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major upheavals come, the practice will be available to us automatically. If we think we can wait until a major crisis arrives and then it will spontaneously click in, we’re wrong.
    Traffic is a great place to work with shenpa. Consider the unreasonable amount of charge that arises around other people’s driving habits, or someone taking the parking place you thought was yours. Instead of just mindlessly feeding the irritation, you can recognize this as a perfect opportunity to do the transmutation practice.
Acknowledge you’re hooked (with humor, if possible).
Pause, take three conscious breaths, and lean in to the energy (with kindness, if possible).
Relax and move on.
    The wisest approach is that we try out this practice. We try it out in our lives today, tomorrow, right now—as long as we’re alive, we practice this way of living.
    Sometimes the only way we learn is the hard way. We might acknowledge that we’re hooked but go ahead and do what we always do anyway—but we can do this as a conscious experiment to see where it will lead. When we’re conscious, it allows us to learn from our mistakes.
    I have an example of how painful this can be. Once I was staying at my daughter’s house and for some reason I was feeling raw and out of sorts. In that prickly mood I received an upsetting e-mail, and the shenpa, which was already percolating, kicked in with a vengeance. You have probably all had that e-mail or voice mail experience. It was Sunday night, so I decided to avoid talking directly to the woman who sent the e-mail by calling her work number and leaving an angry message. When she came into the office on Monday, she was going to get my call. I felt justified because I knew that I was in a position of power, that basically I was going to get what I wanted because this particular company needed my cooperation.
    I let that storyline blind me and I thought, “I am just going to tell it like it is, I’m going to set her straight!” I cringe now when I think of some of the obnoxious, arrogant things I said, practically to the degree of “Do you know who you’re talking to?”
    Then I hung up the phone, and of course I was still in the throes of shenpa, convincing myself that I was right to have called and stubbornly fueling my righteous indignation. My daughter had been sitting there listening to the whole thing, and the look on her face, I’d never seen anything like it. She was absolutely flabbergasted, and what she said next I considered a great compliment since I was at the time sixty-eight years old and she was in her mid-forties. She said, “Mom, I have never seen you lose it like that.” I thought that was pretty good. But still I let shenpa take over and kept justifying what I had done. Seeing my daughter’s total astonishment at my outburst finally brought me to my senses. I thought to myself, “Hmmm, well, it’s done. and let’s see what happens next.”
    What happened was I did get exactly what I wanted—you could say, in worldly terms, that I won. But this woman could never see me in the same light again. To this day, she’s very polite and businesslike, but something shifted in her heart because she had always seen me as a spiritual teacher and someone who had it together, and then she got a voice mail from this neurotic witch. It didn’t do any good to say I’m sorry, which I definitely said. I said it for a year almost every time we talked, but there was no way to change what had happened. So I received a valuable lesson from that; sometimes we just have to learn the hard way.
    Shantideva reminds us that by “putting up with little cares,” with minor annoyances, when the shenpa is lightweight, “we train ourselves to work with great adversity.” By putting up with learning to keep our nobility, to not spin off, to not reject our own energy when the challenge is fairly workable, we train for difficult times. This is how we prepare ourselves to work with any highly charged