An excerpt from the Mindfulness workshop given by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo in 1999
Most of us were trained from early childhood that you’re wrong when you get caught. A lot of times when our parents schooled us and disciplined us, they didn’t really relate to any profound level regarding the development of our consciousness. Very few parents walked up to their children and said, “You know, you’re not developing good inner qualities.” Mostly we were told, “You didn’t wash the dishes!” So we learned that it is the visible things that really count, and it’s when we get caught that life really takes a downward turn. That’s what we’re told, and that’s what we really understand to this day. It’s very hard for us to make that leap from thinking with this get-away-with-it mentality, with this as-long-as-you-hide-it-it’s-OK mentality, into a deeper level of practice where you require of yourself that you do more than look ‘as if.’ That’s a step that only you can take.
My personal experience has been that when we take that kind of step and become inwardly responsible for giving rise to a state of recognition, then at that point our path becomes potent, empowered, and deeper than we thought possible. But then you could say that about any avenue of life. So as long as we’re faking it in any avenue of life, so long as we’re simply trying to hold the image that we think is appropriate, we are missing a lot. So why wouldn’t it apply to Dharma activity also? It is particularly important where the state of awakening, as opposed to being in this narcotic, samsaric mind state is at stake. How much more so, then, in Dharma practice is it to be aware of one’s own mind state and to take oneself to task? If you find that you’re just fulfilling the form of the practice and you’re just acting as if you have reverence, or acting as if you can have some kind of spiritual discrimination or recognition, only you can say to yourself, “W-w-w-wait a minute, go back and do that again.” Only you can sit there doing Seven-line Prayer, and realize you don’t even remember what you’re doing. Things are coming out of your mouth you don’t even know and the mind is all askew and you don’t know where you are and if you didn’t have the beads, you really couldn’t count, you’re so far gone. So when that happens, do you stop, pull yourself together again, and focus? Maybe you even lose a few of the Seven-line Prayers on your little bead thing, and go back and say, “Wait a minute, I think I’ve been gone for about 10 minutes. Only you can do that. I know it sounds silly; it sounds like much ado about nothing, but that is the power that you have. Don’t take it lightly. The potency that we have on our path comes from that kind of mindfulness, that kind of discrimination.
© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo