Do join us for silent sitting and yogic song, with a short teaching in the middle.
The meetings are hosted by Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin, an
ordained teaching couple of the Aro gTér Lineage. They dedicate their
time to practice, teaching, the Aro gTér Lineage, and working with their
students.
Ngakma Nor’dzin is an award winning author. Her books are: Spacious Passion, Relaxing into Meditation, Battlecry of Freedom, and Illusory Advice (co-authored with Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin).
In Aro gTér Buddhism there is a strong focus on engaging with the Arts as practice. I find it hard to put into words the change of view I have experienced from going to a local art group for an hour and a half a week.
The grave yard at the Church of Saint Winwaloe, Cornwall, by Siân Bussingham
Producing just one piece of artwork a week has made me change my relationship with what I see around me. Now when I go out for a walk I feel as though I am wandering through works of art.
Skies and landscapes now suggest to me acrylics, watercolour, pastels, or ink. Somehow the vibrancy of my surroundings seem to communicate to me much more.
This is one of the transformative joys of being a practitioner within in the Aro gTér Lineage.
In this video from February 2010, Ngakma Nor’dzin explains the perspectives of Sutra and Tantra and how the Ngak’phang style of practice is ideal for people who want to live ordinary lives.
Transcript
Ngakma Nor’dzin: The Sutrayana path is the path of renunciation and the ultimate expression of this is monasticism – where you give up your engagement with the ordinary aspects of life. You remove yourself from that and go and live somewhere like a monastery. You remove yourself from desiring things, because you own nothing, you have no money, everything that you need is very basic and provided for you – so you are removing yourself from the objects of desire. Then desire doesn’t arise, and one discovers emptiness. This is the principle of the Sutrayana path.
Now from the perspective of ordinary people who are continually surrounded by objects of desire, this can be quite a difficult path in which to engage in any meaningful way. There can be the danger of trying to be so mindful about desire that one actually becomes somewhat flat in one’s experience of engagement with the world. Because you’re trying not to allow the experience of desire to arise, you become very mindful in a sense of you’re continually watching yourself, you’re continually keeping your energies under control, keeping your emotional states under control.
Here, in this old photograph (May 2005), Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin, are seen through the smoky haze of a fire ceremony, burning the old clothing of a newly ordained apprentice. This celebrates the death of the apprentice—consumed in the flaming pyre—and their rebirth as an ordained tantrika.
In this video from February 2010, Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin discuss practice and how it is supposed to make a difference in people’s lives.
Transcript
Ngakma Nor’dzin: What matters in the end is: is it making you a kinder human being; is it making you a nicer person to be around; is it making you happier? That’s what matters in the end. If having a belief in a God makes you a kinder human being – great, get on with it.
Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: And that’s why it’s important to make sure that your motivation and your formal practice is balanced with compatible activity in your life without laying down any kind of prescription about what those activities might be – because that’s wide open. But if we find that we’re acting unkindly in our lives it’s a sign that we haven’t brought practice into our lives as much as we should, and it gives us something to look at. So it’s important that however we are in our lives is compatible with our idea of being better as people. One of the quotations from Ngak’chang Rinpoche is that ‘it’s supposed to make a difference’ – practice is supposed to make us kinder, more aware people. If it is not doing that, then we’re missing out on something.
In this video from February 2010, Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin discuss why a path of practice needs to be bigger than us and why it’s sometimes inconvenient.
Transcript
Ngakma Nor’dzin: Really to engage in something that is going to change you and move you in a direction of spiritual development, it has to be bigger than you are. It has to—in effect—become inconvenient at some point. So the sitting practice becomes a little difficult: it's not very comfortable, you don't really want to do it -- but you do it because that is the method.
Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: We become part of a path of practice to receive the help and support that that has to offer, and if we're the biggest thing there, then it's not going to be of much support to us
Ngakma Nor’dzin: Just a support to your neurosis.
Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: So in a sense we enter into something that’s bigger than us and, as Ngakma Nor’dzin says, does become inconvenient. But when we take refuge, and when we take vows, it's important to take that on, knowing that they will be inconvenient at some stage, and not to kid ourselves that things are necessarily going to be plain sailing.
Sometimes vows and commitments—to my mind—look a bit like the barriers on the side of the motorway. So if you're falling asleep at the wheel, they will gently but firmly—and with nasty scraping noises—put you back on to the motorway and hopefully wake you up.
Ngakma Nor’dzin: … without hitting anyone else...
Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: … and our vows and refuge commitments are there. If we were completely realised, we'd never bump into our vows. If we're not realised, occasionally we bump into our vows and take notice and put ourselves back on the road again.
