From Boxer to Buddhist

     Teaching Shambhala Training was more demanding than I had imagined.  Thirty years as a university professor were simple by comparison.  At the university I was being asked to help students toward an intellectual understanding in a field of knowledge, so that they could, in turn, both understand and teach others.  Post-class discussions at the university often dealt with personal difficulties, but only to the extent that these difficulties interfered with learning about literature.  Perhaps, at best, I might have helped someone overcome lack of confidence in his or her understanding, or I might, simply from experience, offer tentative advice to a student who seemed to value or want my advice.  These were minor parts of the job all in all, and they were hardly burdensome.

     As a Shambhala teacher, my job has been far more complex.  First, I had to understand the teachings as I received them.  By understanding, I mean thoroughly integrate the teachings with my life - not just possess them in my intellect.  This alone has been a slow process, and is still far from complete.  Looking back on my Shambhala teaching,  I see clearly that, in the beginning, I had been working from an intellectual rather than from an intuitive understanding.  In a sense, to change my understanding meant to change myself.  To change myself, however, meant I had to be able to see the obstacles.  In theory, if I removed the patterns of my habitual mind, I would be able to connect with the basis of mind, called “dharmakaya” or “Ordinary Mind.”  Thus I had to accept the burden of practicing and working with my own personal hang-ups in order to clear my mind enough to embody the teachings.  The model, of course, for the embodiment of teachings was Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa himself, for he “was,” so to speak, the teachings that he gave us. 

Presenting the teachings in the various talks, from Friday night through Sunday, was also a learning process.  Whatever example I used had to move the students toward the right kind of understanding of what they were doing there.  In teaching literature, I had the use of critical models that helped with analysis.  These changed somewhat during my thirty year teaching career, but they all shared some kind of rational basis, historical, or psychological.  Only later in my career did criticism turn toward a more intuitive ground.  That meant the usual intellectual models I had used through much of my teaching career led sometimes in the wrong direction. 

     As a beginning teacher of Shambhala, I found myself in a painful dilemma.  There were no critical models that told me how to teach these new ideas.  I had to speak from my experience, using meditation to sift through my own preconceptions, mental models and feelings over and over until I could begin to get a handle on what was going on deep inside.  I found a useful image of a enlightened mind to be “Cloudless Sky.”  Following that same image, the clouds that block the cloudless sky are our habitual thoughts and feelings.   I had to admit, though, that so far I had only an appealing image, not direct knowledge.  I still lived in a somewhat cloudy world.

     After some years of re-experiencing my body and mind, learning to accept what I discovered without being too hard on myself, I could begin to re-integrate some of my intellectual history. Without embarrassment. I could make use of my knowledge in literature, philosophy, religion, and psychology and bring them into connection with the Shambhala teachings.  After all, poets, if anyone, are registers of the interactions of body, mind, and world.  I found, gradually, that numbers of poets and novelists explored the ground we were investigating in Shambhala practice and they could illuminate some points I was trying to get across.

      Indeed, in more recent times I have found that an entire alternate culture beyond literature, from anthro