The Heart of the Spiritual Warrior

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A spiritual warrior isn't like the image that comes to mind when we think of someone who's trained for combat. Typically, we think of warriors as tough, hard-hearted, aggressive, and dominant. We all know about basic training, and how hard the drill sergeants have to work to try and drive these qualities into their recruits. That's because people are basically rooted in soul qualities that motivate them to help others instead of hurt them. Underneath our woundings and societal pressures, we are all basically seeking to express love and help others. Becoming a spiritual warrior is like peeling off unhealthy emotional layers until we reach the awakened heart, what the Buddhists call bodhicitta. Awakened heart is the willingness to be with ourselves in our most raw, vulnerable state.

Meditation is the best tool we have available to find our awakened heart, because by learning to ignore all of our excuses about how we can't connect inside, our awareness opens and we suddenly connect inside! And when we connect inside, what do we find? Chogyam says, If you search for awakened heart, if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except for tenderness.

In the moments I have glimpsed this kind of tenderness, I've also felt pierced by the state of humanity. In the place where my heart should be, I have felt raw and exposed to my partner Ken's pain, or to my sister's, or to my neighbor's, or to the people suffering in Afghanistan, or Darfur. But I don't feel cornered by their pain, or trapped in it. I feel love for them, and love for the frailty of the human condition. We are all such fragile creatures who toughen ourselves over our wounds so we don't have to feel pain. But then the toxic pain gets stuck beneath these tough calluses, and our bodies enter a diseased state, whether emotional, mental, or physical. We need to keep flushing poisons out of our system all the time in order to stay healthy on every level. The fate of our heart is in our own hands. It is up to us to clean out our hatred, jealousy, envy, regret, revenge, rage, greed, and the list goes on.

Trungpa says that the experience of the open, tender heart gives rise to fearlessness; not the type of fearlessness of somebody with iron biceps who's ready to take on an attacker, but the type of fearlessness that gives us the courage to be open to whatever life offers. This kind of fearlessness takes us to a place beyond fear, to acceptance. Acceptance is based on inner strength that comes from the soul, and it is the homeground of the spiritual warrior. The opposite of this kind of fearlessness is to live life in a kind of sleepy trance in which we ignore our own shadowy qualities, and we try not to think of any kind of change at all; in fact, we try as hard as we can to keep things the same so we feel safe, no matter how bad that safety might really, truly feel.

My cancer has forced me to choose the path of the spiritual warrior, and I don't know if I would have done it willingly. So many people talk about the spiritual gifts that come along with the suffering of cancer, and for me, that couldn't be more true.

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