What About Intensity Capacity in a World on Fire?
Dear Karuna Community,
I notice that each day I wake up, I brace myself—for what else? It has become my habit of mind as I map onto the external events in our World today. International instability. Long-standing alliances are unraveling. Regimes falling. Acts of persecution carried out in the name of revenge. Public violence that echoes some of the darkest chapters of human history.
I find myself asking: How much more can I take before I tune out, dissociate, or collapse into despair? And then another question follows, quieter but just as piercing: Where is my compassionate heart amid the anger I’m holding? If I let myself feel fully—tears, grief, anguish—will I be undone?
The pundits keep saying, “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
I don’t just hear this intellectually—I feel it somatically. Even when we think we’re not paying attention, our nervous systems are tracking. Something deep knows we are living through a profound and precarious period. It’s daunting to watch the unravelling of everything we thought we could trust: the courts, Congress, the Constitution, and even democracy itself.
I’m writing this letter as a cry for help—and as a call to the community. These are daunting and treacherous times. Impermanence is no longer theoretical; it is visibly reshaping our world. We need one another to stay present, to review what we know together, and to call on our tender collective hearts to hold it all – what feels unbearable alone.
Perhaps, as I near seventy, I am learning—slowly—to name what I need. That does not come easily to me. But what I need now, and what I believe we need, is community.
In The Diamonds Within Us, I wrote that learning to truly own our emotions—to feel them in an embodied way—is the capacity to use emotional energy to wake up, rather than act out or go to sleep. Through contemplative methods, we develop what we call intensity capacity: the ability to remain present with emotional intensity long enough for confusion to transmute into wisdom (p. 97).
Karuna Training offers many ways to ritualize and embody this “staying with.” Practices such as the Four-Step Practice, Tonglen, Microscopic Truth, Compassionate Exchange, and Maitri Space Awareness are not techniques for self-improvement—they are ways of learning how not to abandon ourselves or one another when emotional intensity, like fear, arises.
What helps me most—and what I have witnessed helping so many others—is practicing together. Touching hearts together. Remembering, together, the potency and strength of basic sanity. Intensity capacity does not mature in isolation; it grows in relationships.
So I am calling on us to come together in Karunity—a community of open-hearted warriors meeting the challenges of our time with compassion rather than aggression. And when aggression does arise, we remember the teachings of the Vajra Family: clear-seeing compassion, immovable presence, open-eyed clarity that can both know and not know—while still meeting the world grounded in basic sanity.
This is my wish for all of us.
And I hope to see you—soon—practicing together.
With warmth and deep appreciation,
Melissa
How to stay connected
- Brilliant Sanity: Resting in the Four Grounds of Mindful Presence — a five-part online course with Terry Jaworski and Aina Fuller beginning next Saturday, February 7th
- Karuna Open House: Evenings of Connection & Contemplation — Join us for a series of in-person only contemplative evenings exploring the heart of Karuna at the Berkeley Shambhala Center
- Evergreen Courses (self-paced, foundational support in turbulent times - to support remembering the foundational skills.
- Phase 2 Karuna Training — All retreats are open to Graduates - for those ready to deepen embodied, relational practice