Property:BuddhistActivities
From Tsadra Foundation Advanced Contemplative Scholarships
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Practice!
Currently reading and reflecting upon volume three of Chogyam Trungpa's "The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma: The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness" +
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I help facilitating in a Tergar meditation group, connected with Mingyur Rinpoche. Sometimes I also help with the meditation classes in Palpung Thubten Choling, Upstate NY, via Zoom. +
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Three year retreat tutor in POL +
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The Boulder area has offered some connections with different meditation groups and I have been lucky to occasionally perform sadhanas according to my root tradition of the Dudjom Tersar. And then following the birth of my son in 2016, and later my daughter in 2018, my formal practice, whether individual or in a group has been evidently replaced by a relentless practice of the paramita of patience, alongside a reluctant enduring marathon toward selflessness, sprinkled here and there with an unconditional love toward other sentient beings (2 specific ones in particular) that I have never even thought was possible, even during my years in formal retreat. +
Director of Milarepa Retreat Center and Lotus Light Contemplative Community Center, Tennessee. +
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I am so far successful with keeping a daily practice and doing puja twice a month with my husband since we are now isolated from a dharma group. I am planning to go (but rarely) to POL or at the garden of 1000 buddhas in Montana). Since i am in France (January 2020) i have decided to do one week closed retreat every month. Its Mai, and so far i did do it.
I am also related to Thulku SangNgak Rinpoche from whom i received the complete cycle of Yanti Nagpo ending in Sept 2019. +
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Continuing retreat, much stricter now and also, under the guidance of Tsoknyi Rinpoche researching the words tokpa and namtok to help meditators due to being lost in translation and creating much confusion and misguided practice, especially when translated as thought. I am researching their etymology, definitions and uses of the word in all different contexts all to gain a clear understanding of their experience while meditating without straying from their technical definitions. Especially in the context of Dzogchen, I have been going through all of Longchenpa's writings, Mipham's Nyugsem Korsum, Vimalamitra's Dra Thalgyur commentary, and many Dzogchen masters of the past 200 years as well as Pramana and Abhidharma. This research stemmed from the fact that colloquially, people identify "thought" with mental chatter and talking to yourself in your head. So when the lama or teachings say thought free, they immediately think blank, but then after many questions from the students, the lama says thoughts are ok, thus people get confused. You have phrases like tog med yeshe which compound their confusion. Also, according to meditation, bare, thought-free fixation is also a tokpa, yet translators often translate tokpa as thought so that just adds to confusion. Even alayavijnana is a tokpa. Thought is only one fraction of the scope of tokpa and namtok and is not always present in tokpa. To make it more confusing, you can have a thought and it not be a namtok if it is in rigpa. That shows that while thought and namtok are related, they are not the same thing. Tsoknyi Rinpoche has said that in the West, this is one of his biggest problems in teaching and a source of great confusion, misunderstanding, and inccorrect practice. Even the english word itself is misunderstood. People may say the think of thought as a concept or idea, but as soon as you say thought free, they think the mental conversation has to cease. In truth, people primarily relate to the word thought as dra chi don chi, words (mental conversation) and images in the mind and those are actually the objects of tokpa/fixation, not tokpa themselves, so this is the source of confusion. I met a student of Tulku Urgyen who after seeing all of Erik's translations of "thought free wakefulness" and Tulku Urgyen saying thoughts are impossible in rigpa really thought that it meant "no mental chatter, that thoughts were impossible in rigpa"!!! Namtok is impossible, but not thought, they are free to arise, or not. Anyways, I am writing something on the topic over this and next year at Tsoknyi Rinpoche's request.
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