Ngakma Nor’dzin: I think Buddhism is a bit like cooking: that you are given a recipe, you're told what the fruit or the product of the recipe is going to be, and then you just try to cook it. You put the ingredients in and you produce the results. You take it to your teacher and your teacher says 'Mmm, not quite right – you just need a little bit more sugar'. So you take it away, you engage in the method again you cook it again, take it to your teacher, and this time we need just a little bit more spice, or whatever.
Now if you haven’t got the teacher or the lineage there to actually say that what you've produced is nice, but it's not actually what the recipe is aiming at – if you haven't got that person who is bigger than you, who can look at that, outside of your own frame of reference, then you might think that the very first time you cook the cake, what you've got is what was intended by the recipe. You can never actually know whether that cake tastes like the person who wrote the recipe intended.
But if you've got somebody who created that recipe or has received transmission of the recipe down the generations, tasted it from a master, tasted it from the next master, and so on – then they can say exactly how it should taste, and they can tell you how it's not quite right.
In this video from February 2010 Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin and Ngakma Nor’dzin
discuss Living the View and viewing oneself as a practitioner at all
times.
Transcript
Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: One of the simplest approaches to living the view is
to view oneself as a practitioner at all times. It can be very easy to
view oneself as a practitioner whilst you are sitting, and to forget all
of that once you’ve left your sitting place. But to have a memory of
that with you—because most of our practice happens when we’re not
practising formally—and to have that be with you – to take it out with
you, and to understand what it is to be a practitioner in the world is
important.
Ngakma Nor’dzin: I think there are probably different
levels of living the view. When we are on retreat with our Sangha—with
our Vajra bothers and sisters—then we have living the view at quite a
high level: we assume that everybody in that setting has good intention
towards us. We enter into the confidence that that’s what that situation
is like. So we try to be worthy in that situation and similarly we view
the people in that situation that they have good intention towards us.
That means that if something is going on in a conversation or whatever,
and somebody appears to be not being very kind, we assume that we have
misunderstood their intention rather than responding to the apparent
unkindness. So we live the view that our Vajra brothers and sisters are
realised beings. This creates a wonderful rich creative space in which
one can try to live honourably. One can try and live at the very
pinnacle of what it means to be a good, honest, honourable human being.
It’s
obviously much more difficult to do this in an ordinary everyday-life
setting, but I think having had the flavour and experience of this in
the sangha setting, one can start to experiment taking risks in an
ordinary-life setting. The first thing that we try and do is to assume
the best of other people.
A very simple example of this would be
when the children were young (they are grown up now, left home, at
university and everything), but when they were young there was always
this standing-outside-the-school-gate period that happened when you went
to collect your children from school – especially at junior school of
course; junior and infant school. Now one of the root vows of Vajrayana
is ‘never to denigrate the opposite gender’. Often the conversation
outside the school gate seemed to be a bunch of women slagging off their
husbands—saying negative things about their husbands—and the tendency
was that there would be a general, ‘Oh yes, mine’s like that as well …’
And I—from the point of view of my vow—could not join in with this – and
from the point of view of my relationship with my husband, didn’t want
to join in with this because this was not my experience of our
relationship.
So I would try, without the other people feeling
put down in any way, to just say something like, ‘Well yeah, but also
this…’, or ‘I haven’t found that, I’ve found this…’ and just try and
present a more lighthearted view, or try to bring some humour into the
conversation, or whatever – just say, ‘Well actually it doesn’t always
have to be like that. My experience isn’t that it’s always like that,
and does it actually help us all, standing here agreeing with each other
about this not-very-helpful view of our husbands? We are in
relationship with them, so surely the best thing to do is to appreciate
that relationship, not moan about it.’
So this is just a simple example of how you can try and live the view even in ordinary life.
In this video from February 2010 Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ‘ö-Dzin discuss being ordinary and being practitioners.
Transcript
Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: One of the most important aspects of what we do is to
take our practice into our lives and yet live lives that are pretty much
the same as everyone else’s.
Ngakma Nor’dzin: To all intents and
purposes we just look like ordinary people most of the time. We wear
our robes when we’re ‘on duty’, if you like – when we’re being ordained
practitioners: so when we’re teaching, we’re representing the Lineage in
some way. But in other ways our lives are very ordinary – we were
ordinary clothes ...
Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin: … and we look like ordinary
people because we are ordinary people. You don’t have to have a
spiritual organ somewhere in your body in order to make it possible to
practice. It actually means that you’re part of the world, but your
practice is part of what you do.
