After forty-nine days of retreat in complete darkness, I let in the nighttime by carefully removing the light-block- ing panels on a couple of windows. We usually don’t experience total darkness in our everyday lives, and I quickly noticed A the pouring in of the 3 a.m. light. With that change, the visions remaining from my dark retreat began to fade. The floating spheres of rainbow light with buddhas, dakinis, lineage gurus, and bardo deities grew faint, as did the firmament of interior starlight illuminating my mind’s eye. As they faded, I realized how easily this world of light would get in the way of my new awareness of our awakened essence. Not really “in the way,” I reminded myself, but a potential distraction from who we are.As the sun began to rise, the greenery of New York State, the morning birds, and the pale blue sky revealed themselves to what felt like my newborn eyes. The palpable sense of being reborn back into the world of light and busyness felt imminent. I knew I couldn’t relate to this emerging world in the same way I had in the past. Something had shifted. I would be returning to my family, my work on Rikers Island, dharma teaching, and the rest of my life—all real and apparent—and yet, all of it would be experienced more differently than I could have anticipated.

Dark meditation (Tib. mun mtshams), or yangti yoga, is an advanced Vajrayana Buddhist technique practiced in the Nyingma school’s Dzogchen (Great Perfection) tradition. It is often described as a leap-over (thod rgal), or breakthrough, practice done after extensive open-awareness meditation practice known as cutting-through-hardness (khregs chod). This practice utilizes the elaborate visions—mental experiences of light and form—that occur to confirm the natural, spontaneous purity of existence as nothing but self-perfected awakening. Recently, dark meditation retreats have been gaining mainstream popularity: Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers (now with the New York Jets) planned to enter a dark retreat after the 2023 Super Bowl to “do a little self-reflection in some isolation.” Not a trendy, simple sensory deprivation experience in which to dabble, the rigorous Tibetan practice of dark meditation retreat is reserved for senior practitioners.

I first learned of dark meditation in Sikkim during a retreat with Pathing Rinpoche (b. ?-2007), a disciple of Shukseb Jetsun Choying Zangmo (1853/1865–1951), one of several important female Dzogchen lineage holders of her time. During another journey to Sikkim, Rinpoche gave my dharma brother an illustrated text describing dark meditation practices and visions. He offered to teach me if I stayed in Sikkim, but I had recently become a father and needed to be with my partner of the time and my young son. Unfortunately, Rinpoche died before I could learn this from him.Over the next twenty years, I showed the text to several prominent Tibetan teachers, but they either didn’t know about it or didn’t find themselves skilled enough to teach it. All agreed that I should share the sacred text only with accomplished masters. I was fortunate to finally meet the traditional Tibetan doctor and yogi Nida Chenagtsang, who decided to teach me. My journey to find a teacher of yangti yoga has been part of the practice in some respects. One can never separate from the twists and turns of the path; all we can do is show up and see where the karmic journey takes us.

Preparing the proper place for a dark meditation retreat, with all the conducive conditions, is part of the practice. Dark meditation has traditionally been practiced in caves and in specially prepared rooms where a complete lack of light is guaranteed. One eats, sleeps, uses the bathroom, and practices in total darkness. Others prepare your meals and deliver them through a light-proof door, and the space must have adequate ventilation. The typical length of a retreat can last from seven to forty-nine days. The great Tibetan practitioner and yogini Ayu Khandro (1839–1953) is said to have spent years in a dark meditation retreat, but a few hours is a safe place to start for most beginners.

The tradition has detailed instructions on which meditation practices and yogic postures to maintain during the retreat. Prospective practitioners must first learn these instructions from an experienced teacher. The practitioner must be adequately trained, be healthy, and be able to practice in a relaxed, gentle way. This practice can mentally destabilize an unprepared practitioner, and the teachings contain many warnings to this effect. The practitioner should avoid extremes: food should be nutritious and supportive, and one should be conscientious about self-care as the retreat unfolds. If the practice becomes too difficult, knowing when to quit and being prepared to stop without shame or remorse is vital. Regardless of when one stops, the eyes must gradually acclimate to light. Preparing for a post-retreat time to decompress and be with the experience after such an intense practice is more important than many realize—especially in our busy, modern lives.

Trungpa Rinpoche equated the practice of dark meditation with going through the bardo. The bardo process, within the context of the Vajrayana tradition, describes a series of intervals during the dying process. These intervals include the period leading up to physical death, specifically the dissolution of the elements leading up to physical death, the moment of physical death, the dissolution of the eighty different kinds of consciousness after physical death, and the arising of the visionary experience of the peaceful, semi-wrathful, and wrathful bardo deities. The practice of dark meditation cultivates vivid and intense visions to guide one through this same process. Experiencing a bardo-like state through dark meditation before we die has benefits. One is the recognition and processing of fear and anxiety associated with death and the need to let go of all that we hold dear. More importantly, dark meditation leads to a deep sense of relaxed trust in the death process and the subsequent opportunities to experience awakening.

Discerning the separation between waking and dreaming can become difficult at various times during practice. Trying to determine the difference may not even produce any benefits. Everything begins to blend into a nonspecific, nonreferential, nonlinear-time-based experience. An unfabricated experience emerges, characterized by an utterly unstructured relationship to what is unfolding. This experience is an essential characteristic of the practice. Acting as an accelerant or a propellant to help one break through, it’s like playing the children’s game Chutes and Ladders, shooting multiple steps forward into our original state of wakefulness. There is no race to completion because one transcends time during the practice. No development. No gradual or sudden awakening. There’s only pure being. Dark meditation helps bring that fresh, spontaneous being into hyper-focus. For some people, it will bring them to that state of pure being for the first time. For others, it may return them to childhood experiences or profound past moments that allowed them to see and experience with clarity—allowing this spacious, nondual state to arise with clearness and ease.

Eventually, the mind transcends space and time and rests in our original nature—the vast, limitless expanse of awareness. The potential to directly discern the relationship between the conceptual mind (sem) and spontaneous awareness (rig pa) arises. In other words, the difference between an organized, conceptual, rational mind and the vast timelessness that is the essence of our being is brought into focus. We can begin to understand how unfabricated things really are. We begin to know how unfabricated we are. We begin to perceive the constructs that inform, shape, and ground our everyday experiences—how we organize ourselves, how we relate to one another, how we define love and hate, and how we experience aggression, jealousy, loss, joy, and tenderness. In perceiving all this, a spaciousness endowed with energy, potentiality, and creativity emerges.

As a result of seeing and recognizing our original state, a sense of heartbreak emerges. This heartbreak is not constant, but it periodically arises when we begin to see how we all suffer through loss, attachment, and clinging. We don’t need to push anything away. We don’t need to react. We’re just here, and the suffering doesn’t need to be transformed. We experience and allow everything to release into its fundamental nature, this vast spaciousness. This bittersweet glimpse of our liberation and the ease of backsliding into suffering is a profound experience. And this powerful brokenheartedness can stimulate a tenderhearted compassion for our fellow beings. It’s love. It’s an eros for being, and even an eros for suffering and liberation.

Dark meditation retreats shouldn’t be regarded as simply sensory deprivation. On a material level, there is a relationship. Some have speculated that the brain produces endogenous DMT during extended sensory deprivation total darkness. However, rigorous research still needs to be done. But reducing dark meditation to biochemical processes may undercut the importance of specific training and techniques, which have been crafted and perfected over many centuries and cause the practitioner to have a somewhat curated internal visionary experience. In one way, this practice feels very shamanic. As we travel on this transhuman journey, many moments that feel like timeless human experiences arise, as if this practice goes back into prehistory and is a very seminal human experience.

Understanding the bardo process is one thing, but experiencing it is entirely different. I’ve worked as a chaplain in hospitals, hospices, and correctional settings. I have been with hundreds of people during death and have blessed the bodies of thousands of people buried at New York City’s public cemetery on Hart Island. Being able to experience the bardo process through the practice of dark meditation has been transformative. In our youth-
obsessed culture that shuns illness, aging, and death, dark meditation has many practical applications, particularly for those at the end of life.

In our intensely dualistic existence of hard and heavy thinking that causes so much violence and harm, the benefits of dark retreat are multifaceted and possibly hard to grasp fully. The timeless wisdom of dark meditation may help liberate us from such a heavily structured existence. So many of our relational limitations—even how we imagine our interconnected reality on this beautiful planet—may be healed through such a practice. At the same time, we need to guard the ancestral thread, the core heart essence of dark meditation. We must maintain an energetic connection to those who practiced and transmitted it. This lineage practice of making use of darkness, of embracing and traversing its womb-like quality, has transformed many great Vajrayana masters. They have guarded and transmitted the teaching out of respect for its transformational power to help guide us toward the vast potential of a whole mind and body integration. Embracing darkness has the potential to be spiritually, emotionally, and perhaps even biologically therapeutic.

The post Embracing the Darkness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I first met Justin von Bujdoss four and a half years ago, when I attended his meditation session for guards on Rikers Island. Von Bujdoss, or Repa Dorje Odzer, is a lay teacher ordained in the Karma Kamstang tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, and was the first Buddhist chaplain to serve city corrections staff on Rikers Island, New York City’s jail complex located on an island between the Bronx and Queens.

Rikers, which previously housed soldiers during the Civil War and was also home to a slaughterhouse, has long been among the world’s most notorious corrections facilities. (Rikers is a jail, not a prison, and the majority of the 15,000 inmates are detained while awaiting trial.) The early 2010s saw some momentum around closing Rikers. In 2014, then-US state attorney Preet Bharara found that teenage prisoners on Rikers were not protected from the use of excessive force. In 2015, Kalief Browder, who had spent several years on Rikers Island as a teenager for a robbery charge and two years in solitary confinement, killed himself. Browder’s death propelled the movement to close Rikers, which the city approved in 2019 with an ambitious plan to shut down the complex by 2027. Plans were also drawn to reduce the use of punitive solitary confinement, which the United Nations says constitutes psychological torture.

And then came COVID. The virus tore through the entire Rikers community, leading to staffing shortages that fueled dangerous conditions. Double the amount of drugs were seized, even though visitors were not allowed. In 2021, 15 people died on Rikers, from COVID, suicide, and drug overdose. All were Black or brown men. 

Von Bujdoss was a witness to this unrest and chaos. As COVID took off, von Bujdoss took on the additional responsibility of blessing the bodies buried on Hart Island, New York City’s potter’s field. (During the peak COVID crisis, which overwhelmed morgues and funeral homes, some people were temporarily buried there before their families were found.) Von Bujdoss resigned at the end of 2021, after more than five years on Rikers. He recently sat down with me to talk about Rikers, his chaplaincy work, and what comes next. 

Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar (WBA): You recently resigned from your role as chaplain with the New York City Department of Corrections. What are you up to now?  

Justin von Bujdoss: I resigned at the very end of December 2021 and made the shift to do fulltime dharma teaching. Which, interestingly enough, I think COVID made possible. I wrote a book that was published at the end of 2019 (Modern Tantric Buddhism) and after that, a lot of teaching opportunities arose.

With DOC (New York City Department of Correction), I’d been granted a tremendous amount of access at a very high level to engage in co-creation of culture change and advocacy, especially around non-Abrahamic faith traditions, getting services for Buddhists, and increasing resources for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Rastafari people in custody. And COVID was really hard. I contracted COVID early on, and then I was asked to bless the bodies of people who died of COVID. The combination of that and the unprecedented death—I kind of like to think of that as a little bit of ngondro [foundational practice] for my dharma teaching. I’d worked in hospice before and was comfortable and really loved that work. And I ended up blessing over 3,000 bodies in about a year and a half. I love the work and I very much love Hart Island. And, it’s time to move on. 

Now I’m teaching through Bhumisparsha with Lama Rod Owens and Pure Land Farms with Dr. Nida Chenagtsang, who has authorized me to teach Ati Yoga (Tib. Dzogchen, which practitioners of this Tibetan Buddhist school believe are the essence of the Buddha’s teachings). I have a cohort of students I work with providing intimate monthly dharma instruction one-on-one. It’s a little bit like a hybrid of chaplaincy and what a traditional student-teacher relationship should be, and often can’t be. In the Tibetan tradition especially, big teachers will pass through town and teach and maybe they won’t have the opportunity to return for a year. And then the people who connect with them are a little lost for that time. My teachers have been exceptionally generous with their time with me and I’ve experienced a tremendous amount of benefit as a result of that. All you need to do is look at a spiritual biography of anybody from any tradition about 100 years ago and the closeness of the teacher and student walking the path together is evident. So that’s what I’m really passionate about now. 

WBA: Sure, yes. And you left in December because it was the end of a long year, or because the administration was changing? 

JVB: Yes, the administration. I took a leave of absence in early-mid 2021 to do an eight-week solitary retreat. . . Commissioner Cynthia Brann, who was my boss, was let go by the mayor while I was on retreat. When the interim commissioner, Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi, came in, it just felt so chaotic. The number of deaths of people in custody peaked. And I did almost all of the notifications of the next of kin for the inmates’ families—calling people, notifying them that their loved one had died, hearing screaming on the other end, and then hanging up and calling me back and screaming. My poor wife—this was always at night. 

Then with Adams coming into office it was really clear to me that there wasn’t going to be wholesale change of DOC under his leadership. While that was heartbreaking, on another level, I was also becoming aware of just how toxic that work environment was. And while I felt very resourced and able to be in the midst of all this suffering, it was really challenging to notice the work’s impact on my physical and emotional health. I feel like Buddhist chaplains almost operate from this point of feeling like they’re less than—Buddhism is a critical minority faith tradition in the US and I think a lot of people may exert more energy than necessary to try and justify themselves as a Buddhist chaplain. And I’ve seen a lot of people burn out recently. I guess you could say I’ve made it a vow to protect myself and my family—I’m married and have three kids. I don’t want to become the kind of person I saw the DOC staff becoming, which was jaded and calcified, emotionally, and unable to regulate things like that. 

WBA: It’s interesting, you know, the mainstream rhetoric with Adams. He meditates and exercises and eats a plant-based diet! And then he also puts someone in charge of DOC who reintroduces punitive solitary confinement as a way to “restore order.” And if you’re paying attention, it can feel very sad to see meditation as a “cover.” That’s not to say he doesn’t have a genuine practice. But it’s business as usual in a place full of unimaginable suffering that many people don’t think should exist in the first place. 

JVB: I do know the present commissioner (Louis A. Molina) and he’s a really nice person. So I did my due diligence and met him before my last day. I was meeting with him and halfway through I thought “this is going nowhere.” And I feel for the guy. I feel for everybody I left behind, and in some respect, I do feel like I left people behind. I don’t think this system can be fixed at all. There have been a few articles recently about federal monitors overseeing various city agencies that have court cases around ineffective performance. And all of them have said things are just not changing. People in custody are not major constituents for politicians. It doesn’t make any sense to me that in a whole host of city agencies, policies can change at the drop of a hat when a new administration comes in when there are people there who are really trying to make change. The system is broken and needs to be scrapped. I think the city needs to reinvestigate, culturally, its relationship to criminal justice and corrections in particular. And I fear Adams’ level of maturity around the severity of the decision making and how that impacts people in custody. I feel like I’ve earned the right to say that because I’ve done most of the death notifications for people in custody over the last year. Most of them shouldn’t have died there and it’s troubling when there are bureaucrats who seem to not take that so seriously. 

WBA: Did COVID impact your weekly meditation group for officers? 

JVB: That wasn’t able to happen so much. During COVID, our staff death rate shot up by about 500 percent and everything went into emergency mode on Rikers. And then the staffing crisis began, and it hit peak levels this past summer. We had one out of five people not showing up to work, whole housing areas with no uniformed staff. And then the emergency response work I was doing increased. I met one officer who lost six members of her family to COVID. The first city employee to die from COVID was a DOC investigator, and the number of deaths just shot up from there. And then the department retirees, and then family members of staff members, and the additional trauma of the COVID crisis. 

WBA: Everything changed. How can we go back to the way things were before?

JVB: It’s heartbreaking to see how much hasn’t changed in correctional systems at the federal and local levels; it’s business as usual, it almost doesn’t matter who is in charge. I just wonder if there can ever be a wake-up call. And unfortunately, unless there’s a lot of property damage, people aren’t going to make a big deal. I reflect periodically on a quote attributed to Trungpa Rinpoche: that the US is characterized by speed and aggression. The aggression is particularly intense, because I think we’ve all become so used to human suffering that it’s hard to become outraged; we’ve become paralyzed into it and not able to act. And for a culture that prides itself on doing, it’s strange and very inconsistent. 

We’ve lost sight of the collective. The American dream of achieving for oneself and one’s family has come at the expense of the collective. It’s kind of a weird, dark time, isn’t it?

WBA: Yeah. And what do we do?

JBV: Keep showing up, right? 

WBA: Going back to noticing changes in yourself, becoming hardened like others who work for DOC. Bhumiparsha’s mission statement specifically mentions working to end things like white supremacy and patriarchal culture. I’m wondering if there’s tension, or a disconnect, between you working for the department and pressure from your students or sangha?

JBV: I have very gracious students who could have probably held me more accountable. With DOC, I envisioned myself like a spy. I didn’t really have social relationships with anybody I worked with other than one person who was a huge ally. And this spy-like quality I had working for DOC was just not sustainable. I just can’t express enough this level of chaos on Rikers Island. It was paralyzing. Everything from the lack of compassion that the administration was showing to seeing how I was being pushed into a corner by the administration and would continue to be marginalized, and knowing that I could not work in a place where I was not being given the opportunity to make the change that I wanted. Because otherwise, you’re a body working in this machine that produces human suffering. 

From a Buddhist perspective on ethics, when a bodhisattva shows up, they don’t discriminate between who somebody works for. If people are suffering, people are suffering. And there’s something quite refreshing about that impartiality when it comes to showing up for people who are suffering. When approached from a more dualistic political position, it becomes easier to decide to whom I am going to offer care and to whom I might not. I really tried as best I could to remain as impartial as possible, even though sometimes I was providing care to someone who left his post, and then an inmate killed themselves, and the officer comes to see me because they’re afraid they’re going to lose their job. I could, I guess you could say, through projection empathize with being in that position, while at the same time think, “Why did you leave your post? Somebody would be alive who is now dead.” And then I’d have to notify the (inmate’s) family. 

WBA: Looking back to your time on Rikers, I’m interested in your thoughts on being the first Buddhist chaplain with the DOC and what that opens up. There has been a lot of excitement about meditation and what it can provide in jails and prisons, and also the workplace, and making people calmer, better workers. And so this might be a bit cynical, but do you think there is an advantage to a corrections system hiring a Buddhist chaplain to ride that progressive wave?

JBV: So I’m biased, but I think Buddhist chaplains are better chaplains for any kind of institution or organization seeking relief from the typical binary that you find in Abrahamic faith traditions. And some of the greatest compliments I received from high-level leaders at DOC and other city agencies was that I was able to think differently than the common narrative in the criminal justice system. It’s good or bad, guilty or innocent, repent or be locked up. Which is not very creative or sophisticated. And I think our culture doesn’t need that anymore. 

Of course I’m exaggerating a little bit. There are chaplains from other faith traditions that can attend to these things, and mystical traditions in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam that get into a third way of being. But I do think that corrections having chaplains that are Buddhist, Hindu, or from a non-Abrahamic point of orientation with respect to spiritual formation is vital if a correctional city or culture is trying to look at how to provide care that is not wrapped up in punishment and retribution. . . We can think of the dharma as something that can heal us from spiritual and emotional pathogens like guilt, shame, and isolation. And meditation and practice can be part of a “treatment” for relaxing into our original state, as we call it in Vajrayana–a more embodied and direct experience of what’s arising in that moment in the world around us that allows us to see and experience things more clearly. I think there’s something fundamentally beneficial, and potentially quite healing, in that. 

And 100 percent, I’m skeptical of the insertion of meditation in the workplace, especially for productivity. Because I think meditation ideally should lead to a drop-out culture, like the sixties, or the Great Resignation. Meditation has to allow for radical change. And I was very conscious of being used as the poster child: oh we’re not so terrible, we have this meditation program. What I would try to do was include language that would help people question themselves. It’s like turning over compost. It stinks, it’s a little gross, but necessary for everything to break down and have rich soil. Working with the emotions that come up in corrections, or law enforcement in general, is really hard and painful, and it shouldn’t just be about not feeling stressed out. There is a benefit to teaching meditation in jails and prisons, but it has to be met with a certain amount of skill and training to help people process trauma responses that might arise, because these are places that are toxic and difficult; even on a good day people are morally challenged in what they have to do in their work. And if you’re somebody who’s incarcerated, you’re morally challenged in how to respond to what is arising every day, with much less freedom and much higher levels of retribution/reaction if one acts “unskillfully.”

This work can be romanticized, definitely. And anyone who is a meditation teacher needs to be aware of how the practice is being used. You could teach Navy SEALS how to have more single-pointed concentration as they commit atrocities, and that doesn’t work. We have to ask ourselves, especially as a fully formed Buddhist community, what is acceptable. 

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Read Tricycle’s 2017 spotlight on Justin von Bujdoss’s meditation course for Rikers correction staff here.

The post After Rikers appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Most people talk about American Buddhism as if it has not quite arrived, but Lama Justin von Budjoss (Repa Dorje Odzer) thinks that real dharma is already here. Von Budjoss, who is the first dedicated staff chaplain for the New York City Department of Correction, is a dedicated Vajrayana Buddhist practitioner and is outspoken about bringing his tradition into the 21st century. Along with fellow tantrika Lama Rod Owens, last year von Budjoss founded Bhumisparsha, an experimental sangha with a mission of inclusivity that welcomes practitioners who feel uncomfortable in traditional dharma centers. 

With his new book, Modern Tantric Buddhism: Embodiment and Authenticity in Dharma Practice (North Atlantic Books, October 29, 2019), von Budjoss argues that issues that affect and impede the practice of contemporary practitioners––like white supremacy, patriarchy, and ideas of cultural superiority––are not being addressed openly in Tantric Buddhist settings. A dynamic mix of translation, teachings, memoir, and critique, Modern Tantric Buddhism aims to position Vajrayana in the present moment while staying true to its core energy. 

Tricycle spoke with von Budjoss about updating tantra, his relationship with his teacher, and his quest to reassemble a lineage of engaged lay practice in the present day.

You describe this book as a “loving critique” of the Vajrayana tradition. Who is this book for? 

I wrote this book for a growing body of students who come from disaffected sanghas where they have been hurt––sexually assaulted by teachers in a few cases, or financially taken advantage of in others. Often dharma centers rely on volunteers when they grow, and some students were manipulated into working long hours for no pay or minimum wage in a labor system that doesn’t really reflect Buddhist values. I wrote it for them, and as a love letter and a show of gratitude for my teachers, and also for myself, as a way to express my concerns about the Vajrayana tradition and Buddhist tantra in the West.

While the rest of the dharma world has changed, and people now talk about “American Buddhism,” Vajrayana sanghas remain very isolated. Part of the reason for this is that Tibetan Buddhism in the West was born out of a refugee situation of genocide and cultural destruction. Preservation became the most important thing, which makes total sense. No one saw the need to change anything. Lama Rod [Owens] and I have been trying to model a new path that’s not at odds with the tradition itself but a conscious outgrowth from the tradition. 

What does that mean, exactly? Where are we at, and what needs to change? 

I think Vajrayana needs to meet the needs of the generations that have gone by since that of the boomers––my generation, Gen X, millennials, and now people who are even younger than that. The first wave of practitioners did a lot to establish the sanghas and ensure the transition of the canon, but I think the actualization of the tradition requires us to get up and experiment. That’s messy, and it’s challenging. But that’s what all the great Himalayan masters did, male and female. We need to bring that same level of creativity. 

What are some of the ways that contemporary Vajrayana is failing to meet practitioners’ needs?

Across all [American] Buddhism, we see that it’s white-dominant. But in the Vajrayana world, [whiteness] is also very unconscious. When you bring up topics like white supremacy, people get angry and say you’re being politically correct or bringing politics into dharma. It’s a problem when you have people you love and care about who are not able to feel comfortable in those sanghas.

The problem is that Vajrayana Buddhism tends to cloister itself away from things that are hard, when it should be doing the opposite. I admire the late Zen teacher Bernie Glassman and the things he did to encourage his students to make not only a spiritual impact on the world, but financial and social impact as well. Vajrayana can often make “compassion” very intellectual and about your own training. You visualize yourself as the bodhisattva [of compassion], Chenrezig, or recite the mantra––but you keep yourself away from the chaos of 6th Avenue and 23rd Street.  

