Making it Personal

In Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's now classic primer, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, he reminds us that "If you want to help the world, if you want to be of service, it requires a personal journey." Seems simple enough. Put the oxygen mask on yourself first. How're you gonna help anyone else if you can't help yourself? Our modern vernacular is full of these tropes and aphorisms about putting the self first, in order that we might be able to help anyone or anything else.  It sounds selfish and self-absorbed. "If I put me first then my family will collapse." "If I put my needs first I would lose my job!" "With four kids and 2 jobs, I don't even know what my needs are!" But what if it is selfish to put something else in front of you? What if doing all these things for all these other people, thereby distracting one's attention from the deeper needs of the self, what if this is really the true Selfishness? Are we in some way finding worth outside of ourselves? Are we then not entirely dependent on others for our value and meaning? And if this dependency is true, wouldn't that mean that we would grasp and cling to any externality that would continue to refresh and validate our value in the world? And wouldn't that leave us suffocating and separated from oursleves? Unhinged from our capacity to truly know and love ourselves? And if we are so disconnected, then where is the love and vitality coming form that we are offering others? And is it too dependent? Conditional? Somehow impersonal?

We watch the world. We get links, and posts, and newsfeeds on what's "happening" and where, and how terrible this place really is. Money-wasting lawsuits, senseless war & violence, disaster, politicality, breakdowns in communications, unlawful arrests, flat tires, debts, mean-people, terrible drivers GMOs, etc. et al

we hit "like" 

we hit "unlike" 

we involve our selves. 

WE

INVOLVE

OUR

SELVES

everywhere else but with our selves. Raising money and awareness for causes.  Putting the oxygen mask on someone else first.

While we suffocate.

Certainly this sounds dramatic. But what if it is? What kind of life can we really breathe into something if we are avoiding our own? 

What if the Facebook newsfeed was full of status updates from ourself, to ourself? What would it look like? How would it go? How could our attention to our inner worlds change? When Chögyam Trungpa invites us to take that personal journey and uses the idea of it being a requirement, I think it is because anything less than that journey is really, fundamentally impersonal; distant and disconnected. So that what we offer others is deeply strained by the conditions of external dependency that we are so tied to.

There is no counter to this besides examination, there is no salve other than acceptance and effort. 

In meditation we often use the breath is a focal point. I had an instructor once refer to the breath as a "vehicle"  our awareness can "ride on"  so that it can return again and again to the self. That same instructor also liked to call the self "home" and in this way we were able to use our breath to return home again and again. The mind will by its very nature take us away from home, it is its job. But we are  so much more than mind. SO very much more.