Shambhala Sun | July 2011
You'll find this article on page 67 of the magazine.

Great Expectations

We want the sun; we get the rain. But where does the doorway of disappointment lead?

ELIZABETH BROWNRIGG on disappointment as a painful but necessary treasure.

I’ve been disappointed by pretty much everything at one time or another: work, school, vacations, lunch, Desperate Housewives after the third season, marriage, friendship. The list goes on.

The feeling of disappointment can be shock or a slow sinking. It can be the rigidity of denial, followed by the collapse of acquiescence, followed by the vertigo of loss. It can be a slight sadness, soon forgotten. It can be a cataclysm so profound that its lessons are obscured for years. There’s an internal shift as the expected result becomes more ephemeral, and the actual moment becomes more real.

What are our disappointments trying to tell us?

Vacation

We were staying at a resort on the Big Island of Hawaii. From the lanai that served as our kitchen, we could hear the rustle of palm fronds in the trade winds. The electricity depended on a generator, and when they said lights out at 10 p.m., they meant it; ready or not, we were plunged into the velvety darkness of the tropical night.

We drove to a black sand beach along a road lined by guavas ripe for the picking. Turquoise waves curved and exploded into white foam. Nude sunbathers, their bodies gorgeously tanned, dove into the sea. Children ran along the water’s edge and built obsidian castles from the shining sands.

A man rolled a joint and was suddenly surrounded by five new friends, all desperate for a hit. A little boy howled. His mother told him to shut up. She crouched next to the man with the marijuana, waiting her turn. The boy’s back was half-covered with an oozing, sand encrusted gash. The breakers were so rough we had to fight our way in, tossed about and gasping, before we could reach the deep swells beyond the surf.

Back at the resort, I opened the kitchen cupboard. A very large rat stared back at me. I hurriedly shut the door in its face.

School

On a bright winter’s day in Williamsburg, Virginia, I walked down a cobblestone street that stretched exactly one mile from the edge of the college campus to the end of the Colonial Williamsburg historic district. I was walking away from the school, down a road that led nowhere but the past. I had just flunked out.

Colonial Williamsburg was an empty, beautiful place with each building freshly painted, each boxwood trimmed to a perfect shape. There were no chickens wandering the streets, no sewage, no arguments, no signs of the lives that were lived there in the eighteenth century. It was a town historically accurate in its physical details, and much farther removed from reality than three hundred years.

I reached the end of the street and turned around to walk back to the school that no longer had a place for me. How could this have happened? I was cast adrift in this empty town of artifice.
I had been majoring in biology. I hated the stench of formaldehyde, zoned out during the lectures, was bored by the reading, dreaded chemistry lab, and yet was absolutely convinced that I should be a biologist because I loved nature so much. I had been punishing myself with positive thinking, ignoring the signs of my own discontent.

After my failure, I stayed on in Williamsburg and waited tables on the low-paying breakfast and lunch shift. I struggled to find what it was that I really loved. I tried writing poems and stories. There was one beautiful thing that I managed to notice through the fog of my misery. Every morning, as I walked past Bruton Parish Church on the way to my dead-end job, peals of organ music floated through the early spring air.

That hard time was an opportunity for gratitude. My college roommate kept me hidden in the dorm room, and spirited food from the cafeteria until I could find an off-campus apartment. After I’d been floating in a lost world for a few months, my parents took me back home and paid for a creative writing class.

I reapplied to college, and returned as an English major. I plunged happily into all the courses I had missed while I was pretending to be a biologist: “Tragedies of Shakespeare,” “Art of China,” “History of Film,” “Modern British Literature,” “Burmese Supernaturalism.”

Sometimes disappointment is the only thing that can slap you hard enough to wake you up. It turned out that the path of the writer was my way into the natural world. Now I write articles about bat surveys, birding festivals, sea turtles hatching.

Work

When I was eighteen, I spent a summer as a nurse’s aide in the hospital where I was born, in the small town where I grew up. I worked the night shift.

It was a county hospital that served everyone, from the extremely wealthy to the most impoverished. I sat up with old farm women whose unbound hair flowed to their waists. I lit a cigarette for an ancient man who was as thin and dry as a stick. He suckled the cigarette in a single drawn-out breath until it was one long red ember.

In the nursery, a baby screamed. When I went to investigate, I saw a tapeworm six inches long writhing next to the baby’s head. The nurses told me that the anti-parasite medication had driven the worm out through the baby’s nose.

Edith was the other nurse’s aide. She was black and in her thirties, a generously proportioned woman who liked to make me blush by saying, “There’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned orgasm. Don’t you agree?” I nodded as though I had any clue what she was talking about.
We worked together on our rounds, changing sheets, taking temperatures, emptying urine from bloated Foley catheter bags. Edith wrote me little notes: “Dear Elizabeth, you are cordially invited to a Foley Cocktail Party!” Blanche was a patient who had come in for a gallbladder operation months ago and been brain-damaged by the anesthesia. We changed her sheets and turned her so she wouldn’t get bedsores. She spent her waking hours wordlessly howling, except for when Edith said, “Blanche, Blanche, what’s the matter, baby?” Blanche grew silent and turned her unseeing eyes in the direction of Edith’s voice.

A young black man was admitted with a gunshot wound. He had to use a bedpan. Edith tended to him with the gentleness of an angel. “He likes to keep himself clean. He doesn’t like to be dirty.”

Mrs. Clarke was the nursing supervisor. She had risen through the ranks and was a blend of skill and compassion. Every night she stopped in at the nurse’s station to shoot the breeze with the other RNs. She guided me through my menial tasks. She didn’t hesitate to call me on the carpet if I hadn’t been working hard enough or to compliment me when I’d done well. She set a standard that I tried to reach.

She wanted my help with a man who had had a colostomy, but first she asked me, “Are you sure you can handle this? It’s a pretty rough sight.” After we had emptied the colostomy bag and resealed the opening into his abdomen, she shook her head. “That man is riddled with cancer, and he never complains.”

Her nurse’s uniform was spotless and starched, her cap always pinned in place. We didn’t see doctors on the night shift. Instead, Mrs. Clarke ran a universe of patients in intensive care, newborn babies and their mothers, starving children, accident victims, and every possible condition, from the dying to the merely malingering.

At the end of the summer, Mrs. Clarke invited the staff to a cookout at her house. I asked Edith if she was going. She didn’t look at me when she said, “No, I’m busy that day.”

Mrs. Clarke’s house was a small brick ranch on the outskirts of a neighboring town. In the kitchen, the nurses were already drinking and laughing. Mrs. Clarke kept a sharp eye on me and wouldn’t let me near the alcoholic punch. The rest of the women were married with children of their own, and even a few grandchildren. I carried my potato salad to the picnic table outside and came back into the kitchen. Mrs. Clarke was in the middle of a story, “I don’t know what that nigger was doing, meeting her boyfriend out in the parking lot most likely.” She was laughing so hard she was almost crying. “Every single damn night. And you know she was all over that boy with the gunshot wound.” It took me a minute to realize who she was talking about. The wide grimace of racism was revealed like a skull’s grin beneath the skin. Edith had never been invited to this party.

I can tell you two things about Mrs. Clarke: She was an excellent nurse, and she was a bigot. Both are true. Each observation is like peeking through a keyhole and seeing only a tiny facet of the complicated person she was. As the privileged white resident of a southern town, I rarely noticed the racism that Edith encountered every day; the crack of disappointment exposed that truth.

When I left to go back to college in the fall, Edith’s farewell gift was a tiny red plastic pocketbook with a folded note inside: “Dear Elizabeth, I hope you will remember me.”

After Disappointment

Where does the doorway of disappointment lead? If we’re willing to walk through it, we can see all possibilities: the caring nurse and the racist; the rat in the garden of Eden. We can discover the assumptions that we’ve been making all along. Disappointment is a necessary, painful treasure that reveals ourselves to ourselves.

Wouldn’t it be terrible if you were never disappointed again?



Elizabeth Brownrigg is the author of the novels Falling to Earth and The Woman Who Loved War.

Illustration by Katherine Streeter.

From the July 2011 issue of the Shambhala Sun. Click here to browse the entire issue online.

Shambhala Sun | July 2011
FEATURE
You'll find this article on page 50 of the magazine.

Teenagers "get" mindfulness; they soak it up like sponges and it transforms their lives.

GINA BIEGEL on the best ways for parents, teachers, and mentors to introduce teens to the practice.

I recently went to Hawaii for the first time, and a friend suggested we go snorkeling to experience the beautiful tropical fish firsthand. I try to be open-minded about checking out new things and I enjoy seeing with fresh eyes, so even though I had learned to swim only a few years ago, I said yes straight away. But it wasn’t long before fear and worry set in. I began to think about how I wasn’t a very good swimmer, how I often get motion sickness, and that I would probably get seasick. I was sure the fish would bite me. This flood of thoughts about my past and my future filled my mind and offset any anticipated enjoyment.

In the same way, I’ve noticed that many of the teens I work with worry excessively about things that are out of their control. They believe it will change the outcome of what they’re worrying about—which we know from hard experience isn’t the case. One of the simplest techniques I use with teenagers is to help them notice when they’re engaging in these past/future thoughts and help them see that worries can’t change outcomes, no matter how much we would like them to. This small step can often shift their thinking and lead to increased present-moment awareness.

I began to use mindfulness with teenagers in my psychotherapy practice when I saw that techniques that had traditionally been used with adults in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program could work well with teens. Not only were teens “getting it,” they were soaking it up like sponges. I found they were often more open to the practices than adults, if they were explained in teen language. Unlike many of the other interventions I was using from other traditional psychotherapies, I saw that mindfulness techniques and interventions dramatically and quickly improved teens’ quality of life. They reduced stress and gave the teens strength from within to solve their problems, which often led to a shift away from “poor me” or judgmental thinking. I’ve now been systematically teaching these techniques for more than seven years.

People often ask me how to introduce teens to mindfulness. One of the best ways to answer that question is to illustrate it through a story from my own life, such as my snorkeling adventure. I find that mixing stories with real-life examples from the world of teens—along with an appropriate amount of self-disclosure—gets me a lot of mileage in connecting with teenagers and trying to help them.

Now and Then

If we go back to my worry-filled mind as I anticipated going snorkeling, we can see that talking about that experience is just the kind of opening that would help teens relate to a common pattern in their own minds. A great intervention to use with teens is to have them find out how many of their thoughts are actually about what’s going on here and now. They can see that by spending so much time in their mind on things that have already happened or are going to happen, they aren’t living their life right now. How much are they missing in the present?

As an exercise, you can have them jot down all the thoughts that come to their mind for a period of three to five minutes. After they’re finished, ask them to mark each thought with a “P” for past, “N” for now, and “F” for future. It’s easy for them to see that most of their thoughts aren’t in the now. The point of this activity is to help them discover that by being mindful they’ll spend less time focusing on past or future thoughts, many of which aren’t particularly helpful, such as worries and judgments about oneself or others. People need to think about the past and future, but if teens can focus more on the present moment it might mitigate some of the mental and physical problems that come from spending so much time in their heads.

Being in the Body

When the day to go snorkeling arrived, I had knots in my stomach and my hands were a little shaky. My body was sending out “red flags” that I was not doing okay. I was still absorbed in thinking about the worst possible outcomes. A great intervention for teens is to get them to use the red flags their body gives off, which they usually don’t notice. Many teens, and adults for that matter, are cut off from their body and spend most of the time in their head.

Encouraging teens to notice their breath or even count their breaths can help. For example, asking them to notice their breath and say to themselves, “Breathing in, one; breathing out, one; breathing in, two; breathing out, two,” for a count of ten will connect them to their body. It will give them a moment to just be with their breath and body, which unfortunately teens often don’t do these days. Taking several conscious breaths can give teens a few moments before they act or react, either toward themselves or someone else. It can be a good anger management strategy, or possibly prevent a teen from engaging in a self-destructive behavior like cutting.

