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A YouTube video teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo:

The following is respectfully quoted from “Compassionate Action” by Chatral Rinpoche:

Chöd means “cut” and is a practice for destroying ego-clinging by offering your body, cut into pieces and converted into pure nectar, as sustenance for the enlightened ones, the hungry ghosts, demons, and other sentient beings. It is traditionally practiced at charnel grounds and cemeteries.

The following is a YouTube video teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo extracted from a talk called “The Attitude of Gratitude”

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Antidoting the Mantra of Samsara”

As a part of Ngondro, we have to accomplish 100,000 repetitions of a short version of the Bodhisattva Vow,  the Bodhicitta mantra. Do you think to yourself, “Well what’s the goal here?  See, I’m trying to be compassionate. O.k. so from now on I’m just going to be nice.”  Have you ever tried to make that decision?  From now on you’re going to be nice?  Have you ever tried to do that?  How long did it last?  Maybe five minutes if you’re lucky!  I think the all-time world record for a woman is 28 days!  And that goes for her husband also!  So it really can’t be done. You can’t just decide you’re going to be compassionate. And why is that?  Because you still have the weight of these ancient habitual tendencies and deluded perceptions.

The Buddha teaches us that what’s needed here is to recite the Bodhicitta mantra at least 100,000 times with the correct absorption, correct mental concentration, mental imaging, and mental visualization, just as you are taught by the Buddha. Don’t make up your own religion now. Don’t do that!  Practice what the Buddha has taught you just like the Buddha says, and that will change that. Rather than thinking “Oh, let me see if I can rewrite this religion to make it a little easier,” which you guys have all tried to do, haven’t you?  Yes, we know that. So, instead of rewriting the religion, we actually practice it the way that it was given. But we’re thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice, instead of this 100,000 business, why don’t we sort of do it the new way?  This is a new age isn’t it?  We’ll just think positive all of the time.” Anybody ever tried to think positive all the time?  That’s another fun one. The world record for that is also 28 days.

So we have to understand that what’s recommended here is not arbitrary. Some Buddhist person didn’t show up a long time ago and say “Let’s see, when it gets to be about 1996, how are we going to torture these people?”  It wasn’t like that at all. These practices are meant to antidote your particular situation. You must understand that these were not given to us by ordinary sentient beings. These were not authored by someone who felt that they had an answer the way many of our New Age wisdoms are. You know, nowadays we hear people coming up with wisdom all the time, all kinds of wisdom.They came up with it two years ago, five years ago—how to dream, how to vision. Everybody’s got some wisdom.

But this stuff that comes from the Buddha is different. What actually occurred here is that the very mind of enlightenment appeared in the world as the perfected Buddha. This was not an ordinary sentient being. This is the Buddha nature appearing in the world in a form that we can see with our eyes. And from the mind of that nature, from the mind of that one, from that, directly from the Buddha nature itself, this antidotal process was given. It’s not the same as some mom and pop wisdom somebody cooked up nowadays. So it’s not going to sound like, “Let’s put a bandaid on an ulcer.” It’s not going to sound like “O.k. you’ve been alive since time out of mind creating lots of nonvirtue. Just think positive. Everything will be fine.”  It’s not going to sound like that.

It’s going to sound like what it is. The necessary solution for what ails you according to what you actually are, not according to your over-simplified understanding of yourself. So the Buddha has given a very deep, very extensive, very profound method for a very deep, extensive and profound problem. And there are no shortcuts.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo.  All rights reserved

The following is a YouTube video teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo extracted from a talk called “The Attitude of Gratitude”

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

I came  to understand that that is the way it would be.  I had to not lie to sentient beings.  I could not hold these beings in my arms and say, “Here I am for you.  I’ll do anything I can for you,”  because it was complete, pardon my French, bullshit.  You know, I was lying to them.  So I began to think, “Well, if this unlimited luminous, pure, uncontrived nature that is free of suffering could somehow be here, that’s it.  That’s it.”  But how to do it?  How to do it?

At that time I really didn’t have the answers. Honestly, I have to tell you that part of my life was like mountain tops and valleys at the same time, because I really felt the bliss of feeling that I had come to understand the faults of this world and had come to truly reach for and lift my sights to something that was so much purer, so much better.  I really felt the bliss of that, and kind of excitement and happiness of being on my way. But the suffering of knowing that you could do nothing but lie to your child…  The suffering of knowing that everything that we see looks so good, so colorful and wonderful, and it’s bullshit. It’s a lie.  That kind of suffering! It was a very difficult time.  Plus the struggle of thinking “I’ve got to find a way!!”  And I had no teacher who could give me the way.  No teacher at that time had come to my life yet who could say, “All right.  Do this and this and this, and that will happen.”  So I’m struggling with this and I’m thinking every day, “What can I do?” I mean literally I had gotten myself into such a state that if I could have physically ripped out my heart and handed it to Lord Buddha himself… I didn’t think of Lord Buddha at that time, I forget.  It was just that absolute nature.  If I could rip out my heart and physically hand it to the absolute nature, I would do it, because I was going crazy, kind of a little crazy.  There was this crazy Yogi phenomenon happening, you know? I was a little crazy with this idea.  I couldn’t think about anything else.  It was weird.

I would sort of reward myself at the end of the day, here on this farm. I would sit down and have a cup of tea and a snack.  One day I went out and got some potato chips. I thought I would have some potato chips and a coke.  Now I like potato chips, but potato chips don’t like me, so this was a splurge.  So I had a potato chip. And then I started thinking about my practice, and thinking about the children, thinking of beings in samsara, thinking about my mouth.  Did I give this up or not?  I did.  The whole thing became so disgusting to me.

So that’s the kind of experience that I had.  Many of you will say, “Well, I don’t know if I want to have that kind of experience.  Thank you very much.”  But I have to say that also in that was a tremendous amount of joy, like nothing I had ever experienced in the world.  Greater joy than even my family, which I was very happy with and very much caring for and very close to.   Greater joy than anything I could see or touch or eat or smell or anything, because I could feel that here was some noble potential. Maybe it hadn’t been actualized yet, but somewhere was this noble potential, and the excitement of that was really happy.  It was a happy and genuine thing, and I really thought that somewhere in here there is going to be the solution for sentient beings.

Here I was—you have to understand the humor of this.Here I am back in Chandler, North Carolina, reinventing the wheel, literally reinventing the eight-spoke wheel because I didn’t realize that Lord Buddha had already done this.  I had no idea.  I had absolutely no idea.  So here I am trying to find the way.  I didn’t realize that Lord Buddha at some point made the same decision.  He noticed that there was old age, sickness and death and he left to go figure out how to make this better.  He took off and tried to make it better. In a way, that’s exactly what I was trying to do.  If only I had known, I could have short-circuited that a little bit.  I have to tell you, that particular practice, done in that way, from my heart, with very little guidance —especially that nothing was written down so that I had to make it up—was so profound.

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called Turning Adversity Into Felicity

When we practice Guru Yoga, we actually begin to develop the view that the lama is the source of liberation.  We begin to understand using traditional, prescribed images.  For instance, we are taught that we should think of samsara as being like a burning room. In samsara there is a great deal of suffering, and it’s actually just as probable that you will experience adversity as it is probable that you will experience felicity.  It is just as probable that you will experience suffering as it is that you will experience happiness and joy.  So we think of samsara as being untrustworthy, and we think—and this is true—that within samsara, because of our confusion and our lack of awareness about what our nature actually is,  we are constantly giving rise to the causes for more suffering.  This is constantly the case.  So we think of samsara as being like a burning room with no windows, that there is no escape except for this one door.  In our practice we think that the Lama is like that door.

The Lama is considered to be the door to liberation, the very means by which the blessing comes to us.  Without the Lama, we would not have been hooked onto the path.  Without the Lama, we would not receive the teaching.  Without the Lama, we would not understand the teaching.  Without the Lama, our minds would not be empowered and ripened and matured.  That is the responsibility of the relationship between the guru and disciple.  The mind must be matured in order to progress on the path.  So we rely on the Lama for all of these things without which we remain wandering in samsara experiencing birth/death/birth/death/birth/death with very little control.

Of course, when life is going well we think that this must not be true.  It looks like we have a lot of control in our life.  But if you think that, then you should read the newspaper more frequently, and you should talk to people who have been inflicted with incurable, diseases, who were afflicted completely out of the blue, not expecting that their lives would come to this.  You should talk to people who have suffered through circumstances that seemed to come from outside, misfortune, the loss of a job, the loss of loved ones.  These are terrible sufferings for us as human beings, and until we have experienced our fair share of them — and we will, eventually; old age, sickness and death, these things occur to all of us — we have the delusion of a certain kind of control in our life.  Ordinarily that kind of delusion comes with youth, and then later on, as we pass the age of supreme omniscience at about 30, we begin to discover that, in fact, we are not totally in control, that life seems to control us.

So we think of samsara as being this untrustworthy, inescapable difficulty, and we think of the lama as being the door to liberation.  We hold that kind of regard.  It isn’t that we worship a personality.  Of course, it’s not like that.  That would be very superficial and useless.  What good is a personality?  If we conceive of the Lama as a personality, what good would that do us?  We are a personality, and look where it’s gotten us!  That’s nothing to rely on.  So we rely on the Guru as the condensed essence of all the objects of refuge: all the Buddhas, all the Bodhisattvas, all the Lamas, all the meditational Deities, the Dakinis and the Dharma protectors all rolled into one, including all of the teachings.  These are the liberating truths of Dharma.  These are the objects of refuge.  So the Lama becomes the door through which we exit samsara.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Antidoting the Mantra of Samsara”

When we practice prostrations we are applying the antidote to pride. Well, you think to yourself, if that’s what we’re doing, I’ll just stop being proud!  And how long do you think that’s going to work because you know what you’ve already done?  You’ve already said I could figure out how to do this better than the Buddha did!  You don’t think there’s a little pride in that?  Hm?  Hm?  I do. There’s pride in that already.  Instead of being oriented towards engaging in non-virtuous activity and creating non-virtuous habitual tendency and continuing our delusions, instead we should make prostrations. And how do we make prostrations?  We say, “I take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma and in the Sangha.”  The Three Precious Jewels—the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. Now why is it necessary to do that 100,000 times and to bend our bodies when we do that?  Because inside ourselves we are constantly saying “I take refuge in what-I-want, what-I’m-gonna-get, and what-I’ll-have-in-the-future. I take refuge in you-love-me, you-take-care-of-me, you-give-me-stuff.”  We are constantly taking refuge in stereo, TV, CD player. We are taking refuge in chocolate. What else?  What do you like?  Cake?  Ice cream!  I mean, these are the ways that we think!  We don’t realize that, but when you go for something, what do you go for?  You go for something else!  You don’t go for the Buddha, the Dharma or the Sangha.  You go for ice cream!  You go for a new car!  You go for anything but the Buddha the Dharma and the Sangha!

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Norbu Lhamo.  All rights reserved

The following prayer is from the Nam Cho Ngondro, The Great Perfection Buddha in the Palm of Hand

MA NAM KHA DANG NYAM PA’I SEM CHEN THAM CHED

I pray that all motherly sentient beings, countless as space,

LAMA SANGYE CHÖ KYI KU LA SÖL WA DEB SO

May realize the Guru’s Dharmakaya Buddha Body.

MA NAM KHA DANG NYAM PA’I SEM CHEN THAM CHED

I pray that all motherly sentient beings, countless as space,

LAMA DE CHEN LONG CHÖD DZOG PA’I KU LA SÖL

WA DEB SO

May realize the Guru’s Great Bliss Sambhogakaya Body.

MA NAM KHA DANG NYAM PA’I SEM CHEN THAM CHED

I pray that all motherly sentient beings, countless as space,

LAMA THUG JE TRUL PA’I KU LA SÖL WA DEB SO

May realize the Guru’s Great Bliss Nirmanakaya Body

MA NAM KHA DANG NYAM PA’I SEM CHEN THAM CHED

I pray that all motherly sentient beings, countless as space,