Shambhala Level Three: Warrior in the World

Something happened to me at Sky Lake Lodge. I’m having a hard time quantifying, or qualifying, what exactly happened, but I definitely came back refreshed (and also exhausted).

Sky Lake Lodge was established as a Shambhala Training Center by the current leader of Shambhala, Sakyong Mipham, about a decade ago. Prior to becoming a Shambhala Training Center, it was a bed and breakfast and it also had a stint as a biker bar. (If you could see the curves and hills approaching Sky Lake the biker bar part would seem scary and somewhat mystifying.) Sky Lake was created as a place of refuge for those who live in New York City and Philadelphia and thereby might be in need of a quiet, comfortable place to study and to rest. The lodge is in scenic Rosendale, NY, not too far from the “big” Catskills city of New Paltz, where I had dinner at a vegetarian cafe just last night.

My friend Lou and I drove up on Friday afternoon. This was our first road trip together, and it was a little substantial. It took about four hours to arrive, and once we were there we would be somewhat inseparable–sharing a room, learning if or if not the other one of us snores.

Somewhere near Princeton, NJ Lou and I had our first fight. It was minor, but it shook me; its root was clearly miscommunication which led me to feel isolated and wistfully sad. It made me feel distant and tender. That disagreement was the perfect place to start my weekend of Shambhala.

You can read a description of Level three here. The basic teaching is about how to practice courage in your everyday life, in your interactions with others, with your environment, with yourself. It is about being brave and being open. About how to cultivate a sense of daring, of trying something that might or might not work. Of crossing over that invisible line between doubt and action.

Lou and I got to Sky Lake a few hours early to walk around the property. Sky Lake has plenty of gorgeous, quiet nooks to explore. Lou let me lead and so we set out down a gravel road. We arrived at huge rocks, which Lou suggested we hug. I was interested in how each face of an individual rock could feel so different. Some sides were cool, some were smooth, some were jagged, others aloof.

As I put my mouth on the granite and wrapped my arms around rockface, that tenderness rose up again. When we feel open, it’s easier to feel the necessity of being honest. Somehow Lou and I started to talk about acupuncture school (which he is almost finished with and which I someday hope to attend) and I started to cry. My second brave moment of the day (the first being the experience of the fight) was manifesting, as I told Lou aloud that I was secretly afraid that I would be a horrible acupuncturist, that I would know what to do from a technical standpoint but that I would have no “chi sensitivity” (that I wouldn’t really be able to feel the energy of my patients and thereby find the appropriate points to treat).

Lou kept telling me that wasn’t true, that I already was sensitive to the energy of other people, but I couldn’t quite believe him. My old friend self-doubt was washing tears all over me in the Catskills, and I hadn’t even made it to the cushion yet (a place where I seem destined to cry during longer sits).

As Lou and I continued talking, I wiped away tears and we began to trudge back toward the lodge to dinner. As I kept trying to articulate to Lou where my fear came from, as I kept saying, but you don’t understand, I had this experience which leads me to believe this, blah blah….my own experience began to shift. I realized that I didn’t even know what I was talking about. That I was trying to take a bunch of past experiences and use them to assemble a jigsaw puzzle picture of my future. But the pieces didn’t fit, and I couldn’t force a picture of my future to emerge.

The more I talked, the more convinced I was that my fear was truly (and hilariously) insane. The more I tried to assemble the past into a clear projection of the future, the less I was able to even begin to do so. The future became the future and it was unseeable.

The most certain indicator of what I needed to do next with my life in terms of my profession came from a memory of the first time I realized that I wanted to be an acupuncturist. I said it out loud to someone a few years ago quite unexpectedly, and casually, and then I felt awed and even crazed by the power of that statement. (Had I really just said that! How would I go through with it!) Yet it seemed to be the exact right thing to do.

It seemed this way even though at the time I had just finished a MA in English and Poetics and thereby, logically, should have been saying that I wanted to be a teacher, or an editor, or anything else related to that recent undertaking. But truthfully I did not want to be those things. I wanted more than anything at that moment to be an acupuncturist.

I think that many of us are afraid of trying out experiences that don’t make any logical sense. We’re also often afraid that we won’t really be able to fully embody our experiences. We can “have” a technical skill–carpentry, riding a bike, cooking–but if we aren’t really invested in and involved with it, we don’t feel satisfied, and the skill can end up seeming like a trap. It manifests not as an experience but as the production of a product. Having a skill and being (or being with) a skill are two very different ways of living our lives.

We can also easily hold ourselves back before we even begin with endless questions. We shudder with the thought that we might want to “be” a chef, for example. But then what happens if then we go to culinary school and discover that we don’t really like to cook, or that we don’t feel comfortable cooking (that we can’t be or be with the experience of cooking). This fear of a bad outcome can prevent us from even starting anything. If we hold to the fear that the end is unpredictable, we might end up spending our whole lives unable to even begin to try experiencing our true nature and our most natural human dreams.

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