Make Friends with Your Masks: Ani Pema Chödrön from the Tricycle DVD

To complement our December Tricycle Retreat, Being Brave: Transforming Our World, we’re pleased to offer a special DVD created just for Tricycle members. This Tricycle Edition DVD Set includes 8 hours of selected talks and guided meditations on 4 DVDs. You can get the DVD here.

In her talk, “The Bravery of Openness,” which is on the second DVD, Ani Pema Chödrön concludes her talk with a question and answer session and is confronted by an audience member who says that finding the basic goodness beneath our less appealing emotions is well and good, but what if we can’t access even our anger? Pema advises her that perhaps we must begin by making friends with our masks:

This had always been my exit, too, just to be nice and make sure everything is going ok, so I never had to feel some underlying discomfort about myself. So whatever the mask is, it has kind of a texture to it, so you can almost emotionally feel it, like in this case, I would say that from the mask of being the nice girl, I didn’t feel genuine. And genuine, according to Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings, means that you’re willing to honor your whole self.

It is a rare opportunity to be able to experience these teachings from Sakyong Mipham RInpoche and Pema Chödrön in this way. You can only find this DVD here at Tricycle, and after our December Tricycle Retreat ends, it’s gone! Don’t miss out. You can get the DVD here.