happening, which only sends the thoughts underground where they can fester.

Rather than living a life of resistance and trying to disprove our basic situation of impermanence and change, we

could contact the fundamental ambiguity and welcome

Most of us have physical or mental conditions that have caused us distress in the past. And when we get a whiff of one coming—an incipient asthma attack, a symptom of chronic fatigue, a twinge of anxiety—we panic. Instead of relaxing with the feeling and letting it do its minute and a half while we’re fully open and receptive to it, we say, “Oh no,

embrace what you’re feeling.

The more you practice not escaping into the fantasy world of your thoughts and instead contacting the felt sense of groundlessness, the more accustomed you’ll become to experiencing emotions as simply sensation—free of concept, free of story line, free of fixed ideas of bad and good.

For the most part, our attachment, our shenpa, arises involuntarily—our habitual response to feeling insecure. When we’re hooked, we turn to anything to relieve the discomfort—food, alcohol, sex, shopping, being critical or unkind. But there is something more fruitful we can do when that edgy feeling arises. It’s similar to the way we can deal with

Most of us want to avoid emotions that make us feel vulnerable, so we’ll do almost anything to get away from them.

You rejoice when you’re able to acknowledge that you’re caught in an old pattern and when you catch yourself before you speak or act out.