My Summary/Exploration of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

Now in almost 13 years of recovery from a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), I’ve very keenly & very warmly taken to this poignant and comfortingly incisive commentary of Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa in his writing “Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.” I had picked up a copy of this book from my psychologist, who’d given it to me upon my very enthusiastic visit to the Shambhala Meditation Center in Manhattan. Although I’d read this book a few weeks ago, I’ve faced challenges in both the product and the process of posting this entry:

1. Although I’ve found incredibly insightful value in Trungpa’s commentary, I face weaker organizational skills now; and so I just don’t feel as sharp in identifying and pursuing clear ends, particularly as my immediate goals in life have not been able to be clear & direct. (explain!?)
2. The process of creating and updating this blog has held more resistance for me, though my good friend Lauren Kimball (now a grad student at Rutgers University) has really been an indispensable technical aid in bringing this about!

Now, I’m eager to finally draw attention to the gold that I’ve found in Trungpa’s book.  As he writes,

“There's a basic  human wisdom that can solve the world's problems (the world's problems? my problems?  My problem:  trying to find a satisfying mission/purpose/work/profession in my life while I simultaneously must work through my recovery from a severe TBI...I have hope/faith(?) that this 'human wisdom' can help me to solve the problem I face).  

Reading this book, I'd found, has helped me to more stably assess some of  the values and goals before me.  Chogyam Trungpa denotes the actual recognition & application of this basic human wisdom as 'the sacred  path of the warrior.'  This sacred path conquers the world not through violence and aggression, but through gentleness, courage and self-knowledge. As noted on Amazon.com, “the warrior discovers the basic goodness of human life and radiates that goodness into the world for the peace and sanity of others.” (Amazon.com) This seems to fit keenly and metaphorically very well into how I hope to confront the challenge(s) before me now.

Reading this book did help by putting a lot of things into better perspective for me, notably given that my ego and my strong will to work hard have made it very difficult for me to identify my own feelings & priorities. And so my psychology--one that loves to work hard for pleasingly merited results--has thereby tended to cloud my understanding of just what I’m working for. And by sympathizing with some of his vision of the world--and thereby helping me to diminish some of the grandeur of of the losses I face and helping to tune out some of my desires--Trungpa has helped me to keep some enthusing reference points through the recovery from my trauma.

-Trungpa's book is divided into three sections:

I. How to be a warrior

II. Sacredness: The Warrior's World

III. Authentic Presence

And so I'm now very eager to explore how his words apply to me in my recovery. I’ve found the following terms/excerpts potentially extremely helpful (given further exploration/rumination!)

Warrior: Certainly, I working my way through my TBI recovery warrants the status of a warrior (as I am engaged in the warfare of working toward my own peace with myself in this world!).

According to the Shambhala Glossary (http://www.glossary.shambhala.org/)

The warrior's decorum is this natural togetherness and calm, which comes from a feeling of being in harmony with yourself and with the environment. You don't have to fit yourself into situations, but situations fit naturally. When you achieve this level of decorum, then you can abandon the final vestiges...of habitual patterns that you have been carrying so long to protect yourself from nature. (pg 128)

This certainly seems very descriptive of me as I’m working/fighting my way through my TBI recovery

-Trungpa begins with the assertion that 'Shambhala teachings are founded on the premise that there is a basic human wisdom that can help to solve the world's problems.'

Recovery from a traumatic brain injury certainly is not a 'world problem;' though assessing one's own strengths and values--particularly in an inherently changing world--and then examining how that individual can apply herself to the peace, sanity and betterment of the world (and of herself?) certainly seems to apply very keenly to both me as a TBI victim and quite commonly to people throughout this world.  

-28: The key to warriorship & first principle of Shambhala vision is not being afraid of who you are. Shambhala vision is the opposite of selfishness...we must try to think how we can help this world.

Through my recovery, I have felt not necessarily afraid of who I am, but I have been very afraid of what kind of future I’ll face. In fact, as my recovery has progressed, I have seen--thankfully--that much of who I was is now still present, so long as I can calm my anger, disappointment and frustration that--even in spite of all I’d done before my trauma & the things I’m doing now--I often have a hard time accepting the disappointing prospects and unsatisfying work I now must do.

-33: Shambhala vision is trying to provoke you to understand how you live, your relationship with ordinary life...If we begin to perk up, we will find that the whole universe--including the seasons, the snowfall, the ice & the mud--is also powerfully working with us. Life is a humorous situation, but it is not mocking us...we can directly experience and work with reality.

Experiencing the basic goodness of our lives makes us feel that we are intelligent & decent people & that the world is not a threat.

-The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything.

That comment felt exceedingly reassuring to me and of the mission I’m now on--working to bring myself to more peaceful conditions in which I can satisfactorily work for the teaching and instruction of other people (and ideally, my trauma will help me to uncover the ingredient I’ve been missing--an enthusing, sharply empowering goal/academic field to pursue (I’d always been very enthused about the prospect of helping other people via medicine, but I’d then felt discouraged from pursuing that path because I’d felt that there was much more to appreciate in the world/in human health than a scientific understanding of exactly how the body works

Discovering Basic Goodness

35--A great deal of chaos occurs in the world because people don’t appreciate themselves. We have to accept personal responsibility for uplifting ourselves.

36--In the Shambhala tradition, the discipline for developing both gentleness towards ourselves and appreciation of our world is the sitting practice of meditaiton

I have been practicing meditation for over a year now, and I would say that indeed this assertion seems to be true. The value comes from appreciating the simplicity of it all.

41--Medttn practice is regarded as a good & in fact excellent way to overcome warfare in the world: our own warfare as well as greater warfare

44--The point of warriorship is to work personally w/out situation now, as it is. The first step in basic goodness is to appreciate what we have.

45--Sitting practice of medttn...is the means to rediscover basic goodness, & beyond that, it is the means to awaken the genuine heart w/in yrself.

47--We are afraid that we can’t handle the demands of the world. This fear expresses itself as a feeling of inadequacy.

48--Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern & restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath its veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating all the time. When we slow down, when we relax w/our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle.

50--The ideal of warriorship is that the warrior should be sad & tender

I certainly am sad that I don’t have the life I’d thought I’d  always worked for. I have--necessarily--always had the hope that I may somehow be able to use my trauma for the as an instructive experience. I do want to help other people, but I’d prefer to find some way to help that would be in the form of active instruction, teaching. For I do still have a passion for the world of ideas!

I now want to skip ahead to one section of the book that seemed most promising. Trungpa introduced the concept of drala, or what he terms as magic.

95--...failure to appreciate the resourcefulness of human existence--which we call basic goodness--has become one of the world’s biggest problems.

96--The way to experience nowness is to realize that this very moment, this very point in your life, is always the occasion...You should regard hyr home as sacred, as a golden opportunity to experience nowness.
Appreciating sacredness begins very simply by taking an interest in all the details of your life.

Discovering Magic

99--There is some principle of magic in everything, some living quality. Smthng living, smthng real, is taking place in everything.

Magic is arousing because I now feel so inordinately far from the pleasing future that I’d hoped for, and which I still hope for--and that’s teaching at the college level. And so “magic” is naturally sounds very arousing to me!

-In twentieth century, the appreciation of simplicity has almost been lost.

Causalness has become increasingly

MAGIC: "Any perception can connect us to reality properly and fully. What we see doesn't have to be pretty, particularly; we can appreciate anything that exists. There is some principle of magic in everything, some living quality. Something living, something real, is taking place in everything." (pg 99) "When we draw down the power of vastness into a single perception, then we are discovering and invoking magic. By magic, we...mean...the discovery of innate or primordial wisdom in the world as it is." (pg 103) "If we open our eyes, if we open our minds, if we open our hearts, we will find that this world is a magical place. It is not magical because it tricks us or changes unexpectedly into something else, but it is magical because it and be so vividly, so brilliantly. However the discovery of that magic that can happen only when we transcend our embarrassment about being alive, when we have the bravery to proclaim the bravery to proclaim the goodness and dignity of human life, without hesitation of arrogance. Then magic or drala can descend into our lives."(pg 132)

DRALA: (Tibetan: "dra", enemy or opponent; "la", above): "beyond the enemy". "Unconditioned wisdom and power of the world that are beyond any dualism, therefore Drala is above any enemy or conflict. It is wisdom beyond aggression. It is the self existing wisdom and power of the cosmic mirror that are reflected both in us and in our world of perception." "One of the key points in discovering drala principle is realizing that your own wisdom as a human being is not separate from the power of things as they are... reflections of the unconditional wisdom of the cosmic mirror. ... When you can experience those two things together...then you have access to tremendous vision and power in the world...connected to your own vision, your own being. We actually perceive reality. Any perception can connect us to reality properly and fully." (pg 103)

COSMIC MIRROR: "The original state likened to a primordial or cosmic mirror." "By primordial mirror we mean unconditioned." "This unconditioned state is likened to a mirror...is willing to reflect anything...and it remains as it is"..."free from bias: kill or cure, hope or fear." (pg 100) "...the quality of the cosmic mirror is that it is unconditioned, vast open space. ...it is an eternal and completely open space, space beyond question. In the realm of the cosmic mirror, your mind extends its vision completely, beyond doubt. Before thoughts, before the thinking process takes place, there is the accommodation of the cosmic mirror, which has no boundary-no center and no fringe. ...the way to experience this space is through the sitting practice of meditation

...the realm of the cosmic mirror gives rise to wisdom-the wisdom of vast and deep perception, beyond conflict which is called drala. ...the ultimate level of experiencing drala is experiencing directly the wisdom of the cosmic mirror. When you experience that wisdom, then you are contacting the origin of the Shambhala lineage, the source of wisdom." (pg 174)

VERY HELPFUL GLOSSARY: http://www.glossary.shambhala.org/

“the first principle of warriorship is not being afraid of who you are.”

Buddhist commentary—extremely incisive & helpful:

            We’ll all die

Realize that life is about change, need to  RELAX yr EGO and appreciate life as the 

wondrous, bold, extremely comforting & fire eating experience it truly is!

How do we confront the defeats, the frustrations, the angers and the often agitating--even disconcerting--changes that life naturally brings our way? Those're just part of the default bumps in the road that come from any kind of progression through space...or even through time, right? Well, I've found that how we confront challenges...the nature in which we acknowledge any disturbances in our lives...is simply all a matter of perspective, no? As Helen Keller had once so simply, and so wisely, asserted, "life's either a daring adventure or nothing."

As I understand it, her claim is a very sensible declaration that life is best lived by confronting every occurrence for what it truly is:  a very authentic, and so rather daring affair in which, for any person, everything is always completely unique, original and so entirely unpredictable. Nobody can predict the future, and so any simple event can potentially bring outrageously threatening, overwhelmingly angst-inducing ends. Perhaps even more challenging, we never know when we might confront an inescapable event that could be vacuously halting. So goes our ride on the whims of fate, eh?

Keller's mantra has been helpful for me as I've been confronting the slow, sinuously threatening challenges involved in my recovery from a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Struck by a car as a pedestrian over in Moscow, Russia--where I had been working as a journalist--I've made an unbelievably good recovery, physically. Though I've been riding threateningly vacuous ebbs & flows in my TBI recovery: I still love to read and write--and I've  been a good writing tutor and ESL tutor for different students, but damage to my executive functioning means that I have a hard time identifying a clear focus and then adequately prioritizing just what needs to be done. On top of that, my cognitive processing speed now is just "normal," and so the strong work ethic that had driven me so far earlier in my life now often leads me to feeling of defeat and frustration.

Now 12 years into my TBI recovery, it's been a very deceiving challenge to identify where I'm now going. An intelligent & always very active & energetic guy, I experienced my trauma back in 2002--just three years after graduating from college and within one year of finishing up my volunteer service with the Peace Corps. in the post-Soviet country of Uzbekistan. My recovery has felt corrosively insidious, though I'm very blessed to have an incredibly strong & supportive family to stabilize me a bit, along with a few supportive (though intermittent) friends and some very helpful psychiatric aid. And of course, regular visits to the gym have also helped me to release a bit of the steaming anger, frustration & agitation that generally come from the defeat that now so often seems to mark much my experience now.

At the persistent urging of my psychologist now, I want to take this opportunity to document my struggle through this recovery. I hope this will help to override the trouble I now have in staying focused on some of my immediate goals; I think & hope this can also help to curb the frequent cases in which I feel emotionally overwhelmed--or hijacked--and thereby distracted from my immediate tasks.