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

August 2008

Lama Norlha Rinpoche, when he teaches meditation, sometimes illustrates his instructions with a classic example: If we become accustomed to sitting in meditation with a spaced-out, blank mind, it is said that we are sowing seeds for rebirth as a hibernating animal. The raccoon, says Rinpoche (via his ace translator, Lama Jamdron), disappears into its den in the late fall, and when it re-emerges in the spring: same old raccoon!

That, it seems, is not how we want to meditate. When we sit on our cushion or in our chair, our mind should be relaxed, much like the raccoon enjoying its rest after an action-packed summer. But, unlike the raccoon, we should not actually be sleeping—in the midst of our relaxation, our mind should also be very alert, tuned in to our object of meditation and aware of every passing thought. Otherwise, we are wasting our time, and might as well be taking a nap or watching a “Full House” rerun.

I’ve read that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche instructed students to meditate as if they had a snake on their lap. During my years in New Hampshire, driving on icy roads provided another apt analogy. In either case—at least assuming Trungpa Rinpoche was talking about a poisonous snake—even the slightest lapse in vigilance could be fatal, a situation that naturally inspires the mind to be finely attuned to every new development.

The point is not to make meditation sound impossible, or even difficult. It’s not that we should expect to have a “perfect” meditation session every time we sit down. Or even once! In her book The Wisdom of No Escape Pema Chödron devotes a chapter, called “Precision, Gentleness, and Letting Go,” to how these three qualities or techniques of meditation complement each other and can be used as remedies whenever one of them goes out of balance. When you catch your vigilance developing into tightness, tension, or a cascade of thoughts, then you apply relaxation in the form of gentleness or letting go; when you get too spacey or dull, then you rachet up the precision.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, in The Joy of Living, likewise urges us not to be hard on ourselves as we enter into the process of taming our minds. He says that as long as we maintain “the intention to meditate” during our session, it’s a productive one. We are all going to space out or get caught up in thoughts from time to time; the point is that as soon as we remember what we’re doing, we return to our relaxed vigilance. Doing that patiently again and again over time gradually wears away our strong habitual patterns to reveal mind’s brilliant underlying nature, and is what meditation is all about.

Time is going to pass no matter what we are doing, and we are going to get old one way or another—unless, of course, we die tomorrow. Either way, we will suddenly find ourselves at the door to the next life, prepared or unprepared.

The good news is that we don’t have to be at the mercy of the passage of time. We can put it to work for us—even turn it into an asset! If we meditate every day, even for a few minutes, that all adds up automatically as the days, weeks, months and years inexorably fly by. Lama Norlha Rinpoche has said that however much practice we do during our life, it will be in the bank when we need it, to help us through hard times, the process of dying, and the transition to what comes next. Naturally, we’ll be a lot better off when the crunch comes if we have managed to make regular deposits over time.

We can apply the same advice to our daily lives. If we spend every day completely immersed in one project and one thought after another, or lost in distraction in front of the TV, when we wake up in our next life: same old raccoon!

In three-year retreat, the goal is to be 100% focused on our practice all the time—and since we are engaged in formal practice most of the time, it’s not too hard to remember, even if we don’t always succeed. But even during our short breaks, we are encouraged not to think about what we are eating or how much sleep we are getting or what bizarre thing our neighbor seems to be up to, but to apply the techniques of meditation as much as possible in all situations, so that it eventually becomes our default mode.

In household life, where the ratio of formal practice to activity is reversed, we can still put most or even all of our time to constructive use via three handy devices:

• engaging in positive actions and avoiding negative or harmful actions as much as possible;
• letting unnecessary thoughts and negative emotions go as soon as we become aware of them, rather than acting on them or storing them up;
• and, especially in the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, remembering the presence and kindness of the Lama. Once we have taken refuge, the Lama is always with us, even if we don’t remember it. When we are able to keep it in mind, that activates our receptivity to the constant flow of his awareness and blessings, and speeds our progress toward awakening.

And once we awaken, maybe we’ll be able to do something for that old raccoon.