CHAPTER NINE
MEETING THE GREAT CHIEF
“LOVE AND COMPASSION are necessities, not luxuries,” says the Dalai Lama. “Without them humanity cannot survive.”1 Wise spiritual leaders radiate this precious quality, but so do millions of everyday people living simple lives with great heart. I refer to compassion as the Great Chief because with it we can become courageous in the face of overwhelming suffering. Once we truly encounter the Great Chief within ourselves, we can take the hand of others and help them. When we open to the depths of our own pain, we naturally become a refuge for others. We learn to open our heart to other people, because in truth we are all in this together.
My encounters with the Great Chief began at an early age. When I was thirteen, I fell madly in love with a fifteen-year-old boy. He ended up being my childhood sweetheart for many years. It was Valentine’s Day, and I really wanted to give him a gift, but I had no money. So my best friend suggested I steal something for him. I had never shoplifted, but my friend’s enthusiasm persuaded me to give it a try. Bad idea. I was caught immediately by the store security and taken to the police station, where my mother had to pick me up after she got off work. At this time my mother was a single parent working sixty hours a week, this was the last thing she needed to deal with. She was furious, and I remember her yelling angrily, “You’re going to work this off, Spring!”
I agreed to do my fifty hours of community service at Glide Memorial Church, in the soup kitchen. Glide was, and still is, a beacon of hope and compassion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. At the time, the Tenderloin was filled with drug addicts, prostitutes, and a lot of homeless people. Violence and despair were everywhere, and Glide dedicated itself to providing loving, compassionate outreach services to the community.
I showed up early on a Saturday morning ready to work off my debt to society. As I exited the car, my mother said, sternly, “You’re going to mop, clean, and feed people.” And I said, “All right, I’ll do it.” Actually, I was raring to go. It all seemed exciting for some reason, and in spite of it only being 8:00 a.m. in the morning, the Tenderloin was in full swing. There were dealers, hustlers, and people begging for money everywhere.
I went into the kitchen and met the other volunteer staff; and they smiled at me kindly. Many had scars and missing teeth; they’d all been through the depths of hell—former junkies and homeless people who were grateful to have found their way to Glide. They felt blessed to be clean, sober, and still alive. They all had so much joy! One man spoke about how in his worst moment, Jesus came down, kissed his cheeks, and led him to the doors of the church. They all had survival stories, and I thought, “This is so beautiful.” I loved them all immediately. I felt very happy to be spending the day there. We laughed and joked and everyone called me “Baby Girl.”
So I mopped and cleaned the kitchen, which was filled with old cooking and food-prep equipment that had been donated. All the food for lunch had been donated too, and it was pretty basic: Hot dogs, day-old bread, and gigantic cans of pork and beans. We prepared everything as lovingly as we could, and at noon, hundreds of people appeared out of nowhere and were waiting in line. I was astounded. Where did all these people come from? It was a cold, foggy San Francisco day and the wind was blowing, so people were bracing themselves against the side of the church and shivering. My job was to scoop the beans on to each Styrofoam plate as people walked by. I was smiling the whole time, thinking: Here I am! I’m excited, I’m serving! But everyone seemed really sad. They had their heads down, and nobody looked me in the eyes. I was struck by that.
The line just kept coming. At one point I took a break and went outside, and I noticed there were still people lined up way down the street. Eventually, we started running out of food and had to ration the portions. Instead of two hot dogs, two pieces of bread, and two scoops of beans, people got only one of each. People kept coming, some with kids, their clothes in tatters and their hair uncombed, and they got less and less food. Pretty soon the cook came out and said, “Half a hot dog, half a piece of bread, and one small scoop of beans.” Then, with many people still waiting in line, we ran out of food. At that moment, almost everybody disappeared as quickly as they had come. A few stayed, though, and I watched them for a long time.
Later that afternoon, after we cleaned up, I went out to the curb and started sobbing. “This is not right!” I thought. What struck me most was how deeply I cared. I cared that people didn’t get food. I cared about the children with holes in their jackets. I cared that it was cold, and I wondered where they went after waiting in line, what their life was like. It was gut-wrenching for me, an awakening moment, because I realized I could care about and love people I didn’t even know. I’d never experienced that before; it was a very powerful feeling. I had seen people in my neighborhood suffering, but there was something about the number of people and the need for something as basic as food. My heart opened, and somehow I changed. I discovered that I cared deeply, that I wanted to alleviate suffering. I worked at Glide for a few more weeks and had a similar experience each time; and then I went back to my thirteen-year-old life. But something deep in me was touched; the seed of compassion had been watered.
Compassion is a powerful emotion that arises from deep within the heart in response to pain. It can arise in response to our own pain or in response to the suffering of those around us. What is challenging about this emotion is that we aren’t powerful enough to completely take the pain of others away, so what is asked of us is to be present. Often I can’t change a situation but what I can do is offer my sincere care and my loving presence. Author Leo Buscaglia was asked to judge a contest to find the most caring child. The winner was a four-year old whose neighbor had lost his wife. Upon seeing the elderly man cry, the little boy went into the man’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When the boy’s mother asked what he said to the neighbor, the boy replied, “Nothing, I just helped him cry.”2
Thousands of US soldiers have returned from Iraq suffering from serious post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A former University of California nurse in San Diego trained therapy dogs to help these traumatized veterans. Among the most debilitating symptoms of PTSD are the nightmares and night terrors that keep individuals reliving terrifying memories all night long. Over time, sleep deprivation becomes physically and emotionally destabilizing.
The first dogs were sent to soldiers who had the most debilitating symptoms and weren’t responding to prescription medication; they were desperate, overwhelmed, and often suicidal. The dogs were trained to stay up during the night, and when a soldier was having a nightmare, the dog would reach out its paw and tap directly on the soldier’s chest. Then it would lick his face. Feeling the tapping motion, the veteran would wake up and reorient himself. Receiving a compassionate response in moments of distress is what we all need. The veterans who received the dogs are doing much better and the results have astounded everyone.
In my twenties I began teaching a meditation program in Bay Area juvenile halls. We would go into the different units and teach a one-hour mindfulness class. I would do the majority of my work in the boys’ units and I loved it. Most of the youth there were from Oakland. They held the youngest and the smallest kids in a separate area, so I began visiting that unit every Thursday night. There was a little boy in there who I fell in love with as soon as I laid eyes on him. He couldn’t have been more than twelve and his name was Marcus. He had these huge brown eyes and the sweetest smile with dimples. Sometimes the younger kids had a harder time meditating. They would giggle and make fart sounds when everyone closed their eyes. We would all just laugh and then come back to feeling our breath again. But Marcus was a pro and he loved my class. He was very mature for his age, definitely an old soul. Every Thursday he was so excited to see me. I would always give him a huge hug and he would have the biggest smile on his face for the entire class.
After a while, I started to ask him more about his story. I came to find out his mother died when he very young and his father was a homeless man who was living on the streets. Nobody would take him in so he wound up in an abusive foster home that he ran away from. His social worker was unable to find him a new placement primarily because he was an older African American boy. Black boys tend to be the ones who languish and suffer the most in the foster care system. His social worker brought him to juvenile detention while she looked for another home, and sadly one day turned into eight months. I couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t done anything wrong and he was being treated like a criminal. He was all alone and scared. The love I started to develop for this kid was growing every day.
Every week I inquired, “When’s your social worker coming to see you?” His only response was “I haven’t seen her in weeks. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know where I’m going to go.” Many of the kids had similar stories. They had all been abandoned a long time ago, and I started to see my role not so much as a meditation teacher but more as a mother. At the end of my classes, the kids would all begin standing in a line and I would hug each child and remind them of how precious they were. The staff would just stare at me with shocked looks on their faces, They were amazed because these were kids who they labeled as violent and dangerous. I felt so much compassion for them and every week it was getting harder and harder to leave Marcus there. I wanted to adopt him; I wanted to adopt them all really. Then one day it happened. I came in to teach the class and he was gone. He had disappeared into the system, had gone off into the world by himself. I cried all the way home that night praying that Marcus would find the safe place he deserved. I don’t think I will ever forget that kid. Man, he blasted my heart wide open.
I wanted others to see what I was experiencing. So I invited a friend, Alex Katz, who wrote for the Oakland Tribune, to come with me. He brought a photographer. He wrote an article with photos of me doing yoga and hugging the kids. It was a beautiful story and helped bring attention to our project and the kids. He said, “My heart is really changed watching you in here. I had so many ideas about who these kids were or what they needed. And you’re right: it’s just love and attention on some level.” I responded, “Yeah. They all need our compassion.”
When I try to suppress difficult emotions or act them out, it only amplifies my problems. By “difficult” emotions I mean grief, fear, rage and doubt or some variation of them. What I have learned is that the wisest response is to feel what is going on and stay present with myself. It can be so hard because we will do anything not to feel painful emotions. Distracting myself from facing my emotions unfortunately doesn’t change them. Once the distraction is over, the emotions arise again. We are all learning how to stay present and this is what self-compassion is all about. The more you meet the suffering in you with love, the more you can be there for others. Staying present with our own pain takes a fierce heart, but we don’t do it alone; we bring compassion with us.
A few years ago, I was completely exhausted from all the projects I was involved in, and I began to crave solitude. I have always felt that deep down I am secretly a nun and my yogini nature loves solitude. I have always saved money and structured my life simply so that I can travel and at certain times go on long retreats. So this time I planned a five-month retreat in Crestone, Colorado, an area at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, sacred to Native American communities. I felt drawn to this place and had dreams that the land was calling me. Crestone is a hub of spiritual activity, with communities of many traditions that offer retreats and other programs.
I planned to spend the whole time at a Tibetan meditation center focusing on “purification practices”—prostrations, mantras, meditation, and visualizations. But after I’d been there for two months, a nun told me about a magical cabin way up in the mountains nearby, and I instantly knew I needed to spend the rest of my time on retreat there. I grew up in cities and am not that nature-ish, although I longed to be so; and this would be a real immersion in the natural world. So, despite snowstorms and freezing weather, up the mountain I went.
My cabin had a small solar panel, so I had a tiny fridge and lights for a couple of hours in the evening. There was a wood-burning stove, and when I got cold, I went out and got wood to make a fire. The caretaker brought food and water up every ten days, and I would meet him halfway up the rutty road. That was my only human contact. I decided against having a cell phone, and there was no Internet connectivity. I wanted to meditate like a true yogi. So there I was in this very isolated cabin, with an outhouse, a propane burner, a cushion, an altar, and a few Dharma books.
When I’d first heard about the cabin from the nun, I envisioned my retreat as a series of beautiful moments connecting with the Earth, with no one around to distract me. I imagined long periods of blissed out meditation. Setting up the space, though, I began to have second thoughts. Still, I encouraged myself, “Spring, you’re here! You know the Dharma; it’s time to rely on yourself. If times get hard, you can be your own refuge.” I thought the worst that could happen would be a feeling, that is that I would have to feel something. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ll feel whatever comes up. I can do this!”
But the moment the caretaker got in his truck and headed back down the hill, I instantly plummeted into the most painful sorrow I’ve ever known. Oceans of tears interrupted by overwhelming terror. Every day tears poured down my cheeks, my chest ached, and my body was filled with grief. I started sobbing in the morning and it went on for hours, in waves. It was huge and kept getting bigger; I didn’t understand where it was coming from. It was as though ten thousand years of ancestral sorrow was coming straight through my heart, and so I called it “African grief.” It consumed me physically, mentally, and spiritually for hours, a kind of purification. I had co-led several grief rituals led by my dear friend Sobonfu Somé, a healer, teacher, and shaman from Burkina Faso in West Africa. She’d describe this grief that was far beyond anyone’s control. She said that in her tradition, it’s critical to feel it completely and then let it go. While I was wailing, it would turn into gospel hymns, screaming for hours, and witnessing my body contort in unimaginable positions. I thought I was going crazy, but I began to try to trust the process.
In the evenings, as it got dark outside, terror would grip my heart and I’d shake uncontrollably. I was an African American woman completely alone in a place populated by rednecks, I thought. I was sure I’d be attacked and killed at any moment, ripped to shreds by wild animals or deranged rednecks. I heard things moving outside in the dark, and I remember thinking, “This grief, terror, despair, and loneliness are too much. I’m not going to survive this experience.” All day I cried, and at night I was on super-high alert. I kept trying to calm myself, “You live in East Oakland. That’s way more dangerous than here. Actually, there’s nobody around.” But the fears and the energy I was releasing were primal, and rational considerations had no impact on this raw emotion. With endless grief and nightly terror, I hit my breaking point.
I began marking off the days on a calendar, knowing that one day it would all come to an end. It was then I realized how much I needed compassion. I needed to care for myself through this, I needed to help myself. So I began to meditate on self-care and self-compassion for hours at a time, holding my hands on my heart. I began doing prostrations and bowing before my altar for hours, taking refuge in Quan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. I began praying for compassion, I sang songs about compassion, and I chanted Om Mani Padme Hum, the great compassion mantra, constantly. I called in all the compassionate deities from Quan Yin to Mother Mary and everyone in between to help me meet this profound pain, realizing that without compassion, I would not be able to stay present with the powerful forces that were moving through me.
On the days I felt my compassion run out, I borrowed some from Green Tara. I would say, “Tara, please help me. I need some compassion. I’ve lost all of mine.” And it would come. Then I’d say, “Thank you, I feel restored.” I thought about all the people in that very moment meditating, going into churches and temples, praying and reflecting, all the monks and nuns all over the world, as well as all the laypeople. I knew that in some way I was connected to them, and that their practice and faith affect me. We’re all interconnected.
The only way I could get any sleep was to stuff pillows behind me. I would sink down into them and imagine they were the giant bosoms of Mother Earth. I would imagine these big black arms reaching around me as if I were being held in the arms of the Great Mother, and I discovered that you can evoke compassion, this great force, and it will protect you.
After a month of this intense experience, I could feel that I was freeing myself of ancient suffering and that’s when I recognized compassion as a great chief. He, She, They, It, whatever it is, when it showed up, it never left my side. With compassion, I was able to bear what felt unbearable. All I could do was feel the emotions and have faith that my heart was strong enough to take it. I thought about all the beings who throughout the ages had freed their minds through struggles. I thought of Dr. King and Harriet Tubman a lot, as well as Buddha and his great struggle with the demon Mara. I thought of Jesus and his forty days and forty nights in the desert, when they say he battled the devil, and all the nuns I’d read about, staying in hermitages and caves. I pictured all these epic sagas and thought, “If they could do it, I can do it. They had a mind just like mine. They suffered just as I’m suffering.” I took comfort in the awareness that there are awakened beings all over the planet, and I was able to draw strength from the thought of their courage.
When we’re purifying ourselves, when we’re letting go of ancestral sorrows, it doesn’t necessarily come with bliss and light. I had expected serenity and moments connecting to nature. I had imagined it would be all beauty. We want liberation; we want to be awakened. We want to understand the Four Noble Truths without feeling the suffering or anything else too difficult.3 But that’s not how it happens. Buddha himself went through a lot in his six years as an ascetic in the forest. He must have shed many tears, and he almost died from extreme deprivation. It was an epic battle. Christian mystics would build hermitages in the desert to do retreats, and they would be out there howling and screaming, and when someone would pass by, they would say, “It’s just me and my mind.” In the end, it’s just you and your own mind, moment to moment. The only wise response is love and compassion.
This solo retreat was the most intense unraveling I’ve ever experienced. It was a three-month vision quest, and on this journey it was as if I’d died and been reborn. I look back on it with amazement that I endured something that difficult by myself. But in fact I was never alone; the great chief of compassion was by my side every day. We don’t know what we’ll have to go through. Spending three months by myself in that tiny cabin, I developed an unshakeable faith. At the beginning, I thought, “The worst that could happen is feeling.” And wow, did I ever feel! Who knows where this stuff comes from? It was unwinding a sorrow so deep and a fear so entrenched that it felt it would break me at times. Without knowing it, I had prepared for years to be able to meet that experience and to begin to understand about the power of compassion.
When I was thirteen, doing community service at Glide Memorial Church, I had “signed on” somewhere really deep inside. I wanted to be a helper then, and I still do now. What touched me the most was that I saw suffering up close, and for the first time in my young life I saw compassion. This was what excited me about Glide; they were love and compassion in action and I felt it. That quality of love, when fully manifest, becomes the unbreakable lamp that we carry in the darkest of times. There are angels and frontline workers all over the world, all kinds of people who show up for others. I trust compassion, and I have come to know that without a doubt that it’s the most powerful quality that our hearts posses. To live my life dedicated to alleviating my suffering and the suffering in this world is my joy. When people ask me what I do for fun I have to laugh; it’s usually something having to do with compassion. We are never alone: the chief is always there.
Tenderly I now touch all things, knowing one day we will part.
—ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS
