The Role of the Teacher

How does our relationship with a spiritual teacher change as practice matures? In this passage, James Low uses the image of a jigsaw puzzle to explore how what begins as trust gradually becomes direct knowing.

James: As long as the individual is on the path and has not reached an experience of self validation, there will always be a need for some sort of analysis, checking out where she is. The thing has not been demonstrated from the inside out, there is still a need for an external confirmation. Its like doing a jigsaw puzzle when the picture has still not emerged. One has to look back to the illustration on the box now and again. At a certain time it just comes together and there is no need to refer to the picture any more. You just go on knowingly fitting pieces together.

What the teacher of a system provides then is the picture on the box. It is a frame of reference, a meaningful context without which the practitioner may feel lost or even abandon the attempt to practise.

An educated practitioner will also know that the system she is practising is perhaps only one of a family of similar systems. Sometimes it will be helpful to look at these other systems and be aware of their similarities and differences. At other times to do this is of no use. When actually practising ones own system it is important to feel it is the best, or at least to give oneself totally to it.

From James Low, Yogins of Ladakh, p. 190

James' analogy of the jigsaw puzzle illuminates something important about the student-teacher relationship. Initially, the teacher provides the picture on the box. Their words and example give us a way of orienting ourselves when our own experience is still fragmentary. Without that orientation, it can be difficult to know whether the scattered pieces belong together at all.

Also illuminating is James' explanation of self validation. This is not a matter of confidence in one's own opinions or experiences. Rather, it is the point at which what has been understood through the teacher's guidance becomes evident in one's own experience. The understanding is no longer borrowed. It has been, in James' words, “demonstrated from the inside out.”

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How to Interact Around Practice

In this conversation with students, Ken McLeod explains how to be helpful in conversations with others who practice. He’s very clear: don’t offer advice, interpretations, insights, or theories. Forget about telling someone else what you think is really going on with them. Instead, pay attention to your own experience and from there, ask questions that help others understand their own experience more clearly and completely.

This is wonderful advice for conversations of all kinds. How easily I forget this. All too often my conversations with friends or family are mired by my own projections—especially the desire to be perceived as wise or insightful. This is a path right into the blind alley of naming patterns, offering frameworks, or saying what I think the other person needs to hear. Such efforts may sound thoughtful, but they can move the conversation away from the one thing that might actually help: fuller contact with their own experience.

From Interacting Around Practice

Ken: Now, the reason I’m going into this in such detail, Susan, [laughs] is that, in thinking about things this way, there is the key to how you interact with other people when you’re talking about practice. When you’re interacting with other people, you don’t give them theories. You don’t tell them what you think is happening to them or in them or around them, or whatever. Your role is to help them understand their experience, period. Okay? Is to help them understand their experience.

Now, when they understand their experience—and you all know this yourselves—when you understand your experience clearly, do you know what to do?

Student: Yes.

Ken: And this is one of the points about understanding. One can formulate problems in different ways, but often a formulation of a problem doesn’t give you any information about how to resolve it. And in that case, I feel that the formulation of the problem is incomplete because it doesn’t point to anything.

And some time ago I was coaching, or doing a workshop with the legal department of a corporation. And, I’d worked with these people a few times before, and so they knew me and that was fine, and I’d interviewed everybody, and they all got along very well, and they were good in their communications. And the day of the workshop was approaching, and I was beginning to panic. What do I do? Because one of the areas I work on is communications, but they didn’t have any communications problems, nothing major. And being lawyers, they knew all about conflict already, so there’s nothing to do there. "What’s this workshop going to be about?" And I was building up to a fairly decent level of panic. And I said, “There’s something I’m missing here.” And I went through my notes and in my head all of the interviews, and then I realized that everybody had said one thing over and over again: “We have too much work and not enough time.” Oh, okay, that’s what we talk about. Now, too much work and not enough time. That’s a statement of a problem, right?

Well, those of you who have worked in a corporate environment, what can you do about the work? It just keeps coming, doesn’t it? Yeah. Okay. So nothing to be done there. What can you do about time? Anybody figured out how to get more than 24 hours in a day? No. More than seven days in a week? No. Can’t do anything about that. So this is the formulation of a problem that doesn’t point anywhere. And that’s where I started the workshop, divided them up into groups and said, “Your first challenge is to come up with three formulations of this problem that doesn’t use the word work or time.” We got three very good ones, and one of them which we could work with variously, was, “We have difficulty in establishing priorities.” And that just opened up. And so we had a great day in which we discussed how to establish priorities, what were the priorities, and led to very significant reorganization of some of the workflows and things like that.

This is what I mean about a complete formulation of the problem. That’s when you understand the problem. And when you really understand the problem, then you have a direction for a solution. This is what’s contained in the four noble truths. There is the problem, which is suffering. And then you have the genesis of the problem. And you see we’re moving to a more complete understanding right at this point, which is emotional reaction, okay? And the deepest level of emotional reaction—which is that blanking out when an experience arises—that’s ignorance, not knowing. So what’s the solution? Hmm? Oh, okay. I’ll give you the Buddhist term for the solution, but then you’ve gotta translate this into English. Nirvana! That’s a solution. [Laughs] Now, you translate it. What’s the solution?

Student: No self.

Ken: [Laughs] No.

Student: Knowing?

Ken: Knowing! Exactly. Knowing your experience completely. That’s it. So, what is the intention when you interact with each other about your practice?

Student: Each one know their own practice or know it.

Ken: Well, when you’re interacting with a person, your role is to help them know their experience completely. Yes, Janneke? [Laughs]

Janneke: And how does one accomplish that? In terms of the way you interact in terms of the questions—

Ken: Yeah, yeah. I was gonna get there [laughs], because that’s the fourth noble truth, isn’t it?

Janneke: What?

Ken: The way, exactly. It pays to learn this stuff, you know, it’s really useful [laughs]. How do you do it? Now, the reason I’m making such a big deal about the setup, is that if you have this clearly in your mind to start with, you’re going to interact with each other much more productively

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Bring Your Life Into Your Practice

A question I've heard people ask over and over again is: "How do I bring my meditation practice into my life?" Ken McLeod's response is usually something like: That's the wrong question. Bringing practice into life doesn't work. Instead, bring your life into your practice. He makes this point very powerfully in this passage from the Heart Sutra Workshop, session 4:

Ken: Generally people seek how to apply these practices to their lives. I think this is very problematic. In some traditions of Buddhism anyway, there’s a very, very deep bias regarding life, and it’s entrenched in vocabulary—at least in the Tibetan tradition. You know, you have your word for meditation sessions, which is thun (pron. tun), and then you have the word for the rest of your life, which is thun mtshams (pron. tun sang), which means between meditation sessions. In other words, from this point of view, you’re only truly living when you’re meditating. And this kind of attitude has come up a lot in various groups in the West, and it creates a real tension between people’s spiritual practice and their lives. They feel, “Oh, my spiritual practice—I can’t put as much energy into it as I want because it’s going to take away time from my life.” And so it ends up with a total no-win situation. And it’s very, very destructive. So I don’t like that way of thinking at all. I prefer to think of practice in this way.

Practice is the cultivation of attention. Cultivation of attention, exercise of awareness, whatever you want. During your formal meditation periods you’re cultivating attention unmixed with other activities. During the rest of your life you’re cultivating attention mixed with activities. So when you’re walking, you walk in attention. When you speak, you speak in attention. And so forth.

Which doesn’t mean to watch every word that you say; it just means to listen to yourself speak so you hear the sound of your own voice while you are speaking. Very few people do that. They start speaking, and they stop listening to themselves. They just go on, and on, and on, and say things that they really wish they hadn’t said. If you’re listening to the sound of your own voice as if you were listening to another person, you will very rarely say something you regret. Because as soon as you start down that road, you’ll hear the difference in your voice and something will go, “Oh, I don’t think this is such a good place to go.”

So rather than think of bringing practice to life, think of bringing life into your practice. So that—how do I bring walking into my practice? How do I bring washing the dishes into my practice? How do I bring taking care of my children into my practice? And this is very important because when we think of applying practice to life we think of finding this nice calm clarity, and then we’re going to take that nice calm and clarity and bring it to life. How well does this work? As I said, the best military plans last until first contact with the enemy. If you bring your life into practice, then two things shift. One is, you have no choice but to find that calmness and clarity within the experience of life itself. You’re not gonna bring it to life, you have to find it in your experience. Which is exactly what we have to do anyway.

And the second thing is, it’s a practice. How many times have you failed to practice meditation perfectly? [Laughter]

Student: Six or seven.

Ken: Thousand? Million? [Laughter] That’s why we call it a practice because we don’t expect to succeed—we just keep trying. That’s what you do in your life: you bring your life into a practice. “Okay, I didn’t do that so hot, let me try it again.” So one tends to take a much less punishing attitude to one’s self. Which in turn creates the willingness to make further efforts. Because you don’t—how many have that harsh critic flying around in them? Yeah. So that’s the last piece I think. Take your life into your practice. And work with these tools. You will fail thousands of times. So, you’ve already failed that way in your meditation. It hasn’t stopped you from practicing meditation. You know, so you haven’t walked mindfully down the street. Well, maybe next time; maybe next time.

A passage from one of Ken's sutra sessions describes what has proved to be one of the most powerful ways of bringing life into practice for me.

As a child, I learned that interrupting adults was an effective way to get attention, and I invested a lot energy in mental rehearsals of what to say. This habit persisted into adulthood, and I learned the hard way that both habits were highly problematic! Learning to let go of thinking, in favour of listening rather than constantly preparing to say something and interrupting people to say it, has made a huge difference to my life.

Once you learn to drop into what is actually happening, you also start noticing much more about what is going on in conversations—the moments when attention drifts from listening towards rehearsing a response, and the impulse to fill every silence. You start to become very comfortable not saying anything, because the need to be someone diminishes. It’s so relaxing.

From Sutra Session 10, June 13, 2010. Unpublished.

NOTE: In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind. In these sutra sessions Ken converses informally with students about life and practice.

Ken: The big thing is, what do we do in meditation? Here we sit, and a thought comes up, and we recognize it, and go back to the breath. Right? And we do that again, and again, and again. What we're doing is practicing letting go of the thinking process. That's what we're doing.

Now, when you're having a conversation with someone, if you're like most of us, you start thinking immediately what you're going to say to them even before they finished, right? And that's what prevents people from hearing each other. They've got 20 percent of the attention going to what the other person is saying, 80 percent of it is going to: "How am I going to respond? How am I going to look good? How am I not going to offend them?" etc., etc.

That's all internal stuff, all our internal thinking. So as we meditate more and more, we just keep letting go of that, and we don't even notice that we're letting go of it. And we keep coming back, and just listening to the person. And lo and behold, we may hear what they have to say. And now it's a very different kind of dynamic. So what a lot of people find is that as they practice meditation, after about a month or two—and I get this all the time with people—I say, "How's your meditation going?"

They say, "I don't know. I don't think it's going anywhere. I don't seem to be getting anything out of it. It's just thoughts, and thoughts, and thoughts. And if there aren't thoughts, then there are feelings. It's just a big mess. I don't think I'm getting anywhere."

And I say, "Well, how's your life going?"

And they say, "Funny you should ask. Things just seem to be going more smoothly. I seem to be getting along better with everybody." And they just don't put the two things together, because it's not an obvious cause and effect kind of thing. So as you practice letting go of thinking, thinking, thinking, you may find yourself just being a bit more responsive and a bit more attuned to how things are in your life.

