Milarepa’s first thought was practical. He must have forgotten to make offerings to the local spirits. So he sang them a song of praise and welcome. The atsaras grew angrier.

He tried a different approach. He tried to frighten them, adopting a wrathful demeanor, attempting to subdue them by force. They were completely unmoved. And then, as he watched, their number grew to seven.

He tried compassion. He sat down and taught them the dharma, carefully and sincerely. Nothing happened. They stayed exactly where they were, if anything more settled and more vivid than before.

And then something shifted. He remembered what his teacher Marpa had taught him: all phenomena are expressions of one’s own mind. And the mind itself is luminous emptiness. All three attempts shared the same error. He was treating projections of his own mind as external threats.

He gave rise to fearless confidence and sang a song of realization. Then he got up and charged in amongst them. He did not defeat them or appease them or teach them into submission. He simply and fully recognized them for what they were, gave up his struggle and let go. And the atsaras dissolved. His practice, the texts tell us, became enhanced beyond comprehension.

When I read this I sat wondering for some time. How would I have reacted? Would I have been able to discover this fearless confidence? Or would I have done what I often do: oscillate between fighting and appeasing, and then, perhaps, when all of that failed, simply turn and walk away.

This last one is a response that Milarepa’s story does not mention. Not fighting or appeasing or teaching. Just turning away. Just getting used to the demons being there. Just allowing what is unbearable to quietly become ordinary.

This is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about my own relationship to the ecological crisis, to the wars being waged, to the suffering accumulating in the world right now. The rage comes and goes. So does the despair. But underneath both, and more constant than either, is a kind of practiced indifference. A turning away that has become so habitual I barely notice it anymore.

The rage at least knows something is wrong. It blazes like a fire, not so different from the fires burning in the forests. The despair feels the tremendous weight of it, but becomes a form of giving up, a surrendering to what feels insurmountable. But indifference is, at its heart, a form of disconnection. Like the extinction of species, it is the extinction of our own living feeling selves. This looking away is perhaps the most dangerous pollution of all. And without our felt connection, our capacity to respond to the world and to each other quietly disappears.

Rage and despair, however painful, are at least embodied. We experience these strong emotions deeply in the body, our hearts pounding with rage or breaking with despair. Indifference feels like a full disconnection from the body. Joanna Macy described it as a kind of psychic numbing, a defense the mind develops against overwhelming feelings. And this disconnection from embodiment is precisely what makes it so impenetrable and so dangerous.

This is where Milarepa’s story becomes unexpectedly relevant. Because what he discovered in that cave is the exact opposite of indifference.

When Milarepa finally gave rise to fearless confidence, he was not bracing himself to charge toward something threatening and external. Something had shifted in how he experienced the demons. They were no longer solid threats out there to be dealt with. The bracing in his body relaxed. He sensed them as expressions of his own mind, intimate and familiar, no longer foreign. And from that profound opening, the charging in arose naturally, as the most obvious thing in the world.

What Milarepa experienced in that moment was of a different order entirely. It was not a practice of gradually softening the fence between self and world. It was the direct recognition that there was never a fence to begin with. The demons were not experienced as objects to be compassionately engaged with. They were recognized as his own mind. The subject-object division dissolved completely.

Most of us are not there. And perhaps we should not pretend otherwise. What Macy’s grief work and tonglen offer is something different but genuinely valuable, not the sudden dissolution of the fence but its gradual softening. We still experience the crisis as something out there. But we stop keeping it at arm’s length. We allow it to arrive. We breathe it in. And in that allowing, something shifts — not the complete dissolution Milarepa experienced, but a loosening that makes genuine engagement possible.

Indifference prevents precisely this. When we are numb, when the felt connection has been shut down, the crisis remains out there, abstract and other. We cannot charge in toward something we cannot feel. The numbness keeps the fence solid.

This is why Macy’s grief work matters so much. Not as intellectual processing but as embodied experience. Grief, when we allow it, is felt in the body, in the chest, the throat, the belly. Something moves. The numbness lifts. And when we can feel the crisis again, not as an abstract problem out there but as something alive and intimate and close, something like Milarepa’s charging in becomes possible.

And something else happens too. When the crisis becomes felt rather than merely known, it also begins to feel less absolutely fixed. Less immovable. The solidity that seemed so overwhelming starts to loosen, not because the problems are less real, but because we are no longer relating to them from behind the defended distance that made them feel permanent and unchangeable.

This is what practice is for. Not to produce correct philosophical positions but to bring understanding into direct experience. Macy’s grief work does this through feeling the grief. Tonglen does this through the breath, breathing in what we most want to push away, feeling it arrive, breathing out from that place of contact. Both undo the dissociation and restore the body’s felt connection to what is actually happening.

And when that felt connection is restored, something changes in how we engage with the world. Not what we do but how we do it. The person who has sat with the grief of what is being lost, who has breathed in the suffering rather than pushing it away, who has felt the crisis as intimate rather than abstract, brings something completely different to the letters, the meetings, the showing up. The engagement is no longer driven by defended rage or desperate clinging to outcome. It arises from contact. From presence. From a quality of care that no amount of strategizing can produce.

Milarepa charged in amongst the demons. His practice was enhanced beyond comprehension. Perhaps this is what becomes possible when we stop maintaining the distance, not a guaranteed outcome or a solution, but a quality of presence from which something can move that could never have moved from behind the fence. When we allow genuine contact with the crisis, not from a safe distance but right up close, something may be released in us that we cannot currently imagine. Just as Milarepa could not have imagined, from behind his three failed attempts, what would become possible when he finally charged in.

The question is not whether we are willing to fight the crisis. The question is whether we are willing to stop looking away and get close enough to actually feel it. And perhaps, if we are, the outcome will be beyond comprehension.

Famine had struck the region around Nalanda monastery sometime in the fifth century. The monks were hungry. And yet every morning a young monk brought milk to the hall in abundance. Nobody could figure out where it was coming from. Finally someone followed him. They discovered that he was milking a cow from a painting on the wall.

The monk was Chandrakirti, later to become one of the most celebrated philosophers in the history of Buddhism, and the most authoritative exponent of Prasangika Madhyamaka, the philosophical school that argues most rigorously that reality as we perceive it has no true existence.

We can smile at this story, file it under legend or hagiography and move on. But before we do, it is worth reflecting on what it is actually pointing at. Because if we take it seriously, even just as a philosophical thought experiment, it asks us something uncomfortable. What exactly is the boundary between mind and matter? How solid is it really? And who told us it could not be crossed?

Many years ago I read something that baffled me. Trungpa Rinpoche, in his book Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, wrote plainly that environmental pollution can be cleaned up through tonglen practice: “Tonglen seems to be one of the best measures we could take to solve our problems of ecology and pollution. Since everything is included, tonglen is the fundamental way to solve the pollution problem—it is the only way. Quite possibly it will have the physical effect of cleaning up pollution in big cities, maybe even in the entire world. That possibility is quite powerful.” I have a clear recall of the moment I read this. He was not speaking metaphorically. He was suggesting it was the way to solve this problem. I actually gasped.

Upon reflection, I now understand the source of my astonishment. I was still firmly in the grip of the Western mindset that views mind and matter as completely separate. Even years of Buddhist study and practice had not fully dislodged it. It is a deeply ingrained belief. That mind and matter are opposed and distinctly separate. That sitting on a cushion changes nothing beyond the confines of my own mind.

Big mistake.

But it is such a stubborn one. And we persist in spite of all the Buddhist texts and teachings that repeatedly tell us that appearance is emptiness and emptiness is appearance. Or as Nagarjuna points out so clearly: It is only because everything is emptiness that everything is possible. Were emptiness impossible, nothing would be possible. Even after deeply reflecting on the teachings on interdependence, on Indra’s web, on the nature of reality, something in my Western-trained mind kept defaulting back. It still does at times. How can imagination move something material, something physically out there? It’s not possible.

And steeped in this belief we remain paralyzed.

Are we not like magicians who have voluntarily cut ourselves off from our own power. The power is still there. We have simply forgotten it. We have let ourselves be led astray.

So how do we take back our power? How can we change this burning, warfaring planet for the better?

Vajrayana Buddhism has always insisted on something the Western mind finds almost impossible to accept: that the power of the mind surpasses even the power of atoms and substances.

