Awakening the Luminous Mind: Tibetan Meditation for Inner Peace and Joy (18 page)

In doing the informal practice of
Union is great bliss
, it is important to understand that the five steps of Dawa Gyaltsen’s teaching are connected to each other. Therefore, throughout the day, as you hold and maintain a connection with stillness, silence, and spaciousness within you, many opportunities to experience bliss will arise—if you are sensitive enough and able to experience a subtle awareness of it.

As the pain body, pain voice, and the pain mind dissolve, what remains? Draw your attention inside and look: Joy is there. Bliss is there. If, when you close your eyes, there are many disturbing emotions and thoughts, then bliss is not there. You experience pain outside and pain inside. But as you become more familiar with the practice, when you go within and bring awareness to that space, the warmth of connection will be there. In stillness, when you draw attention within, warmth is there. Be open to feeling that warmth. As inner clouds dissipate, inner sunshine is there.

Feel that warmth throughout your day, particularly when you are not moving, talking, or thinking too much. Take advantage of those ordinary moments. While riding a bus, waiting to board a plane, or standing in line at the post office, draw your attention inward and try to connect with and feel the inner warmth of awareness through stillness, silence, and spaciousness. Become as familiar with it as you can, as often as you can, throughout the day. Refresh your commitment to yourself as I have suggested, with the metaphor of taking three pills. And every evening before you go to sleep, review the day and see whether you remembered to do this.

Once you have recognized, connected with, and felt that warmth, try to express it. Perhaps you are talking with someone when you notice that you feel slightly annoyed by the person. At the moment it is not terrible, but it could get worse. As soon as you become aware of that feeling of annoyance, draw your attention within and feel the stillness, hear the silence, or recognize the spaciousness. Connect with the warmth that becomes available, and let that warmth be reflected in your voice. Not only will the words that come from that inner source be kinder or more creative, but you will be able to see this reflected in the other person as warmth comes back toward you.

Again and again, remember to bring awareness to the inner refuge and connect with the awareness of openness directly—the place of union—until it pervades all of your experiences. Actively intend to do this five times daily, particularly when you are challenged or irritated in any way. Particularly at those times, connect with the place of union and express warmth in your speech or actions, or simply host warm thoughts and feelings. Making a commitment in this way and refreshing that commitment daily are very helpful, and will support your progress on the path.

I
N
C
ONCLUSION
:
U
NION
I
S
G
REAT
B
LISS

The conclusion here is the same as for the first four lines of advice, because every part of the practice is connected with the others. You will not have experiences of bliss unless you recognize
Vision is mind
and follow the sequence step by step. Whatever relationship or situation you are working on, try to continue from
Vision is mind
through
Union is great bliss
until you turn that painful thought, action, or state of being into warmth.

If you have not yet experienced the transformation from pain into bliss, do not change the focus of your practice to something different. It is important to have one clear experience of pain becoming bliss. In the end, this practice is about the relationship you have to your experience. You can bring additional topics to your meditation practice, but continue to host the topic you originally chose, so that you can experience that pain releasing into bliss. That is the goal of the practice. Once you experience bliss, it is important not to grasp at the bliss; simply appreciate the shift. You will be able to shift all your experiences of suffering and pain, as long as you look directly at your experience with naked awareness, host your experience with warmth, and trust open awareness.

CHAPTER NINE

T
HE
T
REASURY OF THE
N
ATURAL
M
IND

So, now you have been introduced to the treasury of your own natural mind through discovering and resting in the inner refuge, and through meditation on the five lines of Dawa Gyaltsen. How can you live closer to this treasury? Throughout the day, again and again turn toward the inner refuge. Each time you glimpse the openness of being, you discover the gifs of openness, awareness, and warmth. This refuge is your support. Each time you turn toward the inner refuge, you are reconnected to the sacred in life. Instead of being restlessly driven by the imagined poverty of ego, you discover that your natural being is most precious and valuable. When you are aware of the unbounded spaciousness of being, everything lines up and is interconnected. When you experience that interconnectedness, every single breath you take is a healing breath. Every inhalation heals and nourishes. Every exhalation naturally releases the accumulation of effortful striving, like a river flowing into a vast ocean. Every single exhalation of your breath is a purification of great awareness.

As you abide in open awareness, this union of openness and awareness births immeasurable love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. The birthing of these qualities is referred to as dynamic energy. It is possible to feel a sense of joy in your heart at this moment. You are resting in your body, resting in your breath, connecting with the spaciousness of your mind: everything is supporting you. If you simply allow it, love is here. If you simply allow it, compassion is here. If you simply allow yourself to feel equanimity, it is here. As you are open, you are clear; therefore you allow, and you are able to see, what exists in you. All these enlightened qualities are primordially perfected in being. When there is no obscuration, you can experience this. Each time you are aware of a specific quality, you are nourished. When you rest in that inseparable state of openness and awareness, the inseparable state of mother and child, you are nourished.

