When he finished playing, it wasn’t there. The four
other people in the bar were just sitting there looking
at him with big smug smiles on their faces. They were
really big guys. He felt extremely small and power-
less. He knew that they had taken his jacket and that
it wouldn’t be wise to confront them because he was
small and outnumbered. He felt humiliated and
helpless.
Then, as a result of having worked with this prac-
tice, it occurred to him that he could feel empathy
for people in the world who had been laughed at,
scorned, and spat upon because of their religion or
the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual
orientation or their nationality, or for whatever rea-
son. He found himself empathizing with all the peo-
ple throughout time who had found themselves in
humiliating situations. It was a profound experience
for him. It didn’t get him his jacket back; it didn’t
solve anything. But it opened his heart to a lot of peo-
ple with whom he had not before had any sense of
shared experience.
This is where the heart comes from in this prac-
tice, where the sense of gratitude and appreciation
for our life comes from. We become part of a lineage
of people who have cultivated their bravery through-
out history, people who, against enormous odds, have
stayed open to great difficulties and painful situa-
tions and transformed them into the path of awaken-
ing. We will fall flat on our faces again and again, we
Bringing All That We Meet to the Path 67