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
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.
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!
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.
August 2008
For the past few weeks, we’ve been entertained almost every day by a family of raccoons: a mother and five cubs.
The cubs are SO cute! They climb the chicken wire enclosure where the guinea hens used to live, engage in wrestling matches, and wreak general, adorable havoc on the property, as mom looks on to make sure they stay safe. Early one morning one of the cubs picked a green tomato (our only food crop, aside from a few herbs), and one of the retreatants, who happened to be outdoors just before the 6:00 a.m. chanting, hissed at it to discourage further destruction. It hissed back nonchalantly, and carried on.
The other morning, in pre-dawn twilight, I was out on the front porch enjoying a brief break in the summer heat, when suddenly one of the cedar trees that line the maroon fence waved at me! Astonished, I kept my eyes on the tree…and it waved again! Then I noticed a pair of bright eyes near the top of the tree, and another pair on the waving arm. It was still waving when I had to go back inside.
Observing the raccoon cubs’ antics, it is easy to forget a key downside to the animal realm, but sooner or later, there is always a reminder. One day last week, the birdhouse near the guinea hen coop had its top open, and there were telltale feathers.
Usually when there is evidence of predation, it is left behind by our resident cat, Dee Dee. But prying open the top of a birdhouse is a bit beyond her capabilities. Darn those cute raccoons.
And that Dee Dee! Her full name is Dun Drup, which in Tibetan means “Goal Accomplisher.” She is an ace hunter, and we frequently stumble upon her victims, dead, mortally wounded, or merely terrified. Occasionally we can intervene in the nick of time, but usually all we can do is dispose of the remains and say a few prayers.
Dee Dee is a poster child for the paradox of cyclic existence. She is absolutely the world’s most lovable cat. She lends herself to almost any sort of contact with humans. You can pick her up, rub her belly, scratch her head, squeeze her, turn her upside down, play her like an accordion, or carry her in your arms as you circumambulate the house. She is a perpetual purr machine. They don’t come any cuter than Dee Dee.
Unless, of course, you are a mouse or chipmunk or vole or sparrow or, the worst case so far in retreat, a pair mourning doves. The Dreaded Dee Dee is a certified mass murderer. She revels in the sheer joy of killing. She is also convinced, despite all our scolding, that her deadly sprees contribute to the household larder. There seems to be no way to discourage her.
Why do we keep a cat? In a word: rodents. Why don’t keep her indoors all the time? Eight residents and four doors, versus a cunning, one-pointed feline brain. But even if we kept our personal hands clean of murderous felines, there are billions more where she came from.
We do our best to make sure she is in at night—not only to protect others, but also to save our sweet kitty from a similar fate at the hands of one of the local coyotes. What goes around comes around: that is the law of karma, cause and effect. Dee Dee is headed for a gruesome fate, whether or not it is the way this particular life ends for her. In fact, her victims are paying off their own karmic debts, according to the Buddha’s teaching. Even in this lifetime, some of them were terrifying predators a little further down the food chain.
If you are expecting me to attempt to tie this up into any perspective that makes sense within the context of life as we know it, forget it. It’s a mess! When things are going well and we’re not confronted with the direct evidence—if our cat hasn’t brought in a bluebird lately, and no one close to us has died or received a devastating diagnosis, and we haven’t lost our job or been hounded to the brink by papparazzi—it’s easy to forget what a whirlpool of confusion and vale of tears we really inhabit. For awhile. And when bad things do happen, we can never ultimately sort out who’s to blame. There’s always another layer to it, if we dare to look, and eventually our analysis just hits a wall.
When the World Trade Center was destroyed in 2001 along with thousands of ordinary citizens going about their daily routines, we were horrified. KTC monastery is within commuting distance of New York City, and some of our members knew victims, or were even there. But when we prayed for the victims, we also prayed for the killers. According to the Buddha, people (and animals) do terrible things out of ignorance, thinking they are doing something else entirely, often quite oblivious to the heinous nature of their acts or the suffering they cause. They are busy focusing, as we all do at least most of the time, on another part of the picture: their own goals and their own immediate happiness. And they will pay dearly for it in the end. Just like lovable Dee Dee, and those adorable raccoons.
But wait—that’s not all! The truth that life as we know it is laced with suffering is just the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, his nutshell description of the way things look to a fully awakened mind. The other three truths are all good news: the truth of origination (the mayhem has a cause), the truth of cessation (the mayhem can be ended), and the truth of the path (the complete, step-by-step how-to manual). The raccoon story, and everybody else’s, can have a happy ending. All we have to do is get to work.
July 2008
Just a few days into three-year retreat, almost seven months ago, I was helping a fellow retreatant polish some shrine bowls. It was during the lunch break, the only time talking is allowed, and we discovered that we had both come up with the same metaphor to describe our experience so far: down the rabbit hole!
Many aspects of retreat are like being in another world. We hear very little news from outside, even about the monastery whose grounds we inhabit; we are protected as much as possible from anything that might engage our thought processes unnecessarily and interfere with the process of letting them naturally settle so that we can begin to connect directly with our own vast, peaceful, powerful underlying inner nature. A classic Buddhist metaphor is of being caught up in the waves versus experiencing that they are part of the great, calm ocean.
It’s just a temporary escape; when we emerge from retreat we will fully engage once again with whatever waves the world throws our way. But in order to develop the capacity to engage truly effectively, a period of isolation is needed, and that’s what three-year retreat provides.
Well, that’s half of it. It might be isolated, but it’s full of life and activity, even if most of it is internal. Three-year retreat includes a large number of diverse meditation practices, some of them designed to calm down our current, ordinary mental busyness (the waves), and others intended to activate the various aspects of our potential realization (the ocean). These practices can be quite complex, colorful and dynamic: for more on this topic, see “We Are All Superheroes,” also posted this month.
Or, to paraphrase another classic work of Western literature:
Oh, the places you’ll go and the people you’ll meet
When you sit on your seat in a three-year retreat!
Anyway, this is just by way of letting you know that, though I am aiming to send in a post or two about once a month, there are likely to be some lulls in the process. During these first seven months, and probably for several months to come, we are still in the upper reaches of the rabbit hole, pretty much just out of sight of the surface. But my understanding is that some of the practices we will do in the future will serve as express elevators to the depths of our minds…and those periods may not be conducive to the kind of conceptualization required to write a web post.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this web page, Lama Norlha Rinpoche has given me permission to write occasionally from three-year retreat in order to keep in touch with the New Hampshire/Maine community of practitioners affiliated with KTC Monastery. But I can only write what I know (or think I know), and that isn’t much, compared with what is available from the many accomplished teachers in the Kagyu and other Buddhist traditions. There is a wealth of genuine teaching accessible via books, dvds, cds and the internet, and best is to find an authentic teacher to study with if possible. KTC Monastery is open to visitors, and its schedule of teaching and practice, along with contact information for its twenty or so affiliated centers, can be found on its website, www.kagyu.com. If you can’t get to KTC or an affiliated center, start with books or other media by Kalu Rinpoche, Tai Situpa, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Pema Chödron, and others.
Most likely, I’ll be back with another friendly post in August.
From the yellow brick road,
Yeshe Chödron
via Owl
June 2008
Three-year retreat is the best possible place to be; and most of the time it feels like the best possible work to be doing, and I am very mindful of how lucky I am to have this rare opportunity.
But it also has its challenges. Right now, in late June, it’s very hot. It’s hard to get up before 4:00 a.m., and sometimes it’s hard to stay in the same seat doing the same practice hour upon hour, day after day. At this point, nearing the end of our first six months, the initial novelty has worn off and we are facing many more months of hard work without a lot of the comforts and escapes we used to take for granted. I sometimes feel like I’m “in the weeds,” my friend Anne’s copy editing term for being in the middle of a tough project with no end yet in sight.
The biggest challenge so far: retreat is pretty much designed to paint your ego into a corner. On a daily basis, I fail to live up to my own standards, in terms of both practice and interpersonal relations. As each day connects a few more dots in my devious ego’s outline, sometimes I feel temporarily discouraged, and there are days when I want to run and hide in a closet.
A few inspiring books have helped me through the difficult moments, e.g., the chapter on patience in The Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Gampopa, Shantideva’s The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, Ngulchu Thokme’s 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Thubten Chödron’s excellent book Working with Anger (which draws upon some of these very sources, and puts them into a Western perspective), and Mingyur Rinpoche’s brief account in his book, The Joy of Living, of his difficult first year of retreat, and how he overcame his own personal challenges through intensive application of the very meditation methods he was being taught.
When Lama Norlha Rinpoche was here to teach a couple of weeks ago, as he was leaving the shrine room, he stopped to look at a beautiful calligraphy by Tai Situ Rinpoche that hangs above the stairwell. Someone asked Rinpoche what it says, and he answered, “Ro nyam.” Asked what that means, he said, “Equal taste.” Asked to explain equal taste, he said: “Happiness and suffering are the same.”
He told us that in Tibet, practitioners would rub something soft, such as an offering scarf, against one cheek, while simultaneously rubbing something abrasive, like sandpaper, against the other, to try to get a first-hand glimpse of ro nyam.
Rinpoche often instructs us to examine our mind when we are very happy or very unhappy, and locate the part of the mind that feels the same no matter what, that is unaffected by passing emotions. I have found that instruction very helpful, both before retreat and in it. It’s an experiment anyone can do. If we just put to use the parade of emotions that march through our minds all day long, maybe we can skip the sandpaper!
May 2008
In its thirty years of existence, KTC Monastery has hosted many great Lamas, including the Dalai Lama, the Sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa, Kalu Rinpoche (under whose guidance KTC was founded), Tai Situ Rinpoche, Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, Thrangu Rinpoche, Bokar Rinpoche, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, and many others. Just to read their names confers blessing!
On May 19, 2008, we hosted an especially historic visit: the Seventeenth Gyalwang Karmapa, Orgyen Trinley Dorje, stopped here for a glorious morning on his first visit to the West, in the midst of a whirlwind two-week tour of the US. (New York City; Wappingers Falls, NY—that’s us; Woodstock, NY—his official seat in the US.; Boulder, Colorado; and Seattle). We spent weeks preparing to receive him, and by all accounts it was a splendid event. (We just got to see the part in our retreat house.)
Just 22 years old (a year older than my daughter), the Karmapa first attracted worldwide attention when he made a daring escape from Communist-controlled Tibet to India at the end of 1999, at age 14. He’s been in India ever since, and we’ve been awaiting our first chance to meet him.
It was a particularly poignant moment, as it was his previous incarnation, the Sixteenth Karmapa, who, along with Kalu Rinpoche, urged Lama Norlha Rinpoche to come to New York City in 1976 and undertake the monumental task of establishing the first traditional three-year retreat program in North America. Lama Norlha Rinpoche was with him in Chicago shortly before he passed away there in 1981; he had visited KTC in 1980, as preparations for the retreat were gearing up, but was no longer with us when the first, historic retreat actually began in June of 1982.
After a welcoming ceremony in the main house, an informal talk in a tent outdoors to an audience of more than 300 members of KTC and its affiliated centers (including Jeffrey, Anne and Marguerite from KSC-NH), and a walk down the hill to bless the recently completed foundation of the new Maitreya Center and the stupa that overlooks the Hudson River, the two retreat houses were the last stops on his itinerary.
He spent about ten minutes in each retreat house—first the men’s retreat, Naro Ling; then the women’s retreat, Nigu Ling. At Nigu Ling, we played a traditional welcome on the various Tibetan instruments—conch, cymbals, drum, reed horns and long horns— even though we have barely begun learning them (I played the drum, the easiest one). Then we followed him upstairs to our tiny shrine room, where we served him traditional tea and sweet saffron rice, performed a symbolic mandala offering ceremony, and chanted some prayers. He inspected each of us closely from his seat during all this, which only took about five minutes. Then he made a few remarks, partly in English and partly in Tibetan translated for us by another renowned teacher, the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche; and wished us well in our practice. As he was leaving, he shook each of our hands—not a traditional blessing, but a very special one.
We were told that upon taking his seat in the main shrine room at the beginning of the visit, he immediately asked in which direction the retreat houses lay. In his previous incarnation, he had a strong interest in this project, but six cycles of retreat were completed and the seventh begun, and he himself traveled from one lifetime to the next, before he was finally able to see the results. In fact, we are the first Western retreatants he laid eyes on. He promised that he will be back for a longer visit, and we hope it will be soon.
Like his predecessor, the young Seventeenth Gyalwang Karmapa radiates warmth, charisma, confidence, and wisdom. In his presence, it is impossible to look anywhere but at him. He speaks with humility, and has a playful sense of humor; we heard frequent laughter from the tent during his talk, and were told that, in honor of the unseasonably cold, windy weather that day, he began by welcoming his audience to Tibet.
He is already a very accomplished meditation master and teacher. Some of his early teachings, beginning in his teens, are included in Michelle Martin’s biography of him, Music in the Sky, which also includes a harrowing account of his escape from Tibet. I found these teachings quite moving and wonderful, along with a recent teaching on compassion in the summer 2008 issue of Buddhadharma Magazine, which features his photo on the cover.
In addition to forging an auspicious connection with this powerful young spiritual leader, the Karmapa’s visit also served to remind us what a breathtaking thing it is to be in the presence of an authentic realized master. At Kagyu Thubten Chöling, we have the great good fortune to live every day in the presence of a realized master, who has been patiently teaching us, through words and example, for more than thirty years. Sadly, it is easy to take such an experience a little bit for granted when it is so readily available. Seeing the Karmapa reminded us how very lucky we are.
February 2008
As Buddhists, we are encouraged to spend a lot of time contemplating the impermanence of all phenomena and, in particular, the inevitability of our own death. We realize that if we are going to reach enlightenment, we had better get started right now! There is not a moment to waste. Our opportunity might end before this paragraph is over—by death, disability, or a life-changing phone call—and if we don’t attain mental freedom in this lifetime…we will have to do the whole thing over again, all the confusion and suffering, lifetime after lifetime, sort of a cosmic version of the movie Groundhog Day.
In retreat, I am learning how to harness this quickly passing time and make it work for my benefit as long as it lasts. I won’t be able to transpose this lesson entirely into my post-retreat life (assuming I live that long), but I think I am learning a few valuable tricks. Mostly they have to do with habitual patterns I wasn’t even aware of.
Retreat is an exact inversion of my previous agenda. I would plan for everything else in my life, and maybe even program in a daily slot for some meditation, but in general, Dharma practice was reserved for whatever free time I had left at the end of the day…unless I wanted to watch a dvd…or read the New York Times online…or chat with a friend on the phone, or attend a really important meeting, etc,. pretty much ad infinitum. In short, not much time for Dharma practice at all!
In retreat, it is all about Dharma practice. We have four meditation sessions a day, beginning at 4:00 a.m. and ending at 8:30 p.m., for a total of more than 8 hours of solitary practice in our rooms, plus additional practice to finish up each session after it officially ends, totalling over an hour; plus 4 hours of group chanting practices—in short, 13 hours of scheduled practice daily: that’s five more hours than a full-time job. Everything else has to be fit into the spaces between practice sessions—that includes eating, sleeping, exercise, showers, laundry, brushing your teeth, getting dressed or undressed, cleaning your room, communal chores, dealing with pieces of paper, writing letters, studying, reading, getting out for some fresh air, etc.
At first it seemed completely impossible—on most days we have less than two hours of unscheduled time, most of it in increments of 15 minutes or less, in which we have to fit all of the above activities and anything else we might need to take care of. And most breaks are usually just enough time to visit the bathroom, get a cup of tea, adjust clothing, and take care of any preparation that’s needed for the next session. (There’s an additional hour and a half of “free” time after lunch, but it is usually taken up by work or classes. There’s also an hour after the 8:30 p.m. gong—but it includes a half hour of follow-up practice, and anyway I am toast by then and just go to bed as soon as possible.)
If it sounds grim: it’s NOT! It’s quite wonderful to wake up every morning and live the same day over again, a day devoted almost entirely to the very thing I thought I most wanted to do and considered the most important before, but never found time for. Every day is Groundhog Day in retreat … with the potential to get it right every day, and still do it all over again the next.
An additional benefit: I have become an efficiency expert. I plan in minutes and seconds; I know precisely how long most things I have to do take, when pared of most of the thoughts, daydreams and spacing out that fill up so much time in our ordinary lives. I shower in five minutes flat, get dressed in about a minute, eat in ten, wash my dishes in one. If I find myself in the basement with my toothbrush in my hand and my tea cup empty one minute before I’m due formally dressed in the shrine room (2 floors up) to begin the 6:00am chanting session…no sweat! I fill my cup from the perpetual hot water pot, dash up the stairs, put my toothbrush away, put on my zen (monastic shawl) with all the folds properly in place (or, occasionally, not), grab my mala (prayer beads), turn off my light, and make it upstairs just before the shrinekeeper sounds the first, wrathful blast of the conch.
An interesting and previously unsuspected thing about time: when your mind is really focused, time becomes spacious. Five minutes to spare now seems generous and relaxed; a minute or 30 seconds is enough time for any number of things, without rushing. It turns out, there is plenty of time for Dharma practice (13 hours a day!) if inessential activities are eliminated and others reduced to the minimum time actually needed to do them.
Of course, I have a much simpler life now than I did outside retreat: no shopping, errands, medical appointments, family and social obligations, or income to produce, and most meals are prepared for us. Those things do take up a lot of time, so it wouldn’t be possible to spend 13 hours in formal practice in my ordinary life. But I hope I will find a lot more time when I go back to it than I did before. One less movie is two more hours of meaningful time; 5 minutes less in the shower adds up to over 30 hours in a year. And what do I really get from browsing the political commentary in the New York Times, besides more spinning thoughts?
The more time we have for meditation and Dharma study, the quicker we will start to deactivate the habitual patterns of thought and perception that keep us confused and in pain. The Vajrayana path says complete mental freedom can be attained in this very lifetime, if we play our cards right.
So… enlightenment…or a long, hot shower?