Can we use this tension to fuel a tantric practice? 

In terms of making spiritual use of that dissonance, for me it’s about coming back to a non-monastic set of ideals and gleaning inspiration from the mahasiddhas of medieval India, who were a funky blend of yogis, yoginis, householders––people who just had jobs and were teachers and great practitioners. 

I want to take the mahasiddha tradition and make it applicable for regular people today, and shake the image of these people with long hair and skull bowls running around. Although I came very close to becoming a monk at one point, I think the ideas behind celibate monasticism and retreat need to be parsed out––I can’t do that necessarily, because I’m not a monk, but I think there should be feminist monks and nuns who actively write about and analyze the tradition, to try to make sense of what monasticism should look like in our modern world. 

In the book, you say that we need to write our own commentarial literature. What would contemporary commentaries look like? 

A Western commentarial tradition would look at itself and the tradition critically, acknowledging both the past and the present need for change. Believe me, I’m a big nerd, and I spend a lot of time reading old texts, and I find such great meaning. But I always translate the text into terms that make sense for me. 

Some of our commentaries would be more traditional, and some would be about acknowledging and honoring who we are. There are some people who want the equivalent of the Catholic mass in Latin, and others who think we should have beat box or hip hop in our ganachakra [tantric ritual gathering]. Seriously––if we’re really celebrating who we are––why can’t we include, like, Beyoncé in our services? Why can’t we adapt the foods that are being eaten to our own cultural background, or do our own ancestor practices? Any kind of cultural lens should be able to be transposed onto dharma and find value and meaning in it.

In my own Karma Kagyu tradition, everything seemed to have stopped in the 19th century with Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye––the canon ended there, with the last recognized terton [revealer of hidden teachings] Chokgyur Dechen Lingpa, whose Nyingma practices were blended to some extent with the Karma Kagyu tradition. But there’s been other stuff––and other tertons––since! It’s strange to me that people will go back to a mid-19th century text and just stay there. In other traditions, like Zen and Theravada, the challenges of today are being hashed out with new content. The books are still being written. 

You had a very familial relationship with your root teacher, the Sikkimese Tibetan Buddhist nun Ani Dechen Zangmo. Can you tell me about how you met her? 

As an undergraduate I went on the Antioch University program in Bodhgaya, and it was there I met my friend Erik Bloom, who went to college with Dekila Chungyalpa, Ani Zangmo’s daughter. Erik told me that he had plans to travel to Sikkim while we were in India, and that his good friend Dekila’s mom lived out there. That’s how I met her originally. She was my teacher until she died in 1997. 

Ani Zangmo is a great example of what I’m talking about in terms of creatively making the tradition your own. She was a nun who gave empowerments, which is quite rare. A mother and powerful female presence in a predominantly male dharma world, she chose to live by herself instead of in a nunnery. She knew that there was a politics to that, but it wasn’t born out of politics. 

Also, Ani Zangmo was passionate about empowering me; she found those spots where I felt broken and leaned into them so much that they hurt, but it was only through that process that I began to realize that I could let go of those things, that they don’t define me. 

I think it’s really rare to be able to have this close relationship with someone. In my opinion, most Vajrayana sanghas suffer from a lack of this kind of empowerment, embodiment, and authenticity. This is rooted to some degree in fear of one’s own power and fear of the power of the practice. I see a problem with the way most people relate to the lama––they say things like, “The lama is perfect, an absolute expression of wisdom mind.” But the lama is human. The teachers that I’ve spent the most time with are normal people who have doubts, fears, and anxieties. Relating with them on that level doesn’t take anything away from the realization, but maybe it lowers the realization to my level, and makes it approachable. 

You’re the staff chaplain for the New York City Department of Correction, and you were also a hospice chaplain for a long time. In the book you compare chaplaincy to Buddhist practice, and say it contains the seeds for liberation and transformation in difficult circumstances. 

Formal Buddhist practice is rooted in an authentic religious imperative. It’s helpful to remind ourselves every day that we’re going to die. Chaplains are forced to engage with spirituality in an everyday kind of way, which is helpful because it takes dharma practice off a pedestal and makes it about everything. 

Related: Watch Justin von Budjoss Teach on Caregiving as Dharma Practice

Two nights ago, my phone went off at 4:00 in the morning because a correctional officer died in a car accident. I had to drive out to Long Island to tell this family that their son had died, and be there for them as the mother is screaming and the father is just kind of shutting down. In dealing regularly with all of that visceral emotion and in helping people connect to themselves when they go through these incredibly traumatic experiences, the mind-training aspect [of practice] becomes very important. It’s like doing retreat in heavy emotion. 

In chaplaincy, practice becomes like a very well-oiled bicycle, so effortless that it’s a part of you, because you’re living in close quarters with death, and anxiety, fear, depression, sadness, and rage. I would never choose to just have an intellectual relationship to those emotions.

