It’s so nice to see everybody. You know . . . you guys all fell off the map for three years! Nice to see you’re back.

From the little we’ve heard, it sounds like the world started falling apart the minute we were sealed into retreat. More than one person wrote me that we picked a good three years to miss.

It may seem ironic that we would choose to remove ourselves from the mainstream of the world for 3 years in order to learn to be more aware of it and to serve it more effectively. But that’s the basic idea of three-year retreat as I understand it—to take a break from the constant input and hubbub and stimulus-response so you can quiet down and begin to see more minutely and more realistically what is actually going on underneath all that: the vast vistas of mind normally obscured by the trivia of daily life. And at the same time to keep in mind that our primary goal in developing this awareness is to be of service to all other beings, to put them first.

On that note, and also to acknowledge that long-term cloistered retreat is a tradition that is not unique to Buddhism, I want to share an observation, slightly paraphrased, by the Christian monk Thomas Merton. He wrote, back in the 1960s, “This is an age that, by its very nature as a time of crisis…calls for the special searching and questioning which are the work of the monk [and nun and retreatant] in his [and her] meditation and prayer. For the monk searches not only his own heart: he plunges deep into the heart of that world of which he remains a part even though he seems to have “left” it. In reality, the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.” [Contemplative Prayer 23]

A related point was once made by Lama Tashi Namgyal, an American Lama in Seattle. He completed two three-year retreats, including the second retreat here at Kagyu Thubten Chöling more than two decades ago. Lama Tashi wrote, “Even the least effort in meditation has a positive impact on the world.” So, we haven’t really been apart from the world, we’ve just been working undercover for a few years.

I’d like to share some lines from one of the aspiration prayers we recite daily in retreat, and that are also chanted weekly here in this room every Saturday.  This is from a recently published translation of The Aspiration to Excellent Conduct:

“May all the beings there are in ten directions be free of illness and be happy always. May all the aims in Dharma of all beings be in harmony; may their hopes be fulfilled…I’ll act to fully quell [all] suffering…and bring all beings to joy. I’ll act to benefit all beings throughout the reaches of the realms and the directions…As far as to the ends of the blue sky, as far as to the ends of sentient beings, until the end of karma and afflictions, thus far are the ends of my aspirations.” [Kagyu Monlam Book]

We may not quite live up to that right away…or ever; but spending three years cultivating that frame of mind has to be a good thing. This is day one of our continuing effort to put into practice what we have had the great good fortune to train in for the last three years.

Of course, it wasn’t just good fortune—it had to meet the right conditions in order to come about. Those conditions were made possible by the hard work and generosity of a lot of other people.

Thanks first of all to Lama Norlha Rinpoche, a very great meditation master and teacher who is much better known in other parts of the world than in his own neighborhood, where he has always kept a very humble profile. He has put his entire life into making this three-year retreat program available to anyone willing and able to commit to it. He personally taught us every practice we did in retreat, and he has made many of these same practices available outside retreat through the Dharma Path program. He has been my role model for over thirty years now, and I’ve never found him less than 100% genuine, 100% compassionate, 100% dedicated to the benefit of others. We are so lucky he has believed in our potential enough to adopt this as his home for more than three decades so far.

Thanks also to our fabulous caretaking team at Nigu Ling women’s retreat. Lama Yeshe Palmo has put her heart and every cell of her body into the last 4 retreats. I searched for a phrase that might convey what she did for us. The only one I can think of is: she did everything. Lama Jamdron completed the second retreat at KTC and has helped guide the five subsequent ones to date. As Rinpoche’s translator and secretary, she has a lot of demands on her time, yet always found a moment to answer questions or provide encouragement. Lama Wangmo completed the retreat before ours. Besides cooking for us and helping with our training, she has been an inspiring example and is also possibly the world’s most supportive listener.

To the KTC support staff—monastics and lay community—who keep things running day to day, a big job even when we don’t have 200 guests: thank you. Without their ongoing efforts the retreats could not exist.

To all our benefactors and supporters, whether your contribution was financial support or food or clothing or other material supplies, or just well wishes throughout our three years: thank you all.

To our families and friends, who accepted our decision to just disappear for three years and who supported us however they were able, and many of whom have traveled long distances to be with us today: thank you.

I would also like to take a moment to thank my co-retreatants: Tsomo/Joan Hyme, whose mindfulness and equanimity have been a continuous inspiration; Dechen/Stephanie Woo, whose generosity and harmonious spirit helped keep things flowing smoothly; Zangmo/Melissa Levine/Max, whose analytical brain instantly resolved many a challenging situation; and Samten/Bryn Dawson, always willing to do more than her share of any job, cheerfully. I think we worked together amazingly well as a community, especially considering that among the five of us, we pretty evenly span five decades and at least five personality styles.

Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to our predecessors in three-year retreat at KTC, the pioneers who paved every step of the way for us and through whose efforts the facilities and retreat materials have vastly evolved over the past 30 years.

In fact, it is my recollection that just before the fifth retreat began in 1999, Lama Norlha Rinpoche observed that the first retreat, which began in 1982, had only 20% of the materials they needed to succeed in the retreat practices. This is not to say they didn’t accomplish that, they just had a lot of gaps to bridge through their own hard work. Thanks to them, the second retreat had 40%, then the third retreat 60%, the fourth retreat 80%, and the fifth retreat finally had 100% of the materials they needed, each generation of retreatants having built upon what they inherited from the last.

By my calculations, that means we in retreat number seven had 140% of what we needed. So if there is any shortfall in our results, it can’t be attributed to lack of resources.

I hope we have also contributed in some small ways to benefit future retreats. I will just close by congratulating everyone who is planning to enter the eighth retreat later this year. I wish you the best of luck on your journey; from where I’m standing, it’s really worth it.

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

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”!)

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.”

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.