August, 2012 | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

Courageous Awareness

August 24, 2012 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Western Chod”

I eventually came to draw a lot of strength and a great deal of comfort from that early practice (Chöd) because I found out that I actually never ever had to make another decision. And that’s what we struggle with all the time.

The rest of my life became not a dilemma in some odd way, even though there are many aspects of my life that would seemingly be problematic. It isn’t a dilemma because already the mind is relaxed. That’s one of the great benefits of that practice—the mind becomes relaxed. You’re not tense in the position of getting ready to determine, getting ready to decide. That requires a great deal of mental tension. So that’s done. The mind’s relaxed and it’s all right. There’s a big yes happening. There’s a big yes happening. I agree. I agree. It’s already done, so I don’t have to reinvent that dilemma and solve that dilemma every time. It’s already done. That’s the great blessing of a practice like that.

I have to tell you, once you really examine the faults of cyclic existence that way, and the eyes of suffering… I really recommend that if you do this practice. you can do it sitting, standing, anyway you want to. Do it while you’re walking around. Just constantly think like this. My recommendation is fill your eyes with suffering. Not your heart, not your mind, your eyes. We walk around feeling insulated. We don’t want to see it. You’re flipping through the channels and you see that child in, what, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, someplace like that, belly bulging, ribs sticking out at the same time and limbs that big around, and crusty at the side of the mouth. And why? Because they haven’t had any food recently. And no good food consistently. They’re starving. The first thing we do when we see that? Change the channel because we have the habit of not wanting to see that. We don’t want to see that.

My recommendation is spend some time seeing it. Stop turning away from the sight of suffering. Use that as a tool. It doesn’t mean that you have to, you know, give Buddhism a bum rap. I’m not asking you to be unhappy. I’m telling you that if you really open your eyes and see, you are in a scene where you are half unhappy and half happy already. It’s already mixed. This is not something you have to pretend. All I’m asking you to do is face it. Really look at it. Do not turn your eyes away from it. Fill your eyes with suffering. Stop faking it. We are a nation of fakers. Stop faking it and really see it. See what hatred produces. See what it looks like. Look into the face of it. See what hunger looks like. Face it. See what bigotry looks like. Look at it, face it, see what it feels like. See what ignorance feels like—the kind of dullness and slothfulness that you can hardly get yourself together. Get a good mouthful of that! See what that looks like. Look at all of this concerning ordinary experience in samsara. And then, having filled your eyes with that, you can use that as motivation, as a reason to practice.

So my recommendation is practice deeply, practice consistently. Do not turn your eyes away from suffering. Practice with courage. Be really courageous about this, and never let yourself off easy in this practice. To the bone, and then give them up too. Practice to the depth of your being, until you are deeply satisfied, until you know that you would never take back that offer again, the offer to be a vehicle by which suffering might end. Do not give up your practice until you know that you’ve done that. Be a hero. All you have to do is be a hero one time, one time in your whole life, concerning giving rise to compassion for the sake of sentient beings. Be a hero. Be undaunted. Do not be happy or satisfied with yourself until it is complete. Do not be happy or satisfied with yourself until you have really seen the suffering of cyclic existence and it makes you sick to your stomach, that not only you, but everyone you see is caught in it.

Practice as deeply as you are able. And you are able to practice more deeply than you could ever have imagined. So the goal here, of course, is to give rise to the Bodhicitta, give rise to compassion to realize the faults of cyclic existence. I used to think this to myself, whatever I saw,”There’s no future in this.” So in the future when I picked up a bag of potato chips, I’d go, “Well I can eat it or not eat it, but obviously there’s no future in this!” And I could look at any scenario in life and I would go, “Pff, no future in it. I’ve examined it. I’ve been there, I’ve done it in my mind.” That’s the awareness and understanding that you should be armed with.

Astrology

August 24, 2012 by Norma

A dream or hunch provides the goal you need, and this is a good day to begin a project. Arrange financial backing and pass out specific tasks later. Don’t be confused about who does what, rather, “follow the money.” Do things you can afford. Finances play a major role today. It’s important to line up backers for your project and to understand who your supporters are. Outside of business, spend time considering who will help you and who you will help. Be aware of your support system. This is more important than it seems right now. A powerful person in your corner makes all the difference. Elsewhere, a bouncy, happy energy is present. You’ll run into pleasant, enthusiastic people who want to tell you all about their plans. Be patient. An ingenious invention appears, and a favorable legal decision brings happiness. Okakura Kakuzo said,”The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.”

The daily astrology post affects everyone. Because individual charts vary, the circumstances outlined in the post will affect people differently. Some will feel this energy in the personal arena, some in finances, some with children or family, some in work and so forth. There are many departments of life. Look to see where the dynamic affects you!

Tulku Dawa Gyalpo Has Arrived!

August 23, 2012 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is from a series of tweets by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:

Venerable Tulku Dawa Rinpoche arrived this evening to many welcoming hearts at KPC this evening. It is lovely to have him! He teaches tomorrow night.

He is a devout disciple of His Holiness Penor Rinpoche. I feel comfortable with his energy, he is Palyul. His knowledge is a mine of jewels as he has studied well and worked hard.

Please join us this weekend if you are in the D.C. area, or tune in to the webcast!

Tulku Dawa’s Schedule of teachings

WEBCAST

Bird Stew: Compassion in Action

August 23, 2012August 23, 2012 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo started the Garuda Aviary in 1999 after she adopted Tashi bird, a Moluccan Cockatoo who was driving her former owner crazy with her screaming. Jetsunma soon discovered there are countless parrots suffering from neglect and abuse due to owners ill prepared for their needs.

Jetsunma was so moved by the awareness of the suffering of these intelligent, long lived beings, that one bird quickly grew to 36, and the Garuda Aviary was founded to provide life long sanctuary to abused and neglected birds.

Now Garuda Aviary, a non-profit organization with one paid caretaker and a small staff of volunteers, cares for more than 50 birds, committed to caring for each of them for the duration of their lives.

Jetsunma continues to support the birds by preparing large pots of fresh food, “Bird Stew”, for the birds on a regular basis. Parrots enjoy fresh, healthy and nutritious foods, and Rigdzin, the primary caretaker of the birds, reports they have come to love her stew.

Wishing that others may share in this joyful practice, Jetsunma has asked that this simple recipe be offered so others may feed their birds a nutritious, healthy treat.

This recipe produces a large amount of food, enough to feed 50 birds as a supplement to their diet for several days, so amounts may be adjusted for those with fewer birds. Jetsunma also suggested the stew can be portioned into ice cube trays or empty margarine containers and frozen. These smaller portions can then be warmed in a pan for those with smaller birds.

Supplies:

Large pot

2 bags of dried beans (pinto, red, black, navy, white, or a combo)

1 bag of lentils

1 package of frozen vegetables (mixed vegetables, butter beans, peas, carrots, corn, a variety)

Any left over vegetables from family dinners, but do not feed avocados or white potatoes.

2 lbs of pasta (elbow, spaghetti or penne)

seasoning: Mrs. Dash italian flavor, spicy flavor, hot peppers

Process:

Put two bags of beans in 6 quarts of water and bring to a boil for 20 minutes then turn off heat.

Allow beans and water to sit until completely cooled for an hour.

Bring pot back to a boil and add lentils, vegetables, pasta and seasoning and cook until pasta is Al Dente.

Immediately remove mixture from heat, drain, and run under cold water to stop the cooking process (birds prefer beans and pasta Al Dente rather than mushy.)

May every being be free of suffering!

Astrology

August 23, 2012 by Norma

Romance is on the menu today. Someone likes you and expresses this in subtle ways. Pay attention to non-verbal cues, to micro-gestures that signal interest. A man or a person in a position of authority can make a mistake. If this is you, admit it promptly and fix it. If someone else makes a mistake, kindly help them fix it without embarrassment. The energy has shifted from the obvious to the subtle. Trust your feelings about things. Two planets in Scorpio won’t explain themselves in words, but you’ll get all the explanation you need in other ways. Act directly, follow your hunches, and back away from anything that feels wrong. Mario Cuomo said, “Every time I’ve done something that doesn’t feel right, it’s ended up not being right.” A serious health issue or even death is nearby. At the same time, a happy message or conversation is a godsend today.

