Intimacy with the Path | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

Cars, Sunrays, and Choicelessness

February 16, 2018 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The path of Buddhadharma can only bring about the result that is consistent with and the same as, the seed or its essence. We’re looking at essence, we’re looking at movement and we’re looking at result. Try to imagine how we see things ordinarily. When we are doing what seems right, moving through linear time, isn’t it the case where if something happens to you—let’s say, your car breaks down—that’s it. The car broke down. It’s out there. It’s isolated. It has no connection with anything else. Did the car break down because you forgot to put oil into it? No, no. It just broke down. Did the car break down because you never gave it a checkup or a tune up? No, no, no. It just broke down. It just happened that way. Did the car stop because it had no gas in it? No, no. It just stopped. It’s that kind of thing. When we see events in our lives, we see them like that. They happen out there.

Now as time passes, often there are these connecting things that happen to the events in our lives. Maybe a year after the car broke down, several things might have happened. You might have learned something about how to take care of a car. Let’s say your husband or wife yelled at you for not taking care of the car and you learned because they yelled real, real loud! Or, let’s say a year after the car broke down, a series of events happened in which you were challenged, and you put in some overtime so that you could make some more money so you could get a new car. And so, a couple of years down the road, when you think about the day that car broke down, it’s no longer an isolated situation. The car didn’t just break down! It didn’t just happen. There is meaning and importance that is somehow connected with all of that.

You can see a movement from even before the car broke down, because by that time you have enough distance from the chaos of your mind to be willing to look at things that you weren’t looking at before. You can see that the car broke down, but you also know, in hindsight that in fact you didn’t take care of the car very well. But now you see this as a total learning process. It isn’t just that the car broke and you’re living with that horrible reality. You’re not seeing this isolated, neurotic situation. You’re seeing a trend, a movement. You didn’t know how to take care of the car. You didn’t do such a good job. The car broke down. Certain events happened by which you became naturally empowered to get another car, but that natural empowerment only happened because your first car disappeared. It broke.

So now, in retrospect, you’re seeing this slow, beautiful movement, which started with your incompetence and led to your empowerment. In retrospect, you can see the wholeness of it. Doesn’t that give you a clue as to how we think?

We have this kind of an ignorance that plagues us, a kind of short-sightedness. It’s not being able to understand whole pictures or abstract conceptualizations or how to see around things. I don’t know how better to describe it. So we only see something right in front of us and this is a kind of manic little posture we put ourselves in.

The path is like that also. From the point of view of Buddhahood, one can see the primordial basis, the ground, which is uncontrived, beginningless, endless, unfounded and perfectly complete – Buddha nature, the primordial wisdom state. We see that. We see a dance or a movement, which is very much like having the same relationship with the ground as the rays of the sun have with the sun. You can’t really say where the sun ends and the rays begin. There’s no real way to say that. There’s only a matter of opinion as to where one ends and the other begins. And so we understand that sun’s rays are the same reality as the sun itself.

In the same way, the BuddhaDharma is understood as this radiance or display, which is inseparable from the source. You can’t have sunlight without the sun. It doesn’t exist. They are married in the most intimate fashion. There’s no separation. This is seen from the point of view of Buddhahood. We see the primordial wisdom state. We see display as being inseparable from the natural resting state and we see this from the point of view of result, which is completely dependent on and based on the ground, the primordial wisdom state. In other words, if we did not have this primordial wisdom state, which is Buddhahood, there could be no result of Buddhahood. How would you accomplish it? You couldn’t build it out of sticks and stones. There would be no result.

So from the point of view of Buddhahood, this is seen as a three-legged stool or something that has three facets that are completely inseparable from one another. The idea of whether or not one should practice, of whether one should be spiritual today or not, the idea of becoming stagnant on the path would not be possible if we didn’t see the path as being something separate from us in such an essential way that it becomes something we either walk on or put on. Should one approach this particular problem in a spiritual way or do we simply let ourselves get away with it?

If we were to understand something of our own primordial nature, if we were to understand that the method is not separate from the result, then the hunger that we feel that brings us to the path would also sustain us. There is a hunger that brings us to the path. Something that makes us reach out, throughout the course of our lives. There is some kind of urging towards a natural, open, awakened state of wisdom and poise, a state that is free of the components of suffering. We know that there is something. We can feel it. There is a natural urge and yet, even with all that urging and all that crying out in our hearts which we all do in some way or another, why is it that we are not able to sustain ourselves on the path?

What I’m describing is a very strong and powerful need to have our understanding of our spiritual life be so natural, so connected, so married, with every primal impulse that we have towards spiritual growth that we move past the point of making a choice. That’s where you want to go on the spiritual path. You want to get past the point of needing to make that choice again and again, because so long as you have to re-choose and reaffirm your path, you’re going somewhere that isn’t you. You’re doing something you feel is separate from your nature. You’re doing something still that is unnatural and so all these dilemmas come into play.

We become impotent upon the path then and we get to the point where we need to be inspired on a regular basis, because when you’re traveling a journey that is separate from you, inspiration is necessary. On the other hand, do you need to be inspired to continue living, generally speaking? Do you need to be inspired to take your next breath? It’s true that sometimes we can fall into a confusion that is so thick and so deep that we don’t even understand whether we want to live anymore. That happens. There are people that commit suicide, but generally speaking most of us understand intuitively that life itself is simply a display of our nature. On some level we’re beginning to understand that in order to continue living we’ve got to engage in the method of breathing and moving through our lives.

If we could only do that with the path, if it could be seen as natural for us and as inseparable from us as our own breath, then practicing the Dharma would be much more potent, much more natural for us, much easier. Not easier in that you’d practice it in a schlocky way, or you would practice it without really caring how well you do. Easy in the sense that it becomes as natural as scratching an itch or as natural as the intuitive knowledge that if you want to get out of bed in the morning you’ve got to swing your legs over the edge. It’s such a natural movement.

But that’s not how we practice Dharma. We practice Dharma like it’s a big issue, something we have to do that is not us, a girdle that we have to put on, a thing that we have to suffer through, a ritual that we have to impress somebody with, something we have to set aside time for. And ultimately, we lose touch with and have no sense of what it actually is to to live in spirit, to live a sacred life.

What’s Your Goal?

October 28, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

Ask yourself again and again, “What’s the goal here?” If you are more interested in expressing your fundamental, uncontrived, primordial nature which is free of discrimination, free of that which is complete and that which has just begun, in a joyful, symphonic musical way with wings? If you are more interested in giving flight to what is precious than in following a dogma or a religion or playing church, then you are going to be an excellent practitioner.

On the other hand, if you are interested in playing church and you have a time clock for this and it’s just a thing that you want to do, part of your life, then that will be the result. If you practice religion only to make your life different, then you will have a different life, but if you practice wisdom and Bodhicitta in order to awaken, if you recognize everything as inseparable from you, if you are able to move into the posture of moving through the sacred as that which you are, as something precious, then I think you’ve got a shot at it.

That’s going to take you working at it and you’ve really got to determine this for yourself. You have to build the marriage inside of you. Don’t make the mistake that we make in ordinary marriages, waiting for the romance, hoping that the path will somehow woo you so that you can feel good about the path. That’s not going to work. It’s a lot deeper than that.

What I’m suggesting is that you really take this into your heart, really consider this, turn the page on a new kind of life. You can start today. Supposing you were never to take another bite of food into your mouth without offering the nourishment of that for the liberation and salvation of all sentient beings and giving thanks and realizing the divine, precious inseparable nature of that food. Supposing taste for you became more like chameleon than yum, yum. Think about that.

Supposing love and friendship became for you a holy sacrament rather than a way to fill your time. Supposing the spiritual life became for you an expression of something that exists and fills your heart, rather than something that you’re doing in order to look a certain way. You know you want this. You know you want to feel it to the depth of your heart.

Why won’t you be your own best friend? Take yourself by the hand and give birth to a truly spiritual life. I don’t care if you call it Buddhism. I do care that you practice compassion and Bodhicitta. I do care that you awaken to the primordial wisdom nature. I do care that you begin to understand the sublime nature and emptiness of self and all phenomena. This I care about very much, but what you call it is up to you. Call it love. It’s about really going for it, really taking it in until it’s yours and bonding with it.

