An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999
As a teacher, sometimes I’ve had the opportunity to bring a student to task, to say, “Look, you’re all spaced out. You’re working hard, you’re going through the motions, but you’re not practicing. There’s no inner practice happening here.” The first thing that the student will do is get defensive, and the reason why they’ll get defensive is because they’re dancing as fast as they can. A student will look at me and say, “Well, what the hell do you want? I’m dancing as fast as I can. In the way that I understand, I’m working real hard.” I won’t argue that with you, not for a minute. You’re right. You’re dancing as fast as you can; you’re working really hard; but the difference is you are not practicing recognition. Even if you spend two hours a day practicing and then you leave it to go live the rest of your life, that is still a state of non-recognition, and you are not truly practicing.
What is required here is a deeper understanding, a deeper awareness, and a more profound grasp of the realities that we are facing. Once again, our habitual pattern is to say, “Oh, this person is doing this and that person is doing that and that makes this person like this and that person like that.” but the way to practice is to understand that these things we see are the all-pervasive faults of cyclic existence; this person that you’re seeing is like a bee in a jar, just hitting the glass, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. Does the bee know what’s going on? The bee is trying to fly. The bee is trying to do what bees know how to do, but being in a glass jar, like samsara, all it can do is bash its head against the glass. There’s no way for that bee to figure its way out. That is the condition of samsaric beings, and awakening to that recognition is really the only way that we can give rise to the bodhicitta, give rise to compassion. Otherwise we are simply acting compassionate, which means, “I am the star of the show.” We are still in that deeply deluded state. We’re just acting differently, but acting is still acting.
© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo
