Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

The wisest approach is that we try out this practice. We try it out in our lives today, tomorrow, right now—as long as we’re alive, we practice this way of living.

For example, if you are truly open and receptive to another person, it can be quite a revelation to realize that they aren’t exactly the same on Friday as they were on Monday, that each of us can be perceived freshly any day of the week.

All we are doing is breathing in and experiencing what’s happening, then breathing out as we continue to experience what’s happening. It’s a way of working with our negativity that appreciates that the negative energy per se is not the problem. Confusion only begins when we can’t abide with the intensity of the energy and therefore spin off. Stayin

When you touch your sorrow or fear, your anger or jealousy, you are touching everybody’s jealousy, you are knowing everybody’s fear or sorrow. You wake up in the middle of the night with an anxiety attack and when you can fully experience the taste and smell of it, you are sharing the anxiety and fear of all humanity and all animals as well. Instea

As radical as this idea might seem, I know it to be true that there is nothing that can occur that has to set off the chain reaction of shenpa. Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.

We are never encouraged to experience the ebb and flow of our moods, of our health, of the weather, of outer events—pleasant and unpleasant—in their fullness. Instead we stay caught in a fearful, narrow holding pattern of avoiding any pain and continually seeking comfort. This is the universal dilemma.

Dzigar Kongtrül once pointed out that you may find a particular feeling intolerable, but instead of acting on that you could come to know intolerableness very, very well.

When things fall apart and we can’t get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when the whole thing is just not working and we don’t know what to do, this is the time when the natural warmth of tenderness, the warmth of empathy and kindness, are just waiting to be uncovered, just waiting to be embraced. This is our chance to c

The shenpa itself is not the problem. The ignorance that doesn’t acknowledge that you’re hooked, that just goes unconscious and allows you to act it out—that’s the problem.