Trust You Will Ripen

For me, solo retreats nourish and energise practice in daily life. This year, while preparing, I listened again to Ken’s instructions on the sky-gazing practice.

From A Trackless Path II 14, Ken McLeod

Ken: There are a number of teachings in various traditions on sky-gazing but the one that I’ve been exposed to and feels most complete is one from the Dzogchen tradition in which there are three skies, just to make it complicated. The practice consists of sitting or lying down in a location where ideally all you have is sky in front of you. There were caves that were carefully constructed in Tibet on the sides of mountains so that when you sat in them if you sat in a certain position you saw nothing but sky. There was no other reference point whatsoever.

...

And then you quite literally look at the sky. Now as Tilopa says, “When you look at space, seeing stops. When you look at mind, thinking stops.” It is important to look at the sky, or to put it slightly differently, to look into the sky. So you’re actually looking. You’re not just letting your eyes go into soft focus because there’s nothing to look at. When you do that you actually become passive and probably move in a somewhat dull direction. The looking is active.

And the first sky is what we ordinarily call “sky”; it’s an infinite expanse of blue in front of us. And you look at that or into it. And just because the way the eyes are constructed there will be pixelation, and variation in shades and so forth you know. Pay no attention to all of that, that’s just stuff, and look. If the looking is active you’ll find a couple of things. In the beginning you probably won’t be able to do it for very long ’cause the intensity, the clarity is a little overwhelming, and you just find you’re sort of short-circuiting. But as you do it again and again you’ll build up more capacity. And as you look with that active looking you find it is actually difficult to hold any train of thought. I should mention one other thing on the practical side, at this altitude wear sunblock.

...

So there’s that active looking into the sky. And as you engage that and increase your capacity to hold that gaze into the sky—very hard to hold together the ordinary train of thinking—it just keeps disintegrating. Which of course is part of the purpose of this practice. And you find you’re beginning to experience calm-abiding, shamatha, just resting. But it’s got a little more juice than shamatha and meditation because you’re opening to the sky, and there’s just all that energy of the light coming in filling your whole mind and being with light and energy. So it’s quite a powerful practice.

And as your mind, or the thinking process, crumbles and disintegrates—and it doesn’t do this immediately so don’t get your hopes up—you find, speaking technically, the sensory consciousnesses become less and less dominant in one’s experience. That’s the five associated with the senses except the one for seeing, of course, and the mental consciousness, which is associated with thought. And you’ll find that the seventh consciousness, the emotional mind, which is what I like to call it, also subsides. And you’ll find yourself resting without much sense of “I.”

And basically what’s happening here is that you’re experiencing basis-of-everything consciousness. Sanskrit term for that is alaya-vijñāna. Now in basis-of-everything consciousness there is no explicit sense of “I” or “other” but it is not beyond duality. There’s no explicit sense of I or other, and as Dezhung Rinpoche explained to me, it’s clear, empty, and ineffective. And for those of you who want the Tibetan for ineffective it's lung ma bstan (pron. lung ma ten).

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Carolyn: It’s interesting that that’s lung ma bstan because that’s the dullness in meditation too.

Ken: Sure, yeah. It’s as Dezhung Rinpoche would say, stong gsal lung ma bstan (pron. tong sal lung ma ten). lung ma bstan is often translated as neutral but there’s no juice to it, that’s the idea. Now, this is a little bit of an aside, but particularly in reference to Carolyn’s comment, it’s important. There are countless meditators over the centuries who mistake resting in alaya-vijñāna for enlightenment and it’s not.

Again Dezhung Rinpoche explained this when he was giving us mahamudra instruction: it’s empty, clear, and ineffective. No juice—however you want to describe that to yourselves. It’s like a block of ice. And alaya-vijñāna to buddha mind is like ice to water. That is, ice is clear, can see right through it, you don’t know it’s there, and it can’t do anything because it’s a block of ice. And when you rest in it, bringing active attention into it, basically the ice melts. And then you have empty, clear, unrestricted experience. And the lung ma bstan, the ineffective becomes unrestricted. So it becomes very, very alive.

Having no mental imagery or experience of "hearing" thoughts, my mind is naturally rather quiet. Rather than a flow of thoughts I experience a stream of sensations and feelings punctuated by silent thoughts. Looking into the sky dissolves the sense of I and other, and each time I do the practice, I recall Ken's often repeated advice: “Don’t work at practice, let practice work on you,” and also a line from T. S. Eliot that he often quotes: “The rest is not our business.”

James Low sums it up like this:

From Open to Life 8

James: If we're not ripe, it's not going to work.

...

So how do we become ripe? How do we become? Well, when we want things to ripen, it's better if they can ripen on the tree, and when the tree is rooted. So we root ourselves in the source, in the ground, in the openness, and we resource ourselves by exposure to the ripening forces, the warmth of engaging in the world, blowing with the wind of circumstances, absorbing the rain of the confusion which can flow on to us very easily, and gradually we ripen. Don't force it. Trust you will ripen. Everybody has buddha nature, everybody has buddha potential, but you have your unique individual story, and your path will not be like anyone else's.

In Open to Life 7 and many other retreat recordings, James also teaches a practice that doesn't depend on an unrestricted view of the sky. It's called the guru yoga of the three ah.

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How Dakinis Transform Experience

Over the years I’ve listened to each of Ken McLeod’s classes and retreats as they were published, even when I didn’t feel especially drawn to the topic or practice. Vajrayana material was often hard for me to take in, partly because I lack mental imagery (aphantasia) but also because of a long-standing habit of wanting to understand something before I could open to it. That instinct, shaped by my upbringing and scientific training, made Vajrayana’s imaginal world hard for me to enter.

But life has shown me, repeatedly, that we don’t know what we don’t know. Teachings I once set aside as “not for me” have often opened the most unexpected doors. This talk on dakinis was one of those.

Listening to Ken’s explanation, something in me softened up. The word dakini, wrapped in layers of mystique and esoteric imagery, resonated with a love of fairy tales and myths that I’ve had since childhood. And Ken described these supernatural or mythic figures as the unruly, reactive forces within our own minds—the currents of wanting, grasping, aversion, and confusion that take over before we even register them. Hearing this, resistance fell away, loosening the conditioning that had throttled my connection to the imaginal.

The lines from Khyungpo Naljor struck deeply: “Wanting nothing from outside, taking things as they come.” As Ken unpacked this, I noticed how often I move through life trying to get something—from people, situations, even from practice itself: ease, reassurance, clarity, a sense of direction.

The teaching on the water dakini stopped me. “Crystal is the non-thought of mind itself.” When attention rests without collapsing into analysis or drifting into narrative, there is a clarity. I felt a taste of that while listening—just an uncomplicated openness. And I saw how rarely I allow such simplicity. My conditioning pulls me toward interpretation, understanding, and demanding coherence. But the crystal dakini points to a knowing that precedes all of that.

What struck me most, though, is how this teaching hinges on recognising that what arises in experience is not “other.” When Ken says that knowing the dakini to be your own mind changes everything, I felt something inside reorient. The familiar stance of “me navigating experience” gave way for a moment, to a sense of no separation, just immediacy. And in that moment the transformation he describes felt utterly natural.

From Five Elements, Five Dakinis

Ken: Now let’s talk a little bit about dakinis. Dakinis, the origin of dakinis, these were the aspects of experience ascribed to supernatural entities, that were called dakinis.

Mingyur Dorje, one of the karmapas, wrote a very nice composition about dakinis, in which he describes the origins of a group of four dakinis, which corresponded to the first four of the elements; earth, water, fire, and air. The water element, for instance, corresponds to the dakini whose name is Changeling. And Changeling was this spirit or demon that would appear to you in different forms and seduce you into doing things that were really bad for you. And another one was called the Murderess. These were regarded as female entities. There were in Indian lore also male entities. They were called dakas, and dakini was the female form. And they were originally supernatural spirits. What happens in Vajrayana is that these elements of folklore—the way that experience is interpreted—then became symbols for the way mind works. Does anyone here have a copy of my book, who can loan it to me? Thanks very much. Oh actually, it’s in here.

And I included this song by Khyungpo Naljor, who’s probably known here as Tsultrim. He describes what the crucial element is. The ordinary dakini represents these unruly aspects of our mind, the wild, untamed, reactive mind which just takes over. So he says:

When wanting and grasping hold sway, the dakini has you in her power.
Wanting nothing from outside, taking things as they come.
Know the dakini to be your own mind.

What’s being expressed here is, whatever arises in experience, when we regard it as something other, then attraction, aversion, all of the reactive emotions operate. And we are in the thrall of dualistic fixation and dualistic interpretation. And alienated from our own nature, our own knowing, and just react to things. That’s what it means when he says that the dakini has us in her power.

Then he says:

Wanting nothing from outside, taking things as they come.

Those meditation instructions—wanting nothing from outside—now how much of our lives do we go around trying to get something from the world to make us feel better? Relationships, money, possessions. The list just goes on and on. Trying to get these things from outside to make us feel good in some way. It doesn’t work. Well, no it doesn’t work. It never works. It’s temporary at best. Does that stop us from doing it? No, you keep doing it.

Taking things as they come.

This again is a meditation instruction. All too often, most of the time, we don’t take things as they come. Something arises and we want it to be a little bit different. [Chuckles] It’s not quite right. Many years ago I had a girlfriend who was just exactly right. I was never quite right. [Laughter] Never quite fit. Life was tortuous. It was very difficult.

Know the dakini to be your own mind.

That is, know that what arises in experience is not something other. Now, when we know that, and this is not an intellectual knowing, this is an experiential knowing, then everything changes. The way that we experience the world changes. And so rather than being fixed in this dualistic I/other framework; when we know what arises in experience to be your own mind. Now there is no difference—there is just experience. And you’re awake in that experience. So he goes on to say:
Know that the crystal is the non-thought of mind itself. And,

Crystal dakini guards against interruptions.

This is a very deep instruction. The crystal—this is the water dakini.

Crystal is the non-thought of mind itself.

So when you have a level of attention in which you can rest, and there is no conceptual process taking place in the mind— there’s no thought—then things can arise. And it doesn’t matter what arises. It doesn’t disturb. You follow? And thus nothing can interrupt the quality of your attention and the quality of your presence.

Know that the source of wealth is contentment and the jewel dakini fills all wants and needs.

There’s a story from the life of Buddha in which a poor person, a very poor person comes across this wish-fulfilling jewel and he recognizes what he’s found. And he says, “Wow, this is so important and valuable. I don’t know what to do with this. The Buddha will know what to do with it.” So he went to Buddha and said, “I found this wish-fulfilling jewel. I don’t know what to do with it but you’ll know the person who needs this the most so I’m going to give it to you. The Buddha said, ”Thank you.“

Later that day there was a big festival and sponsored by the local ruler, the king. And in middle of this festival, Buddha called the king and said, ”Here’s this wish-fulfilling jewel. I was told to give it to the person who needs it most and I’m giving it to you.“ The king said, ”Why?“ ”Because you have more want than anybody else in this community.“ [Chuckles]

So, no contentment. When there’s no contentment it does not matter how wealthy we are—and we can think of wealth in terms of financial wealth or possessions. But it doesn’t really matter. It applies to other kinds of wealth, some people are greedy for knowledge, some people are greedy for connections, some people are greedy for power. It doesn’t make any difference.

When there’s no contentment, then the jewel dakini has us in her power. When we know contentment, then we are the richest person in the world because we don’t need anything. So, this is how the dakinis transform experience.

