March 2010

Dear friends,

After our six months of silence last year, a frequent question from correspondents was, what was it like?

In one way, not much different from the rest of the two-plus years of retreat so far, since we are silent anyway all but one-and-a-half hours of each day.

But…in other ways, very different.

For one thing, it was hard to break the habit of being used to asking or telling someone about things that come up in the course of the day. We could write notes, but we’re encouraged not to write them frivolously, as the point is to be undistracted from focus on the internal workings of our own minds. Besides, notes take precious time, and are easily misinterpreted—it ends up being much easier to let things pass. Most things I felt the urge to communicate turned out, upon examination, to be needless anyway—just one more habitual impulse. After the silence ended last July, that awareness stayed with me somewhat, though it doesn’t prevent me from speaking needlessly or thoughtlessly on a daily basis.

Another difference is that not talking frees up enormous amounts of time. It doesn’t seem like we talk all that much—yet we get so much more done, and time seems so much more spacious, when we’re not talking.

I remarked recently to a fellow retreatant that we would all be experts at charades after retreat, if anyone still plays. She responded that our signs are so retreat-specific, no one outside would get them. Still, we have undeniably gotten very efficient at communicating with gestures—though, as with notes, we don’t always convey what we mean to.

It was interesting to note that interpersonal frictions, which we do our best to minimize at all times, seemed to diminish of their own accord during the silent period. Though undeniably useful, words do seem to be a major vehicle of conflict—again, sometimes despite our best intentions.

And lack of speaking does inevitably turn one’s attention inward, heightening awareness of one’s own mental and emotional patterns, and allowing everything to just quiet down over time.

Silence has a texture. It is very spacious, and rich with all kinds of layers normally inaudible underneath the routine din of speech, both outer and inner. To me, it is like the silence of falling snow, not just an absence of sound but an almost tangible presence in its own right.

On that note, I’m happy to report that we have just entered another extended period of silence in support of our new current practice, which is very complex and will benefit from the relatively undistracted focus. By the time we are speaking again, it will be summer, and we will be well into our last year of retreat.

I will not be writing any posts for a few months, as I take advantage of this opportunity for fuller immersion in the inner life.

Before signing off, I would like to share something I have noticed over the course of retreat that I find surprising. Though the practices we learn here are rare and amazing, and some of them, like the current one, quite complex and challenging, I have also developed more and more appreciation for the simplest practices I’ve been doing since I was first introduced to the Buddhist path.

Just taking refuge, dedicating merit, and reciting aspiration prayers are among the most meaningful activities of my day. It seems to me that these simple prayers encompass the entire path, if one can only do them attentively and with an open heart. I also really look forward to moments when I can sit in silent meditation with nothing else going on, or do a simple visualization and mantra, such as Chenrezi, Green Tara or Medicine Buddha.

Whatever your personal practice is, I hope it brings you much benefit and joy.

Best wishes till next time,
Yeshe Chödrön, aka Linda

February 2010

Dear Friends,

Losar Tashi Delek! Happy Tibetan New Year! (as of February 14)

I don’t know if our local groundhog saw his/her shadow on February 2. (As you know, every day is Groundhog Day here in retreat.) My bet is s/he didn’t, as it was overcast most of the day and it’s been wicked cold for weeks. But, groundhog or no, one thing this February is guaranteed to bring is:

Warning: Another exhortation to meditate!

In case you are still reading, I will share that a friend and fellow KTC sangha member in Virginia once said one of the most helpful things I’ve ever heard about meditation. It was quite a few years ago, and I don’t know if she’d still subscribe to this sentiment herself, but what she said was, it’s like brushing your teeth. Even when you really don’t feel like it, you’d never dream of going to bed without having done it.

At that point in my practice, what I really needed was to ratchet up the discipline and be consistent, and that really helped. So I am very grateful to her (thanks, Jean). There is something quite wonderful about looking back and knowing you haven’t missed a day of practice in months or years—even if some days it may have been a tad slapdash.

Over the years I have come to realize—largely thanks to the daily routine of my practice—that, beyond the aspect of simple discipline, meditation is really not at all like brushing your teeth. The best you can hope for if you brush your teeth every day is that they won’t fall out of your head before you die. Face it, once you’ve got them all, teeth are never really going to get any better. The challenge is to keep them from deteriorating too much too fast.

Meditation can surely feel like a drudge, just like brushing your teeth. Same old thing, day in, day out. No, noooo, not time to meditate, again! On occasion it can even be unpleasant; sometimes the last thing we want to do is immerse ourselves in what is going through our mind at a given moment.

The difference, and what makes it worthwhile to slog through the hard parts, is this: the purpose of meditation is to uncover something that does not deteriorate, that is indestructible and glorious, that will outlast and outshine our body and our teeth, however  much money we may have sunk into cosmetic crowns and whitening.

As both Lama Norlha Rinpoche and Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche have instructed us, quoted in my December-January post, that indestructible something is the essential nature of our very own mind. We call it Buddha Nature, but everyone has it, be they Buddhist, non-Buddhist, our dentist or Punxatawney Phil.

What is Buddha Nature like? How does it make meditating even more rewarding than holding onto your teeth?

In his first book, The Joy of Living, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche tells the story of his “nervous breakthrough” in three-year retreat, which he entered at the age of 13. He had a history of anxiety and panic attacks, and the group chanting and activities in retreat were excruciatingly stressful for him. Finally, at the end of the first year, he fled into seclusion in his room and desperately applied the meditation instructions he had received from his teachers. This intensive practice triggered a series of insights over the next few days, which culminated in a direct experience of “the infinitely vast, infinitely open awareness that is the nature of mind itself.”

He goes on to say, “Any attempt to capture the direct experience of the nature of mind in words is impossible. The best that can be said is that the experience is immeasurably peaceful, and, once stablized through repeated experience, virtually unshakable. It’s an experience of absolute well-being that radiates through all physical, emotional, and mental states—even those that might be ordinarily labeled as unpleasant. This sense of well-being, regardless of the fluctuation of outer and inner experiences, is one of the clearest ways to understand what Buddhists mean by ‘happiness,’ and I was fortunate to have caught a glimpse of it during my three days of isolation.”

After that, he rejoined the group practices, and after two more weeks of focused meditation, he was able to stabilize the experience of mind’s nature—and has never had another panic attack. “The sense of peace, confidence, and well-being that resulted from this experience has never wavered. I take no personal credit for this transformation in my experience, because it has only come about through making the effort to apply directly the truth handed down by those who’d preceded me.” (Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living, 22)

Meditation is expressly designed to bring this essential nature to our attention. Ordinarily, it is obscured by constant identification with our stream of thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of reaction and perception, which we erroneously think of as who we are. Meditation gradually quiets all this down, allowing the underlying nature to begin to shine through, and then gives us additional methods for deepening our insight and experience. We might not notice much at first, but if we look back over months and years of regular meditation, we will definitely see that something has changed.

Of course, the caveat is the same as ever—in order to reap the benefits of meditation, we have to do the actual work of sitting and looking repeatedly at the mind. Otherwise, while we will surely derive some benefit from the teachings we receive and the books we read and our occasional practice, our meditation won’t develop in any consistent way. And before we know it—time’s up!

One surprising thing I have come to realize about meditation is that, once you get past the initial challenge phase of just getting into your seat and staying put: there’s really nothing more fun. Rinpoche likes to tease us about the emphasis in our culture on “having fun,” which usually means wasting time on things that will ultimately leave us as unhappy and unfulfilled as ever—sometimes more so.

But when I think about things that are “fun,” they seem to be activities that take us out of our uncomfortable thoughts and emotions and worries and allow us to experience a happier, more spacious, relaxed state—just like meditation, only without the lasting benefit. While meditation may not feel like fun every time we do it, the benefit carries over into daily life, and, at least for me, life gradually becomes less stressful, less grave, less of a crisis—more “fun.”

In meditation, the route to fun is not to avoid or escape the thoughts and emotions that bug us, but to welcome them and immerse ourselves directly in them, no matter what the content. Pema Chödrön, in her audio seminar Perfect as You Are says that the benefits of meditation are just as present in our “negative” states of mind as in our “positive” ones. Beyond the superficial content, it’s all the same stuff. When we are able to sit with, or abide in, the experience that is going through our mind—say, the feeling of anger—while letting go (again and again) of the words that fuel it, we can start to feel, as Pema Chödrön puts it, its basic energy, its basic power, that is in some way no different from what we feel when we abide in a feeling of love or compassion.

Lama Norlha Rinpoche told us in the first year of retreat about ro nyam, equal taste: happiness and suffering are the same. The path to first-hand experience of this is to follow the instruction in his teaching in the December-January post: “Whatever arises, instead of being involved in the content of those experiences, look directly through what is arising and just rest within the essence of the mind’s nature.” Again and again.

What could be more fun than immeasurably peaceful, unshakable, absolute well-being? If we could get it at the cineplex, we’d all move in.

This month’s recommendations:
The Joy of Living and Joyful Wisdom, books by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Perfect as You Are, audio by Pema Chödrön (or any book or audio by Pema Chödrön, but her audio teachings are really “fun”!)

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