America and Me/Shambhala and Me (Part of the Portland Shambhala Diversity Working Group Series)

The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything. We can never say that we are simply falling to pieces or that anyone else is, and we can never say that about the world either. Within our lifetime there will be great problems in the world, but let us make sure that within our lifetime no disasters happen. We can prevent them. It is up to us. We can save the world from destruction, to begin with. That is why Shambhala vision exists. It is a centuries-old idea: by serving this world, we can save it. But saving the world is not enough. We have to work to build an enlightened human society as well.  – Chogyam Trungpa

It was Sunday, May 8th 2016, a partly sunny day with a mildly chilly breeze, when Michaela McCormick, a member of the mandala-wide Diversity Working Group, and I met for coffee at a Starbucks in Portland, OR.  She recently got her proposal for starting a Diversity Working Group at the Shambhala Meditation Center of Portland approved by our council. A couple weeks ago, she asked me if I would be interested. I read the proposal and said yes. We had a great conversation and talked about next steps. I suggested we write our stories of our experiences with racism, discrimination, stigma, and how we got to The Kingdom of Shambhala. We could then post them on our center’s blog. This is my story of America and Me/Shambhala and Me.

I was born on September 15, 1974. My dad is white, college educated, a veteran, and worked at the VA for 29 years. During the Vietnam war, he was stationed in Japan. This was where he met my mother. My mother grew up in post World War II Japan. She had a high school education and was poor. They married and moved to America. My dad’s brother said, “So you married a f***** Jap”. This was how my father’s family welcomed my mother to America. Back then, inter-racial marriages and interracial children were not as common as they are now.

My dad wanted to raise me in a mixed neighborhood in Los Angeles. Instead, we moved into an area that was changing. The white people were moving out and it wasSCAN0003 becoming a predominately Mexican part of town. At home, I either ate fried chicken and mashed potatoes or sashimi and white rice. When I went over to a friend’s house, I might eat menudo and corn tortillas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the fourth grade my mental health challenges started. The stressor was that my parents were going to get a divorce. Mental illness ran on both sides of my family, so I might have been genetically predisposed. This first, but not last, stressor led to me acting out in school. SCAN0005I was assessed by the school psychologist. It was recommended that I be put on medication, but my parents did not want that. Instead of getting me non-pharmacological treatment, my parents sent me to a school in a different part of town. This different part of town was Brentwood. The public school there was much different. I soon learned about socio-economic class in America.

 

 

The second major stressor happened on the school bus in the 6th grade. I won’t go into the details. Some things belong and will remain in my therapist’s office. All I will say is the trauma was physical abuse.

When I got to junior high school, I showed signs of depression. I sat in a corner. One day a girl came up and asked me if I was OK. I said yes. She then said, “Are you sure.” I said yes again. I was too young to know what was going on. I also did not know I was going to be a target for the bullies. I went to a school where some students were bussed in from other parts of Los Angeles. Some were in gangs. I remember the students’ self-imposed segregation on campus. Being half white/ half Japanese, I really didn’t know where I fit in.

My parents were closer to divorce and were not really involved in my life. The bullies started their ruthless verbal and sometimes physical abuse with no adults to stop them. They called me Fat Jap or Lard. Sometimes they choked me or threatened to kick my ass. If I did my homework, they tore it up. My hygiene deteriorated. I was doing poorly in school. I was assessed again. The school psychologist asked me to draw a picture and I drew one of Freddy Kruger from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. She interpreted it as my dad sexually abusing me. This was not the case, but nobody would believe a disturbed teenager. Social Services got involved. There was neglect at home, but no sexual abuse. My parents got divorced and I went with my father. We moved out of the county. My mother married a younger man who was an alcoholic. I dropped out of school. I dropped out of society. I was angry. I hated mental health and social workers. I would go into a long period of social isolation.

The loneliness was great. My dad had a long commute and wasn’t around. SCAN0004One day, I decided to hang out with the bullies again. They were better than the isolation. The bullies were now going in and out of juvenile hall. They were violent and getting into drugs and alcohol. Some came from traumatic backgrounds. Others were in gangs. They were being expelled from school. They were outcasts. I felt like an outcast and felt I belonged with them. I started drinking at age 16 and got into drugs at age 17. I got a tattoo of “Lard” on my arm. Any identity was better than none (this was “me” proclaiming that “I exist”).

 

 

 

 

 

Things reached a climax when I found myself a witness in a murder trial. The bullies I grew up with wanted me killed because I was a snitch. I was now an outcast of the outcasts.This was when I desceSCAN0006nded into the dark world of mental illness and addiction. The despair was great. I did not know what was going on anymore. I was confused and lost. I wandered around aimlessly. My life was pointless. Ignorance became dominant. Wisdom and compassion were hidden. This was 1994.

 

 

 

 

 

Between 1995 and 2009, I was in and out of psych hospitals and rehabs in Los Angeles. People living with mental illness and  addiction could end up in the healthcare system, the legal system, or both. SCAN0007I was lucky, because I ended up in the healthcare system. I didn’t go to prison. In California, the inmates self-segregated in the prisons. There were race riots. Where would I fit in?

 

 

 

 

 

 

2009 was my last year in Los Angeles. I was in a 28 day crisis house and I had a copy of a book by Pema Chodron. It was When Things Fall Apart. The first chapter is called “Intimacy with Fear.” I have lived with extreme fear for so many years. I tried to get rid of it with alcohol, drugs, and psychiatric medications. Nothing completely or permanently got rid of it. Numbing didn’t work. Stuffing didn’t either. I had a great talent for turning a minor fear into a catastrophe with my imagination. I never thought about becoming intimate with fear and my other emotions.

I decided to talk about it with the therapist. I remember in his office there was a picture of two children dressed like buddhist monks. I told him what I read and he seemed to understand what I was talking about. I told him I was interested in mindfulness and meditation. He let me borrow a book by Jon Kabat Zinn. At that time, I did not know I would one day find myself involved with a global meditation community that was connected with Pema Chodron.

In October 2009, I left LA and moved to Vancouver, WA. I did not go outside alone for 20 months. If I did, I stayed in my parent’s car and sometimes I would listen to Pema Chodron audio recordings while I waited. (When I was around 20 years old they got re-married and have been my primary support outside the public mental health system.) They still didn’t understand my mental health challenges. I was in a physical cocoon. I was afraid of everyone and everything. I would spend my time online looking at dharma centers in Portland, OR. I would see Pema’s picture on Shambhala websites so I felt an initial connection. As I read through their website, I came across Shambhala’s diversity policy. All these years I felt like an outcast. The only thing I really wanted was to belong to a group or community. Shambhala looked like a place I might fit in. Around 2010, I was riding home in my parent’s car. I asked them to drive by the center. As we drove by the center, I felt a powerful force that was telling me to find a way to connect with Shambhala.

June 25, 2011, was the day I finally contacted Portland Shambhala. I was in great distress. My life was going nowhere. I felt trapped and hopeless. That day would be the beginning of my way out of my physical cocoon. I sent an email to the center and said I wanted to get involved, but I had panic attacks and phobias. In a couple days, I got a reply. The office manager asked me if I wanted to talk to a meditation instructor (MI). I did not know what that was, but talking to another human being sounded good. I said “yes.” My message was forwarded to the MI coordinator and soon I was told someone would meet with me, but I had to contact him first. I did. It turned out he had a daughter with similar mental health challenges. We met in July 2011.

My first 10 months in Shambhala were awkward for me. I did not have a college degree (I dropped out of junior high). I was below the poverty line (I’m on SSI). I was half white/half Japanese. I didn’t have a job or career. I lived with my parents. I had been homeless and stuck in the public mental health system in Los Angeles for many years. I wasn’t sure where I fit in. When I was taking Meditation in Everyday Life (MIEL) in December 2011, my mother found this picture of me. It was taken before I started the 5th grade. When I saw the photo,SCAN0003 I thought it was like Buddha was saying to me don’t forget your true nature. Over the next couple of decades after that picture was taken, my true nature would be covered over by layer after layer of confusion and bewilderment. I was connecting with Shambhala, but I was about to go through another layer and didn’t know it. I hadn’t been on my psychiatric medication for over 30 months and my thinking was becoming more and more distorted. I thought things were happening that were not. I was becoming paranoid and thought people were afraid of me. I disappeared for a couple months. I had a psychotic break. I thought people wanted to file a restraining order against me because they thought I was dangerous, because I was different from them. I was able to get back on medication, and after a period of reality checks, I was able to realize it was not true.

 

I now have friends at Portland Shambhala. When I walk into the center, people know my name. People actually care about me. I was in the psychiatric hospital back in October 2014 and my MI visited me. She brought a copy of Turning the Mind into an Ally for me to read. How ironic. If there was any place in the world I would want to turn my mind into an ally, it would be in a psychiatric hospital. At Portland Shambhala, I feel I belong. I am no longer the angry outcast. Whatever that force was that was calling me to connect with Shambhala, it had the wisdom to know what I needed.   20160630_181503

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am not the first one with mental health challenges to seek support from Shambhala. There are others. There were also people before Shambhala Meditation Centers were established. In The Sanity We Are Born With, Chogyam Trungpa talks about it:

Sometimes it is very hard to communicate to Westerners the importance of the experiential dimension. After we had started Samye Ling, our meditation center in Scotland, soon after I came from India to England, we found that a great many people with psychological problems came to us for help. They had been in all sorts of different therapies, and many of them were quite neurotic. They looked on us as physicians carrying out medical practice and wanted us to cure them. In working with these people I found that there was a frequent obstacle. Such people often wanted to take a purely theoretical approach, rather than actually experiencing and working with their neuroses. They wanted to understand their neuroses intellectually: where they themselves went wrong, how their neuroses developed, and so on. They often were not willing to let go of that approach.

