And Drugu Choegyal Rinpoche said to me, “Now is the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors – moral courage and physical courage, because they’re going to go into the heart of the barbarian powers to dismantle their weapons. And weapons in every sense of the word.
In fighting for the ecological preservation of our planet, Dr. Joanna Macy, a US environmental activist, author, and scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, found strength and hope from the legend of the Shambhala Warriors.
Born into a Protestant Christian family with a lineage of ministers, Joanna Macy had a curious mind and an adventurous spirit from a young age. She studied Biblical History in college, worked for the CIA in Cold War-era Germany, and explored various parts of the world, from India and Sri Lanka to France, the UK, Nigeria, and Tunisia. The consistent themes of her life were to uncover the meaning of existence and to pursue her love of poetry.
She translated the poetry of the 20th-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke from German and often shared with others how her first encounter with his poetry changed her life.
Dr. Joanna Macy: When I prepared to study for a life in the church, I couldn’t take the theorizing, which was highly patriarchal and hierarchical, and I walked out. And I missed it, because I’d been crazy about GOD and Jesus. And I was missing it until I came upon Rilke in a bookstore in Munich. I was a young mother, I was there, and I picked up this “Book of Hours,” “Das Stunden-Buch,” and it fell open to the second poem. Yeah.
“Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen.”
“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one, but I give myself to it. I’ve been circling around GOD, that Primordial Tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years, and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?” Whoa! Hallo, hallo, life! Whoa! GOD’s everywhere!
“Widening Circles” is the title of Dr. Macy’s memoir. In 1965, she became interested in Tibetan Buddhism when she moved to India with her husband and worked with Tibetan refugees. She continued her practice for the rest of her life. In 1978, she earned a PhD in religious studies from Syracuse University, with her dissertation on mutual causality in Buddhism and systems theory.
As early as the 1970s, she became aware of the danger of developing nuclear power and ecosystem destruction and was deeply concerned about the future of the planet. She explained the threat of “poison fire,” or “radioactive waste” in her interview with a journalist from the journal Inquiring Mind.
Dr. Joanna Macy: The radioactivity generated by nuclear waste every year in the United States alone— and we only have a quarter of the world’s reactors— is equal to 240 times the radioactivity released by the Chernobyl disaster. And don’t forget that this radiation has a hazardous life of up to 250,000 years. Some of it, like the nickel in reactor containments, lasts for millions of years.
Now, statistics about the waste are misleading because of what they don’t include: Everything connected with the fuel cycle and nuclear weapons production becomes radioactive. Nuclear waste is not just some byproduct; every building, every truck, every pipe, every piece of equipment, every step of the way becomes not only contaminated but contaminating. In that sense, the ‘poison fire’ is almost mythic in nature. Like King Midas in his greed, it transforms what it touches. […]
We cannot uninvent the nuclear technology, so we must remember what happened at Alamogordo, at Hiroshima, at Nagasaki, at the testing site in the Nevada desert, what happened to the people around Hanford. This must be enshrined in our collective memory so that we can learn from it and be vigilant.
In 1988, Dr. Macy co-founded the Nuclear Guardianship Project, calling for “community-controlled, ground-level care of radioactive waste instead of transporting it to deep geologic burial sites as the government now proposes to do.”
Moreover, realizing the toll that the dark reality could take on the psychological well-being of activists like herself, she began holding workshops on the subject from a philosophical and religious perspective, creating a safe space for kindred souls. Over the years, her workshops and global networks evolved into a global network called the “Work That Reconnects.”
“Her workshops held across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australasia helped thousands transform despair over environmental crises into collaborative action. As noted on workthatreconnects.org, her 17 books, including ‘World as Lover, World as Self,’ ‘Active Hope,’ and translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry with Anita Barrows, explored the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the nuclear age and eco logical awareness. Her 1983 book ‘Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age’ addresses the emotional toll of global threats, while her translations like Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours’ brought poetic depth to her teachings for Shambhala Publications. Her work at Naropa University, where the Joanna Macy Center for Resilience and Regeneration was established in 2015, and her teaching at institutions like the California Institute of Integral Studies cemented her legacy, as highlighted by Naropa.edu.”
Often in her workshops, Dr. Joanna Macy shares the Shambhala Warrior prophecy she learned from her teacher Drugu Choegyal Rinpoche decades ago.
Dr. Joanna Macy: And Drugu Choegyal Rinpoche said to me, “Now is the time when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors – moral courage and physical courage, because they’re going to go into the heart of the barbarian powers to dismantle their weapons. And weapons in every sense of the word. The bombs and armaments manufactured and deployed, and the corridors of power where the decisions are made – to dismantle the weapons.”
