“Boddhicitta is the true nature of our heart. The nature of one’s heart is always there, but sometimes like the sun, it is hidden behind clouds.”

—Fred Steinmann

In the Eastern calendar there are series of celebrations around the new moons in January, February, or March.  These festival days, usually the traditional Chinese Lunar New Year or Losar Tibetan New Year, shift each year and are dependent on the new moon cycles. This year the Tibetan New Year, known as Losar, was on Feb 21, but the season began on February 10. And on February 10, Gotham Restaurant had a very special guest in His Eminence Shyalpa Tenzin Rinpoche, who was attending New York Fashion Week to speak about making peace more fashionable than war through a universal peace sanctuary he is building in Lumbini Nepal, birthplace of the Buddha.

Special thanks to the organizers, Nicole Enslein and Michelle Moskowitz of Sublime Communications, for bringing this most sublime event to Gotham. Sublime Communications is a certified global communications firm committed to accelerating game-changing growth for leading companies who are aligning their assets, values, and actions. They do great work indeed.

And thank you to Lou Kerner of Crypto Oracle. Lou’s article on his serendipitous encounter with Rinpoche in Davos sparked this auspicious affair.

I had the pleasure of meeting with Rinpoche briefly and was fortunate to receive a blessing. His eminence is currently raising money for a Universal Peace Sanctuary in Lumbini, Nepal. 

I have been a practicing Buddhist since 2017 and had not fully heard the story of the Buddha’s birth until I met Rinpoche. Buddha’s mother, the great queen Maya Devi, was told by the seers that she would not live to see her child grow up, yet she willingly sacrificed her life to give birth. My epiphany on hearing this was that our memory of mother’s love is so powerful it can be used as the fuel to awaken our hearts to what is known in the Buddhist tradition as Bodhicitta.

The majority of humans have been blessed to have some remembrance of their mother, and whatever kind of mother she was, however long we had her, there is no doubting how much she sacrificed to give us life and nurture who we are today. If we reflect and really look and feel how much was given by our mother, this can inspire Bodhicitta. 

But what is Bodhicitta, and why do we need it in today’s world?

Boddhicitta is the true nature of our heart. We may have negative emotions like anger, greed, and jealously, but these emotions are like clouds in the sky, temporary obfuscations that block the sun. And like the sun, boddhicitta is always behind the clouds. As humans, our challenge is getting past our own forgetfulness. We have to remember to look and then be willing to see the sun.

A misconception of Buddhism is that in order to achieve enlightenment or become a spiritual person one must distance oneself from the world, like the Buddha initially did, in becoming a monk or a nun. Our impulse is to stay away from toxic people and situations and to try really hard to be only good. This can be possible, but like most rules there are exceptions. The exception to needing to renounce the world to achieve spiritual liberation is to fall more in love with the world and the people who inhabit it by developing Bodhicitta. To be effective in transforming our world to a more peaceful place, we have to awaken the true nature of our heart.

When life is going well we can unintentionally harden our hearts by seeking pleasure and pushing away pain. After the Buddha’s mother’s death, his father did his best to protect his son from future pain. His father only surrounded him with pleasure and beauty, and servants were placed all around to make sure the young Prince Siddartha never knew ugliness or pain. Then one day the Buddha saw an elderly disfigured woman, who some people say was a goddess in disguise, and his heart instantly broke awake. The contrast between his constant habitual view of pleasure and beauty and something so painfully human shocked his heart into awakening, and there was no turning back. Carl Jung talks about this sort of spiritual awakening, where the tension of the opposites weighs so heavily that a change of mind can occur.

Reflecting on Impermanence

The intelligence of the heart has the ability to feel joy and sorrow equally, but we have forgotten this. This wide range of feeling is akin to the spectrum of a funky jazz arrangement, where dissonance creates tension then harmony. The awakening to Boddhicitta can be like this, arising when opposite feelings come to the surface and produce a shock. We become fully awake and present in this moment. If we are unfamiliar with this feeling, we may panic and even think we may die. But with practice we can relax and a deeper awareness and appreciation of life’s situations can emerge with joy and new possibilities. Yet we tend to suppress negative emotions, like the Buddha’s father did with sadness and grief, and only seek out the more pleasurable experiences. These less undesirable emotions, such as those that naturally arise when we lose someone we care about, is a reminder of how precious it is to be human. From this state of vulnerability is where we paradoxically find a potent source of energy in our hearts. Our mother may have been overwhelmed with us at some point and occasionally lost her cool, but she helped give us life and nurture us to be the humans we are today.

At Gotham we had a Captain who suddenly passed away mere days before our February dinner with Rinpoche. Donny Herman was a captain who joined Gotham right before our reopening in November of 2021. Donny was  loud and brash, and his colleagues would complain about his behavior. One point of contention with Donny is that he would take two helpings of the daily staff meal. He was often coached on how to become more refined in his service and rapport with customers, yet positive reviews were interspersed with the sometimes less so. Everyone seemed to have a strong reaction to Donny, and outwardly people said a lot of things, but I always noticed that he was very well liked and had a good sense of humor. I would joke with him that he was the last man standing of the original captains, and we smiled as he taught me how to use the espresso machine. When it was announced that Donny was gone, I watched some people become aware of how much he meant to them. It seemed like all his idiosyncrasies were forgiven in that moment; we just wished he was still with us. The owners of Gotham, Bret and Kevin, flew Donny’s mom into town from Indiana, spent time with her in the hospital, and hosted at the restaurant while she was in town. It was a profound experience for all of us to be with this mother as she said good-bye to her son.

If we pay attention to life’s abrupt moments of grief and loss and become aware of them, we can start to see the softness of the heart’s intelligence everywhere. This world is going to break all our hearts open at some point in our lives, but the good news is that the cure to suffering lies in the pain. The sadness of this world has the potential to awaken our hearts to a deeper appreciation of the preciousness and temporary nature of all our human experience. It’s from the soft spot in our heart that we can truly and sustainably create an enlightened society.