Biography
“No sessions, no breaks.” This is a saying in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition that seems to be the theme for my spiritual journey. I remember talking to ‘God’ when I was three years old. This was the language I heard around me, echoing from all natural phenomena and relationships. I knew it was about being present to the moment and connecting with something beyond my limited self. I spent a lot of time inside my introverted nature discussing reality with an unseen presence.
By third grade I wrote a paper on the “death of god” theology that was in the headlines. I thought it was a weird premise to state that a transcendent deity could experience death. So I humorously indicated God was actually alive at a hospital in St. Louis under an assumed name. My teacher thought I was a strange kid. She was right.
Video Transcript
Discovey
Digital link in our our teaching lineage. He learned a lot from the natural world as a matter of fact, the natural world as a primary teacher. And so ever since I was a little kid, you know, I would spend time looking at clouds and and. I remember spending time. Looking for four leaf clovers in the lawn and an absolute delight, and then I noticed that. Well, there is a four leaf clover I was looking at, but there was this entire world of little insects. And as you peer down through the blades of grass, there’s this this entire city community of insects. And then as you look through that and there’s another community of insects and you know, and I thought to myself, even at that age three, I was thinking, Wow, there’s so much that we don’t see. You know. And so I’ve always had this, this inquiry about things. And by the time I got into to a third grade, I actually was writing papers on. Kind of inner development, primarily being one at that time, there was this this idea of the death of God theology, even in the Christian tradition, the idea was that his God really did, you know, because the church was changing so much and so on? And so I wrote a paper about death of God theology, and I said God was alive and well. But but, you know, a little bit on life support in a hospital in St Louis under an assumed name. You know, interestingly enough, many years later, there was this movie called Dogma that came out, and there’s a theme that’s similar to in there. OK, so maybe I was prophetic. I have no idea. But so, you know, I had this language that because of what was around me, I would talk to God all the time. And as I said, as far back as I can remember, like age three, coming forward through elementary school, I was one of those people that I got. Baptized by choice in high school rather than infant baptism. And people ask me, well, why did you wait so long or why did you do this? I said, Well, it’s an initiation. You know, it is. It is part of my stepping into the mainstream of the Christian teachings. And so I always kind of had these these like initiations through all the different steps of along the way. You know, in high school, I was, you know, an occasional Methodist church attender and that’s where I got baptized. But all along the way, the that church experience wasn’t as important as my reflection about the church experience. And so I was looking at how people in high school developing individual weight and so on. And so I ended up making a film on. And the masks that we were, you know, and in the context of the film, everybody in the film was wearing a mask except for two people. And they were they were the outcasts. And so I was exploring the theme of identities that we were, you know, what is what is the mask that we were and what would happen if we drop that mask away? There’s actually a scene in the film where the woman character that didn’t have a mask on goes in and talks with a priest. And I actually got an Episcopal priest to be in this film. And so she’s sitting there in a pew waiting for him to come out to give her counsel, and he comes out with a mask on and she’s looking up at him and she’s going like, What is this? And they’re having this conversation and and at one point she basically reaches up. And pulls his mask down. And then she has this epiphany. About what it really means to live with your mask dropped. And so this is kind of like a theme in my life. I mean, all these sorts of things happen and you know, along the way I also had a scientific bent and my family, my dad was a pharmaceutical sales rep and my mom was a nurse. And so I had this influence also of Western medicine and science and so on. So when I went into college, I actually started out in biochemistry. Thinking that, well, this is going to help me understand what makes humans tick. And I remember being in a lab in a bio chem lab by myself one afternoon isolating DNA from a desiccated rat’s liver. And I lifted up the little glass rod. You know, you stirred a little grass rod in the stuff the DNA precipitates out and then you lift it up. And there’s like this not like this, this slimy thing dripping from the glass rod in it. It was like. This was the day, and I was wondering kind of what that had to do with anything. And in that class, I wrote a paper on the ethics of bioengineering and I went around and I interviewed different clergy, people and different scientists and got perspectives on, you know, what is human life? What is the sacredness of human life? You know, who are we really what’s important here? And so that was kind of a theme through college. I started out in biochemistry and then I had the experience of a roommate. Committing suicide, choosing to end his life in our apartment, and it was physically very messy. He blew his head off. And I had already kind of started to redirect my energy away from the sciences or the outer sciences, so to speak to the inner sciences about that particular experience kind of confirmed. The direction that I needed to go in because the person who killed himself was a wonderfully warm, beautiful being who many, many people loved, but he didn’t love himself. He didn’t have a sense of who he was and direction in his own life. And I thought, you know, I think this is more important than slime off of a glass rod. And in my life, not denigrating the other stuff. But. And so I ended up entering into the religious studies department, and I ended up with a degree in comparative religions. And due to some mentorship at that time, I happened to be in the Methodist Church. I was encouraged to go to graduate theological school, so I went to seminary and I took my initial ordination in the Methodist Church. But my seminary sent me to the World Council of Churches in Nairobi, Kenya. This was in 1975 and my experiences there it. Kind of opened my eyes to kind of the dissonance between exported spirituality and then the respect of native traditions that were existing at the time and the other that dissonance, I wasn’t able to kind of reconcile it within the church. And so I left seminary and gone on this long journey of exploration. one of the things I was most interested in my undergraduate studies were eastern traditions, and so one of my professors was a half. Japanese heritage, and he was amazing in the way he taught on so many different levels, he was a scholar as well as a. Had a lot of heart, and I remembered the teachings around Buddhism, and that seemed to be always a kind of a draw for me. So even when I was in seminary, we had this little group where we teach, teach each other yoga and meditation and stuff like that. And so I went on this journey studying with various teachers in different traditions and Hopi shaman Zen Master. But I met a yoga master who was very influential in my development, and I decided to become a yoga teacher and practitioner. And so I did that for quite a number of years, and the yogic tradition has a lot to do with accessing energies that we don’t see moving movement or what they call prana. You know, prana is a word that probably means first unit and means energy. It’s the same root word from which Chee and Qi and things come. This kind of root energy. And so in the yoga tradition, I began to understand movements of energy beyond my conceptual point. And so that was very formative, and in many, many years, I became a certified also massage practitioner. During that time, so between yoga and practicing massage, I was really, you know, hopefully through my own experiences, but also through my engagement with others to help people understand that there’s something beyond what we see and that energy moves in ways that basically flows according to what we think. Whatever’s in our mind affects whatever’s in our body that there isn’t really a separation. Um, I think that was like the foundation because when I met my my Buddhist teachers in the Vajra, youknow, tradition, they were saying similar things, but they seem to like ticket to a deeper level . Um, not so much engaged in, you know, like body awareness and so on, although that’s part of it. But really understanding what is the true nature of our mind and who are we really what? What is the. We were kind of engaged in this, this quantum quantum soup. It’s like a field of clouds that seem to arise and morph into all these different shapes. And when I look out into this world and perceive a reality. Who’s making that choice? What? I noticed that movements in my mind had a corresponding movement in the outer world and I went, What? What’s going on? Just like in the yogic sciences, prana and thought or very close. And there’s a movement of thought it affects the prana and vice versa. And when that settles out, the mind becomes more relaxed and on a it’s it takes it, I think, notches it up a little bit, at least from my experience that that the Buddhist tradition is about who is it that’s having the experience? Who is it that’s asking the question, who is it that is in a yoga posture? Who is it? That’s crazy. Um, and so when I met my my teachers in the Buddhist tradition, they seemed to be having a conversation with that idea and offering practices that helped me to. Settle the mind and help us recognize who we are on an absolute level.
Development
How does it play out? Somebody asks the question the other day in the saga, they said, Um, you know, like, how do you know when you’re classy and how do you know when, when there’s no clarity? I said, Well, you don’t know. My experience is that you only know that when you see it through the eyes of the people you love and the people that you help. You know, and through that kind of a field, that’s how you know and you can’t call that Buddhist or yogic or anything, it doesn’t make it. I don’t think, well, my teacher taught me this at that point in time. You know, I don’t, you know, I have gratitude every day, but I don’t think about them in that context. And so another experience would be like, Oh, my wife and I were walking down the street. one day has been in the sea four years ago or so. And we were just hand in hand. Nice morning walking across the crosswalk and this bicycle and rider came out of nowhere, turned the corner and he was distracted with something. I think it was his little phone, but anyway smacked right into us at full speed. I pushed my wife out of the way. At that point, she landed on her butt. But the impact of the. The bicycle forced me and my knee into the pavement and shattered my kneecap. I learned a new word. It was common you had just shattered into fragments. And I remember at that moment, um, after I swore because it hurt like hell, and I knew enough about my body to know what actually had happened. So I saw for a little while not at anybody, but just to just hurt. And then my first thought was, this person didn’t intend to do this. And my first thought was to help to assuage their suffering. You know, I asked him to come over and he says, you know, I know you didn’t want to do this and, you know, we need to address the situation. You know, if you have a cell phone, you should probably call 911 and I need to get dragged out of the street. And, you know, all these sorts of things. And I just spent time, you know, and then I started kind of like joking with him and, you know, found out about his life. And in that moment, he had he had just broken up with his girlfriend. He was late to work. He was going off to college for the first time. And there’s all these things that his distracted mind was involved in besides whatever device, you know. But I knew he had no intention to run into me. You know, people started gathering around every time, he says, Why aren’t you pissed at him? I said, Well, why would that help him? You know, and wouldn’t help my wife, who was scared because her husband’s like lying in the street and wouldn’t help the person who hit me. Why would I do that, you know? You know, people said, Well, it’s like, What’s wrong with you? Why are you pissed? You know, I didn’t think in that moment, Wow, bodhichitta, wow. My teachers taught me this. I do to understand what I’m saying that this is just a natural way of being. This is just so natural. And one of my teachers, I’m French, and he says, Yeah, it’s so natural. We’re so unnatural. You know, we want to be supernatural, but we don’t even get natural, you know? And so the interesting miracle of this whole story I went to in the the ambulance, to the hospital and and. Had this kind of miraculous unfolding of having a surgeon available the next day, I got into emergency surgery. He happened to be a particularly skilled surgeon to rebuild my kneecap and and all this sort of stuff. And then then to two weeks later, I had a pulmonary embolism in both of my lungs. You know, when you have surgery, sometimes clots develop. So I’m back. You know, but see, I didn’t know that because when you have an embolism, it feels kind of like a stitch in your side or whatever it is. It was really uncomfortable. I couldn’t breathe and it happened to be that that day I was going to go get my stitches taken out. And as soon as I got to the doctor, the the the P.A., the physician assistant said, We need to take you to the emergency room. You recognize the signs of the embolism. And then I I go to the. The emergency room and and then they they, you know, take all the pictures and they find the two huge embolisms in each lung and they got me on anticoagulants. You know, the blood thinners and doctor comes in. Is horrible bedside manner. And he said, Wow, I’m glad we caught those things. Those things can kill you. And I think, well, thank you for sharing that. Thank you very much. Thank you for your kindness, Dr. Well, the the story continues because what happened is that because of a number of accidents that were happening, there wasn’t any place to put me in that hospital. And so I had to be transported to Redmond North to the Redmond hospital. So I go into the this the ambulance to take me on my ride north. And the first thing I do, I get in there and there’s this EMT, this young woman EMT, and I look at her and I said, So how’s your day going? You see, I mean, it’s like there’s this thing about when you take your emphasis off yourself, you, you connect with the beings and the world around you, and I said, How’s your life? You know, how is your day going? And she immediately just starts crying, just weeping, you know, and on the way to the. To the hospital in Redmond, she shares the story of the fact that her mom had just passed away, um, their older parents say that and she was fairly young and her parents had her when they were older and her parents, her mom just passed away and she’s now responsible for caring for her father. And her father has Alzheimer’s, and she has no. Other people in her life that are in that experience, and so I pop in there and who does she get? But a person who just walked the journey of Alzheimer’s was his father until he passed. And the whole way there, I didn’t think about myself at all. I said, Well, these are the resources, these are things you need to do. This is what I’ve learned from caring for a person with Alzheimer’s. And, you know, and she was just grateful and grateful and grateful. You know, I got in this like she was crying because she was so grateful and I’m going like, Wow. This is what we’re here for. So you see what I’m saying in the context of this and then the whole context of caring for my father for the three years of of the journey of Alzheimer’s. You know, he was my body sort for his reality shape shifted from any given moment to you, ever. Have you worked with somebody with Alzheimer’s or anything? Well, they can start a sentence. And the reality that the sentence associated with will be gone before the sentence is done. And other words, their realities are moving around in their short term memory is gone, and they they grab a hold of bits and pieces of long term memory and and uh. An example would be like, um, he would get up in the morning and he’d pack up to go see his parents who had, you know, died long ago. And when I first saw this behavior, I would tell him, while your parents. Have died. And he would he would go. You’re kidding me. I didn’t know that. So he would experience grief as if he heard for the first time that his parents had died. And then I went. Why would I do this to my father? You know why? And so the next time the same behavior is happening, I say, Oh yeah, I talked to your folks this morning. They’re doing just fine and, you know, but the car, you know, we’re, you know, we’re going to. He thought there was a 1936 Ford out there waiting to take him to his parents and said, But you know, the car was having a little trouble and I had to put it in the shop and. And so it’ll be a couple of days before we leave and he’d go, Oh, OK, OK. And then we’d be off to a different reality. So what I learned from all of these experiences is is how do you let go of your assumed reality in such a way that you can engage with other people’s reality and have genuine communication? You know, and that means you have to listen. You have to let go yourself. And so my relationship, my wife with my parents. You know, I I did the journey of of dementia with my mom, too for eleven years. You know, all of these things. That is my practice. You know, my relationship to the natural world, that is my practice, and I don’t think my teachers at those points of time. I don’t think about, well, this is Buddhism. You know, I happen to be a Buddhist practitioner. But I happen to to teach that. But in a moment to moment basis, you know?
Lineage
Well, you know, first, and as I mentioned, you know, I’m not a formally trained lama, OK, so I’m not I’m not the best one to talk in detail about a lot of the rituals and things like that. I had inclinations at one point to learn more specific rituals and doing trauma and all of these different things. And then I realized that that really wasn’t what my life was asking. You know, my life was asking me to demystify this, not to like, mystify it. And so I don’t really think some of the high rituals and forgery on it is all you know for most practitioners. I think they don’t either understand them. I don’t know that they’re all of the best service, you know, to Westerner practitioners. But the core practices, I think, are incredibly profound. You mentioned visualization and stuff like that. Know, even having said that, there isn’t anything wasted in ritual and forgery honor everything you can kind of think of it as holographic, you know, like if you’ve ever seen a hologram printed on a plate, a glass plate, have you seen that if you break the plate in half, the whole picture is in both halves? If you break it into quarters, the whole picture is in every corner. And if you break it into smithereens, actually, the information of the whole picture is in every smithereen, even though you may not be able to see it. So this is a true hologram done by lasers. Okay. And so which is weird. It’s like weird. How can you break something in half and have the whole, well, battery on? It is like that every every little piece of Adobe on a ritual has the whole teaching in it. OK, so there isn’t anything wasted there. So I have great respect for this, but it’s so overwhelming because there’s so many little pieces, right? I know what most of us are not going to learn to read every little piece. But one powerful piece of forgery is this the what they call the creation and perfection, stage creation and completeness completion stage where you develop a visualization? And then and then you basically dissolve it back on a kind of superficial level. But in the creation sage practice, essentially, we’re learning how the mind projects itself out and creates reality. That’s what’s so profound about it. In other words, when you’re doing a visualization of of the different, you know, they call them deities, I use the term kind of archetype in the union language. But whatever you call them, the the the yadam. Yadam is a term that means mind link you’re linking to something, you know, what are you actually linking to on an outward level? You’re linking to this visualization, but also on an inner level, you’re linking to how you create visualization. How do you create reality? How does the mind emanate? The radiance of our mind emanates and recognizes something that we call reality. You know, what is that process, you know? And so the visualization, the creation of such practices is profound in that way. You know, you, you begin to. Experience the light emanation of an image. OK, well, they’re just looking at Buddha or looking at a Tonka painting or whatever it is. And then you, you have. The experience was, of course, about a corresponding sound emanation, which is the mantra. OK, so you have light and sound, so light and sound show here. OK. I remember when I was first starting doing practice, I was terrible at visualizations. I was like hard, you know? But I loved the mattress. So I asked Lum French and I said, Well, I’m having so much trouble for doing these visualizations, but I love the mantras. He says, Oh, the mantra is the visualization. And you go like, wow. He says you just keep doing mantra, you know? That’s so I did the mantra and act upon trying. And all of a sudden the visualization part came I realized I was trying to make a visualization, not allowing the visualization to happen. OK, so there’s you’re working with sound and light, which is all basically frequencies of energy. OK. You know, like in quantum physics, matter doesn’t matter, it’s only energy. OK. Everything is a phase of energy, from a tree to an atom to whatever. And that energy morphs into the reality we see by basically our field of perception. OK. This is why Buddhism and quantum physics are so closely matched. So essentially, we become quantum physics practitioners. We we engage into the world of energy and see how it presents itself as as form. OK. You know, and in the heart, citrus, his form is emptiness, emptiness is formless, form is not other than emptiness. Emptiness is not other than form. So what is it with that, you know? Well, we see that out of nothing. We create something. You know, we’re visualizing this, we’re doing the mantra, OK? And pretty soon there’s this presence. Now, of course, each image has a kind of meaning associated with it, like medicine, Buddha is healing or my judiciary is, you know, wisdom and. And so we we start with the foundation of bodhichitta, the heart mind of out of compassion. We start with that as the foundation. And then out of the foundation of our of our loving intention and kindness, we begin to manifest a world this whole world is holding mandala of of enlightened intention. We begin to see the whole world as a field of enlightened intention. And in this moment, it is presenting itself now as manager sri or Green Tara. OK. Was these certain kinds of characteristics and then we realized, wow, wow. I’ve been doing that all along. But not seeing it as enlightened intention, I’ve been projecting my mind out based on habit patterns of my mind and assuming that’s reality until reality comes up and smacks me in the face, and then I shift my idea and then hang onto that one until that reality smacks me in the face and I shift my idea. This is all I’ve been doing that all along, that the mind radiates and recognizes form from the standpoint of emptiness. OK, but that form doesn’t have that form is like a dreamlike apparition, like it’s not solid and substantial and graspable like we think it is. It’s it’s very much like a dream at night, you know? And one of the main practices in Vojvodina is dream yoga learning how to wake up in your dream at night, recognizing it as a dream and then learning out to wake up in this dream and recognizing it as a dream. So the visualization practice helps. In that process, we begin to see that yes, all reality is dreamlike. And the one? The dreamer, if you don’t understand the dreamer, you don’t understand the how that reality is created. OK. And so you visualize and you stabilize the visualization with the mantra and so on. And then that would be like a kind of schemata meditation if there’s a focus. OK. And then you let it all go. You know, sometimes they call it the dissolving or the completion stage, but really a good word is like the perfection stage, meaning you’ve created the world now you’re going to perfected had you perfected by letting go of hanging on to attributes. You know, you see you see it just as it is just as the radiance of the wisdom mind. And then at that point, you let your mind rest in non conceptual meditation. That’s the completion stage and that would be like more like the Vipassana. OK, so in the teachings really in Rianna, it’s a union of of schemata and Vipassana by doing the creation and completion stage practice. Now. In Western science, this is very interesting question, neuro biological, psychological science, because you know about right and left brain theory, the right brain is the creative spatial and the left brain is the more empirical linear mind. Essentially, what you’re doing is you’re unifying those two aspects of the brain. You’re using the brain that has a predilection toward form, you know, an order which is the left brain by doing the creation sage practice. And then you’re integrating the spatial, unformed aspect in the completion stage. There’s even breath, you know, alternate nostril breathing and yoga is designed to help bring the two hemispheres together. Okay, so creation and completion are a fundamental way. We’re wired is it’s bringing both our spatial and linear. Things together. OK. And so, um, then you meditate for as long on conceptual meditation, for as long as you have time for. And then the third stage of that practice is you regather and the regather, you know, the energy is say, if you’re doing your own green tariffs are you’re doing green Tara practice when you get up from your cushion or your chair. And then you walk out as green Tara. The words you actually see the world is the field of green Tara’s activity. And everybody you meet, you know, green Tara is blessing, you know, through you and through the elements and all of that sort of thing. It has a profound effect on it because when you see reality as a field of enlightened intention rather than, well, that’s just a tree, that’s just a car, that’s a person. I love this, a person that pisses me off and something like that. It’s a completely different context. You began to to watch how basically compassion is echoing through everything in the universe. And you come into alignment with that. And so the negativity and all the habit patterns of the mind, you know, it doesn’t have a chance. They’re, you know, they they they pop up and you go like, Oh, well, thank you for sharing. You know, you don’t try to push them away, you don’t try to indulge in them. They just naturally are put to the service of your body chatter of your compassion because the reality you create is that context. The reality that you’re creating is a context basically of unconditional love and whatever comes up in your mind, then you go like, Well, how do I want to spend this? So for instance, like if anger comes up? You go like, wow, that’s kind of fiery. You know, if your mind doesn’t create an object for your anger. Self or other or anything, but you just boil it down to energy. And how does anger want to flow and watch the flow through love? And so in Brianna, that’s called fierce compassion. So you can take anger that could be spent negatively and you can liberate the negative qualities and you can can express it naturally, as like fiery compassion, fiery compassion would be like a parent rushing out into the street to snatch a child who you know that they don’t see a car coming and they snatch their child to safety. That’s like fierce compassion. You know? And then there’s peaceful and nurturing compassion, a sure thing. Well, whatever the case is, is that if if you if you begin to see reality as a field of enlightened intention, then every thought and every basic movement of your mind is put to that service. And then, you know, the option obscuring habitual aspects of the mind that come from our ego grasping the kind of like background noise, you know, they don’t miraculously like, disappear, but it’s like more like background noise. So that’s kind of it in a nutshell. I find that it’s incredibly profound practice that you don’t find in other forms of Buddhism.
Teacher
I think where I think the biggest stumbling block that people have on any kind of spiritual journey and I certainly experience it over time is um. We we mistake our projections upon. You know, the tradition and the teacher and so on, as as the saying, I mean, you know, we always have like these are high ideals of , you know. That her practice will yield, you know, this her or the other. But, you know, we pop out of the womb already with this, and if we happen to attract like the long jumper said, there really aren’t such thing as pathways and learning about consciousness and awareness. And so but they show up as your awareness seeks to make itself understood. And so to that extent, then we owe a great deal of gratitude to those mirrors that show up to us. But they’re not the reason that we wake up. And that’s that’s, I think, a big mistaken belief and the big stumbling blocks that happen for people, and it’s, I think, a reason why there’s so many fallen teachers in the West is there’s this unrealistic projection upon them. You know, and admittedly, even in the Tibetan tradition where there’s such an emphasis on the role of the teacher. You know, even the Dalai Lama says, I think even this toku thing, the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, I think it’s had its day. He recently has said that the idea of building up the teacher in such this large, grandiose thing is somehow responsible for it. You know? That’s that’s just the same as all the other projections of our ego mind. It’s a misperception of the thing, you know, and if you look into all the teachings, I mean, even the mystical Christian tradition, all these sorts of things, you know, teachers, you know, they don’t think there are any big deal, you know, and why are you making less, you know? And so that system, even in the Tibetan system is is fighting even it’s it’s failing because the ego is so sneaky, you know, it builds up all sorts of ways in which it projects and looks into reality. But really, moment to moment awareness and where we are like, if you look at the do you do the funeral practice? And yet, oh, well, that’s important. You know, since I’m talking about how important the funeral practices. Right? OK, and let’s as well so you do the funeral practice and you get awareness. Know your if your awareness is right, you will do the funeral practice because. It makes sense to do that. Now you may need to get a little, you know, nudging and coaching and stuff along the way. But in the new practice, the main core of the practice with the call Guru Yoga and the Guru Yoga really is you are you. Behold, the emptiness, awareness, the true face of the teacher, the true face of the lama. Emptiness awareness means that it’s your face. It’s inseparable from your face, you know. So the core of the extraordinary preliminary practices is to recognize your own face. You know, in the teachings and the practices in the teacher and not your own face, from an ego standpoint, it’s like sometimes they call it may may. May the light. Come to recognize its own face. Like, that’s the experience made the light come to recognize its own face in our experience, in our awareness. No, and what I found is that you that’s every person that you meet. You know, there’s this concerns, Artfole Premiere, which is a very famous prayer in the ocean lineages, it says there are billions of Buddhas dispatched in order to be of benefit to beings, according to their capability. And so that means that, you know, wherever we are and everything, so so we move from from overly identifying with with the teaching and the teacher. And that’s maybe a process for people, but you move from that into recognizing that there isn’t no intermediary between consciousness. You know, there wasn’t like me, Buddha teaching awareness, you know, or vice versa. But that’s just me. You know, that’s that’s this this idiot who doesn’t think of himself as a teacher fumbling through life. You know, it’s just the way I am, and I’m very nontraditional. So somebody else you know you’re going to interview is going to have a completely different thing. But speaking to the point of how important, you know, like the teacher is that you really have to understand from the get go. That your mind is going to mess with that and your presumptions about reality is going to mess with that. You’re if you have authority issues, you know, you’re just going to. Projector authority issues on them, you know, if you are, you know, all your personality traits and habit habits are going to be, you know, projections onto this sort of thing. You know, and the teachers are good, they’re going to just throw it back in your lap. And and for you to, you know, work it out through your practices, it’s. It’s a mirror to teach us anything of any teacher. Yeah, yeah, so the teacher is us. OK. The teacher may appear external, but the teacher isn’t external. And, you know, I took a few years to learn that, but the the idea of the outer teacher is there none other than an emissary of our own wisdom to begin with? OK, so that’s why if we find a really good teacher on some level, we know they’re not really teaching us something we didn’t already know. There may smack us around a little bit to to help us eliminate some of the obstacles that we we place. Kind of the. It’s a smoke screen through which we we kind of peer at our original awareness, but the teacher functions is like a clear mirror. And so my son, my yoga master, he was a flawed human being. He had, you know, his issues and so on. But you know, when I met him, the first question I asked him is about relationship because my wife and I were thinking about getting divorced for, like ten years of marriage. And, you know, there was like 200 people attending this session and everybody was like, You know, everybody that goes on a spiritual path have some relationship issues. They’re working with at some point in their life, right? Relationship of self relationship with other whatever. But you know, I shared with him the story of my, my relationship and how we we kind of came to this point of neutrality. And we’re kind of wondering, like, who are you and why are you in my life and what’s the deal? We’ve been through a ups and downs and all of this stuff and know he looked at me and he said, You know, Michael, you’re really lucky. You’re you’ve been through all the ups and downs and you come to this point where you’re not very attached to your wife right now. No, not for the very first time. You can love her. You know, and that was like. It’s like, like a cosmic at that point, because to this day, that’s one of the primary teachings, you know, from from him, from my my Buddhist masters, what does non-attached interconnectedness? What is that? What is what is love without having expectations, and I just love without grasping and holding and possessiveness? And what what is that, you know? And. So I realized, well, that’s unconditional love. When I came back. And it was just my wife again, it was a completely different relationship. You know, now we’ve been married more than 44 years. She had also gone on her own kind of parallel journey to come to that same place. And so really, you know, I don’t when I think about yoga, I don’t think about it as a discipline and all of the money on the breath exercises that I did and postures. You know, I think about it from the context of that one point. Because I don’t really think about it that much. You know, it was a moment in time a context in which kind of one of the greatest epiphanies of my life happened and the practice of that non-attachment. Oh, it was more prevalent in Buddhism than in the yoga traditions because, you know. Not to get all technical about it, but you know, about a time, what they call on, not to, you know, self or the emptiness of self and yoga tradition is rooted in what is called the hot, that the big a, the capital, the big the divine self. And there’s some kind of parallels. But but there’s still this idea of a kind of a self that you’re working toward, you know, and you come across Buddhism and he goes like, no self. And I’m going, like, what? But that’s seen a lot more accurate to me. So you could basically say, yeah, yoga brings you to the precipice of what self is Buddhism? Makes you jump off the cliff. See, you know what I mean. And so when I was ready to even my yoga master, he said that because I was always like on the edge with my practice. And he said. You know, the reason you bring yourself to the edge. Is so that you can jump. And he said, I’ll push you, but only if I have your permission. OK. But, you know, when I was deciding to jump, I met my Tibetan Buddhist teachers on the way down. They were waving, saying, How’s that going for you? And and I recognized them. I said, Oh, I would love to land more skillfully. I would love to go into free fall and be more present and relaxed in that process, you know? So they showed up at that time. You know, and so that’s I mean, the teacher, you know, Longchamp was a great teacher of honor tradition. You know, he said, there’s no such thing as pathways or ways in consciousness, but pathways show up as consciousness seeks to make itself understood. And so on an absolute level, you know, we walk this this planetary experience and we might recognize like a spiritual practice that inspires us. But that’s. The result is already there, in other words, if we’re recognizing it, the. The result that we were after in that recognition is already there are the words the teacher is the mirror of that awakening. And so if you hang around the teacher, then they keep reminding you. And they also push your buttons until you have no more buttons to push. And of course, if you’re a sincere practitioner, the practice does that same thing. But until you become a sincere practitioner, you don’t really know that. And that’s the function of the teacher is, you know, to, you know, smile initially and be nice initially and then kick you in the seat of the pants, you know, step on your corns, you know, and things like that. But it’s basically it’s kind of like when you know the word dharma or the teachings and the practices when when you know, the root idea of dharma is is something that helps us maintain direction according to our wisdom, you know? So when when our dramas are converted to Dharma? There’s a big shift. You know, most of us practice our dharma, our dramas a lot more than we practice our dharma. And so my teachers have basically helped to stimulate this shift in me as moving from being kind of a, uh, I think these ideas are really great and I think there would be a good way to live your life. Yeah, blah blah blah, blah blah. And then they say, OK, yeah, but how do you realize those you practice them, you know? And so know full circle. You know that whole teaching from my yoga master about being unattached and then being able to love, you know, my my Buddhist teacher said, Well, this is the way we would normally love if we weren’t so full of ourselves. If we weren’t so attached to ourself. And the practice in Buddhism is essentially that is recognizing the obstacles of ego grasping and and uh, you know, letting that go and and learning that we are a natural state is unconditional loving. And so my my household or dharma. My practice, you know, with my wife, it was like the. The, uh, the lab, you know, the test of my my, uh, you know, practice in my, you know, taking the tissues from my teachers and, you know, putting them into practice and, you know, finding out because, you know. If you really understand the nature of the teacher than the person that’s in front of you is your teacher. Whoever is in front of you is your teacher. As a matter of fact, the person who’s in front of you is your is a Buddha teaching you. And if they’re annoying you, they’re even more skillful Buddha. Because they’re surfacing what it is you have yet to let go of. You know, so you know, there’s this, I think, misperception about this whole idea of teachers and traditions and stuff where you you begin to use the tradition or teacher as another filter through which you experience your life around the whole point of the tradition. And the teacher is to to drop that mask away.
Yoga
Even when I was a yoga teacher, I realized that most people came to yoga. Actually, most people come to yoga as a basically a body discipline. The physical discipline and then a percentage of those folks are interested in the more what you might call the spiritual aspects of it. So I think I look at all the yoga that’s being taught here in Bend. And it’s like, I think it’s it’s so many people are kind of like body oriented. They’re sports oriented. And so yoga is just another sport. It’s like a another physical discipline to to be mastered. And so I don’t think most of the people that are engaged in the yogic sciences are interested in the spiritual piece. But even when I was teaching it, I always would move. Like, for instance, it’s really common to teach a yoga class with music, you know, and nice New-Age mellow music and and, you know, having a nice, slow presentation and stuff like that. There’s a point when I was teaching where I was going to like, you know, in our moment to moment, day to day life, we’re not going to have that all the time. And so I just stopped playing music and people went away. It was so nice and listen to the music of your breath, listen to the music of the movement of your thoughts as your body moves and so on. And and you know, some people like that, a lot of people didn’t. And so it was teaching me how people were still kind of accessing yoga on a on a surface level or early necessarily going, you know, deeper within it. And I felt, you know, in my own experience, in my own practice, that it was calling me. There was this echo that was calling me deeper. You know, it’s not unlike the Echo that I experienced every since I was a kid looking at. Looking for Four-leaf clovers and finding this. Insect city below what the surface of what I saw. Nature is the same way people love nature around here, but they use it as a kind of context for mountain biking and running and so on. But people are oftentimes plugged into their iPods and so on, and they’re not. They might like the The View and it’s fresh air, but they’re not learning how to hear what she teaches, you know, so the same thing in the yogic sciences, you can engage it on a superficial level, you know, a kind of conceptual body level . But but its original intention wasn’t that my yoga masters master was in silence for 14 years of his life, and he attained what they call a NERVA culpa summative, which means somebody without seed. And it’s very difficult to attain that level of so-called enlightenment and still stay in the body. It was like without seed. And, you know, when he came out of his silence and he began to teach people, thousands of people would come. You could look over the horizon, you know, for him to teach. And he was just a simple practitioner, you know, and but something about, um, the ability to go beyond the surface of things. I think there’s a built in thing in in us that really wants to do that, but we get distracted by the surface and kind of are satisfied with the surface. And um, when we have the inclination to go beyond that, it’s it’s a whole different game plan. Even my yoga master, he said, you know, if you’re really serious about this spiritual practice, you have to be ready for it to screw up your traditional life because it’s not going to go the way the status quo, you know, along with the status quo, it is going to challenge you. It’s going to stretch you. It’s going to stretch you out of your complacency, out of your predilection, to believing in what you see out of the, you know, it’s going to stretch you out of out of preconceived ideas you have about reality and who you think you are. And that’s a challenge. That’s why in my own experience with meditation and also teaching things like that, I notice that people have trouble taking it beyond a certain point because because of how it stretches us, you know? But there are a lot of people who are taking it beyond that. But even in the context of Buddhism, you see that that, you know, they’re always teaching about, you know, the teachings of Buddha cannot be held by the conceptual mind. I mean, he they even say he’s he thought, you know, people always putting words in the Buddhist mouth, right? They say he thought. But when he woke up that he thought to himself that this is too wondrous to be. Imagine too close to be seen and too simple to be grasped. And I know even, you know, teaching what at whatever level I can teach. I know that as soon as my I flap my gums and move my mouth, my mouth, that the words that come out land on the conceptual mind and they’re altered into something they’re not. And this is just a fundamental problem in all spiritual practices and so on that the true nature of our mind and the true nature of reality cannot be held by the conceptual mind. We can use the conceptual mind to kind of direct us. But the the realization of our awareness can’t be held hostage to our ideas about it, and so that’s challenging. And so in the yogic traditions, it kind of started to shake, shake my ideas about reality, Luce. But I didn’t really have a frame for framework for the experience I had once it was shaken loose. OK, and when I’m at that point, I met my my Tibetan um fardre on a Buddhist teachers and it’s like, Whoa, you know, where have you been? All my life is like, what they were teaching didn’t seem really new to me. But there was a framework through which they taught that allowed me to. Have more realization or to kind of unmask and uncover, you know, what, what has always been.
Personalities
I don’t know that you can define a specific personality trait or something who’s attracted to a particular style of Buddhism because there’s a mixture. For instance, like I teach the way I teach. So there’s some people that appreciate the way I teach and don’t necessarily have a great connection to Patriota, but they have to kind of Buddhism in general and haven’t really gotten inside boundaries because, excuse me, other people that are more seasoned and insincere practitioners, you know, tends to be older people that have. But but lately we’ve been getting younger people, which is kind of surprising. And young families with kids and the kids are coming and it’s amazing. These kids like, wow, they are already masters, you know, it’s like, Geez. So I don’t know that I could say this is advisory on appeals to such and such. one of the other, because like going on my journey, I was attracted to saying at one point and then caggiano and another point. So I, you know, so I don’t know how that actually is, but I think in it more kind of general idea is that, you know, such in, you know, the natural, great perfection, the natural self liberated state that really wasn’t taught so much, even in Buddha’s own time. You know, they talk about just taught to small like groups and transmission of of. Those distilled teachings were kept in small groups. And then by the time they came through, you know, putting a symbol of it in Tibet, they were more widely dispersed, you know, through the Nygma lineage and so on. And then when? You know, China came in invaded and teachings came out, you know, had Bhava said that when the Iron Bird flies and the horse runs on iron wheels, the Dharma will be spread across the excuse me that the people of Tibet will be spread across the planet like ants and the dharma will come to the land of the red faced people. You’ve heard that. That’s OK. So the idea is that this time is like ripe for this teaching. OK. And why? Because associated is what they call a non graduated past. OK. You don’t do this, this, this, this and you get this, what you get introduced to the nature of your mind. OK? And then you work out the details. You know, some of the words the on is what they call a resultant vehicle, not not a causal vehicle, early school teachings. There’s cause and effect, you know, and forgery on it. It’s a result on vehicle mean in the result car rises in the moment you sit to practice. OK. You’re not doing this to get a result, the result is already there and then you’re basically kind of enhancing it, but it’s already there. So this kind of time where everything’s changing so much. That’s why in the prophecy cycles, this type of teaching is really available, you know, and you know, some people have asked me, Well, why is this such and teachings so available to us in the West? I mean, it’s so distilled. This is this is are we something like great thing? As you well know, we’re kind of dense. We need something that’s going to cut through quickly. I say that humorously, but also, um, you know, the time is not for like going out and spending ten, 20 years at a monastery or meditating. There’s such a rapid change during the degenerating time cycles that non graduated paths have to come up to cut. Like you just called cutting thoroughly, you know, it’s like, you know, quickly sometimes. What I’m teaching like the two or three on, as you know, Buddhism, you know, Hindi owner Treverton, Mahayana and Badree other, I say while the early school teachings are, yes, it’s really good to wake up. Okay. And then the Mahayana teachings? Yeah. But they add the body site for our so it’s really good to wake up, but not only for yourself, but for the benefit of all beings. And then Audriana or Mahayana Part two, you know, forge Rianna teachings come up and I say, Yeah, if honored, you know, they follow along, you know, the teachings of the Buddha and the foundational teachings and then the Mahayana. So it’s really good to get to wake up not only for yourself, but for