Dear Dharma friends,

Thank you for joining me on this longer exploration of the bodhisattva’s path. I’ve found that when I learn something theoretically, I need to work to really connect it to my lived experience. I’m a slow learner and over the years have found that dharma concepts can float pretty unattached to my day to day if I don’t build this bridge.

Maybe your brain works like mine? We need examples of bodhisattvas who walk the earth today, who struggle as we struggle, and find the courage still to rise into their big self. We don’t want to let ourselves off the hook by saying: Yes, I will be a Bodhisattva once I complete the 3 year retreat and have a retreat cabin in the high mountains and my children are grown and I’ve saved enough for retirement. Have you seen the way people drive in Philly? I can’t be a Bodhisattva here!

That is not the point of the Bodhisattva’s path. Once we take our vows to be a Bodhisattva we have made the commitment to turn towards the suffering of the world. Those of us who took our vows have probably said Shantideva’s immortal words, quoted in my teacher Anam Thubten’s translation below. This is not an exalted, theoretical thing that we are reciting!

May I become the protector for those who are helpless.

May I become a guide for those who are travelling.

For those who want to cross the water, may I become a boat, ship, and bridge.

Nemonte Nenquimo’s memoir We Will Be Jaguars offers an illustration of what modern life as a bodhisattva might look like. If you haven’t read the previous installments in the series, what follows will make more sense if you loop back to the beginning first.

• Part 1

• Part 2

Whose Problem?

We last left Nemonte protesting oil companies. She’s tried to comfort the Taromenane girls orphaned by Waorani warriors. She meets a White American, Mitch (Michi in the book) who invites her to visit different tribes to learn how to build rainwater catchment systems. That’s a safe way to capture water because the rivers have been poisoned with oil and pollutants from oil refineries. Nemonte meets elders from other tribes who have lost more to the oil companies than the Waorani have so far, because the oil companies have started drilling on those other tribal lands already.

“‘What are we all doing here together?’ I asked in amazement. ‘A gringo and a Kofan camping out in a tarantula-infested longhouse at the edge of Waorani territory!’

Michi responded by asking a question. ‘You know where all this oil goes?’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Most of it gets shipped up to California, right where I was born.’

I looked at Michi curiously. I wanted to trust him.

‘All this oil so that gringos can drive around in cars and fly in planes,’ Opi interjected.

Michi nodded, spitting into the ash of the fire. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Why?’ I asked, pretending I didn’t understand.

‘Because the world where I was born is destroying all of this,’ he said, casting his gaze everywhere and then settling his eyes on me.”

This scene is an illustration of someone understanding what Buddhists call paticcasamupadda, the interdependence of all things.

Oil companies drill in the Amazon, poisoning the waters, that kills the wildlife, that harms the humans living there. To bring oil to Philadelphia so I can buy a bigger SUV to haul my sons and their friends around after soccer practice. It is my responsibility to curb my consumption for oil. The fish in the river dying in Ecuador are my problem. Brown-skinned Indigenous kids bathing in the river next to the sign that says OIL BRINGS PROGRESS is my problem. The health of the elders eating poisoned fish is my problem. And it is your problem too.

The pandemic was an illustration of the interconnectedness of all things. One person’s new virus was a shutdown on every continent. Wildfire smoke plus wind can poison all of us.

Paticcasamupadda is beautiful because it is a relief, actually, to see ourselves right-sized in the tapestry of life. We take comfort in being small humans with our back against a tall tree. The loneliness of our species abates in the view of interdependence. Bodhisattvas live within this view, and act from this view, and return when they die and transform into the cycle that is encompassed by this view.

Sacred Purpose

Toward the end of We Will Be Jaguars, Nemonte, Opi, Michi and elders from the Waorani and other tribes create the Ceibo Alliance to protest the Ecuadorean government selling oil drilling rights to Indigenous land. Nemonte is a leader. She has become a mother. The work seems, frankly, exhausting. No one does this for the glory! That is clear to me. She’s in it because she has to be. She has found her sacred purpose.

Sometimes arising in sacred purpose is that simple. Who else is going to do it if Nemonte doesn’t? She was made for this job. This is how you know you’re doing the right thing with your precious time on earth. Are you made for this job? Does it serve a higher purpose?

That’s how I feel about my job as a dharma teacher. Is it convenient that I work nights and weekends as a mother of young kids? No. Is it ideal that I teach retreats and leave my babies? Super no! But I consent to it. Heartily. Because, quite simply, I feel I was made to do this. For whatever reason my temperament and training converge into a tremendous devotion to the dharma and a love of reading, writing, teaching. This job is mine. I was made to do this. It is a job that helps people in these times. That is what finding your sacred purpose can sound like.

I will note that sacred purpose should be integral to your life. By that I mean-- it’s something you cannot walk away from. I went to a smart people college, and afterwards plenty of my American friends scattered to the ends of the earth to do good work. Fast forward almost two decades and most of them are back on their home continent, having used those experiences and awards in rural villages in X to get into graduate school. I’m overstating this— I’m sure the years were significant in their own development. But brief, exotic interludes are not an example of sacred purpose. What you work on over the arc of your life has to be your problem in an aligned way.

Barack Obama’s sacred purpose was organizing. If you read Dreams from My Father you can understand why a mixed-race black boy raised by his white mom and grandmother is ignited by bringing unlikely people together.

I learned to meditate as a child. I was born into Buddhism. Those skills and this worldview are how I put myself together as an adult. Teaching dharma to new people coming in with their pain and their questions is aligned for me. My whole life falls into relief with this sacred purpose.

How To Find Sacred Purpose

If you are reading this section and feeling hopelessness well up inside you because you do not know how to find your sacred purpose, I am getting that feedback from a lot of people. I hear you!

Maybe our despair, depression, and spin cycles comes in part from this pain point exactly. How do we find our sacred purpose? What if I am so damaged that I don’t have one?

Please imagine me giving you a huge hug right now, if that’s helpful for you. “Damaged ones”: 🙏🏼 💗 🙏🏼. I feel you. I have been there. Every wound has its gifts once the wound has healed. Maybe, for some period of time, your job is to heal the wound so that you can one day use what you learned in action in the world.

My intuition tells me that finding purpose begins with listening. Letting ourselves listen to our own pain and pitter-patter, and then listening to the pain of the world. Out of listening arises action. If we are holding the boundless intentions.

This work begins on the cushion. We learn to quiet our mind, tune in, and hold what we are hearing with the habits of mind that are loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity. Those are 3 of the 4 Immeasurables. I will be teaching a daylong on the Four Immeasurables next fall at Heart Sangha on Saturday November 7. Please look out for it and consider coming.

If it feels like you don’t have time to learn to meditate, and generate and maintain the inner stance of Immeasurables: change happens quicker than you might think. I meet a lot of people who’ve spent years taking a pill because they are too busy to come to the cushion, or feel too hopeless to do so. You might be surprised what three months on the cushion can do. What is three months in the scheme of your life? Run an experiment and try it.

There is No Enemy

There’s a moment in the courtroom, where the Ceibo Alliance has brought a suit to stop the government from selling oil drilling rights even though some Waorani had mistakenly given their permission to it by signing the documents they couldn’t read.

“I turned my gaze to the judges and realized that if they were to see us, to truly see us, then we must also see them. Not as enemies, not as heartless judges, not as caricatures of conquest but rather as people, like us, capable of love and hate, or joy and grief. As souls that were here on this earth in these bodies for just a momentary flash. Maybe if we showed them that we were capable of seeing them, then they would see us, hear us, learn from us? That’s what my dream was telling me. Maybe Michi had been right about healing? Maybe violence is born in the chasms between us, within us? Maybe the conquest, at its root, has always been about that chasm, a pain so lonely, so unbearable, so spiritually numbing that violence becomes the only path, the narrow trail to being human, to feeling something, anything.” (Emphasis mine.)

How Buddhist is this memoir? I mean this with respect. Dharma means truth. Buddhism can certainly be practiced from a sectarian, orthodox place. I grew up in that manifestation. But at its core, dharma is truth, and that truth can be realized by anyone, in any place, with whatever language they want to use. I’m mapping an Indigenous life to dharma because the conclusions Nemonte comes to are in fact what Buddhists call the Bodhisattvas’s path.

Here is the teaching on not demonizing anyone. There is to be no one outside the circle of our heart. Yes, that is hard. Yes, that is a radical view. Welcome to the 🔥 of the bodhisattva’s path.

It is our job as bodhisattvas in training to hold the view that everyone has buddhanature. We cannot strip anyone of their dignity. That’s how my teacher puts it. We cannot demonize anyone, because when we do we are refusing to see the sacred potential in them.

Even in circumstances where it would be quite understandable to feel hatred toward the judges, or anger toward the lawyers for the oil companies, or hate for the executives of the oil companies, Nemonte is in the courtroom... loving them.

That is hard work!

Thank you Nemonte for modelling it to us!

This insistence on finding a way to feel the heart of people we dislike/ fear/ think we hate is the path to healing our hurting world.

What Did We Learn?

My native culture is one where we recognize life in what is called, in English, the inanimate. Anima, Latin for breath, which reminds me of lung in Tibetan, the warm breath of the energy channels. Lung is also what we call the oral transmission that opens a person’s channels to Vajrayana teachings. I wonder if we need a collective lung ceremony to hear and feel the Earth.

In Thailand we tie cloth around trees that have spirit in them, and leave offerings in respect and supplication. When I came to college in the United States I rejected all that. My home traditions became “superstition”; I took refuge in the rational. Intellect was a fortress I built to keep out what I had learned as a child, which is that life thrums and hums all around us. It is not only humans who deserve our respect. When reading We Will Be Jaguars I felt the relief of a return. Not that I am an Indigenous woman, but I felt that I recognized the worldview that Nemonte depicts.

Who’s to say what came first: recognizing the spirit in a tree, or forgetting that we recognized it once? The book I read is in English, thanks to Nemonte’s American husband Mitch, but the book is not the story of a colonized mind. It is the story of a person emerging from colonization to her wholeness, which are her roots.

Nemonte does not explain the Waorani worldview. She does not justify it or try and rationalize it. She shows us how life looks from behind her eyes. I appreciated this so much.

My hope and belief is that we can all emerge from our colonized minds. I’m going to redefine that as the mind that has forgotten its connection to all things alive, and the mind that has forgotten that it is empty of self.

The colonized mind is the small mind occupied with social media. The mind slipping further into somnolence by outsourcing its alive, idiosyncratic expression to AI. The mind colonized by the small self of ego.

Perhaps this is a good time to look again at how you’re doing as a bodhisattva in training. Is your heart open to the cries of the suffering? Are you committed to seeing the sacred in everyone? Are you, to the best of your ability, serving? How is your practice of nonviolence?

The introspection is between you and you. I won’t know. There is no deity that will know either. The rigor and commitment we bring to the path does lead, in large part, to a corresponding fruition.

Below is a summary of the learnings from Nemonte’s book. You might take these and consider them over the next few weeks.

The Bodhisattva’s Path, from We Will Be Jaguars

1. Extend the Sense of Self

2. Let Suffering Motivate You

3. Live As If Your Life Is Destined to Inspire Others

4. Wise Elders Nurture the Next Generation

5. Defend the Defenseless

6. It’s Your Problem Too

7. Find Your Sacred Purpose

8. There’s No Such Thing As Enemy

It’s not only Indigenous people who are connected to the earth. Some of them seem to realize their connection more. They may have an ancestral practice of living in connection, and be raised in a worldview that recognizes it.

A lot of us raised in industrialized nations are taught how to be in connection to humans. We happen to have the scope a bit too narrow. This is the idea of paticcasamupadda in Buddhism, the interdependence of all things, but extending our sense of self (learning #1) can also come from sacred view, which is a Tibetan Buddhist speciality. Sacred view is seeing the dignity in all humans. That means there are no enemies (#8); you are called to defend the defenseless (#5); it’s your problem too (#6). Many rules collapse into one view. It might be easier to remember the view!

Sacred view is seeing the right of water to run clean, the air to be free from poison, and the trees in the forest to stand. If you love the river, your heart would break when an industry poisons the river. You would have to act to protect the river. If you are descended from the forest, how could you cut down the forest?

For those of us subscribing to the rationalist, scientific view of evolution, Is it that much of a leap to say that we come from a natural place? At some point in our evolution, the forest was the environment that fed us. The water allowed us to live. It was the place that nurtured our life. Is it such a leap to call it mother and feel reverence for it?

All humans are indigenous to this beautiful planet, even if you grew up in an apartment building.

We belong to this earth. We have a responsibility to it. We can learn to cherish it.

I began this series by writing:

I’ve been thinking about oil. Have you? Where it comes from, how we get it, how much we depend on it, and what we do to get more.

I wonder where your thinking is taking you after reading this series. I’d love to hear! Comments are open.

Thank you for reading! These posts were an honor to write.

Sunisa

Links

• Follow Nemonte’s work on Amazon Frontlines.

• Part 1 of this series

• Part 2

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. Every post is free and comments are open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. Thank you!

Dear Dharma Friends,

We’re back with the analysis of Nemonte Nenquimo’s memoir We Will Be Jaguars and how it can be read as an illustration of the path of the bodhisattva. This is Part 2 of the writeup. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, you might want to circle back. What follows will make more sense with that context.

• Part 1

Turning Point

In the memoir we left Nemonte and her brother Opi, with the foreboding that their people may have unwittingly signed permission for the Ecuadorean government to sell rights to drill for oil on Waorani land. They aren’t sure if that’s what happened. They certainly don’t know what to do about it.

Nemonte returns to Quito. She’s at the market looking for Opi when she overhears women from another tribe speaking. She writes:

“So everyone was talking about the Oil Round. But I was too embarrassed to ask these women questions although now I understood that it must surely have something to do with the planes that were landing in our villages, the documents that were being signed. But what was an Oil Round?”

Nemonte gathers her courage and asks questions of the Kichwa women.

One of them says, ‘We are organizing a protest. Are you Waorani?’

‘Yes. The planes are flying everywhere in our territory.’

She said, ‘You should come.’

‘I will.’

‘We women are the voices of the forest,’ she continued. ‘If we don’t speak for our mother, no one will.’

She glaced at my brother, who was muttering in his sleep.

‘I will speak like a jaguar,’ I said. ‘I will make the companies tremble.’

Nemonte is inspired to act by women from another tribe. They are strangers to her. This is a learning: humans are relational. We can be inspired to extraordinary things by the heroism of other people.

Until Nemonte comes across women planning to protest the oil companies, it’s almost as if that action is impossible. Someone has to introduce the idea to her. This is how inspiration works.

I’m reminded of my time in grad school, when several of my professors said I’m a born teacher. This isn’t a big, sacred example, but--I had never taught before. Until that moment, teaching hadn’t crossed my mind. There is an act of service in seeing someone in their circumstances and telling them something that might never have crossed their mind. Join us. Do this. You’d be good at it. You can change someone’s life.

*

Nemonte is inspired generally, by the Kichwa women she meets at the market, and specifically, by Alicia Cawilla, a fierce and famous Waorani woman. This is another learning: mentorship is the work of healthy elders. Nemonte writes, “I admired her (Alicia’s) fearlessness, the way she talked against the oil companies and the government. I wanted to learn from her.” Alicia guides Nemonte through her first protest and tells Nemonte what Alicia has learned over many years. This gives Nemonte a springboard to start not at the beginning, but further into the fight.

If you have had the good fortune to figure out your sacred purpose and serve it, as you age it is your responsibility to help others do the same. A bodhisattva’s work is unceasing because their bodhicitta is boundless. We cannot keep our realization for ourself. We cannot put our feet up and turn away. There is no mic drop at the end-- not if our hearts are open to the cries of the world.

Is it possible to live right now and not hear suffering? Yes. But not if you’re a bodhisattva. As people age and get ready to transition, passing their wisdom to young ones becomes a healthy focus. Wise elders nurture the next generation as part of their commitment to life.

Defend the Defenseless

I can’t summarize everything that happens across the memoir, but will jump around to scenes and circumstances that map onto the bodhisattva’s path. Nemonte begins her life of activism. The fire of bodhicitta is lit.

There’s a news item that jumps into her life. A couple, Waorani elders, have been spear killed by the Taromenane, a tribe related to the Waorani who have chosen to remain uncontacted in the Amazon. It emerges that the killing is because the Waorani elders were unable to do as the Taromenane asked and “turn off the noise of the oil companies.”

We have the making of tragedy. A basic Samsaric response from someone who is Waorani is to want vengeance. That is the world we live in, and how we are generally trained to respond.

Nemonte is Waorani. Here is what she writes:

“‘I felt lightheaded. My people were about to go to war against our uncontacted relatives-- and all because of the oil company. I had never met the Taromenane people, but I loved them. They were a part of me. The part that hadn’t been corrupted, hadn’t been abused, hadn’t been weakened by the white man’s world.’

‘There’s nothing to be done,’ Opi whispered.” (Emphasis is mine).

Notice that Nemonte loves people she hasn’t met. She feels her kinship with them. Deeply. Their well being is her problem. They are a part of her. That is exactly what we are talking about with our commitment to be bodhisattvas. Everyone alive is connected to us. No one is Other.

Opi’s response is the conventional Samsaric response of resignation. Wring our hands, sigh, cook dinner for the kids. Nemonte does something different. It isn’t easy. It is extraordinary. I’m going to say she acts because the feeling of love and responsibility is so big in her. She takes a bus and walks to a different village, where Waorani have killed the Taromenane responsible for killing the elders. Cycles of vengeance have been ignited. The Wheel of Samsara is turning. Negative karma spins.

Two Taromenane girls survived. They are being held by the grown children of the Waorani elders.

Nemonte demands to see the girls. A warning spear is thrown at her. Nemonte pushes into the hut anyway. She comforts the girls, offering her arms, her body, to hold them in their grief.

This is an example of the compassion of a Bodhisattva. It is immediate, direct action in response to suffering. Compassionate action rises in response to suffering. It is a natural flow. It can feel bigger than a choice. It is because your heart is connected, plugged in, and you are moved to respond.

I will note that compassionate action is not easy or always safe. Sometimes in the West I notice we have an idea of compassion as mushy-gushy, soft. It can also be quite fierce. Wrath, in the Vajrayana sense, is to be furious with compassion. Nemonte risks her life to comfort girls from the tribe that just killed elders of hers, too.

When Nemonte leaves she pleads with Kaguime, who is holding the girls.

“‘Let the little girls go,’ I said.

He shook his head, then tears filled his eyes. His parents had been spear-killed. He had sought revenge. And now he was trapped too, in a different way, by his own actions. I was the first to come to the village to be with the little girls and there was nothing I could do to change his mind. But soon Kaguime would be dealing with the soldiers, the police, the ministries, the missionaries, the media, the NGOs. They would all be here.” (Emphasis mine.)

This is an example of the equanimity of the bodhisattva. Equanimity is also often misunderstood. It is to hold the big view, to see intentions and actions in the tapestry of infinite causes and conditions. We hold a wide margin of benefit-of-the-doubt, of all-the-things-we-don’t-know.

Nemonte doesn’t condemn Kaguime for wanting revenge, just as she doesn’t condemn the Taromenane for being angry that the noise of the oil companies has taken over their lives. Nemonte sees causes and conditions at play. It would be easy and foolish to condemn Kaguime, who is grieving the murder of his parents. Nemote is acknowledging the cycle of karma and the trap that comes from planting seeds of violence.

*

I hope you’re enjoying this deep-dive into the life of a modern bodhisattva! The next installment will publish in a week. It will continue with further scenes and learnings from Nemonte’s life. We conclude with a summary of what we can take with us on the path.

Thank you for reading!

Sunisa

Links:

• Follow Nemonte’s work on Amazon Frontlines.

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. Thank you!

Dear dharma friends,

I’ve been thinking about oil. Have you? Where it comes from, how we get it, how much we depend on it, and what we do to get more.

In my reading I came across a book that left me thunderstruck. It’s We Will Be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo, a memoir Nemote wrote in collaboration with her husband Mitch Anderson.

It is rare to get to read a memoir of an indigenous woman. I have never come across this particular story, which is the chronicle of Nemonte’s life as a member of the Waorani tribe in the Amazon. It is not until midway through the book that we learn we’re in Ecuador, which is when, perhaps, she does. We Will Be Jaguars is a memoir of growing up in the forest, fishing and planting gardens and looking after siblings. There's a missionary named Rachel Saint (no less!) who brings more missionaries to the village, then oil companies. Reading this book was eye-opening.

This is the first of three posts unpacking Nemonte's life story. There will be spoilers to the book. I'm going to map Nemonte's life story as an illustration of the bodhisattva’s path. That is not how she frames her own life. My intention is to make this comparison lightly, and with respect. I'm not trying to co-opt her narrative or impose Buddhism on a non-Buddhist. My intention is to show that there are bodhisattvas all around us all the time; that real people are able to use the circumstances of samsara to arise into their sacred purpose, their big self, what Buddhists call the bodhisattva.

The bodhisattva is not only a mythical figure. We are not talking about distant (Himalayan mountain cave) and historic (long ago in the eon before time) beings. When I sit on the teacher’s seat and urge everyone to find their sacred purpose, I mean now. Today. Immediately.

Samsara is happening. Sentient beings are suffering. Today is the perfect day to open our hearts to their cry.

*

In Tibetan literature there is a genre called namthar, which means complete liberation. A namthar is the inner and secret biography of humans who became buddhas. I taught on Yeshe Tsogyal’s namthar and wrote it up as Girls Who Don’t Listen, which is still one of my favorite posts I’ve written here on Dharma Bites. I find much to learn from Yeshe Tsogyal’s example every time I go back to her life story. I believe you will to. And, Yeshe Tsogyal lived a long time ago. There's something fresh and exciting about Nemonte’s life story because she is alive right now. We Will Be Jaguars is a kind of namthar. I’m not saying Nemonte’s perfect. I’m not saying she’s a buddha. I am saying she is probably a bodhisattva, and we can learn from her journey.

Colonization, Shame, and Desire

This is a brief and simplified summary of Nemonte’s life. The book begins when she's a child. Waorani peoples live in different villages. The one that Nemonte is born into, in her father's time, chose to follow Rachel Saint. America is “the land of Rachel.” God is “Wengongi.” Americans are “the Compassionate Ones” because they send clothes, candy, and more for Rachel to dole out. Nemonte's people are naked, they hunt, they fish, and they grow beautiful gardens. With the arrival of Rachel Saint’s church there is the introduction of clothes. Clothes are desirable. Then people need money to get clothes, or a family can to go to church, where Rachel Saint might give them a dress. It's amazing how effective shame is, and what the introduction of desire does to the community.

There are poignant moments that Nemonte captures in her book. Her dad says, "Why do we need clothes and shoes?" Her mother’s stance is, "Everyone else has them, go get a job and get this money." He says, "What? I'm a good hunter." As a reader you can feel that tension.

The dad gets sad. He goes off to the parts of the Amazon where the oil companies are drilling. He razes trees and builds roads. We see him come home with a pile of paper. The family puts it in a basket over the fire. Weeks later they realize the paper's been turning black from the smoke. They look in and are like, "Is that the money?" They have a family discussion: "It must be the money. What are we going to do with the money? We don't know. Well it burned, we might as well toss it into the fire."

This is an illustration of emptiness. There is no intrinsic value in money. We collectively decide to call a piece of paper money, and have that word stand for something. Money, itself, is empty of value. Money is empty of money.

*

Another missionary arrives, a teenager. Nemtonte is drawn to the teenager's clothes, her lipstick, the missionary’s straight white teeth. Nemonte starts to attend church. One day when she’s a teenager she hikes to a different missionary village to live with two Ecuadorian missionaries and attend school there. Nemonte is a smart kid. She learns Spanish. The wife missionary begins to organize a scholarship for Nemonte to go to a nun-run school in Quito. Her parents come after Nemonte. It’s a couple days' walk. They're like, "What are you doing? There's more to learn from the forest. Come back and be with us."

Nemonte says something like, "I want to stay here. There's more to my life than the forest." This moment is about smart kids and girl children, ambition and horizons. Her mother gets upset and says harsh things that stay with Nemonte. I think Nemonte's choice breaks her dad's heart. They leave. The protection her parents provide is gone. The husband missionary begins sexually abusing Nemonte, who is a teenager.

Nemonte goes to Quito to the nun’s school. Skipping ahead past the school and the dark time that follows, I'll summarize it as: Nemonte is in pain, traumatized, alone. Her sense of self is fractured. She continues to be abused by the missionary husband. No one's protecting her. Nemonte can't tell her parents. She decided to leave them and feels she can’t go home. It's a horrible situation.

I'm sharing this because life is like this. We have traumas. We are harmed. Life isn’t a little hard. Live long enough and periods of a time will be excruciating. Nemonte is a person who went through real life. There's not some magic bypass button that she got to press.

Galvanizing Crisis

Many of us would be broken by this level of pain. Many of us would stay in the place of reifying the pain, which is when it becomes suffering. We tell the story of our pain to friends, lovers, a therapist. We pass middle age, still in the same pain. We are unable to let the trauma go. This is the trap of Samsara. Nemonte’s story shows how to get past that.

What changes? Nemonte starts to remember who she is.

One of her brothers Opi also got a missionary scholarship to a smart-kid school; it also didn’t work for him. Sugar, chicken and rice dropped off by oil companies in boxes; alcohol: these change the balance of the Waorani way of life. In their twenties now, Opi visits Nemonte in Quito. They talk. They don’t share what happened specifically to them. Opi says, “When was the last time you tasted turtle eggs?” He persuades Nemonte to visit home.

They return home with the job to record their elders’ stories. Nemonte and her family goes hunting for turtle eggs. They return to the village to find they just missed Cowori, outsiders, who gave Waorani people lunch, in return for them signing a paper. Opi and Nemonte guess that the cowori were representatives of an oil company. The villagers have probably signed proof that the Waorani were consulted, so that the Ecuadorean government can auction oil drilling rights to their territory.

Here is what Nemonte thinks when she returns to Quito:

I couldn’t go home anymore. It was too late for that. I had left the forest many years ago because I believed in the white people. I had trusted them, thought they were better than us. Their skin, their teeth, their clothes, their planes, their promises. But now I knew they had no limits, that they wanted everything. They wanted to save our souls and change our stories and steal our lands. Those distant oil wells rumbling in the depths of the village night—those wells were creeping closer and closer. I still didn’t know what to do about it.

At this point we have a crisis that matters to Nemonte. In writing this post, I run up again at the way that English betrays us. I first wrote this:

Her people’s land is at stake. Their waters, their trees.

But my words are false. They put the power on the pronouns. Me, mine, ours. It is human-centric. That is not how Nemonte depicts the situation. She doesn't write as if she, individually, or her people own anything.

The reader can feel the weight on her heart of these incursions. What is she going to do?

Nemonte and her brother Opi have the education to meet this challenge. There is a sense of responsibility that rests with them. Right here we have an illustration of the potential energy of a bodhisattva. At the same time, we have despair. What was the point of the siblings learning Spanish? What was the point of all their learning, if only to watch the oil companies’ incursion? Waorani territory is huge. They're known to be fierce warriors, but I can imagine the siblings wondering, What are we going to do with our blow darts? This is seeing the world of samsara as it is and feeling, as you would, hopelessness, dejection.

Choices

Let’s imagine a branch in this story. Nemonte takes the narrow view. She succumbs to cynicism, despair, and short-term thinking. She takes a job with the oil company. She has the Spanish and the smarts to do it. She earns a nice salary. She builds a home in Quito with clean, running water. She can bring her parents in from the forest if they want to move. If not, they can have a vacation to a "civilized" place to rest their heads. She makes this choice because she bets that her future children will be safe in Quito. They can go to a Spanish-speaking school. Nemonte relinquishes her ties to the forest.

This is the path of Samsaric settling. It is what most of us are taught to do. We look for our own safety and at best, also the safety of our kids. It is an understandable decision, but not what Nemonte chooses to do. Why? My guess is that isn't possible with her worldview.

I notice that Nemonte calls We Will Be Jaguars “a memoir of my people." The book is her story, but not only her story. That sentence hints at a collective sense of self unlike a typical Western individual outlook. I'm not trying to set up a dualism of Indigenous good; Western bad; that is a reductive trap. There is too much complexity and beauty in life to fall into such simple distinctions. That's why I love long form thinking in books, and why this series will stretch across 3 posts!

But perhaps Nemonte couldn't choose her individual safety in Quito because her sense of self extends beyond her individual body. Her sense of care extends beyond her bloodlines. Her sense of responsibility rests with trees, with water, with toucans and peccary and fish. The safety of Waorani elders are her problem. Even the safety of people she has not met, who are outside her tribe, become her problem. (That's covered in Part 2, coming next week).

This is why I read the memoir as a map of the bodhsattva's path. In a post a few weeks back I described a kid I didn't know at swim class, struggling to swim. I asked how far our sense of care is supposed to extend. To our kids? To our neighborhood? How about jumping across lines of class and race? Nemonte's life story is, in part, an answer to those questions.

Thank you for reading! Part 2 publishes next week. It will chronicle the circumstances of Nemonte's transformation.

Warmly,

Sunisa

Links:

• Follow Nemonte’s work at Amazon Frontlines.

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• June 7, I’m teaching a one-day hybrid retreat on Padampa Sangye’s Instructions to Machig Lapdron. This is a Mahayana retreat open to all levels that will be about birthing this big self, our inner bodhisattva. Join us!

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. You can also give me a one-off donation through Venmo.

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Dear dharma friends,

I gave this talk in a Christian Congregational church. That was not my plan. I was in Boston for a family reunion. My husband and sons were supposed to join me, but one son got sick and my husband stayed back. Our other son made it up to join me. Come Sunday when I was due to give this dharma talk on Zoom, I was missing childcare.

We had so many moving pieces, and that’s life. Whether or not you’re a parent, there’s always circumstances changing and moving. Life is very dynamic, and sometimes life can feel more dynamic than at other times.

I texted my friend, one of the ministers of the church. Can I bring my son to do church with your daughter?

She wrote, Yes!

Said I: Can I preach from your study?

Yes again.

I’m going to have to preach on interfaith friendship! was my last text.

This minister friend and I met at a childbirth class. The first time we hung out, we got coffee in a cute town that is not particularly hip.

She said, “I’ve never been here. How do you know it?”

I said, “I’m going to come out of the closet. I’m actually a devout Buddhist. My teacher’s temple is here.” That was not first date material for me.

“That’s so interesting,” she said. “I’m a devout Christian. I’m a minister.”

This mom minister and I built our friendship on a shared spiritual commitment. Maybe building a friendship on a value is a good idea. We were in a nanny share, and then we were a COVID nanny share pod, and then we lost our nanny and we were parenting each other’s children in a COVID pod, which is a very specific intimacy.

Her daughter and my son were born almost simultaneously. She went into labor while on a walk with me. It was my first walk with a baby outside my body. I was like, “Is he going to be okay?” He was totally, completely wrapped up, an entire burrito on my body.

She said, “My stomach hurts.”

I said, “Indigestion sucks!”

It turned out to be her daughter arriving in the world.

My son was bouncing with excitement to be seeing his oldest best friend. When we arrived at the church, my son’s friend was on stage, in the choir, rehearsing. She had the biggest grin as she caught sight of my son. The congregation was at least a hundred people, and busy with the May day celebrations that were being moved inside because of rain.

My son planted himself in a chair at the back of the hall. I had a few minutes to get him settled.

The minister found us and offered to bring my kid to be near her kid at the front.

He shook his head.

“Do you want to come read in the library while I give my talk?” I asked.

He seemed kind of frozen. He pulled his hood over his head.

Uh oh, I thought. Maybe I am cancelling this dharma talk. I started the mental calculations of the working mom. Did I want to cancel this talk with five minute’s notice, and work on Mother’s Day instead? I couldn’t leave him sitting back here alone. The minister went to get ready. She looked radiant in her spring colors. The room was filling up.

My son’s friend’s grandparents walked over. They have known my baby since he was the size of a load of bread. They greeted him and said, “Why don’t you come sit with us?”

We moved to their pew. My son, hood still on, slid onto the end. I crouched down to get a look at his face. He might cry. I had 2 minutes to start time.

The grandpa put his arm around my son. “My name’s ___, and I’ve been in your backyard in California.”

“You have?” My kid turned to the grandpa.

The grandmother leaned over. “I’m ____, and I remember playing with the bubbles. Do you remember the bubbles we did under the fig tree?”

“I do!” My son’s whole body exhaled.

I gave him a hug and ran.

I was so grateful to these grandparents. They saved my bacon, and not for the first time in this wild and beautiful parenting journey. What they did is an example of particular grandparent wisdom, that ability to read the kid and extend the heart to understand that wow, this room is terrifying. My kid has never been to church. It is intimidating, of course.

There’s emotional intelligence there. There’s compassion there. There’s love there. It might be because they’ve known my kid since he was born, but I don’t think so. Maybe, but we don’t see each other often anymore.

The truth is we all have these qualities available to us. We have it in us to put our arm, maybe metaphorically, around the kid and be like, hey, come with me. Let’s talk about this thing. Then the world will get ever so slightly less frightening. And then the kid will be reminded, actually, that they’re not alone.

And we all have that innate warmth, that fire of bodhicitta in us that prompts us to say hello. It’s not going to sound like: What are you doing here? It’s more like, Hey, I was in your backyard once. I liked it.

I talk about kids a lot because I have young children. I don’t think adults are so different. Little ones go through the world with so much tenderness and courage. I genuinely think that we have that tenderness and courage too.

Adults can develop what look like sophisticated veneers to hide our tenderness, and the courage it takes for us to step into the world. I’m not sure the veneer is useful. Maybe it accounts for some part of our survival, but some of us are past survival mode now.

Our exterior shells can take the form of the habit of judgement, which creates a false distance between us and others, buffering the rawness of the world. The shell can be addictive behaviors, which try to numb us to our pain and the pain of others. We can choose somnolence, an active not-witnessing. That is endless TikTok and confining our mind’s parameters to cute pet videos (but some pet videos are fine!). These are all veils on our pristine and luminous consciousness. These habits are a hard casing around our heart.

Before I was ordained I would have been embarrassed by the number of times I use the words “heart” and “love.” I guess I have a loud teenage part! But since taking my vows and holding this living lineage, I say these words all the time. I cry when I give dharma talks. I named my organization Heart Sangha! What to say—the world is raw. The heart is tender. It takes courage to come to samsara again and again, open and honest and giving.

When I was first ordained, a psychiatrist friend said to me, with casual brilliance, “Americans have a tremendous spiritual longing.”

“You think?” I sputtered.

He grinned.

Now, I agree with him. The root question underneath many of the questions I get is: How should a person be? (with a hat tip to Sheila Heiti.) In this country of superhighways and the endless appetite for oil and the wars we wage to get it; of the myths we tell ourselves and the past we can’t confront, I truly see that yes, we have a huge, gaping spiritual longing.

Maybe instead of filling it with shopping and drama, drinking and judgement, busyness, workaholism, avoidance, disdain, Type A achievement, despair, and more, we could turn toward the hole. We want to fill it with love and compassion. Call it bodhicitta, the awakened heart. Call it God’s love. Call it decent human being.

If we can get back to this baseline we could start to tame these painful outer forces raging unchecked. We aren’t caught buying bigger cars and needing more oil; expanding forever on our shareholder value so we have to sell every more; dreaming of Mars when we live on resplendent, beautiful Earth. When we are at peace inside, we do not need to seek outer satiation.

Peace comes, in part, from practicing human decency. Extending our arm toward someone suffering. Doing our bit to help people feel less alone. Filling our hearts with love and kindness, not material goods.

There is a bedrock of human decency that is in all humanity. It is a common denominator to all of us, regardless of religious affiliation or not. It is a human potential, an ignition of the heart.

Sending love,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom. Check the calendar.

• June 7, I’m teaching a one-day hybrid retreat on Padampa Sangye’s Instructions to Machig Lapdron. This is a Mahayana retreat open to all levels that will be about birthing this big self, our inner bodhisattva. Join us!

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work turning the wheel of dharma. I keep every post free and all comments open. These teachings are for everyone. In keeping with the Buddhist practice of dana, everything I receive is by donation. Thank you!

Dear dharma friends,

This is a mama post. All the kids turn out okay.

I was at my son’s swim lesson. About 40 children at an indoor pool were put in different learning groups. The instructors are teenagers, and there is a grown-up head coach. There was lot of shouting. The sound echoed in the splashy atrium. The kids in my son’s group put on fins for the first time. They looked excited as they jumped into the water. One teenager got in the water at one end of the pool, and the other stood over the lane on the other side. My son’s group looked down the 25 meters. They were going to move from swimming the widths, to the full length for the first time. They started to paddle.

My son wasn’t moving much. One swift kick of a fin and you usually accelerate. I got down close to the water. He wasn’t really kicking his legs. It was more like a half-hearted doggie paddle, focusing on his hands. I shouted his name and mimed kicking. He kicked, and burst through the water. As he swam each length, his confidence built. He got faster each time and he knew it. By the end of the lesson, he was smiling underwater, crinkling his eyes, and water came into his goggles.

The teenagers in charge of our group seemed distracted. One was looking at the kids and turning to talk to his buddy as the buddy circled the pool deck. The instructor out of the water kept looking up to the ceiling. I moved to the other side of the pool. There was an elevated bleacher I hadn’t known was there. What looked to be the school’s swim team was stretching in their swimsuits.

In the water, one of the kids doing what my son had been doing in the beginning. Not really kicking, just paddling his hands. He was slowing down. He got slower. The head coach was behind a desk, behind a laptop, laughing into his phone.

I had a mental moment.

Kick off your shoes, jump in the water.

Clothes? In clothes.

This could be embarrassing.

Who are his caregivers?

He’s not my problem.

The kid was starting to sink. I jumped off the bench. The kid reached out his hands, gripped the side of the pool, and scooted himself along.

His laps were done that way for the rest of the class.

Interference

About a month ago at my gym, I was in the steam room when the heat got too much for me. I couldn’t see my hand at the end of my arm. I stumbled to the door. I remembered that there was a woman still inside, at the far other end of the steam room.

“Can I turn off the steam?” I shouted.

No reply.

“DO YOU MIND IF I TURN OFF THE STEAM?”

No reply.

The woman had collapsed. I jumped out of the room, hit the OFF button, propped the door open, and shouted for help.

The front desk attendant and another woman ran over. We ran into the steam, still unable to see. The steam cleared. The woman sat at the back of the room, upright on a bench. “Is there a problem?” she said as she took her earbuds out.

I am sure I was bright red when I said, “Wow, I’m sorry.” I got dressed and hurried away.

What Do We Owe Each Other?

The swim lesson has stayed with me. The steam room has stayed with me. The question that comes to mind is: what, if anything, we owe each other?

It was embarrassing for me to make that mistake in the steam room. If I had jumped into the pool to come up to the kid’s parents sitting on the side, glancing up from their twinned phones, saying “Excuse me what are you doing?” maybe my son and I would not have gone back to the lessons. I don’t want to be an over-reactive Good Samaritan. I don’t want to be an annoying, jumpy mom. And yet.

Despite cinematic depictions, I suspect that kids do not drown while shouting and thrashing. My guess is that they get tired and stop moving. They’re going to have a little rest. By the time they have gulped water and started to panic, they’re too far underwater.

If my kid was slowing, sinking, I would want to trust that any of the fully-dressed strangers around the pool would jump in the water, even if it turned out that my son was playing some silly game. Water is scary. My reverence for the ocean is entwined with my respect for her power. I’m sorry to scare everyone reading this here. The question, to me, is how far our care is supposed to reach. Outside our body? Outside our family? Outside our race?

In some part of the world, the dominant culture cherishes the children, who thrive in the love beam of strangers on the bus, a teenager walking by with a soccer ball, the other moms in the café. That is not broadly true of the society we’ve built in the US. In our hyper-individualized culture, I could imagine getting yelled at by a parent for touching their kid, or presuming to interfere with a lesson. What if we look absurd? What if we are accused of interfering? What if we are—gulp—sued?

We may have gotten to this place incrementally, with good intentions or not, but we have ended up in a culture where we override our natural human instinct to feel responsible for one another’s wellbeing. Instead there is a hesitation that has seeped inside us like noxious gas. We default to Not My Business. We would rather hide from the potential of social awkwardness in our phones.

The Buddhist Part

Does this have anything to do with Buddhism? I think so.

There’s a special moment when you can become a Buddhist. It’s when we take our Buddhist vows. To be clear, we don’t covert anyone. At heart, we are a religion without boundaries, a group for all living beings, and the more we think ourselves special, the less we embody the dharma.

Buddhism is an opt-in situation, and even if you are native Buddhist, as I am, I recommend taking your vows again as an adult. This is stepping into the dharma consciously, when you have done the homework of finding a teacher, a sangha, and a lineage that suits you. Then it is a fully adult choice to decide that this is the spiritual path for you, and not default inherit a religious culture from your parents and community. That is beautiful, and, that keeps a person in the position of a child.

There is a ceremony when you can become Buddhist, if you choose to.

In brief, first you meditate on the mind of disenchantment. You are turning away from our samsaric refuges in material culture, in sensory pleasures, in chasing the illusions of career, ambition, success, to become homeless within Samsara. This is an intense sensation to sit with.

Then you take refuge in the Buddha as the potential for awakening within you; the dharma as the instructions—with special gratitude for not having to bumble through and figure this out yourself! and the sangha, the enlightened community. It may be everyone who has walked with you on the path, the people witnessing your vows in that moment, and even your healed ancestors.

My beautiful teacher Anam Thubten says that a person can give themselves the Buddhist vows. That looks like: you ask the mountains to be witness, the trees, the ocean. There is a splendor to that. If you choose to take your vows from a living teacher, especially one holding a living lineage, it has a different kind of majesty. By taking vows from a person, you are joining your life, across time, human to human, back 2,600 years.

Breathe in that perspective! Sit with the awe and humility of that simple fact. Teacher to student, practitioner to sincere practitioner, we have been asking the question of how should a person be for a long time.

This is a path that everyone is welcome to join. Women, when that was controversial. Poor people, when it was radical. Many Dalits, formerly known as Untouchables, are Buddhist. This may have more to do with the fact that Dalits were welcome to join than because Buddhism has anything superior to offer.

Once ordained in the lineage of the Buddha Shakyamuni, there is a symbolic haircut. We give something to get something.

And then we take our bodhisattva’s vows. That is what I want to focus on. We vow not to run away from the sorrows of Samsara. We vow to take our struggles as the path. We vow to serve all sentient beings without bias. The most important promise is ahimsa, non-violence. We try (and fail, and try again) to have non-violent intention and action, as much as possible.

Why We Take Our Vows

The moment we take the Bodhisattva’s vows, we make a promise to our biggest self. We cannot wait for perfect circumstances. We are ready right now to embody our biggest self.

I cry when I give this part of the talk. I find it wildly hopeful, heart-burstingly immense, that people line up burning with impatience to be of service.

As with all vows, they hold us to our commitments even when it’s inconvenient. Even when no one is looking. Even when we may look a fool.

There is no perfect moment to jump in the water. We will never have all the data that we are not going to make a mistake and get laughed at. If we are sincere in our Bodhisattva’s vows, we are okay sacrificing the flimsy edifice of that risk, because we are dialed into our heart.

Most of us have been trained to succeed within Maslow’s hierarchy. We are automatically committed to our own safety and security. Even if we get to ascend, we can become obsessed with our enviability, which is the realm of the Jealous Gods (to mix metaphors). Even if we study Dzogchen, the highest of the nine yanas (vehicles) of the Nyingma school, it can be done for an especially shiny spiritual badge, which means we are still within the narrow self, the ego.

The heart aches in this world of suffering. It longs to be of service. We take our vows because we are committed to letting ourselves fall open into an ocean of love and compassion and equanimity.

It is a nice feeling to go in this direction, can I tell you? It is not hard at all. We let go. It is a transcendent, profound, sacred letting go.

We say, I’m going to promise myself that I will not abide in narrow limits. I will not play the small game. This means that even if you’re in the most competitive meeting room invented, among people who are like: I’m achieving. Are you achieving? You don’t look like you’re achieving. You are going to notice that internally and go: Ah. Unfortunately and fortunately, I’ve taken my Bodhisattva vows, and I am here to express something different than the hyper-capitalist mode that we seem to be living in.

Pillars of Safety

Some of us have had encounters with people who are Bodhisattvas. They are usually inspiring. In my mind James Baldwin was a bodhisattva, Lucille Clifton was a bodhisattva, and Audre Lorde. I have read much of their writing. Their immense, heart-forward racial consciousness has changed me.

The bodhisattvas in your life now and from the past may be why you’re here. They are not only Buddhists. You can usually feel when you’re near a bodhisattva. Particularly if you were a child and they were your teacher, your social worker, your caseworker, your neighbor— there’s a feeling of safety, a melting-with-love around people like this. These people may have been the pillars of safety in your world. Sometimes those people have been a refuge for us in ways that have been startling because we didn’t do anything to earn that loving treatment.

We weren’t a “good child,” or we weren’t their child, or we weren’t smart, beautiful or good at sports. Still we were treated like the most cherished human being. That’s how you know you were in the orbit of a Bodhisattva.

Everyone needs to feel safe. Everyone needs to feel loved. The world is not prioritizing that sort of human development right now. When we are adults, the biggest thing we can do is to commit to being a pillar of safety for others. In fact that is the mature, evolved, sacred thing to do. To be safe for everything alive—human, animal, trees, fish, all of life.

Once we take our vows, we say: I am here to be a conscious member of Samsara.

I am here to be conscious.

I wish you luck on the path. It is a good one! 🙏🏼

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work.

[the Wheel of Samsara, Himalayan Art Resources]

Dear dharma friends,

I recently had the chance to study a profound text, and I came across a paragraph that hit me like a lightning bolt. I knew I wanted to give a dharma talk about it. Here is the paragraph:

“Samsara is established through self-grasping and the appearances of happiness and suffering.”

What stopped me were the words “established” and “appearances.” Let’s take “established.” We know that to be in samsara is to go around in circles, in the fish bowl of our wants/needs/desires. When we are given them we find that we want/need/desire ever more, and better! Faster! With less effort on our part. This is the samsaric mind that leads to Amazon’s market valuation and the birth of AI.

When we don’t get what we desire, we are frustrated. Something is wrong with us, and we go down the road to self-loathing. Or something is wrong with the person not giving us the thing, and anger is born, hatred is born. We can become conscripted into being our ego’s best friend. We are a true believer. We merge with ego’s grumbling mutter about everyone else. This is not healthy.

This is the starting point of an understanding of suffering. Samsara is the condition of being human. We could call it the water, as David Foster Wallace would say, in which we swim.

What I like about the paragraph above is that it tilts practitioners in a direction that sets us up to succeed. The fact that samsara is “established”; that it is not merely there, enduring, as the backdrop of our world. Established creates a sense of false backdrop, like in The Truman Show. We are reminded when we read that “samsara is established” that there is a built element to our suffering. In Buddhism we aren’t saying that some one built the painted sky dome that hems us in. We build it ourselves, every day. We are the architects of our suffering.

If that’s the case, it is hopeful. If we can build the thing, then we can surely take it down.

How?

I suffer. You suffer. We suffer. In what language shall we conjugate this verb? Is there really a way in which we don’t suffer? It’s the next line that tells us. We suffer through self-grasping.

This notion is the essence of the Mahayana. We call it the Perfection of Wisdom, Prajnaparamita. Wisdom is the 6^th of the 6 Paramitas, the 6 Transcendent Practices of a Bodhisattva. In Vajrayana the method to cut through self-grasping happens in Chod, and there are many other beautiful methods. Machig Lapdron talked about the 4 Maras of Chod. While mara means demon, we are not talking about a literally apparition that will rise and haunt us. Many people make a mistake and think that way. We are speaking about psychological forces like fear, or the kleshas, poisons. There is a klesha mara. There is a Mara of Self Concepts. This is the idea that I am good, virtuous, smart, whatever. Once we have installed a sense of self, we cling to it. We instinctively defend it. We contort ourselves into all sorts of positions we wouldn’t consciously put ourselves into. The mistake happens in the beginning. We have taken ourselves to be solid, continuous, as in permanent, and real. We’ve reified ourselves.

There all sorts of ideas we have about ourselves that we hold to in extreme measures. Take aging. As someone in a female body, I marvel at the pressure women are under to pretend that we aren’t aging. Everyone knows that we are aging. We are human, and so, subject to time. But we are supposed to be part of the *wink* *wink* agreement somehow that time isn’t working on us. How extraordinary!

What strange samsara is it, that we are expected to go under a knife, in plastic surgery. This has become normalized to a degree that startles me. At the same time, many people tell me they don’t have what it takes to sit on a cushion. When you put these two statements into conversation it is pretty funny. A cushion, for a half hour? Versus a knife?

We seem to put effort into the superficial, and much less effort into our inner development. We have it backwards. The outer grasping makes us suffer; any inner work we do can lead to loosening, which could give us space. Inner work will start to undo the knots of samsara.

No bananas; yes chocolate chips

Happiness and suffering come for us in myriad ways, big and small. What I like about the paragraph is that again, it poises the practitioner for some big realizations because of the word “appearance.” It is the appearance of happiness and suffering. That is a reminder that even happiness isn’t real. It evaporates just as you think you have it!

Even our suffering changes. When we are in the most dire misery, often we have assumed that our suffering is permanent and solid. We are sure. We know. When I teach on this I make a fist. Suffering is a contraction so strong we might not notice that the pain or sensation has already passed. We get caught. The nature of life is change (see the 4 Noble Truths). When we hold onto suffering, we make the pain worse.

Here is an extended example. I was recently in meditation retreat. I got to slow down and watch my mind, which is one of the many reasons to do retreats as regularly as you can manage. Life as a householder, especially one with young kids, is doing 100 on a highway. In retreat we’re going a leisurely 10 miles, maybe. This means we have a better chance to watch our mind’s swells and slams. We can watch our mind contort, try to hide, argue, and wiggle away. Just watching is bringing awareness. With awareness, over time, the mind can relax. If you are able to fill your mind with love as you watch, you’re golden.

As on many retreats, everyone was put into a work rota. Immediately, I noticed my mind rank the jobs, worst to best. Toilet cleaning—please no! Coffee-making—please yes! I was put on kitchen work. Again, my mind ranked the options. Scrubbing pots, please no! Dipping dishes in sanitizing solution— please yes!

Then I caught sight of a pack of chocolate chips on the open pantry shelves. Were we going to get cookies? Or brownies? Or some other thing? My mind began to speculate. This was fun. This was fodder. But the next day came and there was no sign of chocolate. Despair! What if the chips were for the cooks? Or the next retreat?

I am exaggerating. I don’t see my mind swing over these things anymore, but it did. It’s common and loveable to have such thoughts.

I’m going to make up examples now--

In the meditation hall, there is always that one person that you hope will not sit next to you. They will inevitably be smelly, or kick your cushion, or doze off, or try and talk to you. And they will sit next to you. That’s how life works. So you stew. You might bring the chocolate chips into every meditation across the days, dwelling on whether TODAY IS THE DAY FOR CHOCOLATE. Or you might be meditating on the bag of bananas. You hate the smell of bananas. Are they really going to put bananas out? You might gag. You might be sick. Should you write a note to the retreat coordinators saying NO BANANAS? It is crucial that you find a pen and paper. Halt the retreat! You have something important to do!

You get where I’m going…

These are small examples of how we are pulled by hope and aversion, by happiness and suffering. The small examples work with the big examples too. It’s useful to start small with our noticing, and laugh. I am a big fan of laughing with kindness. Life in samsara is funny all the time.

We only need to remember that we are within the “appearance” of each happiness and suffering to be liberated. The instruction is to treat life as a bubble, like a dream. Real but not apparent. Like a rainbow. A beautiful display of your mind that evaporates if you reach out to touch it.

When the chocolate chips arrive, they are in the banana bread. You may be delirious with happiness, or find that you didn’t like the baked banana either. When the bananas are set out, you may gag but then feel okay. Or you find that the smell doesn’t carry in such a large dining hall. While the person sitting next to you has snored and kicked your cushion in every session (I am genuinely making this up), by the end of the retreat you will turn to them with eyes shining with love. Retreat is always a journey. You’ve been on a journey together. As fellow passengers, you are united.

Wisdom is Earned

Samsara is established when we give in to the normal currents of happiness and suffering, when we don’t remember that they are impermanent. If we can remember, we can enjoy the happiness, and be equanimous when the happiness changes. When we are suffering, we can acknowledge our hardship, and have a spacious buffer around it, because we remember that everything changes. If we can make peace with aging, we are better set up for dying, an inevitability that comes for us all.

Dignity, grace, the luminousness that wise elders attain as they reach their transition—this comes from a lifetime of practice. The accumulation of hours can’t be faked, bottled, marketed, sold. There is no succinct reel that will give us the shortcut. AI can spit out bullet points on the Paramitas, Dzogchen, the Heart Sutra, and still it will miss the point (it can be inaccurate, by the way—be careful).

It is a human connection that allows us to receive the transmission of dharma, which is a transmission of wisdom and love. Human to human, we understand our tricky foibles. Human to human, we feel, and so can trust, the warmth of each other’s love. With such inspiration, we arise in our wisdom and liberate each other.

It’s been happening for thousands of years this way. I trust and hope it will happen for a thousand more.

I am wishing you much diligence in your practice, with a bow,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work!

Dear dharma friends,

This talk is part of the continuation on our work at Heart Sangha on the 5 poisons, or kleshas, which are anger, pride, greed, jealousy and ignorance. The transformation of these forces inside ourself can bring profound relief. There is a skillful way to work with the 5 poisons.

Why Work with Poisons At All?

One way of summarizing the 3 vehicles of Buddhism is through this metaphor: in the Theravada a person is walking through a forest and encounters a poisonous tree. They know this because they have memorized the rules that allows them to look at the bark, the shape of the leaves, the smell of the tree, and go—Oh yes! This tree is poisonous. I will go around it and continue on my way.

In Mahayana a person is walking through a forest and encounters a poisonous tree. They sit down and meditate in front of it. They may stay in front of the tree for their whole life, warning everyone who wanders by not to touch the tree, climb it, eat from it, because the tree is poisonous. This is the way of the Bodhisattva, who is of service to the world.

In Vajrayana, a person walks into a forest. They see the poisonous tree. They remember the words of their perfect teacher (that’s a shoutout to Patrul Rinpoche), who taught them that this tree is poisonous, but if you apply the exact method and pound the bark, boil it for four-and-a-half minutes, and drink the concoction cold while facing East, there is wisdom in the brew.

This reads like a bad joke and is of course an oversimplification. Buddhist walks into a bar, etc. But I find the metaphor useful because it contains so much about the view, conduct and fruition of each stream of the dharma. In the context of the 5 poisons, it illustrates that in the Vajrayana we do not want to push away our pain. We are taught that we don’t have to. It is the very pain of our kleshas that will liberate us.

Notice that in the Vajrayana the teacher becomes important. The tree really is poisonous. It can harm. Only with a heart connection to a real teacher might a student be trained, and have the devotion, to follow the steps of transformation. This is important.

Fear Is Empty of Fear

Where is fear with the mandala of the 5 poisons? Why isn’t fear, of all the terrifying states, a klesha in its own right?

In my understanding, fear isn’t a poison because it isn’t truly an emotional state. It is a biological response that rises up in the body. We are taught ways to work with it, but this is slightly different than the transformation of poisons. Anger and hatred, for example, are worked with the phurba (ritual dagger) of love. When anger is running through your body, if you can remember that you love that person, you metaphorically drive the love stake through the object of anger and boom: mirror-like wisdom arises. You are able to see things as they are, in that clear-seeing way of anger, without having to use anger, to indulge it, to feed the fire of your hatred in order to get to a boundary or clear-seeing.

With fear we cut through it right away. If you are familiar with the Prajnaparamitra, perhaps through reciting the Heart Sutra, you cut through the fear by remembering that fear is empty of fear. You use emptiness to cut through fear.

There is no solidity to fear. That immense, terrifying, I’m-sure-this-is-here-and-I-am-in-danger block that can occupy our bodies? It is a projection.

If we are firmly on the Buddhist path, I recommend summoning up this wisdom and cutting through. Use fear to fuel your evolution. Start with small fears and work up to bigger ones. Maybe snakes are empty of snake; can divorce be empty of alone-stigma?

If you are newer to Buddhism, firmly not Buddhist, or haven’t studied the Prajnaparamitra yet, I recommend laughing at your fear.

Fear Is A Frog!

If we can laugh at something, it is a form of cutting through. The projection of fear, which has such solidity and immensity, loses its luster. I am thinking of the Harry Potter books where the kids have to generate a memory of love (I think?) to bellow: Expecto Patronum!

Similarly, the apparition of fear will lose its ghostly power if you can laugh. My teacher Anam Thubten has said that Tibetans tend to be scared of frogs. So a typical Tibetan may, in North America, start hopping about or shouting if they see a frog. And a typical Westerner may whip around, saying What? Scorpion? Snake? Because those are the things that can bother a typical Westerner. And seeing a wee green frog, they might laugh.

This is a chance for all of us to remember that all fear is a frog. It is almost random what we consider scary and what we don’t.

There are plenty of poisonous frogs around, yet it is spiders that are commonly thought to be scary. When I lived in Australia a friend said, “Can you stop touching everything until you learn what is safe and not?” I learned that there really are tree barks that can cause pain. Nature is humbling!

The fear response isn’t always linked to real biological danger. There is a cultural code for fear. There is an ancestral code for fear. And there is a personally-informed, trauma-response for fear.

If we can laugh at our fear at all, we start to loosen the grip of fear.

Motivation

Going through life ruled by fear can lead to a very narrow life. We can do better.

At first avoiding the things that scare us seems like a decent compromise. Maybe the fear looks small. I won’t walk on any storm drains in a city. Because you could fall through, duh! But then you are in Paris and hopping around from one part of the sidewalk to another. And you are sure that you look painfully, shamefully ridiculous. So you stop going to Paris. On your next big wedding anniversary you nix the trip to Spain. You’d rather go to the bed and breakfast in the next town over, you assure your spouse. It’s fine! But even that sweet town has storm drains and everyone is looking at you thread back and forth, a little OCD, they can all tell, and also that time you scraped your knees on a storm drain and were dangling half-in and your parent was nowhere in sight—you haven’t told anyone about that. So you decide to stay home. Home is a good place for you.

Somehow, in not too much time, life has narrowed to a needle’s eye. The compromise is worth it. But your kids want to go to new places. Your friends are teeming with life. What’s wrong with you? You start criticizing others. You start believing, with this online group you found, that only people who look like you are not judging you. With them you can be safe.

And then in not too long you arrive at a place you don’t recognize. You are an anger ball hiding the fear inside, which has not diminished from your efforts but grown. It’s kind of incredible! You re-double your efforts to control life. You control yourself. You divorce your spouse. They don’t understand. You become more reclusive. You stop seeing your kids, who keep trying to get you out of what they think is a phase. But this is your life. Is this what they mean by the golden years?

I made up that example. You see where I’m going. The truth is that we all have fear. Sometimes it keeps us from doing stupid things and harming ourself and others. Most of the time, fear is a projection of the mind. It’s a freeze in the body. It’s a return to the animal self. This is normal, but we don’t have to live there. We can work with fear too. Laughing at it deflates fear’s self-seriousness. Fear is a tyrant. It’s not good at facing humor. There is no roll with it. And so we can use that.

Good luck on this journey. I am here for questions.

With a big bow,

Sunisa

Ps. It’s kind of interesting to take a tour through how much I have written about anger. Phew! I am not kidding when I say I work with anger myself. It is clearly a preoccupation. Further reading is here:

• Anger, Pain and Liberation

• The Cyclone of Anger and Self-loathing

• Anger

• Living in the Uh-Oh— this is really about fear, with an extended, personal example.

• What is the Vajrayana? might be a useful post to revisit.

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work!

[The wrathful dark goddess Krodhakali. In Buddhist cosmology, we are in Kaliyuga, the age of Kali.]

Dear dharma friends,

I just taught two retreats back-to-back. Hello again!

The residential retreat was about a portion of Chod where the 5 kleshas, or poisons, are transformed into 5 types of wisdom. This happens in something called the Dakini Dance. I love every part of this metaphor. Naked female figures made of light, dancing in ecstasy as they subdue 5 toxic substances? Sign me up.

The 5 poisons or afflictive emotions are anger, pride, greed, jealousy and ignorance. There is a lot more to this whole transformation business. Enough to fill a weekend residential retreat and then some. But I want to share small slices of the material publicly, widely, because there is a lot of misunderstanding happening here, and also potential for awakening right here in this topic.

Anger

We had a lot of questions in retreat about anger. In the Dakini Mandala, anger is one of the poisons. Certainly it’s a major force right now on all sides of the political spectrum. Remember that righteousness is a form of anger. I see a lot of hand waving about how anger has wisdom, and your anger is wise. To clarify: there is no wisdom in anger. Absolutely not.

I want to double click on that. This is why we need human teachers. This is why we pass lineage very carefully, human teacher to human teacher. Maybe there’s a way you can read the dharma and think you’ve wound yourself into a pretzel and discovered that your anger is wise. Follow the road of that anger and you do not become liberated. Actually, you become a crunched-up, righteous ball full of pride.

You can tell because you’re pushing people away more and more. You might feel better, you think, but the measure will be: are you becoming filled with love and compassion? No. Righteousness doesn’t fill you with love and compassion. Righteousness is anger and judgment. So all this stuff about the wisdom in your anger? My response is oh, no, no, no.

Look, I know anger. Luckily for everyone here— I get to dance with it a lot. I will be talking about anger a lot. I think when we have anger, it’s a clue, just as all of the five poisons we were talking about is a clue. With anger particularly, there’s something to see. That’s not the same as saying it’s wise.

You’re not going to follow your anger. You’re not going to indulge in your anger. Particularly if you’re female, particularly if you are a person of color, when we notice anger in the body it might be an invitation to a boundary. Usually there’s a boundary needed.

I notice a lot of anger in me. I’m curious about what I might need to see. But that’s not the same as saying my anger has wisdom. Once it has wisdom, if that’s what we’re telling ourselves, we start to indulge in it. We listen to it. “My anger is telling me to hate these people.” Usually we don’t admit that to ourselves, but actually our anger is saying something like that in beautiful egoic language. If you’ve been in the dharma a while, it’s going to be full of dharma terminology. But essentially you will notice that it’s saying something like: my anger is telling me to hate these people and that it’s okay. I get a pass.

That’s funny. You do not get a pass. That is not what the dharma is saying. It’s a mistake that I see getting made a lot. Anger, pride, greed, jealousy, and ignorance are not wise in and of themselves. The transformation of these poisons births wisdom. Note the distinction.

Do not make this subtle but profound mistake. It could mean years of your life going down a klesha rabbit hole. Not fun for you or anyone around you. This can happen not just with anger, but with any of the poisons. You could do it with pride too. Righteousness has a tinge of pride. Whenever we give ourselves a pass with one of these poisons, we’re indulging in a poison. That’s why I like calling them poisons. It is not ambiguous language.

Pain

Pain is normal. It is part of the quality of saṃsara. We go through periods of pain. Sometimes there are long periods of pain. It’s likely that if you’re someone who has a regular Buddhist practice you are right now in pain and trying everything, or you’ve gone through a significant pain period. If you’re coming to the temple then I am impressed. There are a lot of things to do on a Sunday morning that aren’t sitting in Padma Od temple! Usually when people are there with me, they’ve found motivation in the pain of saṃsara.

Pain is normal, but it can lead us to reactivity. When we have no mind training—and I don’t mean of the head, I mean of the heart— we can get more and more reactive. Then we’re like, What’s wrong with me? I’m hurting everyone.

Most of us are taught to deny pain and to hold onto it. We pretend it’s not happening and we hold it. That makes the pain worse. Unfortunately it will make us more reactive.

There get to be levels of pain that we are unable to deny and hold onto, and then it starts to spurt out without control. This is when we traumatize other people. Even if we’re trying to hold it as best we can. If there’s enough pain—live long enough, and there might be—there are circumstances, life situations, when it’s coming out of you like fireworks and you’re sort of helpless. You become a firewheel of the poisons. Whether that’s showing up as anger or some of the other poisons, you can recognize that you’re really hurting people and you start to be like, What am I to do?

Instead of denying the pain and holding onto it simultaneously, instead, we want to acknowledge the pain.

Oh, I’m feeling pain. This is pain. When we can acknowledge the pain happening in our body to ourselves, and if we particularly can do that with compassion,

Wow, I think I’m feeling quite a lot of pain. That hurts—and slow down... That hurt. Oh my goodness. You can feel your own body relax and start to let the pain go.

This is actually how we process pain into sensation and then out.

The processing of psychotherapeutic language is the wrong thing to do from a Buddhist perspective. In Buddhism we have learned that it’s not that helpful to talk about the pain. Then you can make the pain real.

This is how that looks: We’re denying we’re in pain in the body, and then we’re holding onto the story, usually because I’m processing it very well by being like, “So-and-so did this to me, and then it hurt, and now I’m angry, and now I have a right to be angry and da da da.”

We’re actually making it hurt more. We’re helping the pain solidify inside us. We are giving ourselves a pain body.

The Body Digests When You Fill it with Love

From a Buddhist perspective you want to acknowledge the pain. I’m feeling this certain sensation in the body. Acknowledging whatever that feels like in the body for you in that moment, precisely and honestly.

And then being like, Aw, I’m in pain. Aw! Give yourself a flood of heart love 💕💕💕💕💕💕💕 You are in critical need of an infusion of love and compassion.

Your body will metabolize the pain. You don’t have to be like, I’m so right and they hurt me so bad and here’s the story of how they hurt me. Fill in the blank. Don’t do that. It doesn’t actually help.

If you just acknowledge sensation and give yourself love. It can sound like: it’s really hard to move around the world with this type of fist in the stomach. It’s really hard to move around the world with this type of tenderness in the heart. Maybe I can take care of myself. I want to do that. I’m going to do that. Look at me taking care of myself.

You’re giving yourself what you need to metabolize the pain and to let it go. It is the nature of pain to move and change. All pain eventually will move. Often we’re doing the wrong thing and sealing it in our body. We’re trying to bury pain inside ourselves.

I even like to pretend I’m speaking to my toddler when I’m speaking with myself. It is a good tone to adopt! Please pretend you have a toddler that you want to cover with kisses. That sounds like this—

Oh, what’s happening? Oh, does that hurt, baby?

I have a working theory that we all need that tone. That actually we’re incredibly tender, fragile, mushy little beings looking for love. Give up pretending that we’re sophisticated adults. Better to pretend we’re SUPER loving parents, the perfect parents, the primordial Buddha parents that we maybe never got. That’s okay. We can give it to ourselves and then the pain will move.

It’s a big shift that is luckily not that hard. You treat all pain as a sacred opportunity to wake up to a new way of relating to it.

Pain Circuit Conductors

When we hold so much pain in the body, the accrual of that quality over time leads to us spurting poisons and we become sort of tyrannical, unable to hold ourselves together. We’re trying to give our pain to other people, whether we know it or not. We’re trying to set other people on fire. This is a picture of a society. Collective karma looks like this.

I wonder where I could be talking about? Not us in America!

In the end, we must begin by working with our own pain. We stop conducting our pain so it doesn’t harm everyone in our relational field, particularly those who are in constant contact with us—our family, probably. This is the transformation of pain.

We are built to be liberated.

What?

Yes.

Anger, pain, and fear are here in Samsara so we can practice and be liberated. We can treat them as trailheads, in Internal Family Systems speak, as opportunities to do our vital work.

Kaliyuga as Opportunity

I wanted to end by talking about this age we’re in. Kaliyuga. I think we should reality-check some of our expectations for this age. From the Buddhist perspective, it’s called Kali Yuga. Yuga means age. Kali—the goddess, Krodha Kali, the wrathful dark one. She is the image at the top of this post.

We could spend all our time reporting the news to one another and saying, Can you believe that? But then we wouldn’t be effective bodhisattvas. Surprise, outrage, fear—all of that is a form of naïveté that is paralyzing. Let’s just cut through all that. This is the age of Kali dancing. We can expect quite a lot of turbulence.

In this time, the conditions of our own awakening will be fear, anger, hatred—huge turbulent waves of it. Let’s shake hands with reality. Then the question becomes: What are we going to do about it?

I think of Elizabeth Matthis Namgyel. If you have the chance to hear her teach in person, do. She has no time for sentimental hand-wringing. A lot of the female teachers are heroes of my heart. Khandro Rinpoche. Jetsun Tenzin Palmo. I notice— they are all very tough.

The presiding deity of this age, Krodha Kali, is wrathful in form. She is not White Tara. She’s not even Green Tara. There are no flowers. Kali is flames and skulls and knives. Read the metaphor. She has fangs and three eyes. Whoa. What I read from Kali is: in this time, the transformation of Samsara is going to take a powerful dharma.

If you are going to arise into your compassionate incarnation, you know what? Be prepared for some strong medicine. That’s the dharma medicine meeting the age.

If you’re really looking out at the world, we don’t need to wring our hands. Or we can do a little bit, but then we’re done. Because hand-wringing, and friend “can-you-believe-this” phone calls don’t help anyone. The sky continues to fall. We need to accept reality, take a deep breath, and say: okay. Let’s go.

What am I going to do about it?

Thank you,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• As always, could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work!

“As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence — as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.”

- Leo Tolstoy, Letters From One

Dear Dharma Friends,

Buddhists talk a lot about this precious human life. It’s because humans have the capacity to understand the tapestry that we’re within, and from that we can choose what to do in our actions. Animals cannot do this.

Choice. It turns out to be the most hopeful thing about us. We can have some years of somnolence where we are consuming as much as we can, and maybe we are callous to the destructive capacity of our actions. We go through that. And then in the same lifetime, we can also arise with this profound, no. I will not do that not again.

Ashoka the Great

Have people seen the flag of India? There’s a dharma wheel on it. India is the birthplace of Buddhism, but it is not a Buddhist nation. Why would they put a dharma wheel on their flag? That is the dharma chakra of Ashoka. He built hospitals for humans and animals, highways, and he created these pillars, on which were carved edicts of the dharma. Nonviolence, ahimsa. Compassion. At Heart Sangha we were recently gifted a small replica of the lion pillars of Ashoka. He is celebrated for creating the first social welfare program in the world.

How did Ashoka decide to be a Buddhist king?

He wasn’t raised a Buddhist and he didn’t study with the Buddha. He became Buddhist right as the Buddha was dying. I find this story interesting because Ashoka was a king at first known for his brutality. He invaded another kingdom called Kalinga. The invasion is known for how many Kalingans died and by what brutal methods. The fields were more gruesome than ever. It was a total slaughter. And so Ashoka was first known as a violent ruler. The story goes that it was on the battlefield as Ashoka surveyed the new territory that he had conquered when he had a realization. It was, I never want to kill anything again.

It was seeing everything that had been wrought in his name, everything that he had done, that changed him. Ashoka said, no more. Out of that, he studied Buddhism and he became the first dharma raja, Ashoka the great. He had pillars carved with lions and dharma wheels, saying: this is what the empire of Ashoka is doing. Everyone who breaks this is breaking the rules. We are not eating any animals, we are not killing people. That’s why it’s Ashoka’s dharma wheel on India’s flag.

This is a hopeful story. Ashoka and we are connected. We’re just human. We can be living quite unconsciously. Ashoka’s job would’ve been to expand the territory and secure the borders--- language we hear these days. But he looked around him with humility. He let the truth of the suffering he’d caused touch his heart.

Count Leo Tolstoy

Another example I wanted to give is Leo Tolstoy, whom I find to be endlessly fascinating. He is my favorite writer. Tolstoy was a count, born into the nobility. He was sent into the Caucasus with Russian troops for war. While there, they subdued the Caucasus, and that meant imposing empire on peoples there. They also deforested parts of the beautiful mountains and the Steppes.

Fast forward some decades and Leo Tolstoy writes this amazing novella called Hadji Murat. It is Tolstoy’s last work of fiction. Boy, does he go out in a blaze. What Tolstoy does in 1000+ pages of War and Peace he nails in this perfect novella. Tolstoy witnesses the hypocrisy of empire, the cost of war. The narrator takes a searing look at how the cast of characters, Muslim and Russian, go at each other. This novella anticipates and humanizes so many conflicts: Israel and Gaza is what comes to mind when you read it now.

I imagine how Tolstoy’s time in the Caucasus stayed with him. Over the decades as he turned what he had done over in his mind, his natural human empathy, the warmth of love and compassion, compelled Tolstoy to write Hadji Murat. Tolstoy was feeling his human kinship to the people he subdued. It took decades, but in the span of the same lifetime Tolstoy came to wonder, What was it like for these people when we swept through?

Russian troops deforested parts of the Caucasus. By the time War and Peace became a bestseller, Tolstoy used some of the proceeds of that amazing book to plant trees on his estate. Tolstoy became connected to the trees.

Another example: Tolstoy liberated his serfs. Why? He was a great fiction writer. In my opinion, the greatest. His capacity for observation and compassion must have been tremendous. He noticed what it must have been like for the serfs. Those were slaves. Then he couldn’t keep them, as a conscious human being. He couldn’t not-see what he was doing.

Tolstoy became a vegetarian. He decided we cannot eat animals. We cannot own people. We cannot cut down trees. He associated these acts with God and not the Russian Orthodox God, which also got him in trouble. He was a rabble rouser in every respect.

This is what we are all capable of. Reflecting on the chaos world we’ve built and changing course. Deciding we will act differently.

In Tolstoy’s later life he abandoned fiction, which is sad to me. He became a religious leader. Some of what he espoused is strange, and some deeply inspiring. His gospel of love and living simply touched the heart of a young lawyer from South Africa who wrote to Tolstoy asking about this new philosophy.

That lawyer moved to India, where he took his place in non-violence protest. The lawyer was Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi, of course, went on to inspire Martin Luther King. I recommend reading the Tolstoy/Gandhi correspondence. What I got from reading the letters is that the forces of love, compassion, non-violence— in short, deciding to be a bodhisattva— these are contagious too.

In Tolstoy’s shoes, in Ashoka’s, perhaps many of us would have ignored what we did in our careless youth, what we were doing when we followed orders. If we’re slightly more reflective we might think back and feel shame but not act any different. But I give two examples of people who had the courage and integrity to seize their precious human life and change. We are all capable of birthing a new self, just as Tolstoy and Ashoka did.

I like to imagine those two shaking hands across time: two mere humans, two great bodhisattvas.

It is a gift to be human. A simple truth worth realizing deeply.

We want to wake up to the opportunities we have right now, while we are still alive, and capable of action.

Thank you,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work!

[a garuda]

Dear Dharma Friends,

My dharma talks keep getting better after I give them, lol. In the temple yesterday I spoke about the Two Accumulations of Merit (panya) and Wisdom (jnanna). It’s a way of re-organizing the 6 Paramitas into the metaphor of a bird with two wings. Now I am filled with thoughts that I didn’t share. Luckily, here we are on a written platform, my first love and training.

The metaphor of a bird is useful to contemplate because we are often temperamentally more inclined to be stronger at the Panya or Jnanna side of the Paramitas. The idea is that you want to be balanced. We need two wings and the body of a bird to fly.

The Paramitas are:

1. Dana

2. Sila

3. Krishanti

4. Virya

5. Dhyana

6. Prajna

In the West, very broadly speaking, I meet people who have read many books and sat with many masters, but have yet to have the humility to practice dana, the first paramita, or don’t think much about right speech and right action, which is sila (ethical conduct). They are the folks who announce that they’re studying Dzogchen only, and only with a master, and not one who is taking new students any more, certainly not. (O, pride!)

These people will want to work on the accumulation of merit, panya, which cannot be skipped. This encompasses dana, sila, and krishanti, tolerance. What comes to mind is the warmth of a fire, versus a TV playing an image of a fire. When one has integrated generosity, ethical conduct and tolerance into one’s practice there is a crackling warmth that is felt by everyone else.

You know how we say children know a kind person, and animals know a kind person? That’s because we all can feel a truly kind person. That crackling fire of effortless warmth comes from the Accumulation of Merit.

If you think of time you may have spent in the presence of the great dharma masters, you will notice that it is probably their presence that struck you. I’ve been physically near the Dalai Lama twice in my life, and it wasn’t what he was saying that I carry around with me. It is the tremendous warmth pouring off him. Being near the Dalai Lama felt like being loved in a way that was impossible up to that moment. He wasn’t even talking to me! It wasn’t a romantic love feeling. I was anchored in a sense of limitless compassion. Experiencing that made me go, Woah. What is THAT? I can say that my curiosity and falling-in-love-with-that-feeling kept me on the path through the long, dry years. I kept going in part because of my lived, body experience of the Dalai Lama’s presence.

No matter how many books you’ve read, empowerments you’ve gained, and khathas you have been given back by a master— do not skip working to open your heart with generosity. Do not skip disciplining your mind. Do not skip developing a toleratance for samsara, instead of trying to optimize for your comfort. These are all crucial steps on the path. These are the foundation of decency, and a quality that is disappearing in this wild time.

To me the accumulation of merit makes one not only a decent human being but a grown up. If you have integrated generosity, ethical conduct and tolerance, then congratulations: you are a human adult.

In Asia I sink with relief into a broad culture of generosity, ethical conduct, and tolerance, but people might not know why they are saying a prayer; they might not be meditating (hard to do when meditation halls in temples are only for monks); and they might not have ever heard a dharma talk, which can be perceived as เชย, outdated— as in, a peasant thing. Thailand is all about status these days, and dharma talks seem to have very little status.

These people will want to work on the accumulation of Jnanna, which involves dhyana, meditation, and prajna, wisdom.

It is a kind of putting oneself forward as a thinking human, as a full citizen, into the dharma stream. It involves interrogating the teacher and the teachings, asking questions, and deciding for themselves if they want to follow the path of the dharma. This is radical and uncomfortable when you are coming from a culture of orthodoxy, hierarchy, and subservience for women.

But let’s be honest. The dharma is uncomfortable. Waking from the somnolence is uncomfortable. It is the opposite of Netflix and chill. It is not bingeing on anything, but engaging the mental and physical faculties to plow a way through the snow all the way to liberation. We get cold. We get hungry. We persevere.

[hello from the artic tundra of Philadelphia. do I have joyful effort to push through more winter?]

That’s why the body of the bird is the fourth paramita, virya. Joyful effort. One has to activate joyful effort. We will not stumble to awakening. Virya is crucial to push through the sophmore slump of the path, when you have heard EVERY dharma talk in existence, definitely, and you cannot be reminded, ONCE AGAIN! of meditation posture.

There are so many dharmas that one can get a little lost and overwhelmed in trying to find them, learn them, and master them. But one could live a good lifetime within the 6 Paramitas and the 4 Immeasurables, the stances that poise the heart for liberation. One could live a good lifetime with one text— Shantideva’s the Bodhicharyavatara, The Way of the Bodhisattva.

And by good I mean: an honest life, a kind and decent life, and a compassionate one. These qualities are increasingly endangered. We can do our best to keep them alive.

Here’s to wishing you can fly,

Sunisa

Links:

• the 4 Immeasurables are loving kindness; equanimity; compassion; sympathetic joy.

• Come hear these talks live! Sundays at 10 am est in person in Philly and on Zoom. More jokes, and the chance to ask me questions.

• Could you like, re-stack, or drop a comment to help people find Dharma Bites?

• And please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you are able. 🙏🏼

[O Andaman sea!]

What is the sacred? It is the ground of our being.

It’s the whole of which we are a part.

It’s what imbues our life with meaning and beauty.

– Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self

Dear Dharma friends,

I want to talk about interdependence. A lot of us are suffering right now. I was thinking about how do we understand the dharma for ourselves, because that’s what we’re here for: to take in the teachings; decide if they’re bullshit; and if you proceed, digest them and integrate them into your life.

This idea of interdependence, if you can digest and understand it, is important. It is the worldview of Buddhism. Everything arises out of interdependence: emptiness, compassion, right action, ethical conduct, it all comes out of this crucial idea.

The whole phase is “interdependent origination.” It is from the Sanskrit, paticca samupadda.

That’s a mouthful. Every part of the translation is important. Let’s look at interdependent. It’s a skillful translation. Nothing comes into being on its own, singularly. When we are born, we are co-arisen from our parents. The web stretches further. We have the genes of our grandparents within us. We are shaped by our siblings and birth order. We can be shaped by our neighbors, the kids next door, the uncle who babysat us once.

In modern life we now understand that families are a system. Say you’re known in the family as “the good kid” who’s quiet and studious. That’s usually in response to a sibling or some family member who’s “the demanding one.” We arise in our temperaments, and how we’re perceived, within a dynamic.

In Buddhism we arise in particularity. We are not one. But we are part of a fabric that’s beyond what we could understand. We are part of an infinite net. We are downstream from infinite causes and conditions that give rise to—everything.

Self As Singular - ha ha ha!

If we look at the fiction of a self, who we are is shaped by our genes, our birth order, how our parents treat us. We are even shaped by the experiences our parents had in their childhoods. This can leap across countries and continents, and not just because of immigration. I come from a country where many kids of the upper class are raised by nannies. They’re profoundly shaped by a nanny who may have been raised in a different country, in a different language, and definitely a different class. That’s part of the co-arising that goes into this one child! How can we claim to be singular when so many circumstances go into making the “I” who talks and thinks and acts?

We’re talking about factors, some of which we comprehend, most of which we will never know. That’s paṭicca samuppada. I feel it is most useful to imagine as Indra’s divine net. We are the little lights at the interstices of the net. We are part of a system that connects to everything alive.

If we can understand this, if we can actually digest it, everything we do is changed. Karma arises out of Paṭicca Samuppāda. If we can remember ourselves as part of a profound fabric of infinite causes and conditions, we actually will, on our own, become careful about our actions, because we understand that our actions affect so many things beyond our comprehension.

And not just in this time but in time to come. To go back to the example of the family system, how we’re treating our kids for the next two years could be affecting our ancestors in 100 years. This is not theoretical. We are imprinting habits in the gene code. Things the babies of our great-great grand-babies will be scared of; experiences they will be drawn to; hobbies; their ways of being.

When we hold that view of time and interconnectedness, doesn’t that change how we play with the kids after dinner?

Result

If we are able to spend time pondering our place in Indra’s Net, we become humble. We are also, finally, in the right size. We do not dominate the system. We are a light, sure, but just one among many lights in a vast tapestry.

A lot of the time we’re moving around in our human society feeling lonely, because we think that we are singular and thus cut off. With paticca samupadda, we find we are not as lonely because we are in company with everything alive, and we’re in company across time. We find company in nature, too.

I’m struck by how many children understand their connectedness to other alive beings. There’s a moment when kids understand that meat comes from the death of an animal. It hurts them. They don’t think they are the animal (because we are not one)—but their sense of alive kinship extends beyond the confines of their relative body. I know multiple kids who are vegetarian, or who won’t eat certain animals, because that is their naturally-arising response. The kids aren’t doing this because of a rule of ethical conduct. The impulse comes from their hearts. They cannot eat animals. This is an example of how understanding paticca samupadda simplifies this walk of an ethical life.

Dugongs

I grew up in Thailand. I’m a tropical taco. My happy memories are from the South and the hours I spent in the Andaman, my favorite sea. My sister-in-law lives in Bangkok and she made a documentary about how dugongs are going extinct. I have not been able to make myself watch it. It touches on a grief too deep. Why? Because dugongs and their habitat are part of the fabric that is me. As a kid I kayaked in mangrove swamps and admired mudskippers. They are so ugly and so cute at the same time.

I tumbled off the back of the longtail boats when the boat captains said, “Go on.” They’d never say what they had spotted in the water, but I knew to keep my fins and mask on, to be ready. For that reason I have swum with turtles and dugongs, have jumped into inky water on the dark side of a limestone island and had it erupt into light (that was bioluminescence in Krabi).

In Thailand now, we’ve cut back mangrove forests so tourists can have pristine beaches. Without mangroves, beaches are being eroded in the ocean. The ocean is warming. Seagrass isn’t growing. And dugongs are washing up dead.

I can’t watch this short documentary. I want to support my sister-in-law. But I can’t seem to do it, because the turtles and dugongs and mangroves and mudskippers are a part of me.

Many people have this kind of relationship to a natural ecosystem if they spent part of their childhood outside. My husband feels this ways about the trees and creeks of the farm where he grew up. And that is good. That is healthy. We are right-sized in a fabric stretching in time and place and aliveness that goes beyond us.

Paticca samupadda is cultivating the view that we are a small node in Indra’s Net. Out of that comes this reverence for all of life. Reverence carries with it gentleness, humility, and a sense of connection that runs through our bodies. This brings so much relief! I’ll even call living with paticca samupadda inside a kind of purpose. When we hold this view, we can arise in our life’s purpose, whatever that will be, with integrity and alignment.

My hope is that we can all find our connection to the tapestry of paticca samupadda, whether we approach it psychologically or through nature. This view seems to me to be a crucial and stabilizing one to hold in the wild world we’re living in now.

What is the natural place you love? I’d like to hear. Drop me a note. If it is a natural place, that can be such an anchor in these times. The backdrop to my phone is one of my kids in the waters of the Andaman, the sea a bright glass green.

With love,

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• A residential Chod retreat is coming up soon. I am going to sing all four Chod ceremonies. Come, if this might be your lane.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• And please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you can support my work!

Postscript: I did watch the documentary and it is beautiful. So moving. As the Northeast of the US is buried in freezing winds and snow, you may enjoy time as a tropical taco. You can watch the video by clicking the image below. Go Mailee!

[the mall rat, prom dress days— this was my first and favorite dress, bought on the streets of Siam Square for something like 300 baht.]

Dear Dharma Friends,

I’m from Bangkok, which is known for its traffic. Thai people tend to be easygoing and epically late. People show up late, and then they get to say, “Ah, the traffic.”

I grew up in this environment. This is funny because I am precise and I tend to be early. If not on time, I’m usually early, even in a city of traffic. In my teenage years, when I was meeting up with friends, I would be early even knowing that my friends would come half an hour late.

They would be like, “Oh, the traffic.” I’d be like, “You took a motorbike here.” On a motorbike, you can cut between the cars. But I’d still be early. I’d bring a book and sit.

A State of Pleasant Lassitude

Do we remember Tower Records? I would sit in this one mall, the Emporium, in front of Tower Records. There were pillars and benches that circled the pillars. I think I had a cell phone, but there was definitely no social media. This is the era of flip phones or the little Nokias—mine was red. I would bring a book but I often would sit and watch people. I would be bored, just doing nothing. I would think, not in an active way, but where you’re kind of daydreaming. You’re not thinking linearly, but you have this space. I would watch the people come and go in the mall, watch the kids try to persuade their parents to buy things. There was a good speaker store right there. I would watch speaker heads go in. I don’t understand speakers. I’d sit and try to imagine how they were picking what they’d buy. The Thai word for what I was doing is เพลิน, ploen, which means to enjoy, but in a daydreaming kind of way. I’ll call it: a state of pleasant lassitude.

I was spacing out. Do you remember being able to space out? Sometimes it isn’t even boredom, it isn’t even dissatisfaction yet. It is just this BLAH. It can be neutral.

Material Culture

Thinking back now, I notice that this time is part of where my commitment to Buddhism comes from. I spent a lot of time in malls shopping for little trinkets. Bangkok is a great city for shopping. So many outdoor markets. I had the opportunity to notice that it didn’t matter what I bought. There’d be this inner journey: Oh, if I can get the perfect prom dress, then I’ll feel like a superstar at prom, and it’ll be amazing, and I’ll be happy forever, I’ll feel totally beautiful, desirable, and safe. And if I become the prom queen, I’ll be 100% satisfied in every direction.

Noticing that: Oh, it was a good prom dress and we bargained and got it for a good price, but even as a teenager thinking, Huh, I wasn’t 100% satisfied. I had this fantasy that I would be armored in every direction, all the way around, above me, below me, behind me, that I would be protected by the material thing I had acquired, which was probably a dress since it was me at 14 and 15. And then I was able to notice that I didn’t feel that way.

Or even if I felt that way, it didn’t last for long. We know this intellectually, but actually we have to experience it for ourselves, in our bodies. I’d think, Oh, I had it for a night like Cinderella, but then the next day the dress didn’t look the same, it didn’t have the same luster.

I created a narrative about that: Well, I got it at the outdoor market. Maybe if it was a real brand, I would’ve had luster for a longer time, two days, maybe three days.

It is funny, but this is actually how we work, for some time. Then, hopefully, we outgrow it. I did quite rapidly, which is interesting. By the time I got to college, I had spent so much time testing this as a teenager and noticing that the material world did not bring me safety in the way I wanted, which I think was social safety and emotional safety. That luster—material goods have a sheen to them when you desire them. They almost glow.

