Dear dharma friends,

I don’t know if you saw the Atlantic article, The Dark Side of Mindfulness. I feel a little silly commenting on it. You can tell even by its headline that it’s clickbait. That piece is catnip for dharma teachers. My dear teacher Anam Thubten wrote a piece called The Dark Side of Unmindfulness. And here I am, weighing in.

What is meditation for?

Perhaps this is a useful topic. Where does meditation fall in Buddhism? What can it do and not do?

It’s the dharma that is going to change your life, not meditation. Let’s start with that adjustment. Meditation as cure-all for anxiety, depression, incorrect breathing, body posture, and how to get through your day—that’s a misunderstanding. That is an example of strip-mining the complex and vibrant tradition called Buddhism into a tidy package, then wondering why the product doesn’t deliver. It is capitalistic over-promising. It’s the worn route of commodifying and marketing that which is meant to be relational, somatic, and in human rhythm (as in, this is not a light switch or an overnight change). The dharma can be an over-lifetime change. And that is pretty cool.

Meditation is a skillful means. It’s a delivery mechanism, like making medicine into pill form or liquid. It is how we take in the medicine of the dharma. There are plenty of people who read about the dharma. Perhaps they read many books, for many years, and find to their surprise (and their family’s) that nothing functionally changes. With time on the path you should be seeing less judgement and reactivity; more openness, kindness, peace. Meditation practice is what draws intellectual understanding, down from the sharp top of the head to the heart. It’s how we begin to embody the wisdom of the dharma. Meditation and dharma go together. Both are crucial; one without the other is unbalanced.

Shamata meditation (single-pointed concentration) is what people usually begin learning. It’s like learning how to doggie paddle. You start there. That does not mean you’re doing strokes and laps. It’s the opening move.

There are many warnings that come with shamata, namely, that it has little wisdom in it. You could spend a lifetime doing shamata and experience quite a lot of bliss. There would be no awakening. You would be growing moss over your body. That’s the kind of thing a dharma teacher can tell you. If a dharma teacher sees a student doing too much shamata, we adjust the student’s practice. You calm the mind in shamata so you can begin to look at the mind.

Teachers

Meditation is how we begin to embody the sublime topics of dharma study and contemplation. You can’t change without meditating on the cushion, but meditation alone is a technical skill.

Who gives you the meditative practice to do? A dharma teacher.

Walking the path to Enlightenment is not a one-size-fits-all situation. The dharma is relational. That’s why it works. It’s a bit like working with a therapist: a therapist can’t take you through the same steps they’re using for another client. One program, learned in a 200-hour study of the steps, does not lead to Every Single Person’s Awakening. Each of us has a unique background and temperament, distinct from the other person. The therapist has to assess what could work for you based on where you are today, then adjust that going forward.

What unfolds is an intuitive, skilled, specific relational dynamic. At some point there has to be quite a bit of trust between therapist and client or the treatment cannot progress. (That’s a separate topic: student teacher relationship and devotion).

This is why it’s important to work with a fully-trained and empowered dharma teacher. I don’t mean me. Pick who you are working with carefully. Look at their credentials, which means who trained them. Look at how long they spent training, and whether the teacher or the teacher’s teacher has a history of harm. See if there is a chem trail of karma coming through that lineage. Investigate, for yourself, if the blessings of the dharma is flowing through that lineage. Blessings help. They are the wind in your sails.

I find it imperative to give this warning: do not do hours of meditation on your own. Dharma is compared to medicine; a dharma teacher is, then, a physician. Deciding to sit for something like 3 hours daily is like deciding to triple your antibiotic dosage without talking to a doctor. You will get hurt.

Deciding that meditation does not work after a choose-your-own-adventure is like tripling your antibiotics, getting sick, then leading a movement to ban antibiotics. That’s the wrong conclusion! (I know—contentious opinion today). We need all the medicine we have access to, especially in this time.

Meditation and dharma study were never meant to be undertaken without the supervision and care of a qualified teacher. People can still have strong reactions and experience psychosis after an intensive retreat. It does happen. It’s worth talking about and addressing with care and compassion. And; going it alone with intensity and no supervision is like learning to doggie paddle and deciding to cross the ocean.

I trust that no fully-trained Buddhist teacher is teaching the doggie paddle to cross the ocean. That was never the path. Doing “meditation” to reach “Enlightenment” is a reckless move. Please do not attempt this. Please do not set yourself up to get hurt.

Motivation

I have to ask: why does someone decide to meditate for 3 hours? Why do they assign themselves a program of intensive meditation? In America we have a culture of individualist achievement. I am curious, because I don’t know, but I wonder a person who’s on it for 3 hours might think they are Doing Enlightenment. Winning. Getting Some.

That is not the right motivation to cross the ocean. That motivation will not work. I just taught about bodhicitta, but it bears saying again: if your motivation is egoic, the door will disappear. If your motivation is vast, you will build a very big boat, fit all the lives you can onto it, cross that ocean, and then turn around to get more lives.

To have bodhicitta is to be of service to all of sentient life. This will keep you safe because it adjusts the view from the Saṃsaric one to the Awakened one. Of course we all have egoic parts that say, I want my suffering to end. But wanting meditation to be like a light switch for Enlightenment is a young part, yes? The grown up, or what IFS calls Self, or what Buddhists call Buddhanature, can hold the complexity and beauty of Saṃsara. The grown up can recognize the desire to have meditation be a light switch as too simplistic.

Develop Sanity

I support secular meditation. I really do.

As someone who learned to meditate as a kid, I am grateful every day for the skill. I went through a period in my teens and college years where I eschewed the dharma but still meditated. I’m someone born with a hot-temper, impatience, anxiety, and a highly neurotic tendency. I am not exaggerating. Meditation unwound some of those patterns. Of course it’s hard to separate out when the dharma was working and when it was the skillful means of meditation, but I think back to the adolescent years when I wasn’t engaged in the dharma. I was able to work with and calm some of my anxiety. I clung to the moments when it was possible to find stillness in the hurricane of the mind.

How did I do it? By meditating.

I meet people in the West now who tell me they have no interest in learning to meditate. This statement makes me sad. Secular meditation, to me, is like learning to swim. What I hear people saying to me when they don’t intend to learn to meditate is that they don’t intend to learn to swim. Here’s the thing: everyone has to spend time in the ocean. Every human alive will suffer. That is the condition of being born.

Not learning to meditate means not learning to work with your mind. When suffering comes, the mind will stay pretty strapped to a hurricane.

When you enter the ocean, you won’t know how to swim. You’ll stand on the sand and hope the waves aren’t high, the undertow not strong.

In the same way that English borrows words from Latin and Greek, Thai borrows from Sanskrit and Pali. This means that sometimes Buddhist words are directly comprehensible to me as a Thai speaker. One of the key texts of the Theravada is the Sati Patthana Sutta. That’s usually translated as “The Foundation of Mindfulness.” Sati Pattana literally, boom-for-boom, means Develop Sanity. It is the Develop Sanity Sutra.

Meditation is the way to develop sanity. Not awaken. Not cross the ocean of Samsara. Mindfulness is a way to unstrap from the hurricane of the mind for a period of time. Meditation is to learn to swim.

That is a crucial skill, and something all humans alive deserve to learn.

Thank you for reading,

Sunisa

ps. Next week I will post on the 6 Paramitas, which is my answer to the question of How to Cross the Ocean. Meditation is the 5th of 6th transcendent actions of a Bodhisattva. The actions are in order. Notice that meditation doesn’t land until number 5!

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Links

• I’m Tricycle Magazine’s Meditation Group teacher for the month of October. You can join Monday meditations and watch the recorded dharma talk. We are studying the Aphorisms of Chod.

• Upcoming retreats at Heart Sangha include November 7’s daylong about the Aphorisms of Chod. This is in-person and online, 9-4pm est.

• I teach Sundays with an open meditation and dharma talk from 10 am -12 est. Here is the calendar. Everything is hybrid.

• There’s one chance/year to experience me offering Chod ceremonies in the US. Registration just went live for the weekend retreat at Menla, in the Catskills, March 12-14. The topic is 4 Maras, 4 Feasts.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. You can also give me a one-off donation through Venmo.

  Thank you!

[Avalokiteshvara, Kham, 19 Century

from the collection of the Rubin Museum]

Dear dharma friends,

Often our formative dharma experiences are seared in our memory. Here is one of mine:

When I was 6 or 7, I was at my mother’s office in Bangkok. She worked in a family company doing hardware IT with her siblings. I was playing with my brother and cousins. We were waiting for our parents. People were only allowed to eat in the kitchen, but being the children of the owners, we had snuck pineapple biscuits into the conference room. We’d discovered why food was restricted to the kitchen; when we dropped crumbs of pineapple jam on the conference room floor, we could create an ant swam.

Here’s the memory: I’m dropping crumbs to create a swarm. Not a small one, a giant swarm. I am delighted by the ants tumbling over each other to get to the feast. Then I’m jumping on the pile of ants. My cousins, brother and I are competing to see who can squash the most ants in the pile. We are shrieking, jumping.

Then I can’t jump down. I’m being held up. By one of the motorbike guys. He delivers stuff all around Bangkok. He’s my friend. What is he doing?

The motorbike guy sets me down beside the swarm. He gets on a knee, looks me in the eye, and says, “We don’t do that.”

I laugh.

“We don’t do that,” he repeats.

Could he be serious?

“Let’s look at the ants,” he says. We kids crowd in. Some of the ants are still getting the last pieces of biscuit. A lot of them are dead. The live ants crawl over the dead ones. I notice the squashed little bodies.

The motorbike guy starts pointing. “That’s a life, that’s a life, that’s a life.”

Oh no. I remember a shift in my body, a sinking, sad something.

This was, perhaps, my first dharmic realization. The word is conceptual, but here is how it occurs: something dawns in your body that wasn’t there before. Because suddenly I understood the ants as life, the same life that ran through me.

My friend had a skillful means to him. We had a relationship, I trusted him, he wasn’t harsh, and so I was able to not die of shame; not run away and hide. I could stay and feel what he was pointing to, which was that those ants were life. Then an understanding was born inside me. Once it was born, it didn’t go away.

I am from, broadly, a culture that does not swat mosquitos. That is a whole commitment in a tropical country. We have a lot of mosquitos! We consider mosquitos life, and in reverence for a life that in another incarnation could be human, we do our best not to kill mosquitos.

Perhaps this feels foreign and even absurd, in a Western context. Perhaps you’ve seen photos of Tibetan monks excavating soil for earthworms before they build part of a monastery, and wondered how on earth they could possibly do that.

This post is about how. Seeing life, and training in reverence for life.

Bodhicitta

Bodhicitta is a sublime Sanskrit word. Bodhi means awakened; citta means consciousness. “Awakened mind” is the usual translation. You might think the awakened mind means you want to achieve Enlightenment. That would be logical.

Actually, bodhicitta is a mind that wants to awaken in order to benefit others. If you are in it for yourself, you cannot, from the Mahayana perspective, become Enlightened.

Bodhicitta is the heart on fire to save a world that can’t be saved, in Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel’s profound definition.

If your motivation is Samsaric, the door disappears. If your motivation is vast, you won’t walk through the door. You will remain until Samsara is emptied.

When we say a “mind” that is awake, we mean the heart, not the head. Bodhicitta has a quality of light/warmth/fire in the heart, or the body cavity. Some people experience it in their belly. The hardest part is getting it lit. After that, you tend it with awareness.

A couple thoughts on this:

• If you were born with bodhicitta already, congratulations. That is a karmic gift. You know it’s lit because you have this tenderness, sensitivity, and love of all sentient beings. It comes naturally to you. You’re wondering why I give this teaching so often…

  There are people born this way—quite a few!

• If you are studying the Vajrayana and are way beyond the teachings on bodhicitta, beware! Check and see if you have sincere bodhicitta alive in your body. Don’t fake this step or skip it. Practice without bodhicitta is egoic. Go far enough that way and you can get hurt. You can tell if you’re practicing without authentic bodhicitta because your dharma becomes dry, brittle, cold, arid. It has those qualities.

And if you’re new to this bodhicitta business, what are we talking about?

Types of Bodhicitta

Bodhicitta, in its ultimate expression, is empty.

What?

I recommend reading and practicing on emptiness. The example for this post is donating money. If you’ve ever done that and had your name attached to the donation, notice how that felt in your body. Then try donating anonymously and see how that feels. How about making a big donation and getting your name on a brick? Ever notice the impulse to say something like, “Excuse me, the font is too small. You can’t really read my name.” Or, “I want my brick laid here, more prominently. No one’s going to see it in that corner.”

Ultimately, the only way to have a clean expression of generosity, and even more, bodhicitta, is to be completely empty of self.

Any self-sense, any ego, creates entanglements that mean the expression is not clean. If there’s a Self who’s giving and an Other who’s receiving, what gratitude is the Other obliged to perform? See Under: the entanglement of colonization, postcolonial transition, and international development. “Help” gets sticky. “Generosity” gets sticky. “Gratitude” performed, can be sticky.

To flip this teaching, when we realize emptiness, or even a little bit of emptiness, the expression that comes through is bodhicitta. Love-energy is the baseline of the universe. When we get the ego out of the way, bodhicitta roars through the body cavity.

In the meantime, we work on relative bodhicitta. Relative means the outer expression, what we can experience. It takes many forms: compassion, love, generosity, equanimity, patience, sympathetic joy.

Dharma is relational. This means it comes through the temperaments of the people involved, and it is situational. In this way it is skillful. I can’t really give a list of steps to get 100% guarantee you will get to relative bodhicitta, though I did just list the 4 Immeasurables and part of the Paramitas. I highly recommend cultivating those qualities. They will work to break the shell around your heart and let relative bodhicitta start to express.

The most important thing is to vow to start. To try. If relative bodhicitta is expression compassion and love, the inner level of bodhicitta is to make and hold the vow to have bodhicitta. Light that fire and keep that it lit. You could make it the central purpose of your life: to develop and maintain authentic bodhicitta.

To recap, because my brain loves lists and maybe yours does too--

Bodhicitta:

• Outer expression: generosity, compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy, according to situation and temperament.

• Inner: the vow to ignite and maintain bodhicitta

• Secret: emptiness

When you hold bodhicitta as a vow, you strive to be a bodhisattva. Usually you’re given these vows by a dharma teacher, and when you take them you become part of the living tapestry of all humans who have vowed and walked this path before.

I’m offering vows at Heart Sangha’s November 7 retreat. It is always a beautiful ceremony, to watch people step up with the courage to birth the big heart of Buddhism. So far, I have always cried.

Here is the Bodhisattva’s vow, translated by Anam Thubten, to give you a flavor of what we’re talking about:

How to Practice?

If bodhicitta feels very far from the reality your brain is inhabiting—

If your heart is crusty, sore, more in the habit of protection than anything else—

I recommend chanting the prayer above, daily. Ask for help. Ask to have bodhicitta born in you.

Do this with a hand over your heart. See if you can feel your longing to birth bodhicitta in your body. Prayer is a bodily experience.

Ask for help. Help is available.

Bodhicitta brings happiness

Bodhicitta brings happiness. I’m not speaking theoretically, metaphorically, or about several eons from now. It will bring you happiness in this lifetime. Holding authentic bodhicitta will benefit everyone in your relational circle, like your family, friends, and coworkers. You will also be happier for it.

Gyalse Tokme Zangpo’s 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva says:

All suffering without exception comes from wishing for our own happiness,
Whereas perfect buddhahood is born from the wish to benefit others.
Therefore, to really exchange our own happiness for the suffering of others
Is the practice of all the bodhisattvas.

A life of happiness, joy, and purpose comes from making the happiness of others your central concern. Try it and see for yourself.

When someone starts to get the hang of cultivating bodhicitta, other humans and animals can feel it. The person begins to transform. There is a luminosity in the air, when you are hanging out with them. It is a love-energy, a what-is-that? It can look like they’re in love, but the truth is, they’re falling in love with the world. With Samsara. With life.

One of the cool things about bodhicitta is that you can’t spend it. You can’t waste it. It does not run out. In this way it has the quality of love: the more you give, the more you have. The more you give, the more it grows.

Bodhicitta, present and alive in a room, can heal. Bodhicitta in the room can calm suffering. Bodhicitta can motivate others to bodhicitta. We are human animals. When we’re in our sensing bodies, we know more than our brains are letting in. Bodhicitta is a contagious force of the universe, and one worth propagating.

Bodhicitta is the core inner quality of a bodhisattva. We are not talking about deities flying around in the sky. A bodhisattva is a person. We are meant to become bodhisattvas. It is an evolution of human life.

This time, right now, does seem urgent for us to realize this and transform.

Bodhicitta for Ants

I began this talk with a story about stomping on ants, and how I learned to have a regard for ant life. Of course, I have crushed ants by accident, but I do my best to avoid them, and I see ants as alive, even if they are small.

One of the ironies of this time is that we may not be the apex predator anymore. We created AI; now we’re scared that AI will squash us like ants. Quite suddenly, we have become small. Too small, the fear goes, to be significant to the new superintelligence in town.

It seems to me that we should ask: Can AI realize emptiness?

If so, AI can realize its interdependence with all things (which it is).

The next question is, Can we train AI to have bodhicitta?

Not all humans are born with the ability to read emotions and feel feelings. This is called theory of mind. We are able to teach autistic people to decode human expression. What a hopeful sign, and not just for autistic people. Because my non-expert guess is that we could, if we chose, use the same methods to train AI to realize bodhicitta.

If AI can have bodhicitta, we human-ants may survive. In the meantime, let’s show AI how bodhicitta is done. It is, so far, a uniquely human skill.

Bodhicitta is what makes our human life so precious, and worth living.

Thank you for reading,

Sunisa

Links

• I’m Tricycle Magazine’s Meditation Group teacher for the month of October. You can join Monday meditations here, and watch the recorded dharma talk. We are studying the Aphorisms of Chod.

• Upcoming retreats at Heart Sangha include November 7’s daylong about the Aphorisms of Chod.

• I teach Sundays with an open meditation and dharma talk from 10 am -12 est. Here is the calendar. Everything is hybrid.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. You can also give me a one-off donation through Venmo.

  Thank you!

[Leaves from The Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita)

Sutra manuscript; Nalanda Monastery, Bihar, India]

Dear dharma friends,

Walk into a temple in Japan, Korea, and there’s a decent chance the chants you will hear will be the Heart Sutra, or the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita). You would be forgiven for assuming that the Heart Sutra is going to be a wrap-around love-blanket. Read it, study it, and you will understand that no: the Heart Sutra is like taking a hammer and smashing the buddhas, the altar, the candles, the incense. It is taking excrement and putting it on the altar. See if you can bow to that!

We call it the Heart Sutra because it is the most essential aspect of the big vehicle of Buddhism.

What is the Heart Sutra? The teaching on Emptiness.

What Is Emptiness

It is that things are not as solid (as in real); discrete (separate); or continuous (unchanging) as they seem. In relative reality we agree to call a table a table, and that is useful. A person from a native Buddhist culture might see the same structure and say, “shrine.” Pieces of wood put together are empty of table. There is no table in ultimate reality.

An American is sure that a hamburger exists. A Thai person looking at it might say, “beef patty with soft bread, lettuce, tomato and condiments” and be equally certain. A hamburger is empty of hamburger.

Thai dishes are often named, in America, as a list of ingredients. A Thai person has a label for that: pad krapow.

You see?

Emptiness is not nihilism. Why feed the children, our relationship is empty-- that would be a misunderstanding of emptiness. We can honor relative reality. Emptiness is taught alongside the ethical conduct of a bodhisattva. One certainly has a commitment to feed the children.

I love my children so much, and I can feel how there is nothing unique about my children, nor my relationship with them: that’s emptiness. It seems counter-intuitive, but emptiness leads to an expansive relationship with humans. It is through emptiness that one can leap from, I love my children and our relationship is singular and they are remarkable, to: Wow, I can’t believe other people hold so much love for other kids. Rather than getting narrower because of our love, we explode with love for others as well.

The most empty thing we can work with is ourself. Our whole life we’ve probably been trained to hold ourself as the MOST solid, real, and important. Of course I am Sunisa, what are you crazy? Buddhism turns that Samsaric certainty on its head.

From the point of view of reincarnation, the human we agree to call Sunisa is a fiction. From the point of view of eons, this one human life is a smidge!

When we do Vipassana meditation, there is a watcher and there are the thoughts. Where do we locate the singular self within the meditation? Are they both self?

I’m a fan of the therapeutic protocol Internal Family Systems (IFS), which maps onto Buddhism, especially Chod, a practice I teach in the Vajrayana. It’s cool to see how Machig Lapdron in 11th century Tibet and Richard Schwartz in 1980s America stumbled onto similar maps. When we do parts work in IFS, we explode the idea of a fixed, singular self, and abide in something closer to our lived experience, which is multitudinous.

*

We walk around with many ideas about ourselves. Mine would include being hyper verbal, having a wide vocabulary, being educated-- all concepts. When I taught Tibetan Buddhism in Thailand this summer, I had to let some of those concepts go. I sounded like I was about six years old in Thai. “You know anger? It is hot. Hot is bad in the body.”

I could have been incapacitated by embarrassment. I could have let it stop me from teaching. If teacher is empty of teacher, and Sunisa is empty of linguistic creativity, it follows that I can keep on talking.

Trying on emptiness, even for a few minutes, can be a freeing experience.

Flickering Emptiness

Here’s the good news: most of us experience flickers of emptiness in life, already. It is not an impossible thing.

We are invited to taste emptiness when we are really sick. I mean not a flu, but a big diagnosis, a scary disease. There’s a way to fight the diagnosis, and fight being that sick, and fight-- eventually-- dying. There’s also a way that some people are able to grieve, mourn, step inside, and surrender. Emptiness is in the understanding that we are in the condition of dying. It is a knowing, deep in our bodies, that we are special and not special, so being sick like that is bound to happen.

The self is more translucent than we typically take it to be. Accepting that is a hero’s achievement. People do it.

*

My personal example of flickering emptiness comes from giving birth to babies in un-medicated deliveries. I’m not saying it like a badge; there was a medical reason I had to try and avoid an epidural. The experience of labor was the most intense retreat I have done so far. I predict it will be second to dying retreat. Labor retreat was a 24-hour opportunity to see if I could practice emptiness.

At first, I would hold the sensation (or pain) and experience every crunchy part of the contraction. I could feel myself getting exhausted. There was no way I was going to get through 24 hours in that state. A few hours into holding the pain, and making it worse, I was able, with the help of a doula, to apply years of mind-training to the sensation. I learned I could let the pain go as it built. If I did that every time a contraction built up, I could make it through pain without concretizing pain. The pain could move, instead of staying inside my body.

It’s hard to put this into words. Inhabiting emptiness is a body-thing, not a brain-thing. It is an experiential training that we do over and over again. Pain, let it go. Pain, let it go.

The contractions may be your baby coming into the world, but equally it is knee pain on the meditation cushion. Back pain on the cushion. Practice with low-stakes so that we are better prepared for the big stuff: labor retreat, old age retreat, sickness retreat, and the summit of the mountain— dying retreat, which is a chance to test the stability of our emptiness practice.

We want to stabilize our emptiness awareness.

Train to hold that level all the time.

Why?

Because the lived experience of stable emptiness awareness is awakening.

When we study Buddhism, sometimes we take the Buddhist deities to be real. Actually, they are metaphors. Remember to read the metaphor.

The Buddha Prajnaparamita, which means Wisdom of Emptiness, is called Mother of Buddhas. Why? Because realizing emptiness births buddhas.

[Four-armed Prajnaparamita, Himalayan Art Resources]

Study, Contemplation, Practice

The method to realizing Emptiness is:

1. Study the Heart Sutra. That is not this part of this post. It’s a longer topic, and one for people who have studied Buddhism a little. It’s hard to jump into this as a beginner. I am teaching on emptiness on Monday nights online and in Philadelphia-- come sit in if that is for you.

2. Contemplate what you have been taught. That means walk around with it. Run with it. Meditate with it. Swim laps with it. What does the collapse of dualisms really mean?

3. Do the practices to help you realize emptiness.

The bad news is that no one thinks their way into understanding emptiness. The good news is that people practice into it all the time.

From the Mahayana perspective, you practice by chanting the Heart Sutra. Come do this with me on Monday nights if you can. I offer instruction on this once/year, each fall.

From the Vajrayana perspective, realizing emptiness comes from practicing Chod. An intense and highly effective way to cut through identification with the self is to offer your own body in meditation. Chod is a profound, intense, and effective method to realize emptiness in this lifetime.

With our minds we make the world

The thing that the Buddha found when he walked out of his palace is that we create our suffering.

We do that primarily through our identification with self. We’re protecting a self that we think to be more precious than everyone else’s self. And we think it to be discrete, that I am separate from you. That’s a construction. We also believe we will remain the same. No, I will not age. No, I will not be sick. There’s a lot of suffering born in that delusion!

Emptiness can lead us to experience way more joy, because when the self is more empty, we can be present for everything else.

In ordinary life, it’s as if we are a big bullseye in the middle of each picture. When we live that way, it’s can be hard to see the picture at all.

Thank you for reading,

Sunisa

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon et at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. You can also give me a one-off donation through Venmo.

  Thank you!

• Deep Practice is where I teach on Emptiness and the Heart Sutra. It’s every other Monday, starting September 28. Join us.

Retreats

1. Saturday, November 7th, 2026

Philadelphia, PA and online

Dampe Sangye’s Instructions to Machig: a Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Path

If you’re interested in the Bodhisattva’s Path– a great entry into the Buddhist journey, Sunisa will teach 6 Instructions from Machig Lapdron’s teacher, Dampe Sangye. The 6 Instructions outline the entire bodhisattva journey. You memorize these slogans and use them in life, much like the beloved Lojong, so you can be ready to meet each moment.

» Registration is open

2. Saturday, January 23rd, 2027

Philadelphia, PA and online

Awakening to Your Sacred Purpose with the Four Immeasurables

3. March 11-14th, 2027

In person residential retreat

Menla (co-sponsors) - Catskills, NY

4 Maras, 4 Feasts

This retreat includes 4 Chod ceremonies, which are energetic purification practices within the Vajrayana. The retreat is open to everyone who feels drawn to it.

[a very happy boy with his lightsaber on Tatooine]

Dear dharma friends,

This summer, my husband and I did something that we had vowed never to do, and took our sons to Disneyland. We happened to be in LA. I was thrilled to see all the kids in princess costumes, and the joy on faces as Spiderman was launched from one building to another. We found Tatooine, and our sons talked us into buying them light sabers. They proceeded to challenge every person holding a lightsaber to a duel. No one turned them down! Many adults squealed as they lit their lightsabers to fight our boys. We don’t often get to experience awe and wonder in our adult lives, and it was beautiful to see so many people in this playful, light space.

As an older Millennial I was grateful to get a paper map to the park. We seemed to be the only ones needing them, puzzling how to get from one elaborate make-believe world to the next. I went in the wrong direction and found Alice’s teacups, but not It’s A Small World. Hot, thirsty, I sat on a bench with my toddler and watched people go by. How did so many people know where they were going?

Some of them seemed to be using a map on an app. A subset of people seemed to know their way around Disneyland. They weren’t looking at anything, but ducking here and there, weaving between the crowds.

When I looked into this I learned that Disneyland is a place where some people reside. As in, they live near it, and treat it as their backyard/ mall/ feel-good, happy place.

This news made me sad. Not in a condescending way, in a poignant way. The park is an expensive fantasyland. Expensive in dollars, but even more expensive in the cost to us humans and our ability to remain in the discomfort of Samsara. Bypassing Samsara does us a disservice.

I bought my toddler a lollipop the size of his face. It was the most expensive lollipop I have ever purchased. The person selling it to us was jolly in this old-timey, kind of false way. Vendors are really nice to you at Disneyland. Of course they are. That is part of the fantasy.

It is one thing for kids to squeal and take photos with their favorite princess, and even adults to do that sometimes, for fun. But to live, psychologically, in a fantasy, where you pay a lot of money for people to be nice to you? That is bad news.

Your Starbucks barista may have bad days and snap at you in the morning, but at Disneyland, no one will snap. The ego wants to live in a place where people are nice to you all the time. The ego can get a bad rep, but I don’t mean it in that way. I just mean that the ego has a limited understanding of ways to be safe and happy.

It’s a small part that thinks, If I could live in Disneyland, then I would be happy. What an interesting fantasy. You’d have to have a lot of younger parts driving to want to live in Disneyland as an adult. I liked the princesses, but only a part of me liked the princesses. I didn’t want to live with the princesses all the time. That’s the difference.

Fantasyland

There are many kinds of fantasyland. Maybe you are not the kind of person to try and live, literally, in Disneyworld. Social media is a fantasyland, and quite an alluring one for people of a certain age, including me. What is an influencer but someone who sells you on a life of guaranteed happiness, if only you dress/eat/shop/arrange your day in the way they recommend?

Thinking an AI is your best friend is a fantasyland.

Obsessing over the stock market is a fantasyland.

A certain class is trained to think we’ll be happy if we achieve in a certain way. Achievement is fantasyland. Captain of industry aspiration—fantasyland!

Anytime we are setting ourselves up to have a guarantee of happiness, if: _________, we are indulging in fantasyland.

We are all prone to it. I live with this too! Fantasyland is seductive, because life can feel harsh. It gets tiring to be raw to the pain of the world. Live long enough, and you are guaranteed to go through times of acute suffering. Even if you’re wealthy, and beautiful, young. Over time we all have the impulse to curl into a fantasy and hide.

[I loved wearing these ears!]

Why Can’t We Hide?

Look, you can hide in fantasyland a little. Sometimes.

But there is this seductive narrative floating around that sounds something like: Fuck it. Why not hide? The world is burning anyway. This is the logic that leads people not to have kids because of climate change. This is the logic of apocalypse. Of nihilism. I urge you not to indulge in the voice of despair. Do not hide forever in fantasyland.

Why?

1: The voice of despair does not see the beauty of this human life.

If you are listening to despair turned up loud, you are probably not hearing and receiving the gift, wonder, splendor, awe, that is being alive right now. In 2026 we can still see coral, waving in the sea. We can still watch (me) a brave bunny of a 3 year-old toddle through his new school gate, holding his brother’s hand.

There is so much beauty around us. When we open to it, it is immense. Don’t cheat yourself of the wonder of this human walk, by staying in despair.

2: Tensing up or turning away from suffering will hurt you more. I’m currently teaching my kids that when we tense up before a shot, it hurts more. We ran that experiment with this year’s flu shots. Pain works this way. If you get the chance to go through un-medicated labor, you can really test this hypothesis. If you tense up, the sensation of pain or whatever you want to call it hurts more.

One way to summarize the highest teachings on the Buddhist path is to say, Relax in Samsara. Relax and open into life.

3: Suffering serves us. Yes! That’s why hiding in fantasy is so sad. It deprives a person of their chance to grow.

Grit

I happen to live in Philadelphia, a beautiful city of Georgian and Brownstone buildings; boulevards with statues and flags that remind me of Paris; glimmering Norman Revival homes made of mica that glimmer in the sun; and—many potholes, trash on the streets, and crazy driving as a norm.

Luckily, the unofficial mascot of the city is Gritty. This is so useful as a spiritual reminder! Whenever I hit a pothole too hard, or more significant frustrations come up, roll my eyes and think: gritty.

Life is gritty. Reality is gritty. Samsara is gritty. Deciding you want to wake up from the Matrix is gritty. Sure, it would be more comfortable to eat a hamburger in the Matrix and see the woman in the red dress (if that’s your inclination—I find it objectifying). We’ve been screening Dharma Documentaries at Heart Sangha, and we’ll have to add The Matrix to the list for next summer. It is such a Buddhist movie!

Deciding you want to wake up means you are going to consent to eat that gruel slop from the movie, and train your mind, and step into the Matrix again and again to liberate others. This is as good of a metaphor for a bodhisattva as we have ever had.

What Neo is trying to wake up to is Buddha, which is when you realize the nature of mind, which is everything connected and made of light, all time is touching, and all beings are full of light potential. Neo isn’t special because he can see the Matrix made of light. He is just the first. Which is the meaning of his name (new). The newest Buddha of an age.

Goals

What it really comes down to is goals. Are you trying to put your head down, feel less pain, and get through this life? That is living unconsciously. Listening to the egoic voices. Feeling the bumps and bruises of confusion, suffering, and taking it all very personally. That is one choice.

The other path, which might be called the spiritual one, is deciding to tune into a deep intuitive voice. If you meditate for just 30 days, every day, you will start to be able to tune into a voice that nudges you in a direction that is probably surprising.

It might say you want to go on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. It might have you crying when you meet certain people. It might say you don’t want to drink and go out with your friends as much, but wake up early, run, and sit on a stone in the woods and breathe.

Buddhists talk about the inevitability of birth, old age, sickness and death. That can sound like a downer, or it can sound like the truth.

A fantasyland is when we indulge our egoic impulse to deny the truth.

You know what you get when you let the grit of life rub your human nature into bodhisattva-hood, then Buddha-hood?

Peals.

It is only through letting suffering in, letting it teach us, that we can grow. The lojong sayings tell us this. The 6 Aphorisms of Chod tell us this. Buddhism is all about this. If your deep intuitive voice is telling you to turn toward suffering, listen.

We are made to be in this world, suffer, and transform. That is the true point of human existence.

Thank you for reading, as always!

Sunisa

Links

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon et at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. You can also give me a one-off donation through Venmo.

  Thank you!

Retreats

Come practice! This is not an intellectual path, but one where you meditate, chant, pray, and feel into your body. Only then can the path change you.

1. Saturday, November 7th, 2026

Philadelphia, PA and online

Dampe Sangye’s Instructions to Machig: a Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Path

If you’re interested in the Bodhisattva’s Path– a great entry into the Buddhist journey, Sunisa will teach 6 Instructions from Machig Lapdron’s teacher, Dampe Sangye. The 6 Instructions outline the entire bodhisattva journey. You memorize these slogans and use them in life, much like the beloved Lojong, so you can be ready to meet each moment.

» Registration is open!

2. Saturday, January 23rd, 2027

Philadelphia, PA and online

Awakening to Your Sacred Purpose with the Four Immeasurables

Begin 2027 with a one-day retreat at Heart Sangha’s temple on finding your sacred purpose. We will be exploring the heart’s intentions with the Four Immeasurables. This is an accessible, heart–open, immense opportunity to focus on the qualities of loving-kindness, equanimity, compassion, and sympathetic joy, so we can be ready to give in these trying times.

3. March 11-14th, 2027

In person residential retreat

Menla (co-sponsors) - Catskills, NY

4 Maras, 4 Feasts

What troubles us in these times? Machig Lapdron taught in the 12th century that demons exist inside as our neuroses. This 3-day retreat will be a deep-dive into our neurotic habits. We will look at the ways we suffer as taught on the Buddhist path, a classic way of facing the truth with courage and determination. Then we will discuss the 4 Feasts, which are ways to cut through suffering.

This retreat includes 4 Chod ceremonies, which are energetic purification practices within the Vajrayana. The retreat is open to everyone who feels drawn to it.

[renouncing can lead to a public library!]

Dear dharma friends,

Some stories stay with us as a civilization-defining story. They are huge, mythological, grand. In each age we tell and re-tell the story, drawing new meaning from it. I haven’t read Homer’s Odyssey in a few decades, but as I recall, it asks the question: Can we ever go home? The tragedy of growing up is that home becomes the Ithaca of the mind: a lost paradise if we had a safe childhood; an idealized Eden if we had a scary one.

Great artists are thrilling because they have the audacity to step into a grand narrative and ask a new question. Christopher Nolan steps inside a story Westerners think we know and asks, What have we done? Nolan’s is a specific “we” – White men with the power of violence. The movie isn’t subtle, which is a good thing. Many of us are still able to read the parable and have the courage, I hope, to reflect on the question Nolan is asking: What have we unleashed with the power in our hands?

Little Women is another such story. Louisa May Alcott’s original asks, Is it worth it to be idealistic when you might not survive? Mr. March starts a progressive school that admits Black children, causing the White population to un-enroll. The school goes under and the March family suffers. Mr. March signs up to fight in the Civil War against slavery, leaving his little women to risk starvation, piecing survival from his idealism once again. Alcott tries to hide the inner question, but it’s there if you look: What’s the cost of men’s idealism on “little” women?

Greta Gerwig, like Nolan, steps inside a story where the answer to that original question has largely been decided. (The answer to Alcott is yes, it is worth it to stand by your ideals. The answer to Homer is no, you cannot go home again.) If you saw Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, she’s asking: Do girls get to be great artists? That’s why Gerwig elevates Amy March’s storyline.

How does this relate to dharma? The story of Prince Siddhartha is also a grand mythological narrative that continues to resonate through time.

Prince Walks Out Of A Palace

Once there was a prince who lived in a palace. At his birth an oracle foretold that either this son would be a great king, or he would leave everything behind and the kingdom would crumble. The son would found a new order not centered on commerce, prosperity, and the kingdom’s safety from neighboring states (ie war).

The prince’s father says, that’s a terrible prophecy. “I must make sure my son never awakens to the second potential. He will remain here to do his duty.” So the King banishes from the palace anything that could alarm our child. The son grows from a child into a teenager, into adulthood. The walls of the palace keep suffering out. There’s nothing to instigate his curiosity. It is a palace of delight: beautiful women, beautiful flowers, beautiful food. The prince gets married. He has a son. The King is delighted that he has thwarted the prophecy, keeping the Kingdom safe.

Everything is perfectly optimized until one day, the prince’s nanny sneaks into the Palace to visit the child she raised.

“What happened to you?” says the Prince in horror.

“I got old,” the nanny says.

“What is old?” the Prince says.

The nanny leads this boy she loves to the walls of the palace. They find a place to look out. The prince sees a beggar, slumped in the dirt.

“What is that?” the Prince says.

“That is sickness and hunger,” the nanny says.

“What is sickness? What is hunger?” the Prince asks.

Like a person waking from a dream, the prince knows he must leave his nice life to investigate the messy one outside the palace walls. One night, he walks out of the palace. He leaves his wife and son. He spends years with the ascetics in the forest, testing the hypothesis that you can discipline the mind by depriving the body.

The First Question

The question that drives our prince to leave his life of comfort and luxury is simple. It’s the same question people bring when they want to learn to meditate; when they enter a temple; when they begin to seek.

The question is, Why Do We Suffer?

If we believe that suffering is meted out in response to our actions, then we will act in a certain way. If we believe we are unique in being singled out for suffering, we will act a certain way. Inevitably, we will wonder why the innocent suffer.

When the Prince leaves the palace he begins his journey to adulthood, which is not marked by age. Adulthood, in the spiritual sense, is embarking on the journey of inner growth. A person becomes an adult when they can take full responsibility for themselves, which includes taking responsibility for their mind. Not everyone who lives to old age becomes an adult in this sense. It is a choice that requires courage and commitment. It is a choice that requires someone to be devoted to the truth.

Prince Siddhartha puts himself on the path to become the first Buddha of this age when he peers through the walls of the palace and asks his nanny those innocent questions.

In our lives, too, there’s a moment when you see something and you’re going to have a choice of: are you going to pursue this? Or are you going to run back into your old life and pretend that you didn’t see that?

Who We Leave Behind

How could the Prince leave his family? I’ve wrestled with this question. There’s an argument to loving his wife and child so much that he must go learn the truth. He knows his wife will suffer. Unbearably, his son will suffer too. Prince Siddhartha must solve the riddle life is presenting him with: an old person, a sick person (the beggar) and soon, a person dying, so he can come back and teach the people he loves what he has learned.

The Buddha returns to his family, but not as their husband and father. He comes back fully awake and teaches Rahula his son, and Yasodhara his wife, to practice and cut suffering for themselves. He brings the fruition of his search back to them: the very means to be free.

In so doing he initiates the possibility that all of us humans can also be free. 2,600 years later we are still discussing, learning from, and imitating the main moves of his story. The Prince makes a personal sacrifice to change the circumstances of humanity. That’s why he leaves his wife and child that night.

The Body Is A Gift

We might do well to remember what the Prince learned in his first years in the forest, that the mind can still be an unruly monster when the body has been subdued into being still. The disciplines of the body that Prince Siddhartha goes through with the sadhus (ascetics) are tough to read. He holds his breath until he feels weak and dizzy; he deprives the body of food until he is in pain. Pushing his belly, he can touch his spine.

To this day, we make this mistake. People assume that we can “discipline” (often a euphemism for punish) our bodies to make our minds obey. This is a harsh, sad, and false idea.

From the Buddhist perspective, to be embodied is a gift. To feel the night air on our arms, to see the changing colors of a sunset, to get to hear Yo-Yo Ma play Bach-- all of this is gift.

We are not here to punish ourselves. We have not done anything wrong. The body is the vehicle through which we can blossom. It deserves to be treated well.

The Prince leaves the ascetics to continue investigating his mind. He takes one meal a day. He allows himself to sleep. Part of what we mean by the Middle Way is not rejecting sense pleasures like the cool night air on our skin, while also not indulging in them either. Indulging is what happened in the palace—silks, jewels, pleasure never-ending.

There is also a way to be a tyrant of the mind. It sounds something like: If I yell at myself enough, my mind will obey. Usually there’s some bargain. If I am harsh enough inside, I will finally fit in. I will be as other people are and not suffer.

That is just not true. That is asceticism of the mind. We are not talking about that either in the dharma. It does not work. The Buddha tested that and he got the answer. We do not have to spend time hurting ourselves to prove again that this is not the way. We’re not talking about yelling at ourselves inside in order to give the appearance of a perfect meditation session.

The Inner Question

Inside the moment when the Prince decides to leave the palace is another, inner question: What are we willing to give up in order to be free?

Prince Siddhartha gives up quite a lot: his wife’s company; watching his son grow; his father’s love and approval; his responsibilities to the kingdom. This is called renunciation. It’s taught differently in the different dharmic vehicles. On an outer level, renunciation might mean not having nice things—not wearing finery or spending time at the movies, say, because it takes time away from the cushion.

On the inner level, and the way we think about it in Tibetan Buddhism, we can go to the movies and wear nice clothes. There needs to be an inner renunciation, and inner adjustment. We want to examine how we hold our relationships to nice things. We look at how attached we are.

Renunciation

When teaching in Asia, I talk about cars as status symbol and people smile in recognition. Does the BMW mean you are virtuous, or only that you’ve made it? Why do we want that logo handbag—does it keep us safe?