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It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

For many people, the holiday season carries a bittersweet quality—moments of warmth mixed with pressure, expectation, and emotional strain. The weight of family expectations, financial stress, loneliness, old patterns, and the year-end reckoning with what has or hasn’t happened can make December one of the most difficult stretches of the year. Disrupted routines and the cultural insistence on togetherness often amplify feelings of stress, sadness, or disconnection. Instead of ease, the season can feel like a convergence of emotional weather systems.

In “What to Do About Christmas?” Ken McLeod uses the three marks of existence—impermanence, suffering, and non-self—to illuminate the emotional turbulence of the season. He begins with impermanence, noting how seasonal cycles prompt reflection, self-evaluation, regret, and disappointment. Ken offers guided meditations on both regret and accomplishment, emphasising that fully experiencing sensations, emotions, and stories in the body allows these experiences to complete themselves instead of lingering.

Turning to suffering, he reframes it as the universal struggle to get emotional needs met—and the futility of trying to control what we feel. Emotional freedom arises not through control but through experiencing emotions directly. Ken introduces taking and sending (tonglen) as a practice well-suited to family tensions: breathing in others’ painful feelings as black smoke and breathing out one’s own ease as moonlight. This practice undermines self-cherishing and opens us to the full complexity of shared emotional life.

NOTE: Since visualisation is not a part of my experience (aphantasia), on the in-breath, I feel the weight, tightness, or contraction of difficult emotions. On the out-breath, I sense whatever ease, warmth, or clarity is present and feel it radiating outwards. A simple phrase can help: in-breath: “feeling this”; out-breath: “offering ease.” This is tonglen without imagery—direct, embodied, and complete.

Finally, addressing non-self, Ken suggests entering challenging holiday situations with a clear intention, because without intention, reactivity easily sweeps us away. Ken encourages us to dig beneath surface motivations until we find a deeply felt, honest intention. This clarity shifts experience from “something happening to me” to “I am in this,” enabling genuine presence and connection to arise.

Listen to the whole talk if you can. It's a great way to spend 40 mins.

From What to Do About Christmas?

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Beyond Visualisation

In this interview with Matthew O’Connell on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast, Ken McLeod reframes Vajrayana deity practice for those who struggle with visualisation. Rather than using imagery, he emphasises touching compassion and emptiness directly and letting the feeling of being the deity arise from that experience. It’s a shift from image-making to feeling-being, and it changes the whole flavour of practice.

He shares striking examples: practitioners forming deep relationships with figures like Green Tara through sustained devotion; the way deities function as living presences rather than symbolic artefacts; and how, for Western practitioners, meaningful connection may come more readily through familiar figures such as Mary or Christ. The heart of his point is that an authentic relationship with a deity evolves from experience, not from forcing the traditional forms.

I first reached out to Ken for advice on the difficulties I was experiencing with Vajrayana visualisation, and the communication challenges I faced in taking practice questions to my teacher, a young Tibetan tulku who spoke little English. Ken invited me to set imagery aside and let the practice speak to me. That shift helped me stay with the long arc of ngöndro. In time, I came to see that the 100,000 repetitions of these practices, day after day—stretching to five years in my case—built capacity in attention, which later supported deeper forms of practice. Nowadays, the absence of mental imagery is recognised as a form of neurodivergence called aphantasia which often co-occurs with absence of a mental voice (anauralgia).

Many years afterwards, something unexpected happened: a sense of devotion began to flow naturally, and now I find myself spontaneously reciting the 100-syllable Vajrasattva mantra and singing the Heart Sutra, and forming an awe-struck relationship with Niguma through recitation of The Magic of Faith. This conversation with Matthew O'Connell is a reminder of how relationships with deities are lived, felt, and discovered over time rather than achieved through effort or visualisation.

From The Magic of Vajrayana

Matthew: So I wonder, I'm one of those people that finds visualization and energy stuff pretty easy. That comes to me quite naturally. And so I don't necessarily have a huge problem visualizing these quite elaborate entourages of different beings with eight arms and all of this stuff going on. But within that I quite enjoy exploring the simplification of it too. And then shifting my attention to appreciate different aspects of it.

