Taking refuge in Dharma is placing our confidence in practice as a place of safety. This is redefining ‘safety’ as the challenge of practice. Once we become practitioners it is guaranteed that at some point practice will become inconvenient. We will wish to take the easy but less honest option; to make the half-hearted response; to indulge in believing that we have no responsibility for the situation in which we find ourselves. But as practitioners, these are no longer available options.
As warriors we have to live with honour, boldness, and integrity. We cannot allow ourselves to slip into good-enough mediocrity. Our security in terms of realisation is absolutely guaranteed if we remain in the domain of practice. But the path of warriorship may be the harder and less comfortable choice. It may be the path that leads us into exposure and danger. The security of practice may be the least secure path in terms of referential personal safety and referential self-protection.
Spacious Passion, Ngakma Nor’dzin, Aro Books worldwide, 2006, ISBN 978-0-9653948-0, chapter 9 Irrational Reason, page 215 and 216