An excerpt from a teaching called Intimacy with the Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo
Ask yourself again and again, “What’s the goal here?” If you are more interested in expressing your fundamental, uncontrived, primordial nature which is free of discrimination, free of that which is complete and that which has just begun, in a joyful, symphonic musical way with wings? If you are more interested in giving flight to what is precious than in following a dogma or a religion or playing church, then you are going to be an excellent practitioner.
On the other hand, if you are interested in playing church and you have a time clock for this and it’s just a thing that you want to do, part of your life, then that will be the result. If you practice religion only to make your life different, then you will have a different life, but if you practice wisdom and Bodhicitta in order to awaken, if you recognize everything as inseparable from you, if you are able to move into the posture of moving through the sacred as that which you are, as something precious, then I think you’ve got a shot at it.
That’s going to take you working at it and you’ve really got to determine this for yourself. You have to build the marriage inside of you. Don’t make the mistake that we make in ordinary marriages, waiting for the romance, hoping that the path will somehow woo you so that you can feel good about the path. That’s not going to work. It’s a lot deeper than that.
What I’m suggesting is that you really take this into your heart, really consider this, turn the page on a new kind of life. You can start today. Supposing you were never to take another bite of food into your mouth without offering the nourishment of that for the liberation and salvation of all sentient beings and giving thanks and realizing the divine, precious inseparable nature of that food. Supposing taste for you became more like chameleon than yum, yum. Think about that.
Supposing love and friendship became for you a holy sacrament rather than a way to fill your time. Supposing the spiritual life became for you an expression of something that exists and fills your heart, rather than something that you’re doing in order to look a certain way. You know you want this. You know you want to feel it to the depth of your heart.
Why won’t you be your own best friend? Take yourself by the hand and give birth to a truly spiritual life. I don’t care if you call it Buddhism. I do care that you practice compassion and Bodhicitta. I do care that you awaken to the primordial wisdom nature. I do care that you begin to understand the sublime nature and emptiness of self and all phenomena. This I care about very much, but what you call it is up to you. Call it love. It’s about really going for it, really taking it in until it’s yours and bonding with it.
Practicing the path the way we’ve practiced it is kind of like having a baby and putting it up for adoption and checking in on it every once in a while and expecting to have the same kind of bonding and connection that you do with a child that you nursed with your own body and gave your own milk to and formed that kind of unbreakable connection with. What a difference.
Don’t make spirituality in your life the bastard child. Let it be your life. Let you be that. And of course you are. You are the ground, the basis, the primordial wisdom nature. You are the movement and display, which is also called method, and you are the result. And it only seems like we’re on the path now because it seems like we are traveling toward the result, but in fact nothing is going anywhere. You are not moving. Nothing is far away from you and there is nothing to uncover or to build or to establish. It is simply the precious awakening, and to truly live a spiritual life you must understand that this is your nature.
Transform your life into the sacred, the sacrament, the beauty that you long for as though it were an external thing, and I’m asking you to do it by 1 o’clock. The reason why I’m naming this time is because it’s so simple. It’s just as simple as what you’re doing now. In fact, it’s much more simple, because what you’re doing now is feeling separate from the source, separate from your path, neurotic and needy. And by 1 o’clock you could have that all fixed.
© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo
Whoa!