November 15, 1937 – August 31, 2023

Paul Shippee, an original first-generation American student of Suzuki Roshi and of Vidyadhara Chögyam Trunpa Rinpoche, a highly innovative and creative early-sangha pioneer, an enduring and devoted Dharma practitioner and a friend and close dharma-cohort to so many of us, has died. May his adventuresome and ingenious spirit, his magnanimous vision and work, his passion for life, and his consummate perkiness continue to influence Dharma as it continues its grand entry to the West. Our condolences to his family, with great appreciation for his life.

Paul was cremated at the the Crestone Open Air Cremation Pyre on Sunday morning, September 3, 2023. A rainbow appeared in the early morning sky, the pyre was lit as the sun rose over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the coyotes howled.

Paul Shippee moved to Crestone in 1999 and built his passive solar heated, rammed earth/straw bail home. He loved his community and over the years built many strong bonds of love and friendship. His passions were the Buddha Dharma, Non-Violent Communication (NVC), and Solar Energy. He loved the sun — both the physical sun and the sun of wisdom. He deeply cared for this world and always wanted to help make things better. He yearned for humanity to become enlightened, for us to learn how to live sustainably on the planet, and he was always seeking to connect with others on a deeper and more meaningful level. He was an engineer by training, but tirelessly sought to educate himself beyond the straight lines and neat calculations of the physical world. The Crestone Solar School was one of Paul’s cherished projects, and some of his work can be viewed on the CSS website.

Paul was an early student of Suzuki Roshi’s, and spent two years at Tassajara Mountain Zen Center before meeting Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He moved to Colorado in 1970 and helped establish Rocky Mountain Dharma Center (now Drala Mountain Center), was a founding faculty member during the first year of Naropa University, and had a solar energy business in Boulder called Colorado Sunworks. In his later years, Paul developed a unique and special blend of Buddhism and Nonviolent Communication, which he shared in prisons and NVC study groups until the last weeks of his life, and which he promoted on this Paul Shippee website.

Paul passed peacefully at Kongtrul Rinpoche’s and his daughter Jennifer’s home in Crestone on Thursday evening after a brief illness. It was a full blue moon and Buddha Amitabha Day in the Tibetan Buddhist Calendar.

He greatly appreciated CEOLP (The Crestone End of Life Project) and Open Air Cremation and attended many of them in the past. He said everyone would be invited to his!

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by Paul Shippee

I feel grateful for NVC (Nonviolent Communication) training because it shows “how to” deal with our suffering and stuck places. It is a useful tool for dealing with depression and even more so with anger. And in our modern times it is a welcome and effective partner to meditation.

NVC is a path of healing from emotional pain by guiding us to work directly with our inner life, our heart and with our feelings and needs specifically. Marshall clarifies this nonviolent application of skillful means when he says, “NVC is built on the premise that anger is the result of life-alienated ways of evaluating what is happening to us.” In essence, he means that anger is never caused by others.

Further, he says that our self-alienated ways are “based on ways of thinking that imply wrongness or badness on the part of others for what they have done.” In this way, our blame is a dark cloud that distorts and captures our thinking, directs our energy outward and is responsible for the suffering of ourselves and others.

In other words, what someone has said or done is never the cause of our anger; it is only the stimulus or trigger. So, “we don’t want to mix up what people do – the trigger – with the cause of anger.”

When we are able to take in and practice this inner life revolution we can reliably touch peace and harmony that is natural to our being. Again, the cause of our anger is always our own thinking and our judgments. This is a fortunate situation because with proper training we can free ourselves from unnecessary pain by reflecting on and changing our thinking and judgments. In this way we can direct our energy inward instead of outward, and our anger can be transformed into the healing we need.

How to do this is simple but not easy. It means that we identify the unmet needs that are driving our judgment and anger. When we do that a shift happens in our body that may feel like the hot, painful and compressed quality of anger is now released into a more cool and open way of thinking. This is a healing shift of consciousness. Learning to identify our unmet needs, and the needs of others, is simply a new way of thinking and being that allows our natural compassion to arise.

The magic of NVC and the beauty of healing happens when we fully internalize and integrate a new NVC consciousness and way of living. It connects with our inner life and is more natural than our conditioned and habitual way of thinking – a kind of automated, unconsciousness reaction to pain by judging and blaming and making others wrong, thus blocking our pain and hurt by transferring it to others.

“Blame is a way of unloading our emotional pain onto others.”

-Brene Brown

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-Left and Right Hands of a Common Body—

by Paul Shippee

I have been studying, practicing, teaching and facilitating NVC live groups since 2006.

Why NVC?

I have been a serious practitioner of Buddhism for more than fifty years. During that time I began to notice that in Buddhist sanghas my needs for connection – warmth, affection, and honesty – were not often met or even recognized, but actually discouraged. These universal human needs are often dismissed, ignored and devalued as if people’s needs for warmth, friendliness and honesty are not supposed to be supported in Buddhist sanghas.

Over time I discovered that the reason was because feelings and universal human needs were being misunderstood as ego needs and selfish appeals for ego protection. In one of my Buddhist communities, cynicism and even insult were advocated as a way to discourage ego’s displays and attachments. To me, this seemed to feed right into the mainstream culture’s ethos of separation and threw the baby out with the bath water.

I believed that Buddhist communities would be the first place to honor and learn more about the inner life of the students. Some say that deep anxieties and self-esteem issues should properly be left to psychologists and psychotherapy Yet friendliness toward oneself and compassion toward others are widely noted as the basic building blocks of Buddhist teachings and a healthy, sane life.

A Missing Link

When I discovered Nonviolent Communication years ago, I experienced an immense relief that I had stumbled on an important missing link in our evolving American Buddhism as well as a critical developmental gap in my own existence. I came to Buddhism originally for help overcoming the alienation and anguish I felt in our American industrial culture, and despite my deep respect and affection for its practices, particularly meditation, I began to experience a deep longing to end the endemic separation, disconnection, secrecy and shame I often experienced in interpersonal relationships in the larger culture and within Buddhist sanghas.

The addition of Nonviolent Communication afforded me the antidote to these dilemmas and a skill-set to help others deepen both their experience of Buddhism and their daily lives. I found NVC to be good medicine for an emotion-phobic culture.

Love’s Skill – The Practice of Nonviolent Communication

What attracts me to NVC is its ability to teach how to connect, really connect with others; how to identify and overcome our shame and competitiveness, especially in difficult circumstances.  Nonviolence makes conflict safe, said Dorothy Day. The NVC teaching and practice of taking responsibility for your feelings says the same thing.

Psychologist and longtime Buddhist practitioner, the late John Welwood stated the issue in this way,

“All psychological problems are at root spiritual issues – symptoms of disconnection from our deeper nature. Conventional psychotherapy rarely addresses this disconnect from our being that is at the root of all emotional distress. Spiritual practices, on the other hand, often bypass, and thus fail to transform, the conditioned patterns and unconscious identities that arise from our personal history.”[1]

Shall the fruits of American Buddhism remain locked up in a cool cynicism and separation that often fosters a cold study of egolessness, or shall it teach, embody and embrace warmth, affection, honesty, friendliness and love as the true heart of enlightenment along with emotional and spiritual liberation? If, like me, you believe that there might be a better way, read on to learn more about Nonviolent Communication.

Compassionate Communication

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a well-researched, practical and effective method of Compassionate Communication developed within Western psychology and psychotherapy over the past fifty years by the late Marshall Rosenberg, PhD. Marshall developed the NVC method of communication through a lifetime of conflict resolution and mediation work in hot spots all around the world.

Buddhism, on the other hand, is a relatively ancient system of philosophical wisdom and meditation practice developed in India 2,600 years ago by a prince named Siddhartha who abandoned materialistic life in an earnest search for liberation from confusion and suffering. What he discovered is a way of wisdom based in the experience of meditation.

When I asked Marshall privately if he liked Buddhism he thanked me for asking and told me that half of what he teaches in NVC he learned from Buddhism. This conversation confirmed what I had already suspected, that Nonviolent Communication, like Buddhism, is inspired by spiritual aspiration, discipline and the arc of human development. In my experience they fit each other like hand and glove.

Wisdom Comes Home

Fortunately, in our lifetime, these two streams of wisdom and method have come together auspiciously in the West to offer knowledge and tools to those of us yearning for liberation from confusion, pain and distress. They also offer relief for those wishing to enjoy better interpersonal communication skills, and to those longing to experience and share natural warmth, happiness and love. Much of the basic knowledge, inspiration, skills and tools of NVC and Buddhism are similar. Buddhism calls these basic time-honored mental skills of mindfulness and awareness the iron hook that will pull you out of confusion, ignorance and suffering and lead you to liberation.

The work indicated here in both NVC and Buddhism is a common path of inner development often referred to as “waking up,” which generally means becoming aware of what’s going on in your body, speech, mind, and your conduct. It also means to expand your consciousness to include greater inner and outer mindfulness.

As a result, emotional awareness flowing from both NVC and Buddhism helps you understand yourself and get along with people better. As the 8th century Indian mahasiddha, Padmasambhava, famously said, “Although my view is as high as the sky, my conduct is as fine as flour.”

Emotional Awareness

What is emotional awareness, you might ask? It refers to an inner process of training our mindful attention toward identifying and expressing what we are feeling in our mind and body in the moment. We have forgotten how to do this. It is a simple human skill, but not easy to recover. Like many outer skills, this inner discipline requires learning and training. It’s not taught in our schools.

Awareness then provides the open space to discover the wisdom hidden within difficult situations, afflictive emotions and feeling energies. With meditation it is our natural wisdom and insight that investigates and discovers the underlying root of our suffering and touches on needs that are met or unmet. The lost art of emotional awareness, then, is a tool or lever to open up our hidden inner life of feelings and needs.

Mind and Body

Another aspect of waking up is discovering how to recover mind and body synchronization, as these experiences are often split in our Western culture. This psychological split is a serious and common social dis-ease that blocks compassion and often regards our feelings as separate and alienated, self-centered private property. As human beings we are evolved to discover and enjoy emotional, psychological, and spiritual development. These markers of wellbeing may be expressed as communication, connection, integration, and a vulnerable sharing of our wholeness -one’s body, speech, mind, and spirit- over the course of our lives. Many of us don’t know this or don’t believe it is possible.

Brain Wisdom

But in fact, our brain circuits enjoy neuroplasticity and are by nature open to change. Despite this well-researched fact, we are often afraid of change and shy away from the natural arc of lifespan development. We shut down at some point and opt for a narrow, ‘safe’ and repressed version of life. Fortunately, many of us also have a deep yearning to understand the meaning of our life, and thus have a longing to experience true being, beyond only the materialistic comforts of a “having, or getting more” mode of living.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, observed that, “A person isn’t some private entity traveling unaffected through time and space as if sealed off from the rest of the world by a thick shell.”

Giving From the Heart

This phrase reminds us to ask: “How open do we want to be?” How connected to others, to ourselves and to nature? Opening up and giving from the heart can be difficult and is not easily understood in our modern culture. And, change is not easy for any of us. Learning to trust our natural warmth and peaceful heart is a big challenge. We have deeply held unconscious patterns of limiting and primitive beliefs about how things should be. We have outdated emotion-based reactions of one-upmanship, withdrawal, attack, and competitiveness –patterns of defense that no longer serve life as mature adults.

Change

We may even think that change is not possible or that it is idealistic. For example, we might think it strange to understand and love ourselves. Asking “Do I love myself?” can feel embarrassing to many of us as it evokes a deeply buried shame response, a vulnerable feeling that we are strangers and disconnected within ourselves. But as shame researcher, Brene Brown, emphasizes: no vulnerability, no growth.

Alternatively, we may prefer to not change, to remain small and cling to a frozen identity, mistaking it for protection or an idea of perfection we no longer actually need. All such strategies resist change and allow our old patterns of defending, attacking and withdrawal to keep us isolated, separate and ‘safe’, in a false ego shell. It is a cocoon of protection that buries our demons, and shadows, beneath an attractive, distracting, and inauthentic surface.

Vertical and Horizontal

A simple way to clarify the differences between NVC and Buddhism is to use the metaphor of a cross. Ancient Buddhism is a deep vertical teaching about how the world works, how human ignorance and other ego-clinging operates within us. It teaches us how to release ego fixations, soften our hearts and open our minds. The teachings are an invitation to unearth the wisdom and compassion that is actually our deep nature. It is described as vertical because it plumbs the hidden depths, and reaches up toward the highest achievements of human development.

By contrast, Nonviolent Communication may be considered a discipline with a horizontal reach. It seeks to extend our warmth, empathy, compassion, responsiveness and love outward, including to other peoples in sane and skillful ways to produce harmony in our world, reduce suffering in self and others, and enjoy intelligent and nourishing interactions in our world. Whereas meditation is a solitary practice, NVC is a relationship-based training. We do this in relationship with others by awakening to our true feelings and universal human needs. This gentle discipline fosters fearless connections with oneself and with others.

What Do You Want to Do?

Does it make sense to combine the spacious depths of Buddhist practice with the deliberate warmth of NVC, extending inner emotional awareness outward? It depends. If you have the sense that something in your world is amiss, that there might be a better way to express yourself as a living being, then the opening is already there, as is the answer. You are ready to take the first step.

This involves identifying and expressing the transitory, subtle and juicy feelings presently cloaked in privacy or ignorance. Once identified, we can connect that dynamic energy with our basic and universal human needs which are not, if we look closely, selfish. They are adorned with the beauty and living energy of needs, the colors of survival, nurturing connections and skillful human interactions.

I invite you to join us as we explore these essential dimensions of human life in conversations and practice exercises that guide us in learning to see, appreciate and share what is truly most alive and most important in our lives.

*********************

1 Toward a Psychology of Awakening, by John Welwood, 2000. Shambhala

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1. The Wisdom of Imperfection by Brene Brown
2. Brene Brown’s first TED Talk – 23 million views and counting, about vulnerability and why we believe we are not worthy of love and belonging.
3. Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw
4. The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford
5. Undefended Love by Jett Psaris and Marlena Lyons
6. Nonviolent Communication, A Language of Life by Marshall Rosenberg

The post Resources appeared first on Paul Shippee.

To that end I am offering to our community Conflict Resolution and Mediation services pro bono. Using my skills as a trained and experienced teacher of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) workshops and classes over the past 14 years both in Crestone, around the country, in Europe and in the Colorado prison system, I feel a call to help my community bring light where there may be darkness, hurt, misguided anger and hostility.

My training in NVC with founder Marshall Rosenberg, PhD can effectively be put to use with couples and with groups in conflict. In addition to NVC, I have also received direct in-person training in Restorative Justice (RJ) Circles from Dominic Barter, an innovator in RJ trained by Dr. Rosenberg and practicing in the poor favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Beyond that, I am also willing to offer my experience in various Circling venues that may help raise awareness of community values and our potential for goodness, positivity, warmth and authentic connection.

Contact me through my website www.paulshippee.com if you’d like to start a conversation.

Sincerely,

Paul Shippee, MA Psychology

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Anger can be used to keep the world away and sometimes this can be helpful and sometimes it is harmful to oneself and others. Anger can often have a self-righteous quality to it where we fortify our defenses by feeling and proclaiming that we are right! This can be troublesome in interpersonal relations such as social, intimate and family interactions. Understanding how anger works can be liberating. It can make conflict safe by reducing violent behavior.

On the other hand, many people, especially women, have been conditioned so that they cannot express or feel any anger at all. In these cases people may not be able to tolerate anger in others, even in their own children.

I would like to speak here about expressed anger, rather than suppressed or repressed anger. First of all, it is important to realize that there is anger with hatred, and there is anger without hatred. How do we tell the difference? Well, it’s not easy for most of us. Often the first step is to hear about this distinction – someone points out to us the fact that anger can be hooked into hatred, or can be free from hatred. One kind of anger is rather hot and confused and dangerous, the other kind is somewhat cool and clear.

Upon hearing this for the first time you might not believe it or you might feel puzzled. You may not, at first, be able to see this in yourself, unaided, but it is relatively easy to observe in others. For example, some people respond to perceived slights with wounded rage while another person will just laugh it off. This observation alone shows that anger works differently in people. And there is a reason for that which is not generally understood.

The person with a rage response is still carrying an undetected, unresolved, and unhealed emotional wound received in childhood. The source of anger with hatred, whether it occurs in a parent, a politician, a criminal, or a lover is an unhealed inner emotional wound. In order to admit to carrying an inner wound, a difficult thing to do for many, one will be interested in and committed to engaging an inner life. Otherwise we are hopelessly stuck in projection, unaware of yourself and always blaming the other person as the source and cause of your anger. In this case, the confused thinking mind attributes the “cause” of anger to others – he did this, she did that to me – it’s their fault! Although this unfortunate blind cycle can continue, tragically, through one’s entire life it can also be seen through, changed and healed. The hard part is that sometimes other people re art fault and this clouds the issue of understanding and healing our own anger-with-hatred. The point here is that other people’s perceived faults are irrelevant to our own healing.

In contrast to anger with hatred, anger without hatred and without blame is not a problem. It is simply a clear and healthy expression of a violation of boundaries, like when someone steps on your toe. When invasion of one’s boundaries is inappropriate to dignity, privacy, etc., then anger brings focus, clarity, and energy to properly identify what’s going on. Simply naming what’s happening is helpful in acknowledging healthy boundaries.

Often situations of closeness or intimacy can activate an internalized wound and trigger a cloud of hatred to spring forth, attached to the anger. The reason why anger brings out hatred is that the original wounding was never recognized or grieved when it was happening. It was caused by repeated, neglect, deception, abuse or emotional distance in the family of origin that had failed to mirror loving-kindness and understanding during crucial developmental stages of childhood. The original hurt, frustration, anger and injustice was never acknowledged properly and we remain stuck there.

Canadian psychiatrist Gabor Mate, MD says,

“When you’re a child and your parents can’t handle your feelings, you learn to suppress them to maintain your relationship with your parents. But what was a coping response in the child becomes a source of illness in the adult.”

Since hurt is always at the bottom of anger with hatred then this acting out anger is also a mask. What is it hiding? It effectively covers up the deep hurt from childhood and renders that buried pain inaccessible. You can’t feel it. You don’t want to feel it. It is this buried and inaccessible hurt that feeds the sick, unhealed anger – the anger with hatred that continuously gives rise to blaming, shaming and complaining.

Hatred is the reeling of wanting to hurt, harm or kill someone. It’s about unconscious revenge for perceived injustice. The lack of awareness, the ignorance, of the connection between anger and mask is what gives rise to violence of al kinds. “The most violent element in society is ignorance,” said Emma Goldman. Always hidden beneath anger with hatred is old hurt. When we start to see this we can start to heal. In one of my Nonviolent Communication (NVC) practice groups a participant said, “Anger is a sideshow for hurt.”

For many people the early pain of rejection or emotional abuse is so great that this connection with buried anger cannot be made at all. Nor is there interest in making it known. Psychopathic serial killers and self-righteous religious fundamentalists are what I think of in this extreme territory. But the same basic pattern of rigidity is there in most of us. The wall is so solid. For most people the wall can be taken down, brick by brick. The anger, in this case, has served its role as a survival tool long ago and now it can usefully be relived and seen as a signal which is saying: Hey, I’m hurting, I need help, I don’t want to continue hurting myself and others, or being right…it feels terrible, like molten lead…and it’s so isolating! Once a person sees how dysfunctional and harmful they are with the hatred/anger/self-hatred loop then that glimpse can provide the ground for increasing self-reflection and self-insight. One can actually learn how to create connection with self and other instead of the old life-alienating habits of thinking, behavior and communication.

The way to work with destructive and harmful anger is to educate oneself about it. There are many resources for this in our society. The helping professions, self-help books, NVC, and the 12-step programs are some places where clues and insights may be found. Erich Neumann wrote a wonderful book about scapegoating and blame titled Depth Psychology and the New Ethic. The new ethic is simply to become willing to study oneself, see oneself, “know thyself,” heal thyself physician! This program of self-reflection requires, for example, giving up blaming, shaming and complaining. It’s not an easy path and calls upon strong motivation. As Anais Nin, wrote, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

The first step is to surrender, to realize that you are powerless over your disease and your pain. Recognizing that you have a dis/ease, and that it’s not your fault, is the first step. How to work with anger is to recognize its source in ourselves and to own it, to take responsibility for it. Without this first humble step of surrender and of ownership nothing can happen. It’s not your fault, but you own it. This is often the hardest part to grasp; a difficult middle ground where things are neither black nor white. We surrender black and white toxic thinking and open to the truth of body feelings.

The next step is to see and feel how a pool of hurt underlies your, or somebody else’s, misdirected anger. But this inner seeing must be accompanied by an outer seeing as well. The outer signal to look for is blame, which is a most significant obstacle to healing. You are always blaming others. Blame is the extreme toxic self-poison. It’s cousin, resentment, is the final killer that keeps you down, ignorant and blocked from a dawning inner life of relative freedom. Scapegoating is an age-old tool of ignorance; like blame it is outer directed, a powerful distraction to healing. But inner awareness is our birthright. It is the joy of healing. It opens the door to genuine compassion, self-insight and self-worth, intimacy, confidence, love and a living feeling sense of connection and appropriate boundaries. It is the seed of wisdom.