Offered for the Benefit of All Beings

August 22, 2012 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Western Chod”

My teachers have instructed me that that practice is actually called ‘chöd’ (and there is an umlaut above the o). Actually there is no text to go with it so you couldn’t say it was the practice of chöd as it is written in the text. It has been called by my teachers the essence or essential nectar of chöd. So I have been given permission to continue to practice that way and also to teach others to practice in that way. My experience has been that it has made my life a lot easier.

Now how is that? Well, I’ll tell you. It came to pass that there were many sacrifices that needed to be made. I’m not saying this so that you’ll say “Oh, isn’t she a good girl!” Save it. I don’t care. But there were sacrifices that needed to be made. If I’d had my druthers, I would still be on a farm in North Carolina. By now I would not only know how to put up beans, but I would have the best darn garden you’d ever seen, and all the farmers around would be impressed. And I would have a dairy cow to boot. I would still be there. I would still be there, much isolated. I prefer a lot of privacy. Even though I seem to be good at this (I don’t know why but I seem to be good at this), I have to tell you that everyone who knows me well knows that to get me out of the house so that I’ll come and do my job, it takes oh, spraying with Pam and loosening her up with a crowbar. It’s not my natural tendency to want to come out and do this. I really don’t like this kind of thing.

Not only did privacy have to be given up (and that seems to be getting worse and worse), but also personal freedom. Now I am in the position where if I decide that I want to go somewhere and just not think about whether I look like a dharma teacher or not, just sort of be myself, I find that it’s a little tricky. It happens pretty often that people will come up to me and they will say “Are you that Buddha lady?” It really happens on a regular basis. In fact one time at the airport somebody came running up to me, “Are you that Jetsa Jetsa Buddha lady?” That Jetsa Jetsa Buddha lady, that’s me! So I have that kind of going on. And you know, I was not brought up as a Tibetan. I was not groomed for this job; I just got this job. So I found that many sacrifices had to take place, including watching my children have to give up their own privacy.

There are just a lot of issues. When we first came to this temple, none of the doors that you see were here. There were hardly any doors on the inside of the temple. Everything was very open and this room was divided in half. We used to live upstairs, but there were no doors between the upstairs and the lower, and so basically I was not separate from the temple whatsoever. And the only coffee pot, get this!, the only coffee pot in the whole place was downstairs where the kitchen room is downstairs now, and I slept upstairs. , Because this place was open 24 hours a day, I would have to wade through students to get to my first cup of coffee in the morning. If that’s not love, what is? ? Then my students would say to me, “You never smile at me in the morning.” Smile in the morning!! The weight of the bags under my eyes keep my cheeks from going up, what can I tell you! So anyway, smiling was not forthcoming before the coffee, I’m sorry. There’s not that much compassion in the world!

I eventually came to draw a lot of strength and a great deal of comfort from that early practice because I found out that I never actually had to make another decision. And that’s what we struggle with all the time. Should I spare this time to do my practice? Should I spare this time to practice compassion toward others? Should I spend the effort to go over here and help that person? Should I do that? It’s that thinking—should I, should I, should I? You burn more calories doing that than any of the good works that you actually do in your life. So I found out that that head thing that we do when we can’t decide and we always go through the dilemma of being a samsaric being, that was alleviated, and I never really had to make another decision ever again. I felt that from that point on, everything in my life had already been decided because I didn’t own my feet, I didn’t own my ankles, didn’t own my body, didn’t own my speech, didn’t own my hearing, didn’t own anything. Anything! I had already decided that I owned nothing. None of it was mine.