Practicing the path the way we’ve practiced it is kind of like having a baby and putting it up for adoption and checking in on it every once in a while and expecting to have the same kind of bonding and connection that you do with a child that you nursed with your own body and gave your own milk to and formed that kind of unbreakable connection with. What a difference.

Don’t make spirituality in your life the bastard child. Let it be your life. Let you be that. And of course you are. You are the ground, the basis, the primordial wisdom nature. You are the movement and display, which is also called method, and you are the result. And it only seems like we’re on the path now because it seems like we are traveling toward the result, but in fact nothing is going anywhere. You are not moving. Nothing is far away from you and there is nothing to uncover or to build or to establish. It is simply the precious awakening, and to truly live a spiritual life you must understand that this is your nature.

Transform your life into the sacred, the sacrament, the beauty that you long for as though it were an external thing, and I’m asking you to do it by 1 o’clock. The reason why I’m naming this time is because it’s so simple. It’s just as simple as what you’re doing now. In fact, it’s much more simple, because what you’re doing now is feeling separate from the source, separate from your path, neurotic and needy. And by 1 o’clock you could have that all fixed.

Express Your Nature

October 27, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

I’ll tell you something about myself which may sound odd, being as I’m sitting on this throne in the middle of this Buddhist mandala here. I’m not a religious person. I do not like spiritual dogma! I do not like religion as I see it practiced. I wish that I had a more comfortable seat, but I have connection with this particular method and so that’s the display or form that it takes, but the underlying reality, the thing that wrenches my heart, and makes everything about my life without choice, is that I know no other way to live other than to see my life as an expression of my Nature.

I have watched myself throughout the course of my life. I have made choices that are so difficult, but they were never about the spiritual. I have moved on and I have left things and I have walked into things and I have done all kinds of stuff, but when it comes to the spiritual unfolding in my life, there has never been a choice about that. In any event in my life, if I have had to choose continuing on with the expression of my Nature, this spiritual clay that is unfolding here, or engaging in some ordinary activity, which would not facilitate that sacred life, there has never been a choice. I will always choose the sacred.

It’s not that I’m patting myself on the back, it’s just the way it is. I never have chosen and I think it’s because I’m not religious or dogmatic. I don’t see religion as separate from me. I don’t see dogma as something I have to pick up and carry around. I see my life as being innately spiritual and I see that there is no other way for me to express myself.

For each one of you I make the same recommendation, that you each find a way to experience that kind of intimacy with your spiritual life, to realize that you’re not doing anything or anybody a favor. You are simply expressing what is true. To try to find a way to understand that the ground or basis and the movement or method and the fruit or result are simply three faces of the same reality, and that reality is you. There is nothing that you are doing here that is strange or exotic or unusual. You are expressing your nature. What else would you do? Not express your nature?

Each one of us has to find a way to really get that for ourselves. That’s your challenge, isn’t it? Haven’t you as you’ve matured throughout the course of your life, as an older person or middle-aged person and, however old you are, haven’t you looked back at earlier times in your life and realized that you didn’t know how to really engage, that you were kind of absent, that there is a certain kind of absenteeism that we practice with when we are less mature in our lives. Do you remember what it was like to be 15 to 18? You haven’t yet grown a brain. And later on with maturity you realize, “Whoa! I’m in my life!” Later on it happens spiritually and it’s even more profound on a spiritual level.

When you’re a young practitioner you realized that in a somewhat unconscious way that you were simply trying to do what this Lama tells you and trying to do what the Buddha says. You were just doing stuff. But then, later on as you mature on the path, you begin to realize that there is something here that is like the amplification of your own voice or the rays of your own sun or some movement that is a natural display of your own nature. You realize that there is a connectedness about the way that you lived. You begin to move into the maturity of that.

On the path that is really necessary for us. It requires that each one of us take responsibility in an individual way, not relying on the structure of the temple for this one to come to you; not relying on the capacity of the teacher to empower, deepen and ripen our minds; not relying on the Sangha to support you and give you that shot in the arm that we need all the time. In the same way that you do when it comes time for you to marry on an ordinary level, you find what in you connects with that. You begin to understand the union of this, begin to find how it is that you are a spiritual being and how it is that the path has appeared. You begin to take responsibility for this connection, for this marriedness and it is not about vows and commitments to something outside. It’s about walking in a sacred life as a person fully endowed with the natural capacity, the method and the potency of result in order to attain Buddhahood.

Think Before You Leap

October 26, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

For those of us practicing the Buddha Dharma, there is the tendency to act and practice like new practitioners. When I say new practitioners, I don’t mean practitioners that have been practicing for only a week or six months or two years. We act like a culture of new practitioners, which we are. The Buddha Dharma has only recently been introduced into our culture. Our culture is more determined by Judeo-Christian thought than it is by Eastern thought and so many elements of our culture do not comfortably embrace the way the path is taught, including our language, and most especially the way that we live – our life style. We are in a culture that is materialistic and extremely competitive. These two ideas of competition and materialism are taught to us as virtues from childhood and so “collecting things” or “going somewhere” are very pivotal ways of viewing our progress through life. For those of us on the path, that becomes somewhat difficult, and we have to translate what is basically innate Eastern thought into a western context or culture. I think that I am good at that because I was born an American and I think that’s helpful, if one has some understanding of the path.

Our problem as we face either beginning on the path of Buddhadharma or continuing on the path, is the sense that the path has to become really married or bonded with the way that we utilize our mind and our perception. We have not really been able to do this yet, even if we’ve been practicing for some time, even if we are wearing the robes, even if we have a daily practice that we are extremely committed to. It tends to be the case that we don’t actually bond or marry with the path in a way that is truly intimate and lasting. Unfortunately, we tend to externalize the path.

What are the reasons for that and how does it manifest? First of all, in our culture and way of thinking, we externalize everything. This is not unusual. Everything that we see is a road in front of us. Of course this isn’t only typical of our culture. It’s typical of the way that human beings perceive things altogether, but particularly in this culture we think of things that must be accomplished and things that must be collected. We find ourselves facing something that is in front of us, a path that is in front of us. And although the teaching of the BuddhaDharma is extraordinarily different from spiritual and esoteric philosophy as we understand it in this Judeo-Christian society, we are not able to make that transition. We practice Buddhism like Christians, which is really not how Buddhism ought to be practiced at all.

If we understand the source of our misunderstanding and how it is that we externalize the path, we can begin to repair the damage and begin to rethink and reassess. The great thing about us is that we can learn. We are that particular unusual kind of computer, which can learn from its own programming, reassess and reevaluate. We are capable of that. If you watch us in our lives, you’d never know it, but we are capable of learning.

If you are practicing a method that did not arise from the mind of the Buddha, from supreme enlightenment, you are not practicing a path that can also result in supreme enlightenment, because the seed and the fruit have to match. An asparagus plant will not produce an apple. They have to match. It’s one of those fundamental, commonsensical, “2 + 2 = 4” kinds of reality that we like to conveniently leave out on a regular basis.

Why do we do that? Is it because we have a particular shtick that we need to fulfill about what religion is all about? Is it preconceived notions that we have? Yes, there are elements of that, that’s true, because we are intellectual people, we have formed ideas that are difficult to change once they are formed. We have the habit of clinging to ideas almost in the posture that if our ideas were to change, the result would be so mind-blowingly chaotic that surely we would die. We have this habit of wrapping ourselves around our ideas in a very firm way. Flexibility, of course, is an unheard-of skill.

That’s certainly one reason why it is difficult for us to think logically about the path. Another reason why it is so difficult is that, if you really examine us, we have very little familiarity with, or habits geared towards, really thinking something through, from cause to result, in any area of our lives. We like to take these flying leaps at reality. We like to take these great plunges thinking, “I want that and I’m here, so jump!” It’s that kind of thinking. Just jump! And jump again! But heaven forbid, don’t stop and think what cause would produce that result. We don’t have that habit.

We spend a good deal of our lives incapacitated in certain ways because each one of us has a particular problem to deal with. Some of us may have confused mental states. Some of us may have really strange habitual tendencies that produce unhappiness for us again and again. Many of us engage in patterns that we just can’t seem to shake and they always produce for us these habits that make us unhappy. When we make ourselves unhappy, we withdraw from that unhappiness and we whine and we blame the faith and we blame the people next to us. We take these flying leaps at our lives without really thinking through any kind of cause and effect relationship.

