The Longing to Awaken

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called Longing for the Guru

You were born with the longing to awaken. You were born with a longing to know your own nature, to taste that nature. You were born with a longing and a homing instinct to find your Teacher. You were born with a longing to find a pure path and there were no words for that when you grew up.

You compensated by substituting other things as the object of your longing. You made lots of mistakes because of it. That’s not the point, though. There is nothing you can do in one lifetime that is as meaningful a miscalculation as reaching for that nature and trying to find it in something small. That is the biggest miscalculation that any of us can make and we do it constantly. That’s what keeps us revolving endlessly in cyclic existence.

The relationship with the Teacher is especially difficult for Westerners. We have lots of training on authority figures. We have lots of training on mothers and fathers. But we have no training on to how to deal with this longing. The ways we have dealt with it have brought us a great deal of pain and suffering because we have acted in ways that we do not understand. We are people who have had a particular karma that did not quite fit in with the karma of the society in which we were brought up. If that were not so, then more of the society in which we were brought up would be able to approach the idea of awakening, and the idea of having a Teacher in order to follow a supreme path to achieve that great awakening.

If we can reprogram ourselves by looking back at that original longing, understanding its depth, understanding the ways in which we compensated and forgiving ourselves and confessing the lack of recognition, we will then be able to establish a relationship with the Teacher, the path, the Buddha and the meditational deities that we practice. If we can establish that relationship anew, the quality of the path that we practice will be completely different. The quality of the experience that we have will be completely different. We will feel healed, and the need for that healing is very sharp and very strong.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo