Mindfulness Workshop

Seeing The Guru’s Face in All Things

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

We have to find a way to live in a constant state of recognition.  The greatest power that any of us can have is that practice of recognition.  To give rise to the bodhicitta in our ordinary lives, to give rise to an awakening state in our ordinary lives, to give rise to compassion, which is the very display of the Buddha’s miraculous intention in our lives, this is the way that we change our lives meaningfully.  It won’t change our lives permanently because even our lives aren’t permanent.  But this the way we deeply and meaningfully change our lives, through applying the antidote.

Running around like a chicken without a head trying to make everything work makes you a chicken without a head.  It does not make you successful.  It will not help.  I don’t know how better to put this to you, but consciousness creates form. There is no getting around that. There is no other way.  It is through the mindfulness of our practice, it is through spiritual discrimination that we can make an actual change in the flavor, the condition and the results of our lives, and that’s really the only way.  Anything else that we do is like putting a bandaid on an ulcer.  It’s just festering underneath there, and pretty soon it’s just going to open under the bandaid.  Do you see what I’m saying?  The disease is still there, and I’m using a disgusting analogy because it should be disgusting.

But when you practice the antidote, you’re talking about healing something from the inside out, from the root cause, which is your mindstream, your consciousness.  It’s so real, and we’ve never had the opportunity to see how real it is: how this spiritual mindfulness, this lifting up of what is sacred, this practicing of bodhicitta in every aspect of our lives, this looking for the Guru’s face in all things — we have not had the opportunity to see what a tremendous life changer this is, what a tremendous empowerment, what a tremendous power to live it gives us.  And so we’re asleep, sleeping peacefully, thinking all we have to do is do the things, the busywork, that keeps us afloat, and we don’t know why life happens to us the way that it does.

Your life is not happening to you.  You are caught in a feedback loop, if you will.  Let me use some electronics: caught in a feedback loop, a bubble, a reflection.  You look outward, and you see your own mind moving back and forth.  That’s kind of a feedback loop, a constant, circular kind of motion, and the qualities of your mind display themselves in the world, and they have the same taste as the quality of your mindstream.  The external conditions that you have and the quality of your mindstream:  same taste.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Baby Steps to Recognition

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Sometimes when we begin to make offerings of what we experience to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, we may think it’s not a good idea to offer something that’s not ours, but that’s only because we’re materialists and have this idea of ownership.  We really don’t understand how things are.  We’re kind of sick and deluded with this idea of the self being the center of all experience.  So that being the case, when we offer a tree or a field of flowers that isn’t ours or even offer an experience that you have with someone else that’s wonderful and pleasurable to you or to see a friend of yours that has not one, not two, but three cars — for you to offer any of those things to the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas in your mind, is that illegal because you don’t own them?  Of course not.  The idea isn’t about ownership.  It isn’t about defining that, yet again.  It’s about allowing these five senses to participate in Recognition in some way, even if it’s only in a small way.  To offer anything that one sees, any image that is formulated in the eyes, any sound – the sound of the beloved’s voice, maybe your beloved friend, your beloved spouse or child – the sound of that voice that is so comforting and so wonderful to us, that very sound can be offered when it meets your ears.  Rather than owning it and saying this is about me and my children or me and my spouse or me and my stuff, instead make that kind of ongoing process of offering.

In a very real sense, you’re not so much offering the object as you are offering your response to the object.  You’re allowing your senses, your thoughts, and your sensibilities to work in a different way than they have worked before, so then you can feel free.  You can offer someone else’s money.  You can do anything you want to in that way as long as you are truly sincere and it’s done in a profound way.  Remember, we’re keeping in mind the faults of cyclic existence, and practicing that kind of renunciation because we have seen the faults of cyclic existence.

Perhaps you meet somebody really rich, and you may notice, because of the contemplations you’ve been doing on the faults of cyclic existence, that those people are so connected to their money that there is some real clinging going on there. Maybe you notice that that person is all about their money and maybe, because you’ve practiced Recognition, you can see that this is a non-virtue.  You can see that this is not making that person happy, that literally the money has no power to make that person happy.  So knowing that, in your practice you can visualize that money and offer it to the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas.  What good does that do?  Does the money disappear out of the banks?  No.  Perhaps there is some small blessing.  Perhaps more importantly, you, by making such an offering and by thinking that way, can begin to differentiate, to distinguish between clinging and some form of Recognition that there is something more precious than our egos. Maybe it’s a baby step, but many of those baby steps make for big movements.

Cultivate the habit of constantly offering everything that you see, all pleasure, and even hardship.  When we come into a place in our life where it’s very uncomfortable, where there’s some hardship and we survive and perhaps overcome that hardship, that very event can also be offered.  That event can be considered practice, a manifestation of an opportunity to have made offerings, to have been more mindful, and to have been in a better state of Recognition.  Then, that very difficulty that you just survived becomes a form of practice.  It becomes sacred.

For Westerners, our biggest problem is that lack of a deeper understanding of how to practice.  We still think that you go to church on Sunday, and so you practice on Sunday.  You do your religious thing on Sunday and maybe on the other holidays.  We still have that division in our mind.  We are deeply materialistic people, and that is the worst, most horrible delusion that we’re stuck in: that inability to recognize any distinction because of our material outlook.  Practicing in the way I’ve described gives us the opportunity to develop constant mindfulness, purification of the mind, and constantly creating new habitual tendencies.  It’s perfect for Westerners to practice in this way in addition to their sit-down practice because we have such limited time to sit down.  In addition, in this culture we’re taught that when you’re sitting down, you’re being lazy, and our whole commitment, therefore, is to be busy all the time.  So one way to begin to counteract that is to practice in this way of constantly making offerings.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The Point of Practice

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Training the mind is a very personal, very intimate, and very private thing because there is nobody that can train our minds better than we can.  No one can know the ins and outs of how we think better than we can, and so that responsibility, as well as that power, lies in our hands.  Therefore, the most important aspect of one’s practice is to practice recognition of the nature of phenomena, of the emptiness of all that is; to practice recognition of cause and effect relationships; to practice recognition of the faults of samsara; to practice recognition of the difference between what is ordinary and what is the miraculous activity of the Buddhas.  To practice this kind of recognition is the point, and it’s included in the book practices that we do.  That is as much our practice as reading these prayers is — more so, because if you were to practice this state of recognition without having a book – let’s say you were a prisoner, and you couldn’t get your books – you could still practice a state of recognition.  You could still learn to practice the View.  You could still examine your habitual tendencies.  You could still reorient your intentions and your understanding.  There’s so much that you can do.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Challenge the Appearances

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Since you were young and you figured out that it was very bad to get caught, that idea has never changed. Literally, once that idea is there, it’s in you.  You have that idea.  Why go back and challenge it?  Because it isn’t true.  We have to overcome that childish, immature part of us that we have preserved. You’re not only in trouble when you get caught; you’re in trouble when you’re in a state of non-recognition.  You’re in trouble when you’re asleep, spiritually speaking.  So why are we thinking in that same childish way?  Because it is also human nature, and we have to observe this about ourselves, that in certain ways, we’re incredibly lazy.

We like to keep really busy to reach a goal because we want that, but when it comes to backtracking and reevaluating an old conceptual scenario, like “it’s only trouble when you get caught,” we’re not going to do that unless we are pushed to do it.  We’re not going to do that because we already did it.  Why do it again?

In order to practice effectively, you must go back and challenge all things samsaric, all conceptual proliferation.  Instead of going through the rest of our lives in a childlike way, we have to go back and reevaluate, and you know how childlike we are about this.  We don’t want to get caught.  We don’t want to get in trouble.  We don’t want people to think badly of us, so we work very hard at this.  Instead of staying in that childish place, which only reinforces the idea of self-nature as inherently real, ego-cherishing, ego-clinging and the division between self and other, why not go back and challenge appearances?  Why not go back and reevaluate and ask yourself: what is the nature of suffering?  Where does the suffering come from?  Does it come from getting caught?

If you are gifted with the ability to impress people with how cool and attractive and wonderful you are, and yet within your mind, you’re basically a schmuck, constantly in judgment of others, constantly uncaring about others, constantly in a state of non-recognition, constantly fearful, angry, not compassionate, just your average, ordinary, mid-grade schmuckness on the inside but on the outside it’s not visible, then you have the greatest obstacle of all.  I am so sorry for you.  I’ll do anything I can to help you work through that, but it’s not going to work unless you work through it with me.  It’s much easier to be a student if you’re somebody like a recovering alcoholic and know that people have seen you vomit.  You have gotten to the bottom and it was nasty and dirty and there was no way you could avoid it.  I have more hope for the practitioner that one day decided to practice because they woke up in a pool of their own vomit than I do the practitioner that wants to practice because they want to be a Buddhist.  You think about that.  To come to the point where you really deal with yourself, with the appearances that you are putting forth, and discriminate between that, and just faking your way through.  This is really quite a different level of depth, isn’t it?

You have to ask yourself: remaining in a state of non-recognition, acting outwardly as though you have some answers, what do you think the result will be?  Why wait for me to tell you?  What do you think the result will be?  Assuming that the seed and the fruit are the same, that the seed produces the appropriate fruit and not a different kind of fruit, what do you think is going to happen?  Do you think your life will have less suffering in it, or more?  So much more.  But to be in a state where you’ve seen that there is some flaw here, that there’s something wrong here, then there is a kind of self-honesty that you have attained.  In the case of the recovering alcoholic, maybe you come to the point where you say, “Well, anywhere I go from here is up,” that is a very valuable point because at that point you’re not faking it.  You’re not in a place where you’re saying, “Oh, if I act this way, then I’ll be this way.”  Having fallen so far to where you’ve bottomed out and really recognize the faults of samsara, when you begin to engage mindfulness, it won’t be an external acting.  It will be more of an internal engagement, or an internal awareness.

It’s that kind of thoughtfulness, mindfulness, and recognition that must be part of our practice.  If we had been born in a culture where spiritual progression and realization were not only valued but eventually expected, we wouldn’t have to be told this, just as in a materialistic society we don’t have to be told that you have to train for your profession.  We would automatically, by reading these texts, understand that it is pointless to read the prayers, even if you read them so well and you are so cool when you read them.  If you have no understanding of their meaning or if you are insincere about this recitation, there’s just no point.  To realize that the point is to actually awaken, to move into a state of recognition, one would practice differently than if one’s understanding was that you had to do a certain amount of practice in order to be a really cool guy, or in order to be successful at Buddhism.  Do you see the difference?  One is about mind training, and the other is about samsara.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Bring the Sacred Into Your Life

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Oftentimes we run into this terrible, terrible, tragic separation in our lives, don’t we?  Where this is this thing, and that’s the sacred.  This is the life, and that’s the sacred.  The way that we practice is by saying, “Okay, here’s how I’m doing on my path.  I’ve got this practice and that practice and this practice, and I’ve accumulated 30,000 prostrations, so that’s how I’m doing on my path.” Then we have our lives, and we say, “Oh, am I  making lots of money?  Do I have a good family situation?  Do I have good relationships, good friends?  Do I have a good social life?  Am I cool?”  Mostly,  “Am I cool?  Am I in?  Am I happening?  Am I loved by everybody?  Do I get enough approval?  Do you all care for me enough?”  We’ll say,  “Okay, I’ll go practice Guru Rinpoche over here.”  You visualize Guru Rinpoche in the sky with diamonds, right?   You’re visualizing Guru Rinpoche in the sky like a cartoon, and you do that for 20 minutes or a half an hour, two hours, and that’s your practice.  Then you walk out of that, and you forget everything.  You forget everything.  And then, in the rest of your life you think, “I’m not making enough money. How am I going to do this?  How am I going to pay this bill?”   And you get all tense and wound up and  think, “I’ve got to run over here, I’ve got to run over there. I’ve got to have this relationship or that relationship.”  So you’re okay with your practice, but stuff’s not going too well for you out here.  Why do you think that is?

Here’s why it is: because Guru Rinpoche is not in your life because there is non-recognition.  You are just floundering in a state of non-recognition.  There can be no blessing if you’re not looking for it.  There can be no recognition if you do not establish it.  No one can shove it down your throat, and it’s not going to magically appear in front of you.  If you do have a vision of some deity or something like that, that’s probably because you did well in your practice, but that doesn’t mean that you wait for the next time for the deity to show up before you think of the deity again. It’s up to us to make our life sacred.

As we are thinking, “Why don’t I have enough money, gotta get more money, gotta get a better job, gotta do this, that and the other thing, why isn’t this happening?”  The Buddha taught you why this isn’t happening: you’re not practicing generosity.  You’re not practicing bodhicitta, or at least in the past you did not practice generosity and bodhicitta, and so the seed that creates the fruit of prosperity was not there.  Your opportunity, then, is to begin to practice generosity, to begin to practice bodhicitta in your ordinary life.

Start small.  It’s best that way.  Start small and work your way big because when we start small, we learn.  It’s kind of like when you’re exercising, if you do a great, big, giant, heavyweight workout the first time, you’ll never do it again because the pain will kill you. You think, “I’ll never do this again.” and then you wait three weeks and by that time it’s all gone.

My suggestion is that you start to practice things like mindfulness and generosity in a small way.  If you have two dollars, buy somebody a cup of coffee or something with one of them.  If you have three dollars, give one of them to somebody that needs it more than you do, like the temple, or put it aside for a donation or something like that.  Start in that small way, making that kind of generosity and offering part of your life to bring the sacred into your life. It also changes the actual conditions of your life, because really, according to the teachings, if we find that we are poor and then somehow we get a better job and maybe the money situation works out, that cure is not permanent.  The poverty will return, either in this life, by you losing that job, or in a future life by the condition simply returning, and we may not understand why.  That mindfulness, that spiritual distinction, has to be embedded in our lives.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Upholding the Extraordinary

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

When we view one another, if we have taken teachings together or empowerments under the same teacher, we are Vajra brothers and sisters.  We are family.  When we see each other, we should be willing to lay down our lives for each other because there is nothing more precious than someone who is holding empowerment, holding the blessings of the Buddha in the world.  That doesn’t mean you have to make a big display about it.  You still have that one vertebra bow trick you could do.  We hold our Vajra family as being most precious.  We should think very, very carefully how we deal with our Vajra brothers and sisters.  If we’re ill-tempered, hateful, scornful towards them; if we are not holding them in pure View, holding them as gods and goddesses, as deities and consorts, if we are not looking at them in that way, we are committing a non-virtue.  If we speak with hatred or ugliness to a monk or nun, we are committing a heinous non-virtue.  I don’t think it’s written “heinous” in the book, but I’m telling you, it is.  It is a serious non-virtue because monks and nuns are the providers, the holders, of the doctrine that make it possible for us to practice.  So if we were to speak with disrespect to a monk or nun, the one who suffers from that is us.  The monk or nun, they’re going to react or not react.  That’s their business.  Whatever they do, that’s their practice.  You’re only responsible for your own practice.  And whether that’s a good monk or a good nun, that’s also not your problem.  That they are holding the Buddha’s teachings invites you to accomplish pure View regarding them.  So we should not think of monks and nuns as being equal to us.  I think of monks and nuns as being higher.  They hold the Doctrine, and I hold the view about them.  So even though I am required, to sit higher than the monks and nuns, if I didn’t have this job, I would never willingly do it, never.  I would never willingly do it.  I know you guys on chairs, you’re thinking, “Oh God!”  But in general, I will tell you that when you have the opportunity to sit lower than a monk or nun, you should try to do so, always.  If you have the opportunity to receive a cup of tea from a monk or nun,  receive it properly.  This is from a monk or a nun!  This is really important to hold the View.  These nuns are goddesses.  They are Tara, none other.  These monks are the appearance of Avalokiteshvara in the world, Chenrezig.  Their compassion establishes the Lineage on this Earth.  It’s because of their efforts that we are able to keep ourselves together.  It’s about raising up what is extraordinary, raising the Dharma up higher.

For monks and nuns, there is a particular hierarchy that we think of when we honor one another. For instance, the younger – I don’t mean younger in terms of age but younger in terms of ordination – the more recently ordained monks and nuns are supposed to hold the elders in higher respect, and you should because they have held the robes longer.  Even if you’re better at your practice, if there is a monk or a nun that has held their robes longer than you, you hold them up.  You practice that View.  You monks and nuns that have had your robes for a long time, however, you don’t hold yourselves up.  You don’t think, “Well, you know, I’m an older monk, I’m an older nun.” In fact, your job should be a little bit like the tactic I take.  Perhaps you can allow younger monks and nuns to show some respect if that is their practice and they are willing to do so, but in your mind, you should be thinking, “These are the most precious ones, the babies, the newly ordained, fresh, moist with longing.”  You should think that they are still fresh from that devotion, from that opening, from that pouring out and the gathering of merit that it took for them to become monks and nuns.  You should think, “These are the jewels.  I, as an older monk or nun, am responsible for bringing these along because they are so precious.” not because they are younger in their ordination.  Do you understand that?

In a way, each of us is looking for ways to not have our own ego in the center of our own mandala.  We are looking for a way to practice View so that we really begin to awaken to the sense of all phenomena, all appearance, as being none other than the celestial palace mandala, and that doesn’t mean thinking it.  It means practicing like I said, not just saying, “Oh, everything is love and light, everything is celestial palace mandala.” That’s not how it’s done.  That will produce absolutely zero result.  Positive thinking is not the same thing as practicing View.  Positive thinking is nice, it’s lovely, I hope you do it, but that ain’t what the Buddha taught.  Practicing View is much firmer than that, and yet more subtle.

Practicing View is instituting the habit in your mind to see things differently than you did before.  Practicing View is using every opportunity to get yourself, your ego, off that throne, and using every opportunity to flush out that obsessive-compulsive desire syndrome.  You know that syndrome: the one that says if you have something sweet, now you have to balance it with something salty and then you have to have something sour and then you have to something wet and then you’re thirsty and then you’re hungry.  That is never ending.  Those are the attributes of your ego.  That is what your ego does, that obsessive-compulsive nature, that constantly going around in circles with what we want.  That is absolutely the nature of the ego.  That is all it does.  That’s all it does, and your five senses help you do it.  You smell what you want, you see what you want, you touch what you want, you grab what you want.  The five senses help us to do that.  Any opportunity that we have to move away from that is an excellent opportunity.

When we have those opportunities, and we search them out, you will find those opportunities everywhere, because there is no place where it’s impossible to practice the sacred.  So that being the case, once you move into that posture of really practicing View and beginning to give rise to that recognition and beginning to see all extraordinary, compassionate, sacred objects as being something different — once you begin to see opportunities in every part of your life, you will begin as well to recognize Guru Rinpoche’s blessing.  Once you recognize those opportunities and practice like that, Guru Rinpoche’s blessing will be everywhere.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

Observe the Equation

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Lamas and bodhisattvas have taught time and time again that one’s practice must be part of one’s life.  They have taught that it has to be an ongoing thing, and that you can’t separate it from whatever else it is that you do.  The opportunity to practice exists in our lives, and so therefore, to only utilize sit-down time and completely separate that from the rest of our lives without any effort toward recognition or mindfulness is really pretty useless.  It’s like trying to drive down the street with no air in your tires.  You’re not going to get that far. This mindfulness, like changing any habitual tendency, can be a little bit painful or tight at first – that happens – but you know that, and you’ve broken through things like that before when they were important to you.  For those of you that have quit smoking, when you first quit smoking, that was a raw and painful thing, but you pushed through it because you knew that established the new habit pattern was going to be the way to go.  That was the only way to get to that goal.

