Alyce Zeoli

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.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo