Mindfulness: Letting Go of Reaction

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Stabilizing the Mind”

If you can get to a place of natural awareness, you can remain mindful in a way that isn’t really describable in words.  You can begin to sense a little bit of space between the calm, natural awareness and the reaction that you have quite automatically, instantaneously.  It’s really necessary to develop the skill of sensing that little bit of space, because your tendency is to run off and react to every thought that you have. Just look at what you’re doing in your mind right now.  What are your thoughts?  You’re reacting.  Everything is a reaction, and you’re floating on it.  You’re up and down with it all the time.

If you can just begin to sense a little bit of space between that natural awareness and the reaction, you can begin to have the skill to not be so at the mercy of the conceptual proliferations of your mind.  That little bit of space is exactly what you need to begin to disengage the ego, to begin to disengage desire.  You need space in your mind to meditate even on the problems that desire brings up for you.  You have to have some space in your mind to meditate on true nature.  You have to have some space in your mind to meditate on emptiness.  That kind of space can be developed all the time.  If you practice in that way constantly, or at least as often as you are able, to remain mindful, and increase that mindfulness and increase that kind of practice, you’ll find yourself doing it more and more naturally.

But don’t try to keep yourself locked up.  That’ll make you crazy.  That is not a solution.  You make yourself crazy when you say, “I’m not going to be happy now.  I’m not going to be unhappy now.  I’m not going to follow my mind around the block.  I’m not going to do that.”  Really, that is not a good solution.  If you practice the spaciousness in your mind in the gentle way I have just described, you’ll begin to be able to be more mindful and more aware of the validity of the Buddha’s teaching.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Spaciousness: The Foundation of Practice

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Stabilizing the Mind”

If you are romantically involved with Dharma, then you have developed no space in your mind and you will be constantly up and down, skating on your own dramatics with no stability in the mind.  And you are completely at the mercy of suffering.  Where there is no space, there is nowhere to go.  There’s no quiet place where you can rest.  You are either going to be suffering or feeling exhilarated — an intensity of a different kind.  Ultimately it’s all suffering.  You’re going to be into the intensity with no spaciousness in your mind.  You’ll be stuck there with nowhere to go.  You just ride on your emotions.  If you have not developed spaciousness in your mind, you are the victim of the highs and lows and the mind’s conceptual proliferations.  For example, you’re completely at the mercy of pain.  Have you ever had really intense pain?  It can make you lose all awareness.  It’s unbelievable.  You just lose consciousness, and it’s because there’s no space in your mind.  Pain is a concept; it’s something in your mind.

You are completely at the mercy of emotionalism of all kind, and you know that of yourself.  You follow your emotions constantly.  They’ve been high, and they’ve been low.  They’ve been big, and they’ve been small.  They’ve been in, and they’ve been out.  Have your emotions ever made you happy for a long time?  Have your emotions ever been dependable companions?  They never have if you really think about it.

So if you develop spaciousness, you have at least a fighting chance, if you will excuse the phrase, to begin to practice in such a way that your mind has some potential for liberation.  In other words, there’s a little spaciousness in which you can practice.  It’s very, very important for you to try to do that.  If you develop a little bit of space, you can start building up these bricks of the Buddha’s teaching.  You can evaluate the teachings for yourself.  From that calm place, from that place behind all of the concepts, you can see that following the mind leads to no happiness.  You can see that desire is the cause of suffering.  You can sense the potential for enlightenment or at least for disengaging from that phenomenon that you are so involved in.  You can sense that there is something behind all of your concepts that’s very profound.  You can begin to build the solid blocks that are necessary in order to follow the Buddha’s path until you achieve supreme enlightenment.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

How to Practice Mindfulness During All Activities

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Stabilizing the Mind”

While you’re practicing you have to find a way to stabilize your mind.  I cannot emphasize mindfulness enough.  It is what will result in a stabilized mind.  One of the best things that you can do, no matter what experience you’re having – whether you’re getting excited about something new that you bought, some new project that you’re doing, some new idea that you’ve been presented with, some new relationship that you have, or depressed about the loss of any of these things, whether you’re having a high or low experience – ask yourself in the midst of that circumstance, “Who is the taster here?”

When His Holiness Penor Rinpoche was giving the Rinchen Terzod, he gave us lemon juice and then honey, and he asked, “Who is the taster? Who says one is sweet and one is bitter?  What is the meaning of this taste?  How does taste come about?” It is important to remember that taste is a perceptual thing.

You should practice this type of mindfulness when you’re feeling intense emotion of any kind – whether great joy, great sorrow, great pain, great physical pleasure, even during sexual activity, during any of those intense experiences that run the gamut of human emotion.  Center into a natural awareness.  A good way to do that would be, for instance, to just watch your breath with gentle attention.  It’s not forceful; don’t go, “OK, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in…”  It isn’t like that.  It’s a gentle, nonintrusive, passive attention on the breath, a light awareness.  Just lightly watch the breath for a few moments, and let that be what you’re doing right then.  Then observe, while you’re breathing,  “Who is the watcher?”  Observe the natural awareness that occurs when you just gently watch your breath.  Try to sense that natural awareness.

