On a hot August day three and a half years ago Tsering Everest entered retreat. Amid a small group of sangha members, she said good-bye and walked through the front door of her house. This February she finished the retreat and opened her doors to welcome a sizable group of sangha members and friends into her home. A large tsog feas twas spread on tables in the living room, and everyone offered katags and gifts.(Jane Tromge arrived with a most appropriate gift, a garment bag for Tsering's upcoming travels.) Tsering spoke briefly, saying that without the lama's blessings there cannot be even the thought of anything but the suffering of samsara. The Windhorse spoke with her later in the week about her retreat.
After ten years of traveling with Rinpoche as his interpreter and being so close to him, it was really difficult for me in retreat to hear about his many travels and activities. It was very hard not being included in them, because I take so much joy in sangha activities,watching Rinpoche's magnificence, his display, all the activities he gives us to participate in and enact our dharma intentions through. I had dreams of sitting with him and being so happy. But when you're alone in your house practicing, you're never really separate from Rinpoche, because you're doing what he's taught you to do. Your meditation is a process of remaining inseparable from the lama. I once said to Rinpoche during one of his visits, "I really miss you," and he asked, "Why you missing me?" He started to scold and tease me, saying, "You're supposed to visualize me on the top of your head all the time." And I said, "That is true, but this one on the top of my head doesn't tease me, doesn't make me laugh."
So there was a maturing, a weaning, I had to go through. In that process I found another, more profound level to the relationship, one where there really isn't an absence, where the love, compassion and mind of the guru are not bounded. The quality of practice that's immediate and awake–the presence and openness–is the essence of the Iama. If we don't make this leap, then our practice doesn't ripen past a certain dualistic adoration. Though that is wonderful and a crucial step we go through, we have to go to the next step of understanding everything as the lama. Then there is the non-differentiation of one's mind as the lama.
I'd wanted to do retreat for some time but it was impossible because of the service I needed to perform. I couldn't justify a retreat, so I just left it up to Rinpoche. To my surprise, on my thirty fifth birthday Rinpoche said it was time.
Many practitioners have the karma to go away to a cave, but I didn't do retreat in that way. I had Board of Directors meetings in my home; my husband and son who were here all the time, going in and out; doors were slamming and cars coming and going.
So I took a slightly middle way, but it was the kind of retreat that I think is more accessible to householders with children. There is something you offer your children by meditating with them nearby. They learn what it is like to have a spiritual focus to their lives. And even if they come and go, there is an amazing stability. For almost four years I was for my son this woman who sat in her room and practiced. He would come in and sit beside my meditation seat and tell me about his life and the high school dances and the girls. And it all happened in the context of the blessings of the practice.
The challenge was having distraction, yet staying in the practice. It is a little fictitious to take yourself away from everything, to try and turn the world off so that you are undistracted. Everything is the display of the mind. If you think something is a distraction, that's just your judgment of a phenomenon that is manifesting. In my years of traveling with Rinpoche, it was always a matter of practicing while traveling on airplanes and dealing with constant activity. And so even in retreat, even in a cave, there is going to be the mouse chewing on your cookies.
Out of his kindness, Rinpoche doesn't let us go into retreat just as soon as we come up with the idea and there is some kind of glamour or mystique about it. It's not so much that people run away from their lives to do retreat as that they are drawn toward the image they have of it. But unless you're well steeped in the view and understand how to implement it, it is just your ordinary mind that you are sitting with in retreat.
If you are well established in your practice, you have a better chance for effective meditation, because there are a lot of storms in the mind. Developing pure guru yoga and ngondro, and an ability to meditate without sitting, are not just preliminaries you need to rush beyond to get to something greater or more wonderful. Each of them is complete in itself if you just let your mind settle in the moment and abide in that. Then they ripen and become methods you rely on throughout your practice.
Meditation is a process of chipping away, of cutting off andsevering, of splitting open and opening up, of letting go. It's not just an arbitrary process; it's a very specific, extremely refined, well-honed system that has been developed over centuries and comes directly from the purity of absolute being. You use all the tools you've been given. So if you fly through the ngondro in order to get to something else, later you'll be handicapped. If you wanted to become a nuclear physicist but didn't want to waste your time learning to read or add, you'd have nothing to work with.
These methods work for Westerners. But a person also has to understand his or her responsibility in the process; it's not all the lama's job. In a disciple guru relationship the disciple and the teacher both have a responsibility.
