In Buddhist teaching, however, the immediate result of an action, and how others respond to it, is only a small part of its value. There are two other significant aspects: the intention giving rise to an action and the skillfulness with which we perform it.

A student approached Khenpo one evening during a retreat and asked how to get better experiences in meditation, and more of them. Khenpo laughed. Holding out his prayer beads, he said, “That kind of desire is like taking this mala and stretching it and stretching it to make it bigger and better, until it finally breaks. What’s important is not the

One of the best depictions of awareness comes from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In a class he was teaching he drew a loose V shape in the center of a large white sheet of paper. “What is this a picture of?” he asked. The students all responded, “It’s a bird.” “No,” Trungpa Rinpoche said. “It’s a picture of the sky, with a bird flying through it.” Like

unknown. Only when he has the courage to step into the darkness, as O’Donohue depicts it, does the light to guide him to the next step reveal itself.

Viktor Frankl, the psychotherapist who spent years in Auschwitz, understood how the suffering of the Holocaust might be seen as overshadowing any other. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote that we can never compare the depths of suffering “because suffering is like a gas; it completely fills whatever chamber it is in.”

Our ultimate concern is the touchstone we turn to over and over again, the thread that we reach for to convey a sense of meaning in our lives. It is the glue that connects the disparate pieces, the frame that gives shape to the picture of our experiences.

Even when we don’t know what to do to make things better for someone, or when whatever we do seems likely to be of little consequence, we can have faith that we are not isolated individuals in a fragmented world. We can have faith that the power of intention links our actions to a vast web of interconnection.

I watched as the masks I had used to hide my pain fell, and the boundaries of isolation that kept me from more fully connecting to others and to the wholeness of life crumbled.

Smiling, he said, “It seems…I’ve taught more about love through this stroke…than I have through all my thirty years…of lecturing about it.” He also has taught us about a power of faith that doesn’t depend on clinging to the known, but instead on opening to the vastness and mystery of what life provides in each moment.