And he said, “Joanna, mark this. The Shambhala warriors know that these weapons can be dismantled. Because they are ‘manomaya’ – mindmade. They are made by the human mind. They can be unmade by the human mind. Because the disasters that are threatening us and unfolding are not brought about by some extraterrestrial force or some satanic deity or even by an unchangeable, inexorable fate. They arise from our relationships, and our priorities, and our habits. They’re made by the human mind; they can be unmade by the human mind.” “So the time is upon us,” he said, “when the Shambhala warriors go into training.”
Well, you can imagine. I said, “How do they train?” And he said, “They train in the use of two weapons.” That was the term he used. “What are they?” I asked. And he held up his hands the way the lamas hold the ritual objects in the great lama dances of his people. And he said, “One is compassion, and the other is insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. And you need both. One is not enough. You need the compassion because that provides you the fuel, the motive force to get you out there where you need to be, to do what you need to do. And what it consists of basically is not being afraid of the suffering of your world. And you know when you’re not afraid of the suffering of your world, nothing can stop you.” “But that by itself,” he said, “is too hot. It can burn you out. So you need the other. You need that wisdom, that insight into the mutual belonging of everything that is interwoven as it is in the web of life. And when you have that, you see, you know that this is not a war between the good guys and the bad guys, but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. And we are so interwoven in the web of life that even the smallest act with clear intention has repercussions through that web that we can barely see.” “But that,” he said,” is a little cool by itself. So you need the heat of the compassion.”
And if you’ve looked at the Tibetan monks chanting, often you will see their “pujas” (devotional rituals), you will see their hands doing moving mudras and often as not they are dancing the interplay between “Karuna and Prajna” – compassion and wisdom. Well, that’s the prophecy. And I was… I thought, “This is it. I’ve got my marching orders.”
Dr. Joanna Macy embodied the spirit of the Shambhala warrior. She was not afraid of demonstrating her emotions in public, which stemmed from her deep compassion for the world.
Dr. Joanna Macy: I can see why the Buddhist teachers put such great prize on “Bodhicitta,” that motivation for the welfare of all, so don’t take that for granted, cherish it, blow on that little ember, make it into a flame.
As Jesus said, and I just come right along with that Bodhicitta, “Ye are the salt of the Earth, but if the salt loses it savor where with will it be salted?” That’s what intention is like. Intention, your motivation. Don’t take that for granted, bless it, that itch, that needing to take part.
The courage to feel what you fear in the present moment, as you become present to your world, then you feel what you’re carrying, that usually, if you’re being rushed and hurried out of your minds, you don’t bother paying– you try to pave it over, block it down, shut it down, turn away, turn it off. But try as we might, it comes up again – the grief, the outrage, the raw fear – what in GOD’s name are we doing to our world and to each other?! And you now are not going to fall for the ploy of the Industrial Growth Society to pathologize that pain. Hear me? Don’t let people, therapists or well-meaning friends, try to explain it away, in terms of your personal biography or that time of month. It is a measure of your evolution, it is a measure of your humanity, it is a measure of your nobility that you have a heart and mind big enough to see and empathize with the outrage being inflicted on our world and all our relations!
At the same time, Dr. Macy refused to drown in her emotions and offered wise insights, thus putting the crisis into perspective.
Dr. Joanna Macy: You see, we live in a time when our karma, that is the consequences of our actions, thanks to science and the industrial capitalism, extends into geological time, reaches of time, hundreds of thousands of generations. I learned this in my work around nuclear waste. The decisions we make right now in a multitude of activities will have a direct effect on whether future generations, centuries and centuries, millennia from now, will be able to be born sound of mind and body. You’d better believe that. So the future ones are therefore in our actions right here now – feathered ones and scaled ones, and so are the ancestors by the same token. I want you to feel them present, along with the brothers and sisters of all species and forms of beauty and strength. And you can let them be yours. Yeah, you deserve that, because they’re on your side, you see. To be a human now in this darkness of uncertainty, they’re all plugging for us. Please feel them, the ancestors and the future beings. Let them laugh in your ear as well as slap you on the backside and pull you forward, because we have great work to do.
Dr. Joanna Macy passed away peacefully at her home in July 2025 at the age of 96, but her legacy lives on in all the courageous activists – the prophesied Shambhala warriors. They continue to fight, not with weapons but with compassion and wisdom, for the ecology of the Earth and for Her inhabitants’ right to live.
f1: She [Joanna Macy] talks about business as usual, which is this worldview of hyper-extraction, hyper-consumption.
f2: We’re also hearing the messages of the great unraveling, because the systems are unraveling, they’re losing their coherence, ecosystems are collapsing.
m: The great turning is this moment in which we get to decide as a human species what the future of this planet will look like and how we want to be with one another.
f3: We have the capacity to rewrite the narrative of business as usual and actually tell a story collectively that we are healing the world, and we are taking action on some of these issues that are really important and pivotal, so it’s rewriting the social narrative that’s shared between us.
The Tibetan prophecy about the emergence of Shambhala that Dr. Joanna Macy discussed has deep roots that go back thousands of years. We’ll continue to explore them in the next episode.
