A yogini told me: When you are trying to help sentient beings, you will encounter difficulties. You must make your decisions and take the consequences. You must have a warrior’s heart.

Escaping from Tibet as a young teenager, the yogini witnessed her family being massacred by Chinese soldiers and then managed to walk across Tibet to Mt. Kailash despite having been shot in the foot herself. She spent three years in solitary retreat on Mt. Kailash, circumambulated around the mountain three times doing full prostrations the whole way and finally slid down the mountain ice on her butt, roped to her one remaining cousin, while being chased by the Chinese a second time. She met her Guru in a relocation camp in Orissa and persevered with her solitary practice despite accusations from fellow refugees that she was meeting men in the forest. It took her two decades to let go of the fury she felt toward the Chinese for invading her country and killing her parents. But she did.

This is a person who knows about warriorship.

My diksha Guru talks a lot about warriorship. It’s an infinitely nuanced subject.

A true warrior desires nothing so much as to be perfectly appropriate, “in synch” with space and time in each and every moment.

The perfection of warrior timing results in a kind of invisibility. Walking between the super strings of karma, or bound activity, the warrior engages in kriya, or spontaneous action. This is the actionless action spoken of so eloquently by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Only the natural perfection of kriya ensures that a warrior’s actions will be of real benefit to those she serves. Walking between, unattached and in a state of total nondistraction, a warrior’s invisibility is identical to her invincibility.

In the zone of the warrior heart is a dynamic stillness that is unperturbed by any arising of this world, by any impediment or seeming obstacle. Even when we have not realized this perfection, it is our warrior hearts, still mostly unknown to us, that lead us steadily on to realization.

Many of us teaching and practicing in the West have confused the warrior with the rockstar. The warrior practices to exist in perfect harmony with the totality of nature. The rockstar practices to be acclaimed for her or his spiritual “achievements” and devoted following. Often, the warrior and the rockstar exist and conflict uneasily within one practitioner.

The warrior heart in us will do whatever it takes to Self-realize. Our warrior heart is willing to lose everything, even if this is not asked, or if it is. A rockstar desperately wants to maintain position and prestige.

Our warrior heart discovers precision precisely through having the courage to look stupid, make mistakes and stare directly into fear and fixation without blinking. A rockstar compulsively calculates potential loses and gains and cannot tolerate seeing anything in the mirror but her own pumped up, cleaned up, self-perpetuated image.

During the puja, the yogini fed us spoonfuls of blood red wine from the human skull that is supposedly the supreme possession of the yogini. She blew tuneful messages to wisdom beings through a human thigh bone and patiently tutored two generations of women gathered to learn the ritual. When it was done, she told us stories of her life, laughing uproariously.

Later, I ran outside to find the yogini. She was already seated in the car that would take her to the airport.

“The skull is still on the altar!” I announced, relieved that she hadn’t yet left without this most precious possession.

She looked at me mildly and said: “I’ll get it next time.”

For some reason, I didn’t stay to watch her leave.

In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi

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