Basic Goodness 1(BG1) is entitled “Who Am I?” In a worldly way, I was always asking this question: Who am I? It felt like people were asking me a different question: “What are you?” In The Shambhala Principle, Sakyong Mipham writes about his father Chogyam Trungpa: “He told me that people would not ask ‘Who are you?’ but ‘What are you?’ He would reply, ‘I am a human being.’” I could really relate to that. If you remove all the labels I have been given over my four decades of life: Fat Jap, Lard, Mentally Ill Monster, Wino, Crackhead, Homeless Bum, etc., I would be a human being.  I seem to want an identity I can cling to (This is “me”. I am real. I exist.). I Am This. But who is this “I” that is this? What is there if this “I” is removed? Will I just be what is? Will there be basic sanity or basic anxiety? I don’t know the answer to these open-ended existential questions. I do know in this world that if I look a certain way I could get hurt or killed. I could be treated badly or less than a human being.

It might be helpful to ask a similar, but different, question: What do I think our true nature is? What can I find out from the books on my bookshelf? Would racism and hatred be a permanent part of our true nature? I want to start with three things that seem different but are really the same: Basic Goodness, Buddha Nature, and Bodhichitta. These are described as our inherent nature. I have heard that it is similar to how oil is inherent in sesame seeds. However, it can be covered over. Are racism and hatred part of the ignorance that covers our true nature? Do both the victims of racism and the racist have basic goodness? I ask so many questions. Here are some answers from my books.

Pema Chodron, in Comfortable with Uncertainty, describes the way it is covered this way:

Based on a deep fear of being hurt, we erect protective walls made out of strategies, opinions, prejudices, and emotions.”  She then continues to describe how our true nature is inherent: “Yet just as a jewel that has been buried in the earth for a million years is not discolored or harmed, in the same way this noble heart is not affected by all of the ways we try to protect ourselves from it. The jewel can be brought out into the light at any time, and it will glow as brilliantly as if nothing had ever happened.

She describes Basic Goodness as natural intelligence, natural warmth, and natural openness in her book, Taking the Leap, on page 5. So, is our true nature wisdom, love, gentleness, compassion, and empty of concepts?

In Sacred World, Jeremy and Karen Hayward explain it this way:

Since we are all part of the sacred world, we also possess basic goodness, hidden deepwithin our conditioned, rigid, narrow ways of believing and acting — like a jewel hidden in a heap of garbage…” Later in the chapter, they write: “…the dross, the tendency to dualistic thinking in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘me’ and ‘you,’ that covers our buddha nature.

Finally, they give us hope that the covering is not permanent: “…however, the dross, the garbage, is like manure, which can be transformed into food for a beautiful flower bed, rather than something that forever keeps us from our basic goodness.”

This would be very interesting if we only talked about individual liberation. In Shambhala, we also talk about social liberation. In his Treatise on Enlightened Society, the Sakyong describes enlightened society as a flower covered by dust. The flower is inherently beautiful and natural. The dust and it’s ugliness is temporary. Just like the confusion and bewilderment (e.g., mental illness and addiction) covered my true nature, the true beauty of society can be covered by racism, sexism, ageism, violence, riots, terrorism, wars, genocide, socio-economic inequality, privatized prisons, and fear. I don’t know what my true nature or the true beauty of society would actually look like yet, but maybe one day I will experience it.  

What would an enlightened society look like? How would we create it? Chogyam Trungpa described it, in Shambhala: the Sacred Path of the Warrior, this way:  “the stories say that all of the people of Shambhala began to practice meditation and to follow the Buddhist path of loving kindness and concern for all beings.” Would taming our minds help us see clearly enough so we won’t hate someone because they are  different? Could it be possible this “I” (this identity we cling to so tightly) does not exist? In Turning the Mind into an Ally (TMA), the Sakyong let’s us know:

Our root fantasy is that “I” am real and that there’s a way to make “me” happy. The reason we meditate is to let that fantasy unravel. After a while, we notice that much of what we took to be real and permanent about ourselves isn’t so solid — it’s a string of thoughts we hold together with tremendous effort. We’ve built an identity out of a thin web of concepts.

Could it be possible that once I believe I am real, I start to believe I am also separate from everything? When “I” exist, “you” exist. This “you” might be different than “me” and “my group”. They might look different, eat different kinds of foods, be from a different religion or no religion, and have different worldviews. At what point does this separation turn into bigotry and hatred? How could it turn into something as horrific as genocide?

