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THE SHENPA SYNDROME
Arrogance, Shenpa and Mind Training
Then, in the West, you could count on it, you could take a predictability test with a room full of twenty-five thousand people and count on almost every single one them that sees that they're arrogant, okay, next thing shenpa about seeing that you're arrogant, then major stuff about bad me.
It's really helpful to know that bad me is going to start yelling and screaming at you. And with the pain of having seen that, just keep going back to the tenderness, the vulnerability, the actual soft spot of the pain of seeing. And then keep interrupting the momentum of the voice that says, "You're hopeless, you're bad," and then that heavy feeling.
That's why I told the story about the Dalai Lama. Let's just use you as an example. It would be like you saying, that feeling of pain is still there. When I realize my arrogance, I feel that feeling. That's like the Dalai Lama saying, "The pain of regret didn't go away. But I don't let it pull me back and drag me down." This is because you know that if it drags you down it will make you dysfunctional, probably you'll snap at people, your world will become smaller and smaller, less and less love will flow from you, less and less kindness. Do you see what I'm saying?
I want to talk about this in this chapter on confession, which is a very loaded subject. But, it's basically about, from a Western point of view, it is necessary to see what we do in order to be free of what we do. But then we have to apply enormous loving kindness.
The other thing that Dzigar Kongtrul said in his teaching was we have to treat our mind as if it was our most beloved child. And we have to train it rather than spoil it, indulge it and say, "We won't go there now, we won't feel those things." Instead, you train yourself with gentleness and compassion to be able to feel that short-term pain of the shenpa being burst and the self-importance bubble being burst, in order to be free of the chain reaction of suffering. Do you see? That's much greater.
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