To summarize, anger with hatred comes from an unhealed wound. It comes from legitimate unacknowledged pain, shame, hurt and emotional abuse and neglect that continually blocked our healthy emotional development as a child. We are still stuck back there somehow. Healing with emotional awareness is about recovering from this. It is not about blaming parents or siblings. It is about seeing and owning the tragedy of the hurt you have inherited, the needs and care and understanding you missed. It is about working directly with and through the grief of all that now in the present moment. Some call it re-parenting or waking up. Grief is the doorway to awareness, to grace, to surrender, to an awareness of deep emotions that is necessary to fulfill our human capacity. Robert Bly said, in A Little Book on the Human Shadow, “The person who has eaten his shadow spreads calmness, and shows more grief than anger.”

REFERENCES:

 1. The Wisdom of Imperfection -a short book by Brene Brown.

2. Brene Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability, shame and empathy:

https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?language=en

…23 million views and counting, this contains an important message.

3. Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw.

4. The Surprising Purpose of Anger in Living Nonviolent Communication -Practical Tools to Connect and Communicate Skillfully in Every Situationby Marshall Rosenberg.

 5. Nonviolent Communication –A Language of Life by Marshall Rosenberg.

6. The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford.

7. Undefended Love by Jett Psaris and Marlene

The post How Anger Works appeared first on Paul Shippee.

In the recent book by Pema Chodron titled Living Beautifully…with uncertainty and change (Shambhala 2012) Chapter Nine is called “Nowhere To Hide.”

We are studying this book in my ongoing NVC (nonviolent communication) group in Crestone, Colorado because it brings a Buddhist perspective to the subject of living transparently. It is also is one of the first and finest examples of a Western Buddhist teacher able to speak clearly and knowingly about experiencing feelings and needs, which forms the backbone of NVC practice and study.

In this chapter, Pema speaks of the need, when we wish to live a full and present life, to come out of hiding behind our dark emotional reactivity behaviors such as blame, judgment, criticism, withdrawal, attack, aggression and other defense mechanisms that cloud our basic nature of compassion.

The following Chapter Ten is titled “Charnel Ground” where the subject of hiding ourselves behind various false personas is stripped bare to reveal who we really are without shame, restraint or bravado…to embrace what is.

A charnel ground is a scary place in some Asian countries where the dead are brought to decay and be eaten by various animals. In some yogic meditation traditions yogis aspiring to freedom and enlightenment spend time there to deepen and transform their meditation practice. In this way, hidden beliefs are uncovered.

We hold many beliefs that we are not aware of, that are hiding yet dictating our behavior, our speech, thoughts, judgments, etc.

So, since NVC is a tool for developing transparency via mindfulness and awareness, it should be a juicy journey for all spiritual seekers to spend time looking into the tapestry of our fragile identity woven by the clandestine interaction of beliefs and hiding.

What need is met by hiding? I am beginning to ask myself this as I begin to see myself better. And the beat goes on.

The CHARNEL GROUND ENERGY is to see what’s there, whether we like it or not. And to accept what’s there, and also to see into the wide river of attachment that flows deep in the psyche of all, the attachment that binds us to a false and limiting identity, that limits our options and freedom, and that steals much of the joy and fun that is there when we completely relax into our pure essence.
–Paul Shippee
More: http://cnvc.org/

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When we feel insecure and unsafe, we keep our essence shrouded in an attempt to protect ourselves.

What to do?

Since we hold back our presence we lack confidence that it matters; our impact is diluted because we place a censor between our inner self and the outer world, inhibiting our behavior. Not only does this censor constrict our actions, it also prevents us from fully discovering who we are, and it prevents us from deeply experiencing those around us.

We then live in a world of uncertainty where we strive to control events, fearing we’ll be taken advantage of by others or expose ourselves to ridicule by revealing our inadequacies.

Training in Nonviolent Communication helps us become aware of our feelings and needs. When we connect with our needs a few things happen. Clarity and recognition resonates through our being, we become grounded in ourselves, and we become clear about our boundaries. Rooted in this recognition we grow a deep inner connection, stability, and calm.

Our drive to control events diminishes as we begin to trust ourselves to handle situations without rehearsal. We experience ourselves, rather than external reference points, as the true source of our own well-being and find the confidence and courage to be vulnerable. Not only do we have a deeper, wider experience of our being when we are vulnerable, we experience others more directly too. We may discover that we are of one essence, the perception of the “other” as different dissolves, and we enter a generous and empathic rapport. We might see that we are participants in a larger life force, and we can’t help but want to contribute. — David Steele (edited by Paul Shippee)

Visit the RMCCC new site:   http://rmccn.org

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This is a conversation between a well-loved Tibetan meditation master (HH Khyentse, R.), who passed away ten+ years ago, and a student. You might find yourself in it like I did!

“How does one extend compassion to aggression in the environment?”

“Begin with the person nearest you.”

“How does one do that?”

“First, you do not respond with aggression even if you feel hurt and that the other person is at fault. That is simply adding fuel to a fire that is already very hot and painful. And beyond that, you express gratitude to the person who harmed you.”

“Why gratitude? I don’t understand that.”

“You are grateful to them for being your teacher, for showing you where you are still reactive and defensive. You are thankful to them for showing you the work you still need to do in order to become liberated.”

Note: This conversation is taken from a 2012 book by Frank Berliner titled: Falling In Love With A Buddha.

Here is a Commentary I wrote for those of us who wish to learn more about the density of our reactivity & defensiveness:

To me, this conversation is profound and wickedly on target. Who talks about this in the West? Nobody! To express gratitude to someone who has harmed you and has triggered your “reactivity and defensiveness” is so far ahead of our human evolutionary trajectory as to seem unreal, as if from another planet, or maybe seriously misguided. However, to me it clearly shows the next step for my own development, my own trajectory.

For example, my brother says to me, “You want people to come to you, you don’t want to go to them,” implying clearly a judgment that I am selfish and that something is wrong with me. I was stunned so I asked him how he knows this? His reply is that it is only “conjecture,” whatever that means. But truth be told I felt hurt but it did not immediately occur to me to feel or express gratitude to him. But my Nonviolent Communication (NVC) training did prompt me to ask myself later, “What’s going on with him that he would say that to me?” And I thought he was probably feeling some pain and wanted me to come up to Denver to visit him. NVC teaches that it is not necessary to get the answer right to this query. What’s important is the shift in direction and emphasis from my hurt, my pain, my reaction, my defense, my blame,  over to shine the light of consciousness onto his feelings and needs. It is to become curious about his pain. In NVC we call this empathy.

It is a shift in me from dwelling on myself over to extending true compassion to another. And this in no way implies that I “should not” feel the hurt emotion. I can and “should” certainly honestly acknowledge what I am feeling. Yes, I am still “reactive” inside my bones, heart, cells, heart, tissues, etc. But I think what Khyentse R. is talking about is is to become mindful of my hurt, yes, but to not let this internal reaction leak out into a behavioral expression, a big reaction or defensive maneuver of speech aimed at winning. This is not a battle, but rather it is to contain my blood even if heated, and remember to also switch over to concern for the other person. Being peace is achieved in each moment by giving up struggle.

Now, is this “spirituality?” Well, if transforming the pain of perceived hurt and harm away from reaction and defense into compassion is not an earthy spirituality, then I don’t know what is. It is like Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche says, “Feel your emotions directly and selflessly and let their power open you up.”

That’s what it means. Yes, feel your emotions and allow their power to open you up to the other person or the situation, open you up to seeing the bigger picture than just your own hurt, sadness, anger, whatever. This does not mean to diminish or judge or shame your negative or difficult feelings. But it does mean to not get stuck there. It means to use the event or occasion as an opportunity to transform your reaction and defense into compassion, becoming curious and seeing into the feelings and needs of the other.

Your reactive nature, such as it is, is now viewed as a launching pad for an earthy spirituality, for it takes a spirit element to uplift you out of self-centered, dense reactions. This spirit is needed to transform confusion into wisdom, and it feels like a blessing. It is the higher human nature, so to speak; it is a distilled essence we call “spirit” that is necessary to accomplish this movement from dense to light, from neurosis to enlightenment. That is, it feels light as opposed to heavy. And it all started with a difficult emotion (never call it negative) handled in such a way as to facilitate transformation. Wow!

This is a wonderful opportunity to access both the wound, the hidden pain that produces the reactive and defensive behavior we are carrying somewhere deep in our bones and cells, as well as the blessing that can open our heart to others, to compassion. When we can access both the wound and the blessing, that is where we can find liberation.

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