Walking the “middle way:” The Eight Worldly Dharmas

When I unexpectedly got laid off in 2017 I was angry and confused and wanted to blame others while simultaneously questioning my abilities. I lost faith and confidence in myself and wondered how I could have gone from a top 1% performer in a gigantic pharma company to rating a 2 out of 5 at a tiny little start-up. I had the requisite pity party for myself before starting to do the inner work that I knew I was being called to do. I have always believed that things happen for a reason, but I take my time processing the full spectrum of human emotions before I finally surrender to ask the relevant question, “what am I supposed to learn from this?”

There were two books on my shelf at that time that had traveled with me, unopened, through 2 separate moves across cross-country, over the previous 3 years. The first was “Daring Greatly,” by Brene Brown, and the second was “When Things Fall Apart,” by Pema Chodron. The titles of these books accurately represented my feelings at the time– I was both motivated to get back in the arena and re-spark my career, but also not confident that I had what it took to achieve my goals–so I read them both simultaneously and they turned out to be the perfect balance to one another.

“When Things Fall Apart” was recommended years prior by a friend after discovering some common personal relationship challenges. I let it sit unopened by my bedside, along with all of the other self-help books I had purchased during that time period (surely you can at least get the gist of these via osmosis, right? No need to actually open them??), for 3 years. If I had thought that “‘things were falling apart” in my personal life when I first purchased that book, I was really feeling it after taking this hit on the career front. My career was the place where I defined my identity, and where I had likely buried some of the real issues affecting all parts of my life that I still needed to address.

Opening When Things Fall Apart was like opening a book of spells that helped me unravel the confusion in my life. There was immediate relief and resonation as I read what Pema Chodron named the root cause of our suffering: our attachment to extremes of emotions that define a vicious cycle of hope and fear, otherwise known as the “eight worldly dharmas.” These are: pleasure and pain, fame and disgrace, loss and gain, praise and blame. 

We spend our lives ping-ponging between these bookends of emotions, riding the “highs” of pleasure, praise, fame and gain, and then getting blindsided when we are knocked backwards by pain, disgrace, loss and blame. We live to experience the so-called positives, and we live in fear of the so-called negatives. We seek validation from external “authorities” to receive validation or criticism, rather than look within ourselves. We hold too tightly to praise and fall into a well of shame when we are blamed for something that doesn’t go well. Why would we ever expect that we would be able to stay attached to the side of praise, gain, pleasure and fame? There are exactly ZERO examples in this world of people who are on “top” for their entire lives, and we have countless expressions to warn people of this idealism: “How the mighty have fallen…,” “People who run at the front get arrows shot at their backs,” “Pride comes before the fall…” These are all reminders of the reality that no one gets through this life with a pristine record. There will always be times of reward and accolades, but these times are fleeting, and loss and disgrace may be right around the corner. Nearly every time I’ve won an award that celebrates my achievements at work (as perceived or dictated by others), shortly thereafter I’ve been hit with some kind of constructive feedback or setback that leaves me wondering which part is true, am I worthy or unworthy? “When Things Fall Apart” is a brilliant title. We feel this sentiment at our core when things have not gone the way we expected or have reversed course from a place of gain to loss. When the pedestal we’ve been placed on topples beneath us we feel like everything we’ve worked for has fallen apart. We feel this way because we have assigned “good” and “bad” to our experiences when the reality is that everything is neutral. 

The key lesson from Pema Chodron is that we avoid getting attached to the extremes of emotions and instead find a path that allows us to “walk the middle way,” where we are not magnetized to pleasure, praise, fame or gain, nor do we fear or avoid pain, blame, disgrace or loss. Our goal is to recognize that true suffering comes from attachment to these external sources of validation or invalidation, and contentment comes when we can remain unaffected by these human-made labels. 

“Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.”

Pema Chodron, “When Things Fall Apart”

We do not need to avoid these emotions all together. Pema suggests we “get to know them, see how they hook us, how they color our perception of reality, see how they aren’t all that solid.” 

Some days we will “win,” get it “right,” attain something that we perceive as beneficial. We are allowed to feel joy, peace, or understanding in that moment, but it is too easy to be moved from that feeling if we only value the “upside.” I’m not suggesting we live as though we are “waiting for the other shoe to drop” and deny ourselves the opportunity to experience pleasure; rather, the idea is to acknowledge that we will experience many different emotions and situations that bring us lessons and teach us about what kind of person we want to be. If we are aiming to be the kind of person that other people define as “good,” and trying desperately to avoid being labeled as “bad,” then we will always be in suffering because we have given up our own power and ability to define ourselves. 