Probing and Listening

I felt sick as I got on the boat, and it wasn’t even moving yet. I was convinced that the boat ride and the snorkeling were not going to be fun. I had predetermined the outcome, something teens often do. Try asking them, “If this situation in your life was a movie, how would the end play out?” Their response will give you an insight into their world and a vantage point from which to help and support them. I’ve learned so many times that something that might appear quite small to us could be a teen’s Achilles heel or the biggest trauma they’re facing in their life at that particular moment. Try to respect teens where they are, even if you don’t agree with them about what is important. Doing this will get you far. The opposite will stop you in your tracks.

Mindful listening and respect are offerings you can give no matter what role you play in a teen’s life. Teens often don’t feel heard, particularly by adults. If you can provide a different experience for them, you might be able to build a stronger relationship. You might be surprised by the quality of the communication and the respect you get back. Listening and showing respect are not new concepts, but being present in a mindful way deepens the shared experience.

See, Hear, Feel

As I got in the water and began to snorkel, I noticed the flippers were hurting my feet. I forgot to breathe only through my mouth, and took a lot of salt water in through my nose, which was unpleasant. I felt cold and noticed how different the part of my body above the water felt from the part beneath. And then, “Oh my gosh—beauty, amazement!”

I saw a world I’d never seen before: the colors, all the small and big fish, the coral, and how it all formed a community. I noticed how the fish moved in schools, how they glided through the water. I was wondering why some fish were closer together and others farther apart. A visitor to their world, I was seeing something with fresh eyes. I encourage the teens I work with to see things with fresh eyes. I try to elicit what they see in their world—what makes up their world and what gives them purpose. I inquire about the different relationships in their lives—what schools of fish they hang out with—to get an in-depth look into their world. Sometimes their world can seem as new to me as snorkeling for the first time.

I find it quite helpful to use our senses to experience what mindfulness is rather than relying on a definition. Have a teen tell you what they see, smell, hear, touch, and taste in any given moment. First, it will get them to be present, right here in this moment. Second, they might notice something they have seen a thousand times, but never noticed. You can ask them to share what they see, smell, and so on, and then share things you noticed that they didn’t, and vice versa. You will learn from them by doing this, which can happen in so many moments with teens if you are open.

Space

I wanted to experience this first snorkeling adventure as my own, and not how other people told me it was going to be. Don’t assume a teen’s experience will be like yours or what works for you or what you enjoy will be the same for them. Letting a teen experience mindfulness for themselves is best. We all know how freeing a mindful moment can be, like my first mindful moment snorkeling in the water. It’s most helpful if you can provide a space for a teen to have such moments, rather than trying to replicate your own experience.

While I was in the water, I saw the fish as a sea community: all connected as friends, siblings, parents, partners, teachers, and so on. We too play many roles that connect us to a larger community. At times people ask whose responsibility it is to teach our youth to be well-rounded, educated people who are emotionally and socially savvy. Who is assigned that task? We all are. If we are mindful, we can make a difference in teens’ lives no matter how we encounter them. And, who knows, they might teach us a thing or two and help us see with fresh eyes.



Gina Biegel is the author of The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens and the CD, Mindfulness for Teens: Meditation Practices to Reduce Stress and Promote Well-Being. She is also the founder of Stressed Teens, which introduces youths, families, educators, and professionals to the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Teens program.

Illustration by Eric Hanson.

See the July 2011 issue of the Shambhala Sun to read this complete article. Click here to browse the entire issue online.

Shambhala Sun | July 2011
You'll find these reviews on page 81 of the magazine.

Books in Brief

By Andrea Miller

Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara
By Colleen Morton Busch
Penguin 2011; 272 pp., $25.95 (cloth)

In June 2008, a single lightning storm caused more than 2,000 wildfires across California, and one of those fires surrounded Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Zen monastery in the United States. Fire Monks is the true story of the five monks who, instead of evacuating, risked their lives to save the center. The monks—four men and one woman—had minimal training in firefighting but years of Zen practice, and they were able to meet the fire with mindfulness, treating it as a friend to be guided instead of an enemy to be vanquished. Colleen Morton Busch, a former senior editor of Yoga Journal, has done a remarkable job of both researching the fire and spinning a good yarn. This book reads like a hair-raising adventure novel.

