Where do you take refuge?

That question was put to me by my spiritual director a few months back and I’ll ask you now: Where do you take refuge? It’s easy to feel we have no respite from the upheaval all around us. And it’s easy to feel our emotional life runs amok. Yet our embodied emotional life is meant as a resource for growing our wisdom.

Most of us have not been educated to see our emotions or our body as sources of wisdom. And it is a matter of education.

Here’s an example: I worked with a client who was angry and at first, she wasn’t even able to name that she was angry: because well, anger gets a bad rap. It’s a powerful emotion and left untended can cause great harm. In her mind, the choices were to stuff the anger or blow out at people around her. I offered her a third option: be with the anger, tend it, locate where it lives in her and be with it. As she was slowly able to do be with the anger–give it room, she became quiet, present with an awareness of her whole body. She had a direct experience of her body as a safe holding place for the anger.

The outer circumstances had not changed yet she was able to be with herself and she could touch the hurt beneath the anger. Her heart was no longer contracted around her inner conflict about anger. It gave her a way of being with herself that was compassionate and responsive to the circumstances with clarity. Anger’s gift is clarity. It’s an example of the alchemy that reveals what’s present as the the gift–the wisdom we need to move with life.

This is a practice that builds our emotional repertoire and a practice our worlds needs right now: transforming our emotions into wisdom.

Point being, practices that support our inner life cultivate a refuge we can rely upon day in and day out. Without consistent training in what feeds our inner life we have nothing to rely on especially in crisis. The Greek poet Archilochos said “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training”.

Recently I’ve been listening to talks by Lama Rod Owens. You can read more about him here at www.lamarod.com. I deeply value him as an activist, a black, queer, Buddhist teacher who challenges the status quo, but always comes back to the intersection of his social activism and a well honed inner life. As he so beautifully puts it, each time one of us wakes up, we bring light to the world. I cannot think of a better reason for being true to the cultivation of refuge.