The Warrior Tradition: Conquering Fear

"The Warrior Tradition: Conquering Fear," by Chogyam Trungpa

Today is Losar, or Shambhala Day, as the founder of the Shambhala Sun, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, liked to call it. In honor of Shambhala Day, we present this teaching from Trungpa Rinpoche, based on a seminar he conducted in 1979 for teachers in Shambhala Training on meditation and the view of warriorship. As Carolyn Gimian, Chögyam Trungpa's personal editor, explains:

"The 1979 seminar was about fearlessness, and as well, about how to recognize and conquer real enemies in the world outside. The material was controversial at the time, and the full transcript of the seminar was never edited. It just seemed too outrageous.

"He was not just addressing his immediate audience when he lectured. His life was dedicated to helping others-and some of those others, he knew, would live in difficult times to come, where they would need the 'rock meets bone' teachings that he specialized in. I think that he gave such teachings during his lifetime knowing that they would be needed later, even though they seemed a bit extreme at the time. He didn't present outrageous material to shock people or to indulge himself. He knew that the world was a much more difficult place than most of us, immersed in 20th-century North American comfort, were willing to admit.

"When I dusted off the transcripts of these talks on fearlessness given in 1979, I found that they were full of penetrating and helpful advice. They are still provocative and somewhat outrageous. But they also seem compassionate and designed to make us more wakeful, so that we can find a sane and direct way to work with fear."

May they be of help and encouragement to you, now.

The Warrior Tradition: Conquering Fear
by Chögyam Trungpa

When we bring together the ancient spiritual traditions of the West with those of the Orient, we find a meeting point where the warrior tradition can be experienced and realized. The concept of being a warrior is applicable to the most basic situations in our lives-to the fundamental situation that exists before the notion of good or bad ever occurs. The term "warrior" relates to the basic situation of being a human being. The heart of the warrior is this basic aliveness or basic goodness. Such fearless goodness is free from doubt and overcomes any perverted attitudes towards reality.

Doubt is the first obstacle to fearlessness that has to be overcome. We're not talking here about suppressing your doubts about a particular thing that is taking place. We're not talking about having doubts about joining an organization, or something like that. We are referring here to overcoming a much more basic doubt, which is fundamentally doubting yourself and feeling that you have some kind of shortcoming as a human being. You don't feel that your mind and body are synchronized, or working together properly. You feel that you are constantly being short-changed somewhere in your life.

When you were growing up, at a very early stage-perhaps around two years old-you must have heard our father or mother saying no to you. They would say, "No, don't get into that," or, "No, don't explore that too much," or, "No, be quiet. Be still." When you heard the word no, you may have responded by trying to fulfill that no, by being good. Or you may have reacted negatively, by defying your parents and their no, by exploring further and being "bad." That mixture of the temptation to be naughty and the desire to be disciplined occurs very early in life. When our parents say no to us, it makes us feel strange about ourselves, which becomes an expression of fear.

On the other hand, there is another kind of NO, which is very positive. We have never heard that basic NO properly: NO free from fear and free from doubt. Instead, even if we think that we're doing our best in life, we still feel that we haven't fully lived up to what we should be. We feel that we're not quite doing things right. We feel that our parents or others don't approve of us. There is that fundamental doubt, or fundamental fear, as to whether or not we can actually accomplish something.

Doubt arises in relating with authority, discipline and scheduling throughout our life. When we don't acknowledge our doubt, it manifests as resistance and resentment. There is often some resentment or a reaction against the sitting practice of meditation as well. The moment that the gong is struck to signal the beginning of meditation practice, we feel resistance. But in that situation, we find that it's too late. We're already sitting there on the cushion, so we usually continue to practice.

However, resistance in everyday life provides us with many ways to manipulate situations. When we are presented with a challenge, we often try to turn away rather than having to face it. We come up with all kinds of excuses to avoid the demands that we feel are being put on us.

The basic NO, on the other hand, is accepting discipline in our life without preconceptions. Normally, when we say the word "discipline," it comes with a lot of mixed feelings. It's like saying "porridge." Some people like porridge, and some people hate it. Nevertheless, porridge remains porridge. It is a verystraightforward thing. We have similar feelings about discipline and the meaning of NO. Sometimes, it's a bad NO: it is providing oppressive boundaries that we don't want to accept. Or it could be a good NO, which encourages us to do something healthy. But when we just hear that one word, NO, the message is mixed.

Fearlessness is extending ourselves beyond that limited view. In the Heart Sutra, it talks about going beyond. Gone beyond, gate, is the basic NO. In the sutra, it says there is no eye, no ear, no sound, no smell-all of those things. When you experience egolessness, the solidity of your life and your perceptions falls apart. That could be very desolate or it could be very inspiring, in terms of shunyata, the Buddhist understanding of emptiness. Very simply, it is basic NO. It is a real expression of fearlessness. In the Buddhist view, egolessness is pre-existing, beyond our preconceptions. In the state of egolessness everything is simple and very clear. When we try to supplement the brightness of egolessness by putting a lot of other things onto it, those things obscure its brilliance, becoming blockages and veils.

In the warrior tradition, sacred outlook is the brilliant environment created by basic goodness. When we refuse to have any contact with that state of being, when we turn away from basic goodness, then wrong beliefs arise. We come up with all sorts of logics, again and again, so that we don't have to face the realities of the world.

We run up against our hesitation to get fully into things all the time, even in seemingly insignificant situations. If we don't want to wash the dishes right after we've eaten, we may tell ourselves that we need to let them soak. In fact we're often hoping that one of our housemates will clean up after us. On another level, philosophically speaking, we may feel completely tuned into the warrior's world. From that point of view, we think that we can quite safely say, "Once a warrior, always a warrior." That sounds good, but in terms of the actual practice of warriorship, it's questionable. "Once a warrior" may not always be a warrior if we disregard the beauty of the phenomenal world. We prefer to wear sunglasses, rather than facing the brilliance of the sunshine. We put on a hat and gloves to shield ourselves, fearing that we might get burned. The colourfulness of relationships, household chores, business enterprises and our general livelihood are too irritating. We are constantly looking for padding so that we don't run into the sharp edges of the world. That is the essence of wrong belief. It is an obstacle to seeing the wisdom of the Great Eastern Sun, which is seeing greater vision beyond our own small world.

The ground of fearlessness and the basis of overcoming doubt and wrong belief is to develop renunciation. Renunciation here means overcoming that very hard, tough, aggressive mentality which wards off any gentleness that might come into our hearts. Fear does not allow fundamental tenderness to enter into us. When tenderness tinged by sadness touches our heart, we know that we are in contact with reality. We feel it. That contact is genuine, fresh, and quite raw. That sensitivity is the basic experience of warriorship, and it is the key to developing fearless renunciation.

Sometimes people find that being tender and raw is threatening and seemingly exhausting. Openness seems demanding and energy consuming, so they prefer to cover up their tender heart. Vulnerability can sometimes make you nervous. It is uncomfortable to feel so real, so you want to numb yourself. You look for some kind of anaesthetic, anything that will provide you with entertainment. Then you can forget the discomfort of reality. People don't want to live with their basic rawness for even fifteen minutes. When people say they are bored, often they mean that they don't want to experience the sense of emptiness, which is also an expression of openness and vulnerability. So they pick up the newspaper or read anything else that's lying around the room-even reading what it says on a cereal box to keep themselves entertained. The search for entertainment to baby-sit your boredom soon becomes legitimized as laziness. Such laziness actually involves a lot of exertion. You have to constantly crank things up to occupy yourself, overcoming your boredom by indulging in laziness.

For the warrior, fearlessness is the opposite of that approach. Fearlessness is a question of learning how to be. Be there all along: that is the message. That is quite challenging in what we call the setting-sun world, the world of neurotic comfort where we use everything to fill up the space. We even use our emotions to entertain ourselves. You might be genuinely angry about something for a fraction of a second, but then you draw out your anger so that it lasts for twenty-five minutes. Then you crank up something else to be angry at for the next twenty minutes. Sometimes, if you arouse a really good attack of anger, it can last for days and days. That is another way we entertain ourselves in the setting-sun world.

The remedy to that approach is renunciation. In the Buddhist teachings, renunciation is associated with being nauseated by the confused world and the pain of samsara. For the warrior, renunciation is slightly different. It is giving away, or not indulging in, pleasure for entertainment's sake. We are going to kick out any preoccupations provided by the miscellaneous babysitters in the phenomenal world.

Finally, renunciation is the willingness to work with real situations of aggression in the world. If someone interrupts your world with an attack of aggression, you have to respond to it. There is no other way. Renunciation is being willing to face that kind of situation, rather than covering it up. Everyone is afraid to talk about this. It may be shocking to mention it. Nonetheless, we have to learn to relate to those aspects of the world. We have never developed any response to attack-whether it is a verbal attack or actual physical aggression. People are very shy of this topic, although we have the answers to these challenges in our warrior disciplines, our exertion and our manifestation.

In the warrior tradition, fearlessness is connected with attaching your basic existence to greater vision or what we call the Great Eastern Sun. In order to experience such vast and demanding vision, you need a real connection to basic goodness. The key to that is overcoming doubt and wrong belief. Doubt is your own internal problem, which you have to work with. But then beyond that there may be an enemy, a challenge, that is outside of you. We can't just pretend that those threats never exist. You might say that your laziness is some kind of enemy, but laziness is not actually an enemy. It would be better to call it an obstacle.

How are we going to respond to real opposition that arises in the world? As a warrior, how are you going to relate with that? You don't need a party-line logic or a package deal response. They don't really help. In my experience of how students usually relate with conflict, I find that they tend to freeze up when someone is very critical of them. They become non-communicative, which doesn't help the situation. As warriors, we shouldn't be uptight and uncommunicative. We find it easy to manifest basic goodness when somebody agrees with us. Even if they're half agreeing with you, you can talk to them and have a great time. But if someone is edgy and negative, then you freeze, become defensive, and begin to attack them back. That's the wrong end of the stick. You don't kill an enemy before they become the enemy. You only slash the enemy when they become a 100% good enemy and present a real 100% challenge. If someone is interested in making love with you, you make love to them. But you don't rape them. You don't kill an enemy before they become the enemy. You only slash the enemy when they become a 100% good enemy and present a real 100% challenge. If someone is interested in making love with you, you make love to them. But you don't rape them. You wait until the other person commits themselves to the situation. Working with your enemy is the same idea.

When a warrior has to kill his enemy, he has a very soft heart. He looks his enemy right in the face. The grip on your sword is quite strong and tough, and then with a tender heart, you cut your enemy into two pieces. At that point, slashing your enemy is equivalent to making love to them. That very strong, powerful stroke is also sympathetic. That fearless stroke is frightening, don't you think? We don't want to face that possibility.

On the other hand, if we are in touch with basic goodness, we are always relating to the world directly, choicelessly, whether the energy of the situation demands a destructive or a constructive response. The idea of renunciation is to relate with whatever arises with a sense of sadness and tenderness. We reject the aggressive, hardcore street fighter mentality. The neurotic upheavals created by conflicting emotions, or the kleshas, arise from ignorance, or avidya. Ignorance is very harsh and willing to stick with its own version of things. Therefore, it feels very righteous. Overcoming that is the essence of renunciation: we have no hard edges.

Warriorship is so tender, without skin, without tissue, naked and raw. It is soft and gentle. You have renounced putting on a new suit of armor. You have renounced growing a thick, hard skin. You are willing to expose naked flesh, bone and marrow to the world.

This whole discussion is not just metaphoric. We are talking about what you do if you actually have to slash the enemy, if you are in combat or having a sword fight with someone, as you see in Japanese samurai movies. We shouldn't be too cowardly. A sword fight is real, as real as making love to another human being. We are talking about direct experience and we're not psychologizing anything here. Before you slash the enemy, look into his or her eyes and feel that tenderness. Then you slash. When you slash your enemy, your compassionate heart becomes twice as big. It puffs up; it becomes a big heart; therefore you can slash the enemy. If you are small-hearted, you cannot do this properly.

Of course, many times conquering the enemy might not involve cutting them in two. You might just turn them upside down! But you have to be willing to face the possibilities.

When the warrior has thoroughly experienced his or her own basic rawness, there is no room to manipulate the situation. You just go forward and present the truth quite fearlessly. You can be what you are, in a very straightforward and basic way. So tenderness brings simplicity and naturalness, almost at the level of simple-mindedness.

We don't want to become tricky warriors, with all kinds of tricks up our sleeves and ways to cut people's logic down when we don't agree with them. Then there is no cultivation of either ourselves or others. When that occurs, we destroy any possibilities of enlightened society. In fact, there will be no society; just a few people hanging out. Instead, the fearless warriors of Shambhala are very ordinary, simpleminded warriors. That is the starting point for developing true bravery.

The Path

The starting point on the path of fearlessness is the discovery of fear. We find ourselves fearful, frightened, even petrified by circumstances. This ubiquitous nervousness provides us with a stepping stone, so that we can step over our fear. We have to make a definite move to cross over the boundary from cowardice to bravery. If we do so properly, the other side of our cowardice contains bravery.

We may not discover bravery right away. Instead, beyond our nervousness, we find a shaky tenderness. We are still quivering, but we are shaking with tenderness rather than bewilderment. That shaky vulnerability contains an element of sadness, but not in the sense of feeling badly about ourself or feeling deprived. Rather, we feel a natural sense of fullness which is tender and sad.

It's like the feeling you have when you are about to shed a tear. You feel somewhat wealthy because your eyes are full of tears. When you blink, tears begin to roll down your cheeks. There is also an element of loneliness, but again it is not based on deprivation, inadequacy or rejection. Instead you feel that you alone can understand the truth of your own loneliness, which is quite dignified and self-contained. You have a full heart, you feel lonely, but you don't feel particularly bad about it. It is like an island in the middle of a lake. The island is self-contained; therefore it looks lonely in the middle of the water. Occasionally, ferry boats carry commuters back and forth from the shore to the island, but that doesn't particularly help. In fact, it expresses the loneliness or the aloneness of the island further.

Discovering these facets of fearlessness is preparation for the further journey on the warrior's path. If the warrior does not feel alone and sad, then he or she can be corrupted very easily. In fact, such a person may not be a warrior at all. To be a good warrior, one has to feel sad and lonely, but rich and resourceful at the same time. This makes the warrior sensitive to every aspect of phenomena: to sights, smells, sounds and feelings. In that sense, the warrior is also an artist, appreciating whatever goes on in the world. Everything is extremely vivid. The rustling of your armor or the sound of rain drops falling on your coat is very loud. Because you are so sensitive, the fluttering of occasional butterflies around you is almost an insult.

Such a sensitive warrior can then go further on the path of fearlessness. There are three tools or practical guides that the warrior uses on this journey. The first is the development of discipline, or sila in Sanskrit, which is represented by the analogy of the sun. Sunshine is all-pervasive. When the sun shines on the land, it doesn't neglect any area. It does a thorough job. Similarly, as a warrior, you never neglect your discipline.

We're not talking about military rigidity here. Rather, in all your mannerisms, every aspect of behavior, you maintain your openness to the environment. You constantly extend yourself to things around you. There is a complete absence of laziness. Even if what you are seeing, hearing or perceiving becomes very difficult and demanding, the warrior never gives up. You go along with the situation. You don't withdraw. This allows you to develop your loyalty and connection to others, free from fear. You can relate with other sentient beings who are trapped in the confused world, perpetuating their pain. In fact, you realize that it is your duty. You feel warmth, compassion, and even passion towards others. First you develop your own good conduct, and then you can extend yourself fearlessly to others. That is the concept of the sun.

The second guide on the warrior's path is represented by the analogy of an echo, which is connected with meditative awareness, or samadhi. When you try to take time off from being a warrior, when you want to let go of your discipline or indulge mindlessly in some activity, your action produces an echo. It's like a sound echoing in a canyon, bouncing back on itself, producing more echoes that bounce off of one another. Those echoes or reflections happen all the time, and if we pay attention to them, they provide constant reminders to be awake. At first, the reminder might be fairly timid, but then the second, third and fourth time you hear it, it's a much louder echo. These echoes remind you to be on the spot, on the dot.

However, you can't just wait for an echo to wake you up. You have to put your awareness out into the situation. You have to put effort into being aware.

Becoming a warrior means that you are building a world that does not give you the setting sun, or degraded, concept of rest, which is purely indulging in your confusion. Sometimes you are tempted to return to that cowardly world. You just want to flop and forget the echo of your awareness. It seems like a tremendous relief not to have to work so hard. But then you discover that this world without even an echo is too deadly. You find it refreshing to get back to the warrior's world, because it is so much more alive.

The warrior's third tool is actually a weapon. It is represented by the analogy of a bow and arrow, which is connected with developing wisdom, or prajna, and skillful means, or upaya. In this case we are talking about the wisdom of discriminating awareness, which is experiencing the sharpness of sense perceptions and developing psychological accuracy. You can't develop this kind of sharpness unless some experience of egolessness has manifested in your mind. Otherwise, your mind will be preoccupied, full of its own ego. But when you have made a connection with basic goodness, you can relate with both the actual sharpness of the arrow and with the skillful means provided by the bow. The bow allows you to harness or execute the sharpness of your perceptions.

The development of this discriminating awareness wisdom also allows you to accurately detect the enemy. A real enemy is someone who propagates and promotes ultimate selfishness, or ego. Such enemies promote basic badness rather than basic goodness. They try to bring others into their realm, tempting them with anything from a cookie up to a million dollars.

In the Shambhala warrior tradition, we say that you should only have to kill an enemy once every thousand years. We mean here the real enemy, the basic rudra principle, which is the personification of Ego-hood, of ego run wild. You can work with other enemies by subjugating them, talking to them, buying them out, or seducing them. However, according to this tradition, once in a thousand years a real assassination of the enemy is necessary. We're talking about someone who can't be reached by any other means. You might use a sword or an arrow, whatever means you need to overpower them, so their ego is completely popped. Such an assassination has to be very direct and personal. It's not like dropping bombs on people. If we pop the enemy, and only then, they might be able to connect with some basic goodness within themselves and realize that they made a gigantic mistake. It's like having rotten teeth in your mouth. Eventually you have to have all your teeth removed, replacing them with false teeth. After that, you might be able to appreciate the teeth that you lost.

Overall, these three principles-the sun, the echo, and the bow and arrow-are all connected with the natural process, or path, of working with our basic intelligence. Beyond that, they describe the fundamental decorum and decency of the warrior's existence. A warrior should be capable of artfully conducting his or her life in every action, from drinking tea to running a country. Learning how to handle fear, both how to utilize one's own fear and that of others, is what allows us to brew the beer of fearlessness. You can put all of those situations of fear and doubt into a gigantic vat and ferment them.

The path of fearlessness is connected with what we do right now, today, rather than with anything theoretical or waiting for a cue from somewhere else. The basic vision of warriorship is that there is goodness in everyone. We are all good in ourselves. So we have our own warrior society within our own body. We have everything we need to make the journey already.

Fruition

Fearlessness has a starting point, it includes discipline, it makes a journey, and it reaches a conclusion. It is like the Great Eastern Sun: the sun rises, it radiates light, and this benefits people by dispelling the darkness and allowing the fruit to ripen and the flowers to blossom.

The fruition of fearlessness is also connected with three analogies. The first is that fearlessness is like a reservoir of trust. This trust arises from the experience of basic goodness, which we have already discussed. When we feel basically good, rather than degraded or condemned, then we become very inquisitive, looking into every situation and examining it. We don't want to fool ourselves by relying on belief alone. Rather, we want to make a personal connection with reality.

This is a very simple, straightforward idea. If we accept a challenge and take certain steps to accomplish something, the process will yield results-either success or failure. When you sow a seed or plant a tree, either the seed will germinate and the tree will grow, or they will die. Similarly, for the inquisitive warrior, trust means that we know that our actions will bring a definite response from reality. We know that we will get a message. Failure generally is telling us that our action has been undisciplined and inaccurate in some way. Therefore, it fails. When our action is fully disciplined, it usually is fulfilled; we have success. But those responses are not regarded as either punishment or congratulations.

Trust then is being willing to take a chance, knowing that what goes up must come down, as they say. When a warrior has that kind of trust in the reflections of the phenomenal world, then he or she can trust his or her individual discovery of goodness. Communication produces results, either success or failure. That is how the fearless warrior relates with the universe: not by remaining alone and insecure, hiding away, but by constantly being exposed to the phenomenal world and constantly being willing to take that chance.

The reservoir of trust is a bank of richness from which the warrior can always draw conclusions. We begin to feel that we are dealing with a rich world, one that never runs out of messages. The only problem arises if we try to manipulate the situation in our favor. You are not supposed to fish in the reservoir or swim in it. The reservoir has to remain unconditional, unpolluted. So you don't put your one-sidedness, your bias or conditionality, into it. Then the reservoir might dry up.

Normally, trust means that we think that our world is trustworthy. We think that it's going to produce a good result, success. But in this case, we're talking about having a continual relationship with the phenomenal world that is not based on either a good or bad result. We have unconditional trust in the phenomenal world to always give us a message, either success or failure. The fruition of our action will always provide us with information. Such trust in the reservoir keeps us from being too arrogant or too timid. If you're too arrogant, you'll find yourself bumping into the ceiling. If you're too timid, you'll be pushed up by the floor. Roughly speaking, that's the concept of the reservoir.

The ancient Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching often talks about success being failure and failure being success. Success sows the seeds of future failure, and failure may bring a later success. So it's always a dynamic process. As warriors, fearlessness doesn't mean that we cheer up by saying, "Look! I'm on the side of the right. I'm a success." Nor do we feel that we're being punished when we fail. In any case, success and failure are saying the same thing.

That brings us to the next analogy, which is music. Music is connected with the idea of continuously being joyful. The feedback, or the result, that comes from the warrior's practice is never a dead end. It presents another path. We always can go on, go beyond. So while the result of action is fruition, beyond that, the result is the seed for the next journey. Our journey continues, cycling between success and failure, path and fruition, just as the four seasons alternate. There is always a sense of creativity, so there is always joy on the journey, joy in the result.

Why are you so joyful? You are guided on the path by the disciplines of the sun, the echo, and the bow and arrow. You have witnessed your basic goodness, taking joy in having nothing to hang onto. You have realized the fundamental NO. You are free from doubt and you have experienced a sense of renunciation. So whether the situation brings success or failure, it brings an unconditional good understanding. Therefore, your mind and body are constantly synchronized; there is no deficit of any kind in the body or the mind. Your experience becomes like music, which has rhythm and a melody that is constantly expanding and being recreated. So the sense of celebration is constant, inbuilt, in spite of the ups and downs of one's personal life. That is continuously being joyful.

Having developed trust and appreciation, you can finally conquer fear, which is connected with the analogy of a saddle. In the Buddhist teachings we talk about developing such a good sense of mental balance that, if you become mindless, your awareness automatically brings you back, just as in the process of skidding on the ice and losing your balance, your body automatically rebalances itself to keep you from falling. As long as you have good posture and a good seat in the saddle, you can overcome any startling or unexpected moves your horse makes. So the idea of the saddle is taking a good seat in your life.

An overreaction or an exaggerated reaction to situations shouldn't happen at this level. You have trust, you are constantly being joyful, and therefore you can't be startled, either. This doesn't mean that your life is monotone, but rather you feel established in this world. You belong here. You are one of the warriors in this world, so even if little unexpected things happen, good or bad, right or wrong, you don't exaggerate them. You come back to your seat in the saddle and maintain your posture in the situation.

The warrior is never amazed by anything. If someone comes up to you and says, "I'm going to kill you right now," you are not amazed. If someone says that are going to give you a million dollars, you think, "So what?" Assuming your seat in the saddle at this level is achieving inscrutability, in the positive sense.

It is also taking your seat on the earth. Once you have a good seat on the earth, you don't need witnesses to validate you. Someone once asked the Buddha, "How do we know that you are enlightened?" And he touched the earth in what is called the earth-touching mudra, or gesture, and said, "Earth is my witness." That is the same concept as holding your seat in the saddle. Someone might ask, "How do we know you won't overreact to this situation?" You can say, "Just watch my posture in the saddle."

Fearlessness in the warrior tradition is not a training in ultimate paranoia. It is based on training in ultimate solidity-which is basic goodness. You have to learn how to be regal. Trust is like becoming a good citizen, celebrating the journey is like becoming a good minister in the government, but holding your seat in the saddle is finally assuming command. It is how to be a king or queen.

At the same time, conquering fear is not based on blocking your sensitivity. Otherwise, you become a deaf and dumb monarch, a jellyfish king. Sitting on the horse requires balance, and as you acquire that balance in the saddle, you have more awareness of the horse. So when you sit in the saddle on your fickle horse, you feel completely exposed and gentle. If you feel aggressive, you don't have a good seat. In fact, you are probably not even riding the horse. You don't put your saddle on a fence railing. You have to saddle a real horse.

In this case, riding the horse is riding somebody else's mind. It requires a complete connection. In the Buddhist tradition, this is called compassion, or working with somebody else. You are completely exposed in this situation. Otherwise, it's like a medieval knight encased in his armor. It's so heavy that he has to be cranked up onto the horse. Then he rides off to battle and usually falls off. There's something wrong with that technology.

Often, when someone tells us we should be fearless, we think they're saying not to worry, that everything is going to be all right. But unconditional fearlessness is simply based on being awake. Once you have command of the situation, fearlessness is unconditional because you are neither on the side of success or failure. Success and failure are your journey.

Nevertheless, sometimes you become so petrified on your journey that your teeth, your eyes, your hands, and your legs are all vibrating. You are hardly sitting in your seat; you are practically levitating with fear. But even that is regarded as an expression of fearlessness if you have a fundamental connection with the earth of basic goodness-which is unconditional goodness at this point.

Developing the Mind of Great Capacity

By His Holiness the Dalai Lama

A teaching on practices to generate bodhichitta by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

From one point of view, personal liberation without freeing others is selfish and unfair, because all sentient beings also have the natural right and desire to be free of suffering. Therefore, it is important for practitioners to engage in the practice of the stages of the path of the highest scope, starting with the generation of bodhichitta, the altruistic aspiration to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. Once one has cultivated bodhichitta, all the meritorious actions that are supported by and complemented with this altruism—even the slightest form of positive action—become causes for the achievement of omniscience.

Omniscience is a wisdom that is able to perceive directly all phenomena, both the ultimate and the conventional natures, simultaneously. It is a state where all the potentials of one's wisdom are developed fully and where there is also a total freedom from all the obstructions to knowledge. It can be achieved only by purifying all the faults of one's mind, and only by complementing the practice of wisdom with the practices of method: bodhichitta, compassion and so forth. Without bodhichitta, even though one might have great wisdom realizing emptiness, one will not be able to achieve the omniscient state.

In order to cultivate a genuine bodhichitta, you have to depend upon the proper methods and the instructions outlining these. There are two major systems of instructions, one the seven-point cause and effect method, the other the equalizing and exchanging oneself with others. The different methods will suit the various mental dispositions of the different practitioners; some might find one more effective than the other. The tradition is that these methods are combined and practiced together.


The Seven-Point Cause and Effect Method

The Preliminary Step of Cultivating Equanimity

The foundation for practicing the seven-point cause and effect method is cultivating a mind of equanimity. Without this foundation you will not be able to have an impartial altruistic view, because without equanimity you will always have partiality towards your relatives and friends. Realize that you should not have prejudice, hatred or desire towards enemies, friends or neutral persons, and thus lay a very firm foundation of equanimity.

To do this, first visualize a neutral person whom you do not know at all. When you clearly visualize that person, you will find that you don't feel any fluctuations of emotion, no desire or hatred—you are indifferent. Then visualize an enemy; when you visualize the enemy clearly you will have a natural reaction of hatred, feeling all sorts of ill will. Next, clearly visualize a friend or relative to whom you feel very close. With that visualization, the natural reaction will be a feeling of affection and attachment. With the visualization of your enemies, you will feel somewhat distant and will have hatred and a sense of repulsion. Reflect upon your justification in reacting so negatively to them. Although it is true that they have meted out much harm in this life, have they always done such things and been like this? You will find that they have not: in the past they must have engaged in actions beneficial to you and many others. Right now, because of being under the influence of ignorance, hatred and so forth, they have these faults; it is not their essential nature.

Reflect that delusions are within your own mind also. Although there might be a difference in the force of these delusions, in terms of being delusions they are delusions equally. You should decide that there is not much point in emotionally reacting to the people you have categorized as enemies.

Then examine how you react, on the other hand, to your relatives and friends. Although it is true that they have been kind to you in this life, in the past they might have been your enemies, and even gone to the extent of taking your life. Therefore, there is no point in being absolutely or permanently attached to such people, categorizing them as your friends and relatives.

Thus, there is not much difference between enemies and friends as far as yourself is concerned. They have both had times of benefiting you and they have both had times of harming you. Your having partiality towards them is groundless. Therefore, develop the mind of equanimity directed towards all sentient beings. This mind cannot be brought about by meditating just once or twice, but rather through repeated meditations over months or years.

1. Recognizing Sentient Beings as Having Been One's Mother

The first step of the seven-point cause and effect method is to cultivate the recognition of all sentient beings as having been one's mother. To do this, it is first necessary to reflect on your beginningless lives in this cycle of existence and that through many of your lives you have had to depend on your mothers. There is not a single living being that you can definitely point to as not having been your mother in the past. Perceive all sentient beings as having been your own kind mothers. If you are able to understand the beginninglessness of your lives, you will be able to understand that you have taken many forms of life that require a mother. You will find that there is not a single sentient being that has not been your mother in the past.

Next, examine whether you stand to gain or lose by cultivating this recognition of others as mothers. Since you are concerned with cultivating bodhichitta, the altruistic aspiration, you should recognize that if you do not have this basic factor of recognition of others as having been your mothers, you will not have success in its cultivation. So by not developing this recognition you stand to lose.

A recognition of others as being your dearest ones need not be confined to recognizing them as mothers alone. As Maitreya recommends in his Abhisamayalankara, you can also view them as having been your best friends or closest relatives. For example, you can view all sentient beings as having been your fathers, if you relate better to your father than to your mother, or as children to whom you feel closest and for whom you have the deepest affection. The point is to bring about an effect within your mind and to develop a state of mind that will enable you to perceive all living beings as the closest objects of affection and kindness. That is how you cultivate the recognition of sentient beings as having been one's mother.

2. Recollection of All Beings' Kindness

The next meditation is on the recollection of the kindness of all beings. For this, you should visualize the person to whom you feel closest—be it your mother or father—when she or he is quite old. Clearly visualize the person at an age when she or he depends upon others' cooperation and assistance. Doing this has a special significance, for it will make your meditation more powerful and effective.

Then think that your mother, for example, has been your mother not only in this lifetime, but also in past lives. Particularly in this life her kindness was boundless at the time of your birth, and before that during gestation she had to undergo all sorts of hardships, and even after birth her affection was such that she was able to surrender her own happiness and pleasure for the sake of the happiness and pleasure of her child. At the time of your birth she felt as joyful as if she had found a treasure, and according to her own capacities she has protected you. You were thus protected until you could stand on your own feet.

After reflecting upon the kindness of mothers, particularly of this lifetime, you should visualize other beings whom you find quite distant and repulsive, even animals, and take them as your object of visualization. Think that although these enemies are harmful to you and are your adversaries in this life, in past lives they must have been your most dear parents and must have even protected and saved your life countless times. Therefore their kindness is boundless. In such a manner you should train your mind.

3. Repaying Kindness

The meditation on the recollection of kindness should be followed by meditation upon repaying that kindness. The thought to repay the kindness of mothers will come about naturally when you have been successful in recollecting this kindness—it should come from the depths of your heart. Not to repay their kindness would be unfair and ungrateful of you. Therefore, you should work according to your own capacity for the benefit of others; doing this repays their kindness.

4. Loving-kindness

Having cultivated equanimity and the recognition of all sentient beings as having been one's mother, you will see all sentient beings as objects of affection and endearment. And the more forceful your feeling of affection towards them, the stronger will be your aspiration that they be free from suffering and enjoy happiness. So the recognition of others as having been one's mother is the foundation for the subsequent meditations. Having laid that proper foundation, recollected their kindness and developed the genuine wish to repay it, you gain a state wherein you feel close to and affectionate towards all living beings. Now reflect that all these sentient beings, although they naturally desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering, are tormented by unimaginable sufferings. Reflect upon the fact that they are just like yourself in desiring happiness, but they lack this happiness. By such reflection, cultivate loving-kindness.

5. Great Compassion

When you do the meditation on compassion, reflect upon the manner in which sentient beings undergo the experience of suffering. First, in order to have a very strong force of compassion, visualize a person undergoing active sufferings. You can visualize any situation that you find unbearable. Doing so will enable you to have a strong force of compassion and make it easier to develop a genuine universal compassion.

Then think about the sentient beings in other categories; they may not be undergoing manifest sufferings right now, but due to indulging in negative actions that will definitely produce undesirable consequences in the future, they are certain to face such experiences.

The wish that all sentient beings who lack happiness be endowed with happiness is the state of mind called universal love, and the wish that sentient beings be free of suffering is called compassion. These two meditations can be undertaken in combination, until there is some kind of effect or change in your mind.

6. The Unusual Attitude

Your cultivation of love and great compassion should not be left in a state of mere imagination or wish alone; rather, a sense of responsibility, a genuine intention to engage in the task of relieving sentient beings of their suffering and providing them with happiness, should be developed. It is important for a practitioner to work for and take upon himself or herself the responsibility of fulfilling this intention. The stronger your cultivation of compassion is, the more committed you will feel to taking this responsibility. Because of their ignorance, sentient beings do not know the right methods by which they can fulfill their aims. It is the responsibility of those who are equipped with this knowledge to fulfill the intention of working for their benefit.

Such a state of mind is called the extraordinary attitude or special, unusual attitude. It is called unusual or extraordinary because such a force of compassion, comitting oneself to taking on such a responsibility, is not to be found in the trainees of lower capacity. As the oral traditions explain, with this extraordinary attitude there is a commitment that one will take upon oneself the responsibility of fulfilling this aim. It is like striking a deal in business and signing a contract.

After generating the extraordinary attitude, ask yourself whether or not, although you have developed the strong courage and the determination to work for the benefit of other sentient beings, you really possess the capacity and capability to bring them genuine happiness. It is only by your showing living beings the right path leading towards omniscience, and by living beings on their part eliminating the ignorance within themselves, that they will be able to gain lasting happiness. Although you may be able to work for other sentient beings to bring them temporary happiness, bringing about their ultimate aims is possible only when these beings take upon themselves the initiative to eliminate the ignorance within themselves. The same is true of yourself: if you desire the attainment of liberation, it is your responsibility to take the initiative to eliminate the ignorance within yourself.

As I just mentioned, you must also show the right path to living beings—and for that, first of all, you must possess the knowledge yourself. So long as you yourself are not completely enlightened there will always be an inner obstruction. Therefore, it is very important that you work for your own achievement of the completely enlightened state. By thinking in such terms, you will be able to develop the strong belief that without attaining the omniscient state you will not be able to fulfill what you set out to do and truly benefit others.

7. Bodhicitta

Based on the foundation of love and compassion, you should generate from the depths of your heart the aspiration to achieve the completely enlightened state for the benefit of all sentient beings. The cultivation of such a mind constitutes the realization of bodhichitta.

After the meditation on generating bodhichitta you should engage in the practice of cultivating bodhichitta that takes the result into the path. Visualizing the spiritual guru at your crown, imagine that the guru expresses delight, saying that it is very admirable and you are very fortunate that you have generated bodhichitta and have engaged in the path of cultivating it, and that he shall take you under his care. Imagine that, as a result of the guru's delight, he dissolves through your crown and into your heart. Then you dissolve into emptiness and from emptiness arise in the aspect of Buddha Shakyamuni. See yourself becoming inseparable from him, and rejoice. At your heart visualize all your virtues accumulated through the practice of bodhichitta. These emanate, in the form of light rays, toward all living beings and actively work for their benefit, relieving them of their suffering, placing them in the state of liberation and favorable rebirth and eventually leading them to the omniscient state.


Equalizing and Exchanging Oneself with Others

Next follows the instruction on the cultivation of bodhichitta according to the method of equalizing and exchanging oneself with others. This meditation has five sections: 1) equalizing oneself with others; 2) reflecting on the disadvantages of the self-cherishing attitude from many perspectives; 3) reflecting on the advantages of the thought cherishing the welfare of others from many perspectives; 4) the actual exchange of oneself and others and 5) taking and giving.

1. Equalizing Oneself with Others

This phrase refers to the practice of reflecting upon the equality of oneself and others in having the natural and spontaneous wish to enjoy happiness and avoid suffering. For the generation of this type of equanimity, the instruction by the late Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche on the nine-round meditation is very powerful and effective.

Meditation on Equanimity

The nine-round meditation is comprised of training the mind in equanimity with a mental outlook based on the dual nature of things and events: the conventional and the ultimate. Based on different perspectives, the first in turn is divided into two sections, one from the viewpoint of others and the second from the viewpoint of oneself.

