The ultimate definition of bravery is not being afraid of who you are. ~ Chögyam Trungpa
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation, we will be sitting from 7:30 to 10:00 PM EST. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you.
Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers of all stripes who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
This last week I spent with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in a figurative sense of course. Reading Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa by Diana Mukpo was an experience I won't soon forget. I'm sensitive in ways of which I am not necessarily proud, and reading about Trungpa's later years resulted in a considerable amount of discomfort.
Once I finished the book, I watched YouTube videos, read the comments, and I also wound up reading Amazon reviews of his books. They are interesting in their degree of polarization, with some people adoring him and others hating him, often for things that are not completely factual. I read that he said, "The role of the teacher is to insult you." I do understand that, however I also laugh that he did an such an extremely good job at it there are a lot of people still insulted all these years later.
Because we are human, and because it is natural to think our judgments mean something, people will continue to either adore or abhor Trungpa for years to come. For myself, I prefer to take a kind of middle path. All these years after his death and from this distance I am in no position to come to any conclusions regarding who or what Trungpa was. Even his wife, Diana Mukpo said that after years of marriage she used to watch him sleep and wonder, "Who are you?"
It seems to me his entire life was a teaching and to judge him for his faults misses the point of the greater teaching: We really can't separate the good from the bad, the sacred from the profane, the craziness from the sanity. The best we can ever hope for is to learn to embrace paradox, and to recognize the bad, the profane, the craziness, and all that seems negative when it arises within us, to treat it with gentleness and kindness, and to try to keep it out of the driver's seat in our lives.
In the course of all my Chogyam Trungpa websurfing throughout this week, I ran across this wonderful account in which one person relates his first experience with Trungpa. It is a little long, but near the end I laughed out loud so long and hard that buckets of tears ran down my cheeks. I hope you will find time to read it, and that you will appreciate it as I did.
Finally I leave you with one of my favorite Trungpa quote to start us off for the evening:
"...the pain never ends; you'll never be happy! There's a mantra for you..." ~Chogyam Trungpa