Real Humility Is Genuineness 

Humility, very simply, is the absence of arrogance.

Where there is no arrogance, you relate with your world as an eye-level situation, without one-upmanship. Because of that, there can be a genuine interchange. Nobody is using their message to put anybody else down, and nobody has to come down or up to the other person’s level. Everything is eye-level.

Humility in the Shambhala tradition also involves some kind of playfulness, which is a sense of humor…

In most religious traditions, you feel humble because of a fear of punishment, pain, and sin. In the Shambhala world you feel full of it. You feel healthy and good. In fact, you feel proud. Therefore, you feel humility. That’s one of the Shambhala contradictions or, we could say, dichotomies.

Real humility is genuineness.

From Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala. Courtesy Walter Fordham & the good folks at Chronicle Project. Subscribe to Ocean of Dharma Quotes of the Week—an email service that brings Trungpa Rinpoche’s Dharma to your inbox several times each week: OceanofDharma.com. Edited and produced by Carolyn Rose Gimian, with thanks to Lady Diana Mukpo and Shambhala Publications.