When you have the means to buy them, wear them, or show them off, they quite rapidly lose the glow. Really, if you pay attention, you can notice it, and even a teenager can notice it. It’s funny because we think of teenagers as not wired for this kind of subtle disillusion, but I must have had consumption-forward teenage years or something, because I did get there. I went, huh, material goods don’t make me that happy. By the time I was in college, I still liked pretty things but there wasn’t the same total, bought-in relationship to material culture.

The BLAH is important

We all probably had that stage where we were just so identified with material culture. It’s a normal stage. We don’t have to judge it. We might have family members in it, we might have children in it.

Honestly, some of the lull in time is what allowed me to notice the patterns. This is what that BLAH does: it allows us to notice our patterns of attachment and being pulled.

Once we can notice, we don’t have to try so hard. You don’t have to march through your spiritual practice and achieve much at all. We do need that dissatisfaction. At first it is a cute, French beret-wearing little frisson. And then it actually builds. In my experience, it built. It was a tiny little frisson of being like, I don’t know, this thing we seem to be doing.

You notice other people too, and you’re like: It doesn’t seem to be making you happy, and it doesn’t really make me that happy.

Dissatisfaction with Samsara

I rarely sit and do nothing anymore. Sure, I have young kids, but it is the fact that we have social media and email on our phones. Suddenly all these little gaps are taken up. The technologies of distraction are methods of numbing us out. When we use them more and more, we get more and more numbed. We get less present, more disassociated, not really here.

For example when I’m on Instagram, being sold something, it’s so pretty. I get to be a teenager again and be like, Wow! I want this thing. It reminds me of my adolescence, being in malls and markets, but crucially, without these moments of 15- or 30-minute gaps that can accrue. When we are addicted to the technologies of dissatisfaction, numbing out, disassociating, that accrues into a different thing. We get more and more bought into the samsaric mind. Notice the language of capitalism? We can even buy into samsara’s mind, as if it were a stock.

That dissatisfaction is an important part of the journey of noticing that samsara has not brought us lasting happiness. In the beginning we want the happiness of safety and security. After that, we’re looking for dopamine hits of happiness. After that, we’re looking for happiness as peacefulness, and we really want samsara to give us peacefulness that is unending, unchanging.

For us to wake up from samsara, we have to notice. What worries me among many worries these days is that we might not get the chance. We might remain totally identified. And also, samsara is getting better at being samsara.

How much time do we gaze at the sky?

How much time do we watch people come and go?

When do we linger and pause?

What To Do

The very addiction to being in this numbing-out loop creates a lack of moments where you have to tolerate samsara and develop a dissatisfaction for it. If we numb out, if we remain attached to the casino in our pocket, the gumball machine of our phone, we won’t come to disenchantment with samsara on our own.

I share these embarrassing stories from when I was a teenager to show that even a teenager predisposed to the gumball-machine mentality, even that teenager, with enough boredom because no social media, will notice: I’m at a party. The party doesn’t make me happy. The party doesn’t make me safe. Turning towards the path can only happen authentically for each of us. No one can do it for you.

I could be sitting here in 25 years talking about turning towards our Buddha-nature, turning away from samsara. But this is the thing about Buddhism. It’s not a religion that guarantees anything. The teachers can’t do anything for you. We sort of suck at being religion. The dharma is profound and humble, because, well, I don’t like anyone telling me what to do, so maybe you don’t either. We all stay in our own agency. We have to walk this for ourselves.

Turning towards the Four Noble Truths is noticing the truth of samsara. The truth that suffering is a condition we live in. In fact, it is suffering that awakens us.

You’re probably here because you’ve been in a lot of pain and need to find a way out of it. Buying dresses wasn’t it. Buying the vacation home wasn’t it. Having the best friends in the world, no matter how good, no matter how dedicated your partner is—no one seems able to fix it for you. You can’t feel good all the time. You keep falling off the cliff of pain, fear, suffering.

Then the Four Noble Truths come as a relief. You weren’t doing anything wrong. In fact, it’s just the condition of being alive: suffering. That is part of what causes us to look for the path of practice and do it with virya, joyful effort.

Then we are deeply committed to the dharma. It is a personal resolve: I am going to do this. I am going to walk this path.

I am wishing you all luck in getting to this place. Please resist the gumball machine!

Sunisa

Links:

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast for free on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• A residential Chod retreat is coming up soon. I am going to sing all four Chod ceremonies. Come, if this might be your lane.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you can. 🙏🏼

[Miss Trunchbull— does she reside within us?]

Dear dharma friends,

I am such a new dharma teacher. I have taught 3 daylong retreats and a weekend retreat so far. That’s it! But fully two of those retreats have been about, in essence, self-loathing. One was on the topic of metta, loving-kindness, and one was on finding a befriending demons from within the Chod paradigm. In both cases, I felt pulled to focus on self-loathing. Of all the dharma topics and of all the sublime, important teachings I’ve studied, I return again and again to self-loathing and how we work with it. Why?

I was just lucky enough to do online retreat with my teacher Anam Thubten, and he mentioned something that another dharma teacher had said to him, which was: the problems aren’t political and they won’t be solved by politics; the issue is consciousness and will be solved be consciousness.

Don’t mistake this to say that we shouldn’t change our politics or protest or be engaged. It’s more that the root of our suffering happens through a misperception of our true nature, and if we can shift that understanding-- if we can transform our conciousness-- the actions flowing out of our intentions will be transformed.

At this point in our wild time, let’s be interested in root causes, and the total transformation of ourselves and the collective. The time for incremental change is over. We need strong medicine now.

Inner Intention

Many of us begin the Gregorian calendar year with so many good intentions. They are usually outer in nature: more working out, less indulgent food; less social media, more introspection. Tibetan Buddhism works with Outer, Inner, Secret, and sometimes a fourth level, so let’s borrow that framework for a minute to wonder if we could invite an inner intention, and if it could be: to be kind to ourselves.

What if this is the year you are kind to yourself?

Our inner culture is saturated with self-loathing.

Being kind to ourselves-- giving ourselves a break-- giving ourself the benefit of the doubt-- seeing where we messed up without condemning-- I believe this is hard for many of us to do. Many of us seem to have inherited an inner culture of pouring poison into ourselves, and then wondering why we snap, yell, hit, rage. This could be at our spouses, to our co-workers, to our kids, to the cashier at the check-out lane, on the road, to anyone. We’ve built a culture that can sometimes be a cyclone of rage. We could be wondering where we got it from.

Nowadays when we see someone who is a bully, we know to ask where they learned that from. Similarly, if our instinctive reaction is to condemn someone else, often with strong language, we can wonder, also, how we are speaking to ourself. What is outer is inner. Where did we learn such rage?

It is so important to speak to ourself with kindness, gentleness, and generosity. If we can do that, we can authentically be kind, gentle and generous to others. If we are in the mindset of starving our inner selves, how can we expect to be bodhisattvas who feed others?

The Uses of Cruelty

We can even admit that harshness towards self has often been a useful framework. I have used it to motivate myself to work hard, be disciplined, and make myself fall in line with societal expectations. “Drive”, “Type A,” “Perfectionism,” and “Good” could actually be inner parts, or demons, as they are called in Chod, that are like Mrs Trunchbull from Matilda. The disciplinarian is there for a reason. You might also have a part who is like Matilda’s dad, saying, “I’m smart and you’re dumb. I’m big and you’re small.” That is the inner tyrant.

What do we do with these inner parts that we’d like to disown?

We probably spend time denying that the parts exist, and try to suppress them. When they pop out (they always do) we are somewhere in the spectrum from embarrassed to ashamed, and we push them away harder, “better”, which means with more-- harshness. So that is the cycle of cruelty, and why we have disciplinarians, tyrants, angry parts, raging parts, and abusive parts, like a cyclone in our consciousness.

What To Do

If you want to take up my challenge and make 2026 a banner year for kindness toward yourself, here is what I suggest:

1. Take an honest look at who’s inside

This is like when Professor X wears his fancy headgear and tries to Find all the mutants. You want to scan inside and find all your parts. Do this in meditation if you can. You’re more likely to see, instead of manufacture what you see. Can you make space in meditation to see who is there? Particularly invite the parts/demons of self-loathing to show themselves. Who is angry? Who yells at you? Who defends? Who yells at others?

This is the moment in Chod where we invite the demons to come dance. First we have to see them.

2. Listen

Do the angry parts have something they want to say? If you listen for awhile, does the anger can subside? Is there is something the part wants to tell you?

3. One Question

If the cycle isn’t subsiding, or if the part/demon needs encouragement, I would ask one question: Can you tell me why you were born?

There is a logic to every part, even the ones you wish weren’t there. The moment they were born is pivotal because they were created for a purpose. It is probably to keep you safe. It’s useful— a gold mine, actually— to see the moment the part was born because that can help you be in a different relationship with it.

If the part shows you why they were born, then...

4. Compassion like a waterfall

Here is the dharma, and the part you cannot skip over. I just taught retreat on Finding and Befriending Demons, part of the Chod cycle. There was a dharma teacher in the audience. That didn’t make me nervous at all! Once we broke silence, the teacher said that it was interesting how much of Chod mapped with Western Psychology, and also interesting how much Western Psychology missed.

I asked what they thought psychology missed, and they said, “Oh, you know, emptiness and compassion.” We cackled like gleeful witches. Missing the union of bliss emptiness is like having a house with no walls and no foundation.

Step four is where we depart from secular psychology. You call in Green Tara, White Tara, Medicine Buddha, Avalokiteshvara— whichever enlightened archetype that evokes the greatest, beyond-relative, ultimate compassion for you. Ask them for help. Ask them to hold the tyrannical part with you. Ask them for help witnessing why they were born.

This work is beyond what we can do with our secular minds, in our ordinary bodies. Here is where we get transcendent.

Build A Better House

This wisdom tradition is here to help all of us build a better house. What we have been doing in Western Psychology, in capitalism, in me-versus-you thinking, in us/them, in/out binaries, is not working. It’s time to build a better house. Let’s get our foundation down and some damn walls on this house.

When we look and find that we have an inner cyclone of tyrant, abuser, angry part, cruel part, we would usually fall into shame and blame of ourself. That’s where the self-loathing comes in. We fall into suppression and denial. That is business as usual. Instead, we want to turn toward those parts with compassion and curiosity.

When we ask how the part was born, we are trying to come into profound, sincere, specific compassion with the angry part. That can be hard to do if they have helped you do harmful things; if you are carrying shame about even having them (which is normal); and if you are struggling to own that you have them inside you (also normal).

So if you can find out why they were born, and be open to witness that moment (this is equanimity), you can let your heart break. You have an origin story for that demon. You have a moment of connection with that part. You can understand, thank you so much, why they are the way they are. Can you see the part’s reason they are so angry? With understanding there can be wisdom, compassion, a shift, small but seismic, of the way we relate to ourself.

When you let a little light of awareness in, the demon begins to dissolve on its own. Awareness has the light of compassion in it, not condemnation. Even your demons are deserving of your bodhicitta ❤️‍🔥

If they can experience your love, your self-loathing begins to loosen. If it loosens, how you treat everyone else can be transformed in an authentic, integrated, natural way. This is not hard. It just happens. Like a snake unwinding itself from a knot. I promise.

Thank you for reading,

Sunisa

Links

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• A residential Chod retreat is coming up soon. I am going to sing all four Chod ceremonies. Come, if this is your lane.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interact in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Thank you to everyone who has recently upgraded to support my work! Unexpected gift of the new year.

[A damaru, the double-sided drum of Chod.]

Dear dharma friends,

Welcome to 2026.

Someone asked today for my definition of spirituality. Such a good question! To me, spirituality is a lived ethics. In short, the dharma. A deep and honest inquiry into how we should live our life.

We ended last year with a summary of the path of the dharma. There are many dharmas, and many specifics, but sometimes it’s nice to have a few steps to follow. That was How to Practice, General Edition.

Here is the next iteration: a specific look at the way that Chod re-orients us from our habitual stuck-ness and patterns of contraction, into a more expansive way to live now.

Prajnaparamita, from head to heart (to belly?)

The wisdom of emptiness teaches that there is no self to the self-cherishing, no “I” that needs protecting. Many of us recite the Heart Sutra to start to taste emptiness. Mahamudra and other analytical meditations help us deconstruct our cherished dualisms. Chod brings the wisdom of the prajnaparamita into the body, to change how our body reacts.

Why worry about reactivity?

The holiday season arrived with a shooter at my alma mater, Brown. Two students were killed as they studied for their finals, and more hospitalized. Today there is a debate about what happened in Minneapolis when ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good. The society we’ve built of reflexive over-protection is madness. We are experiencing its toxicity.

We are so quick to defend ourselves. We are quick to hold our bodies as precious, and other lives as not. We are quick to perceive danger, whether the danger is happening or not. This egoic habit is in all of us.

There’s a difference between self-defense and the prickly, over-reactive wham! Fire the gun. Shove the person. Unleash hateful words. Many of us are exhausted by living in this unconscious society. But how do we actually change the impulsive reaction our bodies make to defend? With Chod, a Tibetan Buddhist dharma.

Here is a brief overview of the way Chod re-orients us away from our habitual patterns.

1. Find Safety

Chod is Tibetan Buddhist trauma-healing protocol that transmutes personal, collective, and ancestral karma. To do anything that big, we must first ground ourselves in safety.

We take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, if that’s in our wheelhouse. We call on healed ancestors to support the work. We build our devotion to a living lineage of enlightened energy that can bring blessings, adishtana. That must be how we begin.

2. Approach What Your Fear

Machig Lapdron originated Chod in the 11^th century in Tibet. She said to approach anything you fear. In the West we say, “face your fears.” In Chod, we go towards them. Machig didn’t mean to go jumping off cliffs, but to use samsara’s operating system to liberate ourselves.

All of us live pulled between hope and fear. Fear can seem solid, eternal, real. When we go towards fear and then through it, we experience how fear is impermanent. Fear is empty of substance. Fear is empty of fear. This is a big thing for our bodies to encounter. It isn’t enough to do this in the mind.

In Tibet, Chodpas used to practice Chod in a charnel ground, a burial ground. We can imagine meditating among bones and bits of muscle and sinew, the stench of human decomposition filling our noses. Meditating in a charnel ground calls up our aversion for sickness and our fear of death. Approach what you’re afraid of.

In Thailand, I am told that Ajahn Cha had novice monks spend their first night meditating alone in a forest. This makes me laugh and cry, because that is wildly scary to a Thai person. Being alone, in nature, in the dark? We believe in spirits and ghosts! We are good at making horror movies! Ajahn Cha was masterly with his instruction, because to survive a night in the forest, a novice monk would have to cut through fear.

What Ajahn Cha realized is that cutting through fear and the ego of our self-cherishing is a direct path to awakening.

3. Cut Neurotic Patterns

Many of us have spent years in therapy. We probably have a good understanding of our family of origin and the stuff we’re carrying into adult life. We might even know something about our ancestral baggage.

What then? There’s a balance between needing to see, and how we can reify, make concrete, the very stories that trapped us. When we reify our trauma, it becomes more engrained in our bodies because we have unconsciously begun to cherish them. We have made it a thing.

Chod takes our human tendency to create narratives and uses it to liberate us. In Chod ceremony we anthropomorphize our suffering into "demons, Machig’s term, or parts, as Internal Family Systems calls them. This allows us to see the suffering clearly. It’s important we do that.

We see the suffering we carry as beloved demons. And then we call in our safety, our enlightened refuge, and our Buddha Nature—what IFS calls Self—to cut through the demons. Even our demons are empty.

We do this with love and compassion, tenderness and understanding. We stop indulging our neurotic patterns.

4. Offer the Body

We cut our neurotic habits not conceptually, but in the body. The radical part of Chod is that we offer our body to our demons.

In Chod ceremony we visualize our own cherished body as a feast for demons. So today, I would visualize Sunisa, wearing a navy button-down shirt tucked into jeans, and long brass earrings, in size as big as a universe. I would lay myself out as concretely and literally as I can visualize in the meditation.

[A yummy body offering!]

Then in the ceremony where the demons arise, I picture the demon of self-cherishing eating me.

If you are really offering your body in meditation, the ego struggles. It thrashes. It OBJECTS.

(Sample inner explosion: what the f—- crazy-ass ritual are you doing— it is a CULT —we are going to DIE— WHAT ARE YOU DOING GET OUT).

That is the point. You let the ego die.

For me, the demon of self-cherishing looks like me but shinier— diamonds and fancy handbag, heels and slick hair.

She feasts on my body. And when she is sated she transforms into a softer, disheveled, tired-mom version of me. The one that has a looser relationship to “my” self. The one that has let something go.

The feast of the body is where the habit of over self-protection starts to fall away.

5. Grow Into Wisdom

When we stop indulging our neurotic tendencies, there is a spaciousness in our being that allows quite a lot else to rush in. We become capable of growing into our wisdom nature. This part doesn’t take effort. We rest. Buddha Nature manifests.

But we need the space that was filled with demons for this to be able to happen. In many ways, we are being filled with the buddha nature from our demon parts. There is wisdom in fear. There is love in anger.

Can you believe it? This is how Chod ceremony concludes.

Ways to Pursue Chod

I am summarizing a path that takes years to learn and inhabit. What I want to illustrate is the profound re-orientation that Chod can create. There is the usual practice path of the dharma, and it is good. And then there is this specific dharma lane.

Chod means severance. It is not for everyone. Looking at the neurotic patterns I carry has been an explosive and uncomfortable process. But Chod is powerful and direct. If you feel an exhaustion with samsara; if you have strong motivation; if you are ready to take responsibility for the stuff you have been hauling around; if you are an intense kind of person; if you are determined not to let your kids inherit the scorched earth of collective and ancestral pain; basically, if you read this and feel in your body that Chod might be your path, then—

Here are ways to pursue Chod:

1. I have outlined a path of Chod Healing, which cycles through all of Chod across 2 years, for non-Vajrayana practitioners.

2. At the end of February I am teaching a residential Chod Healing retreat at Menla in the Catskills. This retreat is focused on the transformation of poisonous emotions like hatred into their wisdom qualities. We’ll do all 4 feasts of Chod. We will be fed and housed. Menla is the right container to let all of the healing work of Chod take place. You might consider coming, if you think Chod could be your dharma lane.

