Student questions

Ken: Okay, so here’s our final session together. We have a few verses. They’re fairly straightforward. Straightforward as anything has been this weekend. Before we go there, let’s do some meditation practice together. Before we do any meditation practice, I’m very happy to take any questions you may have about any challenges, issues, or things you find you’d like to understand better about the actual technique of meditation, whatever technique you’re using. So, the floor is open for questions; I’ll just take a few. Of course, I may be quite wrong here. All of you may be extremely experienced, and just total attention all the time, so no need to ask any questions. Do I have anything up on the website about how to meditate? Yeah, you’ll find there’s a couple of articles there. Yes?

Student: Three things. I could tie them all into one long question or I could …

Ken: One by one would be better.

Student: Friday you mentioned three different kinds of prayer: petition—

Ken: Petitionary.

Student: Yeah, and the other one I think was kind of basically mantra-ing where you repeat a mantra over and over again. And then maybe the third part was when you can live in that state of mantra-ing. I made that word up, but how did you say it? What are the two and three?

Ken: Well, actually I talked about five different kinds of prayer on one list from the Greek Orthodox tradition. And then I talked about nine stages of prayer from the Catholic tradition. I think that basically comes from Teresa of Avila. And then I talked a bit about the stages of mantra meditation. So, what’s at the base of your question?

Student: Let’s skip that one and go to question two. [Laughter]

Ken: One down two to go.

Student: Lions: three, Christians: zero. In the model of Tibetan Buddhism, do they have saints? Do they have revered people that people pray to to intercede? Depending on how you answer that will help me frame my third question, which is rather pathetic, but I’m just going to put it on the table because I trust you.

Ken: Welll, Tibetan Buddhism was a medieval institution. Yes, they had people that would be roughly the equivalent of saints, lots of them actually. And would people pray to people who had lived previously, using an intercessory prayer, comparable to the intercessory prayer and Catholic church? Yes, people definitely did that. No question.

Student: You haven’t helped me much yet, but I know—

Ken: Good, [laughter] I’m being unhelpful. This is the best kind of help.

Student: I was raised Catholic from a very innocent age. So, before I had reason, I was taught Catholicism. And I was invited to have the idea of a guardian angel. So, I haven’t quite figured out, am I foolish to say angels don’t exist? And do they really exist and I’m just not taking advantage of it? So, therefore I could be having all this great assistance. The essence of my question comes down to kind of a scary place for me to try to hang out. And I call that life without a personal god.

So, in the Catholic model, one is invited to contemplate that God knows you and says, “Oh yeah, Mark, I talked to him this morning. He’s a little concerned about this and blah, blah, blah.” But God wants me to be happy. As a chiropractor and as one who pursues this kind of thinking, I trust that there is an innate, intrinsic life force within us that is inviting us to be whole and healthy and prosper. And that when we meditate, we are stilling ourselves and listening. Now what I want to know from your understanding of Tibetan Buddhism is how personal of an experience is this listening? If I get quiet, my little neuroses will say, “Mark, I really do care about you. I’ve been concerned that you’re not flossing that back tooth,” or something.

But I don’t want to quite be in a universe where there is a life force and I am just as important to it as the worm is. Somehow my ego wants me to be more important than that. And as I reach for meaning and strength during different experiences, I say, okay, surrender what is. That’s the essence of my question. When we started this meditation process yesterday, the purpose of this was to say, okay, I want to be able to accept what is. So, I’m quietly asking in the Tibetan model, “What is?” in terms of how does the listening god that speaks and listens back to us. I better stop here. Thank you.

Ken: Were you at my talk Friday night?

Student: Yes, sir.

Ken: Remember the story I told about this nun being interviewed about prayer?

Student: It was beautiful. That’s where they met, the two ideas. Prayer and meditation met. God listens back.

Ken: Yeah. So, what more is there to say?

Student: Thank you. You’ve clarified my concern that there might be—a part of me is reluctant to give up my childhood innocence—that there is a force out there that really particularly cares about my well-being as opposed to just the well-being of all of life.

Ken: Okay.

Student: Thank you.

Ken: You’re welcome.

Student: So, a meditation question. A little background: the first meditation practice I did was staring into the empty space an inch in front of my nose. And it was really profound actually from the moment I started. But it kind of broke down and I was looking for a teacher for a way to proceed and I eventually arrived at reading Khandro Rinpoche’s book. And at the end, she talks about a meditation practice where you begin, I guess it’s shamatha with support, and you can focus on a candlelight for example. And she said at some point when the mind is still enough, you can move to focusing on your breath. So, my question is practice speaking. How does one know when to move, when your mind is still enough to move from the candle to the breath?

Ken: Find a teacher. Find a teacher. There are a large number of suppositions in your question, many of which I would regard as somewhat problematic. You’re going to do much better sitting down and talking with someone about why you practice, and how to practice, in a direct interaction. That’s how you’re going to work through all of that.

Student: Where do you find one?

Ken: That’s part of the challenge. It happens in different ways for different people. You go to programs like this until you find someone who speaks to you. And then you explore to see if that person is actually available. And they may be available and are they actually interested in working with you? So, there are a lot of challenges here. And the rule of thumb that I give for finding a teacher is you find someone to whom you’re going to listen, even when you are completely crazy. That’s your teacher. Okay?

Student: I think everyone here has heard your instructions on practicing mindfulness in speech. I was wondering if you had a technique for practicing mindfulness while reading. Is it necessary to talk to ourselves when we read? If not, is comprehension better or not as good when we talk to ourselves?

Ken: What problem are you trying to address?

Student: Involvement in thought activity.

Ken: What’s wrong? You’re reading to learn something. What’s the problem?

Student: I’m a slow reader and it seems like, well, in order to really comprehend something, I have to read it slowly.

Ken: Okay. Well, I’m going to be very glib on one side and then I’ll be a little more serious on the other. Take a speed reading course.

Student: I did that a long time ago.

Ken: Okay. I mean they didn’t work for me. But I have a friend, he reads 300-page novels in a couple of hours, and he knows everything that’s in it. So, it worked for him, doesn’t work for me. But behind your question, I sense something else. So, I’m going to tell you the story of St. Teresa of Avila who one day was in the convent refractory sitting down and eating two cooked chickens in front of her. And a couple of other nuns came in and looked at Teresa and just went, “Oh Teresa, what about the sin of gluttony?” which is one of the seven deadly sins.

Teresa put down her knife and fork, turned to the two sisters and glared at them. “When I eat, I eat. When I pray, I pray.” [Laughs] Okay? Other questions?

All right. Let’s do a period of practice together. No special instructions; you can just rest.

The closing verses

Ken: I just have a few verses left here. I am not sure that there’s any explicit structure to these. It may be that when he was writing these last verses, these were the points that Tokmé Zongpo felt were important, either because they were things that he had to remind himself of, or he found that working with others, that they came up again and again.

If you don’t go into your own confusion, you may just be a materialist in practitioner’s clothing. Constantly go into your own confusion and put an end to it—this is the practice of a bodhisattva.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 31

Let’s talk about going into our own confusion first. Sometimes we do things in life and we don’t know why. Particularly when they don’t work out very well, we wonder, what was going on there? And in my experience, there’s always something going on. And one of the principles I use both in spiritual and in consulting work is, return confusion to its own source.

When you find yourself upset about something and you don’t know why, or reacting more strongly either in terms of desire or anger or other reactive emotions then seems necessary or appropriate for the situation, the first thing to do is get curious. Now, most of the time because we’ve been exposed to the perspectives of psychoanalysis or various forms of psychology, is we try to do this kind of psychoanalysis of ourselves and figure out why we’re doing such things. What’s driving us, etc., etc.?

I find that usually unsatisfactory, or insufficient, because that is basically a conceptual process. It can be illuminating and sometimes that illumination can be helpful. But most of the time it just results in a certain explanation, “Oh, we’re doing this because of X, Y, and Z.” And nothing changes.

What Tokmé Zongpo is referring to here is something quite different. When he says “go into your own confusion,” he means experience it, which we can translate into sitting in the experience of one’s own confusion. This is very important. When we’re confused and reactive, we almost always go to our heads and start thinking about things, and we get lost in the stories. And getting lost in the stories separates us from what is actually going on in us. And we can spin wonderful stories about it and wonderful explanations, but it doesn’t really help anything.

So, the first step in going into our own confusion is, what am I experiencing physically? Now if you’re not used to connecting with your body, this can be difficult. I was invited to teach at a Zen Center several years ago, and they wanted to learn about the four immeasureables. And so I was happily teaching about the four immeasureables, but the questions they were asking seemed to be off in some way.

And about a day into the program, I realized that even though many people in the center had been practicing Zen for 20 years or so, they had never sat actually in their body. They weren’t connected with the physical experience of emotion or the physical experience of confusion. So, this kind of thing can happen.

So, when you’re feeling confused and reactive, you ask, what am I experiencing in my body? And you just breathe. You may not be able to discern or pick it out right away. That doesn’t matter. You just sit in the experience of your body. And if you need help with that, there’s a very simple way you can do this. And that is to say, “Crown of the head, soles of my feet, everything in between.” And that will bring your attention into your body. “Crown of my head, soles of my feet, everything in between.”

And when you do that, you open to your experience of confusion or reactivity or however it’s manifesting for you. And sooner or later, and for most people it’s sooner rather than later, you’ll begin to sense how your body is expressing that confusion or that emotional reaction. And there are all kinds of sensations. There’s no point in trying to give a catalog here. There can be tightness, contraction, movements of energy in the body, all kinds of stuff.

When you connect with the body, it stops the tendency to get lost in thought. You’re beginning to connect with the actual experience. So, you keep doing that. Earlier today I described an incident where I found myself just flooded with anger. So, that’s what I was doing there. I was just, “What am I experiencing in my body?” And that’s why I could say every cell of my body was inflamed with anger because every cell was burning. It was just like everything was really hot and it was burning, inside and out.

When we connect with the body, we stop thinking, and that’s really helpful here. The function of thought when we’re upset or confused is to dissipate attention so that we don’t experience anything. We just go round and round and round. That’s the function of thinking. By connecting with a body, we sidetrack that distracting mechanism and we begin to experience what’s going on in us.

And little by little we will become aware of the emotional sensations. And when you can sit in the physical sensations and the emotional sensations, things tend to get clearer pretty quickly. It’s not a reasoning process; it’s not an intellectual process; it’s not a conceptual process. Knowing arises out of being in the experience itself. So, when Tokmé Zongpo says, “Constantly go into your own confusion and put an end to it,” he doesn’t mean you stop the confusion. You put an end to confusion by experiencing it clearly. And now you can say, I’m very clear about being confused.

I’ll give you a practical example of the woman I’ve hired to help me organize my space. One of the first things she said was, “Okay, what do you want to organize?” I said, “Well, I’ve got this CD collection.” “Well, which ones do you want to keep?” I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “Sit down.” She’s great at this. And she just brought me over this one box of CDs, another box of CDs, and another box. “We’re going to go through these.” So, “Okay, I want to keep this one. No, I don’t want that one. This one I’m not sure about.” And I started holding it for a while. You know how it is when you’re clearing stuff up. “Do I throw this one away?” She said, “That goes in the not-sure pile.”

And it was wonderful, because now there was a not-sure pile. So, now I could just go through all of the CDs very quickly: keep, throw away, not sure, keep throw away, not sure. After a while we got to the not-sure pile, and then I could bring more attention to that. But this is an example of how, just by connecting really with your experience of confusion, and being clear in it, things get clearer. And so, “Okay, I don’t know what I want to do now. I don’t know what the right thing to do is.” Okay, sit right there. Sit in the not knowing.

That’s how you end confusion. We think that if we end confusion then, “I will just know the answer to everything.” Dream on, it’s not going to happen. But the more that you’re able to sit and actually experience the confusion, the less likely you are to react to situations. You may just say, “I don’t know what to do here.” Okay. “I don’t know whether I want to keep this CD or not.” Okay, right there. And this is immensely useful in our lives. Even though you may not think it’s moving forward, it creates a space in which other things can happen.

Now, the willingness to go into what is arising in us and experience it completely is the characteristic of a practitioner. That’s what practice is. Doing rituals, reading, studying, etc., etc. which many people do very, very well and get expert at. If any of those are being used as a way to avoid doing just what I’ve described, then you’re a “materialist in practitioner’s clothing.” you’re looking like someone who’s practicing, but you’re not really because you’re not using these tools to experience your own confusion and being able to rest in that experience.

You undermine yourself when you react emotionally and
Grumble about the imperfections of other bodhisattvas.
(Now in this context, another bodhisattva is anybody who aspires to help others through spiritual awakening. So, it basically means almost everybody.)
Of the imperfections of those who have entered the Great Way,
Don’t say anything.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 32

Now in today’s climate, this is tricky because in various institutions, somewhat in the Tibetan tradition, the Catholic, the institutions have sought to protect people who’ve engaged in activities which have been very, very harmful, very hurtful to people over long periods of time. And this traditional way of operating, of not saying anything, has not been effective in changing that.

Traditionally, if you asked one teacher about another teacher, and that teacher said, “I can’t say anything about that.” That was like, “Don’t go to that teacher!” But we don’t know how to read those codes any more. And it used to be in villages, it was known who were the people it wasn’t safe to leave young children with. And so the people in the village would just take care that those situations never arose. But in a complex society such as ours, those subtleties of interaction in community have been lost. So, we have to fall back on much more explicit things and thus when people are being harmed and damaged, the appropriate authorities actually need to be informed. And this is often very difficult and a painful thing to do even though it’s necessary.

We’re talking about really bad things being done, which are harmful to people. Here Tokmé Zongpo is talking about grumbling, about, “They’re not practicing the way they should be practicing or they’re not doing what they should be doing, etc., etc.” The reason that Tokmé Zongpo is saying stay quiet here, is because that grumbling has a really bad effect on you. It may stir up stuff in the community and create things like that, but giving this kind of expression to your resentment and judgment, etc., is simply reinforcing those tendencies in you. And it’s not helpful either to your interest in developing a high quality of attention, nor is it helpful in developing an approach to life which actually allows you to help others, and enables you help others.

Learning how to let that grumbling go frees you in many, many ways from a whole level of judgment and comparison that goes on in most of us. When you see something happening that is definitely wrong, then it’s appropriate to take action. But that’s very different from this harping, and holding it in oneself, and thinking about it, and talking about it with others, which becomes very easily a form of idle talk or gossip or something like that.

This is basically an ethical stance because it’s about choosing how you want to be in the world. All of these instructions are not—and this is very important—these are not saying, “These are the things that you should do,” as if Tokmé Zongopo is some higher authority. I probably should have said this right at the beginning. All of these instructions are saying, this is what I have found helpful and you may find it helpful too. And in approaching these instructions, that’s exactly what you should do. You should experiment with them and see, is this actually helpful to me? Or how do I practice this in a way that is helpful to me?

[Discussion about going overtime and ending the session soon]

Ken: The next one is very similar:

When you squabble with others about status and rewards,
You undermine your own practice, learning, meditation, reflection
(Just three aspects of practice. I had a great time translating this one:)
Let go of any investment in your family circle
Or the circle of those who support you.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 33

Well, these are your closest connections. Now those who support you, you’re talking about monks and the patrons that they had and things like that. So, you can think of your work environment and the people who help you and support you in your life here. And then you have your family.

Now, I had a very interesting time. I did a program, I think it was, Who am I? But I asked people to spend some time thinking of their relationship with their parents. And there was a certain feeling that came up in the room. And then I asked them to think of their relationship with their children. And we just sat with that and there was another feeling in the room. Then I asked, think of your relationship with your siblings. And the room was just charged with pain, just like that.

Our siblings are the people that we’re in the most intense competition with, and everybody has difficulty. Some people mature into very good relationship with their siblings, but a lot of people experienced a tremendous amount of pain with their siblings. And you see this very, very clearly when a family elder dies and then all the old family stuff comes out. It’s wonderful to watch if you don’t have to be a part of it.

So, time and time again, when you’re squabbling with others, it’s all based on certain forms of lack of recognition, lack of appreciation, not being understood, not being heard, and things like that. Really, really old stuff that’s been triggered. And that’s why Tokmé Zongpo is saying, forget this old emotional investment in all of this stuff. It’s in the past, and when you react on the basis of that stuff, you’re actually living in the past. You had a question back here.

Student: So, you’re saying you don’t have to wait until we die.

Ken: The family of origin issues will come up long before that. In many cases, yes. When it’s saying “Let go of any investment,” it doesn’t mean don’t care.

There’s a very famous story of Buddha coming to a certain monastery where there were some monks that were ill and they were lying in their own excrement and they were in just horrible conditions. And Buddha called the people that had come with him and immediately set about washing them and cleaning them up and everything. And then he asked to meet with the other monks in the monastery. He said, “Why weren’t you taking care of these people?” “Well, we didn’t want be impure.” And he just said, “Nonsense. They were sick. You take care of them.”

And this is where some idealization about practice gets in the way of ordinary human caring, which comes up again and again. So, when Tokmé Zongpo is talking about this, it’s letting go of the emotional investment in it. He’s not talking about letting go of ordinary human caring.

Abusive language upsets others
And undermines the ethics of a bodhisattva.
So, don’t upset people or
Speak abusively—this is the practice of a bodhisattva.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 34

It’s really a skill, and it’s an extraordinarily effective skill, to learn how to articulate things clearly and politely. I’ve seen people who have extraordinary abilities in this. The consequence is people listen to them. And so, if you want to be heard, speaking gently and softly and saying things in a way that the other person can actually hear them is far more effective than yelling at them or yelling at them and telling them to listen to you.

Red Auerbach—who’s the coach of the Celtics for many years—said, “It’s not what you say to the players that’s important. It’s what they hear that’s important.”

And so whenever you’re communicating with somebody else, your aim should be, “How can I say this in a way that they hear what I’m saying?” Not, “How can I say this in a way that makes me feel okay?”

When reactive emotions acquire momentum,
It is hard to make remedies work.
A person in attention wields remedies like weapons,
Crushing reactive emotions such as craving as soon as they arrive.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 35

What I’ve been trying to convey to you this weekend is, even though you have this martial language—crush emotions, get out those weapons, cut them to pieces, round them up, flatten them, many books that talk about this—it’s poetic expression. You try to do this literally and you’ll just create so much resistance in yourself and you split yourself off in all kinds of problematic ways. What is your weapon here? Your weapon, or as I would prefer to say, your tool here is attention.

And when a reactive emotion rises such as anger or jealousy, you don’t remedy it. You don’t stop its operation by shutting it down. If you’re able to shut it down, all you’ve done is put the energy of that emotion into your body, and it’s going to make you sick later. The way that it doesn’t go into operation is that you experience it completely. And it’s very, very important.

I had an office partner and he’d been a student of mine for many years. We became friends. He said, “Let’s rent an office together.” I needed to move and he needed an office. Well, so we did. Everybody who knew us thought this is going to last two months, maybe one month. We ended up having a great three years together. Now this is a really, really angry guy. He was much worse than me. Well into his 40s, if you cut him off on a freeway, he was the kind of guy who would follow you home and punch you out. So, this one really angry dude. We shared an assistant who was a very sweet person. And she was just scared of this guy, even though she’d been with him for several years. So, she always did things exactly right.