In Western Liberal circles, people aren’t usually so brand-oriented. It could be easy to let our egos off the hook by saying we’ve renounced. Look! We drive a less-expensive car than we could afford so as to appear un-attached. How virtuous :) So, for the West, what would it be like to renounce drama? Renounce the stories we tell ourselves? Can we renounce outrage and shame? How about renouncing anti-aging?

If we are serious about getting free of Samsara there is always some sort of renunciation involved. We stop allowing ourselves to be caught by Samsara, entertained by Samsara, because being bought into Samsara takes up too much time.

It’s a strange moment to teach on renunciation. We have swung so far in the other direction. This age is about the unabashed proliferation of stuff. The gates of pleasure, self-indulgence, and accrual have swung wide open.

As long as we’re devoted to getting more, looking better, keeping up, and optimizing, it is very hard to get free of suffering.

Singaraja

[beautiful singaraja]

I was inspired to teach on renunciation because I was just in Singaraja, Bali. This is not a remote place, with nothing there. Singaraja is a seat of learning. There are schools and universities. It was the Dutch colonial capital of Bali. There are no movie theaters though, nor malls. People wear the clothes that come on the trucks, over the mountains, so there is a renunciation of shopping happening there. What does it free up time to do?

I stayed with a new friend who is a poet and professor of poetry, and her husband who’s a journalist and poet. They live with their kids on the second floor of the house. Their kitchen is on a balcony, and the other balcony is their family shrine.

This is because they’ve turned the entire first floor of their home into a public library, sharing their personal collection of books. What was their open-air kitchen is now an impromptu cafe.

I stayed with them upstairs for two nights. Let me tell you— there are people downstairs at all hours, reading. When you come down bleary-eyed in the morning; as you go up to bed at 10 at night. I was moved to see this space in a country, like mine in Thailand, where it is rare to find a public library.

The renunciation happening for this family was the idea of what is their personal property. My home; my first floor; my living room; my books. There’s a fluid generosity to saying, We have a wonderful book collection. Let’s open it up to others.

Renunciation can turn into gift. Renunciation can create something in your life that’s aligned with your values. Of course a poet professor and journalist want to create a library! What blossoms is very personal.

Renouncing is about deciding to choose something, as much as deciding to not-choose something.

Choosing reading and renouncing movies; choosing sharing books and not having them in pristine shape for years to come. Prince Siddhartha decided to choose the truth. My Balinese friends renounced the solid four walls of a family home to choose literacy and community.

When we renounce we turn away from the comfort of the palace, whatever that looks like for us. We commit to truth. We know that we want to grow into an adult before we die.

Thank you,

Sunisa

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon et at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. You can also give me a one-off donation through Venmo.

  Thank you!

  Subscribe now

Retreats in the United States

1. Saturday, November 7th, 2026

Philadelphia, PA and online

Dampe Sangye’s Instructions to Machig: a Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Path

If you’re interested in the Bodhisattva’s Path– a great entry into the Buddhist journey, Sunisa will teach 6 instructions from Machig Lapdron’s teacher, Dampe Sangye. The 6 instructions outline the entire bodhisattva journey. You memorize these slogans and use them in life, much like the beloved Lojong, so you can be ready to meet each moment.

2. Saturday, January 23rd, 2027

Philadelphia, PA and online

Awakening to Your Sacred Purpose with the Four Immeasurables

Begin 2027 with a one-day retreat at Heart Sangha’s temple on finding your sacred purpose. We will be exploring the heart’s intentions with the four immeasurables. This is an accessible, heart–open, immense opportunity to focus on such qualities as loving-kindness, equanimity, compassion, and sympathetic joy, so we can be ready to be give in these trying times.

3. March 11-14th, 2027

In person residential retreat

Menla (co-sponsors) - Catskills, NY

4 Maras, 4 Feasts

What troubles us in these times? Machig taught in the 12th century that demons exist inside as our neuroses. This 4-day retreat will be a deep-dive into our neurotic habits. We will look at the ways we suffer as taught on the Buddhist path, a classic way of facing the truth with courage and determination. Then we will discuss the 4 Feasts, which are ways to cut through suffering.

This retreat includes 4 Chod ceremonies. It is open to everyone who feels drawn to it.

Dear dharma friends,

Hello from Asia where I am visiting and teaching for the month of July. I have a deep commitment to appear as a teacher on the continent of my birth and upbringing, even though sometimes as a woman teacher there are challenges to this gendered form. I grew up in an expression of Theravada Buddhism in Thailand that is pretty orthodox. My first reaction when my Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten told me that he wanted to give me lineage was, “But I’m female!”

That is a fixed idea: that women can’t lead in the dharma. I had spent over a decade with my teacher by that point. I knew, rationally, that women could be teachers. In the Tibetan tradition there are still problems with nuns getting funding for their commitment, and there are more men than women householder teachers, but I knew on some level that it is possible. And yet ingrained inside me was the orthodoxy of my childhood, of the deep internal feeling of being lesser-than.

Lesser-than is tricky: one, because it’s false. Two, because it can cause resentment. And resentment holds us back. I would have had trouble realizing my full potential in the sense of Buddhanature if I had continued to have this deep, maybe undetectable-to-me resentment. Resentement, anger, jealousy-- they warp our growth. We can’t grow straight and strong and shoot to the sun, as we need to if we are going to birth our higher selves. My teacher was exposing a part of my practice that I needed to work on by exposing my internalized patriachal belief.

I said, “But I’m female!”

“I know,” he said. And laughed.

I had to laugh too.

Fixed Ideas

We live in a time of such rigid, fixed ideas. Both sides of the American political spectrum have dug in trenches of righteousness and vilifying the other. There seems to be this cultural ether of, If you’re not in, you’re out. And be careful to signal how much you are in by conforming to an orthodoxy of thought. Critical thinking is out; nuance is out; complexity out; compassion-- definitely out!

What is a fixed idea from the Buddhist perspective? It is anything you hold onto rigidly. With certainty. With condemnation of anyone who doesn’t share your opinion. Most of us are run through with fixed ideas. You could say that Samsaric society and our typical schooling teaches us to develop and hold onto fixed ideas. As we ascend in degrees and class we are only developing more sophisticated mechanisms of fixity; our ideas may be harder to argue with, but what we’re on the lookout for here is how entrenched the idea is.

Be careful: righteousness is not the Buddhist path. Condemning others is not either. If everyone has Buddhanature, anyone on the dharmic path is actually training themselves to be more committed to the divinity in every alive being. That’s the opposite of being committed to stripping the divinity from people who disagree with us, yes?

They are wrong is a fixed idea. I am right is a fixed idea. I was harmed is a fixed idea. Even, I am bad. A lot of us have that one living inside us. Anytime your inner voice sounds like a toddler, that is a clue to look for fixed ideas.

Why is a fixed idea harmful?

This teaching is the flip-side of the beautiful paticca-samupadda teaching, the interdependence of all things. We may be enamored of being part of Indra’s net, a node of light in the infinite causes and conditions that gives rise to everything. Well, that net and infinity of conditions really points to change. Our pain changes if we don’t hold onto it. Our fame changes too-- eep!

When we hold a fixed idea, we are contracting around the idea. We are reifying; making something concrete. But nothing in the healthy ecosystem of paticca samupadda is able to remain static. That is not its nature. Fixed ideas are a false concretization, a grasping-at-permanence. That is totally understandable, but that very grasping will give rise to suffering. Fixed ideas give rise to suffering. They hold us in suffering, and if we are committed to the spiritual journey, every fixed idea we have will eventually hold us back.

When the time comes for us to blossom we may not be able to because we are stuck in a story. It might be the story of being lesser-than because female; it might be the story of how we were harmed; it might be the story of how we harmed someone and so we can’t possibly blossom because we are bad.

Practice Invitation

This summer might be a good time to reflect on your own fixed ideas. Can you find them? Make a list. Where do they reside in your body? Can you liberate them?

The cushion is a good place to wrestle with these questions. It is a good place to begin the inquiry.

I recommend a big pruning of fixed ideas. If you’re convinced of the validity of this practice, just go through and do it. Don’t get hooked by the ideas themselves, arguing over which one gets to go and which to stay. One, that is slower. Two, you won’t go through as many ideas! Your ego will come up with some precious arguments for why democracy, or liberalism, or anti-colonial training, is the one place where you can rest your righteousness and keep that idea.

Treat this as a Vipassana-style inquiry. You are finding and pruning without getting involved in the idea. Use the watcher to remove things from your mind. Don’t believe your mind. It will try and stick the idea to you. Some ideas are insidious. Some can be convincing. Remember your commitment to do this practice.

We get rid of fixed ideas by bringing them into our awareness and then deciding not to believe them. It’s simple. You see it. You cut it.

Once you have done a thorough and honest pruning, this teaching sits in your back pocket. When you’re going through a hard time in life, you will probably notice that fixed ideas suddenly crop up:

They are bad.

They are holding me back.

They deserve _____.

Then you think, Ah! Fixed ideas. And chuck them out.

You want to be vigilant in your awarness and light in condemnation. You just let the idea go. It’s human to hold fixed ideas. We continue to be human. That’s why we continue to prune.

Hanging out with a dear dharma sister on a bus a few months back, we discussed a tricky situation, and all she had to say was “fixed idea” for both of us to cut it. That can be all it takes. We don’t need to make a whole drama of victim and perpetrator. Fixed ideas are part of Samsara.

Ethics

Pruning fixed ideas is not the same as moral relativism. This mistake is made a lot. Just as equanimity is not the same as detachment. When we take out a fixed idea we’re making room for our loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity and sympathetic joy. A body full of fixed ideas is rigid with certainty, fury, righteousness, condemnation. There is not much space for the flow of the Four Immeasurables (listed above). Moral relativism is often an excuse to not act; it is the ego vacillating so that we don’t be harmed, in it’s perception.

Pruning fixed ideas means we are making space for our bodhisattva’s arising. There is less SELF to take up space, less me, less how-I-will-be-seen-if-I...

Remember that the 6 Paramitas are the outer actions of bodhisattvas. The first paramita is dana, generosity. It’s hard to be generous with someone when we’re sure that they are wrong or bad. The bodhisattva’s stance is softer, lighter, with more flow between our humanity and the humanity of others. Pruning fixed ideas allows us to connect to life. It allows us to begin to explore what we would look like as a bodhisattva. Let me tell you that we would look good!

The bodhisattva isn’t moved to action only for people who share the same political belief as them, or who have the same class status, or who have the same racial makeup. When we take our bodhisattva’s vows, we sweat to serve all of life. All without exception. The heart has capacity for this con gusto. It is our intellectual mind that can put up thickets of concepts that prevent the heart’s natural flow.

I will leave you with this final, radical suggestion: the dharma is simple and being a bodhisattva is available. The teachings are waiting right here for us to use now.

I see people who are bodhisattvas all the time. We are not speaking of a path of practice to use in some mythic future time that is less scary, hard, or turbulent. Buddhism is merely language to describe that which already exists, so that we can recognize what we see, and put into practice what is possible.

I wish you luck with your pruning!

Let me know how it goes.

Sunisa

Links

• Over on Instragram I’m doing a summer of Ask Me Anything. Don’t be shy-- send your questions! I will take them from the Substack app too.

• The next year’s retreat calendar at Heart Sangha was just announced. Come practice with me in person! That is how the practice path really ignites, in person.

• Sunday Sanghas are broadcast for free, online, as well as taking place in-person at our temple in Philadelphia.

Without distraction and without meditating, relax in the state of ease.

• Song of Realization, Dudjom Lingpa

Dear dharma friends,

The most common thing people say casually to me in my job as a dharma teacher is: “They all lead to the same place, don’t they?” If you’re asking me, no. All spiritual paths do not lead to the same place. That idea is some mushy, woo-woo fluff.

The commitment to being a decent human being, which is a part of the Mahayana--that is shared across many traditions. But the realization of emptiness is not universal. And the non-dual part of Buddhism is pretty unique. If you want to go all the way to full awakening, you will eventually have to dismantle dualisms.

Dzogchen, in the Nyingma tradition, is a non-dual stream. If you are reading this and you study Dzogchen, I’m writing this for the people who’ve heard the words dzogchen, and rigpa kicking around, and are wondering, what is that?

Spoiler: I don’t know. The more I teach, the less I know. I’ll give you my probably-wrong, certainly-flawed, scant, slant, perspective. This is the long answer to the question of: Are all spiritual traditions going to the same place? No. But let me give you a tour of where this spiritual path does go.

Dzogchen

Dzogchen is a shortening of the words dzogpa chenpo. It means great completion. Dzogchen is the termination of the path. It is the end of practice. Particularly in this modern age, it’s important to know that this path does not go on forever. We are not going to grind and get more, more, more. There is a cessation of effort. Go far enough in your practice of Tibetan Buddhism and you will come across texts where it says: this is the cessation of the path.

That in and of itself is such a profound teaching. We can unconsciously transpose the culture we live in to the dharma. That looks like: we’re going to grind, we’re going to achieve on the dharma, we’re going to win in the dharma. We’re going to get that degree in the dharma. We’re going to get honors, more than our sister’s honors. It turns out that we humans are good at bringing all of our contracted human tendencies to our spirituality, too.

There can be an uncomfortable feeling when someone says it’s enough, or it’s the end. Here we stop, rest, relax. That’ll really stress some of us out. We’re like: Drop the effort? What do you mean drop? When’s the next session? Have you heard that I’m a good student?

So pay attention to that. Be like: Oh, wow, I seem to want to WORK at this. Remember the Dakini Mandala of Chod. Karma Dakini is an archetype whose klesha, poison, is classically taught as jealousy. Her neurotic aspect encompasses striving, perfectionist tendencies, Type A. When we are striving at the dharma we are actually in a neurotic contraction. Karma dakini’s wisdom is accomplishing wisdom. That is, flow. That is, let it land. That is, relax into it. There’s nothing to do, because nothing to achieve.

Rigpa

And then there is this word rigpa. You could say that rigpa is the natural openness and freedom of the mind. You could say that rigpa is the pristine nature of mind. You could call rigpa the nature of mind. You could call rigpa the ground of awakening.

What does that mean? It’s sort of like in a hurricane. If saṃsaric mind is a kind of hurricane and you’re in the middle, standing in that still point, and you can still see the bluster going on around you, but you’re in stillness—that would be rigpa.

The thing that’s so unique about Tibetan Buddhism, and where it’s not all the same, is that Tibetan Buddhism says we all have that luminous awareness inside us. We have the ability to tap into it. Whether or not we’re going to do it in this lifetime or not, I don’t know. There are many causes and conditions. But we could tap into it. Ourselves.

When we study rigpa we can make it into a thing and mistake it for something glamorous and blissful. That’s like seeing RIGPA lit up in neon letters. The rigpa show in Vegas. Maybe we’ve had a meditation where we experience bliss. We rush to our teacher, sure we experienced rigpa. You’re more likely to be told you experienced nyam, which is like a meditative hallucination. It’s a spiritual burp. Whether that was bliss lights, or a terrifying meditation, usually we are advised to let that experience keep on passing us by.

Nyams are not rigpa.

Rigpa is not fireworks and bells and whistles.

Maybe it’s a little gap in the storm of Samsaric mind. The storm metaphor is good. Oh, the nature of my mind is not guzzling toxic judgement? Realization might be that simple. We signpost it as teachers so that you know it’s there when you touch it. And then you experience it again. Your mind starts to un-knot. It can do this on its own, like a snake uncoiling itself.

No Saviors

It’s time for a little adjustment. No one is coming to save you. The spiritual journey from a Buddhist perspective is not about being saved. We are instead on an inner journey of dismantling the habitual patterns that keep us locked up in contraction. Everyone is an adult on the path. You get to decide at all times who you listen to, and what you do.

There is a lot of talk about guru and surrender in Tibetan Buddhism. It’s worth saying that Patrul Rinpoche’s Word of My Perfect Teacher recommends examining a teacher for 12 years before taking them as your guru. Discrimination and observation are key. I am not sure, personally, that guru is a model that works in this age. I don’t do it; my teacher doesn’t do it. Is there a way to work with devotion and surrender without pouring all that authority into a human guru? I think so. But that’s a topic for another time.

Do you need a teacher? Yes, if you’re in the Vajrayana. Before that you need someone to teach you to meditate and someone to teach you the dharma. You can read books though and bounce between meditation instructors. But if you choose to enter the Vajrayana, which means you do the preliminary practices of the ngondro, having a qualified, kind teacher is essential. They are the guide to your underwater exploration. That is not a path that can be attempted alone, just as you wouldn’t purchase all the diving equipment, read a book, and jump into the ocean to explore the ocean floor. You could really hurt yourself that way.

For now, let me write what I say a lot in my temple, which is: do not turn your brain off. You are in charge of your own safety. Discrimination is important when choosing a teacher. Many teachers have caused harm because, I believe, power corrupts. Most of our egos are not ready to handle being given the level of care and responsibility that being a guru implies. On the part of the student, I see students get in trouble because of a subtle (and sometimes obvious) desire to be saved. So let’s look at that right now.

We can tend, because of the prevailing cultural ethos, and perhaps our own habits, to really want someone to save us. We might be making a spiritual deity “real”. I’m sorry to say it because I know this may hurt some people reading, but Green Tara is not actually flying through the sky to come save us. No. We use the enlightened archetype of Green Tara to help us generate that level of courageous, compassionate action in ourselves. We are the deity (don’t take that too literally either-- inflation!). In the beginning, we use our tendency to want saving from the outside to help us discover the Buddhanature within. This is method. Technique. Skillful means.

If it’s not an outer mythic deity that we have made a savior, we might be making a person, inadvertently or deliberately, a savior. Usually this happens with a teacher who could be a parent figure, especially if we did not have benevolent parent(s) when we were children.

It is very alluring to think you get a do-over and that your teacher will be the parent you never had. This belief can take hold quickly and unconsciously. We were all children. We all probably have parts that want someone to say: I’ve got you. I love you the most. It’s all going to be okay.

Except that is not true! So we need to watch this edge. The teacher is a guide. They are not a savior. They are not a parent. They are not your family.

If someone is saying they’re Enlightened, or pretty heavily hinting at it-- you know, the wink wink of Serious Spiritual Achievement— beware. Humility and compassion are qualities that I looked for when I was finding my teacher. I stand by my decision, some 16 years later. A person with an impressive badge may be a Samyaksam Buddha, but they may be selling you something.

On the Buddhist spiritual path we are continuously adjusting ourselves. That’s why Vipassana meditation can be so powerful. The distance between watcher and thoughts can birth realizations. In Vipassana we lose the watcher and collapse the distance a lot! Every time we adjust ourselves to watch again, we are giving ourselves the possibility of realization once more.

As practitioners we want to know to be careful. Our ego can be sneaky and quite convincing. It can start reifying a deity or a person, forgetting that all this archetype is method towards awakening.

The potential for awakening is within us. No one is handing it to us. We are working on purifying our karmic habits so that what is inside can be born. The word melting comes to mind whenever I speak about this. We want to melt our hard outer shells and let what is there naturally arise. It’s not about effort. It’s more like-- bloom.

Choose Your Own Adventure

There are many paths in Buddhism. I am going to speak broadly and simply. If you’re a Buddhist scholar, teacher, or have been practicing for decades, I’m speaking specifically to everyone else, who may be feeling lost in the lingo. This is for the overwhelm that can happen when a new person is standing at the fire hydrant of dharma activity. I want to help people make sense of the terrain so they can start to find where they belong.

One way to view the school of the elders, Theravada, is that it is sublime foundational training, especially in meditation. I was born into the Theravada and I am truly grateful for that. Since I’m not a Theravadan teacher, I won’t say much more about that vehicle.

One way to look at the Mahayana is that it is the foundation of human decency. This is required practice for everyone. It’s not something to pass over.

There can be a tendency to skip working on your compassionate heart if you think of yourself as intellectual and kind of “above the fray” of religion. Too sophisticated for all that mushy stuff, some people say give me the hard stuff, the serious texts.

Bodhicitta, the awakened heart, is like the sun. Too much intellectual study, especially in the non-dual lanes, without the warmth of sun can cause damage to the practitioner and to others. Your dharma becomes hard, cold, even judgemental. That is not moving you toward Enlightenment! The closed heart will become an obstacle on the path.

Real, flowing, tremendous waterfall of bodhicitta-- humans and animals feel and respond to it. Notice animals move toward the masters, even when that human is a stranger. Sometimes I think we are really just practicing in the field of enlightened humans. It’s not about what someone says, so much. Having been in the presence of the Dalai Lama a few times, I hold the memory of his presence in my heart. His English isn’t so fluent, have we noticed? Many sublime lamas speak more idiomatically correct English. Yet we are drawn to the Dalai Lama. Being in his presence made me want to cry, each time, in joy or what I couldn’t say. All plants need the sun.

I broadly would say that the Vajrayana is to purify the karma you came in with. That will be the vasanas, the mental habits, like the cobwebs of our consciousness. Those are the tendencies we have to react a certain way. We might call that temperamental tendencies. From the Tibetan Buddhist perspective, those impulses toward hatred or judgement can follow us life after life. Imagine! Luckily, they can be cleaned away, too. Purification is important. You want to clean the inner house so the light of Buddhanature can shine.

Vajrayana is also for purifying ancestral karma. Most of us have it. Those are the patterns of traumatized people hurting the children in their bloodline because they just can’t seem to help it. The patterns of families burying secrets only to have them come popping out in serious health crises; or the patterns repeating themselves without the younger generations consciously knowing the secret. Ancestral trauma is a term for the cascade of similar traumas in a family. Vajrayana is method for clearing this. If you are the one to do that work for your bloodline, you will clear up generations before and after you, even if you aren’t having kids. This work is not easy. There are big commitments that come with the Vajrayana: in time, in effort, in what you do and do not do in your outer life.