Why don’t we think the same way about our practice?  Why do we think that we just have to wait for the glory?  If you decide you’re going to exercise, you have a goal: you don’t want to be a blob anymore.  That’s your goal, and you’re fervent about it.  When you first exercise, you’re going to hurt.  It’s going to ache.  If you’re really committed and you’re really not into being a blob, you’re going to take two Tylenol, and you’re going to continue.  You’re going to push through it.  Why can’t we push through our own habitual tendencies?  Why can’t we push through into some kind of ritual of recognition?  If we can ritualize working out, if we can ritualize stopping smoking, if we can ritualize crossing the street safely, if we can ritualize occupational training, why can’t we ritualize the state of recognition so that we make it part and practice of our walking, waking lives?  We trained to become whatever we are now.  Are you a doctor?  Are you a nurse?  Are you trained for that?  Wasn’t it hard when you first started taking in all that information?  Sure it was.  Are you a professional in any way?  You trained for that.  It was hard when you made those new habits, but you saw a goal and you had to get there because everything in you told you you’re supposed to be successful at that.  Why won’t we accept this responsibility in our practice?  That’s what it takes.  It takes really accepting that responsibility in our practice.

If you want to play guitar, your fingers are going to hurt for a while.  You’ve got to build calluses, but ordinary human beings, perfectly ordinary human beings, can do that because they observe the equation.  They can see that if they want to get there, they have to go through this uncomfortable zone of practice.  Why can’t we do that in our spiritual practice?  Why is it up to our teacher to push us through to realization?  Why do we hang around like limp practitioners and say, “Well, after I do this practice, what practice should I do after that?” without really ever trying in the least little way to have any recognition of the nature of phenomena, of the nature of reality?  We’re perfectly able to do this.  We do this in other areas of our lives.  Why is this so hard?

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The Heart of Experience is the Guru

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

For many of you, I know that when we first started this temple it was family style, and you thought of yourselves as children, and I thought of myself as your mother in many ways, and there was a spiritual family dynamic.  We started small, and we got big.  So for many of the people who have always been around, who have been practicing with me for about 15 years now, (or 15 aeons it seems like), for many of you, my going away, my physical movement, if you will, from Poolesville, Maryland, to Sedona, Arizona, has been an extremely painful thing.  It’s not that I don’t have compassion for you, but if that is the case, I’m telling you, you are not practicing correctly.

There is nothing on this earth, including me, that can take your guru away from you.  There is nothing that can take that Recognition away from you, that relationship. There is nothing that can take Guru Rinpoche’s blessing away from you, that marvelous connection. Nothing has that power.  If you think that your teacher is absent, then you are absent.  It’s like the sun and the earth.

When we were younger as a species, we thought that when nighttime came, the sun disappeared; it fell off the edge, and it wasn’t there anymore.  Then later on it came back, and we liked it better when the sun was there because we could see better and it felt warm on our skin and it was safer.  But really what was happening, we later found out, is that the sun is staying right where it is constantly shining.  It’s the earth that cyclically turns away.   It’s the same way with the relationship with our teachers.  To the degree that we keep mindfulness, that we practice Recognition, that we are willing to see the guru in all things, in every opportunity, and utilize that opportunity, to that degree we experience oneness, non-duality, with our teachers.  We also experience some kind of awakening to our own primordial wisdom nature to the degree that we practice that Recognition.

If you think that your teacher is not with you most of the time, then you are not with your practice most of the time.  We have to get past making our egos and the appearances that go with the phenomena of ego-clinging the center of the mandala of our activity.  We have to stop doing that, and move past appearances into a deeper Recognition through constant mindfulness. To practice that as an extension to our sit-down practice, is the way, and to the degree that we awaken our capacity to Recognize, we are held inseparable from the heart of Guru Rinpoche.

Don’t waste your time as a practitioner thinking, “Oh, now my teacher moved away, so now I am lonely.  Now she’s there and I’m here, or he’s there and I’m here.” You’re accumulating the mantra of samsara if you do that.  You are accumulating appearances.  You are just thickening the delusion. Instead practice the recognition of one’s own nature being totally inseparable from the guru.  Practice the recognition of that to such an extent that you feel, in every moment, the king of that moment is Guru Rinpoche; in every breath, the queen of that breath is Guru Rinpoche – yes, the queen – everything.   Whatever ideas that we have, think that every movement, every experience, through our practice, through our determination to practice Recognition, the essence of that experience is the guru.  The more we practice like this, more and more we become awake.

It is possible to practice in that way with such fervent regard that in every future lifetime that presence will not be denied you.  In this and every future lifetime that presence will never be denied you.  There is no way that, as we accomplish Recognition, the primordial wisdom nature can be kept from you.  Again and again it will be Recognized as the seed and the fruit of every moment, every bit of experience.  But it only works if you work it.  So this tendency that we have to keep our minds satisfied with simply fulfilling the form and then going out to be lazy and slothful, reacting to appearances, simply accepting things at the most superficial, apparent level — this is a mistake.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

A Nontraditional Chod Practice to Establish a Sacred View

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Before I ever learned about the Buddha dharma, I actually used to do a practice that my teachers have told me was a natural kind of Chöd.  What I would do is contemplate on different body parts and it took me months and months and months to do this. I practiced it for months because I felt like the deeper I went into it, the more involved it became.  I would think about a certain body part, like my feet, and I would say, “Thinking of these feet in one way, here are their limitations,” and it’s easy to see what the limitations of feet are.  You can’t walk on fire with them.  Well, not most of us.  You can’t walk on water with them – not most of us either.  There are so many things you can’t do with your feet, but there are also many things that you can do with your feet.  So thinking of feet in those ways, I would see all of the limitations of feet, being used as they are presently being used, and then I would think about all the possible ways that feet could be of benefit to beings.  How could my feet be of use?  That’s what I want.  I want my feet to be of use.  So I would think, “How can my feet be of use?  Well, I can go to people that need me with my feet.  I can go to do some meditation.  I can make my body go and comfort someone that’s sick or feed someone that’s hungry through moving my feet.”

After I had examined both the down side and the opportunity associated with feet, I would then practice this kind of deep offering, and I would make many prayers.  I would say, “I offer my feet to (back then I didn’t say Buddhas and bodhisattvas), Absolute Nature. I offer my feet to the Buddhas and bodhisattvas in order that they might be used to benefit sentient beings.  Other than that, they have no meaning for me.”  I would practice that until I felt like I had given up my feet and they were no longer mine; they were offerings.  I went through my entire body.  Then I found that that wasn’t enough, so I went through all my emotions.  And then I found that wasn’t enough, so I went through all the different ways of thinking and attributes of mind.  I would see the potential of each and I would see the downfall of each and I would contemplate on that very, very carefully.  Then I would spend a great deal of time offering that particular quality or attribute or body part to be used for the benefit of sentient beings, to be used to accomplish some good.

It seemed to me that, generally speaking, the body is a marvelous thing, but if it’s not accomplishing any good, it’s kind of limited, so it seemed logical and reasonable to me to want to offer all of my limitations, all of my ordinary perceptions, all of my attachments in the hope that every part of me would be used to benefit sentient beings.

Think about your speech.  Speech is a wonderful thing; it’s an amazing thing.  It’s one of those human attributes that make it possible for us to teach and learn, so it makes it possible for us to practice Dharma.  So although speech is an amazing thing, what do we use our speech for?  For the most part, we use our speech to help us suffer.  For the most part, our speech is like vomit coming out of our mouths.  What I mean by that is, the stuff that comes out of our mouth often is not connected to any thought anywhere.  We use our speech for blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, and yet this precious thing could be used to teach Dharma.  This precious capability could be used to receive teachings of Dharma.  How amazing!

Practicing this kind of nontraditional Chöd was when I really learned about speech.  That was really important.  When I learned about speech, I found out that if I were really to offer my speech and be constantly mindful of its power, constantly mindful of this blessing, and if I really, ultimately offered my speech to the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas, that instead their holy speech might be here.  That makes the speech worth something.  That makes it powerful.

I used to spend a lot of time considering the pros and cons, the limitations and the attributes of different aspects of what I considered ‘myself,’ and eventually, after offering all my parts and all my qualities and all my different attributes, at that point I felt that something was changed.  I had done this so deeply that I got into the habit of thinking like this, to the point where, when it comes to benefiting sentient beings, I don’t have to make that choice because it’s already been made.  I don’t own this stuff.  It’s already given away.  I developed this habit of constantly offering, and I’m telling you about the way that I did this is not so that you can say, “Ooh, aah, wasn’t she a great practitioner!” I’m not a great practitioner by any means.  What I’m telling you is that as a Westerner, even if we don’t have perfect translations, even if we haven’t accumulated all the teachings, even if it seems to us strange to practice Chöd in a way where we boil stuff and offer it and all those things, even if we’ve never heard of that teaching, it is still possible for us to practice the same principles and to establish a sacred view. It’s still possible.

I feel like my main job is to speak to Westerners because Westerners have a particular outlook, a particular take on things, and I think one of the greatest blessings that I have is that I’m a Westerner and I think like you.  I really do think exactly like you, so maybe I can help you, not just to follow the books by rote, not just to repeat everything like a magpie, but maybe instead to practice more deeply.  Maybe I can help you practice in such a way that the practice becomes married with your life, with your body, with your speech, with your mind, with your consciousness, until they are so one that it’s like mixing milk with water.  That is how practice becomes potent.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The Comfort Zone – Is It Real?

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An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999

Let’s say we were living in a terribly traumatic situation where there was all kinds of danger and all kinds of suffering, but something came on TV, a sitcom, the one that starts with an event and ends up with happily ever after in 30 minutes.  Don’t you love that about sitcoms?  I wish life were like that.  In the midst of all your travail and suffering you watch this sitcom, and for that short period of time, you’re comfortable, sort of happy.  You can laugh at things, but like the sitcom playing, does it change anything?  When the sitcom is finished, what happens?  You’ve still got your life, right?  So it’s like that with the kind of escaping that we try to do.  We try to put ourselves in a comfort zone.  We are so addicted to the narcotic quality of samsara that we try to bring that narcotic state onto ourselves again and again.   We want to watch TV.  We want to do different kinds of activities that make us feel safe.  We like to do activities that we can control.  We like to experience little adventures that are completely within our control, where there are no surprises, and we call that amusement.  We like to experience psychological, emotional events that are totally safe and totally controlled, and we call that relationships.  We don’t want to leave that comfort zone.

What is that comfort zone?  That comfort zone is the blind, dumb acceptance of the appearance of phenomena as being real without any discrimination, without any recognition.  We prefer to bring this narcotic cloak onto ourselves.  When we feel that things are getting too naked, too real, pull up the covers!  That’s what we do.  And we all have different ways of doing that, don’t we?  You know some people like to do the domestic goddess routine; some people like to be workaholics; some people like to do the fertility mambo.

No matter what area you’re practicing, you have to require of yourself a mental exercise – to rethink things, to reassess.  You have to practice recognition.  Do not wait for recognition to come.  The mistake that most practitioners make is magical thinking.  They say, “If I do this practice for two hours a day for the rest of my life, and maybe I’ll take a three year retreat, then I will be enlightened.”  It’s like a magical charm.  It doesn’t matter how you do those things or what you do after those things or before those things, but so long as you do those things, you will be enlightened.  This is the kind of thinking we have about our practice.  What I’m suggesting is that it’s not true.  We achieve enlightenment when we awaken.  There’s a difference.  You can’t really say you achieve your enlightenment after you finish your practice.  You achieve your enlightenment when you awaken.  The state of recognition is the key here.  How you hone your mind, how you choose to use your senses, how you redefine, how you study Samsara in order to recognize, how you study and learn to discriminate is necessary in order to achieve realization.  It is part of the process of awakening.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

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