We are deeply conditioned to believe otherwise, and it may well take time and effort to transform this. The change begins by acknowledging our present beliefs—often they remain hidden from us. When I read Trungpa Rinpoche’s statement about tonglen cleaning up pollution, my first thought was disbelief. How can imagination influence the material world around us? How can breathing exercises change something as solid and measurable as pollution, as warfare, or the melting of glaciers? It feels like wishful thinking dressed up as spirituality.

But I have come to distrust that old voice. I now more clearly see it as a deeply conditioned belief.

And science itself has been quietly chipping away at this dichotomy. The placebo effect, now undeniable in mainstream medicine, reveals how belief literally changes physical outcomes in the body. Studies with large groups of Transcendental Meditation practitioners have shown, however contested the methodology, that when enough people meditate together, measurable social improvements seem to follow in the surrounding area: reduced crime, reduced accidents, reduced conflict.

What if we put Trungpa Rinpoche’s suggestion to a proper test? A group of committed, motivated tonglen practitioners, specifically breathing in environmental pollution and breathing out clarity and purity. Over weeks, months, years. With proper measurements of air quality, water quality, and whatever else can be tracked. Would there be discernible change? Maybe. But I find I can no longer dismiss these kinds of questions.

I truly feel that the belief in the separation of mind and matter, that nothing I do in here can affect anything out there, has made us passive in the face of crisis. Perhaps the most radical thing we can do right now is to question this. Not naively, and not by abandoning science. But by opening to the possibility that the fence between mind and matter, like so many other fences we have explored in this series, may be less solid than we think.

But before we can even consider tonglen as a force for change in the world, something else has to happen first. The Buddha understood this from the very beginning and placed it as the absolute foundation of his teaching. His very first sermon begins here: Acknowledge the suffering that is inherent in samsara. Not as a philosophical position, but as a felt reality. In order to awaken, we need to fully open ourselves to our experience of the world, we have to feel what is actually happening.

I grew up in the Austrian countryside. I remember as a child feeling something close to physical pain when I saw factories, industrial chimneys, pollution scarring the landscape. It disturbed me deeply. Something in me recoiled. But then, gradually, I got used to it, the way we get used to things. The way the mind learns to look without really seeing or responding. Eventually the mind becomes indifferent and looks the other way.

This is perhaps the most dangerous thing that can happen to us. We are not cruel or uncaring by nature, but we are extraordinarily good at adaptation. At normalizing. At letting the unbearable quietly become ordinary.

Thich Nhat Hanh was once asked what we most need to do for the sake of our world. He said we need to listen and to hear within ourselves the sounds of the earth crying. Not to analyze or calculate. To hear it. To let it in.

I meet so many people, including Buddhist practitioners, who genuinely do not lose sleep over the wars, the environmental disasters, the profound amount of suffering accumulating in the world right now. I am not judging this. I recognize it in myself. The mind is extraordinarily skilled at blocking what is too uncomfortable to feel. It is a survival mechanism. But choosing to turn away at this particular moment in history has very hazardous consequences.

Joanna Macy, the Buddhist scholar and environmental activist who passed away earlier this year at the age of ninety-six, spent decades working directly with ecological grief—the overwhelming pain that arises when we truly allow ourselves to feel what is happening to our world. She created the Work That Reconnects, a series of group practices that transforms feelings of grief, anger, and fear into a renewed sense of interdependence and engaged action. Her central insight was simple and radical: The pain we feel for the world is not a weakness to be overcome. It arises because of our deep love for it and for what is being lost. Grief and love are not separate or at odds. And when we fully open to our painful feelings of loss we also connect with our love. And with our compassion. By allowing ourselves to deeply feel our grief, not just think about it, but truly embody our experience, we begin to create and act with genuine clarity and power. We stop. We feel. We allow the grief of the world to move through us, not around us.

This matters more than we might think. We cannot respond to what we refuse to feel. And, yet, fully allowing the feelings is not easy. At times, when I allow myself to genuinely open to the pain of the world, the overwhelm quickly arrives. The suffering is too vast, it’s too heavy, with no obvious solutions in sight. Then something in me wants to close the door again.

This is how spiritual bypassing arises. Not through bad intentions, but through the mind’s very reasonable desire to protect itself from what feels unbearably overwhelming.

What has helped me in these moments is tonglen. Not as a grand solution to the world’s problems. But as a response to what is arising right now, within me. Breathing in the heaviness, the grief, the sense of helplessness. Owning it rather than pushing it away. And then breathing out whatever small measure of ease or warmth or clarity I have to offer. Not trying to fix anything at all. But remaining open and not closing the door.

Something shifts when I do this. Not always dramatically. But the overwhelming feelings become workable. The grief becomes something I can remain present with rather than something I run away from. And from this place of presence emerges a sense that genuine action is a possibility. This makes me wonder: if this is what one breath can do, what might many breaths do? What might a world of practitioners breathing together do?

So how do we take back our power? How can we change this burning, warfaring planet for the better?

Perhaps the answer begins here. With a change in our most fundamental belief, the belief that mind cannot touch matter, that what happens in here has no power to affect what is out there.

And in the moment that this held belief begins to loosen, the practice of tonglen is transformed. It is no longer a gentle practice that helps us to feel better and perhaps does some good. It becomes something else entirely. A practice that can actually move and change things to a degree we have barely begun to imagine.

If Chandrakirti could milk a painted cow, imagine what such a mind could do to the pollution choking our rivers and skies?

We are magicians. And it is time to remember this.

___________

End Notes: Chogyam Trungpa, Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness (Shambhala, 2010), 29.

“If we can't respond to this, Buddhism will become irrelevant”. These are not the words of a critic. They come from David Loy, a Zen teacher and author of Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis. I could not stop thinking about them, and they made me reflect on my own practice in ways I did not expect.

I want to be honest about a tension I have been feeling in myself. Coming out of three years of retreat into a world that seems more unstable and more damaged than when I went in, I find myself asking whether this was the right response, whether turning inward, however deeply, however sincerely, is an adequate answer to what is happening in our shared world.

After much reflection, I have become more certain that retreat, when it is genuine, is a profound form of activism. And yet I also want to acknowledge something I still struggle with: Buddhism can become a kind of closed-mindedness, a laziness dressed up as renunciation, a preference for the cushion over the discomfort of showing up in the world. I have felt this, at times, in myself. The teaching that everything is an illusion, that nothing is worth grasping at, can quietly become an excuse for not caring enough to act.

Naomi Klein, in her landmark book This Changes Everything, argues that the destruction of the natural world is not primarily a technical problem waiting for a technological fix. It is a values problem, a worldview problem. She argues that we have not done what is necessary to address these problems because doing so would fundamentally conflict with the reigning economic ideology of our time: the belief that the natural world exists to serve human desires, that growth is always good, that profit is the measure of all things.

What Klein is describing, though she does not use this language, is self-grasping on a global scale: we value our own gain over the needs of others, over the needs of our world. This self-grasping is exactly what Buddhism has spent the past twenty-five centuries teaching us how to transform.

Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the great Buddhist voices of our time, said something that has stayed with me: “When you wake up and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is us, you touch the nature of interbeing.” This is not a poetic flourish. It is a precise philosophical claim, one the Buddhist tradition has been making for centuries in different ways.

The Avatamsaka Sutra describes reality through the image of Indra’s web: a vast net stretching in all directions without limit, a jewel at every node, each jewel reflecting every other jewel perfectly, reflections containing reflections, endlessly. Nothing in this web exists independently. Everything is interconnected with everything else. We explored this image in an earlier post in a different context. Here it becomes urgently ecological.

We are not separate beings living inside a pre-existing universe, we are nodes in a web of interdependent arising. We live as the universe, not in it. This is the nature of interbeing.

If this is true, as both the Buddhist tradition and some modern physics suggest, then the destruction of the natural world is not happening out there, it’s not happening to something separate from us. It is happening directly to us. The burning forests are not only the environment; they are us. The warming oceans are not someone else’s problem; they are us.

And the self-grasping mind that consumes without concern, that extracts without limit, that pushes the consequences onto others, onto the next generation, onto the earth itself, is not the villain in a story we are watching from a safe distance. It is our own mind, the one we sit with every morning on the cushion.

Buddhism becomes not irrelevant but urgently relevant. Not a retreat from the world. A direct response to what is destroying it.

David Loy is clear on what this looks like. The path of the bodhisattva, he argues in Ecodharma, is a rich resource for those answering the call for change. Genuine Buddhist engagement is not driven by attachment to outcomes. We act because it is the right thing to do.

That is a profound statement and points to something that distinguishes Buddhist engagement from many forms of activism.

Much of the activism we see today, however justified, however necessary, is driven by fear, rage, and despair. These are understandable responses to what is happening, but they are also, as the Buddhist tradition has always known, exhausting and ultimately unsustainable. Rage burns a mind out. Despair makes it give up. Attachment to results causes real suffering when those results are slow, incomplete, or nonexistent. The Dalai Lama has taught that we should always oppose wrongdoing, but without anger, because anger clouds our clarity and destroys our own peace of mind long before it changes anything in the world.

What Buddhism offers is this: action without ego, engagement without attachment to outcome, the willingness to do what is needed not because we are certain it will work, but because it is the right expression of who we really are and what we understand.

Naomi Klein writes that the changes required of us to respond to the ecological crisis should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift, as a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities. I find this deeply resonant, because it is exactly what Buddhism is pointing to. The dissolution of self-grasping is not a sacrifice; it is a liberation. A mind that gives up its territory, that no longer hoards what is good for itself, that stops offloading what it does not want onto others and onto the earth, that does not shrink. It opens. It becomes vast and compassionate.

This is perhaps what Buddhism has to offer to this burning world: not an escape from it, not a retreat into a private peace while the forests fall, but the most radical possible engagement, the transformation of the very mind that is driving the crisis, one practitioner at a time, the fence between you and me coming down slowly, the territory shrinking, the open space that was always already there becoming a little more available.

And perhaps that transformation does not stop at the edge of the mind. Patrul Rinpoche, whose stories we have been following in recent posts, embodied this fully: lying on dirt paths, offering his body to horseflies, living his life as an undefended mind in motion. He taught the Bodhicharyavatara many times throughout eastern Tibet, touching the hearts and minds of the many who listened. It is said these teachings also touched the ground itself, where new kinds of flowers began appearing on the hillsides where he sat, blooming even in winter. Whatever we make of this story, the logic of interdependence is clear. When self-grasping dissolves, what floods in is compassion, natural, unobstructed, reaching everything around it. A mind like that cannot help but leave a mark on the world, felt in the ecology itself.

I am still finding my way with this question. Three years of retreat, and I am only beginning to glimpse what genuine engagement might look like. But I keep coming back to something simple: the quality of presence we bring changes things. Not always visibly. Not always quickly. But it changes things.

Footnotes:
Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, Harper One, 2021.p 2.

By now most of you will have guessed that this is the same master we have been exploring in my last two posts. Dza Patrul Rinpoche. This account comes from Matthieu Ricard’s Enlightened Vagabond.

We may no longer be surprised by his eccentric and selfless behavior. We may also be shaking our heads thinking: This man is crazy. Are these acts necessary? Isn’t this a form of self-torture?

Whatever we may think, these are stories that stay with us. Whether they invoke irritation or wonder, they remain, percolating somewhere in the back of our minds. Now, every evening when the mosquitoes attack us or when a horsefly lands on our skin, how will we respond? With compassion? Will we think: how wonderful, now I can make an offering? Most likely it is immediate irritation that arises. Perhaps we automatically try to swat and kill them. Or we quickly chase them away, these small but highly obstinate bloodthirsty creatures. Rarely will we let them land on us and allow them to pierce our flesh and extract our blood.

Patrul’s story reminds me of something a Chod master once said. The best Chod practice, he taught, is to go to a place with many blood-seeking insects, strip naked, and let them bite you. Chod, meaning cutting through, is a Tibetan Buddhist practice developed by the extraordinary female teacher Machig Labdron, where practitioners visualize offering their body to spirits and other beings in order to cut through all attachment to the self. Machig has famously said: To consider adversity as a friend is the instruction of Chod.

Was Patrul Rinpoche doing this practice in the forest to cut through his own attachment? Or was he acting out of pure compassion for these bloodthirsty creatures, offering his body to them just as he had offered his presence to the feuding nomads, feeling heartfelt love and care for their welfare and their future existence?

Perhaps there is not much difference. Most likely the two go hand in hand. The less attachment we have to this body, to this self, the greater our compassion and willingness to use it for the nourishment of others. Our attachment to the body and the self is what impedes the natural expression of compassion toward other beings. This is the shepherd’s bodhicitta lived in the most literal way imaginable. Their welfare first. His comfort, his ease, his body. Simply not his concern.

But before we can understand what Patrul was actually doing, we need to ask a more basic question. What is this body that we are so urgently protecting? And who exactly is doing the protecting?

Shantideva asks something similar in the eighth chapter of The Way of the Bodhisattva. He points out that we currently identify with a body that is actually made of other, from sperm and egg, neither of which is consciousness itself. Yet we cling to this manifestation as our self. So why not make this same connection with other sentient beings? He writes: “Just as you identify a drop of others’ blood and sperm, and cling to it as though it were yourself, now take sentient beings — others — as your self.” In the next verse he goes further still. If you truly take others as your self, then be covetous on their behalf. Take everything you possess and give it away for their benefit.^[1]

This is not a metaphor. Patrul Rinpoche, lying naked on the ground, offering his body to the horseflies, was living these verses with profound authenticity.

Researchers studying what they call body ownership illusions have found that the brain's sense of "this body is mine" is not a fixed fact. Something the brain actively produces. And something that can, under the right conditions, attach itself to objects beyond our own flesh and bone.

The most famous of these experiments is the Rubber Hand Illusion, first described by researchers Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen in 1998. A participant sits at a table with one hand hidden from view. A rubber hand is placed on the table in front of them. A researcher strokes both the rubber hand and the hidden real hand simultaneously with a brush. Within minutes the participant begins to feel that the rubber hand is their own. The brain had simply incorporated it into its sense of the body. That, it seems, was all it took. We feel sensations in a hand that is not ours. In later experiments, when the rubber hand was suddenly threatened with a hammer, participants pulled back in alarm.

Chris Niebauer, in his book No Self No Problem, draws a connection between cognitive neuroscience and Buddhist teachings. Neuropsychology, he argues, is now confirming what Buddhism has known for centuries that our sense of self, what we commonly call the ego, is an illusion created by the left side of the brain. It exists, he writes, the way a mirage exists in the desert. As a thought rather than a thing. The rubber hand experiment points in the same direction from a different angle: even our sense of owning this particular body turns out to be something the mind constructs rather than something that is simply there.

And because we take this constructed body so completely for granted, we do not hesitate to cause harm in its defense. We kill insects without a second thought. We consume food without considering the suffering involved. We arrange our lives, our economies, our entire civilization around human physical comfort. And the planet is paying the price. The forests burn. The oceans warm. Species disappear. All so that this body, the domain of the self, remains protected, fed, and comfortable. It may start with the horsefly. It ends with the planet.

This is perhaps the most ingrained habit of the mind, the deep conviction that there is an owner here who deserves all the good. Who righteously discards the bad. To others. To wherever. To the next generation.

Patrul Rinpoche shows the inverse. Not by keeping the bad out. By allowing it in. As an offering. The border of the body not defended but dissolved entirely. Whether lying on the dirt of a narrow mountain path or naked in the forest offering his body to the horseflies, the fence is simply not there. This is the ultimate practice of Tonglen. Not a visualization or a formal session. A life lived without any fundamental division between self and not self.

Often we tell ourselves we have too little time to practice. But perhaps practice is closer than we think. The blood-seeking insects of summer are everywhere right now. Most of us are not yet ready to offer our body to them as Patrul did. And if we are not ready, Shantideva advises being patient with ourselves. The offering of the body is an advanced practice for those who have worked deeply with the mind. But perhaps we can pause for just a moment before we chase them off or swat at them. To stop and consider something about the living being that has arrived before us. Just that. A moment of kind acknowledgement. Remembering that it too is under the illusion that its body urgently requires food.

And let us recall, even briefly, that the owner we are so busy protecting may itself be nothing more than what neuroscientist Anil Seth calls a controlled hallucination.

Self-torture requires a self. What Patrul demonstrated was something else entirely. A body without an owner, offered without reservation to beings who need it. Not a spiritual exercise. Not even a practice. Simply pure compassion, with nothing in the way.

^[1] Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, trans. by the Padmakara Translation Group, (Shambhala, 2006), chap. 8, verses 158-159.

A man was sitting alone on a stone, out in the open, in the cold. No audience. At least none visible to human eyes. And yet for days he sat there, expounding on the Bodhicharyavatara (The Way of the Bodhisattva), Shantideva’s incomparable guide, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, to the wide empty meadow around him.

This was, of course, Patrul Rinpoche. The same yogi I wrote about in my last post, who lay for days on a dirt path between two feuding tribes until all their anger melted away like snowflakes on a hot stone. Here he was again. This time teaching to no one. Or perhaps, to everyone. To spirits, animals, insects, gods, to all the nonhuman beings, gathered in that meadow, listening attentively to a text on the very heart of bodhicitta. Reflect on this image for a moment.

Bodhicitta is the intention to become awakened solely for the welfare of all sentient beings. When it truly awakens in us, it changes everything. Shantideva says that from the moment such an attitude arises, we are transformed from ordinary confused human beings into offspring of the buddhas, objects of reverence by humans and gods alike. Not a small claim. Possibly the most radical transformation any tradition has ever described.

I was fortunate to have translated the Bodhicharyavatara on multiple occasions at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Kathmandu. Each time it changed my heart. There is something about listening deeply to the words of Shantideva and genuinely allowing them in. Each verse transforms. A softness, a kindness, appears that wasn’t there before.

Patrul Rinpoche taught the Bodhicharyavatara more than a hundred times and received teachings on it himself more than a hundred times. And yet, he would remark that he had still not fully grasped its meaning. He traveled extensively throughout eastern Tibet, teaching it wherever he went. According to Alak Zenkar Rinpoche’s biography, during Patrul Rinpoche’s lifetime the text became as widespread as the very stones and earth found throughout the upper, middle, and lower regions of this part of Tibet.

Another story from Matthieu Ricard’s collection stays with me. During an extensive teaching to a crowd of several thousand, Patrul Rinpoche sat, not on a throne, but on a simple grass-covered mound of earth. When the teachings were over, something remarkable happened. Wildflowers of many kinds and colors began to bloom on the grassy mound where he had been sitting. The bright yellow flowers that grow abundantly on the high altitude meadows of Kham in summer usually have five petals. But here and in other places where Patrul Rinpoche taught the Bodhicharyavatara, these flowers began blooming with abundant petals, sometimes thirty, sometimes as many as fifty petals. It is said these flowers even bloomed in winter. They became known throughout the region as “Bodhicharyavatara flowers.”

He once heard of a master who was known to be a true living embodiment of bodhicitta and renunciation. He set out to pay homage. Not to request teachings. Simply to bow before such a person. On his way there he heard the master had just died. He stopped on the road. And then he made a hundred prostrations in the direction of where this master had lived.

This story appears tamer, much less dramatic, than Rinpoche’s encounter with feuding nomads. But I keep coming back to it. Why would one of the most highly realized Dzogchen masters of his time travel to pay homage to someone simply because they possessed true bodhicitta?

Maybe Patrul understood something about bodhicitta that many of us have not yet really grasped.

A good friend once shared something she had heard from Khyabje Khen Rinpoche that stayed with her. He said: If you are trying to progress on the path, you do not yet have true bodhicitta.

I reflected on this statement for a long time. On the surface it makes little sense. Bodhicitta, the mind of awakening, is the wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. A most noble aspiration. And of course we want to progress along the path. Is this not the whole point? And yet Khen Rinpoche suggests this very impetus is a sign that something important may be missing.

I came back to this in meditation many times before I began to feel what he was pointing at.

If you truly possess bodhicitta, your only concern is for others. Your entire being aspires for this and nothing else. Patrul Rinpoche lay on that dirt path not for personal gain, not for recognition, not even for his own spiritual progress. He did so purely and entirely for the peace of those nomads. Nothing in it for him. Nothing at all.

This is perhaps the most complete way to step out of what Trungpa Rinpoche called the bureaucracy of ego. Not through effort or discipline. Simply because the heart has opened so completely toward the suffering of others that there is no room left for self-concern. No room for personal progress either. The ego does not get dismantled. It simply falls away.

The Buddhist tradition describes three types of bodhicitta, each one progressively harder to grasp.

The first is easy to understand. The king walks ahead of his subjects. We strive for enlightenment first so we can return and help others. Logical. Most of us aspire to this one.

The second is already more surprising. The ferryman crosses the river together with his passengers. We wish to attain enlightenment alongside all beings simultaneously. The scope expands. Still, we have not forgotten ourselves.

The third may surprise you. The shepherd walks behind the flock, tending to each one, making sure not a single animal is left behind. Only when every last sheep is safely through the gate does the shepherd enter. The wish here is to bring every sentient being to enlightenment first. Every last one. And only then do we attain enlightenment for ourselves.

Reading this for the first time, most people feel something between admiration and mild panic.

The tradition calls this third way the arousing of bodhicitta beyond compare. It is said to be the way Manjushri himself first gave rise to bodhicitta. Avalokiteshvara made a similar vow, refusing to attain enlightenment until every last sentient being had been freed from suffering.

What moves me about this is the paradox at its heart. The shepherd vows to be last. And yet it is precisely this, the complete letting go of any concern for one’s own liberation, that may become the ground of the deepest realization. Not as a reward. Just a natural consequence. When there is no self left seeking enlightenment, what remains?

This is not a teaching to understand logically. For me it is one to feel. To feel deeply.

Try it now, as you read. From your heart, make this wish: may all sentient beings become awakened before me. May I assist them however I can. They are suffering so much. Let me care for them first, regardless of the time, the hardship, the sheer infinite number of beings involved. May they be free before I am free.

When I genuinely try to feel this rather than just think it, something shifts. The low hum of self-concern, the striving, the need to get somewhere, quiets. Not because I pushed it away. Simply because there is suddenly no room for it.

This is what Khen Rinpoche may have been pointing at. And it is what Patrul Rinpoche kept demonstrating, on the mountain pathway, on the stone, in the hundred prostrations for a master he never met. Not a single moment kept for himself. Everything for others.

This may be what true bodhicitta looks like when it is fully lived.

A sleeping Tibetan vagrant was lying in the middle of a narrow mountain path, blocking the way. The nomads living in two small neighboring valleys were forced to step over him. Some felt annoyed. Others disgusted. Everyone wondered, why does he have to lie exactly here blocking the way? In Tibetan culture, stepping over someone’s body is considered deeply disrespectful, a serious breach of etiquette, especially with shoes on. And yet one by one, that is exactly what they were forced to do.

None of them knew that the person blocking their path and lying on the dirty ground was actually the highly realized master Patrul Rinpoche (1808-1887).

According to his biography, Enlightened Vagabond, compiled by Matthieu Ricard from oral accounts and written sources, Patrul Rinpoche had heard that a serious blood feud had broken out between two nomadic tribes. Traveling alone as he mostly did, dressed in simple nomad clothing, he made his way there to prevent further bloodshed and see if he could pacify the conflict. He did not go as a peace negotiator and had no interventions in mind at all. He simply lay down on a mountain pathway between the two valleys. Pretending to sleep, he gave rise to strong compassion and loving kindness, wishing that each person would let go of their anger and hatred. This went on for days and days, until every single person from both nomadic tribes had been forced to step over him at least once. The blood feud dissolved. Peace returned.

He did not say a word. All that was needed, it seems, was his loving presence. A presence so thoroughly suffused with bodhicitta and compassion that merely coming into contact with him was enough to make the rampant anger, ready to boil over, simply die down.

When I read this story during my retreat, it touched me deeply.

What struck me was his complete humility. He did not want anyone to know who he was or what he was doing. Putting myself in his shoes, I wondered how it must have felt to lie there on that path. The nomads stepping over him one by one. Their curses. The anger directed at him from all sides. He was there entirely for their sake and well-being. Patrul Rinpoche was utterly free from any craving for recognition or praise. He simply did what was necessary.

But the story also raised a question that I have been reflecting on ever since. What kind of practice produces this kind of presence?

When we think about becoming awakened, we may picture something rather different. Perhaps we see ourselves on a high throne, teaching to a devoted assembly. Flowers being offered. Students gazing up at us with admiration. We are definitely not lying on a dirt path for days with nomads stepping over us, cursing at us, and shaking their heads in pity and disgust.

What have we actually signed up for here?

Trungpa Rinpoche had a name for the throne fantasy. In his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, he warned against what he called the golden chain of spirituality, the beautiful but imprisoning belief that the path will deliver us what we most want. Such a chain might be beautiful to wear, he wrote, but ultimately it imprisons us.

He also described how the path requires us to step out of what he called the bureaucracy of ego, that restless drive to improve and elevate itself through anything it touches. Even spirituality becomes yet another project for the ego to pursue. The real path of dharma is a continual process of dismantling, undoing, opening, giving up ego’s territory. All the way. With no expectation of reward.

Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche says the same thing with equal bluntness. In his book Not For Happiness, he writes: “It is such a mistake to assume that practicing dharma will help us calm down and lead an untroubled life; nothing could be further from the truth. Dharma is not a therapy.” Buddhist practices, he explains, are specifically designed to dismantle our habitual tendency to cherish and protect the self. Pattern by pattern. Until the compulsion to cling to a solid self is gone entirely. And he offers an uncomfortable measure of whether practice is working: if your life is not being turned upside down, something is probably not working.

Enlightenment, in Trungpa Rinpoche’s words, is ego’s ultimate disappointment.

So what IS the path for then?

It may be the most honest question we can ask ourselves. And perhaps looking at the image of Patrul Rinpoche lying on that dirt path, being stepped over, cursed and ridiculed, the answer is: nothing. Nothing in the conventional sense. Nothing the ego would recognize as a reward.

The path is about dismantling all of ego’s expectations.

Tonglen, the practice of taking and giving, is perhaps the most direct expression of this dismantling. Its purpose is not to achieve calm. Not to feel more spiritual. Its intent is to take down the fence. To break down the deep habitual structures that keep our world divided. What belongs inside our clean private territory and what must be kept out. Our suffering on one side. Everyone else’s on the other.

The instruction is almost shockingly literal. Breathe in the suffering of others. Let it seep into every pore. Own the heat of it. Release any sense that the suffering belongs somewhere else, to someone else, outside your clean private space. And then on the outbreath give away whatever ease, happiness and spaciousness you have. Send it out toward everyone.

This feels counterintuitive. Every instinct says close the border. Every habit of self-protection agrees. And yet the practice says: take it down. Not because suffering is pleasant. But because the fence itself is the problem.

What Patrul Rinpoche demonstrated on the mountain pathway between two feuding tribes was not a technique or a miracle. It was the result of years, decades, of exactly this kind of practice carried to its conclusion. The fence between himself and those nomads had dissolved so completely that his mere presence changed the atmosphere. He did not need words. He did not need a plan. The bodhicitta and compassion cultivated over a lifetime simply radiated outward, as naturally as warmth from a fire.

And this gives me such confidence. Especially in our times, when we see so much cruelty, inequality, power-grabbing and disinformation, it is easy to feel powerless, alone and insignificant. But we are not. Every moment of genuine practice, however small and invisible, however unrecognized, changes something. Every time we breathe in what we most want to push away and breathe out what we most want to keep, the fence comes down a little. Ego’s territory shrinks a little. The vast open space that was always already there becomes a little more available.

This path is not for happiness, at least not in the way we usually mean the word. It is for the kind of presence whose deepest joy lies in benefiting others. Lying on a dirt path for days on end, unrecognized and uncelebrated, while changing everything by simply being there.

^[1] Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, Not For Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called Preliminary Practices, Shambhala Publications, 2012, p. 8.

“Were you ever afraid?” The Dalai Lama asked this of a monk called Lopon-la, who had just emerged from eighteen years in a Chinese labor camp. Tortured. Imprisoned. Cut off from everything he had ever known. The answer was not what anyone expected. “Yes,” Lopon-la said. “There was one thing I was afraid of. I was afraid I might lose compassion for my torturers.”

That answer stays with me. And it makes me wonder about my own fears.

What is my greatest fear? Getting seriously ill and dying, perhaps. Losing the ones I love. Or watching the world as we know it unravel under the weight of climate crisis and political upheaval. Or, quite concretely, the fear I felt when a forest fire burning near my home in the Pyrenees threatened to spread further and take everything with it.

These are real fears. I do not dismiss them. But when I hear a story like Lopon-la’s, I find myself looking inward and asking a more uncomfortable question. How do my fears reflect the quality of my practice?

We all carry fears, small and large, some deeply existential. I certainly do. But perhaps the most honest measure of where we are on the path is not how much fear we have, but what we fear most deeply.

Would my greatest fear, in the face of pain and suffering, be losing compassion for those who cause it? Would it even occur to me to be afraid of that? Or would I be so consumed by the pain, injustice, and perhaps the anger itself that the question would never arise?

This reminds me of something Drubpon Tenzin Sangpo often says. The greatest fear of a Mahayana practitioner, he tells us, is to be selfish. For a Vajrayana practitioner, he continues, it is to experience oneself and the world in an ordinary way, to lose sight of the pure and sacred dimension of everything that arises. Both of these are inward-focused fears. Fears about the orientation of the mind. Not about what the world might do to us, but about what we might be doing to our own heart.

Shantideva speaks to this with extraordinary precision. A wild and untrained elephant can, in the worst case, put an end to our life. But it cannot drag us down into the deepest realms of future suffering. The wild untrained elephant of our own mind, however, can do precisely that.

The Lojong tradition, a body of mind training teachings at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist practice, has a slogan for exactly this. When the world is filled with evil, transform adversity into the path of enlightenment. Not if the world becomes filled with evil. When. The slogan assumes difficulty as the baseline condition of human existence and asks a single question: what do we do with it?

Lopon-la had an answer. He transformed his imprisonment into the most intensive compassion practice imaginable. His torturers became his teachers. Not because he was passive or submissive, but because he refused to let them take the one thing that was entirely his own. The orientation of his mind.

This is not a story about inconceivable saintliness. We do not need to face imprisonment or torture to find these teachings relevant. Every day we encounter small versions of the same challenges. The colleague who pushes our buttons. The person who speaks unkindly of us or quietly casts us as the villain in their story. These moments arise all around us. In each of them, the same question arises: what do we do with this? What do we do with what is arising right now?

Sara Lewis, in her remarkable book Spacious Minds, studied Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala and found something unexpected about how human beings process trauma. The Tibetans who coped most gracefully were not the ones who processed or debriefed their suffering in the conventional psychological sense. What worked instead was what Tibetan Buddhism calls sems pa chen po, a vast and spacious mind that does not fixate on individual problems. Seeing past events as impermanent and ultimately illusory in nature, they used suffering as an opportunity to generate compassion for others rather than as a wound to be healed. My own sense, having practiced within this tradition for many years, is that this resilience was not accidental. It grows from understanding karma, which places responsibility within rather than without. From the understanding that the nature of mind remains untouched, no matter what arises. And from Lojong, which precisely trains the mind’s orientation, from looking outward to looking inward, from victimhood to agency, from self-concern to vast compassion, day after day. Lojong training is like building a muscle. And like any muscle, it grows stronger through use.

The slogan does not ask us to approve of evil or to pretend it is not happening. It asks something far more radical and far more practical. It asks us to refuse to be consumed by it. To keep the orientation of our mind clear. And then we can do something remarkable. We put ourselves in the shoes of others. We sense their suffering, their confusion, everything they are carrying, and out of compassion we take all of this upon ourselves so that they do not have to carry it alone. We use all of this as the path.

When the world is filled with evil, and there are days when it certainly seems to be, this is the instruction. Not to look away or despair, but to transform. And perhaps the question to ask ourselves, as we face whatever difficulty is arising right now, is the one Lopon-la’s story quietly poses. Not: what am I afraid of losing out there? But: what am I in danger of losing in here?

The mind that holds this question is not a superhuman mind. It is a trained mind. And training, as our teachers remind us every single day, is simply a matter of beginning. Again and again and again.

Drive all blame into oneself. Of all the Lojong slogans, this one may produce the most uncomfortable silence.

Many of us, especially those unfamiliar with mind training, recoil immediately upon hearing it. Blame myself for everything? For the political chaos, the environmental catastrophe, the wars, all the cruelty and indifference? Absolutely not. This is not only outrageous, it sounds positively dangerous. A colossal guilt trip dressed up as spiritual practice. It reminds me, having grown up Catholic, of sitting in church as a small child repeating mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. I still remember how strange and uncomfortable that felt in a child’s body. This slogan can land in a similar way.

The resistance is understandable. Are we supposed to blame ourselves for the state of the world? Is this not precisely what Buddhism is promising to free us from?

But the Tibetan word that translates as “blame” is worth reflecting on. It points to something far more interesting than self-flagellation: a radical refusal to locate the source of our suffering outside ourselves. There is no guilt. Rather it steers us toward reclaiming full ownership of our experience.

Modern psychology has a name for this distinction. It distinguishes between an external locus of control, the belief that we are at the mercy of what happens to us, and an internal locus of control, the sense that we are the authors of our own responses and experience. Studies suggest that people with a stronger internal locus of control are more resilient, more creative. Less flattened by difficulty.

But Buddhism goes considerably further than psychology here.

It holds that we are not only responsible for our responses. We are, in a very real sense, participants in the creation of the reality we experience. This is not to say that the world is created by consciousness. It means that what we perceive, how we perceive it, and what meaning we assign to it, is always already shaped by our own karmic tendencies, our habitual patterns, what Buddhism calls the vast storehouse of the alaya consciousness. We are never simply passive recipients of a ready-made world, watching events unfold as if on a screen that has nothing to do with us.

The Avatamsaka Sutra captures this through the image of Indra’s web. Imagine a vast net stretching in all directions without limit. At every node of this enormous net sit multi-faceted jewels, each jewel reflecting the infinite array of other jewels perfectly, a continuous and endless realm of reflections containing reflections. Nothing in this web exists independently. Everything that arises is shaped by and connected with everything else.

This is a fundamentally different model of reality from the one most of us grew up with. In that familiar view, things exist separately and independently, affecting each other from the outside but remaining fundamentally distinct. In Indra’s web, separation itself is an illusion. There are no separate things. There is only relationship.

And if this is true, then nothing is insignificant. Not a single thought. Not a single moment of anger or kindness. Every ripple moves through the entire web. This is not a poetic metaphor. It is the deepest possible argument for why every small choice matters and why driving all blame into oneself is not self-punishment. It is an act of cosmic responsibility.

We are not separate beings living inside a pre-existing universe. We are nodes in a vast web of interdependent arising. We could think of it this way. We do not experience the world and then react to it. We are already part of what is arising. The anger we feel, the conflict we encounter, the world we perceive, none of it exists independently of the awareness that meets it. We do not live inside the universe like a visitor in a house. We are the universe, arising moment by moment, shaped by and shaping everything around us. We live as the universe. Not in it. That is a crucial distinction.

Every experience that arises, the difficult person in front of us, the anger in our chest, the feeling of being wronged or overlooked, is not happening to a separate self who stands apart from the world. These experiences are arising within us. Within the awareness that we are. Driving all blame into oneself, seen from this angle, is not self-punishment. It is a recognition of participation, of our inseparability from everything that arises.

This has practical consequences that go far beyond personal practice.

When we see leaders gaining power only to fill their pockets, when greed and cruelty seem to shape everything around us, it is easy to feel outraged and helpless. It is all happening out there. But if we understand that each selfish thought, each moment of our own greed or anger or indifference is participating in and contributing to the landscape of collective experience, then powerlessness becomes harder to justify. The opposite of greed is in our hands. The opposite of cruelty is in our hands. We are not separate from what is unfolding. We are implicated in it, which means we are also capable of changing it.

Not necessarily through grand gestures. But simply through this moment. This thought. This choice.

And this is where the slogan transforms entirely. Every time we open to the suffering of all beings, wishing to take their pain upon ourselves so that they do not have to carry it, we are not performing a private spiritual exercise. We are changing the web itself. Each time anger comes up about the state of the world, we can pause and recognise something. This anger, left unattended, only adds to what we are angry about. But taken upon ourselves with the wish that others be free from it, something shifts. We are no longer adding to the problem. We have become, however quietly, part of the solution.

Not a guilt trip after all. A recipe for freedom. The recognition that every thought, every emotion, every small act matters. We were never cut off from the web. We were always woven of it.

Everyone knows how uncomfortable it can be to find ourselves in the grip of a powerful negative emotion, especially when we consider ourselves serious Buddhist practitioners who work hard at taming these insidious afflictions. We’re not supposed to feel like this. We should be far beyond this by now. The shame that creeps in when we find ourselves failing to uphold these important aspirations can be as suffocating as the emotion itself.

And yet here it is once again. The cold flash of anger gripping the entire body. The envy, the unkind thought, the sudden wave of isolation pressing in from all sides. It can blindside us, take us unaware, and momentarily consume us. How do can we relate to these states? What do we do?

Khen Rinpoche, when teaching us during our retreat, had a simple answer. Transform all these negative states into virtue. But how?

The solution to working with these most enduring human afflictions may seem counterintuitive: plain and simple ownership.

The problem, much of the time, is not so much the emotion itself, but rather our resistance to owning it, to accepting it. We automatically try to hand responsibility to someone else. We feel this way because of what this person did to us, because of how unfairly we were treated. Our emotional responses are their fault, it’s their doing, it’s caused by something happening to us from outside. And the moment we do that, we lose our agency. And we lose an opportunity for growth. We become stuck, perhaps even a bit frozen, as we wait for the emotion to pass or for the situation to change, and in the meantime the emotion runs its course unchecked, repeating itself, ever deepening its grooves.

Modern psychology has much to say about owning, accepting, and working with our difficult emotions. Research on emotion regulation, for example, has some interesting findings. Simply shifting from the position “I am angry” to “I notice anger arising in me” significantly reduces the intensity of the emotion. This small shift, from identification to observation, activates the part of the brain responsible for rational awareness and creates a gap between the raw emotional charge and our response to it. That gap is where genuine choice lives and grows.

Buddhist mind training, including Tonglen, approaches ownership of our emotions differently from the way psychology does. One of the classical Lojong slogans, drive all blame into oneself, points to something remarkably radical: a willingness to take complete responsibility, not only for our own emotional states, but for everything that arises. In my own experience with this practice, I have found that genuine openness to sensing emotions directly, in the present moment, is what makes profound transformation possible. Without this honest acknowledgement, the aspiration to take on the suffering of others tends to remain something purely intellectual, a nice idea rather than a living practice. How can we genuinely take on the suffering of all beings if we are still secretly fleeing from our own?

What has helped me personally is to simply try to meet the emotion honestly when it arises. When anger comes, or envy, or an unkind thought, rather than pushing it away or drowning in it, I try to just feel it, in the body and in the mind, as it actually is. And then, from the heart, however tentatively, I make this wish: may this anger I am feeling right now stand in for the anger of all beings. May they be free from it. I take it upon myself so that they do not have to carry it.

As seasoned practitioners we most likely have heard these teachings on mind training and tonglen many times. Some of us, if we are honest, may have quietly filed them away as touching but not especially profound or relevant. I would like to argue otherwise.

The real question here is not how well we really know these teachings. It is what actually happens in us when we encounter a negative emotion. How do we relate to it in that very moment? This becomes very relevant to the practice of tonglen, also known as giving and taking, as we will soon see.

We all may instinctively contract when anger, desire, or envy creeps in. We want it gone. We push against it, label it, try to force it out of our system as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this attitude of rejection, however well intentioned, often makes things worse. What we resist will persist. The emotion doesn’t get processed. It gets compressed. It becomes lodged and locked in.

When we open up and meet the emotion as an opportunity, something shifts immediately. The anger is no longer an enemy to be conquered. It becomes a door. You acknowledge it, you feel it honestly in the body, and in the very next moment you expand the frame entirely: all beings suffer from this same poison. You are not alone in it and neither are they. You take their suffering upon yourself, embracing the common, shared experience, and in that gesture something opens. The mind is no longer imprisoned in its own private misery. It has become, however briefly, vast.

Rejoice in that. Rejoice in the courage it takes. Rejoice in the thought that other beings might be a little freer because of this moment.

All emotions and thoughts, including indifferent and nonvirtuous thoughts, can be transformed in this way. No mental event is too small, too large, too shameful, or too ordinary to become an occasion for this practice.

The Buddhist approach of mind training takes this further than psychology has generally ventured. It does not simply ask us to take responsibility for our own emotional states, or even to cultivate general compassion for others. It asks something more specific and more radical: to take the suffering of all beings upon ourselves, deliberately, in the very moment we are most overwhelmed by our own suffering. With this wish, however tentative at first, the scope of the mind begins to shift from the small contracted loop of “my anger, my suffering, my problem” to something boundless. You are no longer alone in your misery. You are there with every being who has ever felt this same poison. And in that expansion, something remarkable happens. The emotion that felt like a prison becomes a gateway into genuine compassion. The egotistical mind, narrowed and contracted around its own pain, opens into something vast.

When I think about the founders of the mind training tradition, I feel such gratitude for their ingenuity. What strikes me most is not only that they found a way to work with negative emotions rather than suppress them, but that they conceived of something far more radical than mere personal emotional management. They turned the whole thing inside out. Instead of asking how we might feel better, they asked how we might use our own suffering to benefit others. That shift, from self to other, from contracted to boundless, is perhaps the most remarkable thing about this entire tradition.

