December 2009-January 2010

I rarely have time to look out the window these days, as I sometimes did earlier in retreat. Looking at the mind turns out to be much more compelling anyway. But I do occasionally have a chance to rest my mind in the winter view of the Hudson River. My favorite time is sunrise.

The first sign of sunrise via my west-facing window is the gradually lightening sky, and then a faint, rosy glow just above the tops of the hills on the western bank. A few minutes later, sunlight strikes, one by one or in clusters, the windows of scattered buildings, very tiny from this distance, turning them into bright orange-gold mini-suns, like sparkling jewels. The unseen sun’s warm glow gradually brightens the hills farther and farther down, until it finally reaches the Hudson.

With any luck, a freight train passes while the water is illuminated, and its colorful cars are reflected, like a second identical train running alongside in the river, upside-down. If there are a few clouds in the sky, they pick up the sun’s color too, and on rare occasions, a turkey vulture will circle over the river at the same time, its underwings the same brilliant gold. My description doesn’t begin to do justice to this show that comes and goes on schedule each sunny morning, whether I see it or not. It’s very relaxing to watch it unfold, while reciting mantras or just letting the mind rest.

This scene often brings to mind the wonderful teacher Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche’s advice, in his book as it is, not to get so caught up in the sun’s reflection that we forget to look at its source. “Our enlightened essence, the buddha nature, is like the sun itself, present as our very nature. Its reflection can be compared to our thoughts—all our plans, memories, our attachment, our anger, our closed-mindedness, and so on. One thought arises after the other, one movement of mind occurs after the other, just like one reflection after another appears. If you control this one sun in the sky, don’t you automatically control all its reflections in various ponds of water in the whole world? Why pay attention to all the different reflections? Instead of circling endlessly in samsara, recognize the one sun. If you recognize the nature of your mind, the buddha nature, that is sufficient.” (as it is, volume 1, page 77)

October 29, 2009, marked the 29th anniversary of my taking refuge with Lama Norlha Rinpoche. To celebrate this, I would like to share, with permission, a slightly condensed and edited excerpt from a teaching on the Seven Points of Mind Training that he gave at KTC Monastery in 1991. In it he explains how to begin to look at the mind.

From Lama Norlha Rinpoche:

“The next instruction is the actual method for placing the mind, the way we just place the mind or settle the mind in meditation. That instruction is, “Rest in the nature of all, the basis of everything.” Then it’s explained: when there is no involvement with the [sense consciousnesses], there is still the nature of all phenomena, the natural state, which is the basis of everything. If there’s no involvement with any of one’s [senses], that does not somehow exhaust our experience; there is still the nature of all phenomena, which is the natural state, which is the basis of everything. And this is pointed out by the term “the noble Buddha nature.

“To experience that, you just rest without conceptuality in an uncomplicated luminosity of mind. It says here, ‘Let go and rest without the slightest idea of a nature existing as something, with absolutely no mental clinging, in a state of nonconceptuality, which is clarity and pure simplicity.’ In summary, for as long as you are able, do not follow thoughts but rest evenly in a state in which the mind is clear in itself and free of conceptuality. This is called placement meditation.

“What happens is that when we’re constantly following our [sense] consciousnesses, then that is what causes us to spin in samsara, because we’re just involved in the objects of those consciousnesses. And it basically means that we’re just following our thoughts, whatever thoughts arise in connection with our senses. In connection with what’s going on in our minds, we’re following thoughts and we are in samsara. And the way to meditate then is to let go of thought, do not follow thought, but just let the mind settle naturally, rest evenly. That is meditation. So when we’re just thinking, then we’re ordinary sentient beings, just a sentient being in samsara following our own confusion. Meditation is not about following our own confusion but rather letting the mind rest naturally in its own state.

“The reason it’s just our nature to follow thoughts is because that’s our habitual tendency. The three main mental afflictions of ignorance, desire and anger have caused us to continually wander in samsara, following our thoughts and suffering, experiencing sickness in our body and problems in our mind, all because of just following and believing in our thoughts, in our conceptuality. That’s our habit. Our habit is to pay attention to our thoughts and follow our thoughts. Meditation is different from that. Meditation is not following thoughts, but learning to rest within the mind’s natural state in which one does not follow thoughts.

“So let’s meditate a little together. The instruction is to rest in the essence of whatever arises. ‘Whatever arises’ refers to whatever appears to our various senses—sights, sounds, thoughts that arise in the mind. So whatever arises, instead of being involved in the content of those experiences, we look directly through what is arising and just rest within the essence of the mind’s nature.

“So we’ll do that for a short time.”

November 2009

Dear friends,

Our venerable Retreat Master at KTC Monastery, Lama Norlha Rinpoche, completed two three-year retreats before escaping from occupied Tibet at the age of 20 and has subsequently led many such retreats in India, New York, and Tibet over nearly 50 years, most of them begun under the guidance of his own Lama, the late renowned meditation master Kalu Rinpoche. From his vast experience, he assures us that the secrets of three-year retreat are to practice diligently without allowing yourself to become distracted, to keep a joyful mind and look upon everyone with love and compassion in all circumstances, and always to remember the impermanence of your situation so you don’t waste any time. There may be more, but I don’t remember them offhand.

I will take questions now.

Q. What do you really do in there?

A. Practice, practice, practice. And when we’re not practicing, we look at the mind.

Q. Why do you need three years of seclusion to do something that frankly sounds so simple?

A. I don’t. I am too lazy to do it on my own. Of course, it helps that we have immense amounts of time to practice without outside stimulation, are trained in very profound meditation methods generally not available outside the retreat setting, and are guided at every step of the way by a realized teacher and other very accomplished retreat graduates. Many people do not have these advantages in their own homes.

Q. It’s all very well to talk about love and compassion, but what’s it really like to be enclosed in a small house with the same tiny group of women day in and day out with no other company and no escape for years on end?

A. I see where you’re going with this question, but I’m afraid I will have to disappoint you. For the most part, it’s surprisingly uneventful. We are encouraged to look at our own minds and try not to pay attention to each other except in practical matters, so even though strange things might possibly happen from time to time, we mostly don’t notice them and as a result we all get along very well. The Buddha taught that there are no such things as “friends” and “enemies,” and in retreat you get to experience this first-hand on a daily basis. We learn that it doesn’t pay to compartmentalize other people too much, better to try to maintain a friendly equanimity toward everyone, give them lots of space for human error, and hope they will do the same for you.

Of course, we might have learned a few things the hard way, and no doubt there is a bit more of that ahead in year three, but that is one of the most ingenious features of the traditional three-year group retreat format—you spend all day immersed in techniques to develop wisdom and compassion, and are given every possible opportunity to fail to practice them in real life. All in all, in my opinion, this group is doing quite well and I feel fortunate to be part of it.

Q. Have you become like the Borg?

A. If you mean are we all plugged into one central “mind” and no longer distinguishable from one another, no, that does not seem to be the case. Apparently we get to keep our personalities and individual autonomy even as we travel the path toward nondual perception. The realized Lamas from Tibet and India are testaments to this, as are the biographies of past masters such as Naropa, Marpa, Milarepa, Gampopa, Rechungpa, and the Eighty-Four Mahasiddhas.

If, on the other hand, you mean do we wear eyepieces that make us look like machines, that is not it, either. At least not so far.

Q. Have you kept your sense of humor, then?

A. Not to my knowledge. I believe I let go of that in year one.

Q. What do you eat?

A. A great many more parsnips than I expected. In fact, were I ever to write an autobiography, I would call it Taking Parsnips on the Path.

Q. Do you eat anything else?

A. We are actually very well nourished on a wide variety of foods lovingly prepared by our caretakers. Benefactors also sometimes send in food as donations toward our retreat, or as sponsorship offerings during some of our special practices.

Q. Could you say more about the parsnips?

A. Not really. However, thanks to parsnips, I am learning to appreciate that resistance is not only futile, it is entirely counterproductive. Intellectually I have come to understand that parsnips are self-liberating and efforts to solve them from the outside only reinforce their parsnipitiness. Then, the next thing you know, they are a town in New Jersey.

I hope to gradually internalize this understanding through my meditation practice and one day attain the state of ro nyam (one taste). So in the end, I am grateful to parsnips, but it is not always an easy path. Anyway, the parsnips are more than made up for by the okra and brussels sprouts.

Q. Back to parsnips, are they a typical facet of the traditional three-year retreat program? Is this something prospective retreatants need to prepare for?

A. I don’t know whether the parsnips are by accident or by design; they do not in fact seem to be mentioned in Jamgon Kongtrul’s classic Retreat Manual. Nor can I say whether participants in another three-year retreat program would encounter them in similar quantities, or even at all. But I am quite sure that if it’s not parsnips, it will be something else, whether you plan to do retreat or not. It would be good to prepare for that.

Q. Thank you for your time and unusual forthrightness about life in the three-year retreat.

A. Till next time, best wishes,

Yeshe Chödron, aka Linda

October 2009

Dear friends,

We passed the halfway mark of the three-year, three-month, three-day retreat during the summer, and are now speeding down the hill toward our re-entry into the world we left behind in January 2008. It is hard to believe that so much time has passed, and equally hard to believe that the rest will be over just as quickly.

Halfway through, as I have already written to some of you, I feel I know about half as much as when I came in—and hopefully the second half will be enough time to clear out the rest.

What I see, or think I see, halfway through retreat, is that the point of our practice is not so much to accumulate more knowledge and techniques as it is to use every resource at our disposal to clear away the obstacles to seeing what we already have. In retreat we have indeed learned a lot of special practices, many of which are available to any practitioner outside retreat, others of which are generally available only in this context, when your mind has been thoroughly prepared to make use of them. But they all seem to be not ends in themselves but tools to help us do the real work of looking at our mind and seeing what it really is, unobscured by the cloud cover of all those fleeting thoughts, emotions, preconceptions, and habitual patterns: the same result we can eventually achieve by applying our trusty old calm abiding and insight meditation techniques.

It’s easy to feel that what we really need in order to progress along the path is the next teaching, the next book, the next empowerment, the next meditation technique, the next quantum leap in meditation cushion technology. And while it’s true that these things help move us along, what we need most is to sit on our ordinary cushion or chair and put into actual practice the simplest instructions we already have. Nothing new we receive will do us any good at the time of death, or the time of overpowering anger or depression, if we don’t put it into practice regularly.

To me, that is the greatest advantage of the three-year retreat—the time and lack of distraction to just look at the mind in the way Lama Norlha Rinpoche has urged me to since day one, back in 1980. I can’t say if I’ve made any progress. Maybe I’ll come out the same old raccoon! Rinpoche told us recently that how or if we have changed won’t be evident until our re-entry into the big, busy world. But, he said, it’s at least a good sign that we’ve made it this far.

I have noticed a few different stages in the way I relate to my mind since retreat began. For me, the first year was mostly about getting used to the routines and practices and trying to remember to look at the mind instead of at everything else around me. Sometimes thoughts and emotions got the better of me, and I had to just keep looking and not give up. (That still happens…but maybe not quite as often.)

Then, as my attention seemed to settle down a bit and turn inward, for a long time bits of seemingly random junk floated to the surface at odd moments, from Old Yeller to Sucrets (mysterious throat lozenges from my childhood) to every stupid thing I ever said or did. The challenge then was to avoid getting caught up anew in fascination or emotion toward these thoughts and memories, but instead to just watch them come up, let them go, and in between try to recognize that they are all made of the exact same thing—the essence of my mind. Painful or pleasant, trivial or earth-shattering, mundane or bizarre, they are all the same in essence, Rinpoche tells us again and again, and first-hand awareness of that is the only key to unlocking our inner nature that is peaceful, joyful and unassailable no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in.

I can’t say that phase is over either, as there still seems to be a large supply of junk in the mental basement (including the Sucrets), but it has quieted down to some extent for the time being, leaving more space to just rest the mind in that ever-present essence, to whatever extent I am able, which I hope is more and more as time goes on.

I will leave you with some advice from Tenga Rinpoche, one of the great contemporary Lamas of the Kagyu Lineage, in his book about dying and the intermediate state after death, Transition and Liberation:

“I constantly remind my students to meditate on shamatha [calm abiding] and the true nature of mind. Five minutes of daily practice brings within ten days the benefit of fifty minutes’ practice. Every one of us will meet death one day, maybe even tomorrow. Meditation in this life will then be of great value to us.”

No letter would be complete without that reminder of impermanence! Until it kicks in, I wish you all many happy hours of beneficial meditation, whether it’s five minutes at a time or an hour.

Till next time, best wishes to everyone,
Yeshe Chödron, aka Linda

December 2008

This is the final month of our first year of three-year retreat. On January 5, 2009, year two begins.

Lama Norlha Rinpoche used to say that during the first year of retreat, everyone always thinks they made a big mistake, but for the last two years, they never want to leave. He also says the first year can seem a little slow, but the second year is really fast, and the third year speeds by before you know it. I imagine that third year will be a bit like an Amtrak through train whizzing by the Metro-North platform in New Hamburg. I’ve seen six previous retreats begin and end, and I know that no matter what you’re doing, three years are gone in a flash, like a dream. One is gone already!

From my perspective at the end of the first year, I can say that, though it has been hard in some ways, the practices are completely compelling and absolutely worth the effort. I’ve definitely learned a few things. But I would say that the main thing I have accomplished in my first year of retreat is perhaps to have a little more awareness of the work that lies ahead. Two more years doesn’t seem half enough!

I wrote in an early post that retreat reminded me of the movie Groundhog Day. I had no idea how relentlessly that analogy would play out. Being in an isolated, enclosed environment and following the exact same routines day after day, week after week, month after month, highlights many patterns. In particular, it brings one’s own habitual ego-driven patterns into such strong relief that they become inescapable, like being trapped in a house of mirrors with infinite regress in every direction. This can be a cause of despair from time to time, but then the recollection kicks in that this is the very work I signed up to do, and the most effective place to do it. There’s no way to avoid situations you don’t want to deal with; every day brings you face to face with the same raw material, with no handy distractions or escapes.

A year into retreat, I wake up every morning and think, sometimes cheerfully and sometimes not, “Today, I get to do it all over again!” And every morning I aspire to do it a little better, not to waste any time, not to let anything bother me, not to react from my devious ego. As Battlestar Galactica put it, “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” Whatever we don’t resolve in this life, we will take with us to Groundhog Day: The Next Life. May as well work on it now!

In my solitary room practice, every time I finish counting 108 prayer beads, I start again. Every time I finish a thousand, or ten thousand, I start another. But each repetition is subtly different, just as I’m not exactly the same person from day to day in my routines and interactions. If I practice sincerely and diligently, gradual awakening is happening, even though it may not be evident in the short term. Three years is a generous amount of time to devote to this process. I feel very fortunate.

Over the course of the past year, from the vantage point of my window looking out on the Hudson River, I’ve watched the days grow gradually longer, then gradually shorter, and later this month they will start to lengthen again. The sunset has migrated to the north and migrated to the south, and soon it will be center stage across from my window again for a month or two. Squirrels, groundhogs, Carolina wrens, catbirds and geese have come and gone. There are no more walnuts. Impermanence and change are evident everywhere, even in the most ordinary and subtle phenomena. Nothing stays the same.

Shortly after Christmas we will begin our first “major” practice. It will last about six months and require complete silence; we aren’t even allowed to talk to ourselves! The purpose is to reduce interactions and thinking so that our habitual conceptual patterns can subside and we can cultivate continual awareness of what is real and constant and generally obscured by all that activity.

I will be opting out of most extracurricular activities during that time, such as elective correspondence and these web posts. I feel less and less like I have anything useful to say anyway. My hope is that some of Lama Norlha Rinpoche’s words have come through over the past year and illuminated your way, as they have mine for the last 28 years.

Till next time,
Linda / Yeshe Chödron

December 2008

Lama Norlha Rinpoche often reminds us that the best advice he got from his first root lama in Tibet was, “Always remember impermanence.”

Rinpoche likes to point out that most of us don’t plan for the end of our life. We only get as far as saving up for the nursing home—and many of us don’t even make it there. We never give a thought to what will happen after we die, or we don’t really believe in it, until we get there.

Buddhists consider the moment of death to be our greatest opportunity to fully recognize the true, unchanging nature of our mind, jump off the merry-go-round, and help others do the same. But without advance preparation, when that moment comes we won’t have a clue, and we don’t know where our karma will take us next time around. “If you don’t practice now,” Rinpoche once asked, “when will you do it? When you’re a cow grazing in a field?” That’s why we constantly remind ourselves, through the second of the Four Thoughts, that death could come, or our situation could suddenly change, at any moment.

A few years ago, when I lived in rural New Hampshire, I was taking a walk on the most gloriously perfect early fall day you can imagine, just feeling on top of the world, la la la la la, when I passed a neighbor’s pig pen. Mr. and Mrs. Pig were friends of mine, and I always stopped to say a few mani’s if they were out and about. But today Mrs. Pig was standing there all alone looking very, very upset. Where is Mr. Pig? As I passed the driveway, why, there was Mr. Pig—laid out on the asphalt, freshly slaughtered and about to be hung up for bacon. Mrs. Pig was next on the list.

A Western teacher I studied Tibetan with back in the 1980s used to say, “We already fell off the building. We’re hurtling toward the ground.”

Whatever helps us remember impermanence and appreciate the amazing opportunity this lifetime affords—no matter what temporary problems we may be facing at any given moment—the best way to take advantage of it is summed up in the Buddha’s most concise exposition of the path:

Refrain from negative actions,
Engage in positive actions,
And tame your own mind.
That is the Buddha’s teaching.

With regard to our actions, he advised us to avoid harm to others and, if at all possible, help them, particularly by refraining from and doing the opposite of killing, stealing, sexual misconduct; untruthful, harsh, divisive or meaningless speech; coveting what others have, and wishing others harm. These 10 negative and positive actions are further explained in numerous excellent resources, such as The Torch of Certainty by Jamgon Kongtrul and The Words of My Perfect Teacher by Patrul Rinpoche.

Taming the mind is done through meditation. The Tibetan Buddhist path includes many different types of meditation designed to uncover our innate wisdom through various routes. In three-year retreat, we’ve begun to get a glimpse of some of the more esoteric practices that are said to make enlightenment possible in a single lifetime. But the starting point of the path is simple calm abiding meditation, and this method alone, if practiced diligently, will vastly improve one’s day-to-day quality of life, lead automatically to deeper realization, and come in very handy at the time of death or in any kind of adversity.

In the early days of the personal computer, circa 1980, when there was only one font, no graphics, no color, and no mouse, and everybody played Pac-Man, a really sophisticated computer game came out. It was based on the 1970s TV show The Prisoner, about a renegade British secret agent mysteriously exiled to “the Village,” a maddeningly cheerful island that bore no resemblance to reality. In the computer game, the player typed in words, and maybe used the cursor keys to move around, in order to solve a series of more and more complex and seemingly illogical puzzles and eventually “escape”—something Number Six, the hero of The Prisoner, never managed to do.

I remember clearly the day we solved the final puzzle. The solution was: “Unplug the computer.” So simple…yet we never thought of it on our own!

You might need your computer, but what if you just turned it off and meditated for a half hour, or even 15 minutes? Or, don’t turn it off—just walk away and meditate for ten minutes, or five, and come right back.

Or, stay at the computer and just swivel your chair around and let thoughts go for a few minutes. Or, don’t even turn around—just lower your gaze and focus on your breath. Don’t try to change it, just notice it, while gently letting go of any thoughts that arise. You can even look like you’re working!

If you don’t have five minutes, and I’ve been in that situation many times myself, maybe you could follow Thich Nhat Hanh’s advice and take three slow, mindful breaths, relaxing and letting all thoughts go just for that short amount of time.

If you don’t even have time for three breaths, then Mingyur Rinpoche has a suggestion: just rest your mind for ONE SECOND! He says we can do this any time, anywhere. Once when he was teaching meditation in New York City he stopped and talked to himself for a moment to see if it’s possible to meditate while conversing. He reported to his highly amused audience that yes,  it is! In the one-second technique, you just focus for that second on whatever you’re doing; let all thoughts and feelings go, and be present where you are, vividly—feeling tactile sensations, hearing sounds, noticing your breath, or relaxing into the vastness of space.

Many years ago during a teaching at KTC, someone asked Kalu Rinpoche how often we should meditate. Without hesitating, Rinpoche replied, “Whenever you realize you’re not meditating, then you should meditate.”

Listen! The banshee is already wailing on the mountainside! There’s no other time than now.

November 2008

I took refuge with Lama Norlha Rinpoche on October 29, 1980.

I had met him just a few days earlier, when I attended a meditation session at his center in New York City with my friend Carolyn. I never expected to be a Tibetan Buddhist; I was more attracted to the economy of Zen practice. But in a year or so of meditating at Zen centers in NYC, I had somehow not yet connected directly with a teacher.

I went to Lama Norlha’s center just to see what it was like. After an evening of chanting, a short teaching, and a brief interview, I had no idea what this strange practice was about, but I knew for sure that I had found my teacher.

Twenty-eight years later, my most vivid memories of that first evening are of Rinpoche’s words. His teaching was on impermanence, and what resonated most with me, having just broken up with my boyfriend, was his observation that no matter how long an experience lasts, when it’s over, it’s as if it had only lasted an instant. The older I get, the more of my life seems like that. The benefit of this perspective, if you can have it while events are unfolding, is that most things are just not worth getting all worked up about—they’re going to be over in a flash anyway.

After the formal activities of the evening, Carolyn asked if we could have a private interview, and Rinpoche invited us to his tiny room. I was much too overwhelmed to think of a question, but Carolyn had one: living in a place like New York City, how do you deal with fear?

Rinpoche said, “No matter what’s happening, think it’s just like television.” After three decades of teachings, that is still some of the best advice I’ve ever received.

November 2008

A previous post focused on Lama Norlha Rinpoche’s advice that the secret to happiness in this lifetime is, in all our relationships, to focus on people’s good qualities and kindness rather than on their faults and negative behavior.

But in other teachings, Rinpoche has revealed: it is not the whole secret!

If we want to achieve ultimate, lasting happiness, happiness that never turns on us, that never diminishes and never ends, what we really need to do is give up forever all our expectations that such happiness is to be found in any corner of samsara: in any relationship, career, book, financial windfall, honor, dessert, or day at Six Flags. The kind of happiness produced by those things—if it even materializes in the first place—is fleeting, whether it lasts five minutes or thirty years.

But wait, don’t get discouraged! That doesn’t mean we need to give any of those things up—we can still enjoy them, according to Rinpoche. All we have to give up is our attachment to them, our reflexive belief that changing our external circumstances in a big or small way is finally going to put our life on the right track once and for all.

How to go about this? Just follow the path that has been laid out before us: contemplate and really internalize the four thoughts, and make meditation a part of our daily routine. Meditation is the key to really experiencing the truth of the Buddha’s teachings. In meditation, by sitting through the parade of whatever happens in our mind, we begin to see for ourselves that there is no reality to anything we think or feel; it is all just a stream of temporary impressions, and if we let it flow without getting caught up in particular aspects of it, nothing in it can ever hurt us or anyone else. We won’t see much, according to the teachings, by sitting for a few minutes now and then; we will only see it by clocking the hours on our cushion or chair. But even in small increments, daily practice will add up over the months and years.

If we accumulate enough hours of meditation, we also begin to experience what is underneath the surging waves of all those fleeting experiences: the vast, unperturbed, brilliant, completely compelling ocean of mind. Connecting with this, Rinpoche teaches, is the real secret to happiness.

In the rare spare moment, I have recently been going through my notes on teachings I’ve received over the past three decades, and this is a recurrent theme. We won’t attain ultimate, lasting happiness until we take the well-being of others to heart, practice meditation and get to know our own mind, and ultimately, through these two, under the guidance of a genuine teacher who has realized the path, recognize and dwell in the essential nature of who we really are.

October 2008

Our mindfulness of impermanence at Nigu Ling is heightened at this time of year by two venerable black walnut trees overlooking our tiny fenced yard. From midsummer through early fall, there is a continual rain of walnuts onto the gravel walking path that encircles the house. Each walnut, fully encased, is about the size, weight and color of a tennis ball but without the bounce, and they pick up quite a bit of speed in their plunge from the tiptop branches of these lofty trees.

When I am circumambulating the house and shrine room in my rare free time, and I hear the loud thud of a walnut right behind me, I am always thankful to have another day to live and practice. To my knowledge, in 26 years and six full cycles of three-year retreat, no retreatant has yet been taken out by a falling walnut. But…there could always be a first time.

Once when Lama Norlha Rinpoche was teaching from his seat in the main shrine room on a hot summer day, someone asked him how to keep impermanence in mind without getting depressed about it. Glancing up at the ceiling, he replied, “Well, I try to remember that my life could end at any moment—but I’m not sitting here worrying that the fan will fall on my head.”

In retreat, if we hope to accomplish the goals of this carefully designed, time-tested, sequential path, we need to stay focused. There’s no time for extracurricular reading, in fact hardly any time for reading at all; so the small library I brought with me consists almost entirely of commentaries on the practices, along with a few biographies of realized masters who traveled and taught this path: Kagyu Lineage founders Marpa, Milarepa, and Gampopa; and the founder of KTC Monastery, Kalu Rinpoche.

However, I did bring one book by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh: Present Moment, Wonderful Moment, a collection of short “mindfulness verses for daily living,” which I pick up now and then for inspiration. One of the things he talks about in this book and elsewhere is the mindfulness bell. At his centers, they have actual bells, but he has suggested that we can designate any recurrent sound in our environment as a mindfulness bell: the ring of a phone, the call of a bird, the honk of a car horn, etc. The sound becomes a device, whenever we hear it, to bring us back to where we are, a signal to pause and pay attention to the present moment. He explains, “The bell of mindfulness is the voice of the Buddha calling us back to ourselves.”

In retreat, we have many literal bells of mindfulness. The main one is the gong that signals the beginning and end of each meditation session. There are also the bell and ting shak (tiny hand cymbals) we use in chanting sessions and in some of our personal practices, and even the lunch bell, though that is more of a signal to dash downstairs so we won’t be late for the lunch prayers. (We try to dash mindfully.)

While I am walking on the gravel path around the retreat house, under the walnut trees, I try to remember to meditate, especially during this period when silent meditation is the main practice we do in our rooms all day. But it’s easy to get distracted, so I recently started looking around for a mindfulness bell. What sound is both frequent and intermittent enough to serve the purpose? The only one I could come up with was: THUD! The walnuts provide visual cues, as well; the path is strewn with them, in various states of disrepair and decomposition thanks to our resident gray squirrels and the ravages of time.

Now, in addition to impermanence, the walnuts are also reminders to disengage from my distracting thoughts and go back to the present moment. As soon as I forget, I am likely to hear or encounter another walnut.

Fortunately, our teachers assure us that if we make an effort to bring ourselves back to the present moment, repeatedly, as many times as necessary, without ever giving up, our superfluous thoughts will gradually become less compelling, and we will eventually replace our habit of distraction with a habit of mindfulness. And then: walnut pie!

October 2008

A few years ago, during one of Lama Norlha Rinpoche’s visits to New Hampshire, he gave a public talk at the Unitarian Church in Portsmouth on the topic of how to be happy. The gist of his advice was this: in all our relationships, especially with those closest to us, always focus on the person’s good qualities and their kindness, and never think about their flaws and misdeeds.

As usual, the Buddha’s solution to our problem is very simple. The difficulty is in overcoming our habitual patterns, or internal resistance, in order to apply it or even remember it in the heat of the moment.

I have written about how prone I am to notice the flaws in things, to wish for something to be different, no matter how good my situation is. That seems to be my default setting, and from years of observation, I suspect it is the case with many of us humans, at least those of us with enough resources that we aren’t filled with joy just to have a roof over our head or enough to eat. Just as a cat is programmed to pounce on the slightest movement, we seem to be programmed to notice the slightest flaw or discomfort, and often to focus on that instead of the bigger, happier picture. A classic example is what the real estate industry terms “buyer’s remorse,” that feeling of dread that comes over us as soon as we finally close on the coveted house and begin to notice its every defect.

In retreat, Rinpoche urges us to appreciate our rare, if sometimes challenging, opportunity, rather than give in to the ever-present demons of worry, doubt, and discontent. “Mind is empty,” he said one day. “This means you can change your thoughts.”

He repeated that advice just this week, in the context of reminding us how many methods we now have for dealing with emotional ups and downs. If our meditation is being derailed by an intrusive train of thought, especially one that brings up anger, sadness or some other disturbing emotion, there are various meditational methods we can apply—but we can also just: Hop on a different train! Change the channel! Think about something else! Most helpful, of course, is to turn our mind to a Dharma topic such as remembering impermanence or reviewing the reasons patience is more beneficial than anger—but any positive alternative thought will do the job.

Of course, altering one’s overall thought picture is not an easy task, and Rinpoche was not addressing such situations as clinical depression, which make it harder and may require outside help. But maybe we could just start to work on our everyday garden-variety thoughts, the small ones, when we are just feeling out of sorts with our life or our loved ones. When they leave a mess for us to clean up, or interrupt us for the sixth time, or forget something important, maybe we could google our brain for their lovable qualities and all the times they have shown us that they care.

The very definition of samsara, according to the Buddha, is that it is suffering, ranging from minor dissatisfaction up to terrible tragedy. Even at its best, it’s just never completely, 100% right at any given moment—or if it is, that moment is over in a flash. Rinpoche has also said, “The Buddha taught that samsara is nothing but suffering. So why are you surprised when you suffer?”

The trick, then, to a happy mind is first to understand that something will always be at least a little wrong, and then to persistently reset the dial from “notice what’s wrong” to “notice what’s right.” Meditation is very helpful with this process, because it gives us direct access to the dial, first by cluing us in to what our mind is actually doing at any given moment, and then by providing alternative settings along with the means to apply them

We’ll have to use manual reset for awhile, until our habits begin to change, but if we practice enough—eventually our default setting could be buyer’s delight.

Ha, ha, it’s not really 4:00 a.m. as I write this. I just wanted to echo the title of the first post I wrote, a year ago this month. Normally at 4:00 a.m., we are starting our first meditation session (thun) of the day. Each morning between 4:00 and 5:35, we must complete 100 each of the preliminary practices: prostrations, Dorje Sempa (Vajrasattva), the mandala offering, and Guru Yoga, now that we have finished the intensive accumulation of 111,111 of each of those practices. The other three meditation sessions of the day are devoted mostly to our current main practice.