 
Peace Is Every Breath: A Practice for Our Busy Lives
By Thich Nhat Hanh
HarperOne 2011; 160 pp., $22.99 (cloth)

“You have lots of work to do, and you like doing it,” says Thich Nhat Hanh at the beginning of Peace Is Every Breath. “But working too much, taking care of so many things, tires you out. You want to practice meditation, so you can be more relaxed and have more peace, happiness, and joy in your life. But you don’t have time for daily mediation practice.” If this describes your situation, Peace Is Every Breath will be an excellent resource. It offers anecdotes, meditations, and advice on connecting with your present experience without putting your life on hold. Thich Nhat Hanh explains: “It isn’t necessary to set aside a certain period exclusively for “Spiritual Practice” with a capital S and a capital P. Our spiritual practice can be there at any moment, as we cultivate the energy of mindfulness and concentration.”

The Next Eco-Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men Who Are Saving the Planet
Edited by Emily Hunter
Conari Press 2011; 262 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Twenty-two environmental activists, all under the age of forty, tell their stories. These young people, who hail from across the globe, are using every imaginable tactic to make a difference. For example, Tanya Fields, an African American woman, is fighting poverty through guerilla farming in New York City; Rob Stewart, a Canadian filmmaker, is shining a light on the shark-finning industry through his film Sharkwater; and Australian model Hannah Fraser is performing in a mermaid costume to educate people on the importance of marine life. Emily Hunter, the editor of The Next Eco-Warriors, is the daughter of Greenpeace’s founding president and is herself an environmental activist. Her work has included trips to Antarctica to help save whales and the Galapagos Islands, where she was held hostage when she tried to stop illegal poaching. Currently, Hunter produces and hosts TV documentaries about environmental issues.

The Heart of the Revolution: The Buddha’s Radical Teachings on Forgiveness, Compassion, and Kindness
By Noah Levine
HarperOne 2011; 224 pp., $15.99 (paper)

At age seventeen, Noah Levine hated happy people and depressed people. He hated adults, teachers, cops, and hippies. He hated the world, and he reveled in this hatred, smoking PCP, shooting heroin, stealing, and getting in fights. Then he found the Buddhist path and he slowly began to discover his true, loving heart. In this new volume—his third book—Levine shares his story and offers the practices, which he used to find in himself forgiveness, compassion, and kindness. The Heart of the Revolution covers a lot of ground. It offers a fresh look at mercy, a term not frequently used in Buddhism; includes an extensive commentary on the Metta Sutta; gives the lowdown on personal and romantic love; and explores cosmology and the three personality types according to traditional Buddhist thought.

Married to Bhutan: How One Woman Got Lost, Said “I Do,” and Found Bliss
By Linda Leaming
Hay House 2011; 256 pp., $14.95 (paper)

At its core, Married to Bhutan is a romance; it’s the true story of Linda Leaming’s love affair with both her Bhutanese husband and with Bhutan itself. Leaming, from America, visited the Buddhist nation of Bhutan for the first time when she was thirty-nine. It would be “a nice diversion,” the travel agent had told her. But as soon as that first trip was over, Leaming was devising ways to return. The country was to become, not a diversion, but her life—a life full of hilarious linguistic bumbling, a flexible sense of time, and a sharp awareness of impermanence. “In the West, it is possible to live and be asleep,” she writes. “In Bhutan one is compelled to wake up.” Leaming’s husband is a renowned thangka painter and I very much enjoyed the intimate look at his artistic process.

Dharma Road: A Short Cab Ride to Self Discovery
By Brian Haycock
Hampton Roads Publishing Company 2010; 256 pp., $16.95 (paper)

In this, the first book by former cabdriver Brian Haycock, he unpacks Zen Buddhist philosophy and practice through the lens of that job—the cars and tips and traffic and dispatchers, the run-of-the-mill customers and their small talk and the customers who are trying to score crack. But you don’t need to drive a taxi to be able to relate to this book, writes Haycock in the introduction. “We can’t all be cabdrivers. You’ll see that life on the streets isn’t so different from your life. We all have stress, distractions, delusions. We all get lost sometimes. And we can find ourselves if we try.” I love the fresh premise of Dharma Road, and Haycock’s gritty stories and unpretentious, compassionate voice.
 