The
dzogchen
teachings tell us that abiding in the nature of mind is sufficient for spiritual enlightenment. For that reason, there is not as much emphasis on cultivating compassion as in other traditions; the idea is that as we rest in the nature of mind, compassion will arise naturally. For those who are able to devote a significant amount of time to the practice of abiding in awareness, this teaching makes sense. But what about those of us who lead busy lives and don’t have hours to devote to sitting in meditation? For most ordinary people, for whom thoughts and emotions are so much a part of our everyday life, it is important to be more aware of the situations in which we find ourselves. For example, if you look at your life to identify what drains you, you might find quite a number of things that are making you age faster, behaviors that may lead to sickness, or habit patterns that may interfere with your relationships. The more those stressful patterns are present in you, the more you become self-critical and are filled with judgment.

Perhaps you are not aware of why you feel so drained of energy. When I first got a “smartphone,” I couldn’t understand why the battery lasted such a short time. Then someone advised me that there were ways to save battery life, and in particular that there were many unnecessary applications running on my phone that I wasn’t aware of; these unnecessary apps were draining the life of the battery. If I simply identified them and shut them down, my battery lasted longer. In a similar way, there are some patterns of which you are completely unaware and it seems you never get a break from them. It might be a pervasive anxiety that accompanies you throughout your day. An application is running, but you are unaware of it. At the end of your day you are drained and exhausted. Of course, if you simply abide in the nature of mind, those patterns of hope and fear will not be there while you are meditating. But that means you will have to abide for a long enough time for the patterns to clear. When you stop meditating and continue with your life, the patterns may return. So it is necessary to bring more awareness and look more deeply into the details of your personal patterns while you are in the process of living your life.

Most people would agree that they don’t want to be drained by life—they would like to find life nourishing. In meditation, when you connect with unbounded space, the mother, the source of being, this is like unplugging from whatever drains you. But even when you are not meditating, you can also unplug at any moment when you connect with the unbounded space through bringing your awareness to stillness, silence, and spaciousness. And then you are free. As long as you can stay connected, you are free of draining patterns. So first, unplug from whatever drains you.

Second, when you are aware of boundless space, you find that more energy is available to you. When mother and child unite—when your awareness connects with spaciousness—and as you feel more at home in that open awareness, you will naturally experience qualities that nourish you. Of course, a quality is there whether you recognize it or not, but your awareness of its presence is helpful. I am not encouraging you to
think
about a quality or to make something up, but to be
aware
of a quality. An example of merely thinking about a nourishing quality would be when you say to yourself,
I’m not supposed to feel bad; I’m supposed to feel good, so I’ll think happy thoughts
. Whether you are thinking good thoughts or bad thoughts, they equally obscure openness. If you must choose between the two, good thoughts are more pleasant, but in terms of connecting with the open space of being, both good and bad thoughts are obscurations. Many psychological exercises involve generating good thoughts, but the
dzogchen
teachings do not encourage this type of practice. As the saying goes, whether you are hit on the head with a rock or with a lump of gold, the result is pain. In this teaching you are not asked to improve upon your thoughts; you are simply being aware of what is. You are not trying to “create your own reality” with thoughts, but are simply aware of the reality of joy that already exists. As you become aware of joy, that very moment is a miracle.

If you bring the awareness of joy or love to the pain identity, much of what you experience as pain is relieved. It simply dissipates. Much of what we experience as pain depends so much on how we perceive it. And the mind can also affect what we may believe to be the physical laws of the body. When you connect with unbounded space through the experiences of stillness, silence, and spaciousness, and when you experience the positive qualities that become available, you are able to host your pain without struggling. Fully hosting pain in this way frees you from the conditions in which pain arises. And during moments of awareness, every inhalation and exhalation is healing. When you bring your awareness to the simple rhythm of your breath as it moves in and out, you can experience a deep releasing and opening.

According to the teachings, the subtle underlying structures of our pain body naturally exhaust themselves as we abide in the nature of mind. We are not feeding them, so as thoughts and emotions arise, they naturally release into the openness of the mind. As they do, they no longer have the power to drive our actions. Is it possible that this exhaustion or release can affect the patterns encoded in our DNA and cells? Samsara, the endless wheel of suffering, is the result of disconnectedness from openness, the source within. When you don’t recognize openness, you disconnect from yourself, and this can lead to physical illness and emotional pain. According to traditional Tibetan medicine, the source of all illness is ignorance, the failure to recognize the source of one’s being. When the mother (emptiness, openness, spaciousness) and child (awareness) unite, the causes of sickness are not perpetuated. This is a traditional Tibetan way of saying that the more you are aware of openness as your mother or source, the more the momentum of the pain body’s patterning is disrupted and weakened. When stress is reduced in this way, the negative consequences of that stress—your imbalanced reaction to outer difficulties—are also reduced. The ignorant, disconnected, unhealthy mind creates suffering. The moment you are aware, it changes the momentum and trajectory of your suffering. Confusion dissolves at the source.