Letter to Israeli Shambhala sangha from Robert Chender, our mentor

Dear friends,

Winter in New York has come in very cold, with much snow. It has been below zero degrees Celsius for the last week or so, and you have to take off your shoes or boots at the door so you don’t track snow around the house. It feels a long way from Israel, as it is, and yet this 21st century world is so connected that at the same time Israel feels very close, with only the inconvenient matter of a few time zones separating us. Certainly the news and images of the past weeks (it’s of course as easy to read Haaretz or the Jerusalem Post or the Debka File in English as it is to read the New York Times) have brought Israel and Gaza to the forefront of consciousness, to heightened emotion, a heavy heart.

Often when we are faced with a dilemma, a situation which is difficult, we want to take some action to alleviate our pain, or at least alleviate others’ pain. Sometimes we take action, and other times there is no obvious action to take, or we aren’t sure what is the best, or right, thing to do. When we do take action, it may be very useful or maybe not so useful, but in any case the pain of others and ourselves does not go away so easily. It has a quality of grief – there is not much to do, but on the other hand there is a lot to do, which is to stay present, to not avoid our emotions, to allow others to express theirs, and to maintain good cheer in spite of sadness, or in addition to sadness.

I realize that I’m talking to myself, of course, since I’m not with you except in spirit. Please indulge me – perhaps I’m the only one who feels this way, but perhaps not.

Very often we try to justify our anger through the process of blame. Small children learn this very quickly, as a way to avoid punishment for acting on their anger – “it’s his fault, he hit me first”. And of course the one who hit first has his own story – “he stuck out his tongue at me”, and of course the story keeps going back in time, and maybe one of the children woke up feeling bad because his parents were fighting, for example, and acted out his bad feelings, and the other one has a learning disability and is frustrated because he thinks he’s stupid. Each boy feels righteous and angry, and doesn’t understand or really care about the other boy’s pain and sadness, and they take it out on each other because they don’t have the ability to understand their own emotions, much less the emotions of the other.

This story of children isn’t a political allegory, or maybe it is. It’s not about when it’s time to fight, or not – it’s about our tendency to try to make ourselves feel better by justifying our anger or aggression by demonizing the other person. Maybe this does make us feel better, sort of – but then the cycle never stops, because we feel perfectly okay to throw the next punch, because you deserve it. And then it can go on forever, and that can’t make us feel better in the end.

Chogyam Trungpa had as his central metaphor for the enlightened person the ideal of the warrior. This seems odd, at first, but of all the places in the world Israel seems the place where this can be fully embodied. The warrior of Shambhala is the person who has declared victory over aggression, over war. This means that when anger arises, we have a choice – either we can act it out based on our habit, our feeling of righteousness; or we can notice that we’re angry, take a breath or sit for an hour, and then decide what to do, not based on indulging our anger (or any other emotion), but based on what seems to be appropriate in spite of our anger. Anger is just a feeling, usually a reaction to being hurt, and it arises, it stays for a while, and then it subsides, like every other feeling, every other thought. The warrior sits still in the middle of her anger, or her fear, like sitting in the middle of a fire, has declared victory over it, and then acts without taking anger into account. This doesn’t mean that she doesn’t feel angry, just that she sees it as unimportant, maybe a nuisance, certainly not the master of the situation, the master of her actions. (This doesn’t mean that the warrior doesn’t fight – it’s that the warrior fights only when necessary, and without anger.)

Where does that leave us? If we’re not carried away with our emotion, we just can feel it and return to the present, return to our breath, and actually feel what we’re feeling, which is often sad. Sadness is the expression, the emotion of feeling the pain of ourselves and others, when we’re in the present time, when we’re not carried away by our thoughts and feelings, when we’re “in our bodies”. The other side of sadness is joy, joy to be present, to be alive, to be able to appreciate the sacredness of our world, which can arise at the same time. This is called, in Shambhala terms, the genuine heart of sadness.

As you know, the vehicle to become a warrior is meditation practice, which is the practice of always coming back, returning to the breath, returning to the present. We can start to feel better because, paradoxically, we’re not worried so much about feeling better, we’re not taking our emotions so seriously. And then we become more intelligent, more able to see things clearly, more able to see others for who they are rather than as some version we have of them.

What we realize on a deep level, not just intellectually, is that everyone else not only has basic goodness, everyone else wants to be happy, suffers, enjoys, loves. And then on top of that is confusion, blame, anger, which is the same as ours. And so if we can see in others the same process that we have in ourselves of creating our world, of creating the other as opposed to seeing that we’re all the same, then we can start to set the example of the warrior in the world.

I send you my love and best wishes, and hope for a long and lasting peace.

Robert.
New York