Waking up. Right here, right now.

The Shambhala Path Originally published in Autumn 2012 Pink Play Mags

This world has a lot of pain and we feel it, sometimes acutely.

When I first came to visit the Shambhala Centre (at 670 Bloor Street West #300, Toronto ON), I had returned from living in Japan for a number of years and was feeling lonely and disconnected. Learning meditation seemed like it made sense: a way to help me cope with how I wanted to shape my new life. I soon found out that the Shambhala path made more sense to me living in this big, bad city than anything I had ever explored before. Since then I had “fallen off the cushion,” but I decided to venture back, talk to people about the Shambhala tradition and revisit nurturing my spirit.

Jacqueline Larson, a volunteer with the Shambhala Meditation Centre of Toronto, agreed to spend some time chatting with me on a hot summer afternoon at the Centre. I was curious if more beginners were coming through the Meditation Centre’s doors lately and she confirmed.“

The last few weeks, we’ve had over 20-30 new people come for beginners instructions,” Larson told me. “We’ve had to ask the regulars to switch rooms.” There is one shrine room for instruction and the main shrine room is for open sittings.

If you are to trust the news and social media you might feel that Toronto is becoming faster and less connected. In fact, you might be experiencing that as you navigate around the potholed busy streets. Is the upsurge in newcomers to meditation because people are seeking a way to escape?

Larson told me that the Centre doesn’t take surveys but if they did, she’d bet that there are some common themes to why people are driven to seek meditation. “[One of the teachers here] told me that if you were to ask people about why they’ve come here, it’s usually because they’re in some kind of trouble. That’s the initial motivation: some kind of heartbreak, relationship meltdown… physical pain. And most people feel that their world is too speedy and that they want to do something to slow things down.”

She added, “It often takes something dramatic to cut through. In my case, it was a dramatic relationship breakdown. I had done psychotherapy, exercise and I had reached a point where none of that was helping enough.”

When people come through the doors of a Buddhist meditation centre, I suspect they are seeking spiritual healing but not a religion. I posed the question about what was different about religion and spirituality to Margaret May, the Director of the Centre. I caught May on the phone just prior to her leaving for a Shambhala retreat on the east coast.

May sighed and responded, “I don’t know about those labels. Maybe some people are getting at the idea that one is all form and dogma and the other is a little more open. Without saying it’s one thing or the other, if spirituality is deepening one’s connection to one’s nature and discovering what that is… You know, it’s both ordinary and totally magical.”

But what is different about Shambhala and other Buddhist paths? “On a simple level,” May explained, “Shambhala is related to all the same Buddhist teachings: suffering, impermanence, cause and effect, the path to relating to one’s suffering. [You practice] so that you are no longer caught up in a world of ‘this is suffering and this is happiness, and I don’t want that and I only want this.’”

“We can connect with the enlightened energy of our minds and our being,” she continued. “We can wake up to our true nature and make a difference… today. And we have to. There is an urgency in the world because there is so much suffering.”

“Shambhala is a way of expressing the way society would be if we were all connected to our basic goodness. Shambhala is about waking up right now, being authentic, being genuinely brave,” May says.

That is one thing I remembered about Shambhala. When you sit, you imagine that you are a warrior. Yes, a warrior. The Shambhala path of meditation is not wishy-washy or weak… it is you, on the cushion as a king or queen, the ruler of your world. As Larson quoted Chögyam Trungpa (Shambhala’s founder), “Ruling as the monarch with a broken heart.”

That’s right. Meditation is a brave path. One of the hardest things you can do, but with the greatest results. “When you first sit down,” Larson explained, “You’re feeling pain, you may be in trouble, you’ve got a broken heart, or someone’s died. There’s loss, there’s grief and you sit down and there’s quiet and breathing. It’s pretty powerful. Your feelings can be pretty daunting. But it’s learning how to sit with those powerful feelings with gentleness.”

“If you have this idea that you are going to meditate and everything is going to be peace, love and Woodstock… well anger [or hurt or pain or jealousy] is not a part of that equation.  But meditation gives us that little space to just notice it and feel it without acting on it,” she says.

I asked May about what other misconceptions beginners might have. She responded, “They may have high expectations that this is going to solve all their problems. Or not understanding what meditation actually is—you know, ‘I’m not thought-free.’ Or they may set the intention and don’t deliver on or don’t accomplish and be judgmental about [their failure]. And then [they] get embarrassed and don’t talk about it anymore.”

But both May and Larson used the analogy of joining a gym. You’ve got to keep coming back to see how much better you’ll feel. That’s why practicing with others in a community makes sense. You get support, you may make some friends, you are also less likely to get up and leave the meditation room when you get jumpy, agitated, speedy, if others are sitting beside you.

