05.15.2026 What Tears Teach Us During our live meditation on Wednesday, our May resident teacher, Rev. Marvin Harada, shared a story from his teacher, Professor Shigaraki, who once learned an unexpected life lesson from a cab driver in Kyoto. The story went like this: One day, after a rainfall, the sky in Kyoto was especially blue and clear. On this day, Professor Shigaraki started a conversation with his cab driver. He said, “Isn’t it nice, the day after it rains? The sky is so clear.” The cab driver replied: “Yes — and that’s true for us humans, too.” Confused, Professor Shigaraki asked what he meant. “Sometimes,” the driver said, “we humans have to shed tears to clear our vision.”  “That’s a tremendous lesson, isn’t it?” Rev. Harada asked. “I’m sure many of you have experienced the loss of a loved one. Maybe you shed many tears of sadness. Maybe it felt like an ocean of tears,” he continued. “But, as this cab driver said, there’s meaning in those tears if it clears our vision. We see life a little more clearly, a little differently. We have been taught the impermanence of life because of the loss of our loved one. We know life is so fragile and precious. Now, we’re living life more gratefully.” As Rev. Harada told this story, my own eyes pricked with tears. Just two hours before the meditation, a friend and I had been welcomed into her friend’s living room to say a final goodbye to a dog who would pass the next day. I had taken care of him for a month last spring while his family was away, and again for a weekend this year. I’d only spent a mere thirty-something days with him in his sixteen-and-a-half years, but it was enough to love him, as things go for me and dogs. Enough to want to see him one last time. We left with tears in our eyes, our vision undoubtedly cleared to the reality of impermanence — to the preciousness of each and every life. I’ve cried over a myriad of things in my life that didn’t really warrant the reaction. I’ve also bit my cheek and held the tears in through moments that called for it loud and clear, often spilling out hours, days, or weeks later. I’m happy to now hold the wisdom that the tears have never once been wasted, offering their own sort of cleansing each time. The three pieces below each offer bits of wisdom on letting your tears fall. May they help to clear your vision this weekend. —Lilly Greenblatt, digital editor, Lion’s Roar The Tears I Shed Yesterday Have Become Rain Thich Nhat Hanh personally knows how we all suffer. Yet, he teaches, every single one of us has the capacity to transform our suffering. Line by line, a man reads one of Thay’s poems and the rest of us repeat it. We are a powerful human microphone that can be heard even over the thunder: I walk on thorns, but firmly, as among flowers. I keep my head high. Rhymes bloom among the sounds of bombs and mortars. The tears I shed yesterday have become rain. I feel calm hearing its sound on the thatched roof. Childhood, my birthland, is calling me, and the rains melt my despair. Rain, tears, tea. The clouds above look interminable, but Thay teaches that they can and do transform. He says, “If you don’t practice, you do not know how to handle your suffering and you continue to cry a lot.” Yet with mindfulness, tears become rain. New growth follows. ADVERTISEMENT When Sadness Rages Like Fire Pema Khandro Rinpoche shares the life of the Tibetan yogi Shabkar, whose practice and teachings were inseparable from loss and grief. In his autobiography, Shabkar recounts stopping at Mount Kailash to give advice to an assembly of people who followed him there. His speech was a long exposition about waking up from the denial of impermanence, a teaching typical of introductions to Vajrayana. But it also included something not so typical: a rare lesson on the importance of crying. Shabkar wrote: To cry when parting from one’s guru, and when one’s father or mother dies, is a noble thing in this world. It is something you should wish for, not something despicable. Those who don’t cry need not feel uneasy about the many who do; those who are crying need not feel ashamed, since crying is quite just on this occasion. Anyone who feels like crying should just go ahead and weep — there is nothing wrong with it. Shabkar’s suggestion that we should not hesitate to cry when the occasion calls for it, and also that we shouldn’t feel guilty if we can’t, is advice that would fit in well with modern psychology, which reminds us again and again that there is no one right way to grieve. That Time I Sobbed My Way Through a Himalayan Meditation Retreat After soldiering through his grief, Jaimal Yogis sat down, looked at his mind, and let the floodgates open. There were a lot of tears — but who said that’s a bad thing? It was interesting: once I stopped being angry at myself for not being enlightened, for being a normal human with normal feelings, the crying and sobbing and pounding ceased to be so bad. Of course, I wouldn’t have minded if they left and never came back, but still, when I surrendered in the midst of the bleating and the hiccuping, the wave of emotion became a surge — more akin to unrestrained laughter than it was to depression. It was actually strangely pleasant. And the more the tears were allowed to flow, the more the sobbing shifted away from Sati. There I’d be, head in pillow, but I was also eleven, watching Mom collapse by the sink as Pa said he was leaving the marriage. I was also six at a new kindergarten, terrified to speak to the other kids, who looked so easy and carefree. I was also fifteen, getting high and caught in another stupid lie that was hurting someone I loved.