My first teacher, Trudy, who practised Vedanta, encouraged me to find my own way. When I subsequently encountered the Buddhist teachings, I remember marvelling at the notion of 84,000 methods taught by the Buddha. The idea resonated with Trudy's advice: different ways for different people, acknowledging the enormous variety of human dispositions and circumstances.
Yet when I began practising within the Tibetan tradition, I didn't really know how to explore what might work for me. I found it difficult to talk with teachers about my experience of practice. They seemed somehow set apart, and I didn't know how to bridge that distance.
When I eventually undertook the preliminary practices, or ngöndro—100,000 each of prostrations, purification through Vajrasattva practice, mandala offerings and guru yoga—I struggled. I have no mental imagery, so the parts of the daily ngöndro sadhana that involved visualisation became mechanical. I persevered, often feeling frustrated and disconnected from the practice, but didn't know how to find another way in. During this period, I came across Ken McLeod's Wake Up to Your Life and the Unfettered Mind website. Here was a Buddhist teacher who echoed Trudy's advice: we each have to find our own way.
I still practise guru yoga, but now use a mala I made myself. Each bead is associated with a line or verse of the sadhana. The physical contact with the beads and their association with the words, brings me into touch with what the imagery suggests. I can't know what others experience when they visualise meeting and merging with the guru, but the beads provide me with a way into the experience of no separation.
Recently, listening to James Low, I was struck by his wonderfully straightforward observation: "If you have a method and it makes you feel bored or angry or stupid, it's not your method."
I'm deeply grateful for Trudy's original pointer, yet sometimes wish I'd found Ken and James earlier, but perhaps I wasn't ready! After all, frustration, boredom, and anger can be valuable material for practice. A method isn't unsuitable because it brings us into contact with uncomfortable experience. Yet there's a difference between encountering difficulty in practice and struggling with a method that doesn't fit with the way we experience the world.
James reminds us that methods are ways in, not ends in themselves. A method is useful insofar as it helps us open to what is arising. And finding our own way doesn't necessarily mean abandoning a practice that doesn't seem to work. Sometimes it means discovering another way of engaging with it.
Looking back, I'm in awe of the generosity implicit in the metaphor of 84,000 methods. There is no single way in. Even within a particular practice, there may be many ways in. I'm grateful to Trudy, Ken and James for reminding me that we each have to discover what works, and that methods are there to serve our practice.
From Opening to the Open, Berghof, July 2026
James: And that's very important, because each of us has our own character, our own patterning of habits, and so it's said that the Buddha taught 84,000 different dharmas or methods, 21,000 to deal with mental dullness, 21,000 for desire, 21,000 for anger, and 21,000 for the three mixed together. That is to say, different strokes for different folks. Therefore, if you have a method and it makes you feel bored or angry or stupid, it's not your method. So, you have to explore what would work. For some people, phat is very good, it shocks them open. For other people, it creates an agitation.
So, in the Padmasambhava practice, we're using devotion to gather ourselves together so that we're not tracking out with thoughts, feelings, and memories, and then through that, the power of the devotion becoming inseparable from Padmasambhava as the non-duality of appearance and emptiness. That's another way in, and there are so many methods. It doesn't really matter which method you use, but most of us need some method. So, the three Ah is a method for some people and not for others.
I remember I did a lot of prostrations when I was younger, and I finished the second 100,000 of the prostrations, and I went to my teacher to tell him I'd finished. And he said, ‘Are you tired?’
I said, ‘Yeah, I'm really, really tired,’ because it was summertime and I was doing a lot, a lot every day.
And he said, ‘That's good. Are you full of thoughts?’
I said, ‘No, I'm too tired to think.’
He said, ‘Hah! That's it. That's why we do it.’
So, I said, ‘There must be some easier method than this.’ I didn't say it, of course.
But there are so many methods in which you can be separated out; like when you read the story of Milarepa, and he has to build the towers, and he has hopes, and then they're dashed, and Marpa seems to be so cruel to him. What Marpa is trying to do, is to collapse the will to power, which is in Milarepa, because he was already a very powerful black magician. And he's trying to get him to a state where he's no longer knowing what to do. And he goes into despair, and he speaks to Marpa's wife, Dagmema, and she tries to comfort him. And Marpa says, ‘Oy, leave that boy alone,’ because Marpa knows, ‘My cruelty is kindness. My wife's kindness is cruelty.’ Because if you comfort him, you will close him down. He has to stay with this kind of, ‘I can't bear it, I can't bear it.’ Then, in that moment, you can see your own mind.
So, maybe you have a bad relationship and you feel disappointed, or unloved, or unseen. Maybe you have a horrible boss. Maybe you get an illness, and you have to go to hospital, and you're lying in a bed, and there's tubes going into your body. In all of these situations, you have a reformulation of your ordinary sense of self. And if you could just catch that moment.
‘Who am I? Because now I'm in a bed. I can't even wipe my own arse. I can't get out of the bed. I'm entirely under the power of this medical system, which sees me, not as I see me.’
Relax into it. So, everything can be a method. So, I think it's very good to do that kind of exploration, and you customise it so that it's something which fits you.