A student and I spoke recently after something happened to her on a bus. She was shaken up. An older man had started a perfectly ordinary conversation with her about a WNBA team. Then he asked where her boyfriend was. She told him he lived in another state, and from there the man began talking about long-distance relationships and video calls. Then he started making inappropriate comments about pictures and videos, warning her about what her mother might see. On and on he went as she sat in shock. She shook her head, but she didn’t confront him. Afterward, what disturbed her almost as much as what he had said was the fact that she hadn’t done anything. She kept thinking: Why didn’t I say something? Why did I just sit there? Why did I let that happen?
You Didn’t Let It Happen
didn’t let it happen. It happened at you. This guy has his own life, his own conditioning, his own reasons for behaving the way he does, and you happened to be the person sitting there. He did what he did. You didn’t let him or not let him. Sure, you could have gotten up and moved. You could have told him very clearly that what he was saying was inappropriate. You could have gotten the bus driver involved. You could have confronted him. But you also don’t know who you’re dealing with. You don’t know whether somebody is going to become aggressive, whether he’s carrying a weapon, whether he’s unstable. I don’t think anybody needs to prove their strength by confronting a strange man on a bus. Her sitting there and not engaging him was not a failure. It was an appropriate and intelligent response.
There was something else going on, though, that she was looking at. She had been conditioned for years in her family around male energy that could be intrusive and dismissive, where the assumption hoisted about onto her was essentially, “we’re going to say what we want, we’re going to do what we want, and we’re not terribly interested in what you have to say about it.” Nobody necessarily has to announce that women are inferior. The message can simply be in the atmosphere. It’s in who gets to speak, who gets interrupted, whose discomfort matters, whose anger is acceptable, who is expected to remain pleasant. That conditioning runs very deep in the world, and it can run very deep inside a person. So yes, there was something here for her to look at. But looking at it is completely different from blaming herself for it.
That’s where the second reaction came in. There was the original internal response to the man: Who the hell do you think you are? You creep. Why are you inserting yourself into my attention and talking to me this way? That was clean. Then almost immediately another reaction appeared: Oh my God, what’s wrong with me? Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I do the right thing? I should have stopped him. I let him do this. Now she wasn’t dealing with the man anymore. She was dealing with herself, and she was attacking herself for the way she had responded to him. That’s the part I wanted her to see, because there’s a huge difference between examining our conditioning and using spiritual practice as one more way to beat ourselves up.
You can even develop a kind of spiritual ego around this. Now that you’re becoming more aware, you decide that you should have been more aware. You should have been stronger. You should have acted differently. You should have been some great warrior who rose magnificently in the moment and knew exactly what to do. But that’s an ego projection, a phantom. A this moment, we could look at that together and laugh at it. Then we could get back to the original reaction, because the original reaction had something in it. It had power. It had intelligence. It was responding to something real.
Go Into the Anger
Then she said something else. She was angry. Really angry. And she didn’t like being angry.
I said, okay. Close your eyes and go into it.
There’s nothing wrong with the anger. It’s uncomfortable? Fine. Where is it in your body? Don’t let your thoughts get involved in it. Don’t start explaining why you’re angry, what the man represents, what you should have said, what this means about the world or what you will do if it ever happens again. Feel the emotion itself. Where is it?
She said it felt like fire in her throat and chest. She could feel it going out into her limbs.
That’s pure power. Stay with it.
After a little while I asked her what was happening now. She said the anger was waking up her whole body. She felt invigorated. The emotion that a few minutes earlier she wanted to get rid of had changed when she stopped judging it and simply felt it. It wasn’t telling her what to believe. It wasn’t giving her an argument. It was energy moving through her body.
This is where intense emotion becomes very interesting on the path. Anger is anger. Maybe somebody did something to you. Maybe you encountered an injustice. Maybe you’re furious with yourself. Whatever started it, there is the emotion itself and then there is everything the mind does with it. The mind can keep an emotion going almost indefinitely. It builds the case. It imagines conversations. It remembers twenty other things that happened. It decides what kind of person you are and what kind of person the other person is. It goes backward and forward in time. Pretty soon the original anger is buried underneath a complicated construction.
But if you stay with the actual sensation, something else can happen. The energy becomes available. That’s why I told her not to judge her anger. She had been conditioned, as many women are, to be nice. Anger feels dangerous because it violates the person you’re supposed to be. Who am I to be angry? It’s not a nice way to feel. And what kind of spiritual person gets this pissed off? Forget all of that for a minute. Go into the anger and find out what is actually there.
This is tantra. You use the energy. You don’t have to act it out and you don’t have to suppress it. You don’t have to turn it into a philosophy. You let the intensity crack something open. These emotions can take us very deep when we stop trying to make them conform to our idea of who we’re supposed to be. The energy is already there. The question is what happens to it. When we sit with it, accept it, even make friends with it, then the power of that energy can cut through to something deep and real within us - the luminosity, intelligence, power and love of existence that lives in us as essence, as our awareness.
And Then Came the Third Arrow
A few minutes later she noticed something that made both of us laugh. Her mind had already started constructing what she would do next time. Next time somebody does this, I’m going to say this. Next time I’ll stand up. Next time I’ll know exactly what to do.
There it was. Yet another arrow.
It’s fascinating when you actually catch the mind doing this. Now you’re getting your fight up. You’re puffing out your chest and ruffling your feathers, preparing yourself with the arrogance of being offended for the future confrontation. Next time, buster. Next time I’m going to show you. Humans do this all the time. I’ve done it. I’ll imagine some future situation and think, well, if that happens, I’m going to do blah, blah, blah. Then I see the silliness of it and let it go. The future situation isn’t here. The person isn’t here. I don’t know what the circumstances will be. I’m rehearsing an imaginary life. It’s a tendency that we can see and not play out. But it takes practice.
