Choosing a Warrior Hear Path

Michele Benzamin-Miki

We think we have a choice. I am an artist, a painter, I didn't choose to be.

I am a martial artist and a meditation, I didn't choose those arts.

I teach kids in the high risk category and neighborhoods, I didn't exactly make that choice.

I am a woman martial arts instructor, why would I choose to become that?

I was born in America, a biracial half-Japanese girl, that choice was made for me.

I am teaching Waking-Up Meditation to women facing life in and out of terminal illness, with death as very a real presence. Who made that choice?

I am also teaching the way of harmony and peace and liberation, to privileged middle-class white folks. What!?

I am on a warrior heart path, and I didn't even know it. I thought I had a choice.

I thought we all had choices, after all, we live in a consumer society and have available to us anything we desire, including spiritual paths. With very little effort and commitment in time, we can feel connected to something that will smooth out the edges of our loneliness and isolation, or somehow satisfy our need to achieve or secure our future, with enlightenment, or eternal life.

We think we have the right to these choices.

Looking back on my life I see that the choices that I made, have very little to do with who I am and where I am now.

I would like to be clear, that my life has been a constant aim and shooting of the arrow to my target. But without checking my intention or motivation, or even the true nature of my target, did I expect anything that would lead me to true happiness?

Today I realize that happiness is the only choice that is my own to make. The process of creativity; the act of painting or performance is true happiness for me.

When I move my sword through the air it is my body my breath my mind that you see move.

When I am with these children and young people, who are the invisible and dispossessed of our society, I can only BE my true self in front of them. And as difficult, and unglamorous, and often unsatisfying, as it is to be present there with them, attentive, this is the warrior heart path.

"Warrior" because it evokes Compassion and "Heart Path" because, miraculously and incomprehensibly, it evokes true happiness.

Copyright © Michele Benzamin-Miki