The Sakyong describes in Chapter One of TMA how difficult it is to plant a flower on a rock:

There is an old saying that bringing Buddhism to a new culture is like bringing a flower and a rock together. The flower represents the potential for compassion and wisdom, clarity and joy to blossom in our life. The rock represents the solidity of a bewildered mind. If we want the flower to take root and grow, we have to work to create the right conditions.

He continues to describe the process this way:

The problem for most of us is that we’re trying to grow a flower on a rock. The garden hasn’t been tilled properly. We haven’t trained our minds. It doesn’t work to just throw some seeds on top of the hard ground and then hope for the flowers to grow. We have to prepare the ground, which requires effort. First we have to move the rocks and hoe the weeds. Then we have to soften up the earth and create nice topsoil. This is what we’re doing by learning to peacefully abide in sitting meditation: creating the space for our garden to grow. Then we can cultivate qualities that will allow us to live our lives in full bloom.

Before he talks about enlightened society, he gives us a description of what unenlightened society looks like:

A society of hard and inflexible minds is a society that is incapable of nurturing the flowers of love and compassion. This is the source of the dark age. We tend to question our goodness and our wisdom. When we question these things, we begin to use seemingly more convenient ways to deal with our problems. We are less ready to use love and compassion, more ready to use aggression.

He concludes the chapter by letting us know how we can create enlightened society:

The teachings are always available, like a radio signal in the air. But a student needs to learn how to tune in to that signal, and how to stay tuned in. We can begin the process of personal development now by including short periods of meditation as part of our everyday lives. Tilling the ground of our own minds through meditation is how we begin to create a community garden. In doing so we are helping to create a new culture, a culture that can thrive in the modern world and can at the same time support our human journey in an uplifted and joyous way. Such a culture is called enlightened society. Enlightened society is where the flower and the rock will meet.

The Portland Shambhala Diversity Working Group met for the first time on Thursday, May 26, 2016. The meeting started with a short period of meditation. We shared our experiences at our center. One of us experienced racism. I had a difficult time fitting in when I first came to the center. If we don’t till the ground of our minds through meditation, how could we ever create a community garden? One of the things Michaela suggested was we should take a look at our own prejudices and contemplate what they mean. What insights would we receive?  Maybe one of our layers of confusion and bewilderment is fear of “others” who are different from this “me”. Or maybe it is a form of hatred. Either way, we seem to see a “me” and a “them”. Maybe I don’t like the “other” or I desire “them”. Will Shambhalians around the world be willing to honestly look at their fears, prejudices, and hatred? As we become familiar with our minds, will we acknowledge those parts or will ignorance dominate and we continue to live in the dark age? The other option is we shine the bright light of awareness on these layers that cover our basic goodness. As awareness shines, perhaps we can see how we harm others. With this new insight, we could choose to love instead of hate. We could choose to understand instead of judging. We could choose to Welcome Everyone into The Kingdom of Shambhala instead of hiding in our cocoons. Level II is called “Birth of the Warrior.” Level III is called “Warrior in the World.” By growing out of our cocoons, we can become Warriors in the World.

I started this blog with a quote from Chogyam Trungpa and want to end with another one from him:

Such awakened heart comes from being willing to face your state of mind. That may seem like a great demand, but it is necessary. You should examine yourself and ask how many times you have tried to connect with your heart, fully and truly. How often have you turned away, because you feared you might discover something terrible about yourself? How often have you been willing to look at your face in the mirror, without being embarrassed? How many times have you tried to shield yourself by reading the newspaper, watching television, or just spacing out? That is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: how much have you connected with yourself at all in your whole life?

The sitting practice of meditation, as we discussed in the last chapter, is the means torediscover basic goodness, and beyond that, it is the means to awaken this genuine heart within yourself.

 

 

 

 

2 thoughts on “America and Me/Shambhala and Me (Part of the Portland Shambhala Diversity Working Group Series)

  1. This is the most compelling part of your essay: I seem to want an identity I can cling to (This is “me”. I am real. I exist.). I Am This. But who is this “I” that is this? What is there if this “I” is removed? Will I just be what is? Will there be basic sanity or basic anxiety? I don’t know the answer to these open-ended existential questions.
    I believe it is a sign of wisdom that you can both recognize your desire for some concrete notion of self defined by identity and that you acknowledge that you don’t know who or what that is. We are born into some identifications and society creates extensions of these. Initially we have little choice in the matter and later we “develop” an identity. Then we discover through various experience how artificial, meaningless and cruel these constructions can be. Then we must struggle to create alternative and authentic paradigms. Buddhism helps by exposing the delusional and temporary aspect of these creations. It takes a long time and a lot of work and courage to finally recognize the distortions and the truths of our nature. It has little or nothing to do with identity.

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