Tibetan Buddhist Altar

How to Practice Mindfulness During All Activities

December 20, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

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.

Astrology for 12/20/2016

December 20, 2016 by Norma

12/20/2016 Tuesday by Norma

The steady drumbeat of complaints and rhetorical pontificating means something is winding down, at last. Avoid jumping on the bandwagon. Anonymous said, “You can’t go anywhere in the chariots of the past,” but someone wants to keep the past alive. Smile and keep on shopping. Don’t bother to debate with your companion, you won’t win. Be aware that Mercury is retrograde and it’s a poor time to buy a new car, computer or pet. Avoid signing contracts unless you’ve discussed the matter previously. Friends and groups are great, partnership is better and anyone who apologizes must be forgiven. View forgiving others as paving the way to your own forgiveness when the time comes. (It will.)

The astrology post affects everyone differently, depending on individual horoscopes. Look to see how this message reflects your life today!

Caught in a Dream

December 19, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

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?

Astrology for 12/19/2016

December 19, 2016 by Norma

12/19/2016 Monday by Norma

A dream or rough wake-up generates confusion but relax, it’s over soon. Work is the main topic of the day and a good deal can be accomplished if you avoid the ideological discussions that keep popping up. An organizational wizard puts things into place and tidies up messes, and your job is to step aside and let it happen. As a partner catches your misses, learn something and have the humility to be grateful. Jean Toomer said, “To understand a new idea, break an old habit.” Sensitivity is highlighted, along with hardworking intelligence. Go everywhere in a group and seek out a special friend for happiness. Good news comes from someone you’d given up on.

The astrology post affects everyone differently, depending on individual horoscopes. Look to see how this message reflects your life today!

Why Practice Dharma?

December 18, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

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.

Astrology for 12/18/2016

December 18, 2016 by Norma

12/18/2016 Sunday by Norma

Harmony prevails between men, women and children and someone successfully mediates a dispute between others. The ability to grasp the big picture is they key to happiness today. Too much traffic? Everyone’s out shopping for your gift! Two sides exist in everything that happens and you succeed to the degree that you’re able to identify the concerns of both. Marlo Thomas said, “A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless. All a woman has to do is put you on hold.” Be bigger than every situation and sidestep obsessive thinking about the past. At some point things start moving backward, thanks to retrograde Mercury, signaling forward motion is over for the time being. Stick to previous plans and everything goes well. Friends are great, problems that seemed unsolvable are neatly wrapped up, and life is good.

The astrology post affects everyone differently, depending on individual horoscopes. Look to see how this message reflects your life today!

Motherhood

December 17, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Western Chod”

Somewhere in this process I had my second son. I remember picking him up. Here he is a newborn baby, and I am looking into his face. Those of you who have had children, you know what that is like. You look into that face and you can see your genes! I don’t know how that is, but you can. You can see that this child has your blood in him. There is just this connection. Plus there is something visible, like you recognize those feet. There they are again, or something like that. You have the sense of that. So I remember holding this newborn baby, having this connection with this child. I breast feed this child. I gave birth to this child. This child, at least in part, looks like me. I love this child so much. There is nothing like that feeling. You can hardly think about anything else.

I am holding this child in my arms, and I am thinking, “I will never let you suffer. I will never let you suffer. I will never let you get cold. I will never let you get hungry. Wherever you go, even if you have to go off by yourself, I will watch you and I will follow you. I will make sure that nothing happens to you. And as long as I am alive, you will have food, you will have clothing, you will have a place to live. You will be safe.” Then I realized what I had just said,“As long as I am alive… “ Then I realized that that is no promise at all. What is that? I am lying to my child. Then I thought, ”What if I could somehow provide for my child all the way until the time of his death.” Then I thought, “Yeah, but when my child dies, can I guarantee that that death won’t be a suffering? Can I guarantee that it won’t be a terrible feeling of loss or that it won’t be painful in some way?” No. Can I absolutely assure thatmy child is going to die in a painless way? No. There is nothing that I can do about that. I don’t have that kind of power.

So I thought to myself, ”How disgusting! Here I am holding my newborn baby in my arms and I am making all these promises and I am lying. The first thing I have done for my child is to lie to him. That really made me unhappy. I just couldn’t think what to do. So I used that as a way to practice. I thought to myself, “Therefore, this temporary reality, the human reality, is worth nothing. If there is a way to absolutely embody this primordial wisdom nature, I know this nature is not limited by death. I know this nature is something that is all pervasive. I know it. I don’t know how I know it, but I know it. I think to myself, “If only I could really embody this nature, then somewhere in there is the way to protect my child.

It was being a mother that really taught me how to feel the same way about sentient beings because ultimately I came to understand that if you look at two children side by side because you are the mother of one but not of the other…What is that? These are both my children. How do I say that this one is not my child but this one is? I couldn’t. That doesn’t even make any sense to me.

Astrology for 12/17/2016

December 17, 2016 by Norma

12/17/2016 Saturday by Norma

This is a wonderful day for enthusiasm and progress, so get out there and do something! Attend a parade, a concert or a performance and you’ll enjoy yourself. Look your best and you’ll impress others and make your point without speaking. Ray Charles said, “Live every day like it’s your last ’cause one day your’re gonna be right.” Four planets in fire signs give you the pizzazz to accomplish anything you wish, provided, of course, that you take the initiative. The only way to spoil this day is to stay home and complain about the past.

The astrology post affects everyone differently, depending on individual horoscopes. Look to see how this message reflects your life today!

Astrology for 12/16/2016

December 16, 2016 by Norma

12/16/2016 Friday by Norma

Confidence is the gift of this day, get some! Dress your best and be prepared to shine. It’s a surprisingly stable and time, provided you avoid people who talk too much about a situation that is finished. When you sidestep endless discourse, everything else is sparkly and fun. Eccentric speech and behavior is jarring but meaningless now. Benedict Spinoza said, “If a triangle could speak, it would say that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular.” Time spent with good friends generates happiness, partnership is satisfying and someone is inventing a brilliant device right now. You, perhaps?

The astrology post affects everyone differently, depending on individual horoscopes. Look to see how this message reflects your life today!

Going Deeper

December 16, 2016 by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Western Chod”

I thought about my ears in the same way. I would listen to some music, and I really like music so I could become hypnotized by the music; I could become entranced. I could become sort of addicted to music, and maybe that’s all that I think about is music. In my head is always this music. Have you had it happen where you get a song stuck in your head and you think it will drive you out of your mind? That kind of thing. So what if I were really to do that with music and just remain in that “music is so wonderful” state. You might think the benefit of that would be that it could be relaxing. It could be pleasurable. Maybe if I shared the mood music with someone else, it might make them feel temporarily better. But, ultimately if I use my ears to just give myself some kind of narcotic experience like that, what good are they? I am going to stay in samsara and I’m never going to get out. It’s not going to produce any real result.

Ultimately, I came to understand, here in this day and age, that my ears are precious because I can hear the voice of my teacher. I can hear the prayers. I can hear the sound of mantra. So my ears became to me precious; but I’ve also understood that in truth while they may be a beautiful and precious animal, they are a work horse. They should not dominate me. I must dominate them.So I am thinking like that even with the five senses. I learned how to renounce them and how to experience them as something that will lead to ultimate benefit rather than to something that is temporary.

I thought that way about touch as well. Touch can be very seductive. We can live our entire lives wishing nothing but to be in love and to touch our loved ones, to have that wonderful sensual type of experienceMany of us have the kind of lives where we simply go from one of those experiences to another. It can be very seductive. Touch is good. I can comfort my baby. I can sooth someone who is not feeling well. I can make someone that I can touch temporarily happy. But I came to understand that touch has its limitations and that it can be seductive. I came to understand ultimately it is touch that enables me to turn my page. I can tell where the pages are. Touch tells me how to get to the prayer that I want. So I have come to understand that touch is another animal that can be ridden and that can bring about benefit.

In every case, from the different parts of my body to the whole total sense of my identity to all of my senses as I understood them at that time, even to the external circumstances of my life like the clothing that I wore, or the food that I ate, the car that I drove, the house that I lived in, all of these things that I examined, I thought of in the same way as having some temporary benefit, but that ultimately whatever one receives one will also lose. And that these things are very limited.

You might say to yourself, “Well, gee, did you develop a kind of cynicism? Did you just sit around making yourself miserable all day long?” And I have to tell you that, in truth, there are moments when I felt the grief of sentient beings. I recommend doing this, and I don’t recommend letting yourself off easy. It is like exercise. You know that if you don’t put any weight in your hand, but you just keep going like that [pumping your arm], maybe that muscle will get some blood in it. But if you take some weight in your hand and you really think about it, and you really work it, you will develop a very tuned, very strong muscle. So it is like that. I have to tell you that I would spend some days thinking about the suffering of sentient beings and it would not be happy. It would be really sad.