The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Your Treasure is Heart”
How do you practice this Bodhichitta? In the beginning, the most important posture is to start from where you are. That is your time and space grid, That’s your place, your posture, your “now.” You have to start there. Now that may seem like restating the obvious. “Of course you’re going to start from where you are, oh queen of the department of redundancy.” But most people never start exactly where they are, with that kind of self-honesty, being genuine on their path. No baloney. No games. You look and see what your habit patterns are and what your practice has been. You really look inside yourself and see what your qualities are and face them honestly. It’s not necessarily going to be good news. Some of it will be good, but not all of it. Trust me on this. You look at it the way a child looks at a world it doesn’t have the capacity to conceptualize.
When we look at something, we judge it immediately. We don’t know how to look at something without judgement. When a child looks at the world, it looks at the world with a sense of wonder. In a way, it has no idea what it’s looking at. I read about a perfect example of this in a book. For instance, a one-year-old child, playing in their yard might stop dead in their tracks because they can feel a vibration, but they have no idea where it’s coming from. They don’t even know where to look. And suddenly they just look up and see this thing. They don’t know it’s a plane. They point, go “uh uh uh” you know. It’s shining and it’s moving; and they remain completely absorbed in it until it reaches the end of the sky. And then it’s gone and they just go “wow!” in baby talk of course, whatever their particular way of describing that is. Just two years later, by the time the child is three-years-old, they are going to hear the noise, know where to look, look up at the sky and go “airplane,” and then go back to whatever they were doing. That wonder, that freedom to reinterpret, to actually see everything, is gone. Literally, from that point on, they never see another airplane. It’s like that with all of our ideas and concepts, particularly these subtle concepts about ourselves and about love.
We have very little understanding about how to look at ourselves and to see ourselves fresh and new, so that we can determine how to give rise to the Bodhichitta within our lives. That takes a great degree of self-honesty. If you are not willing to see yourself, whatever poop you have produced, and whatever negative habitual tendencies you have, as well as, and equally with your good qualities, there is no way to actually know yourself. You’ll be like the three-year-old who says, “Oh, airplane.” From the moment that unwillingness occurs, you never see yourself again, not ever.
So here’s the trick. Be willing, in an honest way, to really look at yourself and see where you are, and from that point, you can freely and honestly begin to practice the Bodhichitta. That is a very important first step.
Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo. All rights reserved