So sometimes the detail is quite interesting to explore. Sometimes just a kind of quite bland, almost universal colour or something like this might be interesting. And sometimes I use traditional symbols and then I change them to other things too.

And I feel I can get away with that because I've been practicing for quite a long time. I wonder to what degree we may lose something if we change deities too much or not? So I guess that's a side question. But the real thing I'd like to do is again go back to the suggestion I made before, which is how can deities, in your view, open up possibilities? And as the second part of thour would be, do you think we can thoroughly westernize the kinds of deities and the symbology attached to them that we might be looking at?

Ken: Oh, this is a complex question. I think the first point is, what is a deity? I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about that.

Every deity in the Tibetan tradition is the union of compassion and emptiness. That's our nature. And not everybody has your facility with visualisation. In fact, as you probably know, visualisation is almost an insuperable obstacle for many people when they try to practice Vajrayana. So I wrote the section on deity practice [in The Magic of Vajrayana] with that very much in mind, but also drawing on my own experience. The starting point has to be the unity of compassion and emptiness. And what I suggest in the book is something that I took from the Nyingma tradition: by hook or by crook—to use an English phrase which I'm sure you're familiar with—touch emptiness and compassion. And these are not concepts, of course, but an experiential shift. And let the experience of being the deity grow from there, rather than trying to visualise it, per se. That is an approach which is going to involve feeling being the deity, rather than visualising being the deity. Suzuki Roshi once said, our practice is based on absolute confidence in our fundamental nature. And so when you do deity practice, you take as your fundamental nature the unity of compassion and emptiness, and you let yourself trust that to the umpteenth degree.

Now that's quite a jump right there. And as you let yourself absorb that and let that permeate your whole way of being, then the sense of being the deity can come alive. And that may come alive in the forms of the deity, particularly if you're familiar with the forms. Because one has to remember that all of these deities were at one time or other, religions, and they were the central figure of a religion in its own right. And it was over the process of centuries that these things came together. And the Tibetans went over and just brought everything they could back and put it all together into this thing we call Vajrayana. But it's not how it was practiced in India at all. Tibetans would say, "The Indians practiced one deity and saw hundreds. We practice hundreds of deities and don't see any."

So the sense of really being the deity, and take say, Green Tara, who's the protectress, right? What's it like to have an intimate relationship with this figure? And it's very, very much a relationship. It's your personal god. Taking on as one's personal god a figure from another culture is a difficult transition. A colleague of mine, Michael Taft, feels that many people will do better taking on the Virgin Mary, or Christ, or some other figure. Because we have to come to terms with those figures, too, I don't know what the answers are. But I do know the answers are to "How this is going to evolve?" and things like that.

I was able to develop a relationship with these deities, and I know how to point people in the direction of doing that for themselves. But you really are taking on. At first I thought I had a relationship with one particular deity, and then I found, rather to my surprise, that there's a different deity who feels like a companion to me now. I never feel particularly separate from him, but I know other people feel the same way about other deities. I mean, my own teacher, his teacher, after he had completed his training, was the tailor in the monastery, which was a big job, because you had all of these banners that had to be renewed all the time and things like that. It was a lot of work to do.

And he decided at a certain point, "This is a complete waste of time," and he shut himself in one of the latrines in the monastery. You can imagine what a latrine in a Tibetan monastery was like. Not porcelain, scrubbed every day.

He didn't leave it for seven years. And during that whole time, he prayed and meditated on green Tara. And so there he is, in this basically stone and concrete shithole. After a couple of weeks, they started putting food under the door for him, but he wouldn't unlock the door. That's how he formed a relationship with Green Tara. And it's very much about forming a personal relationship and letting the spirit, and this goes straight to your shamanic training, letting the spirit of the deity come into you and take over in you. That's what it's about.