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What Meditation Is For

People sometimes ask what I do on retreat, and what difference it makes to spend that much time meditating alone and in silence. Often the question feels conversational rather than an invitation to elaborate, but when someone is genuinely curious, much of what I would say is in this talk by Ken McLeod. It's the first talk from a retreat on an advanced practice—not where you might look to find the answers to such basic questions—but Ken is teaching a traditional practice from Vajrayana Buddhism to students of Zen, so he starts by introducing meditation from the Vajrayana perspective.

Ken begins with a basic meditation instruction: return to what is already there and rest. Let the body settle into attention. Let the breath breathe itself. When thoughts and feelings carry you away, as soon as you notice, return and rest in attention again. Practice is not maintaining a special state. It is this repeated returning. Ken also explains why meditation can be demanding. What is true, he says, is simple; what prevents us from knowing what is true is extraordinarily complex. We spend much of our lives moving away from experience—trying to improve it, suppress it, explain it, act it out, distract ourselves from it, or turn it into something else. Meditation begins to reveal those movements because, for a while, we stop giving ourselves so many places to go or to hide.

One of his central points is that we are robbed of attention when we are unable to experience what is arising. When a pleasant or unpleasant feeling, sensation, memory or impulse arises and we are able to remain with it, attention stays available. But if the experience feels threatening or intolerable, we recoil from it. If it feels pleasurable or desirable, we may reach for it, try to hold onto it, or merge with it. Both movements are forms of reactivity. Instead of simply experiencing what is there, attention gets pulled into anger, desire, avoidance, distraction, story, justification, suppression, grasping, or some other attempt to manage the experience. In that sense, attention has been “robbed.” Whether we experience anger, desire, jealousy, shame, sadness, or restlessness—the problem is not that these feelings appear, but rather what happens when we cannot experience them directly. We react instead. And the reaction generates another layer of experience, and then another.

Ken’s instruction is to neither analyse our feelings nor to get rid of them. He makes a sharp distinction between experiencing a feeling, suppressing it and acting it out. To experience it is to feel what is happening in the body, the emotional quality of it, and the stories and associations that accompany it, while remaining present in a wider field of awareness. As he puts it rather wonderfully, "The function of a feeling is to be felt."

Over time, this changes the relationship to what arises. Anger does not have to dictate what happens next. Sadness does not have to be escaped. Impatience does not need to be disguised as patience. Even confusion can simply be confusion. Something that seemed to require an immediate response can be experienced instead, and in that experience a little more freedom becomes possible.

This is one answer I might give to the question of what meditation does. It doesn't necessarily make life easier, but we can be in experience without being so completely governed by impulses to avoid, grasp, resist or alter it. As reactivity loosens and the repetitive thoughts and stories that sustain it begin to subside, there is more freedom in how we respond, and a sense of peace when we are no longer fighting or opposing what is.

There is another reason this talk stays with me. Ken places a particular practice from the Tibetan tradition—chö—in a much broader landscape. Some approaches work gradually: you cultivate capacities and qualities that eventually enable you to meet experience more fully. Others transform the way experience is perceived. Still others, including chö, mahamudra and dzogchen, take a more direct approach, beginning with what is already present rather than first working to develop capacities or transform experience. These gradual and direct approaches look very different, but they can be complementary: step-by-step practice can help develop our capacity to recognise and remain in what is always already here.

Perhaps that is why this teaching feels both advanced and introductory. Chö has a fascinating history. Its traditional form involves elaborate visualisations and deliberately entering situations that provoke disgust and powerful fears about death, but the principle Ken begins with requires none of this. Sit down. Let the body settle. Let the breath come and go. Notice what takes your attention. Notice the moment you come back. And instead of trying to make experience different, see what happens when you are willing to be here for it.

For someone who has never meditated, that may be as good an introduction as any I know. For those who have practised for years or decades, it's not a bad place to return to.

From: Chö: Cutting Through Demonic Obsessions, part 1

This excerpt is from the first session in Ken's chö retreat. The full talk covers much more ground including the origins of chö, working with difficult feelings, and the relationship between gradual and direct approaches to practice. I highly recommend listening to the whole session.

Ken: Now when very strong things come up, they rob us of our attention, just [falling sound] and we fall into reaction. And it’s that process that chö focuses on. How are we robbed of our attention? We are robbed of our attention because we are afraid of experiencing what is arising.

And this applies to our ordinary lives. Why do you get angry? Well, we only get angry when we feel weaker than what we are facing. If you feel stronger you don’t get angry. If you feel weaker, in the moment of anger you feel weak and fear arises that something terrible is going to happen. So there’s an eruption of energy into anger in which you try to destroy what you’re facing before it can overwhelm you.

So that’s how we’re robbed of our attention. We’re robbed of our attention because we are afraid of experiencing that uncomfortable feeling inside. And if there’s anything you take from this retreat, I’d like it to be that one understanding, that the problems that we experience in our life, which lead us into this practice in the first place, arise because we are afraid of experiencing just what is right in that moment.

So we withdraw from it, we try to change it in some way, we try to manipulate, shut it down, whatever. And that’s why we react with anger, or with desire, greed, jealousy, whatever. Once those things start they just snowball, moving things more and more out of balance.

So in your meditation practice, as I said earlier this evening, the essence of meditation is resting in what is already there. Now when we first start to practice, when we rest, what do we find is there? A mass of thoughts and confusion. Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter.

And I’ve had many people say after their first practice of meditation, “Oh, I don’t think I’m cut out for this. My mind didn’t quiet down for a moment.” Well, when I first practiced meditation, I knew I wasn’t cut out for it, I couldn’t sit for more than one minute quite literally. I had to resort to extreme measures to sit for two. That’s always the experience—don’t be afraid of that. If your mind is in complete chaos, jumble jumble all over the place, that’s what you’re experiencing right there.

So experience the chaos. Experience confusion. Or as one teacher said, “Remember, confusion is just confusion.” That’s it. You can use the breath to help you with that, that is rest with the breath and jumble, jumble, jumble. Then you come back. But just experience the confusion, don’t try and do anything with it.

That’s the first step in cutting. You cut your ideas about how it should be and how you want to be and you experience just how you are and just what is. And when you do that, then you start experiencing how the body is. All of these different sensations and discomforts and tugs and tensions in the body. That's what's there. And you'll struggle to find a more comfortable position. But there isn't one. And then you'll struggle with all kinds of ways and tricks to play on yourself to make it a pleasant experience. But it isn't.

Just forget about all of that. Again, you cut your ideas about how you think it should be and how you want it to be. And you just experience what is. And as your body becomes accustomed to the practice of sitting, you realize, "Oh, I can't just sit here."

And then you begin to find that feelings come up, unasked for, demanding your attention. And you may say, “Go away feeling, you’re disturbing my meditation.” But they don’t. They demand, they keep coming back, they want. And some people they think, “Oh this is a distraction,” so they sit, they sit very, very hard and they create a kind of quietness but it’s really blocking the feelings. And they can be very good in their practice, but as soon as they start practicing all those feelings come flooding back. And so there’s no real peace there.

What is the function of a feeling? Well, the function of a feeling is to be felt. It sounds almost trivial to say that, but when you refuse to feel a feeling, you’re denying that feeling the opportunity to fulfill its existence. And they don’t take that very lightly. They just keep coming back, because they’ll keep coming back and they’ll go into the body and do everything until you actually feel it.

So I suggest you don’t engage that whole struggle. Feeling comes up, use your breath as a base of attention if you wish, just experience it. Now experiencing it doesn’t mean getting lost in it, acting it out because acting it out is a way of not experiencing it and it certainly doesn’t mean suppressing it. You just experience it, there it is, whether it’s anger, or love, a feeling of accomplishment, jealousy, shame, inferiority, superiority. There it is. You just experience it.

