How Lama Dawa’s Actions Were Wisdom Display …Provided Your Eyes Were Open to See

“But through play, spiritual energy can be sustained, so we must not think that play is always bad.  Whether or not our rigid mature minds reject play, everything is still the display of the natural secret essence of the elements.  If we are serious and rigid, our subtle elements become congested and cannot reflect this wisdom display.  If our mind is calm and vast and playful, we can always recognize this essence display.  In open space there is never turbulence….”

--Thinley Norbu

Unfortunately, I recognized only very few of Lama Dawa’s displays.  I was lucky if I every once and a while caught one of the sparks when he shot them spontaneously through the pitch-dark night sky of my closed, rigid mind.  Even more seldom, were the occasions when I interpreted them correctly and translated them into suitable matching action.  Mostly, I didn’t.  And many times I must have not even recognized that I had missed something important. Here’s an example for my failing to see the meaning of one such display, and its long-term ripples extending into what lay then still in the future.  

One day I was again sitting in Lama’s room.  It must have been shortly before my departing back for South India, around 2004.  All of a sudden, Lama rose from his carpeted bed, his sort-of teaching throne when he was home in Kathmandu, went over to the metal cabinet where his clothes and some valuables were kept, and pulled out a letter size manila envelope.  He handed it to me unopened with the cryptic comment that soon I would need what was contained therein.  I was too arrogant to have a peak on the spot, and so I took the envelope to the guesthouse where I opened it. 

I don’t know what I had expected.  Clearly I had expected something big, portentous, although I have no clue what that could have been.  But I hadn’t expected what I held in my hands: about two dozen laminated color photos of Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, showing him in layman’s garb on the shore of the Tsangpo River near Lhasa.  The picture is quite famous and by now has been used by many, many times over to illustrate their Facebook posts.  Thinley Norbu also included it in his autobiography, A Brief Fantasy History of a Himalayan. 

But I was clearly disappointed when I held these color photos in my hands.  Devotion didn’t well up deep from inside.  “Just pictures,” I thought and I didn’t even touch the photos to my head.  It didn’t occur to me that these pictures were pointing to something important.  For example, I might have considered that Lama had the same picture on his shrine and that he was fond of Thinley Norbu Rinpoche (in general he didn’t entertain such high respect for Lamas simply because they had been enthroned); furthermore, Khandro Kalsang was Thinley Norbu’s devoted student.  So, upon reflection it could have been conceivable, even to the rational mind, that some auspicious connection from way past when was being re-established in this moment.  Or I might have taken into account that when a Lama really cares about a student, he connects him or her to other worthy teachers.  But no, to me the whole thing felt like a letdown, although in actual fact it indeed was what I had hoped for: portentous.  My fault was that I missed the point.   

When I arrived back home in Karnataka, I burned the photos except for one, which I put up on my desk.  For me the case was closed, filed under: ‘one of Lama’s incomprehensible actions’.  I did not think about the matter any further.  And I had totally forgotten about it until a few days ago when I started writing this article first in my head, and especially about the ramifications of my reaction and action.

A year or so after the incident with the photos, I received a communication from one of the publishers in Germany with and for whom I had free-lanced since the late 1970s quite a bit, asking me if I was interested in translating Thinley Norbu’s Magic Dance and White Sail into German.  Nothing was definite yet, but they were about to sign the contract with Shambhala.  Of course, I was.  More than that, I was delighted. 

It so happened that shortly after receiving the offer I was seeing Lama in Kathmandu, again.  I asked him to ask in Sarasvati’s mirror about the chances of success for the project, which he did.  The answer came that, “there were obstacles, which might be vanquished, if a certain puja was done, even though the outcome was far from guaranteed.”  Lama just commented, that we had to do the puja, which he arranged for through a yogi friend.  What Lama didn’t do was to remind me about the photos and the auspicious connection that he had seen possible and thus had tried to establish in the past.  As stated above, I had totally forgotten about the photos, and as usual he was far too subtle to rub my nose in it. 

But, looking back, I am sure that Lama hadn’t forgotten.  He had the memory of an elephant, and elephants are said to never forget anything.  He could remember a text after reading it once.  On occasion he quoted something that I had said in the past verbatim, and several years later.  You could say that all the networks and files in his data collection were retrievable at any moment  - and not just the data collection from his personal memory bank.  Naturally, most of the time he gave no clue of possessing such abilities and actually could play dumb very convincingly, at least to the unsuspecting.

A few weeks later, I was requested to hand in a sample translation for Thinley Norbu’s people to check for accuracy and style.  I felt absolutely up to the task.  I have great confidence in my stylistic sensibilities especially in my mother tongue.  This is generally not misplaced, yet in this case my habitual arrogance was to be deflated.  I made one big stupid error, which was more like a typo than anything else, by forgetting to add a required negation, which I did not catch, although I read and re-read my two sample pages several times before sending them in.  The reaction came promptly,  “If the guy is not able to get a simple sentence right, even turning the intended meaning into its opposite, how will he translate the book correctly.”  Result: I did not earn the privilege of translating Thinly Norbu’s two books… that I still cherish and still keep reading to this very day; now even more than ever.

At the time of this happening, I did not connect the failure to my ignoring of the tendrel (or auspicious connectedness) that Lama Dawa had tried to point out through his non-verbal communication or display.  Now, I do.  However, one should not confuse such synchronicities for mechanical causalities, which they are not.  Even though as sharp as the tip of a sword, the Lama’s displays always remain as light as a feather.  They do not create do-or-die situations, even though in a way they are.  As we all know, one has to die many times before wizening up, if at all.

A few years later, after Thinley Norbu’s parinirvana, he appeared to me in a vision in the course of one of my dakini retreats.  He stood clearly before me as a man in his prime, like in the photos of his that I had dismissed as ‘un-portentous’ and said, “Although we were supposed to meet in this lifetime, we didn’t. My promise is that we will meet many times in the future.”

What else could one wish for?  Well may be, that I won’t be such a knuckle head as I proved to be in the context of this story, for the remaining years of my life.  But then again, one shouldn’t entertain high hopes against the odds.

“To show true respect in a consistently deep and subtle way we must make our minds pure.  Then, our respect will not be two-faced.  It is always best to examine our mind before automatically saying that we respect someone, remembering that true respect always comes from the mind.  If traditional outer rules of respect for body and speech are taught rigidly, without skillful means, we become fearful that we will disobey or betray the tradition.  When our minds are fearful, our pure inner elements become congested, and we can react by becoming wild, rebellious and disrespectful.  If we learn the inner respect of good intention, which exists within the pure light essence within the elements, then the outer expression of our body and speech will be open, pure, and unobstructed, and our respect will always be continuous.

--Thinley Norbu

 

Remembering Lama Dawa – Part I How & When He Gave His Refuge Lineage

“The Dharma point of view is to try to destroy samsara’s tradition through wisdom expression of skillful means, such as writing, painting, speaking or teaching to teach enlightenment, which is beyond tradition.”

--Thinley Norbu

Thus one fine day, the Lama spoke totally unexpectedly, ”Today, I am giving you my refuge and bodhisattva lineages, and I will explain to you exactly how you should pass them on to others.”

I cannot claim ownership, let alone exclusivity regarding this lineage.  Yet, I feel that some kind of a disclaimer is warranted.  Disclaimers need to be made in today’s environment more frequently than in the past when people were more perceptive of the meaning between the lines of what was being said or written.  Today, too often when somebody comments about an event (even from his personal life and experience) or shares a reflection, a dream, or a momentary impression, due to the already deeply ingrained mistrust habit, even further corrupted by social media exposure, people take it as generalized statement with an agenda.  As if someone else’s experience could contradict one’s own, let alone devalue it.  At the bottom of this lies the basic assumption regarding the sole validity of one’s view.  Which, of course, is faulty, and creates all the trouble in the world. 

I am sharing about the event like I will about other memories of my Lama because I like to demonstrate how multifaceted he used to be and how free of the fetters of conventionality he occasionally acted; for example, how Lama Dawa sometimes passed on essential teachings spontaneously, and seemingly without preparation.  By nature, such sharing, as expressed in these events themselves as well as in telling about them, has to be personal.   And because it is personal, it neither describes nor characterizes how Lama Dawa went about his Lama business with others, or in general.  I don’t know about how he was with others, and of generalities I know even less.  Actually, there is no one and only way that would define or do justice to how he acted. 

He was always spot-on in the moment and taught everyone according to capacity and past life connection.  Quite a few people were blessed by being guided by him in this manner.  Everyone always received a warm-hearted welcome.  But no one received goodies that were not his or hers to receive.  Lama wasn’t a people pleaser or crowd chaser.

His words on the day in question came out of the blue, and even that is an understatement.  Lightening struck, so to speak, in the course of a conversational get together in Lama’s room over cognac, red wine, and, yes, smoking Marlboros – Lama’s ambrosia and incense of choice, at the time.  I had gifted him with a bottle of Hennesy XO only the day before.  He was very fond of XO.  To the chagrin (and annoyance) of many, he used to joke that he had made a vow to build a palace in the realm of the hungry ghosts with his empty booze bottles accumulated over a lifetime, and that the XO bottles were required for ornamentation.  To which Khandro Kalsang drily remarked that enough bottles had been emptied already to last for three palaces.  Strangely enough, I tended to take Lama’s statement at face value.  For me his words rang true.

This meeting took place in late March or early April 2006, when I was visiting Lama in Kathmandu, like I had been doing almost every year after 1999.  Since I started living in India in 1998, it was always easier for me to connect with him while he was in Asia.  To me connecting with him in Asia also felt more satisfying, because in my eyes he appeared different, standing (or even sitting) taller in a way; he appeared to act even less bound by rules and outside expectations, more carefree and spontaneous – and sometimes doing even more outrageous things when challenging students’ egos stuck in the mud of their own pattering.  This, again, is a personal observation, with no claim to objectivity.  May be it was my own perception making me feel this way.  I know that I am more cautious and guarded when I am in the west than when I am in India.  And thus I might have only projected on him to be freer, whereas he was a carefree yogi everywhere and always.

In a way, with the few words that I said I already told the full story.  Nothing much else happened.  No bells and whistles, no great ceremony ensued.  Lama was never the man for much ado about nothing, at least according to what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.  He was always only ceremonial when he felt it was needed.  When a puja was being conducted or substances to be collected and used for a particular purpose, he allowed for no short cuts. 

Thus, he gave me the teaching on how to bestow refuge right there on the spot.  He gave the instructions on how to give bodhisattva instructions the next day.  He told me how I should design the refuge card, and what I should request of people when they asked for bodhisattva instructions, because at that moment they have to give something which they usually wouldn’t want to give.   This something didn’t have to be a material thing, by the way.  He reiterated that I should not discriminate against anyone and that I should grant refuge freely to those who had asked, and that I should always give bodhisattva instructions not ‘bodhisattva vows’ as according to the lineage that he himself had received there weren’t any such vows to be made or taken. 

He concluded the day’s teaching by ordering me that on the coming Padmasambhava day (whichas far as I can remember fell April 9^th   that year) I would need to give my first refuge ceremony, and the one receiving it would be such and such person.  It was someone I knew quite well and to whom I had suggested that he should request refuge from Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche, only a few days before.  Hilarious: I had sent the person to Kunzang Dorje, Kunzang Dorje referred him to Lama Dawa, and Lama Dawa and sent him to me instead, to go full circle.

To date, I have not appeared in public much and only a handful people know my dharma story and connection, naturally not many ask for refuge.  This is also not going to change.  I have given refuge to about a dozen people since then, and bodhisattva instructions to even fewer.  We are a close-knit yet open spirited family so to speak, and everyone is working, in the world and on the path.  I am the only non-Indian in the group.  Everyone else is from either India or Nepal.  Two have completed the dakini part of the Tersar introductory 3-Root retreat series, one has graduated to the Guru retreat; most have completed Ngondro or are applying themselves, including the two teenagers in the group.  In this sense, Lama’s seeds have fallen on fertile ground. 

Some of our sangha members’ lives, in terms of how they feel about themselves and their position in the world, have been evolving over the years from utter confusion and even self-torture to merely basic confusion (of the kind that is afflicting all of us); from total dissatisfaction to a sense of groundedness – in that which has no ground.  Which makes me, and everyone else happy, of course, if only fleetingly.  The teachings are growing on us as we proceed.  There is no end of the process in sight.  The sights are not set on worldly happiness and comfort alone.

A few days ago someone asked me, if I was a ‘Lama’, as he had heard that I had people at my house doing traditional Vajrayana retreats, sometimes for weeks at a time.  I answered that in this context designations and titles were meaningless.  Only actions are meaningful, and over time are telling their own story.  Besides, I don’t have much liking for formal robes as such, not to mention thrones.  The idea of being tied to them has not the least appeal.  Because of my childhood social conditioning, robes and thrones almost disgust me.  Stating that, I also understand and respect the function that robes and thrones play within Tibetan society.  Therefore, I don’t feel called to criticize or change any aspect of Buddhism.  It would serve no purpose whatsoever, except ego-inflation.  I teach the way I learned from Lama Dawa, and how the process evolves, time will reveal.  But whatever slight modifications will occur, they will only be meaningful if founded in practice experience.  Anyway, the essence of the Buddha’s teachings hasn’t changed (according to Dudjom Rinpoche’s dating of Shakyamuni’s life on earth) in the past 2.800 some years.  Why should we try and change anything now?

One event from the year before about which I had never informed Lama Dawa, might have had something to do with his bestowing his refuge lineage, as well.  Being an accomplished tsa-lung yogi Lama Dawa could see both past and future in the present, and nothing could really be hidden from him, ever.  However, often he closed his vision, which is only understandable because nobody wants to know and see everything that is going on around.

In May 2005, a young Indian woman lived in our house and worked at the small business that I had established in Goa.  She had run away from home and with deep emotion begged me to help her to break free from the shackles of the society in which she had grown up and furthermore to help her break the shackles of samsara.  No doubt, a serious request was being made, and not only once.  She appealed to me many times, and it was clear why.  By leaving behind everything that she had known as a safe haven since childhood, she had already proven that she meant business and wasn’t only pretending.  She was dead serious about her desire for liberation.  Besides, an uncanny intuition arose about her past connection to the dharma, later confirmed by Lama Dawa’s mirror divination.

I felt that I needed to encourage her with some outer sign, some token to seal the bond in this life, so to speak.  I reflected upon it for a few days, and eventually told her that if she were up to it that I would give her refuge.  To do something as outrageous as this had never occurred to me before.  I also clearly stated that what I was proposing constituted a breach of protocol.  I was not empowered to give formal refuge and had no instruction on how to go about doing it.  Therefore, I would let my heart spontaneously invent a ceremony for her and pray that it be in harmony with the dharma, in both spirit and form.

In addition, I requested the protectors silently to punish only me and not the innocent aspiring student, for my wrongdoing, adding in my heart, “If I have to go to hell for this violation of a basic dharma precept in my future life, let me go alone and spare her.”  I totally meant it.  I am also not speaking about this as if there had been any kind of emotional drama involved, neither outside nor inside.  Everything concerning such and similar events was and is always only what it is and totally matter-of-fact.

I have no clue if Lama perceived any of these threads from the past through his wisdom eye, or if he only acted on an intuition himself.   But when he said, that he was giving me his refuge lineage, I felt relieved and vindicated.  I hadn’t done something so totally wrong after all.

This is how I received Lama Dawa’s Tersar refuge and bodhisattva lineages.  I always tried to live and act accordingly before I received them.  Nothing changed fundamentally after I had received them.  Much work is still ahead, needing to be done.  No work lies ahead and nothing needs to be done.  My greatest wish is always to convey and teach what cannot be taught.

“If we write or paint or say something that is not too close to tradition, some rigid Buddhists think it is not the Buddhist point of view.  They do not understand that the Buddhist tradition is to break samsara’s impure traditions, to attain the vastest, purest traditions.  Tradition always makes limits if it is not pure.  So, from the beginning, we should have no attachment to tradition in order to release our mind from the habit of samsara’s traditional trap.  We should have an understanding of the display of many possible aspects of tradition without ignoring others’ traditions in order to benefit and satisfy samasara’s traditional beings.  In this way, at the same time we release our mind from tradition, we should play without accepting or rejecting in order to decorate it, as a beautiful bird and a tree ornament each other.”

--Thinley Norbu

The Story of a Wall Painting

“The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world.  See each thing in this world as a moment of time.”

“Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another.  The way-seeking mind arises in this moment.  A way-seeking moment arises in this mind.  It is the same with practice and with attaining the way.”

“Thus, the self, setting itself out in array sees itself.  This is the understanding that the self is time.”

-DOGEN ZENJI

And as such, time being or being time is constantly breathing in and out, incessantly reconfiguring cloudland, not made of substance – only in the continuity of its trajectory.  Moments of it we remember as meaningful.  But all moments are that, and no moments are that. 

In March 1972, I moved to France to become a volunteer in a home for socially handicapped children, the Institut Camille Blaisot in Caen, Normandy.  Two months later I rented an apartment in the old center of the city.  It was a 16^th or 17^th century building with no right angle anywhere to be found, a winding staircase, made of solid granite blocks, and slightly undulating walls throughout – one of the few houses of its kind that had survived intact the 6-week battle between Nazi and allied forces in and around Caen in 1944. 

My neighbors were Alain and Nadine Roussel, living on the second floor whereas I lived on the third.  Nadine worked as a teacher where I worked.  But we had more in common than the workplace.  I had just recently come back from my first trip from India and Nepal, and so had Nadine’s husband Alain, a year before me.

We got close.  We had so many stories to share, usually over bottles of beer and wine that seemed to keep uncorking themselves all of their own.  But we never passed out drunk.  We were just deliriously perky.  Conversation just kept flowing – and to this day, I feel that one needs to speak French with gusto to really appreciate this particular kind of flow.  No other language seems to be so enamored with its own sound of nonchalant, self-assertive perfection, full of itself in best and worst possible ways.  By the way, it was taken for granted that I spoke it fluently too, free of any German accent that is.  As the standard phrase went, “You cannot speak French like everybody else, can you?  Ah, but no, you should”.

In short, we were vibrant, vivacious, expressive 20-somethings, quite unafraid and did not censor – neither our thoughts nor our words.  Young people today seem so much more guarded, self-conscious about the image they present and their impact on others.  This trend will get worse in the days to come too, due to pernicious social media impact, and the increasing pressure it creates to ever more conform.

My apartment had two rooms, all of mixed usage.  For example, the toilet was behind a curtain (no door) in the much larger living cum bedroom (not too far from the dining table).  There was no shower; the only washbasin was located near the window overlooking the backyard.  For showers and baths we went to the nearby campus of Caen University.  The kitchen space was mostly empty, and of course had three whitewashed walls.  Cooking utensils were at a bare minimum.  There was only one cupboard and a 2-flame gas stove.  Later we got the luxury of a n oven and started making pizzas.

One night, we specifically remembered that these whitewashed walls had nothing on it.  We sat, the four of us, Alain, Nadine, Susy and myself around the dining table of their apartment.  For some inexplicable reasons we started discussing the Evans-Wentz translation of the “Tibetan Book of Liberation”, a Padmasambhava terma text.  Alain owned the French version; I went upstairs to get the German edition.  I don’t remember the actual content of the conversation, only that at one instant Alain noticed the beautiful frontispiece in color of a Padmasambhava thangka in the German book, voicing regret that the French edition did not have it.

Then I probably remarked that a large-scale painting like this would look great on the whitewashed wall on the far end of the kitchen space, which was half separated from the front part of the room by the large old cupboard hosting our plates and pots and pans.  Alain spontaneously voiced great enthusiasm for the idea. 

It was early September; his semester would start in late October.  So, he would have the time to launch himself into a crazy venture like this.  He just said something to the effect of, “Let’s do it”.  Which came unexpected.  I had simply voiced an idea and not given a thought to putting it into action.  He grabbed it and ran with it.  For me the actual doing was still a mystery.   Therefore, I enquired how we would go about it.  He said, “The easiest would be, if we had a clear line drawing of Padmasambhava and created a grid of 1cm squares under it and the we divide the wall into 10cm pencil lined squares.  It’s a piece of cake to transfer one to the other.  The grid will make sure that the proportions stay correct.”

At which point I ran upstairs again to fetch the Tibetan rice paper print from over my bed of the trikaya of Amitabha, Avilokiteshvara and Padmasambhava.  I had bought this on the last days of my Kathmandu visit, and it was based on a drawing by the then Khamtrul Rinpoche.  I showed it to Alain, and he judged it the perfect Padmasambhava for our purpose.  The color scheme we decided to copy from the German edition of the Eventz-Wentz book.  Alain would draw the central figure and I would take care of the decorative artwork surrounding it.  Drawing a life size human shape appeared too daunting to me, and way beyond my meager artistic skills.

So it was decided, and so it was done.

The end product of our combined efforts, completed by mid-October 1972, must have been the first life size Padmasambhava on a wall in a French house.   It, of course, looked much more vibrantly alive than the reproduction shown here, made from an old slide from which almost all its color has faded out.  The only thing that neither Alain nor I dared to do was, to give eyes to Padmasambhava.  We were so happy with the mural, and so afraid of ruining it all by making a mistake while painting the eyes.

I guess the eyes of Padmasambhava only came to France, when Dudjom Rinpoche settled there partially, in 1973.

In my early twenties, I didn’t know anything about traditional pujas or other kinds of formal practice.  I remember how we offered incense every once in a while.  In general we really loved the image.  We worshipped it even, like one adores a lover or a really good friend.  It assumed the role of a perfect, silent companion, a protector of sorts.  Each time when I opened the apartment door, my eyes usually wandered first to gaze for a second at Padmasambhava.   Starting in December, when we started to have several guests in a row, we put a second mattress in the cubicle-like space in front it – and there we also made some wild love, some nights and on Sundays.  But there never arose a feeling that the Lotus Born Guru would have minded.  Then around Christmas ’72, I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation Maharishi Mahesh Yogi style, and sometimes meditated in front of the image.  It was a good place, our time in Normandy very happy and harmonious.

In August 1973 we left.   My time as a volunteer had come to an end.  I remember that Susy and I lit two full packets of incense and bowed before the image before closing the door for good. 

But was it ever closed? 

What is open?  What is closed?  What is past?  What is present?  What do our ordinary, linear minds really know – beyond how to help us navigate through the everyday maze of conventionality?     

 And what do we know about the ramifications of painting a Padmasambhava on a kitchen wall?  What had we called into being?  Does it continue to call us, beckon us?  - There is no definite answer to these questions that bears scrutiny.  Yet it is important to ask them – and leave them unanswered. 

I met Alain and Nadine for the last time only two years after I had left Caen, in the summer of 1975.  Writing this, I now wish they were well.  And if they have passed on, which they might, considering the number of Gitanes and Gauloises ‘papier mais’ they were smoking per day, I wish that Padmasambhava would have remembered them, and they would have remembered him.  He has certainly never left me, not even when I planned on leaving him.

Body Focus

The body is the main focus, the well from which awareness springs.

You can consult ancient scriptures like in the following quote from the Samputa Tantra,

“If you don’t know the nature of the body [through direct experience], all the [other] methods that the Buddha revealed in his 84,000 teachings will not yield any fruit.”

Or you can listen to present-day experienced practitioners and teachers like Professor Reggie Ray who recently summed up the view in these words,

“The somatic view of the vajrayana has revolutionary implications for our meditation practice as modern people, and for our spiritual journey altogether… It means that our spiritual life, far from involving a distancing and separating from our body and all the realities of our physical incarnation, requires just the opposite: we must turn toward our body and our life as the proper and possible arena for authentic spiritual development – as the only place where our path can unfold and as the only true access point for genuine realization.  Anything else is a chimera, a dream… Connecting with our body and ordinary life are not add-ons: they ARE the practice of spirituality.  They are what the spiritual journey is all about.”

Buddhist Yoga and the Continuous Diving into Direct Experience

Originating from the teachings of the Buddha, the form of yoga that I teach and call Nadi Prana is mainly about releasing our clinging to the same old habits and patterns that make us suffer.  It cannot be otherwise, as the Buddha's way of teaching was to point out ways that help us to eradicate the causes of suffering from our own mindstream.  Inner imbalances and disharmony have to be dealt with first.  

Why? Because our ego-centered and fixated concepts and patterns are the root of our existential predicaments.  They make us suffer mostly emotionally and mentally at first; later the same trends manifest physically.  All physical problems start as mental/emotional problems before they turn into an outright disease - or in another manifestation: social injustice and the rape of the planet.  It all starts at home, here with each and everyone of us.  We better understand who we are, what what we are doing and what's the purpose of it, before doing anything else.

Therefore, in this yoga, we are not trying to achieve the ideal posture that plays into and/or reinforces our idealized self-image, the way we would like others to see us.  Rather, we use postures only for the purpose that they may reflect back for us to see what is happening in our bodies and minds, moment-to-moment  With their help, we can observe ourselves in slow motion so to speak.  As a result, feeling deeply what is passing through us, we become slowly and gradually very natural and gain the kind of inborn self-confidence that doesn't deflate when ego is deflated.  Our suffering over emotions, concepts and ideas decreases. Although this process takes time and we will need some patience.

In the words of Tarthang Tulku, it works something like this, “Breathing we allow our awareness of the sensation to expand, noting how it ripples outward, shifting its tone over time.  Fierce anger rises, peaks, and settles down.  Amusement may come up suddenly in its wake, leaving a trail of shining bubbles as it flows through us.  It is all subject to change.  It is gradually changing.  As we allow ourselves to feel the great breadth and depth of our sensations, they lose their discreteness, merging with one another at their outer edges.  The stormy weather ebbs away. Leaving us in a quiet sea.”  

From this we can deduct that the whole point in practicing is not to continue with making us suffer over our own concepts, ideas, ad emotions – and not making others suffer either.

But we can explain the result of such practice even more simply, more in terms of our actual palpable, physical experience.  

In these terms, the benefits of Buddhist yoga help us set in motion and enjoy a feedback loop of open-ended and natural, uncontrived positivity.  It starts out with:

Relaxing body and mind.  That’s what we do in the physical exercise. Even when they are a little strenuous we focus on the relaxation that follows.

• Through relaxation we become more aware
• Through becoming more aware we awaken to our direct sensory experiences
• Through awakening the senses we start enjoying every moment
• Through such enjoyment we start nurturing our whole being
• Through nurturing our whole being we are becoming grounded in our own reality
• Through becoming grounded and real we feel embodied in all aspects of our lives
• Feeling thus fully embodied makes us even more relaxed, while likewise deepening our responsiveness
• Deeper relaxation and responsiveness deepen awareness even further
• Such deeper awareness empowers our sensory experiences to become even more fine-tuned, subtle and even continuously self-transforming.

And so forth

Nadi Prana is not a head oriented practice.   Over time you learn how to let the entire unbroken bodymind guide you, not just the brain, let alone your ideas of ‘how things are supposed to be and behave’.  Buddhist yoga has no issue or problem with the body and the senses.  It doesn’t look down on them.  It actually cherishes the body in a non-ego fixated way – as an ever-flowing continuum.

Unlike many other forms of yoga, it does not preach the virtues of the ordinary shortsighted kind of spirituality of forced renunciation that puts ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ on a pedestal, while denigrating the allegedly ‘lowly’ body.  NadiPrana doesn’t just make use of the body; rather it helps us appreciate its richness of so-far undiscovered possibilities.

Being with the body, moving it (mostly) slowly (but sometimes also fast) and feeling the feelings that such movement and attention produces, in and of itself will over time dissolve all preconceived limited ideas and notions that we have.  When the body feels more alive, it becomes less of a conceptual prison but a matrix through which the freedom of spirit can be naturally expressed.

Through the yoga of the Buddha, the open-ended feedback loop of direct experience will make us physically and emotionally much more flexible.

© Matthias Dehne/Choyin Dorje 2017

NadiPrana Experiences

Here is a short piece that I wrote about my experiences during a retreat in 2014.  I found it in an old file tucked away in a folder that I rarely access.  Although in the meantime, I have done three more such retreats, one in 2015 and another one in June 2016 and a 6-week retreat in June & July this year, I still feel that my observations could be helpful to others.  These types of insights don’t come with a shelf life. They are always fresh and new.  Which is why I am sharing the piece here. 

In general, I hope that this kind of retreats can be offered to more people and more often, in the future.  So far, my teacher has not felt very keen on doing so.  He is a rather private person.  He likes to work one on one with a few students that he has known for years, rather than jumping into the ‘fray’ of commercialized yoga.  However, the results that everyone observes in themselves who does work with him, and the positive shifts and changes they experience in their lives would warrant that he play a little more active and public role.  At least that’s what some others and I are thinking. 

In Buddhist yoga, nothing is forced, everything manifests out of your own being, provided the intention is there and motivation enough to put in a little effort to live a fully embodied life rather than a life narrowly defined through ‘heady’ concepts.

I attended the 7-day NadiPrana Buddhist yoga retreat this time with no ulterior motive, like in the pursuit of a particular goal.  I just wanted to be quiet; I needed to relax. Hence, I enjoyed the first four retreat days like a vacation from all of my everyday concerns.  This felt sooo good! It felt like coming home and settling in myself; letting go of all the accumulated stress from the hectic time in the monsoon months that same year when I had been setting up my new clinic. In short, for four days I felt like a happy go lucky child free of all cares.

Day 5 came, and the mood pendulum shifted in the opposite direction.  It brought up deep resistance. As a result, I felt like not wanting to continue with doing more postures.  Likewise, I didn’t want to focus during the silent meditation sessions between postures. While sitting upright, my body started to hurt all over, and I therefore decided that I had felt enough into and of my life and didn’t want to feel anything any more:  No energy movements, no emotions no nothing!  Enough of this spiritual gobbledygook!

However, on closer scrutiny, I could easily discern that this wish to suppress the free flow of sensations and feelings released by NadiPrana was clearly a rather aggressive and self-destructive form of self-denial.

I was simply resisting the next step that had opened up before me as a result of the first four days of practicing, which had allowed me to go deeper into the subtle, internal energy movements at the basis of it all. These subtle life giving energy movements indeed permeated my entire bodymind continuum.  Therefore, what I had labeled as ‘unpleasant’ or even ‘pain’ was in truth the deep-seated resistance against feeling the energy and bliss waves that naturally permeate the body when we connect to its fluidity and ever flowing presence. I felt so much more and in such greater detail than I had ever felt before; and actually when I paid attention, my whole being was vibrating with energy. 

In short, what happened on day 5 was that I became aware of how much I am resisting my own bliss; resist feeling the bliss inherent in the free flow of energies through the body – and this bliss is actually accessible to all of us, every moment.  May be we are resisting it because we are afraid that our narrow minded views regarding ourselves and our world would simply disappear in this sea of energy, leaving us bereft of the concepts that make up what we belief is our precious ‘self’; whereas there is so much more to it, and so much more enjoyable, too.

Thus I had two very important realizations:

1.     I had read many times before, both in modern books on meditation or in ancient dharma texts that all of existence is the projection of one’s own mind. I have always accepted this statement as a working hypothesis, or as a basic ‘theory of everything’; yet I had also never actually ‘tasted’ this truth, or felt it deeply from inside out.  For the first time during the meditation sessions in this retreat, I realized that this view is not merely a theory about reality but reality itself – a palpable presence free of rigid separation; or an inseparable free flowing sense of being that can likewise easily accept and work with the boundaries of our ordinary existence as part of the flow.

2.     Whenever I had done this kind of slow movement exercises before in previous retreats or on my own, my attention had been mostly preoccupied with either maintaining the posture, or feeling pain here or there because of the stress created by holding the posture, or energies rushing through.  I had been lost in these events, totally absorbed by them. But during this retreat for a couple of moments, I felt this amazing connection of body and mind when the posture holds itself, and I felt stable and weightless at the same time; totally grounded in ‘earthiness’, yet lighter than a feather. I have had this experience in previous NadiPrana retreats only fleetingly but never this intense, and never for longer than a few moments.  Usually, the sense of the total balance of feeling grounded in myself had vanished as quickly as it had arisen.   This time there was a sense of abiding in it and with it, some form of calm abiding.  It persisted; it could be explored and relished.

Post retreat, I am noticing that my capacity to hold my breath has deepened, my fear for heights has considerably reduced. I also discovered how strong the tendency is In me to put myself down and deny my capabilities.  The events on day 5 and 6 brought to my attention how much and how often I am stopping myself or shutting myself down when I am just starting to experience some of the most amazing feelings and realizations that I have ever had, or presently have. 

By noticing this tendency, it naturally vanishes.  I can enjoy being alive a whole lot more.  Considering how short our human lives really are, enjoying the moment as it arises and disappears is a precious gift.  I don’t underestimate its value any longer.

I thank my teacher Choyin Dorje for his constant guidance.

Dr. Shikha