The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide to the Sustainable Food Revolution
By Deborah Eden Tull
Process 2010; 250 pp., $17.95 (paper)

Author Deborah Eden Tull spent seven years as a Buddhist monk and cook at the Zen Monastery Peace Center in Murphys, California, and this fall she will be teaching a workshop based on The Natural Kitchen at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. The Natural Kitchen features a number of tasty recipes, such as, miso pesto and summer fruit soup, but it is not primarily a cookbook. Instead, it is an invitation to experience greater health, joy, and mindful awareness by cultivating a more eco-friendly relationship with food. Full of news you can use, it has chapters on these and many other topics: conserving energy while cooking; managing food waste and composting; growing food in your own backyard; introducing children to the delicious world of sustainable food; and eating on the go. The final chapter is a workbook and resource list.

Tea Horse Road: China’s Ancient Trade Road to Tibet
By Michael Freeman and Selena Ahmed
River Books 2011; 340 pp., $65 (cloth)

In the seventh century, Tibetans developed a taste for tea and it quickly became a staple in their meaty diet. At the same time, China—struggling to fend off the Mongols—found itself coveting sturdy warhorses. Since Tibet had horses and China had tea, Cha Ma Dao, or the Tea Horse Road, came into being. It’s a network of trails covering nearly 2,000 miles, and was one of the most important trade routes of the ancient world. This book by photographer and writer Michael Freeman and scholar Selena Ahmed provides a rich visual journey through many of the modern road’s branches. There are photographs of tea and horse culture: teashops, terraced tea plantations, colorful tea festivals, horse races, and saddle-making. But the scope of Freeman’s stunning photography is much wider than that. There are also remarkable images of Buddhist sculptures and temples, pilgrims, monks, and nuns. This is a hefty book that deserves a place of honor on the coffee table.

From the July 2011 issue of the Shambhala Sun. Click here to browse the entire issue online.

Sunny Side Up

SAKYONG MIPHAM explains how cultivating bravery gives us the confidence to live in the brilliance of the Great Eastern Sun.

Bravery is a highlight of the Shambhala teachings that were introduced to the West by my father, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. My last two columns dealt with the first two forms of bravery—freedom from deception, and the willingness to leap beyond our habitual patterns. Now I am focusing on the third form of bravery—vision. To live life with bravery, we need a game plan that’s not based in shallow inspiration or lukewarm conviction. It must have genuineness that stems from deep internal wisdom that is constantly radiating forth.

The Shambhala teachings call such vision the Great Eastern Sun. It is the mental conviction and prowess to engage in life with precision and purpose. When we remove deception and cultivate the willingness to leap into our own inherent brilliance, the forthright, clear intention of the Great Eastern Sun shines through. This form of bravery keeps us always moving forward.

The word “forward” is conventionally understood to mean “onward, so as to make progress toward a successful conclusion.” In Shambhala, our conclusion is to practice living life with enlightened attitude and conduct in every activity. Forward can also mean “toward the future.” Thus it is linked with the word “continuous,” meaning that when we have this kind of vision, the continuity of our intention is not severed.

Forward can also mean, “at or to a different time, earlier or later.” An interesting twist in Shambhala logic is that in order to have the Great Eastern Sun shining in our life—and thus to be always journeying forward—we must first turn back to our origin: the primeval ground of basic goodness, the unconditional purity and confidence of all. That reverse journey happens through the relaxation we cultivate in meditation. As we continue to practice, awareness of our nature arises. Intellectually and intuitively, we know we are not wrong or bad; rather, we are good. Such awareness gives rise to doubtless precision about our basic goodness, which simultaneously illuminates the basic goodness of the world, allowing us to perceive the multitude of individual experiences within our sense fields, bringing incredible precision to our warrior’s mind.

“Great” is the discovery of our basic goodness. “Eastern” is realizing that our goodness was always there. “Sun” is the illumination that occurs once that discovery has been made.

