37 Practices of a Bodhisattva
This retreat offers a sustained, in-depth exploration of Tokmé Zongpo’s Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva, drawing on Ken McLeod’s distinct blend of experiential insight, directness, and responsiveness to real-time student questions. The teachings weave traditional verse commentary with personal anecdotes, poetic language, and dynamic dialogue with participants. Ken repeatedly emphasizes the importance of grounding spiritual practice in direct experience, not conceptual understanding—a point he reinforces through spontaneous interactions, challenges to the habitual tendency to analyze and try to figure things out, and illustrations drawn from everyday life.
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1. Introduction to the Retreat
Ken offers background on Tokmé Zongpo’s *Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva*, blending history, translation issues, and his own understanding of emptiness and compassion. “Freedom from a sense of ‘I’ or understanding of emptiness allows you to act freely.” Topics covered include Tokmé Zongpo’s influences, the structure of Tibetan liturgical texts, the meaning of practice, and the metaphor of a well-equipped boat for spiritual opportunity.
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2. Leaving Your Homeland
Ken examines the second and third verses of The Thirty-Seven Practices, focusing on how attachment, aversion, and indifference trap us in cycles of conditioning. “The piece that I really want to focus on is you have to take action. This doesn’t happen by itself.” Topics covered include literal and metaphorical interpretations of “homeland,” the value of retreat, emotional reactivity, and the necessity of clear, vivid awareness for authentic practice.
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3. Opening to Change: Teachers, Friends
Ken delves into verses 4 through 7 of The Thirty-Seven Practices, addressing themes of impermanence, the influence of companions, and the nature of refuge. “These are instructions, not the Ten Commandments.” Topics covered include discerning beneficial relationships, levels of spiritual ambition, interpretive approaches to Tibetan texts, and methods for deepening meditation using reflective inquiry.
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4. Facing Destruction, Finding Freedom
Ken unpacks verses 8 through 10 of The Thirty-Seven Practices, guiding students through fear, destructive patterns, and the elusive nature of freedom. “It’s not to get rid of the fear—it’s to be able to experience the fear but not have to act on it.” Topics covered include the link between awakened mind and compassion, three marks of existence, reflections on Theravadan and Mahayana perspectives, and how savoring experience reveals the nature of mind.
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5. Compassion Without Limits: Opening to Suffering and Letting Go of Self
Ken discusses verses 11 through 13 of *The Thirty-Seven Practices*, focusing on the exchange of happiness for suffering and what it means to meet hardship with compassion. “The problem is not whether you suffer—it’s whether you try to avoid suffering.” Topics covered include taking and sending (tonglen), the difference between pain and suffering, the illusion of security, inner critics as psychic thieves, and the role of softness in navigating insult and injury without shutting down.
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6. Friction, Forgiveness, and the Edge of Awakening
Ken dives into four potent verses from *The Thirty-Seven Practices*, urging practitioners to meet slander, humiliation, betrayal, and rivalry not with defense, but with openness and respect. “You’re going to feel like shit when you do.” Topics covered include the myth of justified violence, the danger of spiritual suppression, the cost of pride, and how deep attention to bodily and emotional friction creates real transformation.
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7. Neither High nor Low: Staying Present in Every Experience
Ken explores verses 18 and 19 of *The Thirty-Seven Practices*, encouraging students to bring presence to life’s extremes—despair and acclaim alike. “Actually the overwhelm comes from being separate from, not from being one in it.” Topics covered include emotional collapse and inflated pride, the balance point in taking and sending, the illusion of control, and how repetitive practice makes space for real transformation.
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8. Transforming Anger and Desire: The Practice of Inner Freedom
Ken explores verses 20 through 22 of *The Thirty-Seven Practices*, offering a range of techniques to work with reactive patterns—especially anger and desire. “We get angry when we feel that we are weaker than what we are opposing.” Topics covered include multiple strategies for transforming anger, the role of fixation in subject-object duality, reflections on righteous anger, and the importance of finding methods that genuinely work for you.
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9. Dissolving Fixations and Opening to Experience
Ken unpacks verses 22 to 24 of The Thirty-Seven Practices, encouraging direct inquiry into how we relate to experience. “When you look at your own eyes, what do you see? Nothing—and yet everything arises.” Topics covered include Douglas Harding’s “headless” perspective, dream-like experience and lucid awareness, the difference between reacting and responding, and the subtle shift from grasping to open appreciation.
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10. Opening Through Action: The Six Perfections and the Bodhisattva Vow
Ken guides students through verses 25 to 30 of *The Thirty-Seven Practices*, unpacking how generosity, discipline, patience, effort, meditative stability, and wisdom become perfections through non-separation and presence. “You’re looking right at it—but you can’t see it, because there’s nothing to see.” Topics covered include Milarepa’s poetic take on each perfection, the inner mechanics of the bodhisattva vow, how to act without a sense of self, and what it means to return to what’s already there.
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11. Into the Fire: Confusion, Criticism, and the Courage to Stay Present
Ken explores verses 31 to 34 of The Thirty-Seven Practices, turning attention toward confusion itself and the subtle patterns that derail practice. “When you go into your own confusion with attention, you reach a point where the cognitive processing falls away, the emotional processing falls away.” Topics covered include the futility of gossip, how emotional investment clouds perception, the risks of judgment in spiritual communities, and what it means to speak—or remain silent—with integrity.
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12. Living the Path: Renunciation, Presence, and the Flow of Awakening
Ken brings The Thirty-Seven Practices to a close with verses 35 through 41, offering guidance on transforming experience as it arises and letting practice become a natural way of being. “Crushing reactive emotions such as craving… means moving right into the experience of craving, with all of its heart-rending, tugging, and pulling.” Topics covered include working with desire, the subtle power of renunciation, reframing suffering as opportunity, how to dedicate merit through presence, and the lived essence of bodhisattva intention.