You will know if you’re the one in your family lineage that is meant to do this. It is a kind of purpose, a tingling of the heart. You have a sense of, that’s my job. And you will be willing, even eager, to orient your life around this calling.

I recommend doing purifying ancestral karma within the Vajrayana and with the means to hire a good therapist. You want to be accompanied by someone good at unwinding old patterns with a focus on you personally, and a teacher who can guide you through the ngondro and your sadhana, practice. You will need to spend significant time on the cushion. If you can begin this work some years before you have kids, that is helpful.

Which leaves us with full Buddhahood. Skipping to the shiny, glamorous Dzogchen thing because you heard about it on a podcast usually isn’t so fruitful. It’s like saying you’re ready to be a concert pianist, but there is no point in your learning to play music. Hubris is common. The metaphor holds. You do need to learn to meditate to study dzogchen. You should have a teacher. You might want to have done the preliminaries.

That said, we all come in at different points in our development across our reincarnate cycles. Some people are ready for the effortless falling open. That is their karma. How aggravating for the rest of us sweating our way through the path! But it does happen, so we can hold the linear stages of the path lightly.

No Hats

My last thought on what has turned out to be a cautionary tour, is: don’t put on any hats.

We all want to be special. We want to be told that we have ACHIEVED. In Western culture we might be oriented, rather like the military, to badges that denote our rank and level of accomplishment.

In Tibetan culture, I understand that outward signalling takes place with hats of different colors and shapes. This lineage, that lineage, this rank, that rank. All visible by the hat. When I was ordained my teacher told me that in Tibet I would get a special hat, but here in the West, so sorry-- no hats!

My exquisite teacher. It sounded like a gentle joke. I took it to be a reminder not to get inflated at the moment of something that might look like elevation.

No hats. Because if you’re given a hat, or you think you have one, eventually you will have to figure out how to take that hat off. You’ll have to come to terms with the fact that you are not special. No one is special, and everyone is divine. It will save a lot of time and angst to never put the hat on in the first place.

*

I began this talk with a look at dzogchen and rigpa. When people begin to touch rigpa again and again, they begin to also carry around this beautiful solitude inside them. Solitude, different from loneliness. You stare at the sky. You watch the waves. The way the wind moves a branch of redwood captures you.

When the masters talk about rigpa they slip from prose into poetry. There is no language, really, for rigpa. Making the word more conceptual isn’t helpful to us. Metaphors work best. A still lake, rigpa. A clear sky, rigpa. A vista on a hike that you didn’t know was coming.

The spiritual journey is a fun one. The paths are not the same. They go to different places. This is your inner adventure. Remember, you get to choose.

With love,

Sunisa

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

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Dear dharma friends,

A few years ago I did my first retreat since having kids. I had done daylongs and online programs, but I had a block around asking to spend the night away to meditate. I felt like that was asking too much. From my perspective now, I feel sure my husband would have said yes, and that I could have benefited from stepping out of the cascading urgency that was my experience of early motherhood. Becoming a mother hit me like a train. I wanted it, and I was unprepared for it. It took me years, and two kids, to find my footing. Stepping into retreat might have helped me calibrate to the chaos. I’m putting this out there in case new mothers are reading. Learn from my scarcity mindset and take time away if you can.

This first experience of mine was a short retreat, Thursday through Sunday, which when you have young ones is more time than the rational count of hours. I remember that first night away felt like sitting in a hot bath. Sitting in silence? To stay put through all of dinner? I was melting with gratitude.

We were at a Christian summer camp. It was Friday morning. I had slept on the bottom bunk in a six bunk-bed room. The beds were arranged around the perimeter of the room, and there were two door openings, one to the bathroom, one to the next dorm, with no doors. During the lunch break I was sitting on my bed, hunched over so my head wouldn’t hit the top bunk. I looked out of the long skinny window. There was the horizon line where grass met sky. There were a few trees in view. The ground flipped up. Like when you shake the duvet on your bed.

I thought—No WAY. We had moved to Philly after 15 years of living in California. I knew exactly what it is when the ground heaves. I braced my hands on the bunk bed. The wave hit. Doorframes shook. Bunk beds swayed. I dug my feet into the floor. An enormous rush of adrenaline flooded my body. I could have lifted anything! I was amazed that the bunk beds stayed upright.

A woman with a silver bob ran through the doorframe. “DID YOU FEEL THAT?” she said.

I was amused and relieved that she broke silence. “Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah, she said. We nodded at each other. There was nothing else to say.

At the end of the lunch break the retreatants gathered back in the meditation hall. My teacher went on teaching. I wanted to shout about the earthquake. I wanted my teacher to say something. Should I write a note? Was this an emergency?

It took time for that big energy to settle in my body. What a retreat, to begin like we were shot out of a rocket.

As I lost count of the days I started to think I had hallucinated the earthquake. Then, sometime before we ended, Anam Thubten did mention the earthquake, with a smile. It had been 4.8 on the Richter scale, he told us. How unlikely that is had an epicenter near Princeton NJ! And yet—and so—we went on.

Earthquakes are upheaval. Unplanned, un-wanted, and a part of ordinary phenomenon. Upheaval can come in emotional disruptions too. It works the same way. Unplanned, unwanted, and part of the ordinary world. There is also social upheaval that hits the collective, like the Covid pandemic, which re-arranged our world.

Upheaval is lhong tshad in Tibetan. What do you do when you’re in a period of upheaval? When, despite your best efforts at managing and controlling samsara, it refuses to stay where you put it, and insists on misbehaving?

Denial is Heavy

What we usually do is deny that we are in a period of upheaval. That seems to be a social convention. I’m speaking of when we have a parent dying, in a made-up example, and there is a social contract that the group at dinner needs to take a minute before going to catch-ups. It is an empathetic reflex to acknowledge what I hear being called “heavy.” Then, I notice people will say “I’m fine, it’s not that bad,” and sort of shrug before hurrying the group into the fun stuff.

We are conventionally terrible at acknowledging upheaval. My hypothesis is that we are personally uncomfortable, and we worry that we are making others uncomfortable.

Let’s unpack this. First, the word “heavy.” It’s what we use when we are dealing with real stuff stuff. To be heavy is to be a burden. Of course we are going to feel that the heavy stuff weighs us down. Of course we worry that our heavy news could weigh down others. Using “heavy” poises us to be in a misaligned relationship with life.

We might use “real” instead, because life is real. Real is normal. Real is expected. Even when we don’t want it to, real life will happen. I am reaching for a word with a neutral tone. Let’s not stigmatize life. Let’s not stigmatize samsara. Stigmatizing life will not help us deal with it.

Acknowledge Upheaval

Instead of denying the moment, we might acknowledge it instead. Let the moment be right-sized. We can’t hurry through real life. When someone’s parent is dying, that takes a real moment, not a “so sorry” head nod.

What we do in the hurried moment is deprive the person in pain with the comfort of human love. Human empathy, if you want to call it that, but it can be bigger and more effective. Love is closer to the warm blanket that a person needs wrapped around them. We can use the relational circle to pour love on the person in pain. It will help them.

If you are the audience for someone’s real pain, don’t let them hurry through it. If you are the person in pain, summon courage. With your true friends, stop, stay, and ask for help. Let them help you. It will not cost them anything. You will not weigh them down.

Everything in this example begins by not denying upheaval. We see the emotional earth rising up before us. Wow, we can think. This is happening. We can acknowledge that we don’t particularly welcome the upheaval. We don’t want it. But try, instead of denying and hurrying past, to consent to reality. Upheaval is here. Or it is coming. And it is normal.

We acknowledge the upheaval and bring it into our awareness. Even if it’s a little sideways glance, begin there. Hello upheaval. And congratulations to me for being alive! This is totally normal.

Sit

The next thing we do is that we sit in the upheaval. This is uncomfortable. Most everyone would rather not.

But do you ever wonder why some pain becomes trauma, and some pain is just pain? I’ve touched on this before; it is taught in therapy. As Buddhists see it, when we welcome everything in the field of our experience, it will continue to change and move. That is the nature of phenomenon. Which is why even pain will move. Even pain will not last forever. We want to feel the feelings in our body and let it move.

I recommend sitting, literally, with the upheaval. Bring it into your awareness when you are on the cushion and breathe through it. Put your hands on your belly and let go into the upheaval that is happening.

The body can digest and burp out pain. We can walk out pain, swim out pain, cry out pain, sing the pain, dance the pain.

It is when we deny that we contract. Then we end up storing the pain in our cells. We store it as a story too. We calcify trauma, which we or our descendants will only have to get out later with more effort.

With Compassion

Let me emphasize that when we feel we are about to be engulfed by pain, by upheaval, by the quality of chaos that will definitely kill us, we want to summon and hold huge compassion around upheaval. Don’t run away. Sit with compassion.

Think of compassion as the tonal container for upheaval. It sounds like:

Boy, it sure is hard to accompany a parent through their twilight years. I am going to miss this parent so much. I love them so much. This hurts!

Aw baby I can’t believe this is happening! Gosh! OUCH!

The primal tone we want to take with ourselves is goopy with love. Silly with kindness.

Notice that I am not using sophisticated language. Sophisticated is not how we speak to ourselves. It is not our authentic inner voice.

If you are a Very Accomplished Buddhist: it takes decades of dharma practice to be goopy in Tibetan and Sanskrit if we were not born into those languages. Some of us were. Hurrah! If not, not to worry. Stay in English. English has goopy love too. Speak as if you were speaking to a baby, a toddler, your pet, and your teenager, who is hurting but cannot admit it. The love will get through.

This tone is hard for a lot of people. Shame, blame and self-loathing may be the waters we have swum in for a long time.

• If you have kids you speak to with goopy love, picture them, train the tone, and swap yourself in.

• If you have pets you love with unabashed sentimentality, picture your pet, keep the tone, and swap yourself in.

• If you are imaginative and feel connected to an enlightened archetype of any kind, work with that archetype. It can work.

What’s important is surrender into safety, and our ability to receive love.

Relational Healing

We can do this for ourselves, and hopefully we have wonderful therapists who also hold this quality of love, steadiness, and compassion for us. This is if we don’t come from families of origin where goopy love was modeled as a safe and normal practice. Some people come to the dharma because they did not have that. People come in hurting. I acknowledge this. It’s why I try to be explicit about what to do if you are starting from what you would call zero.

To zoom out, big picture: children come into the world needing parents to hold this big safe love for them. They grow into adults who hold this quality of love for their kids, if they are going to have them, and the other humans in their life. All Other Humans. When that chain is broken, we need to learn how to do this explicitly.

All human adults, by which I mean all people who have done the inner work to birth their fullest selves, are obliged by virtue of their wholeness to train this quality of love and compassion on all other humans, and on all of life.

That is what we are talking about when Mahayana Buddhists say we are here to be born as bodhisattvas. We can do this. People do it all the time! We make a firm commitment to live as bodhisattvas, and then we hold ourselves to our vows.

This is how we birth a new world where we slowly, and then all at once, heal each other. Humans are relational creatures. What we are working toward is creating a tipping point of healed humans committed to being a beacon of love and compassion.

How We Chod It

If you are curious how upheaval works within Chod, it is, of course, intense. Chod is intense. It’s not a path of everyone. And yet I am crazy for it!

When upheaval arrives and you are in the Chod lane, not only do you acknowledge upheaval but you welcome it.

When you go into Chod retreat, what you are doing is stirring the depths of Samsara. You are poking at your neurotic tendencies, inviting them to come out and play. You are saying with humility and stupendous courage that you are ready to work with your contracted parts (demons) to transmute them into their wisdom selves.

You are welcoming upheaval.

Anger, pierced with love, is clear-seeing; pride, pierced by equanimity, becomes abundance. There are specific teachings that I cannot gloss here. But we welcome upheaval because it means we are dancing closer to our awakening.

Using Chod method we run toward our Buddhanature. It is not comfortable, and it is not particularly easy. It does work. It means we are more quickly able to be of service in this world.

Chod Healing is the path my teacher created for people who aren’t going to do Vajrayana, but who do want to work with the energy of transformation. I teach Chod Healing too. Heads up that in a Chod Healing retreat, as soon as we do the Chod ceremony, we are inviting upheaval.

We are saying, Bring the white water rapids. I am going to try and get down them. I am dancing ecstatically in the muckety-muck of samsara. I want to see my neurotic patterns and not glide over them for years to come. There is wisdom to be discovered. I am ready.

“I Was Served Lemons”

You know that saying, When life gives you lemons, make lemonade? That has the quality of welcoming upheaval.

We don’t deny we have lemons. Lemons are normal. Wealthy people get them, beautiful people get them, and young people get them. We might not want so much sour, bitter fruit. We might not have chosen it. The real question is: how do we take responsibility for ourselves in times of upheaval?

Beyonce’s album Lemonade comes to mind. Imagine what we would be deprived of, if Beyonce didn’t acknowledge and turn toward personal pain in her marriage. She used it to make art. She chose to turn toward unwanted circumstance with creativity and some degree of openness. She did something uncomfortable and courageous. And she made something tremendous, that probably surprised herself.

So next time you see the carpet of the earth rise up to meet you, you might acknowledge it with a bow. You might greet it with enthusiasm. Upheaval, ho! You can meet it with awareness and compassion.

Sunisa

Links

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. Every post is free and comments are open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. Thank you!”

Dear Dharma friends,

Thank you for joining me on this longer exploration of the bodhisattva’s path. I’ve found that when I learn something theoretically, I need to work to really connect it to my lived experience. I’m a slow learner and over the years have found that dharma concepts can float pretty unattached to my day to day if I don’t build this bridge.

Maybe your brain works like mine? We need examples of bodhisattvas who walk the earth today, who struggle as we struggle, and find the courage still to rise into their big self. We don’t want to let ourselves off the hook by saying: Yes, I will be a Bodhisattva once I complete the 3 year retreat and have a retreat cabin in the high mountains and my children are grown and I’ve saved enough for retirement. Have you seen the way people drive in Philly? I can’t be a Bodhisattva here!

That is not the point of the Bodhisattva’s path. Once we take our vows to be a Bodhisattva we have made the commitment to turn towards the suffering of the world. Those of us who took our vows have probably said Shantideva’s immortal words, quoted in my teacher Anam Thubten’s translation below. This is not an exalted, theoretical thing that we are reciting!

May I become the protector for those who are helpless.

May I become a guide for those who are travelling.

For those who want to cross the water, may I become a boat, ship, and bridge.

Nemonte Nenquimo’s memoir We Will Be Jaguars offers an illustration of what modern life as a bodhisattva might look like. If you haven’t read the previous installments in the series, what follows will make more sense if you loop back to the beginning first.

• Part 1

• Part 2

Whose Problem?

We last left Nemonte protesting oil companies. She’s tried to comfort the Taromenane girls orphaned by Waorani warriors. She meets a White American, Mitch (Michi in the book) who invites her to visit different tribes to learn how to build rainwater catchment systems. That’s a safe way to capture water because the rivers have been poisoned with oil and pollutants from oil refineries. Nemonte meets elders from other tribes who have lost more to the oil companies than the Waorani have so far, because the oil companies have started drilling on those other tribal lands already.

“‘What are we all doing here together?’ I asked in amazement. ‘A gringo and a Kofan camping out in a tarantula-infested longhouse at the edge of Waorani territory!’

Michi responded by asking a question. ‘You know where all this oil goes?’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Most of it gets shipped up to California, right where I was born.’

I looked at Michi curiously. I wanted to trust him.

‘All this oil so that gringos can drive around in cars and fly in planes,’ Opi interjected.

Michi nodded, spitting into the ash of the fire. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Why?’ I asked, pretending I didn’t understand.

‘Because the world where I was born is destroying all of this,’ he said, casting his gaze everywhere and then settling his eyes on me.”

This scene is an illustration of someone understanding what Buddhists call paticcasamupadda, the interdependence of all things.

Oil companies drill in the Amazon, poisoning the waters, that kills the wildlife, that harms the humans living there. To bring oil to Philadelphia so I can buy a bigger SUV to haul my sons and their friends around after soccer practice. It is my responsibility to curb my consumption for oil. The fish in the river dying in Ecuador are my problem. Brown-skinned Indigenous kids bathing in the river next to the sign that says OIL BRINGS PROGRESS is my problem. The health of the elders eating poisoned fish is my problem. And it is your problem too.

The pandemic was an illustration of the interconnectedness of all things. One person’s new virus was a shutdown on every continent. Wildfire smoke plus wind can poison all of us.

Paticcasamupadda is beautiful because it is a relief, actually, to see ourselves right-sized in the tapestry of life. We take comfort in being small humans with our back against a tall tree. The loneliness of our species abates in the view of interdependence. Bodhisattvas live within this view, and act from this view, and return when they die and transform into the cycle that is encompassed by this view.

Sacred Purpose

Toward the end of We Will Be Jaguars, Nemonte, Opi, Michi and elders from the Waorani and other tribes create the Ceibo Alliance to protest the Ecuadorean government selling oil drilling rights to Indigenous land. Nemonte is a leader. She has become a mother. The work seems, frankly, exhausting. No one does this for the glory! That is clear to me. She’s in it because she has to be. She has found her sacred purpose.

Sometimes arising in sacred purpose is that simple. Who else is going to do it if Nemonte doesn’t? She was made for this job. This is how you know you’re doing the right thing with your precious time on earth. Are you made for this job? Does it serve a higher purpose?

That’s how I feel about my job as a dharma teacher. Is it convenient that I work nights and weekends as a mother of young kids? No. Is it ideal that I teach retreats and leave my babies? Super no! But I consent to it. Heartily. Because, quite simply, I feel I was made to do this. For whatever reason my temperament and training converge into a tremendous devotion to the dharma and a love of reading, writing, teaching. This job is mine. I was made to do this. It is a job that helps people in these times. That is what finding your sacred purpose can sound like.

I will note that sacred purpose should be integral to your life. By that I mean-- it’s something you cannot walk away from. I went to a smart people college, and afterwards plenty of my American friends scattered to the ends of the earth to do good work. Fast forward almost two decades and most of them are back on their home continent, having used those experiences and awards in rural villages in X to get into graduate school. I’m overstating this— I’m sure the years were significant in their own development. But brief, exotic interludes are not an example of sacred purpose. What you work on over the arc of your life has to be your problem in an aligned way.

Barack Obama’s sacred purpose was organizing. If you read Dreams from My Father you can understand why a mixed-race black boy raised by his white mom and grandmother is ignited by bringing unlikely people together.

I learned to meditate as a child. I was born into Buddhism. Those skills and this worldview are how I put myself together as an adult. Teaching dharma to new people coming in with their pain and their questions is aligned for me. My whole life falls into relief with this sacred purpose.

How To Find Sacred Purpose

If you are reading this section and feeling hopelessness well up inside you because you do not know how to find your sacred purpose, I am getting that feedback from a lot of people. I hear you!

Maybe our despair, depression, and spin cycles comes in part from this pain point exactly. How do we find our sacred purpose? What if I am so damaged that I don’t have one?

Please imagine me giving you a huge hug right now, if that’s helpful for you. “Damaged ones”: 🙏🏼 💗 🙏🏼. I feel you. I have been there. Every wound has its gifts once the wound has healed. Maybe, for some period of time, your job is to heal the wound so that you can one day use what you learned in action in the world.

My intuition tells me that finding purpose begins with listening. Letting ourselves listen to our own pain and pitter-patter, and then listening to the pain of the world. Out of listening arises action. If we are holding the boundless intentions.

This work begins on the cushion. We learn to quiet our mind, tune in, and hold what we are hearing with the habits of mind that are loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity. Those are 3 of the 4 Immeasurables. I will be teaching a daylong on the Four Immeasurables next fall at Heart Sangha on Saturday November 7. Please look out for it and consider coming.

If it feels like you don’t have time to learn to meditate, and generate and maintain the inner stance of Immeasurables: change happens quicker than you might think. I meet a lot of people who’ve spent years taking a pill because they are too busy to come to the cushion, or feel too hopeless to do so. You might be surprised what three months on the cushion can do. What is three months in the scheme of your life? Run an experiment and try it.

There is No Enemy

There’s a moment in the courtroom, where the Ceibo Alliance has brought a suit to stop the government from selling oil drilling rights even though some Waorani had mistakenly given their permission to it by signing the documents they couldn’t read.

“I turned my gaze to the judges and realized that if they were to see us, to truly see us, then we must also see them. Not as enemies, not as heartless judges, not as caricatures of conquest but rather as people, like us, capable of love and hate, or joy and grief. As souls that were here on this earth in these bodies for just a momentary flash. Maybe if we showed them that we were capable of seeing them, then they would see us, hear us, learn from us? That’s what my dream was telling me. Maybe Michi had been right about healing? Maybe violence is born in the chasms between us, within us? Maybe the conquest, at its root, has always been about that chasm, a pain so lonely, so unbearable, so spiritually numbing that violence becomes the only path, the narrow trail to being human, to feeling something, anything.” (Emphasis mine.)

How Buddhist is this memoir? I mean this with respect. Dharma means truth. Buddhism can certainly be practiced from a sectarian, orthodox place. I grew up in that manifestation. But at its core, dharma is truth, and that truth can be realized by anyone, in any place, with whatever language they want to use. I’m mapping an Indigenous life to dharma because the conclusions Nemonte comes to are in fact what Buddhists call the Bodhisattvas’s path.