If you really ask yourself the question, “Who is watching the breath?”  then your mind is going to come right back at you and say, “I am.”  Then you have to play the game with your mind that goes, “Who is I?”  And you get sort of tense about that.  So you don’t want to really ask yourself who is the watcher.  There will be a sense of peeling away layers until you get to a place of pure awareness.

What you want to do is to gently sense the watcher without forming any conceptualization about it.  Just sense and go behind the concept.  If you gently observe what you are doing, you have a concept about the watcher.  Go behind that concept and sense behind that.  And if you develop another concept about the watcher, go behind that, gently, gently, gently.  You can practice this technique quite naturally while you’re typing or doing anything.

It’s also good to use this technique in meditation, but there are more formal techniques that you can use at that time.  This is a good, ordinary technique that you can use while you’re doing anything – while you’re listening to music, while you’re thinking, “I’m having a good practice” or “I’m having a bad practice” or whatever it is that you’re reacting to.  Take yourself out of the realm of reaction and watch the breath.  Just concentrate on your breathing for some time with light attention and go behind the concepts one after another until you have somehow gotten gently behind or underneath all of the concepts that you have about who the watcher is, until you get to a place of natural awareness where there isn’t so much the question of who the watcher is.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Caught in a Dream

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Stabilizing the Mind”

In order to practice the Buddha’s teaching with any meaning, you first have to understand that all sentient beings are suffering.  Now I have to ask you: Have you really seen that with your own heart, with your own eyes, with your own mind?  Have you seen that all sentient beings are suffering?

If you have seen that you are suffering, then let me describe a funny little thing that you still do that cannot coexist with that knowledge.  You have circumstances throughout the day (and throughout the month, the year, your life) that either please you or displease you, that either make you happy or make you unhappy.

You may think, “Oh, I’m really down today.”  Then you talk to someone, and someone has an upbeat thing to say to you.  It’s meaningful, it’s good, and it pleases you.  So what happens to you?  You go up, right?  There’s a nice sense of warm fuzzies, and you go up.

Or let’s say you are a renunciate, a monk or nun, and when you wake up in the morning, it’s a ho-hum day.  You’re in a flat-line zone, a kind of grey zone.  And let’s say you manage to get in all of the practices that you want to do in the morning, and you manage to have a pretty good experience with them.  You feel buoyant in your practice.  You feel stable in your practice.  You’re able to hold your visualization.  Somehow that magical thing that happens every now and then happens.  You had a good practice.  Then you have your breakfast, eating your cereal by the window like a guy in a commercial, and you say, “Morning is my time!”  But later on the dog urinates on your one robe, you are too busy to eat any lunch or any dinner, and you have a bad practice.  That’s the worst thing – you have a bad practice – and things are no longer going so well.

These things happen to all of you, and yet, although you say you know that there is suffering from the depth of your heart, you have looked to satisfy the end of suffering in a way that is different from what the Buddha taught.  We let our minds float on an ocean of waves like a buoy, up and down.  What is “up”?  What is “down”?  And who is feeling it?  Who says morning is your time?  Who says evening is not?  Who says life is good when you go out to a restaurant and have a glass of wine?  These are concepts that are part of your mind, and your consciousness floats on them.  For some of you, there is not a moment of spaciousness in your mind where your consciousness is not floating on some circumstance you contrived all by yourself.  Why does that happen?

You say that all sentient beings are suffering and that the end to suffering is enlightenment, yet you allow your mind to be satisfied going up and down according to circumstances.  All of the beings that you say are suffering are doing the same thing.  Has anyone achieved happiness by allowing the mind to float on that ocean of concept that we call samsara, affected by circumstances, lifted up by what we call high circumstances, put down by what we call low circumstances?

No one.  Never.  The Buddha tells us that samsara is not happiness, that the contrivances of the mind are not happiness, that sentient beings are suffering, and that the only end to suffering is enlightenment.  Yet we allow ourselves to slide up and down every day.  We get excited about some project, we get enthusiastic, but it always comes to a dead stop.  It always ends.  It has never, never, never, never, never continued until it gave you supreme happiness.

So here’s the point I am trying to make.  First brick: All sentient beings are suffering.  Now, we’ll put the next one on top of it: There is an end to suffering, and it is enlightenment.  Just two bricks, and already we find that we are not secure behind those two bricks, that we don’t believe.  Yes, you say that you believe that all sentient beings are suffering.  Yes, you say that you believe enlightenment is the end of suffering.  Can you tell me how that can coexist with the tendency to let your mind drift, relying on circumstances to make it happy, being the victim of circumstances that make it unhappy?  How do we allow that?

We forget.  We’re caught in a dream, and we lose faith.  So how are you going to practice this Vajrayana, the Diamond Vehicle, the Tantric teachings of Buddhism, passed from teacher to disciple, that can lead to the attainment of enlightenment in one lifetime, a path with sincerity and stability for the rest of your life until some potential comes for you to achieve supreme enlightenment?  Do you believe that that can happen?

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Why Practice Dharma?

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Stabilizing the Mind”

Do you really understand why you are practicing Buddhism?

Ultimately, when you come to understand what the Buddha and all the great lamas have taught, you will come to understand that it basically boils down to the fact that all sentient beings are suffering, that desire is the cause of suffering, that there is an end to suffering, and that end is enlightenment.  There are different ways that you can attain enlightenment, but they all have to do with ending attachment and desire in the mindstream.  They have to do with realizing that one’s nature is not the same as the conceptual proliferations that we live with, the desire that we live with, and the ego that we perceive as ourselves.  I really think that once you understand enough so that you can look at your life – with all its emotional highs and lows – and realize that it is impermanent, that you’re just riding on your own concepts and that by doing that you can’t make your mind stable enough to break free of the compulsion to revolve in cyclic existence for eons and eons that awareness becomes the taskmaster.  That realization becomes the teacher.

If you don’t realize that circumstances are impermanent, if you’re practicing because you have some crazy idea that you’re going to be a great being some day or that you’re going to triumph in the end, and that it’s all about self and self-cherishing, if you have some romantic notion about ordination or about practicing at all, you won’t be stable in your practice.  Understanding the teachings about impermanence is the stabilizer, the real teacher.  Understanding from the depth of your heart that desire really is the cause of suffering is the taskmaster.  Looking at your mind in some stable way so that you can understand that the mind just floats helplessly, constantly, on its own concepts, whichever way the concepts go, up or down, and that these concepts are the cause for suffering and that there’s no lasting happiness in them, gives you a firm foundation.  It is then that you understand why you practice, and although the circumstances of your life may change, you will never turn away from practice.  You may go to work or you may stay home; you may have children or you may not; you may take robes or you may not. Whatever the circumstances are of your life, as long as you know these things, you will remain firm.  Your infatuation with the culture, with the music, with the color, with the ritual of Tibetan Buddhism will never be enough.  You have to understand the heart of the Buddha’s teaching.  You have to understand the value of compassion.  You have to understand how important it is to end suffering and what the means are to end suffering in order to stay with the Dharma, in order to be stable and safe in the Dharma.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

Why Do You Practice Dharma?

An excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Stabilizing the Mind”

If you’re only approaching Dharma by riding on the surface of your mind, you will not stick with it.  You shouldn’t practice Dharma because you like Dharma.  If you do that, there will be a day when you don’t like Dharma.  Dharma is not like listening to music: You like it, you listen to it; you don’t like it, you don’t listen to it.  It’s not that kind of thing.  You should follow the Dharma from a place of spaciousness in your mind, initially because the Buddha says so — and the Buddha is supremely enlightened — and then ultimately from your own knowing, from your own sense of your own nature, from the spaciousness in your mind, and with the dignity that is inherently yours as part of that mind.  From that place of stability, you should choose Dharma, and you should choose it for good reasons.

It is necessary to stabilize the mind so that you can even think about practicing Dharma.  It is important to be stable in your practice.  Being stable in your practice is a step that you need to take before you even commit to stabilizing your mind in your ordinary life.

Look at the mind and see how much stuff you make up all the time.  Why do you practice Dharma?  How much stuff have you made up about Dharma already?  One of you likes to talk about being an old yogi.  Another one of you likes to talk about caves.  You want to talk about the romanticism of practicing Dharma.  Your practice is not going to last if you approach Dharma in that way.  You have to approach Dharma in a solid way because you know that sentient beings are suffering, because you know that you are suffering, because you know that nothing you have tried to date has ended that suffering, and because you know that according to the Buddha’s teaching, there is an end to suffering, and that end is enlightenment. You should practice from a place of space in your mind where you’re not just following yourself down the garden path, making up all these crazy stories about Dharma in the same way that you make up everything about everything.

Come to love the Dharma for what it is, for what it can do, for the rich potential of it.  Love it because it is a practice that, if practiced sincerely, can awaken pure compassion in the mind.  Love it because awakening pure compassion in the mind can be the end of war and of famine and of all kinds of problems that we have on the earth that we haven’t been able to solve.  Love Dharma for the right reasons, from a stable place, not in the same way that you fall in and out of love with everything else.  And in order to do that you must approach Dharma and see and understand it from the place of having a stable mind, from a place of spaciousness.

You are not immune from falling out of love with Dharma until you achieve realization.  The potential is there.  The way to remove that potential is by practicing Dharma in a stable way and for stable reasons.  I don’t think that you’ve thought enough about why you practice.  You say, “Oh, it’s not my nature to do that.  I just become excited about things, and I go into them.  I’m spontaneous.  That’s my nature.”  No, that’s wrong.  It doesn’t work.  You can’t do it that way.  You have to think about it, even if you’ve never thought about anything else before.  You have to think, “Why Dharma?  Why me?  What does this mean?”  If you don’t consider all of these things, if you just do it because it feels right, believe me when I tell you, your feelings are so unstable that one day Dharma will feel wrong.

Please build this fortress carefully with careful consideration and careful thinking.  Even if it’s not your nature to think about anything, anytime, for any length of time, start now.  This is a good reason to start, and it’s very important.

Copyright © Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved

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