The Courage to Open Your Heart

“It takes courage to open our hearts to others and to expose our vulnerability.”

-Thupten Jinpa, PhD

In 2016 I received teachings from Lama Lena on a retreat at the Rime Center. At that time she would come visit us in Kansas City every year and give teachings, so I’ve been on retreats with her a few times. At that event she taught us something called “The Practice That Takes the Open Heart as the Path to Awakening.”

At that time I really didn’t want to receive that kind of teaching. I just wanted to go on retreat with a teacher. I was still feeling inspired to try to be a Zen Buddhist then and these kinds of practices weren’t what I wanted to explore. I thought I could work on opening my mind and not worry about my heart so much. My thoughts on the subject have evolved. This is not to say that there isn’t emphasis on opening the heart in the Zen tradition. I don’t want to suggest there is no heart-centered practice in Zen. But to my mind compassion isn’t nearly as central as it may be in some other traditions.

Anyway, when she was giving this teaching she said something that stuck with me and still sticks with me now.

She said, “It can be hard to open our hearts because we’ve all been kicked in the heart in the past. This causes us to want to have closed hearts for protection.”

This was such a big revelation to me. We have all been kicked in the heart. Everyone on this planet has. Most of us have many times. I like that line so much I use it in my own talks and writings.

I’m telling you that because opening our hearts is brave. Kindness is courage and vulnerability is strength. Sometimes people seem to imply that kindness is bad, that sensitivity is a weakness.

Opening your heart helps others feel empowered to open theirs. In ‘A Fearless Heart’ Thupten Jinpa says, “When people understand the reasons why we chose to do something, when they get the basic message that we don’t want to hurt them, they tend to be more accepting of our decisions and compassionate toward us. This is human nature.”

He goes on to say that we are afraid of opening our hearts and showing compassion because “These fears stem from confusing compassion with submissiveness, weakness, or sentimentality.”

We are afraid people could hurt us, but there is more than that to it. We are taught sometimes that compassion isn’t cool. People have been throwing around terms like “bleeding heart” and “snowflake” to describe someone with an open heart in a negative way.

The thing is that opening our hearts empowers others to open theirs. AND armoring our hearts doesn’t work. Compassion is in our nature. Closing our hearts will not make us happy. We can dare to be compassionate instead. We can try to protect ourselves against all the suffering and pain in life, but we can’t do it, not really. It’s like trying to cover the world with leather instead of putting on shoes. We can’t really do that.

If we open our hearts our hearts can be stronger. We can develop an inner strength that we don’t have now. We can become more patient, wiser, and more motivated to do the work of helping ourselves and others.

An open heart brings connection with other people. And we should connect with others even when we’re afraid of being hurt. One thing we’ve learned in a the last few years is that isolation can be really hard on us.

Jinpa goes on to say, “Through training we can make compassion our basic stance, the very outlook with which we perceive ourselves and the world around us, so that we engage with the world from that place.”

What if we can open our hearts and change our way of thinking?

Kindness, Compassion, and Open-heartedness are virtues. We should be cultivating these things.

Open up your heart. 

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Below is a teaching like the one I received from Lama Lena. Highly recommended:

The 1000-Armed Chenrezig Practice & Mantra

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Benefits of Compassion

Cultivating compassion benefits us and the world around us in many ways.

Being compassionate:

-motivates and inspires us

-helps us deal with stress

-helps us deal with loneliness

-inspires others to be compassionate

Compassion is a worldview that can help us have the opportunity to be home anywhere and create and strengthen communities.

In ‘A Fearless Heart’ Thupten Jinpa says, “Kindness affirms something fundamental to our human condition – our need for and appreciation of connection with our fellow humans.”

Compassion brings us together and connects us to other people. It brings us together in a way that few other things can but more importantly it penetrates the rigid walls we put up that separate us from other people. We’ve been kicked in the heart so we try to put our hearts in cages. But that’s not a good way to live. We can uncage our hearts instead and dare to be kind and open.

Jinpa goes on to say, “If we look, we will always find people who are helping, in big ways or small, because it’s one of the things humans were born to do.”

This echoes the quote from Fred Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

It can be easy to have a negative view of humanity. We see so many things that make us think people are bad. I was going to say this is especially true with the strife and division that is happening now, but it was probably true throughout human history. But we can always look for the helpers. Big and small acts of kindness are happening all the time.

One more quote from Jinpa. He said, “We humans haven’t given ourselves enough credit – and we suffer from the self-fulfilling prophecy of selfishness.”

When we look for trouble, we can find it. When we start from thinking the worst about people, we can find faults.

But what if we don’t look for trouble? What if we stop looking for signs that people are bad?

How can we be confident that people are good, that our true nature is compassion and wisdom?

Is this an article of faith? Is this what I believe in in spite of evidence? I get a lot from looking for the helpers. You can see selfless people all the time if you’re looking for them.

Also, studies show that being compassionate and seeing the world in a positive way are linked. Caring about other people brings you some measure of happiness and joy. Thinking it’s a terrible world and other people are all jerks will make you sad.

I was a depressed and negative teenager before I was a positive adult (as many people are). I thought the world was awful, I thought other people were out to get me, and I hated movies with happy endings. And I was endlessly unhappy.

When I set an intention to be a more positive person, it changed everything. Compassion isn’t just a virtue we’re trying to cultivate. It’s a worldview. If you change how you see the world, you can change your life.

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Click here if you want to help us with the goal of building a new Buddhist temple in Kansas City:

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Fearless Compassion

Compassion is something that we all agree is important. It’s fundamental to all religions and systems of virtue. We all agree that it’s important, but at the same time we so often and clearly fall short of really trying to embody it. When you see someone that needs help and you make excuses not to do it, or when you see someone being harmed and think “they had it coming”…these are examples of falling short in generating compassion.

What is it, really?

Compassion is a sense of concern that arises when we are confronted by another being’s suffering and when we feel motivated to see that suffering relieved.

In his book ‘A Fearless Heart’ the former monk and professor Thupten Jinpa says, “Compassion is fundamental to our basic nature as human beings.”

It’s part of who we are. At the core of our being we are good. We are not broken and hopelessly selfish as we sometimes think we are. We are good and compassion is our nature. It can be easy to believe that human beings are bad, that things are awful out there. But I’m here to tell you compassion is our nature. We just have layers of delusion that keep us from embodying that good true nature. We’ve all been kicked in the heart many times and it has made us feel like people are out to get us and vulnerability is a weakness.

We are called to be vulnerable anyway. An open heart is so important to our spiritual journey and opening our hearts is the way to cultivate compassion.

Jinpa goes on to say, “Compassion offers the possibility of responding to suffering with understanding, patience, and kindness, rather than, say, fear and repulsion.”
 
 Compassion is powerful. It can take us all the way to awakening. We just have to open our hearts and be Fearless and Vulnerable.”

Brene Brown said, “Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center of meaningful human experiences.”
 
 I think she’s right.

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Click here if you want to help support building a new Buddhist temple in Kansas City.

Rime Center Temple Project

Fearless Compassion (podcast)

Introduction to the Heart (video)

can we live in a more openhearted way? I think we can.

if you want audio version of this teaching, click here:

Long and Winding Road

“Sick of whatever it’s called, sick of the names.

I dedicate every pore to what’s here.”

-Ikkyu

There is a light at the end of the tunnel regarding this pandemic. We have been struggling with anxiety and isolation for a year and it seems like the sun is coming out now.

Well, I can’t speak for everyone. I’ve been struggling with anxiety and isolation. We have had to face things that we weren’t prepared for. Not only that, but now here in the United States we are a deeply divided people. “People with different views are the enemy” is something that appears to be all too common now. Maybe the pandemic made people a little more prone to that kind of lashing out.

In September I got married, bought a house, and moved. It may have been the most eventful month of my life. Right in the middle of the pandemic my life had some big changes. And in October I got a new position at work.

At some point I realized I really was not meditating anymore. I enjoyed thinking about meditation. But I had fallen off the wagon.

I wanted to do something to re-commit myself. That’s when I started building a statue garden. My house had a shocking amount of old dead leaves in the backyard and some vines. I started cleaning that up and I discovered there had once been a tiered garden. As I was out there thinking about putting up Buddha statues, I found a statue. It was Fiacre, the Patron Saint of Gardening. I suspect he’s one of the lesser known Catholic saints. I decided to keep him in my Buddha Garden. He gets to stay and represent what used to be there.

I was making space for statues and then one by one getting them and placing them in the garden. There’s still some clearing to do out there and probably always will be. It’s a work in progress that never ends.

The spiritual life is too. I think there’s a deeper meaning to this. I didn’t create a sacred space. I uncovered one. You don’t become your true self, you don’t even awaken your true self, really. On the spiritual path you REVEAL your true self. Like finding a statue buried in leaves. It was there all along. 

I have a statue out there that’s roughly the same size as me. And he’s surrounded by various other, smaller statues. And I go out and I spend time with them. I burn incense and rake. And one day I found myself chanting.

Chanting is my least favorite spiritual practice…or at least it was.

Being out there in the Buddha Garden, clearing leaves in a mindful way, brought me back to my practice. I’m chanting the Vajrasattva mantra for personal transformation 108 times per day.