The purpose of what the teacher does with and for you is your own enlightenment. If you assess the quality of the teacher as you would that of a politician or a parent, if you judge him on whether he sips his tea properly or whether he looks and smiles at you, you are fooling yourself. What you need to require is that your relationship with the teacher heighten your awareness, that it bring about more clarity, selflessness and compassion. And whether it's through the exposure of your faults, which you then overcome, or through the example of the lama's qualities, your responsibility as a student is to use the relationship with the teacher for that purpose. Then the teacher can't fail you, because you're practicing guru yoga in the way it is meant to be practiced. Then the relationship is perfect; it's one that can produce spiritual maturity and transform your understanding of reality.
If we assess the teacher's qualities with the right criteria, we establish a relationship that wiII be of benefit to ourselves and to others. That is lineage. By relying on a teacher as a light into our own mind, we gain what he has gained from his own teachers through this process,and the lineage goes forward.
In the beginning of the ngondro practice, we call on the lama as the infallible constant protector–as one who protects us not from falling rocks, but from the swamp of ordinary perception. Eventually, by going through the process fully. we overcome dualistic perception and understand the nature of our mind, which is none other than the mind of the lama. It becomes a complete resolution of the separateness that now dominates and that pains us so deeply.
When I first met Rinpoche, he couldn't speak English and he didn't have a translator. There was nothing at all–no shrine, no statues. He would sit and draw the hands of the Buddha with us so we would have something to do. He said mantra slowly for us and waited for us to catch up.
We would recite maybe twenty-five mantra in an hour. We had no idea what it was, what it meant. It was just singing with Rinpoche. He literally carried us, like small children who can't yet walk. That's how determined he was. And he still does that. He carries you until you get to the point where you can take a step. I feel as though I'm still just a toddler. The spiritual path is really a lifelong experience. As Dudjom Rinpoche said, "Don't talk about how long you did retreat, life is retreat." This doesn't mean you have to spend your whole life in a cave. Your life is your retreat, and retreat takes your whole life.
In doing retreat, you feel tremendous responsibility to the people who support you and take care of things for you. That responsibility extends outward until you feel that when you practice you're a representative of everyone incapable of the necessary intent and motivation. At one point I realized that if people only knew why they suffer, they would do dharma and reveal the pure awareness of their mind. So I would visualize that I was everybody else and then do the practice.
Compassion for the state of beings is very important for everything to shift. Compassion is really the catalyst. I had heard this many times in the teachings, and had always felt that my heart was open to beings. Finally, I understood that I would rather suffer completely myself than have anyone else ever suffer and in that kind of recognition there was no more suffering. It was very illuminating to find out that you can't get to that experience by thinking, ''I'll get somewhere by having compassion." It has to go out of your head and into your heart as it opens and opens.
You do retreat with the understanding that you are carrying everyone–the frogs in the backyard, hell beings, hungry ghosts–because they don't know how to do it themselves. If they could, they would. There is simply the fact that they don't know what is standing between them and the truth. You take that position because you do know. You visualize that as you receive blessings, they all receive blessings and become aware of their true nature.
On a hot August day three and a half years ago Tsering Everest entered retreat. Amid a small group of sangha members, she said good-bye and walked through the front door of her house. This February she finished the retreat and opened her doors to welcome a sizable group of sangha members and friends into her home. A large tsog feas twas spread on tables in the living room, and everyone offered katags and gifts.(Jane Tromge arrived with a most appropriate gift, a garment bag for Tsering's upcoming travels.) Tsering spoke briefly, saying that without the lama's blessings there cannot be even the thought of anything but the suffering of samsara. The Windhorse spoke with her later in the week about her retreat.
After ten years of traveling with Rinpoche as his interpreter and being so close to him, it was really difficult for me in retreat to hear about his many travels and activities. It was very hard not being included in them, because I take so much joy in sangha activities,watching Rinpoche's magnificence, his display, all the activities he gives us to participate in and enact our dharma intentions through. I had dreams of sitting with him and being so happy. But when you're alone in your house practicing, you're never really separate from Rinpoche, because you're doing what he's taught you to do. Your meditation is a process of remaining inseparable from the lama. I once said to Rinpoche during one of his visits, "I really miss you," and he asked, "Why you missing me?" He started to scold and tease me, saying, "You're supposed to visualize me on the top of your head all the time." And I said, "That is true, but this one on the top of my head doesn't tease me, doesn't make me laugh."
So there was a maturing, a weaning, I had to go through. In that process I found another, more profound level to the relationship, one where there really isn't an absence, where the love, compassion and mind of the guru are not bounded. The quality of practice that's immediate and awake–the presence and openness–is the essence of the Iama. If we don't make this leap, then our practice doesn't ripen past a certain dualistic adoration. Though that is wonderful and a crucial step we go through, we have to go to the next step of understanding everything as the lama. Then there is the non-differentiation of one's mind as the lama.
I'd wanted to do retreat for some time but it was impossible because of the service I needed to perform. I couldn't justify a retreat, so I just left it up to Rinpoche. To my surprise, on my thirty fifth birthday Rinpoche said it was time.
Many practitioners have the karma to go away to a cave, but I didn't do retreat in that way. I had Board of Directors meetings in my home; my husband and son who were here all the time, going in and out; doors were slamming and cars coming and going.
So I took a slightly middle way, but it was the kind of retreat that I think is more accessible to householders with children. There is something you offer your children by meditating with them nearby. They learn what it is like to have a spiritual focus to their lives. And even if they come and go, there is an amazing stability. For almost four years I was for my son this woman who sat in her room and practiced. He would come in and sit beside my meditation seat and tell me about his life and the high school dances and the girls. And it all happened in the context of the blessings of the practice.
The challenge was having distraction, yet staying in the practice. It is a little fictitious to take yourself away from everything, to try and turn the world off so that you are undistracted. Everything is the display of the mind. If you think something is a distraction, that's just your judgment of a phenomenon that is manifesting. In my years of traveling with Rinpoche, it was always a matter of practicing while traveling on airplanes and dealing with constant activity. And so even in retreat, even in a cave, there is going to be the mouse chewing on your cookies.
Out of his kindness, Rinpoche doesn't let us go into retreat just as soon as we come up with the idea and there is some kind of glamour or mystique about it. It's not so much that people run away from their lives to do retreat as that they are drawn toward the image they have of it. But unless you're well steeped in the view and understand how to implement it, it is just your ordinary mind that you are sitting with in retreat.
If you are well established in your practice, you have a better chance for effective meditation, because there are a lot of storms in the mind. Developing pure guru yoga and ngondro, and an ability to meditate without sitting, are not just preliminaries you need to rush beyond to get to something greater or more wonderful. Each of them is complete in itself if you just let your mind settle in the moment and abide in that. Then they ripen and become methods you rely on throughout your practice.
Meditation is a process of chipping away, of cutting off andsevering, of splitting open and opening up, of letting go. It's not just an arbitrary process; it's a very specific, extremely refined, well-honed system that has been developed over centuries and comes directly from the purity of absolute being. You use all the tools you've been given. So if you fly through the ngondro in order to get to something else, later you'll be handicapped. If you wanted to become a nuclear physicist but didn't want to waste your time learning to read or add, you'd have nothing to work with.
These methods work for Westerners. But a person also has to understand his or her responsibility in the process; it's not all the lama's job. In a disciple guru relationship the disciple and the teacher both have a responsibility.
The purpose of what the teacher does with and for you is your own enlightenment. If you assess the quality of the teacher as you would that of a politician or a parent, if you judge him on whether he sips his tea properly or whether he looks and smiles at you, you are fooling yourself. What you need to require is that your relationship with the teacher heighten your awareness, that it bring about more clarity, selflessness and compassion. And whether it's through the exposure of your faults, which you then overcome, or through the example of the lama's qualities, your responsibility as a student is to use the relationship with the teacher for that purpose. Then the teacher can't fail you, because you're practicing guru yoga in the way it is meant to be practiced. Then the relationship is perfect; it's one that can produce spiritual maturity and transform your understanding of reality.
If we assess the teacher's qualities with the right criteria, we establish a relationship that wiII be of benefit to ourselves and to others. That is lineage. By relying on a teacher as a light into our own mind, we gain what he has gained from his own teachers through this process,and the lineage goes forward.
In the beginning of the ngondro practice, we call on the lama as the infallible constant protector–as one who protects us not from falling rocks, but from the swamp of ordinary perception. Eventually, by going through the process fully. we overcome dualistic perception and understand the nature of our mind, which is none other than the mind of the lama. It becomes a complete resolution of the separateness that now dominates and that pains us so deeply.
When I first met Rinpoche, he couldn't speak English and he didn't have a translator. There was nothing at all–no shrine, no statues. He would sit and draw the hands of the Buddha with us so we would have something to do. He said mantra slowly for us and waited for us to catch up.
We would recite maybe twenty-five mantra in an hour. We had no idea what it was, what it meant. It was just singing with Rinpoche. He literally carried us, like small children who can't yet walk. That's how determined he was. And he still does that. He carries you until you get to the point where you can take a step. I feel as though I'm still just a toddler. The spiritual path is really a lifelong experience. As Dudjom Rinpoche said, "Don't talk about how long you did retreat, life is retreat." This doesn't mean you have to spend your whole life in a cave. Your life is your retreat, and retreat takes your whole life.
In doing retreat, you feel tremendous responsibility to the people who support you and take care of things for you. That responsibility extends outward until you feel that when you practice you're a representative of everyone incapable of the necessary intent and motivation. At one point I realized that if people only knew why they suffer, they would do dharma and reveal the pure awareness of their mind. So I would visualize that I was everybody else and then do the practice.
Compassion for the state of beings is very important for everything to shift. Compassion is really the catalyst. I had heard this many times in the teachings, and had always felt that my heart was open to beings. Finally, I understood that I would rather suffer completely myself than have anyone else ever suffer and in that kind of recognition there was no more suffering. It was very illuminating to find out that you can't get to that experience by thinking, ''I'll get somewhere by having compassion." It has to go out of your head and into your heart as it opens and opens.
You do retreat with the understanding that you are carrying everyone–the frogs in the backyard, hell beings, hungry ghosts–because they don't know how to do it themselves. If they could, they would. There is simply the fact that they don't know what is standing between them and the truth. You take that position because you do know. You visualize that as you receive blessings, they all receive blessings and become aware of their true nature.
On a hot August day three and a half years ago Tsering Everest entered retreat. Amid a small group of sangha members, she said good-bye and walked through the front door of her house. This February she finished the retreat and opened her doors to welcome a sizable group of sangha members and friends into her home. A large tsog feas twas spread on tables in the living room, and everyone offered katags and gifts.(Jane Tromge arrived with a most appropriate gift, a garment bag for Tsering's upcoming travels.) Tsering spoke briefly, saying that without the lama's blessings there cannot be even the thought of anything but the suffering of samsara. The Windhorse spoke with her later in the week about her retreat.
After ten years of traveling with Rinpoche as his interpreter and being so close to him, it was really difficult for me in retreat to hear about his many travels and activities. It was very hard not being included in them, because I take so much joy in sangha activities,watching Rinpoche's magnificence, his display, all the activities he gives us to participate in and enact our dharma intentions through. I had dreams of sitting with him and being so happy. But when you're alone in your house practicing, you're never really separate from Rinpoche, because you're doing what he's taught you to do. Your meditation is a process of remaining inseparable from the lama. I once said to Rinpoche during one of his visits, "I really miss you," and he asked, "Why you missing me?" He started to scold and tease me, saying, "You're supposed to visualize me on the top of your head all the time." And I said, "That is true, but this one on the top of my head doesn't tease me, doesn't make me laugh."
So there was a maturing, a weaning, I had to go through. In that process I found another, more profound level to the relationship, one where there really isn't an absence, where the love, compassion and mind of the guru are not bounded. The quality of practice that's immediate and awake–the presence and openness–is the essence of the Iama. If we don't make this leap, then our practice doesn't ripen past a certain dualistic adoration. Though that is wonderful and a crucial step we go through, we have to go to the next step of understanding everything as the lama. Then there is the non-differentiation of one's mind as the lama.
I'd wanted to do retreat for some time but it was impossible because of the service I needed to perform. I couldn't justify a retreat, so I just left it up to Rinpoche. To my surprise, on my thirty fifth birthday Rinpoche said it was time.
Many practitioners have the karma to go away to a cave, but I didn't do retreat in that way. I had Board of Directors meetings in my home; my husband and son who were here all the time, going in and out; doors were slamming and cars coming and going.
So I took a slightly middle way, but it was the kind of retreat that I think is more accessible to householders with children. There is something you offer your children by meditating with them nearby. They learn what it is like to have a spiritual focus to their lives. And even if they come and go, there is an amazing stability. For almost four years I was for my son this woman who sat in her room and practiced. He would come in and sit beside my meditation seat and tell me about his life and the high school dances and the girls. And it all happened in the context of the blessings of the practice.
The challenge was having distraction, yet staying in the practice. It is a little fictitious to take yourself away from everything, to try and turn the world off so that you are undistracted. Everything is the display of the mind. If you think something is a distraction, that's just your judgment of a phenomenon that is manifesting. In my years of traveling with Rinpoche, it was always a matter of practicing while traveling on airplanes and dealing with constant activity. And so even in retreat, even in a cave, there is going to be the mouse chewing on your cookies.
Out of his kindness, Rinpoche doesn't let us go into retreat just as soon as we come up with the idea and there is some kind of glamour or mystique about it. It's not so much that people run away from their lives to do retreat as that they are drawn toward the image they have of it. But unless you're well steeped in the view and understand how to implement it, it is just your ordinary mind that you are sitting with in retreat.
If you are well established in your practice, you have a better chance for effective meditation, because there are a lot of storms in the mind. Developing pure guru yoga and ngondro, and an ability to meditate without sitting, are not just preliminaries you need to rush beyond to get to something greater or more wonderful. Each of them is complete in itself if you just let your mind settle in the moment and abide in that. Then they ripen and become methods you rely on throughout your practice.
