Tantra Retreat: The Three Points

Whether one meditates on an elaborate or concise version of creation stage, there are three main points: Clarity of form purifies attachment to the appearing object, recollecting the purity frees one from clinging to corporeality, and maintaining pride vanquishes clinging to ordinary self.

Important takeaway:  "recollecting  purity" does not mean remember some kind of pristine energy or identity.  It means being able to see  the conceptual models as conceptual models and purifying attachment to these concepts.  E.g. "I hate myself,"  I can see that this self I believe is solid and object of entrenched aversion is actually empty.  Also the "I" that is doing the hating is empty.  This becomes clearer still when I develop a counterpoint vision of a self as a deity. 

Tara visualization helps to develop that recognition of the fundamenta emptiness of all mental models. 

Jenn Dream

 I have serendipitously booked a room that is in a home owned by Mark and Angela.  It is on a pretty peninsula, like Fortune's Rocks.  Jenn is there. 

She is still dead, but a new, eternal version of her has spawned. She's essentially what she always was, delightful, warm, fun to be around. Her life force is undiminished. 

I  worry that we don't have much time together, but the day also feels open and infinitely stretched out. We have all the tme in the world to be loving, dear friends. 

Tantric Mahamudra

 

From "Meditating on the Mind itself" by Traleg Rinpoche

Identity

It struck me yesterday the impact of our sense of identity on our habit energy.  When I quit smoking that happened because I stopped seeing myself as a smoker. If I'm going to quit suffering, I need to stop seeing myself as a sufferer. 

I need to stop seeing myself as someone who is trapped, helpless, unable to transfer my knowledge and strength to others. I need to stop seeing myself as weak, vulnerable and isolated. I need to stop seeing myself as inconsequential to others. 

And then to thrive, I need to start seeing myself as what I am, buddah nature. I need to trust that nature to lead me to where I can lead.  I need to embody this sense of self. And I need to let myself transform as a result of this embodiment. 

This embodiement can be my default. 

Pure Perception retreaat

Day 1 7:49 a.m. 

Morning

I start this retreat feeling distracted and unsettled.

A week of attending the Canadian Tennis Open, rooting for the local hopeful Felix Auger Alliassime.  He's into the quarter finals. But I have committed to this retreat.  If I'm watching tennis scores all weekend, I will not create the causes and conditions I want to put in place for a real transformation.

Good.  This gives a lot of craving and impulsiveness to meditate on.  I am not going to watch those matches.  He doesn't need me.  I need me and Ben needs me and the infinite number of sentient beings need me.  And maybe FAA needs me praying for him. But time to let him go. 

Morning teaching

We re-visit breathing exercises, but add visualization. Reminds me of chi kung practice.  This is how I am going to bring it back in. 

In right nostril we breath out all the old past trauma and anxiety.  In left nostril all anxiety about future.  Through both the present stagnant energy. 

With vase breathing we are bringing in the five elements.  As we breath out the abdomen naturally constrict like the ocean crashing against the mountain (spine).  

And then the shaking ha to get everything going. 

We do an exercise that informs what we are trying to accomplish here.  Imagine the perfect strawberry. Hold it in your hand, smell it, imagine eating it.

We produce saliva just through that image.

Through Tara practice we produce the feeling of enlightenment and transform through that. 

Afternoon

Struggling with my attatchment to the outcome of that game.  But wondering, what if I could put the intense energy of this devotion to tennis to my guru practice? What impact would that have on my life? 

Evening 

It's all about stability.  Learning from Felix (I gave in and looked at the score) He suffered worst defeat of his career on home turf.  The embodied confidence of stability really does mean something. You can't maintain success if you don't have embodied confidence.

Day 2

Feeling great this morning. Went out for a run.  Had a very meaningful nectar of the path practice.  Starting to feel many strands weaving together with this practice. Going back to the first image of Indra Devi when I was a teenager. 

Afternoon:

Tranformative practice with Khenpo Kunga.  Tara as emptiness, all being a Tara, dissolving into a light before all beings do likewise, dissolving into me, and I dissolve into them. 

Indescribably liberating 

Evening:

Another amazing practice. 

Tennis.  Happy for Carrena Busta!  But I slept too late. Consequences of unhealthy self. 

Day 3

Morning:

Practice steps. 

1. Open awareness
2. Imagine White Tara as manifestation of emptiness, wisdom, compassion
3. Dedication and sing mantra
4. Imagine White Tara as healing light touching you and everyone
5. Recite mantra
6. Become white Tara
7. Dedication
8. Dissolve White Tara
9. Dissolve self
10. Rest

Teaching 

It's not enough to simply recite and go through the motions. To transform you need to be with phenomena, see the pieces, and eventually see the emptiness. 

You can have 100 deities and not tranform. Or one deity and know the essence. 

Tara practice allows us to see the emptiness of this unhealthy fearful self we've created. To create a stronger, more compassionate and impactful sense of self through devotion to a constructed deity.

I take refuge in Tara and feel the saliva. 

Insight:

Om Taré Tutaré Ture So Ha

The tongue hits the palate and natural morphine makes its way down the channel.

Fear dissolves. Pure perception settles in. 

micro-dosing on non-duality

Day 2 of a self-directed retreat. 

Life keeps interrupting, so I'm struggling to stay motivated. Doing short times many times, dropping effort, dropping into timeless knowing.  Keeping in mind parts of Tsoknyi Rinpoche's book, Fearless Simplicity: 

I'm letting my mind get distracted, but then I just let Rigpa take the wheel.  Going back to the knowing that I don't own. 

I get these little moments of emptiness and I rest in them, like micro doses.  I wonder if they will get longer.

Later, after listening to Michael Taft's podcast with Dan Brown, I had a sustained full feeling of awakening, a sense of how spacious rigpa really can be.  

I am coming home. 

Renunciation

Revulsion is the foot of meditation...

Whatever I call it, revulsion, disenchantment, renunciation, this is the first stage of Tantra. You cannot take refuge if you don't know what you're taking refuge from.  You cannot visualize enlightenment if you are not clear on what heavy psychic conditioning you are hoping to liberate yourself and all beings from. 

If you are not generous with yourself, you cannot give yourself permission to let it all go and to transform. 

It hit me today what generosity means for a Bodhisattva.  I'm giving up, by ordinary standards, what it takes to be successful.  I'm giving up the centrality of  "wordly pursuits."  I'm giving up prioritizing them, which risk may giving up on having them. 

I do this to achieve buddhahood with no guarantee that I will, and no guarantee that anyone will care if I do. 

But I persevere because I know I'm so close.  I can feel my subtle body purifying. I can feel the energy balancing.  I can feel the bodhichitta growing stronger every day.

In Fearless Simplicity, Tsokny Rinpoche says to start with shamata.  We start by developing ease, delight, joy. And then we have something to give. Compassion arises naturally when we want others to have what we have. 

We want them to know that all is impermanent, but not nothing.  And we want them to know that they know this. 

He likens bodhichitta to the salad dressing.  Without it merit is dry and dull.

Let it all go, the default network.  Just let it go. 

I'm feeling really excited about starting Tantra. 

Toggling with tantra

A new, very strange dream to work with.

I grew a third eye!

This might have something to do with the White Tara practice I've been doing. I'm toggling between tantra, Dzogchen, and the last week of Bodhisattva immersion.

Toggling between effort and effortlessness, the joy of non-duality seems to be arising more spontaneously this week.  I've been doing analytical meditation that is working to dissolve the self, and I've been experimenting more with tantric practices.

Feeling inner space, lucidity and the pleasures of deity practice is opening up more channels, and unleashing great big boulders of stress.

Maybe I am ready to start letting it all go.  

Dreamlike nature of samsara

This morning in meditation I had and experience of what Tsonyi Rinpoche describes  as "baby rigpa."

It felt like the natural result of two practices I've been toggling through all week, Dzogchen and meditating on dreams. I've been working on effortlessness in my meditation and the practice of what Mingyur Rinpoche describes as "chok zhak," the natural dropping down into buddha nature. I've also been pulling out an example dream that represents the work stress that I've been struggling with in recent weeks. I've been asking the Andrew Holocek question "who is dreaming this dream?." 

Yesterday the answer to that question was the aggregate of work stress. There's no "me" that is generating that dream.  Just stress throwing together all kinds of scenarios. And then the dream in real life. My stress creating all kinds of stories that distract me from real productivity and leadership. 

Woke up in the middle of the night and grabbed for a guided meditation. Took the last week of Dzogchen, Cortland Dahl, guiding through the realization that everything is pure awareness.

Went back to sleep and had a different work stress dream. 

This morning I sat with that sense of vulnerability, and out of it came this very pure sense of nowness.  There were no dream, no past, no present. Just what is. I felt it as a thin channel running through me.

It was clarity, lucidity, but it was also love. Pure unconditioned love.

It felt safe, like home. It felt like real power

The mind as an event

 

Today I will contemplate this perpective.

The mind and everything that moves within it, is an event, not a thing we can grasp.  An event is something that happens, takes place. 

The mind just seems static because it's an event that is always happening now.

But it is happening quickly, everywhere, infinitely expanding. 

As long as space endures...

I miss writing.

Trying to find that space in myself where life makes sense. Where there is the possibility of clarity. This weekend on the Way of the Bodhisattva closing retreat, I've had some insights that I know are true roots.

I've finally understood the dynamics of emptiness. 

When something and its nonexistence

Both are absent from before the mind 

No other option does the latter have.

It comes to perfect rest from concepts free

It is said that when Shantideva recited these lines, he floated up and disappeared.  

I have no plans to disappear, but in a certain way I did this weekend. My intuitive belief in the solidity of myself is substantially less intuitive after two days of "sense of self" meditation.  With a less solid sense of self it's easier to let go of suffering. 

But it's also easier to develop buddah nature, compassion, joy, equanimity. The immeasurables. 

Even if the inner refuge is an illusion, it is more stable floating on emptiness. 

 

Taking Refuge

Last weekend I travelled to Boston to take refuge.

I have a new name, Karma Rangdrol Lhamo.  In English: Self-liberated goddess. 

Taking refuge means another level of committment, beyond anything I've done before in the almost 15 years since I started this journal.  I'm not sure exactly when this root really took.  In part it's a pre-requisite for studying Dzogchen, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while.  In part it's grown out of the night my father died and I had no way to spiritually honour him than to read chapter 10 of The Way of the Bodhisattva. Something clicked deeply for me when I read the lines "as long as space endures, and beings are to be found, may I remain to drive away the sorrows of the world." 

My father gave me my love of religion, but he also grew disenchanted with Catholicism in the end, as I have. But I need devotion in my ife. 

Whatever the cause, this feels right...

Happy Losar

Today marks the Tibetan New Year, which I celebrated with an online recitation of The Nectar of The Path.

I'm a Tibetan Buddhist now. Not something I expected to say 10 years ago, when I first started my journey with Mingyur Rinpoche.  I'd had enough of ritual with Catholicism. The appeal of Mingyur Rinpoche was his secularism. 

But there is reward in being locked in. Just as I've been acculumating savings ever since I signed up for a paycheck withdrawal RRSP, I believe that my mind will clarify, peace and love in my heart will grow more effortlessly from my commitment to a belief system that has proven its merit to me over and over again in the last decade. 

Next week I officialy take my Bodhisatva vow.  

I took it in my heart a few months ago.  Before that even, when I read the dedication chapter of the Way of the Bodhisatva to my father a few hours before he died. 

In April I hope to take the first course in The Path of Liberation, and receive pointing out instructions from Mingyur Rinpoche. 

I've received an amazing taste of these instructions from Michael Taft.

Despite all the deep sadness of events in the world right now, as war rages on, I feel ready to accept whatever comes this year of the water tiger. 

May the peace of the water element, from which I take my name, combine with the power of the tiger element to accelerate love and ease to everyone who is suffering now. May we all be liberated. May we all one day soon know joy. 

Top insights of 2021

1. The most difficult emotions contain the seed of deep compassion.  I discovered this in a self-directed retreat, and later in retreat with Mingyur Rinpoche.  In fact, if I really have the courage to sit with self hatred, it starts to move around become three dimensional, reflect the space around and inevitably becomes joy.  Joy on tap. 

We are of the universe and the universe is always well, even if every part of it is dying.

2. Emotional understanding requires repetition, says Tsoknyi Rinpoche

...repeating a teaching is not just for your conceptual mind. Once your conceptual mind understands, you think you understand. But that kind of understanding is not enough because repetition is for your mind's emotional understanding.

3. If emotions are predictions as Lisa Feldman Barrett convingly theorizes, then joy is the prediction of wellness.  Both relative and absolute.  

4. By this logic equanimity is the prediction of balance. 

5. Intentions are more stable than emotions. This helped me through the worst days of my father's death. 

6.  I was struck by the idea that gratitude is the cause of happiness not the effect. Feeling grateful for what is going to happen is a prediction feeling that is tied to intention. 

7.  I developed new words to describe my feelings: incrementum, the feeling of maintaining a small change that will in time create well being. Remomentum, restarting a habit that will restore well being. Being aware of these feelings is driving in second gear. Noticing they have become automatic is third gear. 

8. I had some peak meditation experience from fasting.  It's possible that  skillful fasting can contribute to longevity. 

9. Reading the last chapter of the Way of the Bodhisattva to my father before he died has created a bond with that text that will last for the rest of my life. 

 As long as space endures, and being are to be found, may I remain to drive away the sorrows of the world

10.  Confusion is responsible for my mistakes not "me."