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Be Easy on Yourself

I so appreciate in James Low's willingness to speak honestly about the realities of practice. I suspect that many of us will relate to his personal anecdote about feeling lonely, discouraged, and finding that meditation wasn't giving him any nurturing. He found himself arranging boiled sweets into coloured patterns. When practice feels dry, we invent endless ways to fill the space rather than simply experience what is present. But James doesn't present this as a failure. Instead, he ends with a wonderful reminder: "Don't blame yourself. Don't see yourself as having made a mistake. It's just like this." Very dzogchen as is his often repeated advice to practice the guru yoga of the three ahs.

From From Open to Life, part 18. The passage starts 55:27 minutes into the audio.

Years ago, someone came to see me in my role as a therapist, and they were a nun. The nunnery that they were in was causing some grief for this person, because they said, ‘In the nunnery, everything is controlled. So we get portions of the different kinds of food, so we don't eat too much, and so on. However, if you're sick, you're allowed to get a double portion of tahini with your breakfast. And so some of the nuns are pretending to be sick in order to get tahini.’ And she was incredibly upset. How could they be nuns and do this?

We spent quite a lot of time thinking about, if they're nuns, they don't do bad things, but they do bad things, so they can't be nuns. So what kind of nunnery is this? You go round and round and round, because you start with an assumption that nuns will be well-behaved. But some of these nuns are not well-behaved, because they want more. Why wouldn't they want more? They don't even have their hair.

‘Come on, ladies, give up your hair.’

‘At least give me my tahini.’ Fair exchange.

So you can be disturbed by anything. I did a retreat a long, long time ago. One of the first retreats I did was up in Manali, in a little shack. And every day I did my offerings, and I bought a big bag of sweets, every day putting two sweets and offering them. And after a couple of weeks, I'm looking at the bag of sweets, and I tipped it upside down, and it was like hard-boiled sweets, and they're different colors of wrappers. So I put all the blue ones in a column, all the red ones in a column, all the green ones in a column. And then I moved them around, and I made patterns. I hadn't a clue what I was doing. I was just thinking, ‘I have to do my meditation.’ And it wasn't giving me any nurturing. And I was feeling sad and lonely. Instead of thinking I'm sad and lonely, I entertained myself in this somewhat sad way, you know, slightly autistic. And that's what we do. We fill the space.

Trying to do the meditation, it wasn't going well. I lost my sense of agency. But at least I put the red sweets with the red sweets, the blue sweets with the blue sweets. So when we observe ourselves, we realise these funny things we do, just as a kind of reassurance. And these points are so important. Don't blame yourself. Don't see yourself as having made a mistake. It's just like this.

How to Read “Namtar”

This passage comes from the first talk in Ken McLeod's Learning from the Lives of Lineage Holders series, which focuses on the founders of the Shangpa Kagyu lineage. Throughout his talks on Sukhasiddhi, Niguma, and Khyungpo Naljor, Ken repeatedly returns the question of how to read namtar or spiritual biographies.

Rather than approaching namtar as history—or dismissing them because some events seem improbable—Ken encourages us to ask what they carry. Listening to the series as a whole, I found it helpful to distil his approach into five questions:

1. What freedom or transformation is this story pointing to?
2. Why might this story have been preserved?
3. What is this story telling us? What does it suggest about practice?
4. What is symbolic in this story?
5. How does this illuminate my own practice?

I've been using these questions as supports for reading David Templeman's translation of Tāranātha's The Seven Instruction Lineages. I ask what each mahasiddha story points to, and how I might work with this in my own practice. Read this way, a namtar becomes much more than an inspiring account of an extraordinary practitioner. It becomes a living practice instruction, a way to discover the freedom they were preserved to reveal.

From Sukhasiddhi: A Doorway to Awakening

Ken McLeod: I’m going to take various stories from various teachers’ lives, but I want you to think about them quite deeply, because most of the incidents that are recorded, while they may have actually happened, that’s not why they’ve come down to us today.

They’ve come down to us through the centuries because there’s something in what the record is. And one of the things that I think is very important for us is to be able to read or hear these stories and understand what they carry—and not only understand what they carry, but also know how to work with that in our own practice and in our own lives.

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