There is a story about Naropa, the eleventh-century Buddhist scholar and Indian yogi, meeting an old hag on the street. She asked him if he understood the words in the Buddhist text he was holding.

When Naropa answered, “Yes,” the old hag began laughing and dancing. She then asked if he understood the meaning of the words. Naropa answered, “Yes,” again, thinking it would please her. The old hag became outraged and called Naropa a liar.

With this, Naropa awoke and realized that he only understood the words but did not have the experience and sense of the teachings he knew so well intellectually.

I have immersed myself for many years in the realm of death and dying through reading, education, work, volunteering, and teaching. I assist people in completing their advanced directives with emphasis on their choices for Power of Attorney (POA) for health care. I know about POA.

And yet, it was only when I was actually in that role and faced a heartbreaking decision that I understood the full meaning and sense of being a POA. Talking about POA and the experience of being one are two different universes. As it is with our practice.

Life never stops offering us challenges – watching the news, the crying baby on the plane, conflict at work, changing relationships, sickness, old age, and death. Our blessed egos rise up again and again to protect us with old habitual patterns like anger, fear, and denial. Here be dragons.

Rather than succumbing to old negative reactions to our feelings, how can we experience the teachings we “know” and embody them with a more compassionate presence? How can we live this dharma?

It begins with equanimity. “Don’t leave home without it!” was an old American commercial slogan which could apply here, but truly, equanimity IS our home – available whenever we can quiet our ego noise. 

One path to this quiet is through our felt experience when we ask ourselves, “What do I feel when I don’t accept things as they are and want them to be otherwise?” For me, this question brings up many stories of how it “should” be along with the debilitating feeling of helplessness, leading to even more stuckness in anger, fear, or disconnection. I suffer.

But if I ask, “What do I feel when I accept things as they are?”, the burden of fixing or controlling the problem is gone. I sense an openness that comes with surrender to this truth. Many times I also experience sadness, but this feeling rests in calmness. Equanimity.

Abiding in equanimity, we can now engage our Mondo Zen practice to realize that the message from our feelings is that we deeply care about something. Abiding in equanimity, we can now discern more clearly the appropriate response and action to take.

All we need is to experience what we already possess. The trouble is we aren’t taking time to do so. – Thomas Merton

The experience of the Dharma is a great teacher. As we continually bring the teachings like radical acceptance into our awareness and experience the truth of them, equanimity emerges. We can then respond with mindfulness, wisdom, grace, compassion, and skillful means. 

We are home.