Shining the Shambhala Sun on my Heart

This weekend I took the second level of Shambhala “Warrior” Training. This secular path, taken from Tibetan Buddhism, uses meditation practices that help you to actualize the courage to bravely live your every day life. I love it. (And I could go into a long funny story about how I found this practice, but I will try to stay on task here.)

The first level was insanely perfect for me, because of the brilliant compassionate and very real teacher. The second level turned out to be perfect too (also because of the teacher) but in a far different way from level one (which was more intellectual than practical for me).

Somewhat like the first level, this second level was mostly sitting meditation. I’ve been feeling pretty lousy lately,and this is a difficult time of year for me (professionally, personally, and seasonally), so lots of interesting fodder came up as I sat. The schedule for Level Two is a Friday evening talk and a full day of mostly meditation Saturday and Sunday. By Saturday afternoon I was sitting on my cushion burning with anger. I had not been angry at lunch or during the morning sitting periods, so this anger was completely annoying and would be more than a little confusing if I had not had this exprience before.

As I sat on the cushion, I was irritated and annoyed at everything. (It’s funny to me now but I was seriously hot and pissed off at the time.)

Part of the training, in Zen and Shambhala, is a process called interview. Interview is a chance to sit with the teacher privately and discuss what’s coming up for you as you meditate/sit. The teacher we had for this Level Two was so relaxed, so at ease, that it was weird to walk into interview and tell her (having just met her as well) that I was burning with anger, but that’s what I did. She was grateful for this as there is dignity in integrity.

My meditation teacher at the Zen Center has always said how interesting it is that you can sit in the meditation hall quietly with a straight spine but inside be fuming or screaming or whatever else. I often get sad or frustrated during meditation, but it’s in these longer sessions that the sadness begins to break you down (and, thankfully, it breaks itself down as well).

A few minutes after I admitted that I was sitting out there fuming, I burst into tears. On the surface I was pissed at the Shambhala Center for conducting interview in a “disorderly” way, was angry everything someone moved or gave themselves a break by switching from a cushion to a chair. But beneath this, I knew that I was actually (and ironically) angry at myself for not giving myself a break.

I was angry at my own impulse to control everything (like how they conducted interview, which seemed messy and noisy to me). Mostly, I was completely overwhelmed by my own brain, so that everytime anyone moved I became annoyingly aware of how flighty my own brain was, how quickly my slippery attention span moved away from its point of focus, the breath.

I was also amazed at how long the meditation periods felt. How I could act out an entire lifetime of crazy in three minutes that felt like three hours.

Side note: I’m realizing as I type this that maybe some of you are never going to want to meditate now! But wait, it gets better, and it allows me to be both more human and more alive.

So Saturday morning I had a horrible transit experience trying to get downtown. It was raining heavily (like Noreaster heavily) with 45 mph winds, so I woke up dreading the going outside, the potential of being wet for 8 hours as I meditated, etc. I was going to take a cab, but, in a rush, I mindlessly turned my computer off (a theme of this story you shall see) before looking up any taxi numbers. So I braved the three blocks to the trolley, umbrella pointed into the wind, and was glad when I saw it clicking down the street.

This is the part where the story could get unnecessarily long and detailed. So let me try to make it three sentences: I got on the trolley but it was some weird diverted trolley that took forever to take me a few blocks to the subway. I got on the subway so that I could get off the subway and get a different trolley only to discover that all of the trolleys were shut down for the entire weekend for track repair. I got in a c ab at the subway station and 45 minutes after the start of my journey I emerged extremely agitated but somehow still with enough time to eat a bagel at the Shambhala Center before settling into the cushion.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (the founder of Shambhala) says that we should “turn towards” difficult emotions. This was a big part of the theme of Level Two. How do we work with our emotions so that we can find our natural bravery and cultivate fearlessness? How do we confront and really stay with what we are feeling rather than retreating into what Trungpa Rinpoche calls our “cocoon” (our safety net, our habitual patterns that allow us to avoid the present moment/life as-it-is.)

As I sat sobbing in the interview room (the tears lasted well into tea time, which I skipped), this difficult transit story came up with my teacher. Though it seems benign now (I got there after all, and even got the last multigrain bagel!), it had become difficult because I had skipped over my feelings AND I had narrated it. I had put a storyline, a soundtrack, on top of it and had made it into something else. I had made my difficult trip to the Shambhala Center into a wound, especially after my teacher admitted that it sounded really hard. I realized then that it actually had been hard, but I had been so panicked and agitated I had not even experienced how hard this situation was; as a result of this pushing away, the agitation was still stuck somewhere. And now it was bound up with my usual questions–Why is it so hard when I’m trying to be good, to do good things for myself; I don’t deserve this? Why is everything beyond my control? I had not wanted to be annoyed so I had tried to push that feeling away. Likewise, I had (rightly) not wanted to be pissed off at all of the people moving around in the meditation hall at the Shambhala Center so, not knowing how to say hello to my anger and allow it to go, I had turned it inwards.

I basically learned this weekend that I am best friend to everybody but myself. That I know how to listen to others (as best I can) but not to myself. And (as I have likewise known for awhile) you can’t really be there for others if you are unable to attend to yourself first.

So day three (today), I woke up exhausted with a sore throat. I was clearly spent. The night before I had done something nice for myself, I had softened to my situation and turned on my laptop to look up the number of a taxi company. I wrote it down and went to sleep and vowed to be kind to myself by spending the extra money in the morning and ordering a cab. So I woke up today (sans one hour of sleep due to Daylight Savings Time) and dialed the number only to discover that it had been “disconnected.” I could not believe it. The computer was off and I am incredibly stubborn, so I set out semi-grumbling to walk 7 blocks to the subway, though I knew that the subway would then drop me off another 7 or so blocks from where I needed to be. Arg!

I told myself that I would hail a cab along the way if I saw one, but when I saw a cab at the corner of my block, I froze. I just couldn’t be nice to myself for whatever reason, and, like many of us, I can excel at feeding my wounds. So I trudged on, trying two more times to unsuccessfully secure a cab. By then I was almost at the subway. A block away from the subway I looked up at the tracks and saw my training rolling away. Of course, I thought. So I was relieved when a cab pulled up a few seconds later and honked. I got in, said hello, and the driver was sweet in return. I gave him the address, we pulled up, and I told him I needed to use a credit card. It was only a $9 trip but I was down to $5 cash.

At that point, a complete 360 occurred. The driver turned around, threw his hands into the air and said no no no! “Why didn’t you tell me you were using a card! You’ve got to tell people these things! I don’t take cards all the time. You’re my first ride!” I did not see what this first ride of the day had to do with anything, but I told him that I had neglected to mention this since the sticker on the door I had entered had a mastercard sticker on it. He got more intense and told me that he was driving me to a CVS so that I could use the ATM machine and get some cash. I yielded, realizing that yelling back would do nothing, and used this as an opportunity to buy myself a San Pellegrino with my debit card and get cash back.

But at this point, I was feeling totally lousy and wounded. Wounded not by the driver (who I knew was not actually mad at me but at the credit card companies who were going to take a chunk out of his $9) but by my whole storyline. Why is it so hard? I’m trying to do something good for myself? etc etc. I also was tired of crying and didn’t want to arrive at the Shambhala Center in tears.

I tried to summon my Warrior’s Courage to soften to myself, but I was still impatient and frustrated (and, more importantly, trying not to be impatient and frustrated) when I arrived. I was fidgety and aggressive at breakfast (not in ways that anyone else would recognize but my brain was having fidgety crappy thoughts). Then we went to sat down, and I did not feel any better.

At this point, the story gets muddy in terms of chronology, but at some point in the morning, my anger transformed. We had a small discussion group in which we went around and discussed what “difficult” experience we had called up during our contemplation practice. I dreaded mentioning the taxi driver (which I had dredged up) as we went around the circle and several people talked about dying relatives and cancer. So when it got to be my turn, I downplayed my emotions yet again and told them the taxi story. But by the end of my story, everyone was furious. “He drove you to the CVS against your will! What a jerk!” etc. And I began to feel validated. Yeah, I had had a crappy morning. And no this is not the same as cancer, but interestingly, it was a perfect wound to practice with because it was so recent and raw.

Both people who had been working with the memory of a dying relative had had difficulty calling that up because the deaths were not recent. We talked about the taxi driver and about the importance of not delaying your emotional response, of having it in the moment, when appropriate. This does not mean yelling back but it does mean experiencing your anger, of being brave and facing towards it rather than shutting it down, only to have it pop back up months or even years later at some vastly inappropriate time.

I can’t say anymore about that because I’m still figuring out how to do this. How to not shut down emotions that I perceive I should not be having, even as I am having them.

I bought a copy of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism today at the Shambhala Center bookstore. When I opened it up, I opened it to this passage, a Q&A about anger, as if Trungpa Rinpoche was greetly me directly and playfully with a laugh from the grave. It really made me smile.

Question: “When you feel angry, should you just express that anger in order to open up?”

An excerpt of Trungpa’s answer: “When we speak of opening and surrendering as, for instance, in the case of anger, it does not mean that we should actually go out and hit someone on the spot. That seems to be more a way of feeding ego rather than a way of exposing your anger properly, seeing its real living quality. This applies to exposing yourself in general. It is a matter of seeing the basic quality of the situation, as it is, rather than trying to do something with it.”

Because I am constantly refining the placement of my feet on this spiritual path, and because I could go on forever without making much more sense, I will close with an excerpt on fearlnessness from the primary source text of Shambhala Warrior Training, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.

“In order to experience fearlessness, it is necessary to experience fear….Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath its veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating, all the time. When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. Sadness hits you in the heart, and your body produces a tear. Before you cry, there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes. You are about to produce rain or a waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely, and perhaps romantic at the same time. This is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship. You might think that, when you experience fearlessness, you will hear the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn’t happen that way. In the Shambhala tradition, discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart” (48-49).

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