So what happens if you don’t spend all that energy constructing the next encounter? What if you allow yourself to go all the way into the initial reaction instead? That energy becomes available to your awareness. And awareness is much more intelligent than the little rehearsed speech you’ve prepared in your head. The real question isn’t whether you can develop the perfect response ahead of time. The question is whether you can become open enough that, when life actually presents the next situation, awareness can come forward. That’s trust. Trust in yourself, trust in life, to take each situation as it comes knowing that you can rely on your awareness, your truth, your intent to live with love.
But in the beginning, you’re learning. So, maybe you will, or maybe you won’t. Twenty some odd years of conditioning doesn’t disappear because you had one good conversation with your meditation teacher. That’s why there will be many go-rounds. Situation by situation, you begin to see how you’re constructed. You begin to recognize the knee-jerk reactions, the stories, the fear, the self-judgment, the imaginary future battles. You don’t have to hate any of it. You start making friends with the architecture of your own ego. Then, very kindly and very patiently, you dismantle what keeps you trapped.
That’s the path. It’s situation by situation. It’s not doctrine by doctrine. It’s meditation by meditation, encounter by encounter, reaction by reaction. You bring awareness forward in meditation, and then you learn to bring it forward in the middle of your actual life. That’s mindfulness. And that’s what we were doing in our conversation. Something happened. She was shaken by it. Instead of simply trying to make the feeling go away, we talked and she said, essentially: What happened in me? What can I see here?
There was a great deal to see.
The Power Underneath the Story
One of the things I have seen in my own life is that very intense emotions can contain tremendous power. My emotions were incredibly intense for much of my life. Eventually I had to learn what to do with that. I had to learn how to stop turning all that power into stories about what is and isn’t, what should have happened, what somebody did to me, what I’m going to do next. When the story falls away, the power doesn’t disappear. The power is still there. It’s called Windhorse, and it is the essential life force of existence. We’re learning to harness it in our consciousness, in living with higher and higher awareness.
That’s part of what sunyata means to me. The thing, the challenges, problems, issues and reactions become no big deal. That doesn’t mean something wasn’t painful, frightening, maddening or wrong. It means I no longer have to build an identity around it. I don’t have to make a permanent world out of it. Especially since that’s a fully false premise anyway in a world where impermanence IS what is happening here. The situation happened. Here is my reaction. Here is the energy. Can I sit here and learn? Can I let it crack me open instead of close me down and take me off into story after story, emotion after emotion, narrative after narrative?
You find out that you can take a lot. I’ve been through shattering things in my life that showed me something about my own strength, resilience and ability to let experience open me without deciding whether it was good or bad. That’s part of becoming a fearless warrior. You begin to have some mastery over your internal life and how you approach things. How you frame things. And your internal life is where you meet everything. It’s how you react, how you respond, what you receive, what you bring, what you give. If you’re unconscious of all of that, there can be a wall between you and life. Life is constantly trying to show you something and it can’t get through to you because of the barriers of ego. The mind is already telling you what everything means. Or what you want to share can’t get through the barriers to the other side. Helping becomes bereft of authenticity and feeling - it’s just an act of giving without your love behind it.
In the first years on the path, you’re learning how to work with this. You don’t know how yet. You’re developing a new gauge for what is real and what is not real. You’re learning that you can create some spaciousness around an experience instead of immediately being carried away by it. That’s one reason a student may turn to me when something hits with unusual force. I’m not there to solve the problem or answer questions about shoulds and shouldn’ts. I can’t go backward in time and get on the bus. I’m there to help them discover that the energy, power, insight and awareness they need is already within them, and to help them see the mechanisms that keep them from accessing that.
Over time, something changes. You begin to trust yourself. You begin to trust awareness. You don’t know exactly what you’re going to do next time, and strangely enough, you don’t need to. I’ve had many moments in my own life when something came through that was much more intelligent than anything I could have planned. I’ve learned to trust myself and my instincts. I have enough awareness, strength and experience to bypass my thoughts and old conditioned reactions. That awareness knew what to do in some crazy situations where people could have died. They didn’t. That’s not special. I think that’s the intelligence of existence coming through when there’s enough room for it.
The difficult part is making room.
After we had talked for a while, I told her to stay with what had happened and then write about it. Sit first. Feel it. Let yourself go into the cutting emotions because they can cut right through to awareness if you don’t cover them over with the noise in your head. The stories and judgments. What comes through may not be an answer. If it’s real, it won’t be words. It may have nothing to do with what you expected to learn from the experience. But there can be a deeper alignment underneath it, and from that alignment comes wisdom, power and love. In increments, little by little.
There is something in us that cannot be touched by what happens on a bus, by another person’s conditioning, by pain, by our own anger, by fear, embarrassment, shame, or even by the things in life that are far worse than this. That doesn’t make the experience unreal. It doesn’t mean we don’t protect ourselves or each other. It means that underneath the topical situation there is something beautifully deep, pure and luminous. The essence of who we are. Part of the path is finding that for yourself, not as an idea you’re supposed to believe, but because you have gone directly through your own experience and discovered that it is there.
So yes, the man on the bus behaved badly. Yes, my student was shaken. Yes, she was angry. And she sat there and didn’t confront him.
She did exactly what she did. And it was perfect for that moment.
Now the experience is hers to look at. The anger is hers to feel. The conditioning is hers to discover. And underneath all of it is an enormous amount of energy that no longer has to belong to the man on the bus. It can come back to her.