So then whenever I was called upon, well will you do this, will you do that, will you do that? Now the ultimate test, the moving! Will you do that? Yeah, I’ll do that. You know why I’ll do that? Because it’s already decided. None of this really belongs to me. My job now is to protect every capability that I have or any effort that I’ve made in order to benefit beings. That I will protect, with fangs out and nails extended. That’s when you’ll see the meanness in me. That I will protect, but regarding anything personal, it’s no big deal because it’s already gone. I don’t own it. So I take good care of it. I feed it well. I exercise it, but ultimately I realize that I’m doing that in order to maintain its strength in order to benefit sentient beings. I don’t feel that I own it. I’ve already given it up.

Astrology

August 22, 2012 by Norma

Today is like March; it “comes in like a lion and out like a lamb.” You start out proud and indecisive and end up knowing where you stand and ready to get to work. This feeling of certainty is a huge relief, and it clears up issues that have cluttered the landscape for some time. Keep your nose to the grindstone and don’t be confused by people who make vague suggestions along the lines of “everything would be nicer in a different color, but I don’t know which one.” The person who is doing the job should make the decisions today. Either cook or get out of the kitchen! Avoid the temptation, which is irresistible, to bother people who are hard at work. Elsewhere, a happy frame of mind brings amusing and enjoyable communication of all sorts. A private conversation with a powerful person can bear fruit. Emotional shrewdness appears today, use it. Joyce Brothers said, “Trust your hunches. They’re usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.”

What Are You Looking For?

August 21, 2012 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Longing for the Guru”

In order for you to be with your Teacher, however good or bad that Teacher may be, if you are in a situation where you are close to your Teacher and consistently so and have a great deal of relatively intimate guidance, you must have spent a great deal of time longing for the Teacher. It must be that you have spent a great deal of time making wishing prayers that you would never be separate from your Teacher. There had to be a great deal of time spent in that consideration and with that intention. It’s the only karma that will allow for this situation.

Each of us, then, as we grew up, must have experienced the seeds of that longing. If we look back at our earlier lives, we may not understand that. It’s very difficult to understand how we ended up practicing Vajrayana. We certainly weren’t brought up this way. We certainly had no idea in our younger lives that we were going to be Buddhists, that’s for sure.

Yet, if we were to look in a penetrating way, we would discover that somewhere in our childhood there was a longing. That is the seed or the residue of something that we experienced in a previous incarnation. Because it is not consistent with our culture, because it is not sympathetic with what our culture views as proper, probably when we grew up, we never heard of a Teacher. We never heard of a Guru. We may have diverted into different paths. We may have felt the longing as a need to find ourselves or we may have felt a sense of waiting to be told or to find something that we knew we would find.

For instance, it is possible that you felt a sense of searching and perhaps went from relationship to relationship, searching for someone who would be intimate with you, a certain searching for a fullness that was never found. It could be that you even went from a self-help group to insight situation to church to different kinds of situations that you thought would bring you the answer and you had no idea that it was a spiritual search.
But now, in retrospect, if you examine that, do you think that perhaps you were looking for something you didn’t find because you did not understand exactly what you were looking for? Surely, if you examine your life, you will find something of that longing in your past.

Astrology

August 21, 2012 by Norma

Put your best foot forward and present yourself in style today. You’re emotionally pulled toward a partnership, yet the relationship presents more problems than you anticipated. A situation that began lightly turns serious and possibly contentious. Maintain your dignity and remember who you are. Others make heavy demands, and your job is to determine whether the relationship is worth the bother you now know it entails. Are you “in” or “out”? That’s the question for the day. If you’ve been living on hope; hanging in there because you thought things would improve the next few days will test you. Be aware of your expectations and wishes, and be aware of what others hope for as well. Elsewhere, happiness comes through speech and it’s a good time to cook and express positive feelings. This is both a hard day and an easy day, depending on how you take it. Anais Nin said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” Be brave.

Gaining Strength!

August 20, 2012 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is from a series of tweets by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:

Just back from Phys Therapy. Worked hard and making great progress! Even one session made a difference. Proud of myself and happy with the clinic.

My physical therapist is awesome! She totally gets how I got there. A kind lady. I trust her.

OM TARE TU TARE TU TURE YE SOHA!

When you’re gaining strength you are alive!