Here is the teaching on not demonizing anyone. There is to be no one outside the circle of our heart. Yes, that is hard. Yes, that is a radical view. Welcome to the 🔥 of the bodhisattva’s path.

It is our job as bodhisattvas in training to hold the view that everyone has buddhanature. We cannot strip anyone of their dignity. That’s how my teacher puts it. We cannot demonize anyone, because when we do we are refusing to see the sacred potential in them.

Even in circumstances where it would be quite understandable to feel hatred toward the judges, or anger toward the lawyers for the oil companies, or hate for the executives of the oil companies, Nemonte is in the courtroom... loving them.

That is hard work!

Thank you Nemonte for modelling it to us!

This insistence on finding a way to feel the heart of people we dislike/ fear/ think we hate is the path to healing our hurting world.

What Did We Learn?

My native culture is one where we recognize life in what is called, in English, the inanimate. Anima, Latin for breath, which reminds me of lung in Tibetan, the warm breath of the energy channels. Lung is also what we call the oral transmission that opens a person’s channels to Vajrayana teachings. I wonder if we need a collective lung ceremony to hear and feel the Earth.

In Thailand we tie cloth around trees that have spirit in them, and leave offerings in respect and supplication. When I came to college in the United States I rejected all that. My home traditions became “superstition”; I took refuge in the rational. Intellect was a fortress I built to keep out what I had learned as a child, which is that life thrums and hums all around us. It is not only humans who deserve our respect. When reading We Will Be Jaguars I felt the relief of a return. Not that I am an Indigenous woman, but I felt that I recognized the worldview that Nemonte depicts.

Who’s to say what came first: recognizing the spirit in a tree, or forgetting that we recognized it once? The book I read is in English, thanks to Nemonte’s American husband Mitch, but the book is not the story of a colonized mind. It is the story of a person emerging from colonization to her wholeness, which are her roots.

Nemonte does not explain the Waorani worldview. She does not justify it or try and rationalize it. She shows us how life looks from behind her eyes. I appreciated this so much.

My hope and belief is that we can all emerge from our colonized minds. I’m going to redefine that as the mind that has forgotten its connection to all things alive, and the mind that has forgotten that it is empty of self.

The colonized mind is the small mind occupied with social media. The mind slipping further into somnolence by outsourcing its alive, idiosyncratic expression to AI. The mind colonized by the small self of ego.

Perhaps this is a good time to look again at how you’re doing as a bodhisattva in training. Is your heart open to the cries of the suffering? Are you committed to seeing the sacred in everyone? Are you, to the best of your ability, serving? How is your practice of nonviolence?

The introspection is between you and you. I won’t know. There is no deity that will know either. The rigor and commitment we bring to the path does lead, in large part, to a corresponding fruition.

Below is a summary of the learnings from Nemonte’s book. You might take these and consider them over the next few weeks.

The Bodhisattva’s Path, from We Will Be Jaguars

1. Extend the Sense of Self

2. Let Suffering Motivate You

3. Live As If Your Life Is Destined to Inspire Others

4. Wise Elders Nurture the Next Generation

5. Defend the Defenseless

6. It’s Your Problem Too

7. Find Your Sacred Purpose

8. There’s No Such Thing As Enemy

It’s not only Indigenous people who are connected to the earth. Some of them seem to realize their connection more. They may have an ancestral practice of living in connection, and be raised in a worldview that recognizes it.

A lot of us raised in industrialized nations are taught how to be in connection to humans. We happen to have the scope a bit too narrow. This is the idea of paticcasamupadda in Buddhism, the interdependence of all things, but extending our sense of self (learning #1) can also come from sacred view, which is a Tibetan Buddhist speciality. Sacred view is seeing the dignity in all humans. That means there are no enemies (#8); you are called to defend the defenseless (#5); it’s your problem too (#6). Many rules collapse into one view. It might be easier to remember the view!

Sacred view is seeing the right of water to run clean, the air to be free from poison, and the trees in the forest to stand. If you love the river, your heart would break when an industry poisons the river. You would have to act to protect the river. If you are descended from the forest, how could you cut down the forest?

For those of us subscribing to the rationalist, scientific view of evolution, Is it that much of a leap to say that we come from a natural place? At some point in our evolution, the forest was the environment that fed us. The water allowed us to live. It was the place that nurtured our life. Is it such a leap to call it mother and feel reverence for it?

All humans are indigenous to this beautiful planet, even if you grew up in an apartment building.

We belong to this earth. We have a responsibility to it. We can learn to cherish it.

I began this series by writing:

I’ve been thinking about oil. Have you? Where it comes from, how we get it, how much we depend on it, and what we do to get more.

I wonder where your thinking is taking you after reading this series. I’d love to hear! Comments are open.

Thank you for reading! These posts were an honor to write.

Sunisa

Links

• Follow Nemonte’s work on Amazon Frontlines.

• Part 1 of this series

• Part 2

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. Every post is free and comments are open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. Thank you!

Dear Dharma Friends,

We’re back with the analysis of Nemonte Nenquimo’s memoir We Will Be Jaguars and how it can be read as an illustration of the path of the bodhisattva. This is Part 2 of the writeup. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, you might want to circle back. What follows will make more sense with that context.

• Part 1

Turning Point

In the memoir we left Nemonte and her brother Opi, with the foreboding that their people may have unwittingly signed permission for the Ecuadorean government to sell rights to drill for oil on Waorani land. They aren’t sure if that’s what happened. They certainly don’t know what to do about it.

Nemonte returns to Quito. She’s at the market looking for Opi when she overhears women from another tribe speaking. She writes:

“So everyone was talking about the Oil Round. But I was too embarrassed to ask these women questions although now I understood that it must surely have something to do with the planes that were landing in our villages, the documents that were being signed. But what was an Oil Round?”

Nemonte gathers her courage and asks questions of the Kichwa women.

One of them says, ‘We are organizing a protest. Are you Waorani?’

‘Yes. The planes are flying everywhere in our territory.’

She said, ‘You should come.’

‘I will.’

‘We women are the voices of the forest,’ she continued. ‘If we don’t speak for our mother, no one will.’

She glaced at my brother, who was muttering in his sleep.

‘I will speak like a jaguar,’ I said. ‘I will make the companies tremble.’

Nemonte is inspired to act by women from another tribe. They are strangers to her. This is a learning: humans are relational. We can be inspired to extraordinary things by the heroism of other people.

Until Nemonte comes across women planning to protest the oil companies, it’s almost as if that action is impossible. Someone has to introduce the idea to her. This is how inspiration works.

I’m reminded of my time in grad school, when several of my professors said I’m a born teacher. This isn’t a big, sacred example, but--I had never taught before. Until that moment, teaching hadn’t crossed my mind. There is an act of service in seeing someone in their circumstances and telling them something that might never have crossed their mind. Join us. Do this. You’d be good at it. You can change someone’s life.

*

Nemonte is inspired generally, by the Kichwa women she meets at the market, and specifically, by Alicia Cawilla, a fierce and famous Waorani woman. This is another learning: mentorship is the work of healthy elders. Nemonte writes, “I admired her (Alicia’s) fearlessness, the way she talked against the oil companies and the government. I wanted to learn from her.” Alicia guides Nemonte through her first protest and tells Nemonte what Alicia has learned over many years. This gives Nemonte a springboard to start not at the beginning, but further into the fight.

If you have had the good fortune to figure out your sacred purpose and serve it, as you age it is your responsibility to help others do the same. A bodhisattva’s work is unceasing because their bodhicitta is boundless. We cannot keep our realization for ourself. We cannot put our feet up and turn away. There is no mic drop at the end-- not if our hearts are open to the cries of the world.

Is it possible to live right now and not hear suffering? Yes. But not if you’re a bodhisattva. As people age and get ready to transition, passing their wisdom to young ones becomes a healthy focus. Wise elders nurture the next generation as part of their commitment to life.

Defend the Defenseless

I can’t summarize everything that happens across the memoir, but will jump around to scenes and circumstances that map onto the bodhisattva’s path. Nemonte begins her life of activism. The fire of bodhicitta is lit.

There’s a news item that jumps into her life. A couple, Waorani elders, have been spear killed by the Taromenane, a tribe related to the Waorani who have chosen to remain uncontacted in the Amazon. It emerges that the killing is because the Waorani elders were unable to do as the Taromenane asked and “turn off the noise of the oil companies.”

We have the making of tragedy. A basic Samsaric response from someone who is Waorani is to want vengeance. That is the world we live in, and how we are generally trained to respond.

Nemonte is Waorani. Here is what she writes:

“‘I felt lightheaded. My people were about to go to war against our uncontacted relatives-- and all because of the oil company. I had never met the Taromenane people, but I loved them. They were a part of me. The part that hadn’t been corrupted, hadn’t been abused, hadn’t been weakened by the white man’s world.’

‘There’s nothing to be done,’ Opi whispered.” (Emphasis is mine).

Notice that Nemonte loves people she hasn’t met. She feels her kinship with them. Deeply. Their well being is her problem. They are a part of her. That is exactly what we are talking about with our commitment to be bodhisattvas. Everyone alive is connected to us. No one is Other.

Opi’s response is the conventional Samsaric response of resignation. Wring our hands, sigh, cook dinner for the kids. Nemonte does something different. It isn’t easy. It is extraordinary. I’m going to say she acts because the feeling of love and responsibility is so big in her. She takes a bus and walks to a different village, where Waorani have killed the Taromenane responsible for killing the elders. Cycles of vengeance have been ignited. The Wheel of Samsara is turning. Negative karma spins.

Two Taromenane girls survived. They are being held by the grown children of the Waorani elders.

Nemonte demands to see the girls. A warning spear is thrown at her. Nemonte pushes into the hut anyway. She comforts the girls, offering her arms, her body, to hold them in their grief.

This is an example of the compassion of a Bodhisattva. It is immediate, direct action in response to suffering. Compassionate action rises in response to suffering. It is a natural flow. It can feel bigger than a choice. It is because your heart is connected, plugged in, and you are moved to respond.

I will note that compassionate action is not easy or always safe. Sometimes in the West I notice we have an idea of compassion as mushy-gushy, soft. It can also be quite fierce. Wrath, in the Vajrayana sense, is to be furious with compassion. Nemonte risks her life to comfort girls from the tribe that just killed elders of hers, too.

When Nemonte leaves she pleads with Kaguime, who is holding the girls.

“‘Let the little girls go,’ I said.

He shook his head, then tears filled his eyes. His parents had been spear-killed. He had sought revenge. And now he was trapped too, in a different way, by his own actions. I was the first to come to the village to be with the little girls and there was nothing I could do to change his mind. But soon Kaguime would be dealing with the soldiers, the police, the ministries, the missionaries, the media, the NGOs. They would all be here.” (Emphasis mine.)

This is an example of the equanimity of the bodhisattva. Equanimity is also often misunderstood. It is to hold the big view, to see intentions and actions in the tapestry of infinite causes and conditions. We hold a wide margin of benefit-of-the-doubt, of all-the-things-we-don’t-know.

Nemonte doesn’t condemn Kaguime for wanting revenge, just as she doesn’t condemn the Taromenane for being angry that the noise of the oil companies has taken over their lives. Nemonte sees causes and conditions at play. It would be easy and foolish to condemn Kaguime, who is grieving the murder of his parents. Nemote is acknowledging the cycle of karma and the trap that comes from planting seeds of violence.

*

I hope you’re enjoying this deep-dive into the life of a modern bodhisattva! The next installment will publish in a week. It will continue with further scenes and learnings from Nemonte’s life. We conclude with a summary of what we can take with us on the path.

Thank you for reading!

Sunisa

Links:

• Follow Nemonte’s work on Amazon Frontlines.

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. Thank you!

Dear dharma friends,

I’ve been thinking about oil. Have you? Where it comes from, how we get it, how much we depend on it, and what we do to get more.

In my reading I came across a book that left me thunderstruck. It’s We Will Be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo, a memoir Nemote wrote in collaboration with her husband Mitch Anderson.

It is rare to get to read a memoir of an indigenous woman. I have never come across this particular story, which is the chronicle of Nemonte’s life as a member of the Waorani tribe in the Amazon. It is not until midway through the book that we learn we’re in Ecuador, which is when, perhaps, she does. We Will Be Jaguars is a memoir of growing up in the forest, fishing and planting gardens and looking after siblings. There's a missionary named Rachel Saint (no less!) who brings more missionaries to the village, then oil companies. Reading this book was eye-opening.

This is the first of three posts unpacking Nemonte's life story. There will be spoilers to the book. I'm going to map Nemonte's life story as an illustration of the bodhisattva’s path. That is not how she frames her own life. My intention is to make this comparison lightly, and with respect. I'm not trying to co-opt her narrative or impose Buddhism on a non-Buddhist. My intention is to show that there are bodhisattvas all around us all the time; that real people are able to use the circumstances of samsara to arise into their sacred purpose, their big self, what Buddhists call the bodhisattva.

The bodhisattva is not only a mythical figure. We are not talking about distant (Himalayan mountain cave) and historic (long ago in the eon before time) beings. When I sit on the teacher’s seat and urge everyone to find their sacred purpose, I mean now. Today. Immediately.

Samsara is happening. Sentient beings are suffering. Today is the perfect day to open our hearts to their cry.

*

In Tibetan literature there is a genre called namthar, which means complete liberation. A namthar is the inner and secret biography of humans who became buddhas. I taught on Yeshe Tsogyal’s namthar and wrote it up as Girls Who Don’t Listen, which is still one of my favorite posts I’ve written here on Dharma Bites. I find much to learn from Yeshe Tsogyal’s example every time I go back to her life story. I believe you will to. And, Yeshe Tsogyal lived a long time ago. There's something fresh and exciting about Nemonte’s life story because she is alive right now. We Will Be Jaguars is a kind of namthar. I’m not saying Nemonte’s perfect. I’m not saying she’s a buddha. I am saying she is probably a bodhisattva, and we can learn from her journey.

Colonization, Shame, and Desire

This is a brief and simplified summary of Nemonte’s life. The book begins when she's a child. Waorani peoples live in different villages. The one that Nemonte is born into, in her father's time, chose to follow Rachel Saint. America is “the land of Rachel.” God is “Wengongi.” Americans are “the Compassionate Ones” because they send clothes, candy, and more for Rachel to dole out. Nemonte's people are naked, they hunt, they fish, and they grow beautiful gardens. With the arrival of Rachel Saint’s church there is the introduction of clothes. Clothes are desirable. Then people need money to get clothes, or a family can to go to church, where Rachel Saint might give them a dress. It's amazing how effective shame is, and what the introduction of desire does to the community.

There are poignant moments that Nemonte captures in her book. Her dad says, "Why do we need clothes and shoes?" Her mother’s stance is, "Everyone else has them, go get a job and get this money." He says, "What? I'm a good hunter." As a reader you can feel that tension.

The dad gets sad. He goes off to the parts of the Amazon where the oil companies are drilling. He razes trees and builds roads. We see him come home with a pile of paper. The family puts it in a basket over the fire. Weeks later they realize the paper's been turning black from the smoke. They look in and are like, "Is that the money?" They have a family discussion: "It must be the money. What are we going to do with the money? We don't know. Well it burned, we might as well toss it into the fire."

This is an illustration of emptiness. There is no intrinsic value in money. We collectively decide to call a piece of paper money, and have that word stand for something. Money, itself, is empty of value. Money is empty of money.

*

Another missionary arrives, a teenager. Nemtonte is drawn to the teenager's clothes, her lipstick, the missionary’s straight white teeth. Nemonte starts to attend church. One day when she’s a teenager she hikes to a different missionary village to live with two Ecuadorian missionaries and attend school there. Nemonte is a smart kid. She learns Spanish. The wife missionary begins to organize a scholarship for Nemonte to go to a nun-run school in Quito. Her parents come after Nemonte. It’s a couple days' walk. They're like, "What are you doing? There's more to learn from the forest. Come back and be with us."

Nemonte says something like, "I want to stay here. There's more to my life than the forest." This moment is about smart kids and girl children, ambition and horizons. Her mother gets upset and says harsh things that stay with Nemonte. I think Nemonte's choice breaks her dad's heart. They leave. The protection her parents provide is gone. The husband missionary begins sexually abusing Nemonte, who is a teenager.

Nemonte goes to Quito to the nun’s school. Skipping ahead past the school and the dark time that follows, I'll summarize it as: Nemonte is in pain, traumatized, alone. Her sense of self is fractured. She continues to be abused by the missionary husband. No one's protecting her. Nemonte can't tell her parents. She decided to leave them and feels she can’t go home. It's a horrible situation.

I'm sharing this because life is like this. We have traumas. We are harmed. Life isn’t a little hard. Live long enough and periods of a time will be excruciating. Nemonte is a person who went through real life. There's not some magic bypass button that she got to press.

Galvanizing Crisis

Many of us would be broken by this level of pain. Many of us would stay in the place of reifying the pain, which is when it becomes suffering. We tell the story of our pain to friends, lovers, a therapist. We pass middle age, still in the same pain. We are unable to let the trauma go. This is the trap of Samsara. Nemonte’s story shows how to get past that.

What changes? Nemonte starts to remember who she is.

One of her brothers Opi also got a missionary scholarship to a smart-kid school; it also didn’t work for him. Sugar, chicken and rice dropped off by oil companies in boxes; alcohol: these change the balance of the Waorani way of life. In their twenties now, Opi visits Nemonte in Quito. They talk. They don’t share what happened specifically to them. Opi says, “When was the last time you tasted turtle eggs?” He persuades Nemonte to visit home.

They return home with the job to record their elders’ stories. Nemonte and her family goes hunting for turtle eggs. They return to the village to find they just missed Cowori, outsiders, who gave Waorani people lunch, in return for them signing a paper. Opi and Nemonte guess that the cowori were representatives of an oil company. The villagers have probably signed proof that the Waorani were consulted, so that the Ecuadorean government can auction oil drilling rights to their territory.

Here is what Nemonte thinks when she returns to Quito:

I couldn’t go home anymore. It was too late for that. I had left the forest many years ago because I believed in the white people. I had trusted them, thought they were better than us. Their skin, their teeth, their clothes, their planes, their promises. But now I knew they had no limits, that they wanted everything. They wanted to save our souls and change our stories and steal our lands. Those distant oil wells rumbling in the depths of the village night—those wells were creeping closer and closer. I still didn’t know what to do about it.

At this point we have a crisis that matters to Nemonte. In writing this post, I run up again at the way that English betrays us. I first wrote this:

Her people’s land is at stake. Their waters, their trees.

But my words are false. They put the power on the pronouns. Me, mine, ours. It is human-centric. That is not how Nemonte depicts the situation. She doesn't write as if she, individually, or her people own anything.

The reader can feel the weight on her heart of these incursions. What is she going to do?

Nemonte and her brother Opi have the education to meet this challenge. There is a sense of responsibility that rests with them. Right here we have an illustration of the potential energy of a bodhisattva. At the same time, we have despair. What was the point of the siblings learning Spanish? What was the point of all their learning, if only to watch the oil companies’ incursion? Waorani territory is huge. They're known to be fierce warriors, but I can imagine the siblings wondering, What are we going to do with our blow darts? This is seeing the world of samsara as it is and feeling, as you would, hopelessness, dejection.

Choices

Let’s imagine a branch in this story. Nemonte takes the narrow view. She succumbs to cynicism, despair, and short-term thinking. She takes a job with the oil company. She has the Spanish and the smarts to do it. She earns a nice salary. She builds a home in Quito with clean, running water. She can bring her parents in from the forest if they want to move. If not, they can have a vacation to a "civilized" place to rest their heads. She makes this choice because she bets that her future children will be safe in Quito. They can go to a Spanish-speaking school. Nemonte relinquishes her ties to the forest.

This is the path of Samsaric settling. It is what most of us are taught to do. We look for our own safety and at best, also the safety of our kids. It is an understandable decision, but not what Nemonte chooses to do. Why? My guess is that isn't possible with her worldview.

I notice that Nemonte calls We Will Be Jaguars “a memoir of my people." The book is her story, but not only her story. That sentence hints at a collective sense of self unlike a typical Western individual outlook. I'm not trying to set up a dualism of Indigenous good; Western bad; that is a reductive trap. There is too much complexity and beauty in life to fall into such simple distinctions. That's why I love long form thinking in books, and why this series will stretch across 3 posts!

But perhaps Nemonte couldn't choose her individual safety in Quito because her sense of self extends beyond her individual body. Her sense of care extends beyond her bloodlines. Her sense of responsibility rests with trees, with water, with toucans and peccary and fish. The safety of Waorani elders are her problem. Even the safety of people she has not met, who are outside her tribe, become her problem. (That's covered in Part 2, coming next week).

This is why I read the memoir as a map of the bodhsattva's path. In a post a few weeks back I described a kid I didn't know at swim class, struggling to swim. I asked how far our sense of care is supposed to extend. To our kids? To our neighborhood? How about jumping across lines of class and race? Nemonte's life story is, in part, an answer to those questions.

Thank you for reading! Part 2 publishes next week. It will chronicle the circumstances of Nemonte's transformation.

Warmly,

Sunisa

Links:

• Follow Nemonte’s work at Amazon Frontlines.

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• June 7, I’m teaching a one-day hybrid retreat on Padampa Sangye’s Instructions to Machig Lapdron. This is a Mahayana retreat open to all levels that will be about birthing this big self, our inner bodhisattva. Join us!