The rounds of visualization on cultivating equanimity from the viewpoint of others are divided into three:

a) Develop the thought that all sentient beings are equal insofar as the natural wish to avoid suffering is concerned and that therefore there is no point in being partial or discriminatory.

b) Reflect that all sentient beings equally desire happiness and therefore there is no ground for discriminating between them when working for their benefit. The situation is analogous to one where you encounter ten equally wretched beggars who are desperately asking you to relieve their hunger. In such circumstances it is senseless to have any feeling of preference.

c) Develop an equanimity based on the reflection that all sentient beings are equal in lacking genuine happiness although they have the innate desire to possess it. Likewise all sentient beings are the same in having suffering and the wish to avoid it.

With the above three types of practice you train your mind in the attitude expressed as follows: "I shall never discriminate between beings and will always work equally to help them overcome suffering and gain happiness."

The next three rounds of meditation enforce the thought that there is no justification for discrimination between sentient beings from the point of view of oneself or from the viewpoint of others. This training is divided into three sections:

a) You might have the thought that although reflection upon the equality of others is fairly persuasive regarding the futility of your being discriminatory towards other beings, surely when viewed from your own side the situation will look quite different. After all, some people are friends and help you, whereas many others harm you. To counter this thought which attempts to give false grounds for being partial towards others, reflect that all sentient beings are equally kind to you: they have all been at one time or other your closest friends and relatives. Hence there is no rational basis at all for being biased towards or against any.

b) Perhaps you have the idea that although people have been your friends in the past, they have equally been your enemies and have caused harm as well. Such notions should be countered by reflecting that sentient beings' kindness to you is not confined to when they are friends and relatives alone; their kindness when they are your enemies is boundless. The enemy provides you with the precious opportunity to train yourself in the noble ideals of patience and tolerance, traits vital for the perfection of your generation of universal compassion and bodhichitta. For a bodhisattva who emphasizes the practice of bodhichitta, the training in patience is indispensable. Contemplating upon such lines of reasoning will persuade you that there are no grounds for neglecting the welfare of even a single sentient being.

c) Reflect that, as Shantideva wrote in Bodhisattvacaryavatara, there is no sense in someone who is himself subject to suffering and impermanence being selfish and discriminatory towards others who are also tormented by the same fate.

The next three rounds of meditation deal with the cultivation of equanimity based on an insight into the ultimate nature of things and events. (This "ultimate" should not be taken to refer to the ultimate truth in terms of emptiness—rather, it means that the outlook adopted in these visualizations is deeper and hence relatively ultimate in comparison to the earlier meditations.)

a) Consider whether or not there are any "true" enemies in the real sense of the word. If there are, then the fully enlightened buddhas should perceive them as such, which is definitely not the case. For a buddha, all sentient beings are equally dear. Also, when you examine deeply, you will find that it is in fact the delusions within the enemies and not the enemies themselves that actually cause harm. Aryadeva said in his Chatu-shataka Shastra:

Buddhas see the delusion as the enemy And not the childish who possess it.

Therefore, there is no justification at all for you to hold grudges against those who cause harm, and neglect the welfare of such beings.

b) Secondly, ask yourself whether these so-called enemies are permanent and will always remain as enemies or whether they are changeable. Concluding that they are not permanent will enable you to overcome your disinterest in their welfare.

c) The last meditation is a reflection upon the relative nature of "enemy" and "friend," and touches upon the ultimate nature of phenomena. Concepts of enemy, friend and so forth are relative and exist only at the conventional level. They are mutually dependent, as are the concepts of long and short. A person may be an enemy in relation to one person while at the same time being a dear friend to another. It is your misapprehension of friends, relatives and enemies as inherently existent that gives rise to your fluctuating emotions towards them. Therefore, by realizing that there is no such inherently existent enemy and friend, you will be able to overcome your biased feelings towards all beings.

2. Reflection on the Disadvantages of the Self-Cherishing Attitude

The next step is the contemplation—from many different perspectives—upon the disadvantages and faults of the self-cherishing attitude. As Geshe Chekawa said in his Lojong dhon dun ma ("Seven Points on Thought Transformation"): "Banish the one object of all blame." It is the self-cherishing attitude that is the source of all miseries and therefore is the only object to be blamed for all misfortune.

Since the self-cherishing and self-grasping attitudes abide strongly fortified within our minds, we have never been able to shake them in the least. We have so far not been able to disturb them even as much as a small pebble in a shoe would disturb a person.

If we remain with our present outlook and way of thinking, we will still be under the influence and command of these two factors. We should reflect that these factors have always caused our downfall in the past, and that they will do so in the future if we remain under their influence.

In deeper terms, we will find that all the sufferings and problems and anxieties of not finding what we seek, of being separated from our loved ones, of physical illnesses, of suffering from want, lack of contentment, quarrels and so forth, come about because of our underlying attachment to the self and the self-cherishing attitude that tries to protect such a self within ourselves. The more selfish a person is, the more sufferings and anxieties he or she will have. This self-cherishing attitude manifests in all sorts of ways, which results in problems and anxieties. Yet we never recognize the truth—that these are all the doings of the self-cherishing attitude. Rather, we have the tendency to blame others and external factors: "He did it, and if he had done something else, it wouldn't have happened."

3. Reflection on the Advantages of the Thought Cherishing The Welfare of Others

Having realized the enormous disadvantages of holding on to a selfish thought cherishing your welfare alone, you should now reflect upon the kindness of all mother sentient beings, as discussed earlier. The kindness of other beings towards us is boundless while we revolve in this cycle of existence. This is particularly true when we first embark upon a spiritual path and thus begin the process of untying the chains that bind us to this cyclic existence.

We find that if a person lives a very selfish life and is never concerned about the welfare of others, he will have few friends, and people will not take much notice of him. At the time of his death, there will not be many people who will regret his passing. Some deceptive and negative persons may be very powerful and wealthy, and therefore some people—for economic reasons and so forth—might portray themselves as friends, but they will speak against such persons behind their backs. When these negative persons die, these very same "friends" may rejoice at their death.

On the other hand, many people mourn and regret the death of a person who is very kind and always altruistic and who works for the benefit of others. We find that altruism, as well as the person who possesses it, is regarded as the friend of all, and it becomes the object of veneration and respect by others.

I often remark, partly in jest, that if one really wants to be selfish, one should be "wisely selfish" by working for others. By helping others, one will receive help and assistance in return, particularly when one is in a hard situation—the time when one needs assistance from others the most. But if one tries to be very selfish, then when one is in difficult circumstances, one will find fewer people who are willing to help and one will be left to resolve the situation and difficulty on one's own. It is the nature of human beings to depend upon the cooperation and assistance of others, particularly when facing difficult times; during such times and during hardship it is only true friends who will be beneficial and helpful. By living an unselfish life, one will be able to earn genuine friends, whereas selfish thoughts and a selfish life will never gain one genuine and true friends.

The essence of Mahayana practice is really to teach us the methods by which we will be able to succeed not only in this life but also in the future. Such instruction is, in fact, very practical and relevant to all—believers and nonbelievers alike. If we are able to derive practical benefits within this lifetime by living a virtuous life, we will be able to fulfill the wishes of future lifetimes as well.

4. The Actual Exchange of Oneself with Others

To exchange oneself with others is to reverse a former attitude: the thought of endearment and cherishing of oneself with its feeling of indifference towards others should now be reversed as follows. One should feel indifferent to oneself, reduce the force of clinging to oneself, and rather hold the welfare of other sentient beings as precious. That is the meaning of exchanging oneself with others. The degree of high value one feels towards oneself should now be turned towards others.

For this practice, one should also be knowledgeable about the commitments and precepts of thought transformation practices. If one undertakes such a practice one will be able to transform any adverse circumstances into favorable conditions of the path. In this age of degeneration when one meets with all sorts of problems and adverse circumstances, the practice of thought transformation is very effective. If someone lacks the practice of thought transformation, even though that person might be a very serious meditator he or she will meet with many hardships and hurdles.

5. Giving and Taking

The practice of the actual exchange of oneself with others should be followed by the practice of giving and taking. The latter is begun by reflecting that although all mother sentient beings desire happiness, they lack it, and that although they do not desire suffering, they undergo it. Think that it is the ignorance of sentient beings that impels them to work for the fulfillment of their selfish aims.

You should develop the unusual, extraordinary attitude of wishing that all their sufferings ripen upon yourself. Induced by the strong sense of compassion for other sentient beings, visualize taking all their sufferings upon yourself; and then, induced by the strong wish of love, visualize giving away from the depths of your heart all your virtuous collections, happiness, wealth, possessions, even your body, to other sentient beings. If you can conjoin such practices with the breathing process—that is, imagining taking when inhaling and giving when exhaling—you will be able to engage in a powerful practice, leading you to the strong commitment that you will engage in the bodhisattva deeds. If you are able to engage in such a powerful practice, then due to the strong determination and commitment that you make as a result of cultivating bodhichitta, you will be able to alleviate the forces of the powerful and vast stores of negative actions committed in past lives, and also accumulate great stores of merit.

This is how you should undertake the practice of bodhichitta.


Adapted from The Path to Bliss by Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and translated by Thupten Jinpa (Snow Lion Publications, 2003).

Developing the Mind of Great Capacity, Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, Shambhala Sun, September 2003.

“Of Course I’m Angry,” by Gabriel Cohen

As his marriage falls apart, Gabriel Cohen obsesses over all the things his wife has done to make him angry. But a chance encounter with Buddhism shows him the anger is his alone, and never serves any good purpose anyway.

By Gabriel Cohen

Three years ago I was standing in a real estate office filling out a rental application when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a big man enter and approach the realtor. The stranger muttered something, then shoved the young man. I thought he was just kidding — a friend roughhousing? — until he pinned the realtor against a wall and started punching holes in the Sheetrock, four of them, circling the frightened man's head.

Breathless, I ran out to the store next door and urged the woman behind the counter to call the police. "The guy next door is about to be killed!"

I tiptoed back to check on the realtor. Thankfully, his assailant had disappeared, leaving him alive and unhurt, but the man was still trembling.

"Who was that?" I asked. "Some crazy person off the street?"

"No," the realtor replied. "His ex-wife used to work here. He was drunk, and he was looking for her."

I walked out of the office into a New York heat wave, a day so hot that the asphalt was threatening to melt. I was in the middle of the worst period of my life: a month before, my own wife had suddenly-without warning or apology-walked out of our marriage.

I thought about that stranger's anger, and I thought about my own.

I considered myself a generally cheerful person, prone to corny jokes and bad impressions of TV characters, but that jovial self-image had been severely tested during the last few months of my marriage. Our landlord had decided to sell the house my wife and I were renting an apartment in. Though she and I had gotten along well for four years, our search for a new home led to all sorts of disagreements, and then to outright verbal fights (which pointed to other hidden problems in our relationship).

After our marriage fell apart, I trudged through the city streets, praying that I could find an affordable place on my own. I spent endless hours playing a mental loop in which I railed against my ex-wife, her friends, and even her therapist. At around that time, fortunately, I stumbled across a poster for a Buddhist talk. I knew little about Buddhism; I saw it as a foreign, esoteric religion full of rituals and chanting, or a New Age fad for rock stars and Hollywood actors. But the title of the talk grabbed my attention: How to Deal with Anger (not-as my preconceptions might have led me to expect-How to Bliss Out and Pretend You're Not Really Angry). Under ordinary circumstances I would have passed on by, but I was suffering and desperate. What did I have to lose?

That very first talk turned my whole world upside down-or right-side up. I was greatly surprised to hear that if I was angry at my wife, my wife was not the problem. My problem was my anger.
I used to think of the spiritual path as a detached, solo journey, like Moses trekking up the mountain, or the Buddha wandering off to sit under his bodhi tree. I imagined how challenging it would be to renounce life's pleasures and meditate in a cave. Now I realize that life offers a much more common but just as powerful spiritual trial: just try getting along with one other person for the rest of your life. Tie the knot. In good times, the rewards are great: the intimacy, the support, the joy of being loved and of loving someone else. Sometimes, though, the positive energy of a marriage seems to derail, to twist, to spiral into a negative whirlwind. It almost appears as if the more good energy you put into a relationship, the more bad feeling can come howling out the other side.

In my case, I was sorely tempted to blame my wife for our problems. After all, I had gone into marriage with the understanding that it would inevitably entail struggling through some hard times; she was the one who had refused to put in the hard work that any relationship requires. I thought she was making me feel angry-and heartbroken, and betrayed, and all that other fun stuff. I mean, I knew my anger was an internal feeling, but it felt as if it was coming to me from her, as if it could leap from one person to the other. I didn't see my anger as a sign of my own irrationality; I thought it made perfect sense. My wife had behaved unreasonably-of course I was getting upset.

As I mentioned, though, that Buddhist talk rocked my view.

It took place in a yoga studio. The teacher held up a book. "How many of you think this exists independently of your mind?"

Everyone in the audience raised their hand.

As the teacher led us to see, though, our only way of knowing the book was there was by filtering our perception of it through our own minds. And that's true of every single thing in our lives: the objects around us, the people, our concepts, everything. Our entire experience of life is shaped by how we perceive and how we think.

Normally, we believe that we need to reshape our external circumstances to improve how we feel (more money, a better job, a more accommodating spouse), but that's a huge, never-ending, continually frustrating quest. Buddhism recommends a much more feasible, achievable goal: we can transform our lives by changing how we think about them. As the eighth-century sage Shantideva put it, if we want to avoid stepping on thorns, we can't possibly cover the whole world with leather-but we can cover our own feet.

Somehow, I realized early on that being pissed off at my ex was not making me feel better. I needed to find a more positive way out of my suffering. The fact that my emotions only existed inside my own head was great news; it meant that they were not dependent on my ex-wife, or how the legal proceedings developed, or on any other external factors. I could improve my experience of divorce by taking responsibility for my feelings, and by learning how to train my mind. And so-like millions of Buddhist practitioners before me-I set out on a journey of internal exploration, observing my thoughts like a scientist peering at electrons buzzing around inside a cloud chamber. I made some fundamental discoveries.

I found that I was not "an angry person" — I was simply a person experiencing angry thoughts. Like all thoughts, they were just temporary, just passing through my head like storms through a clear blue sky. They didn't have the power to damage the inherent clarity of my mind. And they couldn't force me to act in an angry way. I learned that it was possible to put a little pause, a breathing space, between an external event and my reaction to it, in order to discover a broader range of options.

As I probed deeper, I realized that — in almost every case — my anger arose out of a deep, internal sense of hurt. That feeling was uncomfortable, often intolerable, and I would try to get rid of it by projecting it outward. That seemed to offer some sense of relief, but it had pained my wife and damaged our relationship.

Often, my hurt arose out of a perceived sense of injustice. Like legions of foolish men before me, I believed that being right was the essential thing. When conflicts arose, I argued like an expensive trial lawyer. I won some battles, but I lost the war.

I don't want to overstate how angry I was. My wife and I actually got along very peacefully and lovingly for the great majority of our time together. I'm generally pretty upbeat and laid-back, and I have friends who say that they can hardly even imagine me angry.

On the other hand, that Buddhist talk made me realize that I was probably underestimating how angry I-and most people-really are, much of the time. We tend to believe that anger is an aberration, an emotion that only arises in exceptional circumstances. But pick up any newspaper and you'll see how prevalent it is in the world at large: abuse, assault, murder, war. And it's pervasive in our daily lives. We're peeved that it starts raining just as we decide to go out for a walk. We're disappointed that we didn't win the lottery (even if we didn't buy a ticket!). We're irate because our parents didn't love us enough, or loved us too much. We're aggrieved that our life is not turning out as we wish or believe it should. Some of us can't acknowledge our anger; we suppress it and become depressed, or try to salve it with alcohol or food or shopping — or we run away. (If you doubt that there's an unacknowledged current of anger underlying your daily existence, just notice how it flares up the instant someone cuts you off in traffic or steals your parking space. Did it arise out of nowhere, or was it already there?)

Among all our spurs to anger, why is a failed marriage so especially powerful? Partly, it's because our expectations are so high and unrealistic. We buy into a fairy tale that our spouse will relieve us of all our existential suffering and loneliness; we believe that they should make us happy all the time. As Buddhism points out, that's not love; it's an ego-based delusion called desirous attachment. When that false ideal falls apart, it's quickly replaced by disappointment and hostility. It's much easier to blame our spouse than to acknowledge the fundamental wrongness of our own view.

It's not a thin line between love and hate; Buddhism says that true love is never the cause of suffering. It's a thin line between unreasonable expectations and the stinging disenchantment that arises when they can't be met. A big part of the solution is learning to let go of our expectations of what should happen, and to be more accepting of what life actually brings. As the thirteenth-century Zen teacher and philosopher Dogen beautifully put it, "A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it."

As I developed a practice, I came to understand that my feelings of disappointment and hurt and injustice were all rooted in the same toxic soil: an inflated sense of the primacy of my own needs and desires-what Buddhists call self-cherishing. My anger was a childish wail of complaint: What about ME?

A remarkable meditation called taking and giving helped me start letting go of my self-centeredness and resentment. As I went to more Buddhist talks, I became familiar with the technique of imagining that I was exhaling my tensions and frustrations as dark smoke, and that I was inhaling a clear, blissful light. One day, though, after a talk on anger, the teacher offered an astonishing, counterintuitive exercise. She said that if we were angry with someone, we should imagine breathing in their suffering as dark smoke, and that we should imagine breathing toward them that blissful light. In the early days of my divorce, the last thing I wanted was to imagine that I was taking on my wife's troubles, but when I tried the meditation, it had a profound effect: it helped me to see her as a suffering person in her own right. I had already found that when my heart was full of anger, it held no room for compassion. While doing this meditation, I discovered that the reverse was also true.

In regard to my big desire to be in the right, Buddhism offered another counterintuitive, helpful method: accepting defeat and offering the victory. Instead of always trying to win, I could surrender my own agenda in the service of a greater peace: I could lose battles, and the war might disappear.

Buddhists say that the antidote to anger is patience. One thing that has helped me move toward that goal has been learning to see that things do not inherently exist in the way that I perceive them to (the Buddhist concept of emptiness.) That may sound abstract and intellectual, but it's easy to apply to relationships. When Zen master Shunryu Suzuki was asked to sum up the essence of his philosophy, he replied with just three words: not necessarily so. If I get riled up now, I repeat those words to myself, a reminder that my perception of what's going on is undoubtedly incomplete and likely faulty. The anger I perceive in someone else may be arising out of hurt; their seeming stubbornness may cover insecurity and fear.

Did all this new knowledge miraculously enable me to eradicate my anger? Of course not. But at least I started getting better at recognizing it when it first arose, and calming myself before I might act on it.

Eventually, I came to see that anger was a false friend. Though it might seem to bolster me, to save me from depression, to keep me moving forward, it worked against me. Each impetuous e-mail, each vengeful riposte, each passive-aggressive refusal to respond — they all came back to bite me in the end. In fact, Buddhism says that acting out of anger is never the skillful thing to do.

You might think of certain exceptions. What about anger directed against social injustice? And isn't it necessary and therapeutic to express some anger?

I can think of at least three answers to these objections.

First, anger causes us to perceive its object in a distorted way. We turn the person we're mad at into an ogre. We become unable to see their good qualities, and we get pumped full of a blinding adrenalin that often causes our interactions to spiral out of control. Anger leads us to see things in a polarized, sharply dualistic way. We believe we're good; we believe our enemies are evil.

If you think that's a helpful way to look at conflict, just look at what it has done for the Israelis and Palestinians, Hutus and Tutsis, Armenians and Turks, etc., etc., etc. Of course, it's important to work against injustice, but we need to do so wisely, with clear eyes and a compassionate, understanding view of all sides. As Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Dalai Lama have so ably demonstrated, a calm mind gets better results. These wise leaders were able to see that, just as our anger is a delusion arising out of our suffering, the anger of our "enemies" is also a delusion, like a sickness in their minds. We should fight the delusion, not the people who suffer from it.

Second, though some therapists tout the benefits of expressing anger in a controlled way, such as punching a pillow, recent research in neuroscience contradicts that notion: if you punch a pillow, you're actually exercising your brain's neural pathways for aggression.

Finally, our anger damages us as well as the object of our wrath. It increases our heart rate, elevates our blood pressure, and has other serious health effects. As the saying goes, anger is an acid that corrodes the vessel that holds it. This seems stupidly obvious to me now, but when I was tromping around the streets of Brooklyn running my resentful little mental loops, I failed to realize that they had absolutely no effect on my wife. I was just working myself into an increasingly agitated state-punching holes, in effect, in a wall that only I could see. I was carrying around an entirely unhelpful burden, and I had to resolve to set it down.

In case I needed a more forceful demonstration of the dangers of anger, life soon provided one. A few minutes after I left that real estate office, I came across another realtor. Miraculously, she drove me straight to a fantastic apartment, in a big old Victorian house with a front porch and a back patio, a stained glass window, and even a chandelier. By New York standards, the rent was cheap. It wasn't until a few weeks later — just before I moved in — that I found out why. It turned out that my landlord had been having troubles with his own marriage.

One night, in a fit of rage, he had killed his wife.

In my new apartment.

The message could not have been clearer: this is what can happen if you let anger win.

Three years of working with Buddhist insights and practice have certainly not turned me into a saint, but occasionally I see evidence of progress.

My writing desk faces a window that looks out on the street. My neighborhood is generally quiet, but several days ago a stranger parked a luxury car directly outside. After a few minutes, its car alarm started going off — the worst kind, the one where the horn continually bleats. I sat there trying to work, getting increasingly frustrated and annoyed. Finally, I wrote a note, and then I marched out and stuck it under the windshield. (What kind of note? Let's put it this way: the salutation read "Dear Asshole.")

When I came back inside, I sat there listening to the alarm. And I stared at my note. It took a while, but eventually my new training kicked in. At first I thought my blast of anger would cause the owner of the car to feel regretful and ashamed; I finally realized that it would only make him angry in return.

I replaced it with a new note. I did my best to keep my emotions out of it. Calmly, I explained that the car alarm was broken. What else did I have to say? I didn't need to inflate the problem by adding all sorts of self-righteousness and drama; I just called it to his attention, and then I let it go.

At the end of a long path, after extensive mental training, we might hope to become completely free of anger. In the meantime, it can act as a fire that consumes us, or a bell that warns us when something is wrong — not with our circumstances, but with the way that we're thinking about them.

The choice is ours.

Gabriel Cohen is author of Storms Can't Hurt the Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce, as well as three novels, including The Graving Dock, a mystery with a Buddhist subplot. He lives in Brooklyn and likes to meditate next to a lake in Prospect Park.

Forced to Sit

By Scott Darnell

A prisoner's story of finding compassion on the inside.


After thirteen days inside a cell, all I wanted to do when I got outside was look up at the blue sky. It would have been nice to enjoy a passing cloud, a bird in flight, or the wind rustling through the trees on a distant hill. But I was one of more than a hundred inmates—for us, looking up was forbidden.

We had our hands cuffed behind our backs, and for every pair of us there was a tactical team member dressed in riot gear, carrying a heavy stick. "Keep your eyes on the ground," these tact members barked as we filed out of the cell house. Then, outside, we were escorted through a gauntlet of even more tact members who were stomping a black-booted march all the way to the chapel at the far end of the institution.

Just ahead of me I could hear the labored breathing of my fifty-eight-year-old celly as he half shuffled, half limped along, trying to keep up with the line. I could only imagine the pain he was in, forced as he was to keep his eyes glued to the ground despite a broken neck for which the institution had done nothing in the past five years except give him ibuprofen and a neck brace. Would he actually make the walk to chapel? And what if he didn't? Would he be dragged off to the side of the line or left where he lay for the rest of us to step over? There was no telling.

Once we were inside the chapel, the tact team officers led us single file into the main auditorium and into our waiting seats. Then they bellowed at us to sit back—a particularly sadistic thing to order, because leaning against the backrest meant the steel cuffs binding our wrists dug mercilessly into our flesh. Since the cuffs had not been double-locked, I quickly realized that as powerless as I was to loosen them, it was regrettably easy to tighten them if I sat back too fast. "Look at your feet," the officers barked again.

For the next thirty-five or forty minutes we sat there uncomfortably, with the chapel fans pointed away from us and toward the clusters of officers. Within minutes my shirt was soaked through with sweat. The poor guy next to me was so badly off that he was trying to wipe his eyes with a raised knee—an exercise in acrobatics that did not go unnoticed by the officers who belted out an order for him to "sit the fuck back!"

Several thoughts rolled through my head. First was the fact that none of us being put through this ordeal had actually done anything to warrant it. The Department of Corrections was simply grandstanding in response to an incident for which those responsible had long since been taken to segregation or transferred out of the institution.

The second thing I thought—which I often think at times like this—was that, whether I directly deserved it or not, the very fact that I'd committed a crime that landed me behind bars meant I'd have to go through things like this from time to time. Like it or not, this was part of the life I had earned for myself. Welcome to karma.

And lastly, I thought about how I had an obligation to live what I had earned as fully as I could. At the moment, it happened to be rather difficult. So I decided to sit with the difficulty, opening myself as fully as possible to my situation, whether that was the numbness growing in my fingers due to the cuffs, or the almost jovial banter of the officers as they picked several inmates out of the crowd for a strip search, or the groans, coughs, and covert attempts at shifting positions that everyone was making around me.

The irony of being forced to sit motionless in the chapel with my eyes cast down to a spot on the floor was not lost on me. Without the cuffs and with a bit of shifting, I could have been sitting in lotus position. I quickly realized, in fact, that my years of meditation practice were making this exercise in "sitting" far more tolerable for me than it otherwise would have been.

I found myself empathizing with the plight of those around me who hadn't had the benefit of practice, and I was once again reminded that the pain and suffering of others is my pain and suffering as well. None of us is separate from any other, which means we can't separate ourselves from each others' trials and afflictions either.

The question was, what could I possibly do in my present state to ease the suffering I was privy to? If I'd had my way, everybody's cuffs would have been taken off. People could have moved freely in their seats and talked quietly amongst themselves. Unfortunately, I could do nothing physically to alleviate the discomfort of those around me. My cuffs were as tight as everyone else's.

But what I could do was face this moment with them, exercising clarity, awareness, and compassion. In this way I hoped that at least their pain would not go completely unnoticed or be dismissed out of hand. After all, like everyone else, the men sweating their way through yet another institutional shakedown deserved to have their plight recognized.

All too often, one's humanity gets forgotten on the inside. People become "inmates" and nothing more. When that happens, it gets much easier to treat someone badly. An officer doesn't have to think twice about making someone walk with a broken neck, turning the fans away on a hot summer day, or cursing and shouting orders at people already outnumbered and subdued by cuffs. Sadly, whether it's an inmate or an officer, when we forget another's humanity we end up giving up our own as well. Victimizing becomes ever easier.

By sitting with difficulty, however, we get an honest and unbiased look at the situation we're facing and, by working with the compassion engendered by our practice, we can acknowledge and perhaps do away with some of the suffering of those around us. Perhaps as I experience the suffering of others through my practice, others may on some level experience the merit of that practice. Perhaps my awareness of others may begin to heal at least some of the suffering I have witnessed.

When we got back to our cell after another long march, my celly and I spent a good hour straightening out our property boxes and putting away the stuff that had been messed up during the shakedown. He was tired and in pain from his exertion, and while he described the pain and the frustration of going so long without treatment, I sat and simply listened.

It was all I could do for him at the moment. The act of listening, of allowing myself to really hear what he had to say, became another way to acknowledge his situation as a human being. While it wasn't the surgery he needed, it was at least a chance to speak his mind and to know that someone cared enough to be present for him. If I accomplished nothing more that day, chapel was worth every moment. Sitting with difficulty always is.


Scott Darnell is a prisoner at the Menard Correctional Center in Menard, Illinois.

Forced to Sit, Scott Darnell, Shambhala Sun, November 2008.

Smile at Fear

Shambhala Sun | March 2009

by Carolyn Rose Gimian

Spiritually speaking, I come from an eccentric family. The patriarch of my family was the Indian mahasiddha Tilopa who, while spiritually accomplished, was not motivated by worldly success. He held humble jobs: grinding sesame seeds into oil during the day, and at night, procuring clients for a prostitute. Later in life, having attained the supreme realization of the Vajrayana, he became a wandering yogi, known to feast on fish entrails left by fisherman down by the lake. At least, that's the story passed down to me, told with a great deal of family pride.

His spiritual son, Naropa, was a renowned scholar at the greatest Indian university of his era, Nalanda. After realizing that he didn't understand the inner meaning of the texts he was studying, he left the university to study with Tilopa. Naropa was subjected to a series of difficult trials by his teacher, such as jumping off buildings or lying in leech-infested water. Eventually, he attained complete, stainless enlightenment when Tilopa whapped him across the cheek with his sandal.

The next forefather, Marpa, owned a farm in Tibet and was married with children. From time to time, he travelled to India to study the dharma. There he found Naropa. Marpa had brought a bag of gold dust to make offerings to the teachers he encountered. When Naropa demanded the whole bag, Marpa didn't want to part with it, but he gave in. At that point, Naropa scattered the gold dust into the air, singing: "Gold, gold, what is gold to me? The whole world is gold to me." This was the beginning of Marpa's training with Naropa, which led to his ultimate liberation.

The next spiritual son, Milarepa, studied black magic and sent a hailstorm to destroy the farm of his aunt and uncle, who had made him and his mother into servants, but the vengeance did not fundamentally satisfy him. Eventually he found Marpa, who asked him to construct a series of buildings in exchange for receiving the teachings. Milarepa had to carry large boulders and shove them into place by himself, but Marpa would show up, often drunk, and ask Milarepa just what in the name of heaven he was doing. Ordered to dismantle the edifice, he would have to put up another somewhere else. Finally, when Mila was completely broken down and close to suicide, Marpa give him formal initiation. Mila eventually left to pursue meditation in solitude, spending the remainder of his life in caves, surviving mainly on nettles (to the point of developing a green glow). Milarepa sang to anyone who came by his cave, leaving thousands of songs of realization for us to contemplate.

These are some of the early forefathers of the Kagyu school of Vajrayana Buddhism, a lineage that has continued in this manner down to the present day. It is currently led by the His Holiness the Seventeenth Karmapa, who had to make a dangerous escape from Tibet in order to receive thorough training and education. These life stories of the great figures of the Kagyu lineage show us what extreme human beings they were. The wisdom that comes from this family tree is extreme wisdom, and it may be just what is needed for the current situation.

This article is not intended to make you long for the "fish-entrails diet." Nor does it prescribe the "sandal-whap facial," the "throw your money in the air" freeing-therapy, or the "if you build it, you will tear it down" theory of insight. Rather, it asks: What helpful insights can we glean from the teachings of people like these? Why would we turn to such people now?

Because they were all fearless. They were not intimidated by external difficulties. In fact, they approached their lives with spontaneity, humor, and a sparkling sense of dignity and decorum that were completely independent of outside circumstances. They were not preoccupied with themselves or their problems. They were concerned about others; in fact, they embodied compassion, either ruthless or gentle depending on what was called for. And they were very, very wise, in the ways of the world, the ways of the heart, and the ways of the spirit.

In tough times, we need wisdom that is not dependent on conditions. When things are falling apart, we need wisdom that is not propped up. The basis for this wisdom is freedom—freedom from confusion, freedom from fear, and interestingly enough, freedom from extreme views. Extreme views in this context means eternalism and nihilism, the belief in either existence or nonexistence as ultimate reality or saving grace. The origin of this wisdom is simplicity, or nonattachment, which is a bit less threatening than calling it "riding on the razor's edge," which might also apply.

Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, Mila, and all their descendants exemplified the freedom of profound simplicity or naturalness of mind, which can adapt to and transform any external circumstance. Their lifestyles might look extremely unconventional to us, perhaps even unspiritual, but in fact these were people completely at ease in their world, having nothing more to attain and nothing more to give up.

How can we, as beginners on the path, relate to this way of being? To follow their example does not mean mimicking their behavior. Rather than trying to imitate or adopt something external, which will never be a thoroughly satisfying solution, we need to emulate their inner practice and, ultimately, their state of mind.

This may seem like a tall order, but to begin, at least, it is not that complicated. In the beginning, we need simply to examine what's taking place; we need to familiarize ourselves with ourselves. As long as we are in a state of panic, it is very difficult to actually see what is happening to us, to others, or to the world altogether. So in the beginning, developing simplicity means making friends with our fear. When the situation in the world around us inspires panic, we may regard that panic as something unusual or extraordinary. But actually, we are panicked all the time. Fear is already an old friend.

However, fear is so ingrained in us, as anxiety and denial, that we generally don't recognize it. We try to suppress our awareness of it. But in extreme times, this becomes harder to do. To keep ourselves from feeling panicked, we have to build a much denser wall of denial and self-deception, which we construct from the building blocks that the Buddhist teachings call the three poisons: passion, aggression, and ignorance.

On the other hand, we could take the approach that an extreme time is an opportunity as well as an obstacle. We could even celebrate and encourage the chance to bring fear to the surface, into the open. We could welcome our fear for the opportunity it brings us to develop fearlessness. Fear is not the enemy, unless we allow it to become that. Instead, fear can be conquered. But that requires that when we see fear, we smile—an image imparted to me by my teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

What does it mean to smile at fear? To begin with, it means to relax with our fear, by allowing ourselves to be fully with ourselves. One way to cultivate this relaxation is through the practice of meditation. In the Buddhist tradition, the practice of sitting meditation has two elements: simplicity, or peacefulness, and insight, or clarity. The application of mindfulness allows us to stop the world from spinning, by stopping the spinning of our own minds. This is the essence of the simplicity or peacefulness of shamatha. Then we can see the confusion. We can shine the light of vipashyana, or clear seeing, on confusion, and that brings the clarity of seeing things as they are. When we begin to see the situation as it is, and when we begin to see our own minds clearly, we defuse the panic.

From the experience we have in meditation, we also may begin to see how we can relax on the spot in the midst of the most difficult experiences in our lives. We begin to see that it is possible to be there in a simple and open way. What are we afraid of all the time? Often, it is the unknown. If we are willing to simply witness what is there, although it might in fact be devastating, it also turns out to be more benign, more manageable, and more ordinary and transparent than we expected. In the emptiness of our freak-out—which allows us to remain vulnerable—we begin to discover the quality of freedom.

The Buddha himself set the example for us. Here was an extreme human being if ever there was one. Having left the comfort of his father's palace and his own regal life, he tried every method he encountered to achieve liberation. Having practiced intense asceticism and arduous disciplines for a number of years, he realized that struggle was not the path to enlightenment. And this, I think, is when he began to smile at fear.

Make no mistake. The closer the Buddha got to enlightenment, the more forceful and insistent were the obstacles he encountered. We sometimes seem to approach the experience of enlightenment as though it were like a long drowsy soak in a warm perfumed bath. After our nap, we will arise as the Awakened One. The stories of the Buddha's enlightenment instead describe how the greatest obstacles, or maras, appeared to the Buddha the night before he attained enlightenment. Meeting their challenge required vigilance, or openness, rather than somnolence. As the Buddha sat in meditation beneath the bodhi tree, Mara sent his daughters in the guise of beautiful women to seduce the Buddha; he sent his troops of warriors to attack the Buddha. The Buddha manifested as the victorious one, vijaya, or the fearless one, the warrior of nonaggression. He remained unmoved by passion and aggression. He chose instead to be awake. Mara's arrows then became a rain of flowers.

In our own lives, it is difficult to be open yet unmoved by extreme situations, but we too, like the Buddha, have the choice to be wakeful. Whether it is the crash of the financial markets, the death of a loved one, the experience of chemotherapy, the failure of a relationship, or the violence of an angry mob—whatever the difficulties, they can be the bearers of good news, or at the very least, real news. That's quite an outrageous thing to say, but it is truly the message of people like the Kagyu lineage forefathers, who lived in the ground of reality beyond pain and pleasure, good and bad. This is not suggesting that the worse things get, the better it is; nor that we shouldn't have sympathy and feel compassion for our own and others' difficulties. However, unless we can make friends with what occurs in our life, we are simply subject to circumstances and controlled by them. Often, the worst—whatever it is—has already happened by the time we realize the need to apply these teachings. In that sense, we have no choice. We can't take our life back. It is not a rehearsal.

When circumstances bring our emotions to a sharp point, at that point both confusion and wakefulness emerge from the same ground. If we are willing to practice in that groundless ground, that too is smiling at our fear. In the Kagyu tradition, this is also called practicing in the place where rock meets bone. I always thought this phrase referred to the meditator's bony behind sitting on the bare rock of a meditation cave, but I learned recently that it refers to crushing bones for soup with a heavy rock mallet. That sense of crushing or breaking through our confusion and hesitation is also an expression of opening everything up, letting everything go, exposing the innermost marrow of the situation. It is about our ultimate vulnerability.

I can't offer you a finite list of things for you to do, nor can I tell you exactly how you can smile at fear. I'm working with turning up the edges of my mouth when I feel anxious. The advice I give myself is: Don't avoid the opportunity to grin back at fear. And if you can dive into that empty feeling in the pit of your stomach, well, that would be excellent! We each have to find our own inner grin.

The time where rock meets bone turns out to be the time we are always living in, although we don't always acknowledge that raw mark of our existence. To do so is to meet the moment where neither past nor future exist and where we cannot hold on to the present for security. In that moment, the closing bell of the stock market is no different from the bell that calls us to the shrine room. In that moment, our dharmic ancestors will all applaud our fearless smile.

From the March 2009 Issue of the Shambhala Sun