Plus the beauty of the Shambhala Centre’s shrine room is seductive. May described the room and why it is set up the way it is. “It is very bright and colourful. The colour is from the Tibetan culture—a celebration of the magic of the world. We’re human beings and our minds are engaged with thought, but our experience of the world is all through our senses. All our five senses are how we experience the magic of the world. That’s why in our meditation practice we meditate with our eyes open, which is a bit of a surprise for some people.”

 “We do this because, we can’t shut down our ears, we can’t shut down our taste or our smell, so why would we shut out our eyes?” May asks. “Now we have to work with that because many of us are so visually oriented.  The shrine room is also connection to sacredness—I mean that in a very broad way. The shrine room is a focal point of energy.”

The Meditation Centre offers classes and intensives to help people grow in their practice. You don’t have to be perfect or pure or even strive for those things to begin a meditation practice. It is odd that meditation is simply sitting and doing nothing but we find it so hard! “It’s about sitting down it the midst of your life as it is,” Larson explained.

She retold the story from Sakyong Mipham’s (current teacher of Shambhala) book, Turning the Mind into an Ally in which he likens meditation practice to taming a wild horse. 

When you first show up (sit on the cushion) the horse (your mind) is just racing around in the field and won't even come near you but over time, if you keep on showing up every day, eventually the horse will let you come closer and closer. When you develop enough trust, you can even ride the horse. But it's a long, slow, gentle process. You can't just climb on a wild horse and expect to ride. That's meditation practice: showing up regularly and just being patient and gentle with the wildness until it starts to be tamer.

Larson told me the act of gentleness with yourself is what is so attractive about Shambhala. “Sakyong Mipham says it’s a way of making friends with yourself. In order for it to be sustainable, you have to be really gentle with yourself. I find that really hard—and really radical.”

She mentions another, perhaps most well known, teacher of Shambhala, Pema Chödrön. “My partner really notices it when I’m not doing my meditation. Changing the world is about changing ourselves. In one of Pema’s teachings, she was saying that when we talk about transforming our world, what she’s talking about is the dinner table. It’s how we are reacting to ‘our’ people. It’s about what’s going on in our domestic [or work] situation,” Larson elaborates.

“Pema Chödrön is really pointing the way for many people. Like them, I read her books and they helped me feel generally better, but I still didn’t meditate,” she continues. “I didn’t really understand that she was talking about meditation. I think a lot of people who read Pema’s books think they’re self-help. I think they do tremendous good at that level because they’re about that basic gentleness, about how to work with pain, how to work with confusion and how to work with our broken hearts. But, when you actually start meditating? Then you read Pema Chödrön? It’s ohhh, that’s what she meant!”

Okay, so you’ve begun to meditate and you’re doing your best but how do you practice having a brave and open heart where we meet real aggression? May advises that we start with our own aggression. She told me, “The practice of meditation: sitting on the cushion is just that—practice. It is becoming familiar with our own minds and our own habits and seeing the patterns as they pass and grab us and strangle us. Just sitting with that and then with practice you start to see that if I don’t feed the story, it actually dissolves. I can start off feeling angry and frustrated and if I just sit there and not think about how right I am and everyone else is so wrong then maybe it doesn’t feel so tight, strong and energetic the next time.”

And if we fail? We choose to jump the queue because, hey, that jerk pushed ahead of us through the door—he deserves it!

“Maybe there will be times when someone’s being aggressive,” May says, “but we don’t need to respond with aggression because we’re not afraid of the other person’s aggression. Now, I’m not talking about having a gun pulled on you—that would probably be an advanced practice,” she says with a chuckle. “But the rudeness, pushing, shoving, and the hurry—if we cannot push and shove so much ourselves or at least recognize when we are pushing and shoving and just hold back. When it happens, we can give it a little more space and say, ‘oh wow that person is really wrapped up. I can give a little more space to that. I don’t need to respond to that.’”

And, after poor behaviour we feel guilt!

May explained, “We often find real fault with ourselves. By becoming familiar with our judgment, we can recognize our own habits of aggression and fear and we start to soften… And we actually can see sadness in other people.”

Shambhala starts right where we are with all our follies and imperfections. The founder of Shambhala, Chögyam Trungpa, was a bit of controversial person in the late 60s and early 70s. He brought the Shambhala teachings to the Western lifestyle by participating in it. He challenged his students to be where they were as Westerners and brought a secular perspective to teachings that previously were esoteric.

And as Larson quoted from Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living, “We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves—the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds—never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.”

As we were leaving the centre, Larson told me a story about her son. He sat down on a step and refused to move after she had told him he couldn’t have something he wanted. When asked why he wouldn’t move he simply said, “I want time to feel disappointed.” From the mouths of babes, we all can learn.

The Shambhala Centre has meditation instruction three times a week and has sessions on the weekend once a month. See you there!