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uncomfortable emotions—a practice for transmuting the poison of negative emotions into wisdom. It is similar to alchemy, the medieval technique of changing base metal into gold. You don’t get rid of the base metal—it isn’t thrown out and replaced by gold. Instead, the crude metal itself is the source of the precious gold. An analogy that’s commonly used by Tibetans is of the peacock who eats poison with the result that its tail feathers become more brilliant and glowing.
    This transmutation practice is specifically one of remaining open and receptive to your own energy when you are triggered. It has three steps.
    Step One. Acknowledge that you’re hooked.
    Step Two. Pause, take three conscious breaths, and lean in. Lean in to the energy. Abide with it. Experience it fully. Taste it. Touch it. Smell it. Get curious about it. How does it feel in your body? What thoughts does it give birth to? Become very intimate with the itch and urge of shenpa and keep breathing. Part of this step is learning not to be seduced by the momentum of shenpa. Like Ulysses, we can find our way to hear the call of the sirens without being seduced. It’s a process of staying awake and compassionate, interrupting the momentum, and refraining from causing harm. Just do not speak, do not act, and feel the energy. Be one with your own energy, one with the ebb and flow of life. Rather than rejecting the energy, embrace it. This leaning in is very open, very curious and intelligent.
    Step Three. Then relax and move on. Just go on with your life so that the practice doesn’t become a big deal, an endurance test, a contest that you win or lose.
    The biggest challenge in doing this practice is to embrace the restless energy, to stay awake to it rather than automatically exiting. When we first start experimenting with this, we find that we can abide with the unpleasantness and pull ourselves out of the tailspin for only brief moments, after which, automatically, habit takes over again.
    My beloved seven-year-old grandson, Pete, is a great example of this. He frequently melts down about the unfairness of life. Pete has a wonderful open quality and a great sense of humor, but when he’s having one of his meltdowns, he temporarily loses all his brilliance and lets the storyline take over, as in: “My younger brother gets everything and I never get anything.” “The world is unfair and I’m a victim.” Reasoning with him definitely doesn’t help. He quickly starts crumbling and gets so worked up that he shakes with rage.
    Pete was obsessed with the Star Wars series at that time, so one day when this was happening, I asked him, “Pete, what would Obi-Wan Kenobi do?” Pete got a curious, receptive look on his face. I could see him contemplating my question, and he began to sit up very straight and smile. He suddenly manifested as a powerful person who trusted in himself. But then he couldn’t resist—he started the storyline again. It was all about how his brother got this, and his brother got that, he never got anything, and he began to crumble again. I took a chance and once more reminded him of Obi-Wan Kenobi. And very, very, very briefly he once again pulled himself up and connected with his innate nobility.
    It’s like this for all of us initially. We can contact our inner strength, our natural openness, for short periods before getting swept away. And this is excellent, heroic, a huge step in interrupting and weakening our ancient habits. If we keep a sense of humor and stay with it for the long haul, the ability to be present just naturally evolves. Gradually we lose our appetite for biting the hook. We lose our appetite for aggression.
    If we choose to work with this kind of practice, it’s wise to start by practicing with little bouts of shenpa, the small irritations that happen all the time. If we become familiar with catching ourselves, acknowledging that we’re hooked, and pausing in these ordinary everyday situations, then when