In practice, this could look something like this–someone gives us a compliment on a presentation or the smooth way we handled a challenging situation. We can tightly grip the praise and ride the “high” for the rest of the day, patting ourselves on the back and feeling proud of our work because someone else told us it was worthy of praise. OR, we can politely say “thank you,” and internally debrief ourselves on what we felt went well and whether we met our own personal goal from the situation–did it seem like the presentation provided value to people who needed it? Did our handling of the difficult situation leave the people involved feeling like there was a path forward? Was there something we could have done different next time that would have helped even more? At the end of the day, we get to decide how to feel about the outcome and whether it aligns with the goals we have set for ourselves and the evolution of our character.

The harder one for me is to remain neutral and walk the middle way when I receive criticism. In my last post I wrote about some of the hardest feedback I’ve received in my professional career, and how it made me better, stronger, more resilient and definitely more self-aware. Of course it didn’t feel like any of those positive descriptors at the time, because I was terrified of receiving “negative” comments.

The practice for that side of the path is to take feedback the same way we take praise–as a temporary piece of information that provides guidance and perspective from an external observer. What we do with that information is within our control and our work is to receive it, examine it, and determine what action we want to take, if any, to address it. Ideally this is all done from a space of neutrality where we silence the ego, get curious about the observations and ground ourselves on that middle path without being swayed to wallow in feelings of unworthiness or failure, or be inclined to defend ourselves by looking to the other side and recalling the praise we may have received just moments before. We can respond the same way to blame, disgrace, pain and loss as we do to praise, fame, pleasure and gain–with gratitude for the external perspective. Say “thank you, you’ve given me a lot to think about.” and maybe even, “could we revisit this conversation after I’ve had some time to look at this from my perspective as well?” 

Pema talks about her own experience with this in the book. Her image of herself was shattered when she entered a new experience and new group of people during her time in a Buddhist temple. She writes, “I had always thought of myself as a flexible, obliging person who was well liked by almost everyone. I’d been able to carry this illusion throughout most of my life. During my early years at the abbey, I discovered that I had been living in some kind of misunderstanding. It wasn’t that I didn’t have good qualities, it was just that I was not the ultimate golden girl. I had so much invested in that image of myself, and it just wasn’t holding together anymore. All my unfinished business was exposed vividly and accurately in living Technicolor, not only to myself, but to everyone else as well. Everything I had not been able to see about myself before was suddenly dramatized. As if that weren’t enough, others were free with their feedback about me and what I was doing. It was so painful that I wondered if I would ever be happy again…In a place where there was so much practice and study going on, I could not get lost in trying to justify myself and blame others. That kind of exit was not available.”

When we walk on either edge of these borders containing the eight worldly dharmas we are at high risk of falling off the cliff. The middle way is wider, more stable, and provides a much broader view of where we are headed. But we have to do the work to stay on the middle path. And the work is freaking hard.

During that time period after I’d been laid off, I did the work. I read through “When Things Fall Apart” every morning, taking notes and reflecting on the parts of me I had tried to hide for so many years. I wished I could be the type of person who didn’t care what other people thought of them, but the more honest I was with myself the more I realized that I had become attached to praise and fame and gain. I recalled that when I took a personality test called the “StrengthsFinder” years ago, one of my top strengths was that I was a WOO-er, which stands for “winning others over.” I hated that term and I wanted to reject this trait so badly. To me it seemed so much cooler to be the kind of person that doesn’t give a shit what others think. But if I was being honest with myself, I knew that I did want to be seen as someone smart and successful. The danger lies in being ATTACHED to the opinions of others and using them to define myself. It dawned on me that I viewed getting laid off as a threat to the identity I wanted to have as a so-called successful person. My first instinct was to defend that identity because I was in fear of the disgrace it held. Like Pema wrote about her own journey, I tried to justify my situation by blaming others, saying things like “they made me doubt myself.” Well, after 20 years of therapy I know that no one can make you feel anything about yourself. That shit is ingrained in our own stories and we till the soil and water the buds and tend that garden of self-loathing all our life until the plants grow so wild the leaves block out all the light and the roots forget where they are in the darkness. 

I needed to reconnect with those deeper roots that had been hidden under the surface, even the ugly, bulbous moldy ones. Something grew even from those at one time and there was something to learn from them as well.

Most often we are motivated to look for solutions to suffering when we are in pain. When things are status quo, we can get complacent and drift back towards the edges where suffering can re-enter our lives. The pain of that time period for me provided tremendous opportunity for growth and gave me skills to use and share with others. I continue to look at my own relationship with the eight worldly dharmas and how I can mediate my own suffering by choosing to walk the middle way. Do I stray from the middle path? All the time. But as Pema Chodron describes in her book, this is a practice that needs to be revisited over and over. None of us are immune to seduction by the eight worldly dharmas. However, when we choose to walk the middle way, those around us will benefit as well.

See you on the path…