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What can we do if we can’t afford to go away to a meditation retreat?

For us as Buddhists, it’s important to address the impact capitalism has had on dharma, including the fact that it costs nearly a month’s rent to go on a weeklong retreat. This is a serious problem, because we run the risk of excluding those who don’t have the necessary resources from meditation practice and sangha formation activities. When we look at the ethics shared by all Buddhist traditions, especially ideas about generosity, protecting access to dharma training becomes an aspect of practice in its own right.

Related: Why is Buddhism so Damned Expensive?

The 12th-century master Lama Shang wrote, “Your mind is birthless and continuous, / Without a beginning, middle, or end.” Recognizing this is the most important thing. The cost of a retreat, along with the exquisite facilities and heavenly food provided, are meaningless distractions from unearthing the fundamental purity of your mind. In fact, from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we settle in at the end of the day, we are afforded so many authentic places to practice. Every experience of hardship provides fertile ground in which we can root our practice.

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Developing a meditation practice can seem daunting, especially at the beginning, when we’re unsure about what having a meditation practice even means. It took me awhile to find a sense of confidence in what I was doing; perhaps more important than the confidence, though, was learning how to be comfortable.

My first teacher, a Sikkimese Buddhist nun, once likened the development of a meditation practice to being an expectant mother. “Now that you’ve taken the time to begin this process,” she explained, “you must learn to take care of and protect your practice, to nurture it, and to maintain the necessary conditions for its growth. You should think of yourself as pregnant—you need to apply that same level of care.” Even at that early stage, her advice made immediate practical sense. And now, two decades later, her words resound with a wisdom that captures the way in which maintaining a practice becomes a life’s work.

The 12th-century Tibetan meditation teacher Gampopa suggested in his work “The Precious Garland of the Supreme Path” that when our practice begins to coalesce we ought to protect it as we would our own eyes. It is during this embryonic stage of practice that we experience moments of vulnerability and tenderness, ripe with the potential to develop a deeper connection to practice.

When I was at this stage in developing my practice, I was introduced to a meditation instruction known as Tilopa’s Six Nails. Tilopa was a mahasiddha, a great adept, who likely lived in the region of present-day West Bengal, India, and Bangladesh around the turn of the 11th century. Little is known about his life, but traditional biographies tell us that he was a cowherd and showed a natural inclination for meditation and mystical experiences. Over the course of his life he became a very experienced meditator with a profound understanding of the mind. Like many of the other famed mahasiddhas from the Indian subcontinent, Tilopa was instrumental in creating and refining core spiritual practices that later spread throughout the Himalayan region—the Six Nails teaching, also known as Tilopa’s Six Words of Advice, is one of his best-known instructions:

Don’t recall. Let go of what has passed.
Don’t imagine. Let go of what may come.
Don’t think. Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t examine. Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t control. Don’t try to make anything happen.
Rest. Relax, right now, and rest.

—trans. Ken McLeod

At its heart, this meditation instruction is about using simple awareness to allow what is happening in the present moment to take place. It’s almost as if Tilopa is trying to point a finger at what the experience of meditation is all about. These six very short lines of instruction not only show us how to settle—or, as is sometimes said, how to “place the mind”—but also highlight all that we as meditators need to be careful of as we cultivate our practice. Tilopa is showing us how we can nurture our practice while simultaneously deepening its meaning, that the two are not mutually exclusive, and that when we find ourselves craving complexity, sometimes we are best served by simplicity.

DON’T RECALL.
LET GO OF WHAT HAS PASSED.

This instruction, especially in the beginning, is simple. It’s almost too simple. Let go of what has passed. Don’t chase after past experiences—easy, right? One might think so, yet when we sit down and begin a meditation session, what happens? What do we experience? Often we are faced with a natural cascading replay of the experiences that we had earlier in the day. If it’s not from earlier today, then it’s from yesterday, or earlier in the week, or before that. The mind can be a busy place, especially when we are early on in developing a relationship with the way it manifests. Sometimes when we are bored, rebellious, or tired, we find ourselves replaying experiences from the past that we feel are significant because they bolster our sense of self-importance. In a similar way we may have a habit of recalling ourselves as not good enough, broken, or without worth. Key to this instruction, though, is gaining a better understanding of how our relationship to the past affects us right now.

DON’T IMAGINE.
LET GO OF WHAT MAY COME.

This instruction is similar to the one about letting go of the past, but now we are invited to not think about what may come in the future. This means not getting distracted by thoughts of chores, meals to make, tasks to accomplish, goals to achieve, or any myriad of things we are convinced we must remember. Sometimes these arise as thoughts or mental images, and sometimes they arise as what I like to call “thought-chains”—mental narratives that, if we are not careful, will run their course throughout the duration of the meditation session. Just as we define ourselves in relation to the past, we also tend to seek particular outcomes for the future. Here Tilopa is asking us to gently let this go.

DON’T THINK.
LET GO OF WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW.