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Dangers in Spiritual Practice

In this passage Ken McLeod describes two dangers in spiritual practice: working at a level of attention you can’t sustain, and working with methods that don’t fit.

While I felt strongly drawn to Vajrayana, I struggled with its imagery-based practices. Years later researhers began to study this form of neurodivergence, dubbed aphantasia in 2015.Without mental imagery, visualisation quickly became frustrating. Eventually I met deep resistance around completing the ngöndro, and began wondering whether I belonged on that path at all, but there was the thorny issue of samaya. Strain, doubt, and the sense that something was fundamentally lacking in me were running wild. Ken’s point is simple but rarely said aloud: when the fit is wrong, practice can become a source of imbalance.

Ken makes it clear that ignoring these dangers has real consequences. Pushing beyond your actual attention capacity can tilt your whole system—creating tension, instability, and overriding the body’s signals that you’re past your limit. Persisting with methods that don’t suit can lead to confusion, guilt, imagining that working harder will solve the problem, or as in my case, total blockage—inability to practice. As Ken points out, imbalance in approach inevitably becomes imbalance in result.

I value Ken’s invitation to trust experience rather than ideology or inherited expectations. He asks the most practical of questions: “Does this work for you?”

For more on the dangers of the spiritual path, check out Ken's explanations of Gampopa's similes for the spiritual teacher as guide, escort, and ferryman in Then and Now 6

From Guru, Deity, Protector 1

Ken: There’s danger in all forms of spiritual practice. And the dangers come about in two ways. There may be more, but for the purposes of our discussion I’m looking at two.

One danger is working at a higher level of attention than you can sustain. This is why many of you recall one of my recommendations is that when you’re working with difficult or painful areas, you let it open to you, you don’t try to open it up. Many of you have heard me say that. The reason for that instruction is so that you aren’t working at a higher level of attention than you can sustain. You are working at the level of attention that you actually have, and things evolve. And they definitely do evolve and they deepen, but in a way in which you stay in balance—you and the whole world. It’s very important. If you work at a higher level of attention than you can sustain, you’re living on borrowed energy. There’s an imbalance. And when there’s a consistent imbalance in your efforts, there will inevitably be an imbalance in the results. That is totally contrary to the intention.

Second danger. You’re working at something that simply doesn’t fit with you. And quite a few people who’ve come to see me over the last few years have been practicing one or more Vajrayana techniques, and I listen to them, and in some cases they simply don’t have the level of attention to be able to do it. They’re just swirling around in confusion and it’s not making anything better.

In other cases, it’s quite clear that Vajrayana practice just doesn’t sit with them. And I’ll say, “Just stop it.” They all get bent out of shape and worried about it, because of all of this big heavy propaganda about samaya and commitment and so forth. But it’s absolutely the case. I mean, we get this same thing in other areas of practice. Some people take ordination as a monk or a nun and it really doesn’t fit them. It’s a long, long path of practice.

One woman I know, she was very sensible. She was quite serious about her practice in Buddhism. The bodhisattva vow just didn’t fit with her. Not at the time that I knew her anyway. She wouldn’t take it. She was very helpful and worked with people and helped people in many, many ways. But there was something about that that really didn’t suit her.

So, what I’m encouraging you to do here is to weigh everything with your own experience. We are going to be talking about faith. We’re going to be talking about devotion, because these are very significant elements in Vajrayana. You can’t ignore them. You can try to, but it really doesn’t work. Devotion is not something that is appropriate or suitable for everyone.

So through these few days I hope you will get a flavor of what this is actually like. I’m going to do my best to convey that to you, both through our talks together but also through the practice. The form of the practice may be a bit different. It’s experimental, so it may be a total failure. But all through this, I want you to be asking, “Does this work for me or not? Is this a path I want to take or not?” And really weigh that. Because the whole point of our work together—not just this thing, but spiritual practice—is becoming more present and aware in every aspect of your life. It’s not about getting a credential or being able to say, “I’m practicing the biggest, meanest, sexiest path there is.” That’s not the point.

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