https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qni8LKMGXToMingyur Rinpoche dropping some wisdom on the difference between natural and self-created suffering.In this short teaching, Mingyur Rinpoche discusses the difference between natural and self-created suffering. Recognizing the difference between these two helps us to see how we can free ourselves from many of the most painful situations in our lives by exploring the mind and gaining insight into the nature and functioning of awareness.This teaching was originally presented as a free monthly teaching on the Tergar Learning Community: http://learning.tergar.org/course_library/mingyur-rinpoches-monthly-teachings/
Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying
Excerpt from Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama. This passage is a section from a talk given by the Dalai Lama. “In order to train in the path that would allow us to transform death, the intermediate state, and rebirth, we have to practice on three occasions: during the waking state, during the sleeping state, and during the death process. This entails integrating the self with spiritual training.Now we have three sets of three:1. Death, intermediate state, and rebirth2. Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya3. Sleeping, dreaming, and wakingIn order to achieve the ultimate states of Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya, one must become acquainted with the three stages of death, intermediate state, and rebirth. In order to become acquainted with these three, one must gain acquaintance with the states of dreamless sleep, dreaming, and waking. “To gain the proper experience during sleep and the waking state, I think it is crucial to become familiar, by means of imagination, with the eightfold process of dying, beginning with the waking conscious state and culminating in the clear light of death. This entails a dissolution process, a withdrawal. At each stage of the actual dying process there are internal signs, and to familiarize yourself with these, you imagine them during meditation in your daytime practice. Then in your imagination, abiding at the clear light level of consciousness, you visualize your subtle body departing from your gross body, and you imagine going to different places; then finally you return and the subtle body becomes reabsorbed in your normal form. Once you are experienced at visualizing this during daytime practice, then when you fall asleep an analogous eightfold process occurs naturally and quickly. That’s the best method for enabling you to recognize the dreamless sleep state as the dreamless sleep state. But without deeper meditative experience of this in the daytime, it’s very difficult to realize this dissolution as you fall asleep.“In the Highest Yoga Tantra practice there are two stages for any sadhana or visualization practice: the stage of generation and the stage of completion. In the stage of generation, the more basic of these two, this whole eightfold process of dissolution is experienced only by the power of imagination; you just visualize it. But in the second stage of practice, the stage of completion, by means of prana yoga, including the vase meditation, you bring the vital energies into the central channel, and you actually bring about such a dissolution, not just with imagination, but in terms of reality. You bring about such a dissolution, and at a certain level of this practice the clear light will manifest.“If you’ve arrived at that point in your experience and practice, then it’s very easy for you to recognize the clear light of sleep when that naturally occurs. And if you have arrived at the point where you can recognize dreamless sleep as dreamless sleep, then it’s very easy for you to recognize the dream as the dream.“This discussion concerns the means of ascertaining sleep as sleep and dream as dream by the power of vital energy. That’s one avenue leading to that result. Now, going back to daytime practice, if one has not reached that level of insight or experience through the vital energy practice, then during the daytime you accomplish this by the power of intent, rather than power of vital energy. Intent means you have to strive very diligently, with a lot of determination. In such practice, recognizing dreamless sleep is harder than recognizing the dream as dream.“Different factors are involved in the ability to recognize the dream as dream. One is diet. Specifically, your diet should be compatible with your own metabolism. For example, in Tibetan medicine, one speaks of the three elements: wind, bile, and phlegm. One or more of these elements are predominant in some people. You should have a diet that helps to maintain balance among these various humors within the body. Moreover, if your sleep is too deep, your dreams will not be very clear. In order to bring about clearer dreams and lighter sleep, you should eat somewhat less. In addition, as you’re falling asleep, you direct your awareness up to the forehead. On the other hand, if your sleep is too light, this will also act as an obstacle for gaining success in this practice. In order to deepen your sleep, you should take heavier, oilier food; and as you’re falling asleep, you should direct your attention down to the vital energy center at the level of navel or the genitals. If your dreams are not clear, as you’re falling asleep you should direct your awareness to the throat center. In this practice, just as in using the device sent by LaBerge (see p. 106), when you begin dreaming it’s helpful to have someone say quietly, ‘You are dreaming now. Try to recognize the dream as the dream.’“Once you are able to recognize the clear light of sleep as the clear light of sleep, that recognition can enable you to sustain that state for a longer period. The main purpose of dream yoga in the context of tantric practice is to first recognize the dream state as dream state. Then, in the next stage of the practice you focus your attention on the heart center of your dream body and try to withdraw the vital energy into that center. That leads to an experience of the clear light of sleep, which arises when the dream state ceases. “The experience of clear light that you have during sleep is not very subtle. As you progress in your practice of dream yoga, the first experience of the clear light occurs as a result of focusing your attention at the heart center of the dream body. Although the clear light state during sleep at the beginning is not very subtle, through practice you’ll be able to make it subtler and also prolong its duration. Also, a secondary benefit of this dream body is that you can be a perfect spy.”He laughed in his usual style. Realizing how much time the teaching had taken, and how late it was, he got up, bowed to all present, and left. We slowly gathered our notes and pads, resting in the aura of a knowledge that was both vast and difficult to grasp.- His Holiness the Dalai Lama Image: Nicholas Roerich
Lama Tsultrim Allione on Feeding Your Demons
Feeding your demons rather than fighting them might seem to contradict the conventional Western approach to what assails us, but it turns out to be a remarkably effective path to inner peace and liberation. Demons are our obsessions and fears, chronic illnesses, or common problems like depression, anxiety, and addiction. They are not bloodthirsty ghouls waiting for us in dark places; they are within us, the forces that we fight inside ourselves. They are inner enemies that undermine our best intentions.The approach of giving form to these inner forces, and feeding rather than struggling against them, was originally articulated by an eleventh-century female Buddhist teacher, Machig Labdrön (1055-1145). Her exact dates are debatable and vary according to the source, but most scholars agree she was born in 1055 and lived well into her nineties. Her spiritual practice was called Chöd (pronounced "chuh"), which means "to cut through." She developed this form of meditation, unusual even in her time in Tibet, and it generated such amazing results that it became very popular, spreading to all the schools of Tibetan Buddhism and beyond.In today's world we suffer from record levels of inner and outer struggle, and find ourselves ever more polarized politically and spiritually. We need a new paradigm, a fresh approach to conflict. Machig's strategy of nurturing rather than battling our inner and outer enemies offers a revolutionary path to resolve conflict that leads to psychological integration and inner peace.In 1967, at age nineteen, I had the good fortune to travel to India and Nepal and meet the Tibetans who had settled there as refugees after being forced into exile during Communist China's invasion of Tibet. I fell in love with the Tibetans and returned to India in 1969 after spending six months at the first Tibetan monastery in Scotland, founded by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. in 1970 I was ordained as a Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition by His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa, in Bodhgaya, India, and for the next few years I had the immeasurable blessing of receiving teachings at the feet of many great Buddhist masters trained in Tibet. As I describe in the following pages, after several years I made the decision to return my monastic vows, It was at this time of great transition and uncertainty that I was first introduced to Chöd. I subsequently returned to America, became a mother, and sought to integrate Tibetan wisdom into my life as a layperson. I was eventually guided to discover Machig Labdrön's biography (written in Tibetan), and her teachings became pivotal for me.Because I myself was able to find such enormous relevance in Machig's teachings, I was motivated to find a way to make her approach accessible in a Western context. When I began to teachthe Chod practice in the West, I developed an exercise of visualizing, dialoguing with, and feeding demons that yielded tangible results. Gradually from this exercise the five-step process described here evolved into a method I call feeding your demons, which began to be used independently of the Tibetan Chöd practice by my students, For the past twenty-five years-most recently at our Colorado retreat center, Tara Mandala, in Chöd and in Kapala Training retreats-I have taught this way of feeding your demons to make friends with that which we would most like to avoid.Those who have used the method report that chronic emotional and physical issues such as anxiety, compulsive eating, panic attacks, and illness were resolved or significantly benefited from this approach. The five-step process has also proved helpful in dealing with short-term upheavals such as the breakup of a relationship, the stress of losing a job, the death of a loved one, and interpersonal problems at work and at home. Sometimes the results have been instantaneous and seemed nothing short of miraculous, while other effects have been more gradual and subtle.The method that I call feeding your demons-based on the principles of Chöd- is a simple five-step practice that doesn't require any knowledge of Buddhism or of any Tibetan spiritual practices. In the first step we find where in the body we hold our "demon" most strongly. This demon might be addiction, selfhatred, perfectionism, anger, jealousy, or anything that is dragging you down, draining your energy. To put it simply, our demons are what we fear. As Machig said, anything that blocks complete inner freedom is a demon. She also spoke of gods and god-demons. Gods are our hopes, what we are obsessed with, what we long for, our attachments. God-demons occur when a hope and a fear are closely attached to each other; when we shift back and forth between hope and fear, this is a god-demon. Although in the following pages I refer for the most part to demons, the same approach applies equally well to our gods and god-demons.In the second step we allow the energy that we find in the body to take personified form as a demon right in front of us. In the third step we discover what the demon needs by putting our-self in the demon's peace, becoming the demon. In the fourth step we imagine dissolving our own body into nectar of whatever it is that the demon needs, and we let this flow to the demon, In this way we nurture it, feeding it to complete satisfaction. Having satisfied the demon, we find that the energy that was tied up in the demon turns into an ally. This ally offers us protection and support and then dissolves into us. At the end of the fourth step, we dissolve into emptiness, and in the fifth and final step, we simply rest in the open awareness that comes from dissolving into emptiness.Paradoxically, feeding our gods or demons to complete satisfaction does not strengthen them; rather it allows the energy that has been locked up in them to become accessible. In this way highly charged emotions that have been bottled up by inner conflict are released and become something beneficial. When we try to fight against or repress the disowned parts of ourselves that 1 call demons, they actually gain power and develop resistance. In feeding our demons we are not only rendering them harmless; we are also, by addressing them instead of running away from them, nurturing the shadow parts of ourselves, so that the energy caught in the struggle transforms into a positive protective force.
Giving our demons form by personifying them brings inchoate energies or harmful habitual patterns into view, allowing them to be liberated rather than leaving them as invisible destructive forces. The alternative to feeding our demons is to engage in a conflict we can never win: our unfed demons only become more and more powerful and monstrous as we either openly battle them or remain ignorant of their undercover operations.
Although the therapeutic technique of personifying a fear or neurosis is not unfamiliar in Western psychology, the five-step practice of feeding your demons takes this approach deeper. Its additional value lies in dissolving our own bodies and nurturing rather than just personifying and interacting with our inner enemies, and in the experience of non-dual meditative awareness that occurs in the final step of the process. This is a state of relaxed awareness, free from our usual fixation of "self" versus "other," which takes us beyond the place where normal psychotherapy ends...- Lama Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict
Meditation for Anxiety, Stress and Panic Attacks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGQ2mxjkb2E
In this short video, Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche talks about his experiences dealing with panic and anxiety as a child. In a second clip, "Using meditation to deal with panic attacks, anxiety, and other painful feelings," he describes how he used the practice of meditation to transform the way he related to these crippling attacks. These clips are drawn from the teachings presented in the Joy of Living meditation workshops, which are offered at Tergar Meditation Centers and Groups around the world. For more information, please visit www.tergar.org.
The Way by Dogen
Fukanzazengi, Dogen Zenji writes:
The Way is basically perfect and all-pervading. How could it be contingent upon practice and realization? The Dharma vehicle is free and untrammeled. What need is there for man’s concentrated effort? Indeed, the whole body is far beyond the world's dust. Who could believe in a means to brush it clean? It is never apart from right where one is. What is the use of going off here and there to practice?
And yet, if there is the slightest discrepancy, the Way is as distant as heaven from earth. If the least like or dislike arises, the Mind is lost in confusion. Suppose one gains pride of understanding and inflates one's own enlightenment, glimpsing the Wisdom that runs through all things, attaining the Way and, clarifying the Mind, raising an aspiration to escalate the very sky. One is making the initial, partial excursions about the frontiers but is still somewhat deficient in the vital Way of total emancipation.
Need I mention the Buddha, who was possessed of inborn knowledge? The influence of his six years of upright sitting is noticeable still. Or Bodhidharma's transmission of the mind-seal? The fame of his nine years of wall-sitting is celebrated to this day. Since this was the case with the saints of old, how can men of today dispense with negotiation of the Way?
You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest. If you want to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay.
The Great Reversal by Sakyong Mipham
The Great Reversalby Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
The Mahayana Buddhist tradition is defined by the supreme thought of bodhichitta, the intention to bring all sentient beings to enlightenment. Those who vow to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of others are known as bodhisattvas. Their path is based on the six transcendent perfections, the paramitas.Paramita is a Sanskrit word meaning “arriving at the other shore.” On the bodhisattva path, one’s view, practice, and action are based on simultaneously benefitting self and other. The bodhisattva is likened to a ferry operator whose sole purpose is to take passengers across the water. Yet while taking others to the other shore, the ferry operator is crossing, too.The paramitas are generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, meditation, and prajna — wisdom or “best knowledge.” They are the supreme way to attain merit, giving one the fuel and strength to take all beings across the waters.Only with prajna are the other paramitas transcendent. Without prajna they are simply ordinary generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, and meditation. The paramita of prajna is like the ferry operator keeping an eye on the other shore, which we could equate with great emptiness and great wisdom. Prajna always sees the purpose of the journey. Therefore, prajna keeps the boat from going adrift. Generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, and meditation are like the oars of the boat.In practicing the paramitas, bodhisattvas progress along the bhumis , the stages of realisation. Through generosity, they create favorable conditions. Through discipline, they become excellent at knowing what to accept and what to reject. Through patience, they retain all the previous merit. Through exertion, they progress joyfully. Through meditation, they exchange self for other and create equanimity. Through prajna, they understand reality. Thus, the paramitas become the bodhisattva’s view, action, and meditation — all fueled by bodhichitta, the supreme thought.We should not confuse bodhichitta with buddhanature, the inherent possibility of becoming a buddha. Everyone has this seed and is fully capable of attaining enlightenment. Since bodhichitta leads to full enlightenment, it too could be regarded as a seed. However, while all beings have buddhanature, we do not all have bodhichitta.While the seed of all beings is buddhanature, at the core of bodhichitta is the exchange of self and other. The two elements that enable one to exchange self and other are loving-kindness and compassion. loving-kindness is engendered by the thought, “May all beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” Compassion is engendered by the thought, “May all beings be free from suffering and the root of suffering.” When we unify these two, we have bodhichitta, the vow to bring all beings to the perfect state of buddhahood.Love and compassion are essential to the teachings of the Mahayana and the way of the bodhisattva. love and compassion lead to buddhahood because for beings to be truly happy, they must understand the true source of happiness, and for beings to be free from suffering, they must understand the true source of freedom from suffering. If beings do not understand the source, they might have a temporary state of happiness, but they will not have a permanent state of happiness.The bodhisattva exists in order to help others. One is not helping others simply because one is inspired and wants to do it for oneself, for the bodhisattva does not believe in the self. rather, the bodhisattva helps others because they are utterly confused about the source of both happiness and suffering. Trying to be happy, sentient beings act out of self-interest and engage in non-virtue — that which benefits self instead of others. In fact, it is said that within samsara, the cycle of suffering, sentient beings act as though it is virtue that will destroy them. and in a way that is true, for if we define virtue as a lack of self-centeredness, virtue ultimately does destroy the self.The bodhisattva sees that entire realms of beings are going up and down the ladder of existence, trying harder and harder to achieve happiness: in the hell realms through anger, in the ghost realms through jealousy, in the human realms through desire, in the god realms through pride, and in the animal realms through ignorance. Clearly these beings are perpetually suffering and utterly confused about how to free themselves. Therefore, the bodhisattva sees an urgent need to apply bodhichitta and liberate them.Bodhisattvas make a vow that they will remain in this cyclical place of pain and suffering until all these beings have perfected view, meditation, action, and the six paramitas. When all beings have perfected those, the bodhisattva stays to ensure that they attain the noble qualities of perfect buddhahood. In this way, the bodhisattva is like a shepherd, remaining until every being in samsara attains the perfect state.Bodhisattvas attain buddhahood themselves as a means to lead all beings to rouse the mind of bodhichitta and attain buddhahood too. In this light, the bodhisattva is said to be like a monarch, first demonstrating the principle so that other beings will follow. Otherwise, they may not follow and, since they do not know what buddhahood is, they might even fear it. Therefore, bodhisattvas perfect the state of buddhahood for the benefit of all.The ferry operator, the shepherd, or the monarch — all these virtues of the bodhisattva stem from bodhichitta. In the sutras, the buddha says that arousing bodhichitta protects the mind like a suit of armor. With bodhichitta, the mind is free from fear. as well, having bodhichitta brings perpetual joy, and arousing bodhichitta gathers unimaginable merit. Once one begins to understand the awesome potency of bodhichitta and its benefits, one starts rousing the mind to generate it. This potent switch from a subjective orientation toward the self to an objective orientation toward others yields vast results.In this light, if one is drawn toward bodhichitta and develops faith, that propels the mind for many lifetimes into the future, laying the ground for enlightenment. Obviously, if one does not know the value of such an intention, one will not generate it. It is also said that the minor effort it takes to arouse bodhichitta is vastly outweighed by the benefits. Thus, the bodhisattva — whether sitting, eating, walking, or talking — raises this attitude, accumulating infinite clouds of unseen merit.
Becoming Intimate with Our Emotions
Working with emotions in meditation practice is a big subject for me. Very often, our thoughts are pretty lightweight. Just light, discursive thoughts. We’re thinking, “What’s for lunch?” or, “Did I remember to run the dishwasher this morning?” Sometimes we’re just having the strangest thoughts. Perhaps you are having a memory of your grandmother eating raw onions. Where does that come from?Sometimes these thoughts take you away. Usually they do. But many times, they don’t have a lot of emotion in them. These little things passing through your mind come and go like the wind. You can get completely caught up in this fantasy world, but on the other hand, it’s somewhat lightweight. When you realize you’re thinking, you say “thinking.” You let the thoughts go, and there you are in the present moment. Maybe it lasts only half a second.But if you sit longer, the more you sit, then—no question—painful memories will come up. Suddenly you are struggling against how you’re feeling, and a lot of emotion is involved.The instruction I’ve been giving for years is: when you’re meditating, and even in your everyday life, notice when you’re hooked. Notice when you’re triggered or activated. That’s the first step: you acknowledge that emotion has arisen.Next, I advise students to drop the story line and lean in. Just pause, and for a second connect in with spaciousness, with openness. I call this the “pause practice.” It’s like taking a time-out for yourself. Then you lean in to the quality or the texture or the experience, completely touching in to the emotion, without the story. How does the sadness feel? How does the anger feel? Where is it in your body? You let the feeling of the emotion become the object of your meditation. And the reason that I’ve been so committed to teaching on this is emotion itself is a radical and very potent way of awakening.Without a doubt, this is where everyone loses it. We have so much fear of our emotions, so much aversion to them. You get caught in the momentum of the emotion, and it sweeps you away as if you were in its control. But I’ve found that we can take another approach, which is to enter the emotions that arise in our practice. Emotions are actually very empowering; I call working with the emotions “accelerated transformation.” When you experience difficult emotions in your sitting practice, and you let go of the words and the story behind the experience, then you’re sitting with just the energy. And yes, it can feel painful to do this.It’s so funny, because sometimes when I give retreats, the TV cameras come in and take pictures of people meditating, and it looks like everyone’s sitting there in complete serenity.If you could see the speech balloons above people’s heads, or feel what’s going on with them, you might be knocked over in shock! The person next to you doesn’t know that you’re reliving a horror story from your childhood in graphic, heartbreaking detail, or that you’re in a deep depression, or that you’re having the world’s most pornographic fantasy. What we look like and what’s actually going on are often so completely different. We’re just sitting there in a Buddha-like posture, and it might appear that we are experiencing nothing but openness and calm—and nothing could be further from the truth. But I think the Buddha had the same experience that we do. For him, as for us, meditation isn’t always about sitting in a state of absolute calm. There is a scene in the movie Little Buddha where special effects are used to reflect the myriad emotions and temptations that are trying to seduce the Buddha. So much is coming at him—everything from gorgeous women to opportunities for power to things that are frightening, everything. The idea that the Buddha was completely chilled out and didn’t experience emotion around any of these things simply isn’t true. When the Buddha achieved enlightenment, he learned to be settled with all of those feelings coursing through him.Like the Buddha, you can come to know your own energy, and you can feel quite settled with it. You become intimate with your own energy, and it no longer rules your life. Your conditioning doesn’t go away, but it no longer controls you.In many ways, it is critical that we do become intimate with our emotions. Sometimes it is even a matter of life and death. I want to tell you a story about my granddaughter. Her mother, my daughter-in-law, died of alcoholism at age forty-eight when my granddaughter was seventeen years old. The addiction had been going on for a long time, from the time my granddaughter was about two. Her mother had a recovery and was sober for ten years, but then she relapsed.So my granddaughter was applying to college and she had to write an essay. One of the essays for the college was to write about a transformative experience, and the first line of her essay was, “My mother died on December 1, 2009.” And this essay was so remarkable to me because in it she explained how her mother had died of alcoholism, and she said, “all my mother’s friends from Alcoholics Anonymous were telling me, and I knew it to be true, that alcohol is a disease and once it has you in its grip it’s pretty hard to shake it, and they said that’s what happened with my mother.” She said, “I knew that to be true, but I felt that her drinking was a symptom of something else. So while my mother was in the hospital in a coma, I wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to remember everything about my mother—my own memories, things she had said about herself, things her friends had said about her. I was trying to figure out who my mother was because I’m so much like her, and I wanted to figure out where she went wrong and what happened that ended in her dying so young.”In her essay, my granddaughter came to the conclusion that her mother had a fixed idea of herself as being a certain way. And one of my granddaughter’s conclusions was that we’re changing all the time; everything about us is always changing. My granddaughter said, “When you hold a fixed idea of yourself, you have to leave out all the parts that you find boring, embarrassing, difficult, or sad. You leave out the emotions you don’t want to feel. And then when you do that, when you leave out all those parts, when those parts are not acceptable, then it eats away at you underneath. These unacknowledged parts are like a hum in the background that’s eating away at you, and you have to find an escape to get away from that. And my mother’s escape was alcohol.”In order for us to be fully present, to experience life fully, we need to acknowledge and accept all our emotions and all parts of ourselves—the embarrassing parts as well as our anger, our rage, our jealousy, our envy, our self-pity, and all these chaotic emotions that sweep us away. Looking for an exit from experiencing the full range of our humanity leads to all kinds of pain and suffering. Meditation gives us the opportunity to experience our emotions naked and fresh, free from the labels of “right” and “wrong,” “should” and “shouldn’t.”~Pema Chodron
Milarepa on Attachment
Milarepa replied, "I am Milarepa, the yogi from Tibet. There is a great purpose to not having possessions."He then explained this in a spiritual song:"I have no desire for wealth or possessions, and so I have nothing. I do not experience the initial suffering of having to accumulate possessions, the intermediate suffering of having to guard and keep up possessions, nor the final suffering of losing the possessions. This is a wonderful thing.I have no desire for friends or relations. I do not experience the initial suffering of forming an attachment, the intermediate suffering of having disagreements with friends and family, nor the final suffering of parting with them. Therefore it is good to be without friends and relations.I have no desire for pleasant conversation. I do not experience the initial suffering of beginning conversation, the intermediate suffering of wondering whether to continue the conversation, nor the final suffering of the conversation deteriorating. Therefore I do not delight in pleasant conversation.I have no desire for a home land and have no fixed residence. I do not experience the initial suffering of partiality of thinking that 'this is my land and that place isn't.'I do not experience the intermediate suffering of yearning for my land. And I do not experience the final suffering of having to protect my land. Therefore I do not have a fixed abode." - from Ten Teachings from the Songs of Milarepa