually lift us above the more embarrassing facts of being human. We imagine becoming spacious, composed, and lightly amused by the things that used to get under our skin. Then ordinary life arrives, with its usual lack of respect for our inner branding. The phone pings. A read receipt sits there for longer than feels reasonable. Someone’s tone shifts slightly on a call. A colleague takes credit for work they know they didn’t do alone. A message lands with just enough ambiguity to let the mind begin searching through every previous moment that might possibly explain why this feels so charged.
The polished future self disappears very quickly in moments like that. What remains feels more primitive and more honest. The chest tightens. The jaw sets. The face becomes polite in a way that usually means nothing polite is happening underneath. You continue to nod, type, listen, or behave like a functioning adult, but something in the body has already caught. Pema Chödrön uses the Tibetan word shenpa for this. It’s often translated as attachment, but in her teaching it has the more immediate feeling of being hooked. Something presses on a bruise, and suddenly the present moment isn’t quite the present moment anymore.
That’s what makes the hook so difficult to see clearly. We usually think we’re reacting to the email, the silence, the criticism, or the look. Sometimes, of course, we are. People can be careless. People can be cruel. Not every reaction comes from private distortion. But often, what’s happening now has brushed against something older. The comment in the meeting touches the fear of being stupid. The delayed reply touches the fear of being unwanted. The criticism touches the suspicion that, underneath everything, we’re not quite enough. The present gives an old feeling a fresh occasion to speak.
When shenpa takes hold, the world narrows. The body wants relief. The mind wants certainty. A familiar interpretation arrives with suspicious confidence and offers to explain everything. This proves they can’t be trusted. This proves you always end up here. This proves you should leave first, strike first, apologise too much, go cold, get clever, disappear, or send the message that will briefly feel like self-respect and later feel like damage control. The hook rarely feels like confusion from the inside. It feels like clarity, which is part of its power.
Our instinct is usually to escape the discomfort as quickly as possible. We call it needing space, processing, setting boundaries, or protecting our peace. Sometimes those are honest descriptions of what’s happening. There are rooms a person should leave, conversations that need to pause, and patterns that shouldn’t be tolerated simply because we’re trying to become spiritually mature. But avoidance can borrow the language of wisdom very easily. It can make running away sound like discernment. It can make punishment sound like a boundary. It can make control sound like calm.
Spirituality isn’t immune from this. In fact, it can become one of the more elegant forms of escape because it gives avoidance better lighting. We can sit on a meditation cushion and use mindfulness to keep ourselves at a safe distance from what actually hurts. We can call something compassion when it’s really fear of conflict. We can call something detachment when it’s really withdrawal. We can become fluent in the language of healing while still refusing the one thing that might actually change us, which is to feel what’s happening before we turn it into a story about ourselves.
Pema Chödrön’s work doesn’t offer the usual escape route. It doesn’t promise that practice will make life stop touching the raw places. It points, instead, towards staying. Not staying in harm. Not staying in situations where cruelty, manipulation, or abuse are being dressed up as spiritual lessons. Staying, in this sense, means remaining present with the inner movement we usually abandon. The tightening. The heat. The panic. The story forming in the mouth. The exact moment before discomfort becomes behaviour.
This is where groundlessness becomes more than a spiritual word. It’s not an abstract philosophical condition. It’s the feeling of sitting in the car outside your own house with the key still in your hand because you don’t yet have the strength to go inside. It’s the silence after a conversation has gone wrong. It’s the hour after a relationship changes shape and the mind begins frantically searching for an explanation solid enough to stand on. In those moments, we often tell ourselves we want truth. More often, we want something that will stop the panic.
The difficult territory is very small. It’s the space between the feeling and the action. The message is ready. The accusation is loaded. The familiar self has arrived, fully prepared to be useful in the worst possible way. To pause there doesn’t look impressive from the outside. No one sees the argument you didn’t start. No one applauds the sentence you softened before sending. No one knows that you stood in the kitchen with your hand on the worktop and let the first wave of panic move through without letting it dictate what happened next. There’s no public drama in restraint, which is probably why it’s so easy to undervalue.
Tonglen, the Tibetan Buddhist practice often described as breathing in suffering and breathing out relief, enters at this point in a way that can sound strange at first. Most of us spend our lives trying to breathe suffering out. We want it removed, solved, medicated, explained, or turned into a lesson quickly enough that we don’t have to sit in its rawness for very long. Tonglen moves against that reflex. It asks us to stop treating suffering as contamination and to meet it as part of the shared condition of being human.
The practice begins with what’s actually here. Jealousy, loneliness, shame, fear, grief, irritation, or whatever unflattering state has moved through the body. Then the frame widens. Somewhere else, someone’s sitting with this too. Someone’s pretending to be fine in a house where the air has changed. Someone’s lying awake beside a person they love, separated by a few inches of mattress and a whole conversation neither of them knows how to begin. Someone’s waiting for a message and trying not to look needy. Someone’s being difficult because they’re frightened, though that doesn’t make the difficulty harmless.
There’s a subtle but important shift here. Tonglen doesn’t make our pain special. It makes it connected. That’s not always comforting, because the ego enjoys exception more than it likes to admit. There can be a bitter glamour in feeling uniquely wounded, uniquely misunderstood, uniquely beyond ordinary repair. Compassion interrupts that performance. It doesn’t minimise the hurt or excuse harm. It simply prevents suffering from becoming the centrepiece around which the whole self must organise.
That distinction matters. Compassion doesn’t mean tolerating cruelty. Understanding someone’s pain doesn’t require giving them unlimited access to your nervous system. Some people can be understood and still kept at a distance. Some patterns can be explained and still refused. Spiritual language has to be handled carefully here, because beautiful words can become hiding places if we’re not paying attention. Forgiveness can be used to rush the wounded. Patience can be used to protect the person causing harm. Compassion without truth becomes sentimentality with better posture.
The more honest version is harder and less decorative. It asks us to soften without collapsing, and to recognise shared suffering without losing discernment. It asks us to admit that the person we’re blaming may also be frightened, without pretending that fear makes their behaviour acceptable. It asks us to notice that the same tightness in our jaw might be present in someone else’s body, even if the wisest response is still distance, silence, or a very clear no.
What changes, then, isn’t that shenpa disappears. The body still reacts. The mind still offers the brief, poisonous relief of a well-aimed accusation. But a little more space appears around the whole thing. We begin to notice that the first story isn’t always the truest story. The first impulse isn’t always the most honest one. The first version of ourselves to arrive after the hook isn’t always the person we want making decisions on our behalf.
That’s a modest form of freedom, but it isn’t a small one. It doesn’t lift us out of life. It returns us to life with a little less force in the hand. It means noticing that we’re about to become cruel because we feel small. It means recognising that the voice in the head sounds like certainty but feels like panic. It means seeing the familiar reaction gather itself, and for once, not letting it decide the next sentence.
This work won’t look especially enlightened. It may look like standing in the kitchen with your hand on the cold worktop, watching your fingers reach for the phone and letting them stop there. It may look like leaving a message overnight. It may look like feeling the embarrassment of wanting to react and choosing to wait until the body has told more of the truth. Nothing grand has happened. Nothing has been solved. But something hasn’t been repeated, and that isn’t nothing.
Much love, David x
