![]() This weekend, Buddhist teacher Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, author of The Power of an Open Question, is leading us in our meditation sessions. To strengthen these natural qualities of mind, we can use meditation. Our minds, however, have two essential qualities we can always draw on to help us wake up: being present and knowing what’s happening, moment by moment. Throughout life, we have trained in distracting ourselves, so going unconscious feels like our natural MO. That’s because we are strengthening qualities we already have, rather than training in something that we have to bring in from the outside.” “You could call it training or taming the mind to stay present,” Ani Pema says, “but a more accurate way of describing it is strengthening the mind. In the face of all this temptation, stabilizing the mind is the basis for showing up for our own life. Even when we turn off the ringer, our cellphone still vibrates and the pull to check it is almost irresistible. And now that we have such a multitude of ways to distract ourselves, from texting to television, it’s even more challenging to be awake and fully present. It’s human nature to want to be distracted from uncomfortable, painful feelings such as boredom, restlessness, or bitterness. “You might just find,” he concluded, “that they’re a lot more interested in staying asleep than in waking up.”Īni Pema believes that Kongtrul Rinpoche had a point: there is a lot of cultural support for unconsciousness in this land of forks. Someday, you’re going to go where people eat with these things.” At this point, Kongtrul Rinpoche smiled broadly at his prediction. “They poke it into meat and then they use it to lift the meat up and put it in their mouth. “In the West, they use this to eat,” Kongtrul Rinpoche explained. It was something Trungpa Rinpoche had never seen before. ![]() In his hands, Kongtrul Rinpoche held a metal object that was shaped like a peculiar comb and was the color of the silver bowls on shrines. One day, Ani Pema tells us, Trungpa Rinpoche went to his teacher’s room, where he found him sitting in front of a window with the soft morning light falling on his face. When Ani Pema’s late teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was a child in Tibet, his primary teacher was a famous master named Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche. Each of her four talks will focus on one of these qualities. She feels they are critical for walking the walk and experiencing genuine transformation. Over the weekend, Ani Pema will teach us about four qualities that are key to waking up. Every single one of us wants to hear something that is going to be of value in our life. Someone else is trying to come to terms with her son’s homelessness. One woman is living with the memory of waking up to find her infant cold and blue. There are people here who are struggling with illness there are people here who’ve lost their job. As Ani Pema points out, most of us are attending because of our issues-our anger or addiction, our grief or loneliness. This weekend, there are 560 retreatants present, with an additional 1,200 people dialing in to the live stream from around the globe. You take the teachings as good medicine for the things that are confusing to you and for the suffering of your life.” In contrast, Ani Pema continues, “Walking the walk means you’re very genuine and down to earth. You’re trying to transcend the messiness of life by being beatific and radiant.” But what being a fake spiritual person really means, she explains, “is that you’re suffering a lot and you want to mask your suffering with some kind of spiritual glow. “One attribute that can be true of fake spiritual people is that they wear fake spiritual clothing,” she says, taking a light crack at her own tidy burgundy robes. ![]() “You got any idea what I mean by that?” she asks the retreatants. Her title for this weekend is “Walk the Walk: Working with Habits & Emotions in Daily Life.”Īs Ani Pema sees it, walking the walk is about being genuine that is, not being a fake spiritual person. Now up on the stage at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, she quips that she never knows so far in advance what she’s going to teach, so she just comes up with something she figures she’ll inevitably say something about. About a year and a half before Ani Pema Chödrön teaches a program, she has to come up with a title for it.
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