For me, this is what makes the mind training tradition so extraordinary. What we thought was the obstacle turns out to be the door.

You may wonder what made old Khen Rinpoche fly to our retreat center for a second time to teach a new group of three-year retreatants, despite his inability to walk, despite his old age. Imagine being eighty-eight years old, bound to a wheelchair, speaking not a word of English, and boarding a plane in Nepal with a stopover somewhere in the Middle East, to come here to the French Pyrenees. Why did he undergo all these hardships for our benefit, while declining to give instructions to many others who have asked?

He arrived here a few days ago, and after many hours of difficult travel, he did not appear even slightly tired. He looked utterly radiant. He was visibly touched and delighted to receive each retreatant, playfully pulling at their hair and beards as he greeted them one by one.

At lunch a single question about the Dharma was enough to launch him into a long discourse where he barely stopped to catch his breath. Explanations and citations gushed forth without end. Here was a living treasure of the Buddhist teachings, overflowing in real time. We were all deeply moved.

During our recently concluded retreat, when I was translating for him, Khen Rinpoche encouraged me to remind him when he went on like this. Only half joking, he said: “Tell me to shut my mouth like a walnut, like a momo, like an apple.” He made a gesture with his right hand and told me to use it too. He added if this didn’t work, I shouldn’t hesitate to throw something at him. He was delighted every time I playfully used this gesture.

So what inspired him to come here again to instruct us? For me there is no doubt. It is the sincerity of our retreatants, each one ready to dedicate the next three years of their life to genuine practice. The young retreatants, and a few older ones, some close to his own age, were all overjoyed to receive him. Like children standing before a Christmas tree. That image stays with me.

Many of us hesitate to consider a three-year retreat because of the time commitment. Family, work, money. It all seems to stand in the way. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche stresses how important it is to have the full support of our family before undertaking such a commitment. This feels like essential advice. If we wholeheartedly aspire to engage in retreat, those who love us may eventually find it surprisingly easy to support that wish. And, curiously, many of our retreatants come from families with no connection to Buddhism at all, and yet receive full consent and encouragement. So committing to a three-year retreat may be more possible than you realize. And three years is not, in truth, such a long time.

Perhaps a more important question is this. Take a good look at your own life. How many three-year periods have already passed, quickly, quietly, almost without notice? Sit with that for a moment. What did you accomplish in the last three years? And the three before that? Did any of it change you, in any lasting way, for the better?

These three years can mark the difference between liberation and continued samsara. That does not mean liberation is impossible outside a retreat, nor is it guaranteed within one. But daily practice remains indispensable, wherever we are, and a three-year retreat offers a profound environment for continuous daily practice. Perhaps what matters most, wherever and however we practice, is simply this: are we managing to transform our temporary states of mind into lasting qualities and traits?

In his book Altered Traits, co-authored with neuroscientist Richard Davidson, Daniel Goleman draws a distinction that speaks directly to what Khen Rinpoche has been trying to teach us all along. A meditative state is a temporary shift, something that arises during a session and fades the moment we stand up. A meditative trait is something else entirely. It remains with us. It is still there the next morning. And the morning after that. Their research points to one thing: sustained, intensive practice, repeated over years, not weeks. The brain reshapes itself through repetition. What begins as a fleeting experience of compassion or equanimity slowly, over time, becomes who we are.

This is another way of understanding why Khen Rinpoche came back to the same instructions every single day. Never spend one moment in ordinariness. Mind your own business. Look only at your own mind. He was not interested in fleeting states. He wanted something to permanently shift in us, worn in so deeply through repetition and effort that it would still be there long after we left the cushion, long after we left the retreat. Not a state. A trait.

And perhaps this, more than anything else, is what makes a genuine Dharma practitioner. Not the number of years spent in retreat, but the quiet, patient transformation of who we are when no one is watching. A wise old man in a wheelchair crossed the world to teach us this. This alone says everything we need to know.

“Only mind your own business.” The old Khen Rinpoche repeated this every single day during his month-long stay at our three-year retreat, his voice strong, his expression stern. There was no room to negotiate. “Your job,” he told us, “is to look only at your own mind and not at others.” It may sound simple. But try it for a couple of days and see what happens.

When you live in a small, isolated group, meditating many hours a day, almost anything can become a problem, a sound, a glance, but also real things: someone’s laziness, an unspoken tension, a sense that you are being treated unfairly. None of it stays small for long. Things that would never bother you, suddenly feel incredibly unbearable. In this heightened state of sensitivity, the mind begins to fixate, almost obsessively so, at times. Before long you have completely stopped minding your own business, convinced that all inner work cannot continue, not until things on the outside change first. This is, as Khen Rinpoche would say, a blatant lie. But the mind embraces this falsehood with enormous conviction and loves to indulge it.

How often do we give our power away to others, casting ourselves as helpless victims of the people around us and what they happen to be doing? The mind loves this game. And we, again and again, fall for it. As Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche often says, our mind is so gullible and appearances are so skilled in deceiving us.

The old Khen Rinpoche, with all he has lived through and with his decades of practice, knew precisely what he was talking about. He knew why he needed to stress this point patiently and unapologetically every single day. This is quite similar to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s continual emphasis on the eightfold mind-training instructions of beloved Atisha, which includes the supreme pith instruction: Always look at your own mind.

We may know this intuitively, and the path reveals that if we follow this pith instruction it will lead us to freedom. We are reminded that finding flaws in others and waiting for change to come from outside is fruitless and the basis of samsara. And yet it is so hard for us to take this truth to heart. Our inner storyteller loves to tell tales about something out there that’s definitely wrong and in need of fixing. And diligently, faithfully, we listen.

Drubpon Tenzin Sangpo, our retreat master, loved to remind us, we have no lack of instructions, our weakness lies in forgetting them. How true.

To mind your own business requires effort: first is making the effort to remember, and second is the effort needed to overcome this long-standing habit of looking outward instead of inward. But why is this so difficult? Why does the mind so persistently prefer to look outside rather than within?

Buddhist teachings point to something quite precise here. Our habitual tendencies are not simply bad habits we have picked up in this lifetime. Rather they are viewed as the accumulated imprints of countless lifetimes of actions, speech and thought, etched so deeply into us that we cannot even see them at work. They lie far beyond the reach of ordinary awareness, shaping everything, while we remain convinced we are simply seeing things as they are. This is why intellectual understanding, however clear, is rarely enough on its own. What we need is something far more patient, repeated, and deeply embodied than a good idea.

Modern neuroscience has also helped me personally to understand how these processes unfold and offers a different perspective. It describes the brain as essentially a prediction machine, constantly trying to conserve energy by following familiar patterns and well worn pathways. Another interesting perspective is called negativity bias, here the brain is identified as having a deep evolutionary tendency to scan the outside world for threats and things that need fixing. We are literally wired to look outward. Turning that gaze inward, honestly and without flinching, goes against a very deep grain.

Call it karma. Call it neuroscience. It comes down to the same thing: genuine transformation is not a single insight. It takes effort, repeated and sustained, a constant application of it, day after day. And this is precisely why old Khen Rinpoche came back to this every single day. He was not interested in our intellectual understanding; he wanted us to go deeper.

To make this concrete, he would invite us to imagine a beautiful woman or a handsome man suddenly entering our small retreat temple. The moment desire or attachment arises, this is the moment to look at your mind. Or to imagine being chased by a tiger, or perhaps more fitting for our retreat in the Pyrenees, a wild boar. At the moment of fear, look at your own mind. Not outside. Look inward.

This practice isn’t just reserved for the big, dramatic moments of fear or desire. Every thought, every feeling, every perception that arises is an invitation to look inward. This is what minding your own business actually means.

I am still practicing this instruction. Some days more successfully than others. But each time I remember to turn the gaze inward, even for a moment, something shifts. What we call the world outside may not have changed. But the one looking at it has.

The word hell tends to make modern ears uncomfortable. It carries centuries of theological baggage, of punishment and damnation from a God who rewards the good and condemns the wicked. Buddhism sees things very differently. Hell realms, according to Buddhist thought, are not eternal punishments handed down by an external judge but rather states of experience that arise naturally from the seeds we plant in our own minds. This, as we will see, makes them rather difficult to dismiss.

You may wonder why Khen Rinpoche would ask such a jarring question of diligent students training in a three year retreat. Aren’t we here for the exact opposite reason, to become liberated? Was this fear mongering, was he trying to make us practice harder? I wondered about this.