the benefit of all beings. You know that everybody jumps and they go, like, So did you get it? You know that that search certain teachings are, you know? OK, non graduated. OK. You know, immediate now doesn’t mean, you know, you don’t have to practice and all these sorts of things, but. So it’s a very different sort of thing. And so I think that that that quality appeals to a lot of people from kind of two different perspectives. one, it appeals to people because they think from a trend standpoint, there’s no place to go and nothing to practice. They really like that. And they’re lazy. OK. And then they come in here and they go, Oh crap, what’s all this stuff, you know? I said, Well, this is the context. You know, this is the field of enlightened intention. Do we we need to create in order to for certain to be beneficial? Otherwise, it’s very dangerous. OK. You know, the ego loves not to have to do anything and feel like it’s being special at the same time. OK, so there are people that may come in with that perspective and then they may get a rude awakening and if they keep hanging around, they realize what’s going on. And then there’s a group of people which I humorously call recovering Catholics. OK. And a lot of them, admittedly that come here, that they grew up with a lot of ritual, but they didn’t really understand the context and their beliefs and things like that, and they kind of like, you know, some of the the ritual. Um, but uh, this is a better context for that ritual. So there’s that kind of demographic, you know, and then there’s a lot of people who really don’t know what they’re looking for and they end up coming here. You know, I teach through the community college, so I get all sorts of people from just tire kickers to, you know, a really wide demographic through the community college class and. A lot of people come just because they’ve heard about Buddhism and they thought it might be fun or they’ve traveled to the East and they saw it , and they like to learn a little bit more specifically about it. So. So there’s there’s all sorts of of of ways, but I think it’s the role of hydrogen into today’s is quite profound. All of Buddhism, for that matter, but very specifically in the sense of it’s got such a core. But Western science, correlation and study, you know, they’ve done lots of studies with monks, and that’s why they hooked them up to circuitry and measured all these different things. And so one of the things that happens when you’re working with, like the creation stage and completion stage practices is that it messes with your your mind and makes it more narrowly plastic. You know what neuroplasticity means? OK, so a lot of the research that they’ve been doing about meditation in general and so on has to do with neuroplasticity. They find when the mind settles out that it has way less anticipatory stress going into a situation. If the situation stresses you, you experience that momentarily and then it resets very quickly. And so what happens is that, um, the um, our mental capability and our mind in general becomes very adaptable. OK and more spacious, you know, and and that’s why you create the context of bodhichitta that that adaptability in the field of compassion and kindness makes us much more effective in the world in terms of of how we conduct skillful activity. You know, whatever context that we happen to be in, you know, so and it’s cool that the Dalai Lama is so interested in science. You know, he’s a scientist monk’s to go to Emory University, you know, to to learn, you know, science so that he can get the language down Western language down because Buddhism really is more of a science and practice than it is a belief. It’s very refined over, you know, all these thousands of years. It’s and so we’re now being able to whom to validate for the Western mind its efficacy. You know that it yeah, it’s it’s kind of like for lack of a better way of saying it if. You practice this way, you become a Buddha. You know, it’s not like there was a Buddha, and as poor people practice around, only hope, maybe in some. Ten lives from now become a Buddha. They say no. To this, you could come up with this matter of fact, your Buddha nature is revealing this to you from the beginning . And so it’s kind of like a technology of awakening, like even using the Mollah, for instance, you know, people like, Well, why do you have to how do I even do all this? And they whine Western if I have to count your mantras and I. I gave her my little violin. I mean, I went through the same thing and says, well, two things one repetition is more powerful than truth. You know, this is why. The context of our current political environment, you know, um, people can say the same lie over and over and over again, the mind gets inured to it and people will actually start to believe it. Every dictator in the world has known this, you know? Um, but uh, repetition is more powerful. The truth, whatever we repeat to ourselves, our unconscious mind, Adobe says truth. So our internal self-talk, you’ve got to be careful there. So what do you repeat on a daily basis? Well, we’re going to ask you to repeat a sound signature of your enlightened intention on Monday. Pardon me, home on the phone home when you find home among beans are good diplomacy publicity you. And this is what we’re asking you to repeat, and we want you to repeat this at least 100,000 times. Know and people going right now hundred thousand times like, you know, why here there their remuneration as well if you’re at a negative side. You know, I said, Well, yeah, I’ve had a negative for how many times do you you repeat that negative thought in any given day. Probably 100,000. I mean, it’s that many. It could be that many, you know, I know if you repeat that negative thought over and over again, what are you going to experience? Negativity, you know, says all I’m asking for suggesting that if you. We’d like to make, you know, do something different. OK, that repeat this mantra and focus on that, and it’ll change your life. It does it change. It’s a technology and another from a Western standpoint. When you have a kinesthetic sense, when you’re repeating a mantra it, it becomes more visceral than conceptual. This is standard awareness in psychological science. It’s called anchoring. OK, so when you do this, you’re anchoring the intention and the mantra, so you’re not just in your head, you know, it becomes every cell, every aspect of your being is oscillating and resonating with that intention, you know? So I mean, it’s a very wonderful, you know, technology. And so these are the sorts of things like I like to share with people. And then once I kind of get that to go like, Oh, that makes sense. You know, the Western mind says it needs to make sense to me. Well, even Buddha Todd, he says, don’t accept this because I tell you only if it makes sense to you. So you have to has to make sense. And then, of course, Western linear mind, you know, you come to a teacher and the teacher says, Well, um. Do this practice 100,000 times. And if I were an ethnic Tibetan or someone in the east who is used to that kind of tradition, you should. Thank you, teacher. I will do. You know, Western minds us well, why? What’s that going to do for me? You know, that sort of thing. And so you have to kind of. The fine line between, you know, the tradition, you know, and the western expression of it, and we’re only now, I think coming into the time where . How the West will be expressing by Adriano, just just kind of like the beginnings of that sort.
Natural World
But Tarin, my wife, her name, Tarin, means it’s a glaciated like it’s a geological term for a high mountain, like when we met and fell into attachment, which blossomed into love. We met on a several hundred mile backpacking trip through the Central Cascades in Washington Olympic Peninsula, the Olympic Mountains and allow the mountains and in Oregon. And so our relationship began in that context. And so that blossomed, you know, through our relationship. And she was always taught about identifying geological features and flowers growing up and and I’d had that inclination. And so we developed that over time. So we had kind of been coming naturalists, you know, we have we can identify flowers and all this sort of stuff. People say, Well, why? Why are you so preoccupied? You know, we go on hikes with people and they think, Well, we’re trying to get to this mountain or we’re trying to get to the stream. What takes so long? And says, Well. Why are you going so fast? What is the point? You know, the journey is the thing, it’s not the. You know, your projection of what you’re going to experience when you get to some endpoint. You know, what do you miss? Along the way and it will take forever to go a mile down on her hands and knees, looking at flowers and and seeing what they teach us and so on. So, you know, I just realized that was just such a mirror of the Buddhist past. And but you see that in Native American spirituality, you see, you know, how does our context teach us whether it’s relationships or whatever, but the natural world has this way because you kind of think of it as kind of untamed wilderness, you know, having not been placed to the use of humans yet sort of thing. And so you go and then it it. Just teaches. Know everything that we look at, you know, from, you know, the teachings and Buddhism. About. You know, reality is like a moon’s reflection in a lake. Well, I’ll tell you, go out and look at a moon’s reflection in a lake, you don’t really