On the main practice front, we recently finished two weeks of intensive calm abiding (shinay) meditation, using a sequence of techniques similar to the ones we practiced at KSC based on the presentation in Bokar Rinpoche’s book Meditation: Advice to Beginners. Our manual in retreat is one of Bokar Rinpoche’s sources, the Ninth Karmapa’s Ocean of Definitive Meaning.

Now we have begun two weeks of intensive taking and sending meditation (tong len), which we also studied and practiced periodically at KSC. It is quite wonderful to be able to practice for several hours each day with no other interruption than our own internal distractions. These, of course, are no small thing, but retreat provides the leisure and incentive to really work with them and learn to see them as part of the practice rather than an intrusion. We are taught not to try to block thoughts or think our meditation is unsuccessful if thoughts arise. Instead, we aspire to see through whatever arises in the mind; to rest in its essence, the nature of mind, instead of engaging in our usual habit of following thoughts into long bouts of distraction or disturbing emotions such as anger, desire, jealousy, and pride, thus further obscuring the mind’s naturally peaceful essence.

September 30 will be the first anniversary of my move to Kagyu Thubten Chöling Monastery. A year ago, I was in the midst of sorting and packing my belongings, and anticipating how much I would miss people and places while in retreat. I do miss people; and sometimes at odd moments I find myself mentally revisiting familiar scenes, often from the vantage point of driving: passing the peach orchard on Young Road in Barrington (it’s peach season right now!) or driving on Roller Coaster Road in Strafford; traveling Route 4 in Nottingham and Northwood; waiting to make a left turn at the traffic signal in front of the main entrance to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine.

Especially during taking and sending, these memories, and any associated emotions, provide more fuel for practice. We spend all day (ideally, anyway) visualizing ourselves taking on the suffering of others, both specific individuals and sentient beings in general, and exchanging it for our own happiness and merit—breathing in everything painful or unwanted, breathing out everything positive and desirable. Anyone who comes to mind becomes a target for this practice. May all their suffering come to me, and may they experience all my happiness, good deeds, merit, and prosperity of the past, present and future. May they enjoy complete freedom from suffering and attain full awakening. Right now!

Realized practitioners are said to be able actually to accomplish this exchange, as in the classic story told by Kalu Rinpoche in his book Luminous Mind. Maitri-yogi, a teacher of the eleventh-century master Atisha, was giving a teaching, when suddenly he cried out in pain. Someone had just thrown a rock at a dog nearby, and Maitri-yogi instantly took the dog’s suffering upon himself, sustaining a large bruise on his back.

When contemporary aspiring bodhisattvas first learn taking and sending, someone always asks, a bit anxiously: what if I really start to feel the other person’s pain? Kalu Rinpoche’s famous answer: “Think, ‘Oh good, it works!’” But most Lamas just say not to worry about it, it’s not going to happen, except possibly in our overactive imagination. At this stage, the practice is really for our own mind training and operates mainly at the level of aspiration. Though some positive energy is surely dispatched in the other person’s direction, our real goal is to begin to lessen our own ego-clinging, our reflexive sense of me-first, the true source of all our own pain and suffering, through mentally reversing one of our deepest habitual patterns: seeking pleasure and fleeing pain, taking the best for ourselves and leaving the dregs for others.

We are supposed to continue the practice all the time—while walking, eating, going to sleep, any time we are able to remember to do it. Breathe in the bad, breathe out the good. In the Torch of Certainty, the nineteenth century master Jamgon Kongtrul advises us, “Even on your deathbed when you cannot perform any other practice, use your time sending and receiving for as long as you can breathe.” Truly, this is a practice we can do any time, anywhere!

October 5 will mark the beginning of our tenth month of retreat. The outside world has definitely faded, though I often think of family and friends and keep in touch as much as I can by mail. I haven’t heard a phone ring or a new song, read a newspaper, or seen a movie in almost a year. I am finding that, aside from my loved ones, there’s not that much I miss. What does it matter if I know who said what about whom, which movie is an Oscar contender, whether Britney is still in the news. It’s all just more fuel to keep the cycle spinning, the same old laundry going round and round.

In retreat, as the cacophony of outer phenomena recedes, you start to notice more inner space, more peace and quiet, more opportunity to catch a glimpse of what’s real and unchanging at the heart of all the relentless commotion of this world. In fact, at the moment, the only things happening outside my immediate mind (“outside” being of course a relative concept): a pair of yellow-shafted flickers are pecking at the ground under the picnic table, a squirrel is making a great racket peeling a walnut, and the groundhog is getting wicked fat.