Meditation is a process of chipping away, of cutting off andsevering, of splitting open and opening up, of letting go. It's not just an arbitrary process; it's a very specific, extremely refined, well-honed system that has been developed over centuries and comes directly from the purity of absolute being. You use all the tools you've been given. So if you fly through the ngondro in order to get to something else, later you'll be handicapped. If you wanted to become a nuclear physicist but didn't want to waste your time learning to read or add, you'd have nothing to work with.
These methods work for Westerners. But a person also has to understand his or her responsibility in the process; it's not all the lama's job. In a disciple guru relationship the disciple and the teacher both have a responsibility.
The purpose of what the teacher does with and for you is your own enlightenment. If you assess the quality of the teacher as you would that of a politician or a parent, if you judge him on whether he sips his tea properly or whether he looks and smiles at you, you are fooling yourself. What you need to require is that your relationship with the teacher heighten your awareness, that it bring about more clarity, selflessness and compassion. And whether it's through the exposure of your faults, which you then overcome, or through the example of the lama's qualities, your responsibility as a student is to use the relationship with the teacher for that purpose. Then the teacher can't fail you, because you're practicing guru yoga in the way it is meant to be practiced. Then the relationship is perfect; it's one that can produce spiritual maturity and transform your understanding of reality.
If we assess the teacher's qualities with the right criteria, we establish a relationship that wiII be of benefit to ourselves and to others. That is lineage. By relying on a teacher as a light into our own mind, we gain what he has gained from his own teachers through this process,and the lineage goes forward.
In the beginning of the ngondro practice, we call on the lama as the infallible constant protector–as one who protects us not from falling rocks, but from the swamp of ordinary perception. Eventually, by going through the process fully. we overcome dualistic perception and understand the nature of our mind, which is none other than the mind of the lama. It becomes a complete resolution of the separateness that now dominates and that pains us so deeply.
When I first met Rinpoche, he couldn't speak English and he didn't have a translator. There was nothing at all–no shrine, no statues. He would sit and draw the hands of the Buddha with us so we would have something to do. He said mantra slowly for us and waited for us to catch up.
We would recite maybe twenty-five mantra in an hour. We had no idea what it was, what it meant. It was just singing with Rinpoche. He literally carried us, like small children who can't yet walk. That's how determined he was. And he still does that. He carries you until you get to the point where you can take a step. I feel as though I'm still just a toddler. The spiritual path is really a lifelong experience. As Dudjom Rinpoche said, "Don't talk about how long you did retreat, life is retreat." This doesn't mean you have to spend your whole life in a cave. Your life is your retreat, and retreat takes your whole life.
In doing retreat, you feel tremendous responsibility to the people who support you and take care of things for you. That responsibility extends outward until you feel that when you practice you're a representative of everyone incapable of the necessary intent and motivation. At one point I realized that if people only knew why they suffer, they would do dharma and reveal the pure awareness of their mind. So I would visualize that I was everybody else and then do the practice.
Compassion for the state of beings is very important for everything to shift. Compassion is really the catalyst. I had heard this many times in the teachings, and had always felt that my heart was open to beings. Finally, I understood that I would rather suffer completely myself than have anyone else ever suffer and in that kind of recognition there was no more suffering. It was very illuminating to find out that you can't get to that experience by thinking, ''I'll get somewhere by having compassion." It has to go out of your head and into your heart as it opens and opens.
You do retreat with the understanding that you are carrying everyone–the frogs in the backyard, hell beings, hungry ghosts–because they don't know how to do it themselves. If they could, they would. There is simply the fact that they don't know what is standing between them and the truth. You take that position because you do know. You visualize that as you receive blessings, they all receive blessings and become aware of their true nature.
On a hot August day three and a half years ago Tsering Everest entered retreat. Amid a small group of sangha members, she said good-bye and walked through the front door of her house. This February she finished the retreat and opened her doors to welcome a sizable group of sangha members and friends into her home. A large tsog feas twas spread on tables in the living room, and everyone offered katags and gifts.(Jane Tromge arrived with a most appropriate gift, a garment bag for Tsering's upcoming travels.) Tsering spoke briefly, saying that without the lama's blessings there cannot be even the thought of anything but the suffering of samsara. The Windhorse spoke with her later in the week about her retreat.
After ten years of traveling with Rinpoche as his interpreter and being so close to him, it was really difficult for me in retreat to hear about his many travels and activities. It was very hard not being included in them, because I take so much joy in sangha activities,watching Rinpoche's magnificence, his display, all the activities he gives us to participate in and enact our dharma intentions through. I had dreams of sitting with him and being so happy. But when you're alone in your house practicing, you're never really separate from Rinpoche, because you're doing what he's taught you to do. Your meditation is a process of remaining inseparable from the lama. I once said to Rinpoche during one of his visits, "I really miss you," and he asked, "Why you missing me?" He started to scold and tease me, saying, "You're supposed to visualize me on the top of your head all the time." And I said, "That is true, but this one on the top of my head doesn't tease me, doesn't make me laugh."
So there was a maturing, a weaning, I had to go through. In that process I found another, more profound level to the relationship, one where there really isn't an absence, where the love, compassion and mind of the guru are not bounded. The quality of practice that's immediate and awake–the presence and openness–is the essence of the Iama. If we don't make this leap, then our practice doesn't ripen past a certain dualistic adoration. Though that is wonderful and a crucial step we go through, we have to go to the next step of understanding everything as the lama. Then there is the non-differentiation of one's mind as the lama.
I'd wanted to do retreat for some time but it was impossible because of the service I needed to perform. I couldn't justify a retreat, so I just left it up to Rinpoche. To my surprise, on my thirty fifth birthday Rinpoche said it was time.
Many practitioners have the karma to go away to a cave, but I didn't do retreat in that way. I had Board of Directors meetings in my home; my husband and son who were here all the time, going in and out; doors were slamming and cars coming and going.
So I took a slightly middle way, but it was the kind of retreat that I think is more accessible to householders with children. There is something you offer your children by meditating with them nearby. They learn what it is like to have a spiritual focus to their lives. And even if they come and go, there is an amazing stability. For almost four years I was for my son this woman who sat in her room and practiced. He would come in and sit beside my meditation seat and tell me about his life and the high school dances and the girls. And it all happened in the context of the blessings of the practice.
The challenge was having distraction, yet staying in the practice. It is a little fictitious to take yourself away from everything, to try and turn the world off so that you are undistracted. Everything is the display of the mind. If you think something is a distraction, that's just your judgment of a phenomenon that is manifesting. In my years of traveling with Rinpoche, it was always a matter of practicing while traveling on airplanes and dealing with constant activity. And so even in retreat, even in a cave, there is going to be the mouse chewing on your cookies.
Out of his kindness, Rinpoche doesn't let us go into retreat just as soon as we come up with the idea and there is some kind of glamour or mystique about it. It's not so much that people run away from their lives to do retreat as that they are drawn toward the image they have of it. But unless you're well steeped in the view and understand how to implement it, it is just your ordinary mind that you are sitting with in retreat.
If you are well established in your practice, you have a better chance for effective meditation, because there are a lot of storms in the mind. Developing pure guru yoga and ngondro, and an ability to meditate without sitting, are not just preliminaries you need to rush beyond to get to something greater or more wonderful. Each of them is complete in itself if you just let your mind settle in the moment and abide in that. Then they ripen and become methods you rely on throughout your practice.
Meditation is a process of chipping away, of cutting off andsevering, of splitting open and opening up, of letting go. It's not just an arbitrary process; it's a very specific, extremely refined, well-honed system that has been developed over centuries and comes directly from the purity of absolute being. You use all the tools you've been given. So if you fly through the ngondro in order to get to something else, later you'll be handicapped. If you wanted to become a nuclear physicist but didn't want to waste your time learning to read or add, you'd have nothing to work with.
These methods work for Westerners. But a person also has to understand his or her responsibility in the process; it's not all the lama's job. In a disciple guru relationship the disciple and the teacher both have a responsibility.
The purpose of what the teacher does with and for you is your own enlightenment. If you assess the quality of the teacher as you would that of a politician or a parent, if you judge him on whether he sips his tea properly or whether he looks and smiles at you, you are fooling yourself. What you need to require is that your relationship with the teacher heighten your awareness, that it bring about more clarity, selflessness and compassion. And whether it's through the exposure of your faults, which you then overcome, or through the example of the lama's qualities, your responsibility as a student is to use the relationship with the teacher for that purpose. Then the teacher can't fail you, because you're practicing guru yoga in the way it is meant to be practiced. Then the relationship is perfect; it's one that can produce spiritual maturity and transform your understanding of reality.
If we assess the teacher's qualities with the right criteria, we establish a relationship that wiII be of benefit to ourselves and to others. That is lineage. By relying on a teacher as a light into our own mind, we gain what he has gained from his own teachers through this process,and the lineage goes forward.
In the beginning of the ngondro practice, we call on the lama as the infallible constant protector–as one who protects us not from falling rocks, but from the swamp of ordinary perception. Eventually, by going through the process fully. we overcome dualistic perception and understand the nature of our mind, which is none other than the mind of the lama. It becomes a complete resolution of the separateness that now dominates and that pains us so deeply.
When I first met Rinpoche, he couldn't speak English and he didn't have a translator. There was nothing at all–no shrine, no statues. He would sit and draw the hands of the Buddha with us so we would have something to do. He said mantra slowly for us and waited for us to catch up.
We would recite maybe twenty-five mantra in an hour. We had no idea what it was, what it meant. It was just singing with Rinpoche. He literally carried us, like small children who can't yet walk. That's how determined he was. And he still does that. He carries you until you get to the point where you can take a step. I feel as though I'm still just a toddler. The spiritual path is really a lifelong experience. As Dudjom Rinpoche said, "Don't talk about how long you did retreat, life is retreat." This doesn't mean you have to spend your whole life in a cave. Your life is your retreat, and retreat takes your whole life.
In doing retreat, you feel tremendous responsibility to the people who support you and take care of things for you. That responsibility extends outward until you feel that when you practice you're a representative of everyone incapable of the necessary intent and motivation. At one point I realized that if people only knew why they suffer, they would do dharma and reveal the pure awareness of their mind. So I would visualize that I was everybody else and then do the practice.
Compassion for the state of beings is very important for everything to shift. Compassion is really the catalyst. I had heard this many times in the teachings, and had always felt that my heart was open to beings. Finally, I understood that I would rather suffer completely myself than have anyone else ever suffer and in that kind of recognition there was no more suffering. It was very illuminating to find out that you can't get to that experience by thinking, ''I'll get somewhere by having compassion." It has to go out of your head and into your heart as it opens and opens.
You do retreat with the understanding that you are carrying everyone–the frogs in the backyard, hell beings, hungry ghosts–because they don't know how to do it themselves. If they could, they would. There is simply the fact that they don't know what is standing between them and the truth. You take that position because you do know. You visualize that as you receive blessings, they all receive blessings and become aware of their true nature.
On a hot August day three and a half years ago Tsering Everest entered retreat. Amid a small group of sangha members, she said good-bye and walked through the front door of her house. This February she finished the retreat and opened her doors to welcome a sizable group of sangha members and friends into her home. A large tsog feas twas spread on tables in the living room, and everyone offered katags and gifts.(Jane Tromge arrived with a most appropriate gift, a garment bag for Tsering's upcoming travels.) Tsering spoke briefly, saying that without the lama's blessings there cannot be even the thought of anything but the suffering of samsara. The Windhorse spoke with her later in the week about her retreat.
After ten years of traveling with Rinpoche as his interpreter and being so close to him, it was really difficult for me in retreat to hear about his many travels and activities. It was very hard not being included in them, because I take so much joy in sangha activities,watching Rinpoche's magnificence, his display, all the activities he gives us to participate in and enact our dharma intentions through. I had dreams of sitting with him and being so happy. But when you're alone in your house practicing, you're never really separate from Rinpoche, because you're doing what he's taught you to do. Your meditation is a process of remaining inseparable from the lama. I once said to Rinpoche during one of his visits, "I really miss you," and he asked, "Why you missing me?" He started to scold and tease me, saying, "You're supposed to visualize me on the top of your head all the time." And I said, "That is true, but this one on the top of my head doesn't tease me, doesn't make me laugh."
So there was a maturing, a weaning, I had to go through. In that process I found another, more profound level to the relationship, one where there really isn't an absence, where the love, compassion and mind of the guru are not bounded. The quality of practice that's immediate and awake–the presence and openness–is the essence of the Iama. If we don't make this leap, then our practice doesn't ripen past a certain dualistic adoration. Though that is wonderful and a crucial step we go through, we have to go to the next step of understanding everything as the lama. Then there is the non-differentiation of one's mind as the lama.
I'd wanted to do retreat for some time but it was impossible because of the service I needed to perform. I couldn't justify a retreat, so I just left it up to Rinpoche. To my surprise, on my thirty fifth birthday Rinpoche said it was time.
Many practitioners have the karma to go away to a cave, but I didn't do retreat in that way. I had Board of Directors meetings in my home; my husband and son who were here all the time, going in and out; doors were slamming and cars coming and going.
So I took a slightly middle way, but it was the kind of retreat that I think is more accessible to householders with children. There is something you offer your children by meditating with them nearby. They learn what it is like to have a spiritual focus to their lives. And even if they come and go, there is an amazing stability. For almost four years I was for my son this woman who sat in her room and practiced. He would come in and sit beside my meditation seat and tell me about his life and the high school dances and the girls. And it all happened in the context of the blessings of the practice.
The challenge was having distraction, yet staying in the practice. It is a little fictitious to take yourself away from everything, to try and turn the world off so that you are undistracted. Everything is the display of the mind. If you think something is a distraction, that's just your judgment of a phenomenon that is manifesting. In my years of traveling with Rinpoche, it was always a matter of practicing while traveling on airplanes and dealing with constant activity. And so even in retreat, even in a cave, there is going to be the mouse chewing on your cookies.
Out of his kindness, Rinpoche doesn't let us go into retreat just as soon as we come up with the idea and there is some kind of glamour or mystique about it. It's not so much that people run away from their lives to do retreat as that they are drawn toward the image they have of it. But unless you're well steeped in the view and understand how to implement it, it is just your ordinary mind that you are sitting with in retreat.
If you are well established in your practice, you have a better chance for effective meditation, because there are a lot of storms in the mind. Developing pure guru yoga and ngondro, and an ability to meditate without sitting, are not just preliminaries you need to rush beyond to get to something greater or more wonderful. Each of them is complete in itself if you just let your mind settle in the moment and abide in that. Then they ripen and become methods you rely on throughout your practice.
Meditation is a process of chipping away, of cutting off andsevering, of splitting open and opening up, of letting go. It's not just an arbitrary process; it's a very specific, extremely refined, well-honed system that has been developed over centuries and comes directly from the purity of absolute being. You use all the tools you've been given. So if you fly through the ngondro in order to get to something else, later you'll be handicapped. If you wanted to become a nuclear physicist but didn't want to waste your time learning to read or add, you'd have nothing to work with.
These methods work for Westerners. But a person also has to understand his or her responsibility in the process; it's not all the lama's job. In a disciple guru relationship the disciple and the teacher both have a responsibility.
The purpose of what the teacher does with and for you is your own enlightenment. If you assess the quality of the teacher as you would that of a politician or a parent, if you judge him on whether he sips his tea properly or whether he looks and smiles at you, you are fooling yourself. What you need to require is that your relationship with the teacher heighten your awareness, that it bring about more clarity, selflessness and compassion. And whether it's through the exposure of your faults, which you then overcome, or through the example of the lama's qualities, your responsibility as a student is to use the relationship with the teacher for that purpose. Then the teacher can't fail you, because you're practicing guru yoga in the way it is meant to be practiced. Then the relationship is perfect; it's one that can produce spiritual maturity and transform your understanding of reality.
If we assess the teacher's qualities with the right criteria, we establish a relationship that wiII be of benefit to ourselves and to others. That is lineage. By relying on a teacher as a light into our own mind, we gain what he has gained from his own teachers through this process,and the lineage goes forward.
In the beginning of the ngondro practice, we call on the lama as the infallible constant protector–as one who protects us not from falling rocks, but from the swamp of ordinary perception. Eventually, by going through the process fully. we overcome dualistic perception and understand the nature of our mind, which is none other than the mind of the lama. It becomes a complete resolution of the separateness that now dominates and that pains us so deeply.
When I first met Rinpoche, he couldn't speak English and he didn't have a translator. There was nothing at all–no shrine, no statues. He would sit and draw the hands of the Buddha with us so we would have something to do. He said mantra slowly for us and waited for us to catch up.
We would recite maybe twenty-five mantra in an hour. We had no idea what it was, what it meant. It was just singing with Rinpoche. He literally carried us, like small children who can't yet walk. That's how determined he was. And he still does that. He carries you until you get to the point where you can take a step. I feel as though I'm still just a toddler. The spiritual path is really a lifelong experience. As Dudjom Rinpoche said, "Don't talk about how long you did retreat, life is retreat." This doesn't mean you have to spend your whole life in a cave. Your life is your retreat, and retreat takes your whole life.
In doing retreat, you feel tremendous responsibility to the people who support you and take care of things for you. That responsibility extends outward until you feel that when you practice you're a representative of everyone incapable of the necessary intent and motivation. At one point I realized that if people only knew why they suffer, they would do dharma and reveal the pure awareness of their mind. So I would visualize that I was everybody else and then do the practice.
Compassion for the state of beings is very important for everything to shift. Compassion is really the catalyst. I had heard this many times in the teachings, and had always felt that my heart was open to beings. Finally, I understood that I would rather suffer completely myself than have anyone else ever suffer and in that kind of recognition there was no more suffering. It was very illuminating to find out that you can't get to that experience by thinking, ''I'll get somewhere by having compassion." It has to go out of your head and into your heart as it opens and opens.
You do retreat with the understanding that you are carrying everyone–the frogs in the backyard, hell beings, hungry ghosts–because they don't know how to do it themselves. If they could, they would. There is simply the fact that they don't know what is standing between them and the truth. You take that position because you do know. You visualize that as you receive blessings, they all receive blessings and become aware of their true nature.