I remembered something a good friend once told me. He had begged Garchen Rinpoche to tell him the most important thing he needed to watch out for in this present life. The answer completely took me by surprise. Rinpoche replied that what my friend needed to be most careful about was not being reborn in hell in his next life. My friend is a really nice guy!

Each day old Khen Rinpoche would also remind us that we should stop thinking of ourselves as genuine Dharma practitioners if we continue to engage in the ten non-virtuous deeds. Why would he teach something so basic to three year retreat students? But perhaps the point was not that we were failing, but rather that some of these tendencies, gossiping, harsh words, covetousness, ill will and wrong view, are so deeply ingrained in the human mind that they require constant vigilance, no matter how long we have been practicing. Khen Rinpoche had a gift for saying the unexpected, and I learned to listen closely and keep an open mind.

He loved to tell the story about a previous life of the Buddha, long before his enlightenment, where he found himself in a hell realm. The Buddha was pulling a heavy cart up a hill alongside another person who was struggling to keep up. The Buddha told him to rest and offered to pull the cart alone. That single moment of loving kindness in the depths of hell was enough. The moment a flash of compassion arose in his heart, he was freed from hell and found himself in the god realms. This was the very first stirring of loving kindness in the Buddha’s mindstream, the seed from which his entire bodhisattva path would grow.

We may of course take these stories to be parables and nothing more. But why did Khen Rinpoche return to this particular story again and again?

“What would you have done in Buddha’s place,” he asked us with that same stern expression. “Would you have acted as he did? Especially,” he continued, “if your companion was simply pretending to be tired and was actually just lazy?”

I admit that when I sat with this question, my first response was mixed. If my companion was genuinely struggling and suffering, something in me would naturally want to help. But if I sensed he was simply pretending, lazily taking advantage of my goodwill, irritation and annoyance would most likely arise, or perhaps something stronger. How would you have responded?

According to Buddhism, irritation and anger are among the primary factors that propel us toward rebirth in realms of great suffering. We may smile at these explanations, perceiving them as naive or old fashioned, and we may disregard the notion of rebirth entirely. And yet we know something of this from the inside, how an angry state can hijack the body completely, how it narrows the mind, how it leaves us depleted and shaken long after the moment has passed.

Modern research reveals just how deep this impact goes. Anger puts the body into a state of constant stress and emergency, as if a threat is always just around the corner. The heart works harder, blood vessels constrict, and inflammation quietly spreads throughout the body. Over time this chronic state of high alert takes a serious toll on our cardiovascular system, our immune system, and our capacity to think clearly and remember well. And this damage does not stop with the body. Anger corrodes our relationships. With ourselves first, then with everyone around us, often without us even noticing.

Every angry thought, every hostile attitude we harbour, leaves its mark in the body, in our relationships, and in the world around us. And if anger already affects us so profoundly in this life, it is not so difficult to grasp how its cumulative effects could become deeply painful and destructive patterns that stretch far beyond what we can immediately see.

So when Khen Rinpoche asked us each morning whether we would go to hell in our next life, perhaps he was not fear mongering at all. He was pointing at something utterly real, the consequences of anger, and of all powerful negative emotions, touching us now, in this body, in this life, and shaping what comes next.

The cart is heavy. Someone beside us is struggling. What is arising in our hearts right now?

When I think about it now, tears come to my eyes.

It takes such a long time for most of us to truly receive something, to transform a piece of information into lived experience. We may smile with love and understanding at our dogs who need so many repetitions before they respond to a command. At least they get treats. What do we get? Perhaps something far more precious — those rare moments when something finally lands. Really lands. Somewhere beneath the thinking mind. But are we really so different from our beloved dogs? When we hear an instruction, we may mentally comprehend it, we may even think “how true.” But has it actually changed anything? In the heat of the moment, when it really counts?

We may have been told a thousand times that there is no solid, real self. But when someone exposes our hidden flaws in front of others, when the anger rises, when the shame floods in, where does all that understanding go?

Every sincere practitioner knows this gap. Sitting honestly with it, without judgment, is perhaps where practice actually begins.

“Not a moment of ordinariness.” But what does Khen Rinpoche mean by ordinariness? Perhaps this: going about your days on autopilot. Lost in distraction. One moment dissolving into the next without you even noticing.

Imagine for a moment spending the next few minutes in a completely different way. What if you stopped letting things, experiences, thoughts, feelings and perceptions, slip by in the same unconscious way they usually do?

Imagine practicing this instruction, in full, from this moment forward. Every moment becomes an opportunity, an invitation to step out of the stream of habit and meet experience with a quality of freshness and presence. There are many instructions and practices that the contemplative traditions offer us. Different doors, but the same vast space behind them. Whatever path you walk, whatever instructions resonate most deeply with you, the invitation is the same: do not let this moment be ordinary.

And then ask yourself honestly: where would I be now, if I had always practiced in this way?

As I explored in my last post, what is it that really holds us back?

Part of the answer may lie in something we cannot see directly, the unconscious mind. Neuroscience continues to reveal how the vast majority of what drives our behaviour, our reactions and our emotions happens completely beneath our awareness. Research suggests that our conscious rational mind plays a surprisingly small role in our actual decisions and reactions, far less than we like to believe. Our deepest patterns are not stored in the thinking mind at all. They live in the body, in the nervous system, somewhere rational understanding simply cannot reach.

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition has known this for centuries, though it uses a different language to describe it. What neuroscience calls the unconscious, Buddhism might express through concepts such as karma, the accumulation of imprints left by past actions, speech and thoughts, or through what is called the alaya consciousness, that vast storehouse of everything we have ever done, thought or felt. These deeply grooved patterns, worn into us like rivers carving through rock, cannot be touched by intellectual understanding alone.

Hearing something once, or even a hundred times, is simply not enough. Khen Rinpoche understands this perfectly, which is why he repeated himself every single day without embarrassment or apology. He was not teaching our thinking minds. He was working on something much deeper than our thinking minds. Patiently. Day after day.

A few things he came back to every single day without fail. They have stuck with me, and I will share these in my next post.

In retreat you are confronted again and again with your own shadows until you fully acknowledge them. But even acknowledging them with kindness is sometimes not enough. They keep coming, all your weaknesses and flaws, until you choose with your whole body and mind to respond differently.

Even after the retreat boundary collapses and you return to the world, your weaknesses will show their face even more loudly, screaming at you: I am still here.

For me the question really became: Do I want to choose freedom or victimhood?

The moment we feel that others are not meeting us with the kindness or consideration we deserve, that we are overlooked or not helped enough, we have entered a subtle form of victimhood, the process of giving our power away to others rather than taking responsibility for our own experience.

So what is freedom? Freedom is allowing that feeling of subtle blame to dissolve on its own. Now you may ask, even if I try to let it go, it won’t. And that is true sometimes. Our patterns are so deeply ingrained in our subconscious and body that even when we want to mentally release them, we simply cannot.

What has helped me is to imagine how real freedom actually feels. Being completely unbound, carefree, not giving a thought to how you are received or treated in the world. Sit with that feeling for a moment.

Now juxtapose it with the feeling that the world around you is harsh, indifferent or unkind.

Then simply choose. What feels better, an unbound and expansive mind, or a mind that feels narrow and paralyzed because something out there in the world is not the way you would like it to be?

Do not give your power away. The moment you choose victimhood, you have lost. Every single moment of our lives we have the ability to choose freedom or imprisonment. A mind that finds fault outside itself, that says because of such and such out there I cannot practice, will never find freedom.

When things became difficult in retreat, Lama Tenzin Sangpo said to us: “You say you cannot practice because of others, then think of the Tibetan Lamas who were imprisoned for many years in Chinese labour camps. Forbidden to recite mantras or even meditate openly. Yet even the fiercest prison guard could not prevent them from working on their minds and choosing freedom over imprisonment, even while their bodies were held in a horrible prison.”

So let us sit with this question: if even a prison cannot imprison the mind, what exactly is it that we are allowing to hold us back?

These reflections emerge from a path I am walking on, a path that has led me to the wondrous teachings of Tara, the female Buddha of compassion and enlightened activity. Through my work on Tara’s Triple Excellence Program I am fortunate to be translating and developing content from these extraordinary teachings, and I look forward to sharing excerpts and reflections from them here. Alongside this I am also developing the 5 Companions meditation app, based on the amazingly practical and transformative teachings of Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. My deepest wish is that these sharings might be of some benefit to whoever finds them, Buddhist practitioner or not.

Welcome to Karuna Dharma, a space where we explore these questions together, as fellow travellers on the path.