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. You can also give me a one-off donation through Venmo.

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Dear dharma friends,

I gave this talk in a Christian Congregational church. That was not my plan. I was in Boston for a family reunion. My husband and sons were supposed to join me, but one son got sick and my husband stayed back. Our other son made it up to join me. Come Sunday when I was due to give this dharma talk on Zoom, I was missing childcare.

We had so many moving pieces, and that’s life. Whether or not you’re a parent, there’s always circumstances changing and moving. Life is very dynamic, and sometimes life can feel more dynamic than at other times.

I texted my friend, one of the ministers of the church. Can I bring my son to do church with your daughter?

She wrote, Yes!

Said I: Can I preach from your study?

Yes again.

I’m going to have to preach on interfaith friendship! was my last text.

This minister friend and I met at a childbirth class. The first time we hung out, we got coffee in a cute town that is not particularly hip.

She said, “I’ve never been here. How do you know it?”

I said, “I’m going to come out of the closet. I’m actually a devout Buddhist. My teacher’s temple is here.” That was not first date material for me.

“That’s so interesting,” she said. “I’m a devout Christian. I’m a minister.”

This mom minister and I built our friendship on a shared spiritual commitment. Maybe building a friendship on a value is a good idea. We were in a nanny share, and then we were a COVID nanny share pod, and then we lost our nanny and we were parenting each other’s children in a COVID pod, which is a very specific intimacy.

Her daughter and my son were born almost simultaneously. She went into labor while on a walk with me. It was my first walk with a baby outside my body. I was like, “Is he going to be okay?” He was totally, completely wrapped up, an entire burrito on my body.

She said, “My stomach hurts.”

I said, “Indigestion sucks!”

It turned out to be her daughter arriving in the world.

My son was bouncing with excitement to be seeing his oldest best friend. When we arrived at the church, my son’s friend was on stage, in the choir, rehearsing. She had the biggest grin as she caught sight of my son. The congregation was at least a hundred people, and busy with the May day celebrations that were being moved inside because of rain.

My son planted himself in a chair at the back of the hall. I had a few minutes to get him settled.

The minister found us and offered to bring my kid to be near her kid at the front.

He shook his head.

“Do you want to come read in the library while I give my talk?” I asked.

He seemed kind of frozen. He pulled his hood over his head.

Uh oh, I thought. Maybe I am cancelling this dharma talk. I started the mental calculations of the working mom. Did I want to cancel this talk with five minute’s notice, and work on Mother’s Day instead? I couldn’t leave him sitting back here alone. The minister went to get ready. She looked radiant in her spring colors. The room was filling up.

My son’s friend’s grandparents walked over. They have known my baby since he was the size of a load of bread. They greeted him and said, “Why don’t you come sit with us?”

We moved to their pew. My son, hood still on, slid onto the end. I crouched down to get a look at his face. He might cry. I had 2 minutes to start time.

The grandpa put his arm around my son. “My name’s ___, and I’ve been in your backyard in California.”

“You have?” My kid turned to the grandpa.

The grandmother leaned over. “I’m ____, and I remember playing with the bubbles. Do you remember the bubbles we did under the fig tree?”

“I do!” My son’s whole body exhaled.

I gave him a hug and ran.

I was so grateful to these grandparents. They saved my bacon, and not for the first time in this wild and beautiful parenting journey. What they did is an example of particular grandparent wisdom, that ability to read the kid and extend the heart to understand that wow, this room is terrifying. My kid has never been to church. It is intimidating, of course.

There’s emotional intelligence there. There’s compassion there. There’s love there. It might be because they’ve known my kid since he was born, but I don’t think so. Maybe, but we don’t see each other often anymore.

The truth is we all have these qualities available to us. We have it in us to put our arm, maybe metaphorically, around the kid and be like, hey, come with me. Let’s talk about this thing. Then the world will get ever so slightly less frightening. And then the kid will be reminded, actually, that they’re not alone.

And we all have that innate warmth, that fire of bodhicitta in us that prompts us to say hello. It’s not going to sound like: What are you doing here? It’s more like, Hey, I was in your backyard once. I liked it.

I talk about kids a lot because I have young children. I don’t think adults are so different. Little ones go through the world with so much tenderness and courage. I genuinely think that we have that tenderness and courage too.

Adults can develop what look like sophisticated veneers to hide our tenderness, and the courage it takes for us to step into the world. I’m not sure the veneer is useful. Maybe it accounts for some part of our survival, but some of us are past survival mode now.

Our exterior shells can take the form of the habit of judgement, which creates a false distance between us and others, buffering the rawness of the world. The shell can be addictive behaviors, which try to numb us to our pain and the pain of others. We can choose somnolence, an active not-witnessing. That is endless TikTok and confining our mind’s parameters to cute pet videos (but some pet videos are fine!). These are all veils on our pristine and luminous consciousness. These habits are a hard casing around our heart.

Before I was ordained I would have been embarrassed by the number of times I use the words “heart” and “love.” I guess I have a loud teenage part! But since taking my vows and holding this living lineage, I say these words all the time. I cry when I give dharma talks. I named my organization Heart Sangha! What to say—the world is raw. The heart is tender. It takes courage to come to samsara again and again, open and honest and giving.

When I was first ordained, a psychiatrist friend said to me, with casual brilliance, “Americans have a tremendous spiritual longing.”

“You think?” I sputtered.

He grinned.

Now, I agree with him. The root question underneath many of the questions I get is: How should a person be? (with a hat tip to Sheila Heiti.) In this country of superhighways and the endless appetite for oil and the wars we wage to get it; of the myths we tell ourselves and the past we can’t confront, I truly see that yes, we have a huge, gaping spiritual longing.

Maybe instead of filling it with shopping and drama, drinking and judgement, busyness, workaholism, avoidance, disdain, Type A achievement, despair, and more, we could turn toward the hole. We want to fill it with love and compassion. Call it bodhicitta, the awakened heart. Call it God’s love. Call it decent human being.

If we can get back to this baseline we could start to tame these painful outer forces raging unchecked. We aren’t caught buying bigger cars and needing more oil; expanding forever on our shareholder value so we have to sell every more; dreaming of Mars when we live on resplendent, beautiful Earth. When we are at peace inside, we do not need to seek outer satiation.

Peace comes, in part, from practicing human decency. Extending our arm toward someone suffering. Doing our bit to help people feel less alone. Filling our hearts with love and kindness, not material goods.

There is a bedrock of human decency that is in all humanity. It is a common denominator to all of us, regardless of religious affiliation or not. It is a human potential, an ignition of the heart.

Sending love,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• June 7, I’m teaching a one-day hybrid retreat on Padampa Sangye’s Instructions to Machig Lapdron. This is a Mahayana retreat open to all levels that will be about birthing this big self, our inner bodhisattva. Join us!

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. Thank you!

Dear dharma friends,

This is a mama post. All the kids turn out okay.

I was at my son’s swim lesson. About 40 children at an indoor pool were put in different learning groups. The instructors are teenagers, and there is a grown-up head coach. There was lot of shouting. The sound echoed in the splashy atrium. The kids in my son’s group put on fins for the first time. They looked excited as they jumped into the water. One teenager got in the water at one end of the pool, and the other stood over the lane on the other side. My son’s group looked down the 25 meters. They were going to move from swimming the widths, to the full length for the first time. They started to paddle.

My son wasn’t moving much. One swift kick of a fin and you usually accelerate. I got down close to the water. He wasn’t really kicking his legs. It was more like a half-hearted doggie paddle, focusing on his hands. I shouted his name and mimed kicking. He kicked, and burst through the water. As he swam each length, his confidence built. He got faster each time and he knew it. By the end of the lesson, he was smiling underwater, crinkling his eyes, and water came into his goggles.

The teenagers in charge of our group seemed distracted. One was looking at the kids and turning to talk to his buddy as the buddy circled the pool deck. The instructor out of the water kept looking up to the ceiling. I moved to the other side of the pool. There was an elevated bleacher I hadn’t known was there. What looked to be the school’s swim team was stretching in their swimsuits.

In the water, one of the kids doing what my son had been doing in the beginning. Not really kicking, just paddling his hands. He was slowing down. He got slower. The head coach was behind a desk, behind a laptop, laughing into his phone.

I had a mental moment.

Kick off your shoes, jump in the water.

Clothes? In clothes.

This could be embarrassing.

Who are his caregivers?

He’s not my problem.

The kid was starting to sink. I jumped off the bench. The kid reached out his hands, gripped the side of the pool, and scooted himself along.

His laps were done that way for the rest of the class.

Interference

About a month ago at my gym, I was in the steam room when the heat got too much for me. I couldn’t see my hand at the end of my arm. I stumbled to the door. I remembered that there was a woman still inside, at the far other end of the steam room.

“Can I turn off the steam?” I shouted.

No reply.

“DO YOU MIND IF I TURN OFF THE STEAM?”

No reply.

The woman had collapsed. I jumped out of the room, hit the OFF button, propped the door open, and shouted for help.

The front desk attendant and another woman ran over. We ran into the steam, still unable to see. The steam cleared. The woman sat at the back of the room, upright on a bench. “Is there a problem?” she said as she took her earbuds out.

I am sure I was bright red when I said, “Wow, I’m sorry.” I got dressed and hurried away.

What Do We Owe Each Other?

The swim lesson has stayed with me. The steam room has stayed with me. The question that comes to mind is: what, if anything, we owe each other?

It was embarrassing for me to make that mistake in the steam room. If I had jumped into the pool to come up to the kid’s parents sitting on the side, glancing up from their twinned phones, saying “Excuse me what are you doing?” maybe my son and I would not have gone back to the lessons. I don’t want to be an over-reactive Good Samaritan. I don’t want to be an annoying, jumpy mom. And yet.

Despite cinematic depictions, I suspect that kids do not drown while shouting and thrashing. My guess is that they get tired and stop moving. They’re going to have a little rest. By the time they have gulped water and started to panic, they’re too far underwater.

If my kid was slowing, sinking, I would want to trust that any of the fully-dressed strangers around the pool would jump in the water, even if it turned out that my son was playing some silly game. Water is scary. My reverence for the ocean is entwined with my respect for her power. I’m sorry to scare everyone reading this here. The question, to me, is how far our care is supposed to reach. Outside our body? Outside our family? Outside our race?

In some part of the world, the dominant culture cherishes the children, who thrive in the love beam of strangers on the bus, a teenager walking by with a soccer ball, the other moms in the café. That is not broadly true of the society we’ve built in the US. In our hyper-individualized culture, I could imagine getting yelled at by a parent for touching their kid, or presuming to interfere with a lesson. What if we look absurd? What if we are accused of interfering? What if we are—gulp—sued?

We may have gotten to this place incrementally, with good intentions or not, but we have ended up in a culture where we override our natural human instinct to feel responsible for one another’s wellbeing. Instead there is a hesitation that has seeped inside us like noxious gas. We default to Not My Business. We would rather hide from the potential of social awkwardness in our phones.

The Buddhist Part

Does this have anything to do with Buddhism? I think so.

There’s a special moment when you can become a Buddhist. It’s when we take our Buddhist vows. To be clear, we don’t covert anyone. At heart, we are a religion without boundaries, a group for all living beings, and the more we think ourselves special, the less we embody the dharma.

Buddhism is an opt-in situation, and even if you are native Buddhist, as I am, I recommend taking your vows again as an adult. This is stepping into the dharma consciously, when you have done the homework of finding a teacher, a sangha, and a lineage that suits you. Then it is a fully adult choice to decide that this is the spiritual path for you, and not default inherit a religious culture from your parents and community. That is beautiful, and, that keeps a person in the position of a child.

There is a ceremony when you can become Buddhist, if you choose to.

In brief, first you meditate on the mind of disenchantment. You are turning away from our samsaric refuges in material culture, in sensory pleasures, in chasing the illusions of career, ambition, success, to become homeless within Samsara. This is an intense sensation to sit with.

Then you take refuge in the Buddha as the potential for awakening within you; the dharma as the instructions—with special gratitude for not having to bumble through and figure this out yourself! and the sangha, the enlightened community. It may be everyone who has walked with you on the path, the people witnessing your vows in that moment, and even your healed ancestors.

My beautiful teacher Anam Thubten says that a person can give themselves the Buddhist vows. That looks like: you ask the mountains to be witness, the trees, the ocean. There is a splendor to that. If you choose to take your vows from a living teacher, especially one holding a living lineage, it has a different kind of majesty. By taking vows from a person, you are joining your life, across time, human to human, back 2,600 years.

Breathe in that perspective! Sit with the awe and humility of that simple fact. Teacher to student, practitioner to sincere practitioner, we have been asking the question of how should a person be for a long time.

This is a path that everyone is welcome to join. Women, when that was controversial. Poor people, when it was radical. Many Dalits, formerly known as Untouchables, are Buddhist. This may have more to do with the fact that Dalits were welcome to join than because Buddhism has anything superior to offer.

Once ordained in the lineage of the Buddha Shakyamuni, there is a symbolic haircut. We give something to get something.

And then we take our bodhisattva’s vows. That is what I want to focus on. We vow not to run away from the sorrows of Samsara. We vow to take our struggles as the path. We vow to serve all sentient beings without bias. The most important promise is ahimsa, non-violence. We try (and fail, and try again) to have non-violent intention and action, as much as possible.

Why We Take Our Vows

The moment we take the Bodhisattva’s vows, we make a promise to our biggest self. We cannot wait for perfect circumstances. We are ready right now to embody our biggest self.

I cry when I give this part of the talk. I find it wildly hopeful, heart-burstingly immense, that people line up burning with impatience to be of service.

As with all vows, they hold us to our commitments even when it’s inconvenient. Even when no one is looking. Even when we may look a fool.

There is no perfect moment to jump in the water. We will never have all the data that we are not going to make a mistake and get laughed at. If we are sincere in our Bodhisattva’s vows, we are okay sacrificing the flimsy edifice of that risk, because we are dialed into our heart.

Most of us have been trained to succeed within Maslow’s hierarchy. We are automatically committed to our own safety and security. Even if we get to ascend, we can become obsessed with our enviability, which is the realm of the Jealous Gods (to mix metaphors). Even if we study Dzogchen, the highest of the nine yanas (vehicles) of the Nyingma school, it can be done for an especially shiny spiritual badge, which means we are still within the narrow self, the ego.

The heart aches in this world of suffering. It longs to be of service. We take our vows because we are committed to letting ourselves fall open into an ocean of love and compassion and equanimity.

It is a nice feeling to go in this direction, can I tell you? It is not hard at all. We let go. It is a transcendent, profound, sacred letting go.

We say, I’m going to promise myself that I will not abide in narrow limits. I will not play the small game. This means that even if you’re in the most competitive meeting room invented, among people who are like: I’m achieving. Are you achieving? You don’t look like you’re achieving. You are going to notice that internally and go: Ah. Unfortunately and fortunately, I’ve taken my Bodhisattva vows, and I am here to express something different than the hyper-capitalist mode that we seem to be living in.

Pillars of Safety

Some of us have had encounters with people who are Bodhisattvas. They are usually inspiring. In my mind James Baldwin was a bodhisattva, Lucille Clifton was a bodhisattva, and Audre Lorde. I have read much of their writing. Their immense, heart-forward racial consciousness has changed me.

The bodhisattvas in your life now and from the past may be why you’re here. They are not only Buddhists. You can usually feel when you’re near a bodhisattva. Particularly if you were a child and they were your teacher, your social worker, your caseworker, your neighbor— there’s a feeling of safety, a melting-with-love around people like this. These people may have been the pillars of safety in your world. Sometimes those people have been a refuge for us in ways that have been startling because we didn’t do anything to earn that loving treatment.

We weren’t a “good child,” or we weren’t their child, or we weren’t smart, beautiful or good at sports. Still we were treated like the most cherished human being. That’s how you know you were in the orbit of a Bodhisattva.

Everyone needs to feel safe. Everyone needs to feel loved. The world is not prioritizing that sort of human development right now. When we are adults, the biggest thing we can do is to commit to being a pillar of safety for others. In fact that is the mature, evolved, sacred thing to do. To be safe for everything alive—human, animal, trees, fish, all of life.

Once we take our vows, we say: I am here to be a conscious member of Samsara.

I am here to be conscious.

I wish you luck on the path. It is a good one! 🙏🏼

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work.

[the Wheel of Samsara, Himalayan Art Resources]

Dear dharma friends,

I recently had the chance to study a profound text, and I came across a paragraph that hit me like a lightning bolt. I knew I wanted to give a dharma talk about it. Here is the paragraph:

“Samsara is established through self-grasping and the appearances of happiness and suffering.”

What stopped me were the words “established” and “appearances.” Let’s take “established.” We know that to be in samsara is to go around in circles, in the fish bowl of our wants/needs/desires. When we are given them we find that we want/need/desire ever more, and better! Faster! With less effort on our part. This is the samsaric mind that leads to Amazon’s market valuation and the birth of AI.

When we don’t get what we desire, we are frustrated. Something is wrong with us, and we go down the road to self-loathing. Or something is wrong with the person not giving us the thing, and anger is born, hatred is born. We can become conscripted into being our ego’s best friend. We are a true believer. We merge with ego’s grumbling mutter about everyone else. This is not healthy.

This is the starting point of an understanding of suffering. Samsara is the condition of being human. We could call it the water, as David Foster Wallace would say, in which we swim.

What I like about the paragraph above is that it tilts practitioners in a direction that sets us up to succeed. The fact that samsara is “established”; that it is not merely there, enduring, as the backdrop of our world. Established creates a sense of false backdrop, like in The Truman Show. We are reminded when we read that “samsara is established” that there is a built element to our suffering. In Buddhism we aren’t saying that some one built the painted sky dome that hems us in. We build it ourselves, every day. We are the architects of our suffering.

If that’s the case, it is hopeful. If we can build the thing, then we can surely take it down.

How?

I suffer. You suffer. We suffer. In what language shall we conjugate this verb? Is there really a way in which we don’t suffer? It’s the next line that tells us. We suffer through self-grasping.

This notion is the essence of the Mahayana. We call it the Perfection of Wisdom, Prajnaparamita. Wisdom is the 6^th of the 6 Paramitas, the 6 Transcendent Practices of a Bodhisattva. In Vajrayana the method to cut through self-grasping happens in Chod, and there are many other beautiful methods. Machig Lapdron talked about the 4 Maras of Chod. While mara means demon, we are not talking about a literally apparition that will rise and haunt us. Many people make a mistake and think that way. We are speaking about psychological forces like fear, or the kleshas, poisons. There is a klesha mara. There is a Mara of Self Concepts. This is the idea that I am good, virtuous, smart, whatever. Once we have installed a sense of self, we cling to it. We instinctively defend it. We contort ourselves into all sorts of positions we wouldn’t consciously put ourselves into. The mistake happens in the beginning. We have taken ourselves to be solid, continuous, as in permanent, and real. We’ve reified ourselves.

There all sorts of ideas we have about ourselves that we hold to in extreme measures. Take aging. As someone in a female body, I marvel at the pressure women are under to pretend that we aren’t aging. Everyone knows that we are aging. We are human, and so, subject to time. But we are supposed to be part of the *wink* *wink* agreement somehow that time isn’t working on us. How extraordinary!

What strange samsara is it, that we are expected to go under a knife, in plastic surgery. This has become normalized to a degree that startles me. At the same time, many people tell me they don’t have what it takes to sit on a cushion. When you put these two statements into conversation it is pretty funny. A cushion, for a half hour? Versus a knife?

We seem to put effort into the superficial, and much less effort into our inner development. We have it backwards. The outer grasping makes us suffer; any inner work we do can lead to loosening, which could give us space. Inner work will start to undo the knots of samsara.

No bananas; yes chocolate chips

Happiness and suffering come for us in myriad ways, big and small. What I like about the paragraph is that again, it poises the practitioner for some big realizations because of the word “appearance.” It is the appearance of happiness and suffering. That is a reminder that even happiness isn’t real. It evaporates just as you think you have it!

Even our suffering changes. When we are in the most dire misery, often we have assumed that our suffering is permanent and solid. We are sure. We know. When I teach on this I make a fist. Suffering is a contraction so strong we might not notice that the pain or sensation has already passed. We get caught. The nature of life is change (see the 4 Noble Truths). When we hold onto suffering, we make the pain worse.

Here is an extended example. I was recently in meditation retreat. I got to slow down and watch my mind, which is one of the many reasons to do retreats as regularly as you can manage. Life as a householder, especially one with young kids, is doing 100 on a highway. In retreat we’re going a leisurely 10 miles, maybe. This means we have a better chance to watch our mind’s swells and slams. We can watch our mind contort, try to hide, argue, and wiggle away. Just watching is bringing awareness. With awareness, over time, the mind can relax. If you are able to fill your mind with love as you watch, you’re golden.

As on many retreats, everyone was put into a work rota. Immediately, I noticed my mind rank the jobs, worst to best. Toilet cleaning—please no! Coffee-making—please yes! I was put on kitchen work. Again, my mind ranked the options. Scrubbing pots, please no! Dipping dishes in sanitizing solution— please yes!

Then I caught sight of a pack of chocolate chips on the open pantry shelves. Were we going to get cookies? Or brownies? Or some other thing? My mind began to speculate. This was fun. This was fodder. But the next day came and there was no sign of chocolate. Despair! What if the chips were for the cooks? Or the next retreat?

