Longing for the Guru DID | Tibetan Buddhist Altar

What Do You Reach For?

January 15, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

There are three different levels on which you can recognize your Teacher. One is an extremely poor level, a common, ordinary level. One is an intermediate level in which you see that the teacher holds the teachings purely and gives the teachings purely and you really admire the Teacher and feel great respect for the Teacher. That, however, is only an intermediate level of recognition.

The deepest and supreme level of recognition is recognizing the Teacher not as a person, but rather, as a door to liberation, as one’s own nature. This supreme level recognizes the Teacher as one’s mind, recognizes the Teacher as the miraculous intention of the Buddha, appearing in a manifest way in order to benefit beings. It recognizes the Teacher as that original longing, the longing to know that nature, to recognize the Teacher as the answer, to recognize the Teacher and primordial wisdom itself in some incarnate form, in the same way that your own relationship to the path becomes not an ordinary thing, but a very profound and mystical thing, a thing of truth, a thing able to bring about awakening.

The relationship with the Teacher is especially difficult for Westerners. We have lots of training on authority figures, we have lots of training on mothers and fathers, but we have no training on to how to deal with this longing. The way we have dealt with it in the past has hurt us. It has brought us a great deal of pain and suffering. It has made us act in ways that we do not understand. We are people who had a particular karma and it did not quite fit in with the karma of the society in which we were brought up. If that were not so, then more of the society in which we were brought up would be able to approach the idea of awakening, would be able to approach the idea of having a Teacher in order to follow a supreme path in order to achieve the great awakening.

So, if we can reprogram ourselves by looking back at that original longing and understanding its depth, understanding the ways in which we compensated and forgiving ourselves and confessing the lack of recognition, we will then be able to establish a relationship with the Teacher, the path, the Buddha and with the meditational deities that we practice. If we can establish that relationship anew in that way, the quality of the path that we practice will be completely different. The quality of the experience that we have will be completely different. We will feel healed, and the need for that healing is very sharp and very strong.

It’s my job to watch over my students. Some of you spend 75 percent of your energy blaming yourself for the way you are. Some of you spend a lot of energy trying to act out things that will never bear fruit concerning the Dharma and concerning your Teacher. Some of you spend 75 percent of your energy trying to pretend that you don’t feel or trying to take issue with one thing or another so you don’t have to feel that longing.

I look at you and I have a sense of how you’re managing that longing. It’s like you come so far and you’re right here, almost to my heart, and then you turn away. Some of you stand in the background and look from afar, look hungry, peek out from behind the door, close the door again, stand back there and be hungry for some more. Then you open the door and do like that. Each one of you has a particular and peculiar different way that you deal with this, but you are all living with this.

You were born with the longing to awaken. You were born with a longing to know your own nature, to taste that nature. You were born with a longing and a homing instinct to find your Teacher. You were born with a longing to find a pure path and there were no words like that when you grew up.

You compensated by substituting other things and trying to make them the object of your longing. You made lots of mistakes because of it. That’s not the point, though. There is nothing you can do in one lifetime that is as meaningful a miscalculation as simply reaching for that nature and trying to find it in something small. That is the biggest miscalculation that any of us can make and we do it constantly. That’s what keeps us revolving endlessly in cyclic existence.

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

Every Experience Is a Blessing

January 13, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

We’re all sleeping until we reach supreme enlightenment, but most are really sleeping in a very profound way. In that coma, they are not even able to say, “I want”. They merely act out, and they act out in different ways.

While we are still asleep and until we achieve supreme realization, the fact that you are here listening to teachings is the evidence to know that you have felt that longing. You should find it and relate to it purely. You should encourage it in that it is a dynamo of energy by which to really touch the nature that you are seeking, that the bliss that you want, the union between the student and the teacher.

But you are so ashamed to feel that feeling directly, because you’re so macho, you’re so tough, or you’re so cool or you’re so advanced. You are so ashamed to feel that feeling that you want to say, “Oh, the longing for the Teacher is only me longing for my own nature”. Well, yes, it is that, but you should face directly the longing for the teacher on the deepest level. You should not be ashamed of that. You were ashamed of it as a child and you were taught not to feel it and this longing created a lot of mistakes for you. You should not be ashamed of that now.

I have that longing. I have it, it is the strongest longing, I cannot imagine another longing like it. I live with that longing constantly. I use that longing to provide the means by which I can accomplish Dharma, or I can accomplish kindness for all sentient beings. I realize that the true longing is the longing for the Guru, it’s the longing for my Teacher, for the Guru on all of the different levels, on the apparent level as well as the deepest, most primordial level. And I realize that I will only find that longing satisfied so long as I try to live the qualities that are my Guru.

So, if I were to turn away from students and say, “Oh, I don’t want to do this anymore, I’m tired,” or, “I’m lonely doing this. I don’t want to do this anymore.” If I were to do that, I would never find my Guru. I would never be with my Guru, because those are the qualities of my Guru. My Guru never leaves me. He cannot turn his face from me. And so, that being the case, if I were to turn my face away from anyone that had hopes of me, it would be hopeless. I would never find the Guru. The longing would never be satisfied, because I would have turned my face away.

You must begin to practice in such a way that the face of the Teacher is understood in everything that you do. No matter what you experience, whether it is loss or whether it is having, whether it is joy or whether it is sadness, whether it is life or it is death, whether it is sickness or health, poverty or wealth, whatever you experience, you should think that everything you experience is a blessing from the root Guru.

Finding Our Way Home

January 12, 2017 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

By the time you have grown and begun to find your path, you have already lost yourself somewhere. You don’t understand yourself any more. You have already done things for which you do not forgive yourself. You have already substituted something else for the longing that you felt. You have already substituted something else for your Teacher. In having done that, it is difficult to find your way home. It is difficult to reach what was originally very pure in your mind. It is difficult to rebirth what was very pure and tender inside of you.

And now, you can’t just say, “Oh, I found it at last. The longing is finished. I found what I’m looking for. I found my path, but in the meantime, I’ve been promiscuous and I don’t forgive myself or I’ve become tough, or numb or I’ve become materialistic.”

What happens is that because you see what’s in front of you, it’s so precious and it’s just what you’ve been waiting for, instead of being able to just grab it and eat it, what we do, then, is try to deal instead with the numbness or the hardness or the promiscuity or the materialism. Because we have become used to this feeling of longing, the longing remains, and we are not able to truly be one with the path and with a Teacher.

We’ve forgotten how to satisfy ourselves. We’ve forgotten how to do anything except blame ourselves and be angry. We make lots of mistakes, compulsively make mistakes. We do not follow the path purely and with a full heart. You have to ask yourself: Is the person who says I’ve got to get my Three Roots practice done today, is that the same person, who, as a child, was waiting for something, was just hungry for something? It’s not the same person. We feel differently now than we did back then and we don’t know how to get back to that original place of purity. We feel something is amiss when we think we’ve found our path because we feel anger, guilt and we feel dirty. We feel different, impure. Then we try to approach the Teacher and the teaching and the path itself in an impure way, because we believe that we are somehow impure.

Having longed for the taste of our own nature for such a long time, now when we look at the Teacher and the teaching, we see it as something altogether different. We see the Teacher as a human being, and we try to get close to a human being. Why do we do that? We do that because we spent our whole lives trying to fit that longing into an acceptable picture, and now we’re trying to do the same thing.

We are afraid to long. We are afraid to experience the depth of that longing and instead, we try to get close to the person. We are afraid to experience the bliss of the union between the meditator, the meditating mind and the nature that is meditated on. The bliss of that union is so strong and we are afraid to experience it. So instead, we long for some kind of union with the person who is our Teacher at this time. It is even common to feel a strong sexual urging for our Teacher. It doesn’t matter if the Teacher is the same sex. Students can have dreams and they will have strong sexual urgings for the Teacher. If you think of the Teacher as a mother or father figure, or an authority figure, or a therapist that you come to with your ordinary stuff, there will never be satisfaction, because that isn’t the truth. That is not the nature of the Teacher. That longing has once again been diverted into a way that you understand. It becomes a perpetuation of the suffering that you had as a child where the longing was not understood, where it was diverted and where it could not be satisfied.

So, the feeling of longing is mistaken. The longing is for union, not for sexual behavior. It is misunderstood. And what generally happens is a feeling of rejection, because the Teacher does not comply with our wishes. There is a feeling of guilt. There is a feeling of wondering what’s wrong with you. There’s a feeling of a lack of acceptance of yourself. There’s a feeling of a lack of confidence, a feeling that you are somehow impure in your motivation. The longing sometimes becomes so strong that one is unable to practice.

You want the Teacher to hold you and love you, or you want the Teacher to be with you as a friend. You are unable to practice because you are so busy watching how your Teacher acts towards you. Does he or she smile at me? Does he or she hold my hand when I’m lonely? Does he or she notice when I’m ailing? Does he or she come after me when I’ve strayed? You’re so busy noticing that that you do not practice. The practice is the caring for you. The practicing is the coming after you when you have strayed. The practice is the taking you home into that acceptance and awakening to that nature. The teachings that you receive are the relationship with the Teacher. They are the fruits the Teacher brings to you. If you are longing for union with the Teacher, when the Teacher teaches you from his or her mind, and offers you the essence of what they know, that is the union, far more so than any physical friendship could ever be. There is nothing more intimate than that.

Yet, we continue to not understand. We continue to divert the longing, not accept ourselves and blame ourselves. We continue to create a bad relationship with our Teacher. If we understood what was happening, we would run to the teacher, run to the path, run to the experience of being on the path and of practicing in order to achieve enlightenment with open arms and with an open heart. But instead, we are doing these other things that do not accomplish the awakening that we wish.

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

Listen to Your Life

December 28, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Longing for the Guru”

One of the great difficulties we have as practitioners and people involved in a materialistic culture is that we have very little understanding of the longing we feel for the Guru. In a culture that has a spiritual foundation, in a culture that recognizes the role of the Guru, that recognizes the role of the Teacher or that recognizes and approves of a tendency to long for spiritual fulfillment, it is much easier to put a name and a label on that longing.

But in our culture, in order for us to survive that kind of longing, we have to make believe that it’s something else. We have to pretend that it has to do with human relationships. We have to pretend that it has to do with prosperity. We have to pretend that it has to do with a certain lifestyle. We have to pretend that it has to do with intelligence or that it has to do with mental health. We have to pretend all sorts of different things in order to put the longing into some slot that our society recognizes, because if not, as we grow up in the formative years, it’s crushing to know in your heart of hearts that you are very different from others. No one seems to have quite the same feeling that you do.

And so, because it is so crushing, because it is such a lonely thing, often, the very people that longed the most are the ones that diverted that longing into, perhaps, promiscuity, or perhaps becoming almost fanatical about this thought or that thought or this idea or that idea. They could have diverted that longing into drugs or alcohol. They could have diverted that longing into making themselves into a way that they are not, such as a superficial way or a hard way or a tough way or a dull way or a dead way. They might have pretended that they had no feelings in order to deal with the ones that they did have.

Now, it’s true that lots of people have these same feelings and lots of people have these same ways of dealing with feelings. For instance, it’s very possible that someone whose mother or father didn’t love them could become promiscuous simply for that reason. Yet, that does not preclude what I’m saying. You should listen to your life. You should listen to what you did and what was underneath it and you should come to understand that perhaps there was something a little different in your heart and in your mind. It was there and it was with you always.

True Confession

September 21, 2012 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Longing for the Guru”

If you feel that you have become deadened to that longing you once felt, if you think that you don’t long for your Teacher or long for the Buddha, if you think that you don’t long with a heartfelt longing for that awakening, then you should try to remember your childhood and the different feelings that you had.

What are some of the things that you did? Were you promiscuous? Did you become involved in drugs or alcohol? Did you become very materialistic in certain ways? And if you can remember the beginning of that, was it based on longing? Was it based on something that you could hardly remember, but remember that it was sharp and poignant? Was it really based on that?

If you can remember a time like that, you should spend time becoming reacquainted with the purity of that urging. Cultivate that longing. Not cultivate it in a false way or in a contrived way, but search for what was already there. Feel what was felt. Don’t make up a feeling. That’s important, because then you’ll blame yourself again. Instead, try to remember that feeling, even if it just numbs you to think that you have gone so far astray, you should not be ashamed because your karma is that you were born into a culture where what you felt was not acceptable and you tried to fit it into ways that were acceptable. Those ways did not work for you and then you shut down. You should try to go back to that original feeling and find a way to forgive yourself. You have to confess in order to be able to fully forgive yourself. Don’t confess: Oh, I’ve been a bad girl, or I’ve been a bad boy, I’ve done this and I’ve done that.

The confession that you should make to the primordial root Guru is: You were everywhere, and I tried to find you here. The true confession is the lack of understanding the nature of the Guru. The true confession is the lack of understanding as to what you are. That’s the real confession, and that’s the real sin that was committed. Yes, karma happened. But that core confession and purification can bring about the end of all the karma that arose from that, truly. It can bring about the end of all sufferings that came from that point. You should allow yourself to remember the longing that you felt and learn to live with it.

In learning to live with it and having it be the warmth in your heart, allowing yourself to be with that and to live with that, then that longing will bring the proper result. So long as it is diverted, so long as you refuse to feel it, so long as you do not allow yourself to be pure and then constantly cover up with feelings of impurity, so long as that condition continues, the longing cannot be satisfied.

That longing, if it’s felt in its pure way and if you can manage to get your ego out of the way, can be the very bread by which you are nurtured to continue in a firm way on your path. That longing can be the way that provides the actual, undeniable connection with one’s own root Guru. It perfects that relationship so that one can realize the nature of the primordial Guru and realize that they are the same. You can understand that what you see in front of you is the miraculous touch of Lord Buddha, that the relationship with the Teacher, the relationship with the path, the relationship with all of the teaching, the relationship with your own practice can only be a result of the miraculous intention of the Buddha. So long as we continue to understand our teaching and our path as something external, we will never understand the nature of it. We will never be able to truly drink of the taste of that nature. Instead, we will continue to feel separate from the mandala.

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.