The illumination of the Great Eastern Sun inherently shows us what is directly in front, and thus forward. It might feel threatening because it does not allow the wiggle room to put on the brakes. On any journey there is the assumption that we should be allowed to avoid danger along the way—at the minimum, to be a little careful. But if we think there is a reverse gear in Shambhala vision, we are misunderstanding a basic reality: life is perpetual motion. We cannot suddenly apply the slow-motion feature, or push the “save” button and deal with it later.

Life is always coming at us, or more accurately, we are always heading into life. Being hesitant—standing still or looking backward instead of forward—creates an immediate ripple effect. Life buckles behind us and builds up pressure, blasting us forward. We are then coerced into dealing with issues at an accelerated rate, beyond what is comfortable or convenient. Such hesitancy, which is a form of cowardice, stems from doubt in relation to our basic goodness.

The bravery of the Great Eastern Sun indicates that the warrior has abruptly come to this conclusion: life is a forward-moving endeavor. Closing our eyes to this fact is like shutting them to oncoming traffic: we are simply afraid to deal with life’s immediacy and brilliance. The reason we maintain a regular meditation practice is to open our eyes and have forward vision. Once we have confidence in the basic nature of things, we are more immediate in our life.

Having the vision that engages life with forwardness does not mean we swallow virtue and nonvirtue indiscriminately. If we engage in nonvirtue because we think engaging in life with forward vision means doing what is right in front of us, that is incorrect. Engaging in nonvirtue is putting on the brakes and grinding our gears into reverse. Great Eastern Sun vision is based on engaging in virtue. We understand that virtue is synonymous with the word forward.

Forward is East; East is richness; richness is virtue. The words Great, Eastern, and Sun hold all the golden virtues. Virtue helps us move forward, whether it manifests outwardly as generosity, or inwardly as patience. In the tremendous heat of the sun, nonvirtue withers and melts.

The path of the warrior is paved with virtue, and what allows us to follow it is the spontaneous insight of the Great Eastern Sun. This “brings about the understanding of what should be avoided and cultivated,” said my father, Chögyam Trungpa, who introduced these teachings to the West, “from how to brew tea to how to preside over a nation.” In this way our mind is both pragmatic and visionary.

Thus the Great Eastern Sun shines and influences both the emotional and intellectual workings of the mind. Intellectually we engage in East. Emotionally we engage in Sun. Thus we become Great. Ultimately this visionary principle gives us tremendous energy­—a battery that does not need recharging.

This vision occurs for three reasons.

First, we are confident and free from aggression and the self-centered struggle. That allows us to have spontaneous insight, which demonstrates itself as bravery in the form of gentle and unwavering steadiness. We become like a tiger, tantalized by every blade of grass, and by the dewdrop on each blade. Because we are not preoccupied with our self-centered doubts, life feels strong and full of possibility.

Second, engaging in life as a visionary eradicates confusion. We are no longer imprisoned by petty mind and cowardice. Because we are not hiding behind the veils of vacillation, we are not confined by narrow vision. Therefore we know clearly where we are: in the lineage of warriorship.

Third, the combination of steadiness, fortitude, and gentleness; the absence of petty mind; and the knowledge of what to cultivate and what to discard, allow us to unite the world of heaven, the world of earth, and the world of humanity. From resting in the primordial space of basic goodness to relating to our domestic world, our intention and activity are united and synchronized. This synchronicity increases our confidence further.

The notion of uniting heaven, earth, and humanity directly correlates to being brave in mind, body, and livelihood. The vision that arises when we engage in bravery allows us to have mastery over our minds—which should be doubtless; our bodies—which should be unwavering; and our livelihood—which should be free of cowardice. In this way, the Great Eastern Sun shines over us, allowing us to be brave in every realm and rule over our world.

From our original ground of basic goodness, the Great Eastern Sun appears. With basic goodness in our heart, we have a fresh start. Because we understand our ancestral heritage from beginningless time, this vision arises, which is Great—we are in a perpetual state of inspiration. Thus the Eastern Sun shines, a result of both logic and heart, perpetually allowing us to be warriors with vision.

Originally published in the July 2011 issue of the Shambhala Sun. Click here to browse the entire issue online.