I am exaggerating. I don’t see my mind swing over these things anymore, but it did. It’s common and loveable to have such thoughts.

I’m going to make up examples now--

In the meditation hall, there is always that one person that you hope will not sit next to you. They will inevitably be smelly, or kick your cushion, or doze off, or try and talk to you. And they will sit next to you. That’s how life works. So you stew. You might bring the chocolate chips into every meditation across the days, dwelling on whether TODAY IS THE DAY FOR CHOCOLATE. Or you might be meditating on the bag of bananas. You hate the smell of bananas. Are they really going to put bananas out? You might gag. You might be sick. Should you write a note to the retreat coordinators saying NO BANANAS? It is crucial that you find a pen and paper. Halt the retreat! You have something important to do!

You get where I’m going…

These are small examples of how we are pulled by hope and aversion, by happiness and suffering. The small examples work with the big examples too. It’s useful to start small with our noticing, and laugh. I am a big fan of laughing with kindness. Life in samsara is funny all the time.

We only need to remember that we are within the “appearance” of each happiness and suffering to be liberated. The instruction is to treat life as a bubble, like a dream. Real but not apparent. Like a rainbow. A beautiful display of your mind that evaporates if you reach out to touch it.

When the chocolate chips arrive, they are in the banana bread. You may be delirious with happiness, or find that you didn’t like the baked banana either. When the bananas are set out, you may gag but then feel okay. Or you find that the smell doesn’t carry in such a large dining hall. While the person sitting next to you has snored and kicked your cushion in every session (I am genuinely making this up), by the end of the retreat you will turn to them with eyes shining with love. Retreat is always a journey. You’ve been on a journey together. As fellow passengers, you are united.

Wisdom is Earned

Samsara is established when we give in to the normal currents of happiness and suffering, when we don’t remember that they are impermanent. If we can remember, we can enjoy the happiness, and be equanimous when the happiness changes. When we are suffering, we can acknowledge our hardship, and have a spacious buffer around it, because we remember that everything changes. If we can make peace with aging, we are better set up for dying, an inevitability that comes for us all.

Dignity, grace, the luminousness that wise elders attain as they reach their transition—this comes from a lifetime of practice. The accumulation of hours can’t be faked, bottled, marketed, sold. There is no succinct reel that will give us the shortcut. AI can spit out bullet points on the Paramitas, Dzogchen, the Heart Sutra, and still it will miss the point (it can be inaccurate, by the way—be careful).

It is a human connection that allows us to receive the transmission of dharma, which is a transmission of wisdom and love. Human to human, we understand our tricky foibles. Human to human, we feel, and so can trust, the warmth of each other’s love. With such inspiration, we arise in our wisdom and liberate each other.

It’s been happening for thousands of years this way. I trust and hope it will happen for a thousand more.

I am wishing you much diligence in your practice, with a bow,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work!

Dear dharma friends,

This talk is part of the continuation on our work at Heart Sangha on the 5 poisons, or kleshas, which are anger, pride, greed, jealousy and ignorance. The transformation of these forces inside ourself can bring profound relief. There is a skillful way to work with the 5 poisons.

Why Work with Poisons At All?

One way of summarizing the 3 vehicles of Buddhism is through this metaphor: in the Theravada a person is walking through a forest and encounters a poisonous tree. They know this because they have memorized the rules that allows them to look at the bark, the shape of the leaves, the smell of the tree, and go—Oh yes! This tree is poisonous. I will go around it and continue on my way.

In Mahayana a person is walking through a forest and encounters a poisonous tree. They sit down and meditate in front of it. They may stay in front of the tree for their whole life, warning everyone who wanders by not to touch the tree, climb it, eat from it, because the tree is poisonous. This is the way of the Bodhisattva, who is of service to the world.

In Vajrayana, a person walks into a forest. They see the poisonous tree. They remember the words of their perfect teacher (that’s a shoutout to Patrul Rinpoche), who taught them that this tree is poisonous, but if you apply the exact method and pound the bark, boil it for four-and-a-half minutes, and drink the concoction cold while facing East, there is wisdom in the brew.

This reads like a bad joke and is of course an oversimplification. Buddhist walks into a bar, etc. But I find the metaphor useful because it contains so much about the view, conduct and fruition of each stream of the dharma. In the context of the 5 poisons, it illustrates that in the Vajrayana we do not want to push away our pain. We are taught that we don’t have to. It is the very pain of our kleshas that will liberate us.

Notice that in the Vajrayana the teacher becomes important. The tree really is poisonous. It can harm. Only with a heart connection to a real teacher might a student be trained, and have the devotion, to follow the steps of transformation. This is important.

Fear Is Empty of Fear

Where is fear with the mandala of the 5 poisons? Why isn’t fear, of all the terrifying states, a klesha in its own right?

In my understanding, fear isn’t a poison because it isn’t truly an emotional state. It is a biological response that rises up in the body. We are taught ways to work with it, but this is slightly different than the transformation of poisons. Anger and hatred, for example, are worked with the phurba (ritual dagger) of love. When anger is running through your body, if you can remember that you love that person, you metaphorically drive the love stake through the object of anger and boom: mirror-like wisdom arises. You are able to see things as they are, in that clear-seeing way of anger, without having to use anger, to indulge it, to feed the fire of your hatred in order to get to a boundary or clear-seeing.

With fear we cut through it right away. If you are familiar with the Prajnaparamitra, perhaps through reciting the Heart Sutra, you cut through the fear by remembering that fear is empty of fear. You use emptiness to cut through fear.

There is no solidity to fear. That immense, terrifying, I’m-sure-this-is-here-and-I-am-in-danger block that can occupy our bodies? It is a projection.

If we are firmly on the Buddhist path, I recommend summoning up this wisdom and cutting through. Use fear to fuel your evolution. Start with small fears and work up to bigger ones. Maybe snakes are empty of snake; can divorce be empty of alone-stigma?

If you are newer to Buddhism, firmly not Buddhist, or haven’t studied the Prajnaparamitra yet, I recommend laughing at your fear.

Fear Is A Frog!

If we can laugh at something, it is a form of cutting through. The projection of fear, which has such solidity and immensity, loses its luster. I am thinking of the Harry Potter books where the kids have to generate a memory of love (I think?) to bellow: Expecto Patronum!

Similarly, the apparition of fear will lose its ghostly power if you can laugh. My teacher Anam Thubten has said that Tibetans tend to be scared of frogs. So a typical Tibetan may, in North America, start hopping about or shouting if they see a frog. And a typical Westerner may whip around, saying What? Scorpion? Snake? Because those are the things that can bother a typical Westerner. And seeing a wee green frog, they might laugh.

This is a chance for all of us to remember that all fear is a frog. It is almost random what we consider scary and what we don’t.

There are plenty of poisonous frogs around, yet it is spiders that are commonly thought to be scary. When I lived in Australia a friend said, “Can you stop touching everything until you learn what is safe and not?” I learned that there really are tree barks that can cause pain. Nature is humbling!

The fear response isn’t always linked to real biological danger. There is a cultural code for fear. There is an ancestral code for fear. And there is a personally-informed, trauma-response for fear.

If we can laugh at our fear at all, we start to loosen the grip of fear.

Motivation

Going through life ruled by fear can lead to a very narrow life. We can do better.

At first avoiding the things that scare us seems like a decent compromise. Maybe the fear looks small. I won’t walk on any storm drains in a city. Because you could fall through, duh! But then you are in Paris and hopping around from one part of the sidewalk to another. And you are sure that you look painfully, shamefully ridiculous. So you stop going to Paris. On your next big wedding anniversary you nix the trip to Spain. You’d rather go to the bed and breakfast in the next town over, you assure your spouse. It’s fine! But even that sweet town has storm drains and everyone is looking at you thread back and forth, a little OCD, they can all tell, and also that time you scraped your knees on a storm drain and were dangling half-in and your parent was nowhere in sight—you haven’t told anyone about that. So you decide to stay home. Home is a good place for you.

Somehow, in not too much time, life has narrowed to a needle’s eye. The compromise is worth it. But your kids want to go to new places. Your friends are teeming with life. What’s wrong with you? You start criticizing others. You start believing, with this online group you found, that only people who look like you are not judging you. With them you can be safe.

And then in not too long you arrive at a place you don’t recognize. You are an anger ball hiding the fear inside, which has not diminished from your efforts but grown. It’s kind of incredible! You re-double your efforts to control life. You control yourself. You divorce your spouse. They don’t understand. You become more reclusive. You stop seeing your kids, who keep trying to get you out of what they think is a phase. But this is your life. Is this what they mean by the golden years?

I made up that example. You see where I’m going. The truth is that we all have fear. Sometimes it keeps us from doing stupid things and harming ourself and others. Most of the time, fear is a projection of the mind. It’s a freeze in the body. It’s a return to the animal self. This is normal, but we don’t have to live there. We can work with fear too. Laughing at it deflates fear’s self-seriousness. Fear is a tyrant. It’s not good at facing humor. There is no roll with it. And so we can use that.

Good luck on this journey. I am here for questions.

With a big bow,

Sunisa

Ps. It’s kind of interesting to take a tour through how much I have written about anger. Phew! I am not kidding when I say I work with anger myself. It is clearly a preoccupation. Further reading is here:

• Anger, Pain and Liberation

• The Cyclone of Anger and Self-loathing

• Anger

• Living in the Uh-Oh— this is really about fear, with an extended, personal example.

• What is the Vajrayana? might be a useful post to revisit.

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work!

[The wrathful dark goddess Krodhakali. In Buddhist cosmology, we are in Kaliyuga, the age of Kali.]

Dear dharma friends,

I just taught two retreats back-to-back. Hello again!

The residential retreat was about a portion of Chod where the 5 kleshas, or poisons, are transformed into 5 types of wisdom. This happens in something called the Dakini Dance. I love every part of this metaphor. Naked female figures made of light, dancing in ecstasy as they subdue 5 toxic substances? Sign me up.

The 5 poisons or afflictive emotions are anger, pride, greed, jealousy and ignorance. There is a lot more to this whole transformation business. Enough to fill a weekend residential retreat and then some. But I want to share small slices of the material publicly, widely, because there is a lot of misunderstanding happening here, and also potential for awakening right here in this topic.

Anger

We had a lot of questions in retreat about anger. In the Dakini Mandala, anger is one of the poisons. Certainly it’s a major force right now on all sides of the political spectrum. Remember that righteousness is a form of anger. I see a lot of hand waving about how anger has wisdom, and your anger is wise. To clarify: there is no wisdom in anger. Absolutely not.

I want to double click on that. This is why we need human teachers. This is why we pass lineage very carefully, human teacher to human teacher. Maybe there’s a way you can read the dharma and think you’ve wound yourself into a pretzel and discovered that your anger is wise. Follow the road of that anger and you do not become liberated. Actually, you become a crunched-up, righteous ball full of pride.

You can tell because you’re pushing people away more and more. You might feel better, you think, but the measure will be: are you becoming filled with love and compassion? No. Righteousness doesn’t fill you with love and compassion. Righteousness is anger and judgment. So all this stuff about the wisdom in your anger? My response is oh, no, no, no.

Look, I know anger. Luckily for everyone here— I get to dance with it a lot. I will be talking about anger a lot. I think when we have anger, it’s a clue, just as all of the five poisons we were talking about is a clue. With anger particularly, there’s something to see. That’s not the same as saying it’s wise.

You’re not going to follow your anger. You’re not going to indulge in your anger. Particularly if you’re female, particularly if you are a person of color, when we notice anger in the body it might be an invitation to a boundary. Usually there’s a boundary needed.

I notice a lot of anger in me. I’m curious about what I might need to see. But that’s not the same as saying my anger has wisdom. Once it has wisdom, if that’s what we’re telling ourselves, we start to indulge in it. We listen to it. “My anger is telling me to hate these people.” Usually we don’t admit that to ourselves, but actually our anger is saying something like that in beautiful egoic language. If you’ve been in the dharma a while, it’s going to be full of dharma terminology. But essentially you will notice that it’s saying something like: my anger is telling me to hate these people and that it’s okay. I get a pass.

That’s funny. You do not get a pass. That is not what the dharma is saying. It’s a mistake that I see getting made a lot. Anger, pride, greed, jealousy, and ignorance are not wise in and of themselves. The transformation of these poisons births wisdom. Note the distinction.

Do not make this subtle but profound mistake. It could mean years of your life going down a klesha rabbit hole. Not fun for you or anyone around you. This can happen not just with anger, but with any of the poisons. You could do it with pride too. Righteousness has a tinge of pride. Whenever we give ourselves a pass with one of these poisons, we’re indulging in a poison. That’s why I like calling them poisons. It is not ambiguous language.

Pain

Pain is normal. It is part of the quality of saṃsara. We go through periods of pain. Sometimes there are long periods of pain. It’s likely that if you’re someone who has a regular Buddhist practice you are right now in pain and trying everything, or you’ve gone through a significant pain period. If you’re coming to the temple then I am impressed. There are a lot of things to do on a Sunday morning that aren’t sitting in Padma Od temple! Usually when people are there with me, they’ve found motivation in the pain of saṃsara.

Pain is normal, but it can lead us to reactivity. When we have no mind training—and I don’t mean of the head, I mean of the heart— we can get more and more reactive. Then we’re like, What’s wrong with me? I’m hurting everyone.

Most of us are taught to deny pain and to hold onto it. We pretend it’s not happening and we hold it. That makes the pain worse. Unfortunately it will make us more reactive.

There get to be levels of pain that we are unable to deny and hold onto, and then it starts to spurt out without control. This is when we traumatize other people. Even if we’re trying to hold it as best we can. If there’s enough pain—live long enough, and there might be—there are circumstances, life situations, when it’s coming out of you like fireworks and you’re sort of helpless. You become a firewheel of the poisons. Whether that’s showing up as anger or some of the other poisons, you can recognize that you’re really hurting people and you start to be like, What am I to do?

Instead of denying the pain and holding onto it simultaneously, instead, we want to acknowledge the pain.

Oh, I’m feeling pain. This is pain. When we can acknowledge the pain happening in our body to ourselves, and if we particularly can do that with compassion,

Wow, I think I’m feeling quite a lot of pain. That hurts—and slow down... That hurt. Oh my goodness. You can feel your own body relax and start to let the pain go.

This is actually how we process pain into sensation and then out.

The processing of psychotherapeutic language is the wrong thing to do from a Buddhist perspective. In Buddhism we have learned that it’s not that helpful to talk about the pain. Then you can make the pain real.

This is how that looks: We’re denying we’re in pain in the body, and then we’re holding onto the story, usually because I’m processing it very well by being like, “So-and-so did this to me, and then it hurt, and now I’m angry, and now I have a right to be angry and da da da.”

We’re actually making it hurt more. We’re helping the pain solidify inside us. We are giving ourselves a pain body.

The Body Digests When You Fill it with Love

From a Buddhist perspective you want to acknowledge the pain. I’m feeling this certain sensation in the body. Acknowledging whatever that feels like in the body for you in that moment, precisely and honestly.

And then being like, Aw, I’m in pain. Aw! Give yourself a flood of heart love 💕💕💕💕💕💕💕 You are in critical need of an infusion of love and compassion.

Your body will metabolize the pain. You don’t have to be like, I’m so right and they hurt me so bad and here’s the story of how they hurt me. Fill in the blank. Don’t do that. It doesn’t actually help.

If you just acknowledge sensation and give yourself love. It can sound like: it’s really hard to move around the world with this type of fist in the stomach. It’s really hard to move around the world with this type of tenderness in the heart. Maybe I can take care of myself. I want to do that. I’m going to do that. Look at me taking care of myself.

You’re giving yourself what you need to metabolize the pain and to let it go. It is the nature of pain to move and change. All pain eventually will move. Often we’re doing the wrong thing and sealing it in our body. We’re trying to bury pain inside ourselves.

I even like to pretend I’m speaking to my toddler when I’m speaking with myself. It is a good tone to adopt! Please pretend you have a toddler that you want to cover with kisses. That sounds like this—

Oh, what’s happening? Oh, does that hurt, baby?

I have a working theory that we all need that tone. That actually we’re incredibly tender, fragile, mushy little beings looking for love. Give up pretending that we’re sophisticated adults. Better to pretend we’re SUPER loving parents, the perfect parents, the primordial Buddha parents that we maybe never got. That’s okay. We can give it to ourselves and then the pain will move.

It’s a big shift that is luckily not that hard. You treat all pain as a sacred opportunity to wake up to a new way of relating to it.

Pain Circuit Conductors

When we hold so much pain in the body, the accrual of that quality over time leads to us spurting poisons and we become sort of tyrannical, unable to hold ourselves together. We’re trying to give our pain to other people, whether we know it or not. We’re trying to set other people on fire. This is a picture of a society. Collective karma looks like this.

I wonder where I could be talking about? Not us in America!

In the end, we must begin by working with our own pain. We stop conducting our pain so it doesn’t harm everyone in our relational field, particularly those who are in constant contact with us—our family, probably. This is the transformation of pain.

We are built to be liberated.

What?

Yes.

Anger, pain, and fear are here in Samsara so we can practice and be liberated. We can treat them as trailheads, in Internal Family Systems speak, as opportunities to do our vital work.

Kaliyuga as Opportunity

I wanted to end by talking about this age we’re in. Kaliyuga. I think we should reality-check some of our expectations for this age. From the Buddhist perspective, it’s called Kali Yuga. Yuga means age. Kali—the goddess, Krodha Kali, the wrathful dark one. She is the image at the top of this post.

We could spend all our time reporting the news to one another and saying, Can you believe that? But then we wouldn’t be effective bodhisattvas. Surprise, outrage, fear—all of that is a form of naïveté that is paralyzing. Let’s just cut through all that. This is the age of Kali dancing. We can expect quite a lot of turbulence.

In this time, the conditions of our own awakening will be fear, anger, hatred—huge turbulent waves of it. Let’s shake hands with reality. Then the question becomes: What are we going to do about it?

I think of Elizabeth Matthis Namgyel. If you have the chance to hear her teach in person, do. She has no time for sentimental hand-wringing. A lot of the female teachers are heroes of my heart. Khandro Rinpoche. Jetsun Tenzin Palmo. I notice— they are all very tough.

The presiding deity of this age, Krodha Kali, is wrathful in form. She is not White Tara. She’s not even Green Tara. There are no flowers. Kali is flames and skulls and knives. Read the metaphor. She has fangs and three eyes. Whoa. What I read from Kali is: in this time, the transformation of Samsara is going to take a powerful dharma.

If you are going to arise into your compassionate incarnation, you know what? Be prepared for some strong medicine. That’s the dharma medicine meeting the age.

If you’re really looking out at the world, we don’t need to wring our hands. Or we can do a little bit, but then we’re done. Because hand-wringing, and friend “can-you-believe-this” phone calls don’t help anyone. The sky continues to fall. We need to accept reality, take a deep breath, and say: okay. Let’s go.

What am I going to do about it?

Thank you,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work!

“As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence — as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.”

- Leo Tolstoy, Letters From One

Dear Dharma Friends,

Buddhists talk a lot about this precious human life. It’s because humans have the capacity to understand the tapestry that we’re within, and from that we can choose what to do in our actions. Animals cannot do this.

Choice. It turns out to be the most hopeful thing about us. We can have some years of somnolence where we are consuming as much as we can, and maybe we are callous to the destructive capacity of our actions. We go through that. And then in the same lifetime, we can also arise with this profound, no. I will not do that not again.

Ashoka the Great

Have people seen the flag of India? There’s a dharma wheel on it. India is the birthplace of Buddhism, but it is not a Buddhist nation. Why would they put a dharma wheel on their flag? That is the dharma chakra of Ashoka. He built hospitals for humans and animals, highways, and he created these pillars, on which were carved edicts of the dharma. Nonviolence, ahimsa. Compassion. At Heart Sangha we were recently gifted a small replica of the lion pillars of Ashoka. He is celebrated for creating the first social welfare program in the world.

How did Ashoka decide to be a Buddhist king?

He wasn’t raised a Buddhist and he didn’t study with the Buddha. He became Buddhist right as the Buddha was dying. I find this story interesting because Ashoka was a king at first known for his brutality. He invaded another kingdom called Kalinga. The invasion is known for how many Kalingans died and by what brutal methods. The fields were more gruesome than ever. It was a total slaughter. And so Ashoka was first known as a violent ruler. The story goes that it was on the battlefield as Ashoka surveyed the new territory that he had conquered when he had a realization. It was, I never want to kill anything again.

It was seeing everything that had been wrought in his name, everything that he had done, that changed him. Ashoka said, no more. Out of that, he studied Buddhism and he became the first dharma raja, Ashoka the great. He had pillars carved with lions and dharma wheels, saying: this is what the empire of Ashoka is doing. Everyone who breaks this is breaking the rules. We are not eating any animals, we are not killing people. That’s why it’s Ashoka’s dharma wheel on India’s flag.

This is a hopeful story. Ashoka and we are connected. We’re just human. We can be living quite unconsciously. Ashoka’s job would’ve been to expand the territory and secure the borders--- language we hear these days. But he looked around him with humility. He let the truth of the suffering he’d caused touch his heart.

Count Leo Tolstoy

Another example I wanted to give is Leo Tolstoy, whom I find to be endlessly fascinating. He is my favorite writer. Tolstoy was a count, born into the nobility. He was sent into the Caucasus with Russian troops for war. While there, they subdued the Caucasus, and that meant imposing empire on peoples there. They also deforested parts of the beautiful mountains and the Steppes.

Fast forward some decades and Leo Tolstoy writes this amazing novella called Hadji Murat. It is Tolstoy’s last work of fiction. Boy, does he go out in a blaze. What Tolstoy does in 1000+ pages of War and Peace he nails in this perfect novella. Tolstoy witnesses the hypocrisy of empire, the cost of war. The narrator takes a searing look at how the cast of characters, Muslim and Russian, go at each other. This novella anticipates and humanizes so many conflicts: Israel and Gaza is what comes to mind when you read it now.

I imagine how Tolstoy’s time in the Caucasus stayed with him. Over the decades as he turned what he had done over in his mind, his natural human empathy, the warmth of love and compassion, compelled Tolstoy to write Hadji Murat. Tolstoy was feeling his human kinship to the people he subdued. It took decades, but in the span of the same lifetime Tolstoy came to wonder, What was it like for these people when we swept through?

Russian troops deforested parts of the Caucasus. By the time War and Peace became a bestseller, Tolstoy used some of the proceeds of that amazing book to plant trees on his estate. Tolstoy became connected to the trees.

Another example: Tolstoy liberated his serfs. Why? He was a great fiction writer. In my opinion, the greatest. His capacity for observation and compassion must have been tremendous. He noticed what it must have been like for the serfs. Those were slaves. Then he couldn’t keep them, as a conscious human being. He couldn’t not-see what he was doing.

Tolstoy became a vegetarian. He decided we cannot eat animals. We cannot own people. We cannot cut down trees. He associated these acts with God and not the Russian Orthodox God, which also got him in trouble. He was a rabble rouser in every respect.

This is what we are all capable of. Reflecting on the chaos world we’ve built and changing course. Deciding we will act differently.

In Tolstoy’s later life he abandoned fiction, which is sad to me. He became a religious leader. Some of what he espoused is strange, and some deeply inspiring. His gospel of love and living simply touched the heart of a young lawyer from South Africa who wrote to Tolstoy asking about this new philosophy.

That lawyer moved to India, where he took his place in non-violence protest. The lawyer was Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi, of course, went on to inspire Martin Luther King. I recommend reading the Tolstoy/Gandhi correspondence. What I got from reading the letters is that the forces of love, compassion, non-violence— in short, deciding to be a bodhisattva— these are contagious too.

In Tolstoy’s shoes, in Ashoka’s, perhaps many of us would have ignored what we did in our careless youth, what we were doing when we followed orders. If we’re slightly more reflective we might think back and feel shame but not act any different. But I give two examples of people who had the courage and integrity to seize their precious human life and change. We are all capable of birthing a new self, just as Tolstoy and Ashoka did.

I like to imagine those two shaking hands across time: two mere humans, two great bodhisattvas.

It is a gift to be human. A simple truth worth realizing deeply.

We want to wake up to the opportunities we have right now, while we are still alive, and capable of action.

Thank you,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work!

[a garuda]

Dear Dharma Friends,

My dharma talks keep getting better after I give them, lol. In the temple yesterday I spoke about the Two Accumulations of Merit (panya) and Wisdom (jnanna). It’s a way of re-organizing the 6 Paramitas into the metaphor of a bird with two wings. Now I am filled with thoughts that I didn’t share. Luckily, here we are on a written platform, my first love and training.

The metaphor of a bird is useful to contemplate because we are often temperamentally more inclined to be stronger at the Panya or Jnanna side of the Paramitas. The idea is that you want to be balanced. We need two wings and the body of a bird to fly.

The Paramitas are:

1. Dana

2. Sila

3. Krishanti

4. Virya

5. Dhyana

6. Prajna

In the West, very broadly speaking, I meet people who have read many books and sat with many masters, but have yet to have the humility to practice dana, the first paramita, or don’t think much about right speech and right action, which is sila (ethical conduct). They are the folks who announce that they’re studying Dzogchen only, and only with a master, and not one who is taking new students any more, certainly not. (O, pride!)

These people will want to work on the accumulation of merit, panya, which cannot be skipped. This encompasses dana, sila, and krishanti, tolerance. What comes to mind is the warmth of a fire, versus a TV playing an image of a fire. When one has integrated generosity, ethical conduct and tolerance into one’s practice there is a crackling warmth that is felt by everyone else.

You know how we say children know a kind person, and animals know a kind person? That’s because we all can feel a truly kind person. That crackling fire of effortless warmth comes from the Accumulation of Merit.

If you think of time you may have spent in the presence of the great dharma masters, you will notice that it is probably their presence that struck you. I’ve been physically near the Dalai Lama twice in my life, and it wasn’t what he was saying that I carry around with me. It is the tremendous warmth pouring off him. Being near the Dalai Lama felt like being loved in a way that was impossible up to that moment. He wasn’t even talking to me! It wasn’t a romantic love feeling. I was anchored in a sense of limitless compassion. Experiencing that made me go, Woah. What is THAT? I can say that my curiosity and falling-in-love-with-that-feeling kept me on the path through the long, dry years. I kept going in part because of my lived, body experience of the Dalai Lama’s presence.

No matter how many books you’ve read, empowerments you’ve gained, and khathas you have been given back by a master— do not skip working to open your heart with generosity. Do not skip disciplining your mind. Do not skip developing a toleratance for samsara, instead of trying to optimize for your comfort. These are all crucial steps on the path. These are the foundation of decency, and a quality that is disappearing in this wild time.

To me the accumulation of merit makes one not only a decent human being but a grown up. If you have integrated generosity, ethical conduct and tolerance, then congratulations: you are a human adult.

In Asia I sink with relief into a broad culture of generosity, ethical conduct, and tolerance, but people might not know why they are saying a prayer; they might not be meditating (hard to do when meditation halls in temples are only for monks); and they might not have ever heard a dharma talk, which can be perceived as เชย, outdated— as in, a peasant thing. Thailand is all about status these days, and dharma talks seem to have very little status.

These people will want to work on the accumulation of Jnanna, which involves dhyana, meditation, and prajna, wisdom.

It is a kind of putting oneself forward as a thinking human, as a full citizen, into the dharma stream. It involves interrogating the teacher and the teachings, asking questions, and deciding for themselves if they want to follow the path of the dharma. This is radical and uncomfortable when you are coming from a culture of orthodoxy, hierarchy, and subservience for women.

But let’s be honest. The dharma is uncomfortable. Waking from the somnolence is uncomfortable. It is the opposite of Netflix and chill. It is not bingeing on anything, but engaging the mental and physical faculties to plow a way through the snow all the way to liberation. We get cold. We get hungry. We persevere.

[hello from the artic tundra of Philadelphia. do I have joyful effort to push through more winter?]

That’s why the body of the bird is the fourth paramita, virya. Joyful effort. One has to activate joyful effort. We will not stumble to awakening. Virya is crucial to push through the sophmore slump of the path, when you have heard EVERY dharma talk in existence, definitely, and you cannot be reminded, ONCE AGAIN! of meditation posture.

There are so many dharmas that one can get a little lost and overwhelmed in trying to find them, learn them, and master them. But one could live a good lifetime within the 6 Paramitas and the 4 Immeasurables, the stances that poise the heart for liberation. One could live a good lifetime with one text— Shantideva’s the Bodhicharyavatara, The Way of the Bodhisattva.

And by good I mean: an honest life, a kind and decent life, and a compassionate one. These qualities are increasingly endangered. We can do our best to keep them alive.

Here’s to wishing you can fly,

Sunisa

Links:

• the 4 Immeasurables are loving kindness; equanimity; compassion; sympathetic joy.

• Come hear these talks live! Sundays at 10 am est in person in Philly and on Zoom. More jokes, and the chance to ask me questions.

• Could you like, re-stack, or drop a comment to help people find Dharma Bites?

• And please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you are able. 🙏🏼

[O Andaman sea!]

What is the sacred? It is the ground of our being.

It’s the whole of which we are a part.

It’s what imbues our life with meaning and beauty.

– Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self

Dear Dharma friends,

I want to talk about interdependence. A lot of us are suffering right now. I was thinking about how do we understand the dharma for ourselves, because that’s what we’re here for: to take in the teachings; decide if they’re bullshit; and if you proceed, digest them and integrate them into your life.

This idea of interdependence, if you can digest and understand it, is important. It is the worldview of Buddhism. Everything arises out of interdependence: emptiness, compassion, right action, ethical conduct, it all comes out of this crucial idea.

The whole phase is “interdependent origination.” It is from the Sanskrit, paticca samupadda.

That’s a mouthful. Every part of the translation is important. Let’s look at interdependent. It’s a skillful translation. Nothing comes into being on its own, singularly. When we are born, we are co-arisen from our parents. The web stretches further. We have the genes of our grandparents within us. We are shaped by our siblings and birth order. We can be shaped by our neighbors, the kids next door, the uncle who babysat us once.

In modern life we now understand that families are a system. Say you’re known in the family as “the good kid” who’s quiet and studious. That’s usually in response to a sibling or some family member who’s “the demanding one.” We arise in our temperaments, and how we’re perceived, within a dynamic.

In Buddhism we arise in particularity. We are not one. But we are part of a fabric that’s beyond what we could understand. We are part of an infinite net. We are downstream from infinite causes and conditions that give rise to—everything.

Self As Singular - ha ha ha!

If we look at the fiction of a self, who we are is shaped by our genes, our birth order, how our parents treat us. We are even shaped by the experiences our parents had in their childhoods. This can leap across countries and continents, and not just because of immigration. I come from a country where many kids of the upper class are raised by nannies. They’re profoundly shaped by a nanny who may have been raised in a different country, in a different language, and definitely a different class. That’s part of the co-arising that goes into this one child! How can we claim to be singular when so many circumstances go into making the “I” who talks and thinks and acts?

We’re talking about factors, some of which we comprehend, most of which we will never know. That’s paṭicca samuppada. I feel it is most useful to imagine as Indra’s divine net. We are the little lights at the interstices of the net. We are part of a system that connects to everything alive.

If we can understand this, if we can actually digest it, everything we do is changed. Karma arises out of Paṭicca Samuppāda. If we can remember ourselves as part of a profound fabric of infinite causes and conditions, we actually will, on our own, become careful about our actions, because we understand that our actions affect so many things beyond our comprehension.

And not just in this time but in time to come. To go back to the example of the family system, how we’re treating our kids for the next two years could be affecting our ancestors in 100 years. This is not theoretical. We are imprinting habits in the gene code. Things the babies of our great-great grand-babies will be scared of; experiences they will be drawn to; hobbies; their ways of being.

When we hold that view of time and interconnectedness, doesn’t that change how we play with the kids after dinner?

Result

If we are able to spend time pondering our place in Indra’s Net, we become humble. We are also, finally, in the right size. We do not dominate the system. We are a light, sure, but just one among many lights in a vast tapestry.

A lot of the time we’re moving around in our human society feeling lonely, because we think that we are singular and thus cut off. With paticca samupadda, we find we are not as lonely because we are in company with everything alive, and we’re in company across time. We find company in nature, too.

I’m struck by how many children understand their connectedness to other alive beings. There’s a moment when kids understand that meat comes from the death of an animal. It hurts them. They don’t think they are the animal (because we are not one)—but their sense of alive kinship extends beyond the confines of their relative body. I know multiple kids who are vegetarian, or who won’t eat certain animals, because that is their naturally-arising response. The kids aren’t doing this because of a rule of ethical conduct. The impulse comes from their hearts. They cannot eat animals. This is an example of how understanding paticca samupadda simplifies this walk of an ethical life.

Dugongs

I grew up in Thailand. I’m a tropical taco. My happy memories are from the South and the hours I spent in the Andaman, my favorite sea. My sister-in-law lives in Bangkok and she made a documentary about how dugongs are going extinct. I have not been able to make myself watch it. It touches on a grief too deep. Why? Because dugongs and their habitat are part of the fabric that is me. As a kid I kayaked in mangrove swamps and admired mudskippers. They are so ugly and so cute at the same time.

I tumbled off the back of the longtail boats when the boat captains said, “Go on.” They’d never say what they had spotted in the water, but I knew to keep my fins and mask on, to be ready. For that reason I have swum with turtles and dugongs, have jumped into inky water on the dark side of a limestone island and had it erupt into light (that was bioluminescence in Krabi).

In Thailand now, we’ve cut back mangrove forests so tourists can have pristine beaches. Without mangroves, beaches are being eroded in the ocean. The ocean is warming. Seagrass isn’t growing. And dugongs are washing up dead.

I can’t watch this short documentary. I want to support my sister-in-law. But I can’t seem to do it, because the turtles and dugongs and mangroves and mudskippers are a part of me.

Many people have this kind of relationship to a natural ecosystem if they spent part of their childhood outside. My husband feels this ways about the trees and creeks of the farm where he grew up. And that is good. That is healthy. We are right-sized in a fabric stretching in time and place and aliveness that goes beyond us.

Paticca samupadda is cultivating the view that we are a small node in Indra’s Net. Out of that comes this reverence for all of life. Reverence carries with it gentleness, humility, and a sense of connection that runs through our bodies. This brings so much relief! I’ll even call living with paticca samupadda inside a kind of purpose. When we hold this view, we can arise in our life’s purpose, whatever that will be, with integrity and alignment.

My hope is that we can all find our connection to the tapestry of paticca samupadda, whether we approach it psychologically or through nature. This view seems to me to be a crucial and stabilizing one to hold in the wild world we’re living in now.

What is the natural place you love? I’d like to hear. Drop me a note. If it is a natural place, that can be such an anchor in these times. The backdrop to my phone is one of my kids in the waters of the Andaman, the sea a bright glass green.

With love,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• A residential Chod retreat is coming up soon. I am going to sing all four Chod ceremonies. Come, if this might be your lane.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• And please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you can support my work!

Postscript: I did watch the documentary and it is beautiful. So moving. As the Northeast of the US is buried in freezing winds and snow, you may enjoy time as a tropical taco. You can watch the video by clicking the image below. Go Mailee!

[the mall rat, prom dress days— this was my first and favorite dress, bought on the streets of Siam Square for something like 300 baht.]

Dear Dharma Friends,

I’m from Bangkok, which is known for its traffic. Thai people tend to be easygoing and epically late. People show up late, and then they get to say, “Ah, the traffic.”

I grew up in this environment. This is funny because I am precise and I tend to be early. If not on time, I’m usually early, even in a city of traffic. In my teenage years, when I was meeting up with friends, I would be early even knowing that my friends would come half an hour late.

They would be like, “Oh, the traffic.” I’d be like, “You took a motorbike here.” On a motorbike, you can cut between the cars. But I’d still be early. I’d bring a book and sit.

A State of Pleasant Lassitude

Do we remember Tower Records? I would sit in this one mall, the Emporium, in front of Tower Records. There were pillars and benches that circled the pillars. I think I had a cell phone, but there was definitely no social media. This is the era of flip phones or the little Nokias—mine was red. I would bring a book but I often would sit and watch people. I would be bored, just doing nothing. I would think, not in an active way, but where you’re kind of daydreaming. You’re not thinking linearly, but you have this space. I would watch the people come and go in the mall, watch the kids try to persuade their parents to buy things. There was a good speaker store right there. I would watch speaker heads go in. I don’t understand speakers. I’d sit and try to imagine how they were picking what they’d buy. The Thai word for what I was doing is เพลิน, ploen, which means to enjoy, but in a daydreaming kind of way. I’ll call it: a state of pleasant lassitude.

I was spacing out. Do you remember being able to space out? Sometimes it isn’t even boredom, it isn’t even dissatisfaction yet. It is just this BLAH. It can be neutral.

Material Culture

Thinking back now, I notice that this time is part of where my commitment to Buddhism comes from. I spent a lot of time in malls shopping for little trinkets. Bangkok is a great city for shopping. So many outdoor markets. I had the opportunity to notice that it didn’t matter what I bought. There’d be this inner journey: Oh, if I can get the perfect prom dress, then I’ll feel like a superstar at prom, and it’ll be amazing, and I’ll be happy forever, I’ll feel totally beautiful, desirable, and safe. And if I become the prom queen, I’ll be 100% satisfied in every direction.

Noticing that: Oh, it was a good prom dress and we bargained and got it for a good price, but even as a teenager thinking, Huh, I wasn’t 100% satisfied. I had this fantasy that I would be armored in every direction, all the way around, above me, below me, behind me, that I would be protected by the material thing I had acquired, which was probably a dress since it was me at 14 and 15. And then I was able to notice that I didn’t feel that way.

Or even if I felt that way, it didn’t last for long. We know this intellectually, but actually we have to experience it for ourselves, in our bodies. I’d think, Oh, I had it for a night like Cinderella, but then the next day the dress didn’t look the same, it didn’t have the same luster.

I created a narrative about that: Well, I got it at the outdoor market. Maybe if it was a real brand, I would’ve had luster for a longer time, two days, maybe three days.

It is funny, but this is actually how we work, for some time. Then, hopefully, we outgrow it. I did quite rapidly, which is interesting. By the time I got to college, I had spent so much time testing this as a teenager and noticing that the material world did not bring me safety in the way I wanted, which I think was social safety and emotional safety. That luster—material goods have a sheen to them when you desire them. They almost glow.

When you have the means to buy them, wear them, or show them off, they quite rapidly lose the glow. Really, if you pay attention, you can notice it, and even a teenager can notice it. It’s funny because we think of teenagers as not wired for this kind of subtle disillusion, but I must have had consumption-forward teenage years or something, because I did get there. I went, huh, material goods don’t make me that happy. By the time I was in college, I still liked pretty things but there wasn’t the same total, bought-in relationship to material culture.

The BLAH is important

We all probably had that stage where we were just so identified with material culture. It’s a normal stage. We don’t have to judge it. We might have family members in it, we might have children in it.

Honestly, some of the lull in time is what allowed me to notice the patterns. This is what that BLAH does: it allows us to notice our patterns of attachment and being pulled.

Once we can notice, we don’t have to try so hard. You don’t have to march through your spiritual practice and achieve much at all. We do need that dissatisfaction. At first it is a cute, French beret-wearing little frisson. And then it actually builds. In my experience, it built. It was a tiny little frisson of being like, I don’t know, this thing we seem to be doing.

You notice other people too, and you’re like: It doesn’t seem to be making you happy, and it doesn’t really make me that happy.

Dissatisfaction with Samsara

I rarely sit and do nothing anymore. Sure, I have young kids, but it is the fact that we have social media and email on our phones. Suddenly all these little gaps are taken up. The technologies of distraction are methods of numbing us out. When we use them more and more, we get more and more numbed. We get less present, more disassociated, not really here.

For example when I’m on Instagram, being sold something, it’s so pretty. I get to be a teenager again and be like, Wow! I want this thing. It reminds me of my adolescence, being in malls and markets, but crucially, without these moments of 15- or 30-minute gaps that can accrue. When we are addicted to the technologies of dissatisfaction, numbing out, disassociating, that accrues into a different thing. We get more and more bought into the samsaric mind. Notice the language of capitalism? We can even buy into samsara’s mind, as if it were a stock.

That dissatisfaction is an important part of the journey of noticing that samsara has not brought us lasting happiness. In the beginning we want the happiness of safety and security. After that, we’re looking for dopamine hits of happiness. After that, we’re looking for happiness as peacefulness, and we really want samsara to give us peacefulness that is unending, unchanging.

For us to wake up from samsara, we have to notice. What worries me among many worries these days is that we might not get the chance. We might remain totally identified. And also, samsara is getting better at being samsara.

How much time do we gaze at the sky?

How much time do we watch people come and go?

When do we linger and pause?

What To Do

The very addiction to being in this numbing-out loop creates a lack of moments where you have to tolerate samsara and develop a dissatisfaction for it. If we numb out, if we remain attached to the casino in our pocket, the gumball machine of our phone, we won’t come to disenchantment with samsara on our own.

I share these embarrassing stories from when I was a teenager to show that even a teenager predisposed to the gumball-machine mentality, even that teenager, with enough boredom because no social media, will notice: I’m at a party. The party doesn’t make me happy. The party doesn’t make me safe. Turning towards the path can only happen authentically for each of us. No one can do it for you.

I could be sitting here in 25 years talking about turning towards our Buddha-nature, turning away from samsara. But this is the thing about Buddhism. It’s not a religion that guarantees anything. The teachers can’t do anything for you. We sort of suck at being religion. The dharma is profound and humble, because, well, I don’t like anyone telling me what to do, so maybe you don’t either. We all stay in our own agency. We have to walk this for ourselves.

Turning towards the Four Noble Truths is noticing the truth of samsara. The truth that suffering is a condition we live in. In fact, it is suffering that awakens us.

You’re probably here because you’ve been in a lot of pain and need to find a way out of it. Buying dresses wasn’t it. Buying the vacation home wasn’t it. Having the best friends in the world, no matter how good, no matter how dedicated your partner is—no one seems able to fix it for you. You can’t feel good all the time. You keep falling off the cliff of pain, fear, suffering.

Then the Four Noble Truths come as a relief. You weren’t doing anything wrong. In fact, it’s just the condition of being alive: suffering. That is part of what causes us to look for the path of practice and do it with virya, joyful effort.

Then we are deeply committed to the dharma. It is a personal resolve: I am going to do this. I am going to walk this path.

I am wishing you all luck in getting to this place. Please resist the gumball machine!

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• A residential Chod retreat is coming up soon. I am going to sing all four Chod ceremonies. Come, if this might be your lane.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you can. 🙏🏼