We have been given definite teachings on what kind of virtue and activities produce happiness, but we don’t want to practice virtue. We want to take flying leaps. We’re used to it and we don’t want to change. Regarding the path, it’s the same way. We see the path as being in front of us. It has certain characteristics, and so we see ourselves as separate from that and we take a flying leap in that general direction, without thinking out what is original cause, what is the basis, what is the method. What is the result, and how to really reason that through. We don’t seem to be able to do that. We seem to like to take these flying leaps.

Oddly enough, we expect that these dramatic, utterly unfounded and ungrounded flying leaps are going to make us happy. So we spend most of our lives just thrashing and flailing around.

In most regards, we don’t have the habit to understand the relationship between cause and result. It’s a particular kind of delusion that seems to go hand-in-glove with our human reality. When it comes time for us to really become intimate with and marry into the path, we look around for some way to do that, and the difficulty is obvious.

For many of us who have been practicing for some time, when we engage in the path we will try to make the path its own satisfaction. If we understood the basis for the path, and what the fundamental underlying ground of the path actually is, and what the result of practicing the path in a certain way will be—not because it’s magic, not because the signs point in that direction, not because of superstition, but because ground and result cannot be separated—we would begin to understand that in fact, under those conditions, the path disappears.

The path as a separate entity then doesn’t exist, not in the way that we understand it. It becomes inseparable from our own primordial wisdom nature, our own Buddhahood in its causative, seed form, and it becomes completely inseparable from the full-blown result of Buddhahood, actual awakening. If you understood this, you would not be engaged in thinking, the way we do now, “Okay, today I’m really going to get into my practice. So instead of doing an hour of practice I’m going to do two hours.” What kind of thinking is that? I mean, yeah, at some point you might have to decide how much time you have to put into it, but that’s not what it’s about. That’s not going to make a bit of difference if that’s the approach.

The kind of thinking that we have now also is “I’ve been out of it with my practice and so now I have to get back into my practice.” Even that kind of thinking is deluded thinking. To get back into your practice means that you’ve walked away from something that is infinitely connected, completely inseparable from that which is your nature. You can’t walk away from that. No matter where you go, there it is.

The Three Faces of the Path

October 25, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

When we think of the path, we think of something that is external, separate from us, something in front of us that we have to move towards or attain. A different understanding of the path might be that the path is something that actually engages with what you might call three faces. But these three faces are very much like us. You could say that each one of us has at least three faces. Each one of has the face of anger or discontentment, the face of joy, and the face of balance or contentment. There are many different faces that we have.

The path also has faces and when we truly study them we can understand what the nature of the path actually is. You could say that the path exists as part of a three-part system and if you were to think of the path itself in a true and more profound way than we normally think, you would understand that there is no way to tell where the path begins and where the path ends. We would understand that comprising what we call the path are three faces which are (1), the ground or basis from which the path arises, (2) the path or movement itself, the display of that source or fundamental nature from which the path arises, and (3) the fruit, which is the direct result of that fundamental nature as well as the direct result of the activity of that fundamental nature.

These three things, the ground, the path and the fruit or result cannot be separated in any way, shape, manner or form. The moment that we begin to separate these three aspects, we have lost touch with what the path actually is. We have lost touch with an intuitive understanding of how to practice the path, and we experience a great deal of delusion concerning the path when we separate ourselves from the understanding of the threefold face of the path: the basis or ground; the movement or path itself; and the result of the path.

Without this understanding, anything that we do becomes a path. Any activity that we engage in becomes a method. That method connects something with something or it wouldn’t be a method. But on the path of Buddha Dharma we have to remain connected with the ground, the method, and the result. These three have to be considered as threefold.

How is it that we can use this understanding to determine the validity of the path and to remove from ourselves the tendency toward delusion? First of all there is the teaching on the relationship of the seed and the fruit. There is that kind of good old-fashioned, common-sense wisdom that if you really want to have an apple tree in your orchard, you’ve got to plant an apple seed, that if you wanted an apple tree in your orchard and were to plant cabbages, it simply would not work. You would have cabbages, not apples. If you wished for some apples and you were to plant asparagus, that’s not going to turn out really well for you unless you really determine that asparagus is your thing. I know it sounds like I’m being silly and belaboring this point. The moment we get it, I’m going to stop nagging about it, because as yet we haven’t got this one and it’s really, really important.

The Buddha Dharma is not a path or a method that arises in any common or ordinary way in the world. In other words, someone didn’t get born at some time and simply compose a path. A team of experts or technicians didn’t get together and engineer a path. NASA didn’t design this one. This path was not a dream or a vision that someone had about twenty years ago that remains unproven or insubstantial.

The path of Buddha Dharma as we know it only arises when the condition of the Buddha nature appears. It arises from the mind of enlightenment – the Buddha nature. Lord Buddha did not begin to teach the path, although he had attained varying degrees of what you might call cosmic consciousness or something like that, before he actually attained supreme enlightenment. He had various degrees of consciousness that he could communicate and various qualities that he could teach to others—teachings on compassion, Bodhicitta, practicing meditation—but in fact he did not teach until he awakened into the primordial nature that was his true nature, Buddhahood. And then at that time he was able to display the path or method to the world.

The path or method actually came forth from his realization. It did not come forth even one millisecond before his realization. Once he achieved that precious awakening, he was able to bring the path to the world. During the course of Lord Buddha’s life he discovered that there were many different displays of consciousness, many different levels of attainment and attunement that one could accomplish and he did accomplish many of these before that ultimate moment. But it was that ultimate awakening that he presented to the world as the Buddha Dharma.

The seed of the method that we practice is enlightenment, the Buddha nature itself. It is not the human nature. If it were the human nature he would have taught before that precious awakening and that would have been something from the human capacity. But it was not until supreme realization that he began to teach the method and he taught only that method which leads to supreme enlightenment. So the seed and the method are completely married and not separable.

Living the Sacred Life

May 7, 2012 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

What if it were possible to live in such a sacred way that instead of thinking of ourselves as separate human beings who want to go there and get that, we were able to see everything in the world around us as the same as us, a display of an underlying primordial natural state. What if we could see that all things are the display of a fundamentally empty and yet full primordial nature, not separate from Buddhahood? Supposing that, instead of clinging to what we see and putting ourselves in the posture of acceptance or rejection, like or dislike, or hope and fear—the hope that it will work out well and someone will love you, or the fear that it won’t and no one will. Instead of approaching life with that kind of idea, which wears us out and does us in, supposing we could live a truly sacred life?

Supposing when we see a tree, a person, something beautiful or not so beautiful, supposing we were in a quiet way simply to know that this too is a display of the Buddha nature. Supposing that when we see something that delights our eyes, we would think of it in a more sacred way as something that can be offered to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas for the sake of sentient beings, rather than clinging and grasping.

Supposing everything could be offered. Supposing that every experience that happened to us could be offered, whether we liked it or didn’t like it. Supposing we could develop a sense of everything being sacred, precious, having its own weight and depth and taste, and that each experience on its essential level can be offered.

Supposing that we grew in the awareness that every single thing that occurs, and every single thing that we see, feel, touch and taste within the context of our life is inseparable from this fundamental spiritual reality that is both our beginning, our ground or basis, our ultimate goal and result. Supposing we could really practice deeply in that way.

Once you get past the point of being an effort, once you really begin to awaken to the interconnectedness and sacredness of everything, then within the mind there becomes a kind of simplicity that is the result of such thoughts. When you’re really in the posture of making offerings for the sake of sentient beings, there is no sense planning on how you’re going to get everything. Once the joy of that begins to catch hold, of seeing everything not as a materialistic, external, or attainable thing, but more as a display of everything you long for, then you begin to move into the understanding that it’s not the display itself that you want, but the underlying joyful, spiritual reality that is in fact the essence we all long for.

In every major religion in the world, there is something about approaching it with the eyes of a child. Every religion has a different way of explaining that, but there is a simplicity and naturalness that if one can engage in that on their spiritual path, it is sustaining, joyful, and natural. It gives us the means by which we will not separate ourselves from the path – having times when we feel that we are very spiritual, and times when we feel that we have other things to do.

If we begin to practice the path in that way, it is much simpler. It is simply our life. It is so inseparable that, in the same way that you cannot stop breathing and continue to move and have your being, neither could you even consider not having one’s spiritual path be the most integral, most core, most central, nourishing and profound element within your life. And so you become empowered.

Each Moment Like a Kiss

November 24, 2011November 11, 2010 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

If you are living a sacred life, which is a life truly connected with meaning, nature, cause, and result, then each moment becomes like a kiss. Every moment is something that you have a sacred relationship with because you move into the awareness that there is nothing that you can do that is separate from your own nature. And nothing that you can do, unless you will it to be so and close your eyes and turn away, that is separate from the result of awakening. In order to establish this truth as being real and relevant in your life, you need to understand the path as being inseparable from your nature.

We run into all kinds of traps when we practice the BuddhaDharma. One of them is that we feel like we’re doing somebody a favor when we practice. We feel like we’re doing our teacher a favor. We feel like we’re doing the people around us a favor and our compassion becomes tainted with that. We feel like we’re doing everybody a favor by praying for the world.

When we move through the vehicle of our lives, we adapt a posture, which is very much like putting on clothing or a false crown. We put on an appearance as though it were not ours. We think of practicing the path as a constraint or something that we do that isn’t naturally part of us and so the path eventually becomes like a burden to carry, something that isn’t you that you have to pull with you and that becomes weighted. It becomes too heavy. It becomes unnatural. It becomes an issue in your life.

What if we understood the path as something that we were unable to walk away from, so natural like our own breath? In the same way that life is displayed as movement, breath, activity and its result is that we live. That natural process of understanding ourselves to be that kind of creature makes it pretty easy for us to breathe, doesn’t it? If you understand the basis of our life, and you understand cause and effect, you’re not likely to say, “Oh God, I’m so tired of breathing all the time. I’m just sick of it. I mean it’s really a pain. You have to do it from the moment you’re born to the moment you die. It’s just not fair. Why does everybody have to do that?” We would never think like that, of course, because your breath, your movement, is an expression of the fact that you live.

It is possible for the path to be the same kind of living reality to you. I know that in my own practice (and I’m certainly not holding myself up as the best practitioner in the world. There are times when I don’t have time to practice at all), I have never for a moment felt separate from the path. That seems to me impossible. It seems to me my entire life is an expression of the path and it is. It seems to me that everything that I know for sure is something that the Buddha brought to the world. I don’t know anything else for sure. I may know something about the nature of mind, but I really couldn’t get you into D.C. I can’t find the place. It’s the truth.

And yet, I wouldn’t know how to take action, no matter what it looks like, that is separate from what I know as sacred. I wouldn’t know how to remove myself from the path. The path for me is inborn, connected, married, and I’m convinced that there would be no reason for me to live if there were no path to be displayed. I don’t think I’d be here. Why is that? Is it because I’m such a great practitioner? No, I don’t think so. I think that somehow perhaps, it has been my good fortune, as my teachers have said, to have practiced many, many lifetimes and it has become natural and habitual for me by this time. Perhaps that’s what it is. But the one thing that I know for sure that I don’t see is anything that is separate from the Buddha nature.

We, as practitioners who are trying to mature in our own spirituality, have to learn how to do that, how to live a truly sacred life. There are many different ways to put that thought into practice. I know that with native Americans, for instance, everything that they do in a ceremonial way they offer to the four directions, they offer to the spirits and powers associated with the transcendent and with earth. Everything first is offered to the creator. Everything is done in a ritual and ceremonial way so that it is in alignment with what we know to be our nature.

How does a Buddhist practice that kind of sacred life? A large part of it would be to understand that the path should never be viewed as a thing that is composed of ordinary elements as we know them. It should be understood as being inseparable from everything you see, everything that is precious to you, and which someday will be even more precious as your understanding increases. Most importantly, the path cannot be and is not separate from that which is your primordial wisdom nature. The voice that is the path, the method that is the path, the direction, the confidence of the path, this is all a miraculous display of Buddha nature. Each and every aspect of the path is a means by which one can develop or awaken to that natural, innate potency that is your potency and that you cannot walk away from, that you cannot abandon or destroy.