3. You could donate to the scholarship fund for the Chod Healing retreat. Be part of someone else’s transformation. It is an expression of dana, transcendent generosity. Use this link and write “scholarship” in the comment box.

4. If you might want to learn the full, Vajrayana Chod, you begin with ngondro, the preliminary practices. I think of these as the gates to the Vajrayana. We are starting a ngondro group at Heart Sangha this spring. This is open to practitioners online. This option takes a strong commitment. Speak about this with me in a kalyanamitra. I would love to lead you in ngondro and then teach you Chod. For me this path has been one filled with intensity yes, but also joy, rapture, and transformation.

Thank you for reading. I wish you courage on the path, and the commitment to keep your tender heart open!

🙏🏼

Sunisa

Links

• I teach live on Sundays from 10am- noon est at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All talks are broadcast on Zoom.

• The full teaching calendar is here.

• Thank you to everyone who has recently upgraded to support my work! Unexpected gift of the new year.

• Could you like, re-stack, drop a comment or interacting in any way with this post, so people can find Dharma Bites?

• Tricycle magazine published a personal essay I wrote about how I came to practice Chod.

• I’m a one-trick pony: Chod is my path. I’m here calling anyone who wants to learn Chod to come dance. ❤️‍🔥

Dear dharma friends,

So many times I’m giving a talk or writing to all of you and thinking, I’m sure they know this. They intuitively know this. I don’t need to spell it out. Then I remember my own confusion, which happens frequently, and how often I have wanted and been grateful for an explicit ladder out of the well of despair, grief, clinging. We do actually know what we need to do if we can relax into our own beautiful nature. Sometimes it can feel impossible to access that. Impossible, like a high wall around a beautiful castle. Impossible like swimming endlessly in the pull of the ocean. Impossible like looking down a ski mountain—you’ve taken a wrong turn onto a double black diamond—and thinking: I’m supposed to get down there!?

In case you are in this place right now or ever, here are pith reminders on how to walk the path. These are general instructions. I will share How to Practice, Chod edition, soon.

What Path?

We are all on a path of practice, whether we know it or not, because we are all alive and subject to the push and pull of hope and despair, dreams and delusion. Even choosing to climb entirely into samsara is a choice on the path. Choosing to live on social media, waiting until the day we can upload our consciousness to the AI, is a choice on the path.

We are all moving through a tapestry of decisions and their consequences.

How To Practice:

1) Use Your Circumstances

Samsara can be the ground of our awakening. Difficult circumstances can be the fire of our awakening. Losing your job—yelling at your kid—falling off sobriety—getting that diagnosis—are the circumstances that could wake us up in this very moment. Sometimes “extremely bad things” are the beautiful wakeup calls from the universe. It means it’s time for your inner wisdom self to be born.

Remember to view the confusion of samsara as opportunity. Samsara comes with everything we need to wake up in the human form. Instead of reacting as we usually do, which is to push away difficulty, resent it, take it personally, or project it on another person, we can change our orientation. When we welcome the difficult circumstances of samsara we begin a different dance. We begin to see that we change in response to our difficult times, our trauma times, our I-fucked-up times. Those moments are motivation.

Many who come to the path with sincerity and devotion do so from a place of suffering. Everyone who is ready to put their forehead to the ground and say please, teach me—has suffered. It is when we are humbled by life that we arrive at ego-effacement. Self-dilation gives dharma the chance to drop all the way in.

2) Stand in Love

Could it be that one of the most radical things we can do right now is to stay in the love lane? I mean it. The winds of anger, bitterness, cynicism, addiction to material goods, hatred, judgement, greed, desire—we are living in a windstorm that doesn’t seem to be abating.

Stand in love. Refuse to strip any sentient being of their humanity—divinity—inner light. Because they are alive they are worthy of your love. In this time of division this is a big practice. Stand in Love.

Can your heart feel every other person’s heart? I have been advising my sangha to try this. One could spend a good lifetime making this your mantra: Can My Heart Feel Their Heart?

To try this practice, make an inner connection with your heart. Then visualize that love emanating from your heart, up through the central channel, out of the top of your head, over to the other person’s head, dropping through their central channel, and into their heart.

Check: can your heart feel their heart?

Sometimes you really won’t want to. Sometimes, honestly, you won’t be able to feel the other person’s heart. But sometimes you will. If you do this enough, you will get better at this quick touch in with the common taste of humanity. Your heart will enlarge. There is only benefit in this.

I’m tapping away on my laptop, writing this Dharma Bite to all of you from the wooden pews of jury duty. Is anything more beautiful than the American experiment in democracy? This crazy, knee-to-nose exercise in sitting among our fellow citizens?

Stand in love.

3) Hold It Lightly

I love the story of the Tao philosopher Chung Tze dreaming that he was a butterfly, and waking up wondering if he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. This has stuck with me as a parable of the strange delusion that we grasp onto and call MY LIFE. Instead, the instruction is to hold the “I”, hold “me”, hold “mine” – lightly. As if it were a bubble or a dream.

This is not to be confused with detachment and numbing out. I am still responsible to my kids even when I hold lightly. I am still feeding them and tending to them. We hold our identification lightly. Our clinging. Our wants.

Another example: we recently opened a temple at Heart Sangha, where I am the guiding teacher. It is an exciting milestone. It is a delight and relief to go to the same place, with the same set up, and teach without so much exertion each time. That said, the temple could go away at any moment. Maybe we don’t have the funding we need to continue, or maybe I get sick, or maybe there are no volunteers who want to step forward for karma yoga. Maybe I move, or the building changes ownership. There is so much we don’t know. It will equally be okay if the temple goes away. I am holding it lightly. Having or not having a temple does not mean anything. Teacher or not being a teacher—I’m holding it lightly.

You might think of the equivalent thing in your life that you are holding tightly right now and see if you can loosen your grip. Hold the butterfly dream of your life lightly.

4) Don’t Give Up

Maybe you’ve been on the path a long time. In that case you will have gone through periods of great exertion and periods of a kind of despair, which is that fallow, dry place where you have sat and sat. You aren’t sure why you’re meditating anymore. You could not hear another dharma talk if your life depended on it. Big teenage feelings! We all have them.

That is a part of the path too. It’s a sign that you probably could change things up. Maybe you need a new practice, a new teacher, a new sangha. Maybe you have dried up because you’ve lost touch with your heart. Has your practice gotten intellectual? Are you the world’s greatest dharma-corrector?

I’d suggest doing action. Maybe you want to volunteer. Teach kids to meditate. That’ll get your playful juices going. Make food for the food pantries. Serve people and look them in the eye. Donate tickets for kids to get to an Eagles game. Shake it up. But don’t give up.

I take heart in the refuge of the Buddha, that first part of the refuge chant. Take a moment to connect the dots here. We aren’t swearing allegiance to a Buddha-god who was once Prince Siddhartha. We are saying thank you for an example of a buddha in human form. One example was Prince Siddhartha, who became the Buddha Shakyamuni. Another is the Buddha Machig Lapdron, and the Buddha Sera Khandro, whose treasure texts I am currently reading. Also the Buddha Yeshe Tsogyal. These women had hard lives. They found liberation from human form. They were women who were oppressed. Caught, captured, beaten, starved. Women like Sera Khandro who journeyed east across the Tibetan plateau from her birth as a noblewoman in Lhasa. To practice the dharma. To find her teacher. To become a buddha.

We are built to liberate our consciousness and then liberate others. Take heart in the examples of all the buddhas, so many that they fill the refuge tree, so many they fill the sky. If they can do it, we can do it.

This is my last post of 2025. Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here. If you feel so moved, please like, comment, restack or interact in any way with this post so more people can find Dharma Bites.

I teach at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All of the Sunday Sanghas are streamed live, for free, on Zoom.

Have a peaceful holiday season. May you turn toward the dharma in the new year, as we begin again, renewing our practice.

See you in 2026 ❤️

Sunisa

[I couldn’t find a photo of me at Padme Samye Ling, but here is a pic of me at the same age, in Dharmsala, falling in love with the Vajrayana without knowing it yet.]

Dear dharma friends,

There are 3 big vehicles of Buddhism: Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Vajrayana has the smallest number of people practicing it, and is the least known in the West. I am a Vajrayana teacher, so let me take a moment to say what the Vajrayana is and how it might be a fit for some people in these chaos times.

My life happens to have been a tour of all three vehicles of Buddhism. I was born into a Theravada country, Thailand. My Thai grandparents are from China. The Mahayana practices of bodhisattvas like Guan Yin were a beautiful part of my childhood. In a way, I am a native Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist. I have so much reverence for those vehicles. For example, I still reflect on Thai monks scooping their meals out of one big bowl. Eating from one bowl where curry, soup, and dessert slop together is a huge practice of cutting through attachment and aversion when you come from a foodie culture.

I’m expounding on the Vajrayana with bows and respect to the other vehicles and lineages. Everyone should find the dharma lane best suited for them. That’s why there is said to be 84,000 doors to the dharma!

How did I come to Tibetan Buddhism?

When I was 20 I went with my American boyfriend to the temple he’d grown up attending in upstate New York. I met two Tibetan lamas: Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche and his older brother Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche. I happened to arrive at their temple Padma Samye Ling for a Kalachakra tantra empowerment. It knocked my socks off! I sat at the back of the temple with my head spinning, my body humming. The empowerment was a big purification for me. I couldn’t stop sneezing and there was this river of snot coming out of my nose. The moment I stepped outside the temple, I dried up. What to say, except— sorry to gross you out!

The weekend ended with fire puja, where any broken vows are restored, and lama dancing, a ritualistic offering. Though I didn’t know intellectually what was happening, I was so moved by the joy and freedom I felt as I watched these brothers dancing in a field of long grass, expressing the dharma. Some part of me got it, even though I couldn’t have told you what “it” was.

As the lamas danced in a circle around us, one of the brothers tapped me on my shoulder. I jumped. And stared. In my memory it was Khenchen Palden who tapped my shoulder. He laughed. He pointed to the pendant of a jade Buddha that I wear around my neck. Through a translator he let me know that he understood that I’m from Thailand, where monks keep 4-5 feet away from women.

Right there, my internalized ideas of good/bad, sacred/profane, the right gender/the wrong one fell away. Sometimes realizations feel like an avalanche. This was an immediate and total experience. It was the moment I fell in love with Tibetan Buddhism.

I can say now, twenty years later, that the weekend in upstate New York at Padme Samye Ling began my journey into the Vajrayana. I have so much gratitude in my heart for the Khenpo brothers. They ignited a fire in me to find my teacher and follow the Vajrayana.

[Prayer flags from the same trip to the Himalayas. I got engaged near this spot!]

What is Vajrayana?

Vajrayana means diamond thunderbolt vehicle. Practicing it can indeed feel like you’ve been hit by an unbreakable bolt. This way is transformative, and not always in the comfortable, can-you-slow-down kind of way.

My teacher Anam Thubten says:

“The very premise of Vajrayana is that enlightenment can be discovered now, in this very life, in your own flesh and bones. Its main view is that the world is sacred. … Many of the practices of Vajrayana are designed to alter our consciousness to develop such perception.”

-p15, Voice of the Primordial Buddha

You may have heard that Vajrayana doesn’t involve much silent meditation. How can that be Buddhism? It isn’t silence that makes something a Buddhist vehicle. Buddhist is the worldview that acknowledges suffering and the end of suffering (the Four Noble Truths); it’s the commitment to hold compassion for all living beings in the Mahayana; and it’s the realization of emptiness.

The Vajrayana uses different methods to other vehicles. There is less silence. There is quite a bit of form. The Vajrayana has the bells and whistles of ceremony and color; light; dancing; naked female deities flying through the sky. They are called dakinis. I enjoy visualizing them for the deep, radical thrill of the female form celebrated on the Buddhist altar.

It’s a universe away from staying 4-5 feet away from women. From my perspective, Theravada might be a form of Buddhism suited to monastics. There are the codes of conduct, the Vinaya, that help a man who has the ability to devote his days to living inside that dharma shave away at the unethical conduct and missteps that we householders, in our fast, modern life, make all the time.

The question becomes: how many of us are monastics? And for women—how many of us are supported to become nuns?

Practicing the Vajrayana can involve full-body prostrations (a lovely yogic warmup to sitting in meditation); chanting out loud; and visualizations of deities made of light. The deities hold ritual instruments. You see syllables coming in and out of them. They rotate, so you are working in 3D.

It takes a whole heck of a lot of meditative focus to essentially play a movie in your mind. All of that practice focusing on the breath is utilized when you use that meditative concentration to beam a movie from your heart into the space in front of your head. What you are seeing up there is a metaphor to hold all your neurotic tendencies. When you dissolve that movie and construct the next one, you begin to transform neurotic poisons into wisdom qualities. In Vajrayana you are still working with samsara (that old sufferin’ tune); bodhicitta (the awakened heart); and emptiness, just with different method— different technology.

[Old timers doing full-body prostrations at the Dalai Lama’s temple. I was moved to see it.]

Vajrayana is a method of practice that takes all our complex human neurosis and meets it in with complexity too. What I’ve found with Vajrayana practice is that the methods of the Vajrayana are complex so that they can hold the complexity of my own neurotic patterns.

Who knows, maybe you are quite spacious and easeful. I know people like that! They might be drawn to Dzogchen, which is the pinnacle of Vajrayana. Dzogchen is not elaborate in form.

I happen to run hot and fast. I run the rails of my mental tendencies hard. For me, temperamentally, I have needed the holding that the Vajrayana practices can do for my mind.

I focus hard for 45 minutes to an hour. Sometimes in one morning meditation I’m moving through 5 stages of visualization and chanting. And then, when I dissolve everything, and sit in the field created by the practice, there are these waves of ease that can roll through my body. For me that has been an immense learning. I didn’t know that such deep joy and ease are possible.

My patterning is such that trust it hard. Slowing down is hard. Trusting in my (and our) Buddha Nature can feel impossible. I find that building an elaborate temple in my mind frees up my body and heart to experience, slowly, the ways that such a temple also resides within me.

For that reason I am glad that one of the 84,000 doors to the dharma is an elaborate, wrought-iron one, with singing and chanting and female deities. It turns out to have been the perfect door for me.

Does this make sense? If you have questions, I’m here.

With lots of love,

Sunisa

[This small notice, stuck above a doorframe, just broke my heart. FREE TIBET. I would add the Tibetan flag emoji, but it doesn’t exist yet]

Dear Dharma friends,

Hello and welcome back to Dharma Bites. I have missed you! Thank you for hanging in through this longer-than-planned break.

I started the year at Heart Sangha, where I am the guiding teacher, with a flurry of trying to find a place to meet. We had been in donated space, then we were online only, then a place we thought was 100% fell through. I had to be a logistical dharma teacher for a while.

I also taught my first Chod Healing retreat in Rochester, NY with Sue Kochan, guiding teacher of Dharma Refuge. Hello to all of you I saw up there, and thank you for coming.

The good news is that Heart Sangha opened our temple last Sunday. My teacher Anam Thubten happened to be in Philadelphia. With the strong lift of our sangha volunteers (go karma yoga!) who painted, taped, installed lights and cleaned like heck, we welcomed my teacher for a dharma talk on What Is Sangha? and a temple opening ceremony.

Why is it important to have a temple?

The temptation would be to secularize Heart Sangha and could call the place we meet a dharma center. That would be understandable, and people do it. I have also heard from people who have hesitation, and even aversion, toward the religious overtones of the word temple.

I am from Asia, so automatically I leaned towards calling the space a temple. It is a space for Buddhist practice after all. But there is a deeper reason that I believe that temple is the right name for the space. It’s because we are starved of sacred space in our culture. I’m speaking about American culture, since I live here. Where are the places we go when we have heartbreak? Despair? A crisis of the heart? It’s important to have a place that looks, feels, and is different from our kitchen counters where can be served tea with a hug, or our living room couch where we may curl up and cry with a blanket and the cat. Those places are important too. I am all for cozy.

Yes, and. We need more spaces in our lives that are physically and energetically delineated as a sacred place where can connect with our higher selves. Part of growing into wisdom beings is moving out of the lane of household life for a short time each week and practicing in the spiritual plane.

Padma Od

Anam Thubten Rinpoche, my dear teacher, named Heart Sangha’s temple: Padma Od. This is Tibetan for “lotus light.”

What a beautiful name! The name is significant because Padma Od was the palace of Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava) and Yeshe Tsogyal, the originators of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. I am a Nyingma teacher. Padma Od is also easy to say in English. A big bow to practical, bilingual beauty.

Please enjoy the photos of Padma Od and my teacher doing a calligraphy of the name for us to hang at the temple. Feel that you, too, are welcomed into the sacred, delineated space that you may need in this time.

We can create a sacred space at home with a shrine and cushion, candles and incense. We could make an impromptu altar on our walk in the forest with twigs and the remnants of autumn leaves. And of course, we can always create sacred space in our heart.

With lots of love,

Sunisa

Those who wish to keep the trainings

Must with perfect self-possession guard their minds.

Without this guard upon the mind,

The trainings cannot be preserved.

- Shantideva

Dear dharma friends,

We are in the midst of examining the 6 Paramitas, the 6 transcendent actions that turn us into our wisdom emanations. We begin with generosity because it opens the heart. With the practice of generosity the ego can come along for the ride. We aren’t muscling our way to transcendence, which doesn’t work anyway. Instead, the ego is invited as a friend to practice with us. Ego can say, oh yeah! I’m so generous! I’m so good! Who else can I help? In this way the dharma is a path inclusive of all our parts. We do not exile anything.

Classically, after generosity, we practice ethical conduct, tolerance, and joyful effort. These four are the transcendent actions of all humans, regardless of denomination. I believe all faith traditions praise these qualities as virtues. Secularly, too, having morals, a generous nature, not taking life too personally, and cultivating persistence are decent, bedrock values. One of the reasons I enjoy my new-ish life in Pennsylvania is this grounded quality of decency. In the four years I’ve been here, I find people to be refreshingly un-neurotic and close to this ground of common human values. Not for nothing is this the Keystone State.

This generous, ethical, tolerant, and diligent ethos is what Americans have been known for. It’s what’s in danger in this time of American leaders practicing a larger version of a tantrum. They want what they want now. They’re right, and people who disagree are wrong. They sound like the tyrants in Roald Dahl’s Matilda. It would be funny except for the consequences of such actions with such power. I was born and raised in Thailand, a country long ruled by monarchy and military dictators. Having seen this story before, I can say that it is reckless to underestimate the blitz against American democracy. We are watching the light of freedom go out before us.

And how are we reacting? Mostly, with silence. So many of us Americans are numbed by social media. We are disembodied routinely. Some of us stay like that for most of the day. Whether the habitual pattern is to live within Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, X, Instagram, Substack, or some other clickbait rage, we are so practiced in numbing out. Almost none of us are present for the wreckage.

I’ve been doing this too. Lately, I’ve been pondering why I have been publicly silent on the massacre of Palestinians by Israel. Is this where I say that I have a lot of Jewish friends? I can say that I am under-informed, that I have no words to match the slaughter. That is intellectual training. Excuses of the mind. What lies underneath is my own flinch from the scale of the suffering. It feels like if I were to let the slaughter of Palestinians in, I might explode. Or dissolve. Or die.

That is what immense suffering can trick us into thinking. I’ve been reflecting on the immense suffering of Palestinians from the cushion. In meditation, I have seen my own lack of courage in witnessing. I have found a spaciousness that can hold the numbers of dead, the hospitals bombed, the callousness of the world’s silence.

We need to go towards ego’s certainty of death. When we explode, melt, and dissolve, that is no-self realized in the body. When we give up our spiritual safety we can start to be the bodhisattvas that we are destined to become. The Buddhist wisdom practices like equanimity and compassion, tonglen, and Chod transform what we think is possible.

How do we begin that transformation?

Meditation.

Mind Down Time

Dhyana, meditation, is the fifth transcendence. Normally it’s taught only for Buddhists, alongside Prajna, Wisdom. I am going to revise that order. The dharma must adapt to this time of great intelligence and spiritual laziness. An example: how many of my Ivy-educated peers applaud my ordination but exempt themselves from the spiritual workout that it takes to sit on the cushion? Almost all of them. Humility is not high in our personal qualities.

What we need in this time of breakage and fear is to embody. We must abide in this uncomfortable world from inside our bodies. I have a working theory that in our agrarian pasts, filled with slavery, the domination of women, and more— so I’m not saying we should return there— we were often in our bodies. I read a lot of Tolstoy. Maybe we were singing in the fields as we hoed. Cantering from one village to the next. Maybe we were riding elephants. Tilling the rice fields with water buffalo. Walking from one village to the next.

We had Mind Down Time, where we could unwind in our bodies so that the everyday qualities of generosity, ethics, tolerance, and diligence could emerge and percolate to the top of our action.

We do not have that luxury any more. If we have Phone Down Time at all, it is an anomaly. So we must adapt. We must make a firm commitment to a daily embodiment ritual.

Please Sit

I am going to advocate for silent sitting meditation. So basic, not sexy, but can I tell you that it is extremely good and effective? I feel like I am trying to market breathing to everyone. If we are alive we are doing it, but, uh, guess what: most of us are not using breath for all that it can unlock!

I was a little worried, when I was ordained about a year ago, that somehow the transformation of my suffering on the path was a dharma fluke. Who knows! What if I got the placebo pill? One of the great privileges of the past year has been the avalanche of personal suffering I have been honored to witness. We have held hands. We have cried. We have prayed. And we have tried practices, tweaked them, and come back for feedback.

In just one year, a scant time in the normal measure of a human life, I have gotten such resounding positive feedback. This isn’t about me. And I’m not sure that I, nor the dharma, can, you know, transform everything. But with all appropriate caveats, let me say that the most abject suffering, the states that we shudder to consider, that we whisper to our spouse with the thrill that it is not us going through it— these are the states that have moved for people. It begins with meditation.

Sit in the fire

So much is unbearable in this life. Sometimes samsara is annoying. Sometimes samsara is pleasurable. And sometimes to be here is to be in a hell realm while in this human body. It is as if being burned alive. It is as if awake while being buried. It is to watch your death unfold, and begin again.

The way out is to embody. To hold the vessel within the largest spaciousness that can witness it all. Meditation is your access route. No one can make you do it. It is entirely too mundane for anyone to force you into a consistent practice. That’s where joyful effort comes in!

Don’t talk about sitting. Don’t write about sitting. Don’t social media claim-credit-for-it. Don’t resolution. Just sit. Quietly and consistently. Meditation is the best way to avoid being kidnapped by the samsaric mind.

Samsaric mind is loud in the collective right now. That kind of energy is catching. Build a fortress of mind training. Develop a resiliency of the mind.

Everything flows out of this daily practice. It is so simple it makes the teeth ache. Show up to the cushion. Show up to the teaching. Show up for your wisdom self.

Whatever it wants to be is beautiful. It is waiting right there, within you, to be born.

With lots of love,

Sunisa

Friends, that was the last dharma talk through the summer.

- I am teaching retreat in Philadelphia on Sunday June 1, if you can join us.

- The teachings will start back up after Labor Day.

- Heart Sangha will be adding Zoom to every live teaching. We will record and share the talks to Heart Sangha members. If you have been enjoying these write-ups, and live sits and videos are for you, please sign up for emails on the Heart Sangha website. All practice information goes out there.

It has been an honor and a pleasure to spend this time with you. Thank you. 🩵

Dear Dharma friends,

In Thailand, it’s traditional to go to the temple on your birthday. You give food to monks, free birds from cages, and walk over to the wet market where you buy fish swimming buckets, destined for dinner, and pour them into the canals instead. On your birthday the most important thing is to practice generosity. Generosity is the opening to divine action.

Six Paramitas

We’ve been looking at the intentions of awake ones: loving kindness; equanimity; compassion; joy. In Buddhism we emphasize intention because it influences how an action manifests. Clear intention is a clean starting point.

From there we move to the actions of a bodhisattva, which are called the Six Paramitas. Paramita is Sanskrit. It’s usually translated as the 6 Perfections. A bodhisattva has perfect action.

Let me tease out the literal meaning of parmitas.

- “Mita” is friend. Intimacy.

- “Para” you might recognize from the Heart Sutra:

OM, GATE, GATE, PARAGATE, PARASAM GATE, BODHI SUAHA!

om, gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, what awakening!

So actually, “para” means beyond. The actions of a bodhisattva take you beyond samsara. They help you live beyond the dualisms of the world. We can translate the Six Paramitas as Transcendent Action.

Dana of Material Things

Generosity is dana in Sanskrit. The first kind of generosity is the dana of material things. This is usually seen as giving money. At Heart Sangha, a friend talked about their daughter, who keeps water and snacks in the back of her car. When she’s in certain neighborhoods she rolls down her window and offers food and drink. Just this example shows why generosity is courageous action. More commonly, we probably speed along past such people, hoping they don’t scratch the car.

Is time a material thing? I put volunteering into this dana bucket. My teacher Anam Thubten has a huge mandala. He moves all over the world, teaching. His flights, schedule, and retreats are coordinated by volunteers. My impression is that people are grateful for the chance to practice dana. The idea is to joyfully step into giving. Dana opens the heart.

Dana of Protection

Equally, we don’t need to over-emphasize giving money. US culture venerates money. Not being able to give material things can generate guilt and shame. This is not the intention of generosity practice at all. There are many ways to practice dana.

The second type of generosity is the dana of protection, which is offering shelter and sustenance to others. Some cultures prize this, such that you might be traveling and come across people living with very little money, yet they invite you into their home to share the best portion of their food.

There are people in my neighborhood who’ve taken in refugees and housed people fleeing war. This is the dana of protection.

I hear that people are abandoning pets at rates equal to that of the Covid pandemic. You could practice the dana of protection by adopting a pet, or fostering them, because Bodhisattvas are here for all sentient beings.

Buddhists would say that if we’re able to give an animal a stable home, they’ll be in less distress, so when they die they have a better chance to be reborn as humans who can practice the dharma. A bodhisattva wants to further every sentient being’s path to awakening.

Dana of Dharma

The last category for generosity is giving the dharma. Classically, this referred to monks teaching the dharma. Buddhism evolves to every culture where it takes root and adapts to the times. In the modern context, when most societies are not built around monastic life as the path for Buddhist practice, the dana of dharma is giving compassion and lovingkindness. When your friend unloads a story and you meet it with compassion and not judgement, that is the dana of dharma. When you send lovingkindness to people you don’t know, that maybe you dislike, that is the dana of dharma.

We’re well aware that the forces of fear, ignorance, anger, and hatred are contagious forces. Compassion is also a contagious force. So is lovingkindness. The more of us practice the dana of dharma, the more evolved our culture becomes.

Dana is limitless

Expanding our heart’s capacity for generosity goes from giving material things, to protection, to energy or prayer. As we practice, we realize that generosity is a limitless resource.

How can this be? Real generosity starts in the heart. It comes from gratitude for what we have. This means we have a lived sense of abundance. It’s hard to give when you’re limited by a mindset of scarcity. If you are reading this post on Substack, the chances are likely that you can find a way to cultivate generosity.

When you investigate this divine action you’ll find that your days are full of moments to be generous, whether that is letting someone walk through the door before you, letting them cut into your lane, giving someone the benefit of the doubt, or picking up the groceries a person has spilled on the street. You might smile at the kid on the rocking horse. These are all communications of dana.

Non-dual Dana

Level One of generosity might be making a donation and taking public credit for it. That’s the naming rights to the building of the college where your kids go to school. It’s okay, but it’s bound. Egoic giving is still a part of samsara.

Generosity can be tricky. When we give, we might feel entitled to a say in how the gift is used. Often when we give, we feel we’re owed something in return, even if it’s gratitude.

The truth is that most of us are practicing a dualistic version of generosity. I include most Buddhists in this! We are still reifying a 1-1 relationship when we give. There is probably an internal holding that looks like: I give, you receive. I benevolent, you in need. I help, you grateful. (Somehow our egos sound like Cookie Monster.)

It can be hard to admit that this is what’s happening inside, but it’s normal. The context of the world we live in has trained us to this limited form of generosity.

Even if this doesn’t make a ton of sense right now, holding the idea in your heart, and holding the aspiration to transcend samsaric generosity, is the place to begin.

Practice Invitation

I invite you to try five acts of generosity in the next month. Notice within yourself if the act can spring from a transcendent well, and what that feels like in your body. Try and let go of the ego’s chatter about what the giving means. Try and focus on what you gain energetically when you give.

If there is a lot of chatter, give it a sweet bow and witness that. Everything is treated with kindness and bemused witnessing. We can only be in the place we are.

At Heart Sangha a friend told a story of a couple who was divorcing. The man and woman decided to give their adult daughter a house. The man mentioned that their daughter never said thank you. He continued: “It didn’t matter. We wanted to give her a house.”

That is the difference between ordinary generosity and transcendent generosity.

When we practice transcendent dana, we open the gate to the big stream of Buddhism. We step firmly onto the noble path of the Bodhisattvas. We begin to create a Buddha-realm here in Samsara. That is what we are called to do in these times.

With love,

Sunisa

Meditate with me

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Dear dharma friends,

There’s a way right now that we might be moving through the world and getting heavier and heavier. Each day brings fresh headlines, fresh outrage, fresh heartbreak. Perhaps it’s getting harder to get out of bed. Maybe we feel like we’re collapsing under the weight of so much sorrow and suffering. Things in America, and as they affect the rest of the world, are scary, turbulent, chaotic. It would be senseless to deny this.

I have thoughts about how to get through the day. That’s all the dharma is, by the way: how to get through this day and the next. Not in a small, material way, but by answering the large questions, like what are we doing here, and what is this life for?

Accept samsara

Most of us are going through life trying to establish safety by imposing control over samsara. We feel outrage over this washing machine life. We think that if we could dominate samsara, we’d be happy.

This idea is understandable but it is a delusion. Samsara is very good at its job, which is to push/pull us in the current of change. Samsara is wanting what we aren’t getting; getting what we don’t want; and having things change even as we try to hold onto them.

A lot of suffering comes from people trying to impose stasis on change. It’s actually not possible. Most people will work harder and harder, thinking that dominating better will bring safety/happiness/peacefulness and freedom. This only gets us deeper into delusion. You can probably think of some current examples of this desperate spiral. These actions stem from ignorance, which is why Tibetan Buddhists consider ignorance to be the root poison of samsara.

Instead of fighting it, we want to accept samsara. In the morning, from bed, we might say, “Hey samsara, good morning! I suspect you’re going to do a good job today.”

One of the Buddha’s major realizations was this changeful flavor of samsara. If we could accept change, then we wouldn’t be trying to stand on permanent ground. We would dance in the whirlwind.

Samsara is transformed by bodhicitta

So how do we get through our days without collapsing in grief? By inverting the structure of the heart.

It’s like we could trudge uphill through mud and rain over eons and eons. That is a path. Or we could sit on a rock, open our heart, and boom! we’re at the top of the mountain. Opening our heart to everyone is vowing to be spiritually liberated to serve everyone. This is the shortcut of the spiritual journey. In Buddhism, the key to liberation is called bodhicitta, the awakened mind.

“Bodhi” means awakening. Because the Buddha sat under a bodhi tree and was enlightened, it is the tree’s name that we give to awakening. There is wisdom in every part of that entomology.

“Citta” is consciousness. Awakened consciousness— the awakened mind, which in Thai and Tibetan refers to the heart.

The world that feels chaotic, threatening, and out of control right now is the same one that is sublime, perfect, transcendent. The change comes from the orientation of our heart. When our heart is moved not for our own optimization but for everyone’s well-being, the circumstances that weighed us down before energize us. They charge us right up.

Bodhicitta is divine purpose. It looks like Senator Cory Booker standing for 25 hours to deliver a love song to America. It looks like every woman who is turning into a mother, tearing herself open to bring new life.

Having bodhicitta doesn’t mean life doesn’t hurt. Samsara hurts. And, we are animated by forces larger than us. What we are doing is worth the sacrifice. When we have turned our hearts open, when we live each day in the fire of bodhicitta, we have too much to do to angst and stew.

Bodhicitta is innate

The awakened heart is within us. A grown-up recently asked my son if he wants to make lots of money when he grows up, and my son answered no, because then other people would have less money. The grown-up reported, “You’re raising a good socialist.” I hope I’m raising a good Buddhist! That was also my kid’s big heart on display, the same big heart we all have.

We spend so much time toughening up, and I do worry that my son’s heart might not survive the world, but the answer, from a Buddhist perspective, to all our suffering, is to let that limpid and tender heart show.

We all have the potential for bodhicitta. There is a bud in all of our hearts. In some respects, we aren’t in charge of when the bud will bloom. But certainly, right now, the circumstances are acute in the world. If, a few years ago we could roll to brunch and chill, forgetting that so many people in the world are struggling, that seems hard now, if not impossible.

This could be a good thing. The circumstances are forcing us to awaken our dormant potential.

This might be the very moment our hearts have been waiting for, the spring of springs.

Awakened heart is rocket fuel

The traditional texts aren’t exaggerating when they say that bodhicitta is a shortcut. It provides the rocket-fuel we need to escape samsaric orbit. In the beginning, when we first discover the spaciousness and sometimes-bliss of meditation, we might vow to be the best meditator in the world. We will be the most staunch sitter, with the best posture, whom the teacher loves most!

Eventually, that enthusiasm wears off. We go back to our life and our comforts. No ordinary commitment to the cushion survives samsara.

It is bodhicitta that gives us enough fuel to keep going. Only the most transcendent commitment can get us through. If you are here for the suffering of the world, you look around, and boy do you see it. Then you have to sit. You go back to your cushion again and again, with the same meditation instruction, and the same human foibles of your teacher, because you see the need for transformation. You feel the suffering of the world so deeply that you must act.

Holding genuine bodhicitta effaces a lot of the ego. It doesn’t matter if you missed a certain lama’s empowerment, or if you didn’t sit in the front and center of every retreat, if you are here for all people. You might even want other people to get a good view!

So you see, bodhicitta is the secret ingredient to liberation.

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How to bodhicitta

It has to be genuine. To some extent, we aren’t in charge of when our heart opens. We will all get there eventually, eons over eons. But we might want to pray that we get there right now. In this life.

Here is the bodhicitta prayer to recite, if it feels good to you:

May the precious and sublime awakened mind
Arise where it has not arisen
And where it has arisen
May it never decay
But grow, ever more and more

Bodhicitta can feel scary as you approach it. That might be ego shouting at you, trying to shake you out of your march to liberation.

This could sound like: what are you crazy? You, awaken? Sunisa must not be hearing your crazy mind in meditation. You suck! You’re a loser! Remember that time you did… to ….? No one who did that can awaken. Sunisa doesn’t mean that you can awaken.

Here are some methods to cut through the ego worry:

• You might bow and say, look, I’m going to try this bodhicitta just for an hour! Or just for 5 minutes! Then we can see how we did.

• You might breathe into that fear. See if you can relax into it.

• You could laugh. Laughter is good for the ego. It deflates without condemning.

• You might say: Wow, that is a great argument. I see you putting so much effort into making sure I don’t make this commitment. Are you worried? Want to tell me?

And then you make that earth-touching gesture that the Buddha did right before his Enlightenment, calling the earth to witness the eons of good deeds culminating in the very moment he tipped into awakening.

You could say, today is a good day to awaken.

Today is the perfect day to have an ego-shattering commitment to serve the world.

Bodhicitta is easier than it seems because it is already within us. We let it open. We let it express.

We don’t “do” anything— like trying to swim then noticing, if you can calm down, that you already know how to float.

Trust in your big heart.

It wants to bloom.

Love,

Sunisa

Meditate with me

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