By Rona
Lately in my practice, I’ve been feeling a deep pain—sorrow, anger, the heaviness of division in our world. It stirred despair in me, and even my own anger. I know I need to work with these feelings, to take care of them, because they’re not the energies I want to send into the world. There’s already enough of that.
Two things have been especially nurturing to me:
- The Shambhala Warrior prophecy
- The Buddhist teaching that we all have Buddha nature—the capacity to awaken
I encourage you to look up the Shambhala Warrior story told by Joanna Macy. She was an environmental activist and a Buddhist scholar who recently passed. The prophecy is a 1200-year-old Tibetan legend shared with her.
It speaks of a time when great forces come together, tearing the Earth apart. In that time, the Shambhala Warriors arise. You can’t recognize them by uniforms or banners or land. They live in our hearts and minds. They train to dismantle forces that are not extraterrestrial—they’re human-made: behaviors, patterns, things created by the human mind. And because they’re made by the human mind, they can be unmade by the human mind.
These warriors train with two “weapons”— I prefer to call them tools:
- Compassion: It opens our hearts to the pains of the world. If you’ve lived with pain—and I believe we all have—you may have touched that compassion. In my own life, during a moment of deep tragedy, I felt my heart crack open even as I was hurting. Love and empathy rose right in the middle of that pain. Compassion feeds our motivation, moving us to act on behalf of all beings.
- Insight: The insight of interbeing (dependent co-arising). We are all interconnected—with each other, with trees, animals, the sky—everything is interwoven, like a web.
With compassion and insight, we can work to transform anger, fear, despair, and disconnection—both in ourselves and in the world. This has helped me with the difficult feelings I’ve been facing. It’s why I sit. I’m so thankful for the Hakone Zendo Sangha, for this community waters these beneficial seeds in me. This is the energy I want to put into the world: to reduce suffering and offer well-being.
I’m grateful to be here, to meditate together. When I look around this room, I see Shambhala Warriors—each of us practicing, each of us touching our own Buddha nature.
Hakone Zendo 