Sometimes our own brilliant mind can be an impediment. The desire to know exactly what we are experiencing is very natural: sometimes we want to codify our experience in practice as either good or bad, and at other times we want to distract ourselves with an endless play of thought activity. Tilopa is suggesting we turn the inner television off and just experience. A Zen Buddhist instruction is similar to this point: “When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” What Tilopa is suggesting is that we cut away labeling and reactivity in relationship to whatever is arising—thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations. Try not to worry about what is happening right now. Instead, let it arise naturally, without judgment.

DON’T EXAMINE.
DON’T TRY TO FIGURE ANYTHING OUT.

Sometimes in Buddhist practice one is advised to be wary of engaging in overly intellectual practice. This is not to say that the Buddhist tradition is anti-intellectual, but rather that it’s easy to substitute descriptions from books for experiences gained in meditation. Practically speaking, this may take shape in our practice when we try to assess our own meditative development based upon what we have studied. Such assessments can create a subtle shift in the experience of meditation from an openness to whatever may arise to an experience that is objectified and studied. In the previous instruction, “thinking” pertains to mental activity in a general sense; in this instruction, “examining” has more to do with an analysis of what is going on, whether one is making progress, and whether the experience fits into one’s larger idea of what meditation is “supposed” to be all about. It is also worth noting that once an assessment or diagnosis occurs, we create the ground for subsequent reactions and so perpetuate our distraction.

Here Tilopa is highlighting the importance of making sure that our experience remains that which is experienced, not something that we study. He isn’t worried about how much you have read or whether you are literate; he is pointing out the importance of letting analysis evaporate to give space for direct experience to occur.

DON’T CONTROL. DON’T TRY TO MAKE ANYTHING HAPPEN.

In some meditation texts, meditators are advised not to fabricate any experience within their practice. That’s what this instruction is all about. Think of sitting on a beach and watching the waves come and go, the flatness of the horizon, and the way the clouds appear. Can you control them? Can you make the salt air different? What would happen if we approached meditation the same way? Here we are faced with putting down the desire to induce change in our experience of practice. This can be challenging when we don’t feel like remaining present, when we want to be distracted, or when we want to push back. But here Tilopa is gently reminding us that actively manipulating what arises in meditation is not the experience we seek to develop.

REST. RELAX, RIGHT NOW, AND REST.

Relax. Practice isn’t about being intense; it’s about coming back to ease—letting the mind and body settle into an experience that holds the seeds of expansiveness. In order to have a clearer sense of what the mind is like, we need to become comfortable letting ourselves, and our mind, rest with ease. Often it isn’t until we fall out of connection with this experience that we feel the need to do something. Maybe we begin chasing after thoughts, examining what is happening, or playing with everything that the mind seems to contain.

Sometimes during a meditation session we feel awkward, as though we need to do something, or as though we need to keep thinking about some particular thing, or else our ability to have a sharp, agile mind will disappear. (That’s not going to happen.) It’s hard to rest, especially given the busy pace that our lives often take. Two other instructions may help convey the sense of rest that Tilopa is getting at: Rest like a bee stuck in honey. Rest like a laborer sitting down at the end of a day of hard work. Try to let your mind settle with an ease born of natural relaxation.

***

In the Tibetan tradition we often talk about meditation as familiarizing ourselves with the mind. This is a way of saying that with each practice session we get to know what is actually going on with greater clarity. Tilopa’s six instructions, which can be applied in a number of ways, are particularly effective in aiding this process. They can be read or chanted before a meditation session, and if you are struggling with one particular instruction you can even focus an entire meditation session on that particular one. Later, once you have developed a more personal relationship to the six instructions, they should be considered akin to a set of boundaries that together allow the experience of mind to take place in a direct, fresh, and uncontrived way. To move in this direction, it will help to minimize how much you study or read about this kind of meditation. Indeed, my first teacher advised me not to read too much about instructions like these. “If you must read,” she told me, “try to read and then instantly forget. Too much knowledge of the path can make meditation much harder than it needs to be.”

As is true for many meditation instructions, it can take time for them to feel natural and integrated into our experience. That’s OK. Developing a practice takes time. It’s natural to want to jump to the end result, but that isn’t possible. The great mystery of cultivating a meditation practice might be the path itself—how it twists and turns; the work we must put into it along the way—yet the result is worth the effort. Over the course of repeated practice, with the kind of gentle care that my teacher taught me and that Gampopa shared with his students, mind becomes less of a mystery and more of a canvas upon which the wealth of our existence is displayed.

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When we raise children, assist our aging parents, or tend to a sick friend, caregiving offers an opportunity to transform our interactions with others into part of the Buddhist path. In this series, Repa Dorje Odzer (Justin von Bujdoss), a Buddhist teacher and Chief Staff Chaplain for New York City’s Department of Correction, presents advice from the 10th-century Buddhist master Tilopa. When we follow Tilopa’s roadmap for approaching every thought, breath, and action with awareness, we achieve a clarity that will help us tend to others with ease.

The post Everyday Buddhahood: Caregiving as Dharma Practice appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.