get that you have a conceptually, but go out and reach into a lake and try to grab the moon that you see reflected in it. And it becomes visceral. You know, it becomes like you were using the word embodied, you know, you know, you find out how this is. So there’s all sorts of natural metaphors that come up in Buddhism, you know, crystals being the, you know, the imagination. The clarity of a crystal is like our original nature. You know, all of these different things. And so. Um, my wife and I are oftentimes partners in like camping and hiking and so on, but it’s always the journey that is more important and if we get to the goal. So or if we don’t get to the goal, you know, so, you know, we just kind of hold hold that lightly. I had a. I had a dream, a pivotal dream of being in the natural world many, many, many years ago and, you know, I was hiking up the mountain. Did you ever climb south, sister over here by chance? It’s a popular one. You know, it’s like a pilgrimage. You know, you can see the lines of people gone. But 11, there’s several routes up up south, sister and one route. I wouldn’t recommend that I happen to go that route one time very often broken rocks and all this sort of stuff. I had this dream about going up this mountain. And so I was climbing up, and all of the stones I was putting my feet on were kind of unstable and whatever, so I would get it to where it was stable. And then I would take another step up until I was stable. But then I realized that the stone that I left, I didn’t need any more sort of like, kick it away. And then I would go up to the next stone and then I would kick that one away and I would go up to the next stone . OK, so I’m almost my goal is to get to the top, you know, because I knew that if I got to the top of the mountain, this would be a most precious most. Vast vista. Enlightenment, you know, it’s so I get up and go up and I go up again and I’m just within a few feet of the top. And then something moved in my mind, I said, this is. There’s something not right about this. And I turned around and I looked at this amazing group of people at the base of the mountain who were wanting to climb up the mountain and the every stone I kicked away made it harder. For them. So I just started crying and I realize how foolish I was, and I turned my back on my goal and I walked back down to the mountain and I replaced every stone. And I stayed at the bottom of the mountain to to help make sure that people’s footing was stable to go up on their own path. So one of the things? That I’ve learned about, you know, the natural world is that that, you know, it is such a uh. It’s our original context. Of our original mind, you know? And so if we can learn to read her and to listen to her. You know, and the advisory on a tradition that reinforces that for me because you know, the the the wisdom bikinis or the elements earth, water, fire, wind in space. That’s what we’re composed of. And the dying process. Earth dissolves into water. Water dissolves into fire. Fire dissolves into wind. When dissolves into space. You can watch the dying process mirrored and the elementals. What actually happens? The composition of our natural analog body has this correspondence in nature and the teachings even talk about then when those elements begin to dissolve. There are corresponding experiences, you know, and the Dickens’s are teaching us all the time. You know, you watch a leaf fall and she’s teaching you, you know, you watch the wind blow, the prayer flags carrying the prayers, all beings. You know that the bikini of wind is is a vehicle for doing those things, you know?
My interest in what drives people to a journey of self-discovery continued in high school when I made a short film about the individuation process. I called it “Roles and Jam”, referring to the masks we wear and how that false self gets us into so much trouble. Although I played the game of excelling as a student and finding myself in leadership positions in various school activities, a part of me was a detached observer. It was simply a mask I was wearing to be a part of the high school scene.
I was also interested in the scientific approach to what makes people tick. I began my college experience by majoring in biochemistry. Due to my academic performance in high school I was placed in advanced classes. I remember a moment in a biochem lab when I was isolating DNA from a desiccated rats liver. When I saw the slimy material dripping from the glass rod in my hand, I thought to myself, “What does this have to do with anything?” Later on, one of my roommates killed himself in our shared apartment. He literally blew his DNA all over the place. As I picked up pieces of brain from furniture and album jackets, I had an epiphany. I entered the Religious Studies program and graduated with a degree in Comparative Religions.
the true nature of mind as reflected in wilderness,
lends itself well to the practices of Vajrayana.
I went on to graduate study in theology and clinical psychology and took deacon ordination in the Methodist Church. In 1975, my seminary sent me as their representative the to the World Council of Churches meeting in Nairobi Kenya. My eyes were opened to the global church and how it was exported to places around the world. I saw how the power belief often superseded awareness of local needs (ie.missionary work) and experienced another epiphany. I created a multimedia production contrasting Christian ideals with the simplicity of native customs and practices.
I left seminary and decided to follow my inclinations toward meditation and inner direction. The journey took many paths with lots of twists and turns. I studied with a Hopi shaman, a Zen master, and engaged in various meditation practices. I eventually found a spiritual mentor in the yogic tradition and studied and practiced/taught yoga for many years. I was a licensed massage therapist with my own private practice. I even got certified to teach the in Enneagram tradition of personality awareness and development.
Finally, I went to a seminar taught by a couple of brothers who were Tibetan Buddhist masters and I was home. What they taught was inscribed upon my heart long before my parents were born. I recognized an echo, a trace of a long forgotten memory. What they taught was, “no sessions, no breaks.” I began to practice in the Nyingma lineage of Vajrayana Buddhism and never looked back.
As years went by, people began asking me to teach about Buddhism and, long story short, this led to the founding of the Natural Mind Dharma Center in Bend Oregon. I teach here and through the local community college. I also guest lecture at local high schools when they offer world religion courses. I am closely connected to the hospice community, offering classes on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and volunteering as requested to be present for the final breaths of some folks.
Now, backing up a bit, this entire journey played out on a backdrop of householder dharma. I have been married for more than forty-four years to a wonderful woman named Tarn. She has been a supportive partner along the way. I worked in many jobs: solar and woodstove sales and installation, an outdoor and sporting goods store, bookstore manager, wild bird shop sales (birdseed, feeders, etc.)—whatever it took to honor my end of the financial responsibilities. I found this work to be the best of all fields in which to practice moment to moment awareness.
offering classes on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and
volunteering as requested to be present for the final breaths of some folks.
This story is also framed by my primary practice of sojourning in the natural world. I always heard teachings emanate from rocks, plants, rivers, deserts, and mountains. These have been my main teachers. My wife and I are consummate wildflower and geology nerds. We take weekly hikes into the wilderness to identify the plants and geological features. Every bit of botany and geology mirrors a teaching about awareness. The dakinis of earth, water, fire, wind, and space, speak in echoes of the primordial mind.
My root teacher, Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche who passed away in 2010, had the same connection with nature. They called him “hurricane” because, as a child, he would tear around the countryside laughing and enjoying the dance of untamed wilderness. I had a formal connection with the Padmasambhava Buddhist Center until he died. My current living teacher, Lama Rinchen Phutsok, also enjoys the natural world. When he travels here from Kathmandu, we often take hikes together.
My close lineage is Dudjom Tersar, beginning with Dudjom Lingpa, to Dudjom Rinpoche, to my personal teachers. There were many signs that pointed to this tradition, not the least being its connection to my mentor in the Christian world, Thomas Merton. Merton met my root teacher and spent an extended time with Chatral Rinpoche. I also had dreams of Dorje Drollo, a Nyingma deity/archetype, even before I met my Tibetan teachers.
My introverted nature and inclination to discover the true nature of mind as reflected in wilderness, lends itself well to the practices of Vajrayana. Moment to moment awareness of bodhicitta, the heart/mind of compassion, is reflected in natural cycles and tested in the realm of work and relationships. In particular, the non-graduated path of Dzogchen is a perfect example of practicing with “no sessions, no breaks,” and the Dudjom Tersar Ngöndro has all elements of this complete practice.
