In Ngondro practice we see all our self-created suffering as a dream that can be woken up from.
I know this theoretically, but how can I get beyond it as a concept? How can I wake up from the entrenched habit of comparing myself to others, resenting my parents, feeling like a failure because I've taken a different path from others? How do I make pure awareness my reality and move farther and farther from these ego driven delusions?
First, I have to see emptiness as reality. The pure timeless emptiness that I am getting better at accessing the more I keep up with my hour long practice. This is reality, not the herky jerky daydream that I am lost in too much of the time.
Today is my birthday and my birthday gift to myself this year is a clean gut, after a few weeks free of sugar, caffeine, dairy, alcohol, gluten, animal products. If I continue to reduce these things, next year, finally my gift to myself would be an optimally healthy body. Vitality. A thriving second adulthood.
What I would be waking up from is the desire for heavy food, for that mind numbing overconsumption. What I would be waking up from would be the delusion that my passivity and sense of powerlessness is permanent. I know that over the years that feeling has been diminishing. But I wonder if I could ever wake up and feel it transformed.
I am deeply blessed with this life, with this awareness. What I want to wake up to is that knowledge second nature, not something I have to keep reminding myself.