February 2008
As Buddhists, we are encouraged to spend a lot of time contemplating the impermanence of all phenomena and, in particular, the inevitability of our own death. We realize that if we are going to reach enlightenment, we had better get started right now! There is not a moment to waste. Our opportunity might end before this paragraph is over—by death, disability, or a life-changing phone call—and if we don’t attain mental freedom in this lifetime…we will have to do the whole thing over again, all the confusion and suffering, lifetime after lifetime, sort of a cosmic version of the movie Groundhog Day.
In retreat, I am learning how to harness this quickly passing time and make it work for my benefit as long as it lasts. I won’t be able to transpose this lesson entirely into my post-retreat life (assuming I live that long), but I think I am learning a few valuable tricks. Mostly they have to do with habitual patterns I wasn’t even aware of.
Retreat is an exact inversion of my previous agenda. I would plan for everything else in my life, and maybe even program in a daily slot for some meditation, but in general, Dharma practice was reserved for whatever free time I had left at the end of the day…unless I wanted to watch a dvd…or read the New York Times online…or chat with a friend on the phone, or attend a really important meeting, etc,. pretty much ad infinitum. In short, not much time for Dharma practice at all!
In retreat, it is all about Dharma practice. We have four meditation sessions a day, beginning at 4:00 a.m. and ending at 8:30 p.m., for a total of more than 8 hours of solitary practice in our rooms, plus additional practice to finish up each session after it officially ends, totalling over an hour; plus 4 hours of group chanting practices—in short, 13 hours of scheduled practice daily: that’s five more hours than a full-time job. Everything else has to be fit into the spaces between practice sessions—that includes eating, sleeping, exercise, showers, laundry, brushing your teeth, getting dressed or undressed, cleaning your room, communal chores, dealing with pieces of paper, writing letters, studying, reading, getting out for some fresh air, etc.
At first it seemed completely impossible—on most days we have less than two hours of unscheduled time, most of it in increments of 15 minutes or less, in which we have to fit all of the above activities and anything else we might need to take care of. And most breaks are usually just enough time to visit the bathroom, get a cup of tea, adjust clothing, and take care of any preparation that’s needed for the next session. (There’s an additional hour and a half of “free” time after lunch, but it is usually taken up by work or classes. There’s also an hour after the 8:30 p.m. gong—but it includes a half hour of follow-up practice, and anyway I am toast by then and just go to bed as soon as possible.)
If it sounds grim: it’s NOT! It’s quite wonderful to wake up every morning and live the same day over again, a day devoted almost entirely to the very thing I thought I most wanted to do and considered the most important before, but never found time for. Every day is Groundhog Day in retreat … with the potential to get it right every day, and still do it all over again the next.
An additional benefit: I have become an efficiency expert. I plan in minutes and seconds; I know precisely how long most things I have to do take, when pared of most of the thoughts, daydreams and spacing out that fill up so much time in our ordinary lives. I shower in five minutes flat, get dressed in about a minute, eat in ten, wash my dishes in one. If I find myself in the basement with my toothbrush in my hand and my tea cup empty one minute before I’m due formally dressed in the shrine room (2 floors up) to begin the 6:00am chanting session…no sweat! I fill my cup from the perpetual hot water pot, dash up the stairs, put my toothbrush away, put on my zen (monastic shawl) with all the folds properly in place (or, occasionally, not), grab my mala (prayer beads), turn off my light, and make it upstairs just before the shrinekeeper sounds the first, wrathful blast of the conch.
An interesting and previously unsuspected thing about time: when your mind is really focused, time becomes spacious. Five minutes to spare now seems generous and relaxed; a minute or 30 seconds is enough time for any number of things, without rushing. It turns out, there is plenty of time for Dharma practice (13 hours a day!) if inessential activities are eliminated and others reduced to the minimum time actually needed to do them.
Of course, I have a much simpler life now than I did outside retreat: no shopping, errands, medical appointments, family and social obligations, or income to produce, and most meals are prepared for us. Those things do take up a lot of time, so it wouldn’t be possible to spend 13 hours in formal practice in my ordinary life. But I hope I will find a lot more time when I go back to it than I did before. One less movie is two more hours of meaningful time; 5 minutes less in the shower adds up to over 30 hours in a year. And what do I really get from browsing the political commentary in the New York Times, besides more spinning thoughts?
The more time we have for meditation and Dharma study, the quicker we will start to deactivate the habitual patterns of thought and perception that keep us confused and in pain. The Vajrayana path says complete mental freedom can be attained in this very lifetime, if we play our cards right.
So… enlightenment…or a long, hot shower?