Quote from Never Turn Away
Never Turn Away: The Buddhist Path Beyond Hope and Fear
by Rigdzin Shikpo
Wisdom Publications, Inc., Somerville, Massachusetts, 2007 179 pages
Trungpa Rinpoche's approach was simply to be open and to minimize the projections we make on our experience. His great saying was, 'Turn towards everything." Even if we don't know what to do, or how to handle a situation, we just turn toward it. What comes to us might be quite painful, but it is always better to turn toward. It is a very simple choice, although it might be a painful choice sometimes. We can either turn toward or we can turn away, and Trungpa Rinpoche said you should always turn toward, and never turn away.
We may find, having turned toward a situation, that we don't know what to do. That might be embarrassing, but it's an interesting kind of embarrassment.
Empty Handed
A martial arts teacher once explained to me that the word karate means to have 'an empty hand.' We don't need what he called a 'secret sword'; in fact, we train to give up all such secret swords. From a Buddhist point of view, we all have a number of secret -- and maybe not so secret -- swords which we use to handle difficult circumstances, when all we really need is to be empty handed, to come nakedly into situations.
We could almost call this the path of embarrassment. Ordinarily, we free ourselves from embarrassment in difficult situations by having some contrived method up our sleeves. But the only method that really helps, in the end, is simply to turn toward and experience things clearly. We have to overcome the embarrassment of not always knowing how to handle ourselves. We have to let go of our habits, projections, and other familiar devices that don't really work. (pp. 9-10)
-- quote submitted by Mora F.
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