And my office partner was the kind of person who treated her as an assistant first and as a person second. And I was always taking this up with him and I was pointing out his anger. One day I went into his office and he was sitting with his feet up on his desk, his arms crossed, scowling furiously. I said, “What’s wrong Dave?” “It was much easier when I just expressed it.” [Laughter] He was taking what we’d discussed to heart and he was just experiencing his anger. He didn’t like it at all. I said, “Good for you, glad you’re experiencing it. That means the rest of us don’t have to.” [Laughter]

But this is the nature of reactive emotions. If we don’t experience them, the energy either goes into our body and makes us sick, or it goes out in the world and other people experience it. So, one way or another, those reactive emotions are going to be experienced. But since they are our emotions, it’s our responsibility to experience them. And we can put them on the body, but we pay for that. It’s really unfair to put them on others. So, that’s how you work with reactive emotions: by experiencing them completely.

Now the question’s raised, “Well, what about acting on them?” No, no. You’re not going to act on them. You’re going to experience them. Acting on them isn’t experiencing them. It’s expressing them, and it’s a way of avoiding experiencing them. What I mean by experiencing them is just experience them; you don’t act on them. When you experience them completely, then something shifts and you can see what is appropriate to do in the situation. But now it’s not going to be motivated by that reactive emotion. It makes a very big difference.

And the other thing is, don’t wait around for this. Don’t say, “Oh, I’ll take care of that anger later,” because it just builds. It’s good to jump on the stuff as soon as it arises. The opportunity allows that.

In short, in everything you do,
Know what is happening in your mind.
By constantly being present and alert,
You bring about what helps others.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 36

And it’s amazing; that’s exactly what happens. And finally, and this is where we’re going to end:

To dispel the suffering of beings without limit,
With wisdom freed from the three spheres
(that’s the same as the three domains earlier)
Direct all the goodness generated by these efforts
To awakening.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 37

This is the final act of letting go. We work hard at our practice. We think we’ve done good. And what do we do with that good? Rather than saying, “Oh, I’ve done good,” we say, “May this good work for the welfare of others.”

Now, just bringing this to a close. What I’d like to do—where’s the microphone?—is just to pass it around. And I’d like you just to say in a sentence, what’s one thing that you’ve got out of our time together which you’re going to take into your life? So, we can just start over here.

Student feedback

Student: I think the main thing has been a deeper experience of stillness and emptiness in my sitting.

Ken: Okay.

Student: Look in the resting, rest in the looking.

Student: I’m going to start practicing again.

Ken: Very good [laughs].

Student: I’m going to attempt to be less judgmental of myself and start at the beginning there with graciousness to myself.

Student: I’ve gained more confidence in that I can actually practice.

Student: Looking at myself more carefully. I feel like I’ve gotten a lot more to work with in terms of thinking about compassion. And secondly, thinking about your phrase of being in my world.

Student: Gosh, hard to know where to start. Compassion doesn’t have a lot to do with meeting the situation with concepts. It has more to do with opening completely to what’s happening. And watch what response can arise and creating space for that other person so that if you can be with them in their pain fully, that helps create a space for them where they can also be there.

Student: For me, this has been a very good reminder not to avoid looking carefully and fully experiencing the difficult aspects of practice.

Student: This is my very, very first time listening to a Buddhist teacher or going to a Buddhist encounter. So, I think I’m very much happy with it and I’ll do it again.

Ken: Didn’t turn you off completely? [Laughs]

Student: To open to my experience and to do that by examining the body and by sitting with the emotions.

Student: A lot to digest, but in particular, trusting, exiting the world and trusting my world.

Student: I realize that I’ve been drawn lately to, I call it developing more compassion, but that’s not really what, I can’t put it into words, but it has to do with compassion. It has to do with opening more fully to everything in my experience.

Student: In your talk on prayer and meditation, prayer is something I was very familiar with at one time. And it is a method to open more to my experience and that the difference between my experience in the world or the other experience. It’s become more apparent in the sitting, of that movement within myself that allows me to connect with what’s real.

Student: I feel like there’s been at least 100 seeds planted and I hope that some of them sprout and grow. But the idea of my world and trying to be more in that and experiencing what is really going on. Also in resting in my meditation.

Student: Encouragement or exercising courage in sitting with my own reactive emotions. And practicing compassion with that part of my experience.

Student: I think I’m looking forward to visiting older stories that are charged with deep emotion.

Student: I think that you’ve given me a sense that allowing myself to feel some of the emotions I’m feeling about the uncertainty of my future, it’s given me some courage to sit with that and not to feel like I’m wallowing, which some people I think of that. And also it’s reminded me of the richness of experiencing stillness within myself and I’ve let that go for a really long time.

Student: Opening to the experience of poetry instead of looking for literal and rational explanations.

Student: Hi, I just popped in here about 10 minutes ago. But in the last 10 minutes I’ve gotten just what I experienced was some sound rational truth.

Student: I think I’m going to try to pay more attention to my world and the world and make an effort to look at it differently than I’ve just been in the habit of doing.

Student: Definitely, without a doubt, I have from everything gotten experience, experience, experience. And I just am seeing that I need to be still and just be with what is and really feel some confidence that that’s going to work. And that’s what I really appreciate. I feel like I have more faith that I can do that because I have a better belief it’s going to work, it’s going to produce a result. And, thank you very much.

Student: Actually, you said just what I was going to say. I liked your two simple things. One, rest and look; and then, look and rest. And also thinking about from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet and in between, simple and helpful.

Student: Moment by moment pay attention to my experience.

Student: I’m grateful to my anger for providing me such an enduring source of motivation. [Laughter]

Student: The word experience has a whole new meaning for me, and I hope using it to unfetter my mind.

Student: I’m reminded to slow way down and to observe more and fix less, because I really like to fix.

Ken: Not everybody likes to be fixed [laughs].

Student: It meant a lot to me when you told the story about being absolutely livid with rage. And how you dealt with that. Because one of the things that I’m coming to see about myself—if you would’ve asked me five years ago, I would’ve totally said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about”—is that I’m fundamentally motivated by anger. So, it’s kind of reassuring that you are too. [Laughter] Well no, because it means that I can move in the world. I can see you as someone living in the world doing what I believe is wonderful, wonderful work. And it’s kind of like, okay, I can be angry and get out there and do some good. And so thank you very much.

And another thing is, I’m going through a period right now in my life where I’m working with a lot of really tough stuff. And up until relatively recently, my orientation to practice has been pretty much one characterized by grim resolution. And the way of approaching practice, well interpreting effort as enthusiasm for example, it’s opening up a lot for me. And actually I’m discovering a quality of joy in it and enthusiasm that I haven’t had for a long time. So, thanks a lot.

Student: I was glad to be reminded that we’re animals. And that what we’re trying to do is really kind of counter to some very fundamental parts of our nature. I also was really happy that we got more tools in the toolkit.

Student: Well, this has been a problem that I’ve had for a really long time and that is the problem of what to do next. And it had never occurred to me to sit with the problem of what to do next. So, thank you for that one.

Student: This might be the same comment, but approaching emotions or what happens with curiosity, I think is a really good attitude. And, I loved the part about kindness, I think it’s so powerful.

Student: To go deep into the of the ache of the heart.

Student: I like the fact that you opened up to me my world vs. the world.

Student: I liked the resting in experience. And I like the idea that the concept of being a bodhisattva is not as esoteric as I had always thought. It seemed like something pretty weird, not much to do with me. I’m not going to just be a martyr and all this kind of stuff. And yet after this weekend, it’s like wow, pretty cool.

Student: I always thought the 37 practices are way beyond my control. Thank you, Ken.

Student: I came to support John and I’m going with support for me.

Student: I’m fairly new to Buddhism. I’ve been meditating for a number of years and I really appreciated your simple descriptions and sometimes using other words and I feel like I can at least leave here this weekend knowing a bit more about what emptiness is. Thank you.

Ken: Did we talk about it?

Student: I enjoyed knowing about not wanting things to be anything other than what they are. Like being last. [Laughter]

Ken: Is that everybody? Okay. Then I’d just like to finish exactly as Tokmé Zongpo suggests:

Goodness comes from this work we have done.
Let me not hold it just in me.
Let it spread to all that is known,
And awaken good throughout the world.

Contemporary Session Prayers

Thank you for your attention. It’s been a pleasure to be with you. I wish you the best.