Then a stranger reached out to me and offered to give me a big indoor statue. I have a big white Buddha in my living room. Like the one outside, this statute is life size. Getting that statue felt important. And having him right there, reminding me every day to practice…that means so much. I sit with the Buddha every day, burning incense, sitting, counting my mala beads, and chanting.

The truth is I struggled with everything.

I’ve been really interested in having a really simple spiritual practice. I wanted to just grab my cushion and sit for a little while each day.

And ultimately that wasn’t working for me anymore. Stilling the mind wasn’t enough. Taming the mind wasn’t enough.

The truth is that I needed something that hasn’t been part of my practice for a while. Heart centered practices.

I’ve for a long time had this view, “I want to be a Zen Buddhist, I want to be a Zen Buddhist, I want to be a Zen Buddhist.” I don’t even know why. Even when I was receiving teachings and empowerments at a Tibetan temple, I just wanted to be a Zen Buddhist. Even when I was named a Teacher (Gegan) in the Tibetan Rime Tradition, I just wanted to be a Zen Buddhist.

But the truth is putting myself into a box hasn’t given me everything my practice needs. I’m a Mahayana Buddhist. I practice the Great Vehicle, the Way of the Bodhisattva, the path of Wisdom and Compassion. The box isn’t real and it never was. 

I don’t need to limit myself. All of the teachings and practices are available to me. They’re available to everyone and on this path no one gets left out.

I’m looking at a more open-hearted practice, a practice that builds bridges and brings people together. That’s not to say I’m changing all my teachings. I’m not. But I’m learning that practices that bring kindness and equanimity are just as important as practices that bring clarity and wisdom.

All these things run together as part of the spiritual journey.

My first encounter with Buddhism was the Tibetan tradition. I’m still leery of Tibetan Buddhism, but I’m welcoming elements of it back into my life. 

The spiritual journey
It’s with that in mind that I’m going to do a series of teachings on Training the Heart soon. Look for that in the near future. Let’s open our hearts and minds. Let’s open them as widely as we can. No one is left out. 

Training the Mind is important, but Training the Heart is too. And if I’m sharing any teachings with others, it needs to be the teachings that I’m finding benefit from myself. 

Tears and an Open Heart

I didn’t cry at all between the ages of 15 and 40.

The reason I know that for sure is because I was 15 when my father died. A part of me shut down. This means I didn’t cry when my mother died, or when we found out she was sick. I never cried when I lost a job or when I struggled to pay bills. I didn’t cry during my first divorce. I didn’t cry during my second divorce. I’ve lost everything and had to start over more than once but I never shed a tear.

And then one day last year I cried. My feelings were suddenly wide open. It was a combination of things. I’ve grown as a person, of course. I have a wife that has helped encourage and empower me to be vulnerable. It was during the pandemic and I’m sure the pandemic has opened all sorts of things for people. I was watching Hamilton with my wife and I cried during the last song. (if you know it, you know it) And it was as though a door opened in me. Things make me cry now. I have feelings and I’m not afraid to express them. I thought I was dead inside.

I spent a lot of my life keeping everything in. I spent a lot of my life being a bitter, sad, and negative person. And it has been a process to grow out of that. Honestly for years I thought I was broken and that there were a lot of things wrong with me. I have grown so much.

I think our culture doesn’t serve us very well in this area. Men are taught to not be sensitive. We are taught that sensitivity and emotion are weaknesses. It’s not always direct. “You shouldn’t be sensitive” isn’t something I ever heard. But I did hear “Don’t cry like a girl.” That’s not a good thing to say. Why do men have a higher suicide rate than women? I think it’s because we’re taught to bury our feelings. It’s not healthy and it’s not good.

Open heartedness is not a weakness. It’s a strength.

Vulnerability brings connection, compassion, and empowerment. Cultivating it is one of the best things we can do for ourselves and the world around us.

I see a lot of people saying things like “People are too sensitive these days”. I respectfully disagree with that. We should be sensitive. Facing the world with kindness and an open heart is a good thing. It’s what can uplift humanity and bring us together. Maybe nothing else can.

If the world is leaning more and more toward caring about the feelings of other people I think that is a good thing.

I’m Trying to Be Openhearted. Don’t Bother Me. (video)

This teaching was recorded on 10/23/17 in my home in Kansas City Missouri. It’s about my experience volunteering with the Rime Center group and some visiting college students at Harvesters. But, really it’s about those experiences in life when we are closed off from the people around us for no reason. Let’s be open instead.

I’m Trying To Be Openhearted. Don’t Bother Me.