When the Picture Falls Apart

This will be my 30th post since starting this blog, and the final one for 2025. It feels quite serious but only from a certain point of view!

Listening to this clip from an interview on the Mystical Positivist with Ken McLeod and Norman Fischer recorded during the early days of the COVID pandemic, I felt an immediate sense of recognition. Like many people, I began practice just as Ken describes, with the notion that at some point the ordinary difficulties of life would stop catching me—that insight, or awakening, would somehow insulate me from unsettling shocks and reversals. Over the years, that picture has steadily fallen apart.

Since I began practising, life has moved in ways I never could have anticipated. I've come to understand that I chose significant directions in my life for reasons that had everything to do with long-standing reactive patterns set in place very early, and very little to do with how I approach life now. Some of the difficulties that followed came from turns of life I had no say in; others arose directly from those early choices. There have been quiet reckonings too: recognising that the life I am living is, in large part, shaped by those early reactions and the choices that followed. And over time, I’ve had experiences that made the cost of those patterns impossible to ignore.

Practice doesn’t free us from wanting things to be different, but it does change how we meet the reality that things are what they are. You can’t go back and choose again with better information or deeper insight, or realign the past with what you understand now. At some point, the only option is to respond to the direction of the present, even when that direction feels constrained by choices you would no longer make.

Ken’s honesty about disorientation—the loss of familiar touchpoints—also resonates deeply for me. I hear him pointing to something both sobering and reassuring: spiritual practice doesn’t deliver a life free of difficulties. What it can offer, over time, is a growing capacity to stay in relationship with what’s actually happening, rather than collapsing into regret, blame, or fantasy. Practice doesn’t necessarily make things easier, and it can even make things a lot harder. But it does make it possible to meet difficult situations more honestly.

From The Mystical Positivist Radio Show 360

Stuart: In the email exchanges that we did about what we were going to talk about for this program, Ken had asked friends what they would be interested in hearing us discuss. There's a lot of things to discuss, but one of the questions that came up is how helpful it would be and encouraging for people to hear that even senior teachers and practitioners have difficult days during our common pandemic crisis. So that's kind of a kind of a starting point. I have some other topics I want to bring up later, but I think it gets to some of the core issues of what makes spiritual practice spiritual practice, what makes practitioners different than people who aren't trying to engage in a spiritual practice. And so I invite any responses that come up to this question posed by one of Ken's friends.

Ken: Norman, do you want to go first? Do you want me to go first?

Norman: You go ahead.

Ken: Thank you. The first thought that comes to mind in that question is that I think a lot of people, when they start spiritual practice, think they're going to get some place where the ordinary vicissitudes of life are not going to bother them anymore. I certainly did when I started off and was gradually disabused of that notion in the course of my practice, and being with people who had a long history of practice, they all found some situations difficult, they had certain things that went on inside them. So my whole understanding of what spiritual practice is about gradually changed over the years.

I was asked a question about enlightenment very recently and the answer that I came up with is we have this idea of enlightenment but as time goes on the picture kind of disintegrates in front of us. And so at this point yeah, I have my ups and downs, and with this crisis—the pandemic—my initial reaction to it was that I found it very disorienting. So many of the usual touchpoints in life weren't there and I think all of us have had to learn to negotiate life a little differently.

I think the most significant effect of years of practice is that I'm probably more ready to relate to how things are rather than how I want them to be. I still want them to be different but I tend to relate to them how they are and go on from there.

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The Reliable Witness

When I listen to this passage, I feel both relieved and unsettled. Relieved because Ken names something I’ve intuited for a long time: that external feedback about the effects of practice—how I seem to others, how “nice” or “settled” I appear—doesn’t actually tell me very much about what’s going on inside. And unsettled because it takes away a reference point. If praise about improved behaviour isn’t a reliable guide, then there’s nowhere to hide.

The idea of the “reliable witness” also cuts through my tendency to feel pleased or even smug when someone remarks that I’m calmer, less reactive, or easier to live with. It’s not that feedback from others has no value, but it can quietly pull attention away from what’s actually happening inside. Behaviour can change for all sorts of reasons. It can even improve while something inside is quietly tightening, avoiding, or accumulating unspoken regret.

I appreciate the simplicity of Kontrül’s mind training instruction: “When you are clear inside, without regret or shame about your actions, that is the reliable witness.” It doesn’t depend on comparison or approval. It points to a kind of inner alignment—a sense that nothing needs to be hidden or justified. I recognise how rare that clarity can be, and how honest it asks me to be.

Hearing Ken describe this, I’m reminded that practice isn’t about becoming a better person in the eyes of others. It’s about developing the capacity to know directly whether I’m at ease with what I do and how I live. The reliable witness speaks softly, but unmistakably.

From A Trackless Path 13

Ken: Let's start with a simple question. How many of you have expectations about your practice? What it should be like, and how you should be in the world as a result of this practice? Well, one of the more relieving and one of the more troubling instructions in The Great Path of Awakening is:

Rely on the principal witness.

It could be "judge" too. And the commentary says, as you practice mind training, people may come to you and say, "Oh, you're a much nicer person than you used to be. You're much easier to get along with. You must be making great progress in your practice." And so you think, "Oh, I'm getting somewhere." But that's regarded in mind training as an unreliable witness because people don't know what's actually going on inside you. All they're doing is basing it on behavior.

And this certainly has happened to me. In the first three-year retreat I got a note from my wife, who was in the women's retreat saying, "From what the other guys are saying you're making great progress in your practice because you're much easier to live with now." And this was further confirmed many years later when I was in Vancouver in the early 70s helping to establish a center there. I was visiting with some old friends, and we were chatting in the kitchen. She came up, put her arm around me and said, "I think I can say this now, Ken. You really were an asshole." [Laughter]

So, what do you do with that? That's the unreliable witness.

And Kontrul goes on in his commentary to say... I'm going to experiment with getting rid of the word mind for a while and see what that's like.

When you are clear inside and not experiencing regrets or shame about your actions, that's the reliable witness.

Student: Could you repeat that?

Ken: When you are clear inside and have no regrets or shame about your actions, that's the reliable witness.

What he's saying is the reliable witness is mind itself.

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People Work in Different Ways

When I first heard Ken tell this story about Lama Tenpa—making the point that different things work for different people—I felt a sense of permission.

As someone who doesn’t visualise, I’d already learnt that many practices don’t translate well into my experience. So hearing Ken say, so plainly, that what matters is finding a way of practice that speaks to you and actually changes you when you do it, was deeply encouraging. It shifted the frame from “try harder” to something more fruitful: pay attention to what works. Ken calls this approach pragmatic Buddhism.

When I first heard Ken talk anout Lama Tenpa I was practising in a dharma centre context, in a very traditional setting. I had little opportunity to ask practice questions of my teacher and spent a long time stuck, spinning in confusion, doing practices that didn't bring about change. It took several years to recognise and acknowledge that I was stuck.

Now I hear this passage as an invitation to trust my own knowing. When you do, your path of practice becomes your own. It may not fit any system, but when you find what works, it changes you utterly.

From A Trackless Path 12

Ken: Well, people work in different ways. Our retreat director when I was in the three-year retreat was Lama Tenpa. Mahamudra was his practice—he didn’t do anything else. And he’d come over to the retreat sometimes, he’d say, “You know I really should offer a few tormas to Mahakala. Oh, I’m too lazy.” And by lazy he meant that he sat about twenty hours a day and he slept for about four hours sitting up. So very lazy person. And in the second retreat he didn’t teach the four immeasurables at all. And I worked with him. When he got to taking and sending he didn’t even teach taking and sending—just a very little bit—he had them doing something else.

I had a really knock down, drag ’em out argument with him about that because it had been a really important part of my training in the first retreat. And finally after listening to me, basically yell at him for half an hour he just looked at me and said, “Ken, that worked for you. It doesn’t work for me.” You know, mahamudra really, really worked for him.

And four immeasurables was very important part of my own practice, which is one of the reasons I teach it—because I think it’s very, very important. For other people it’s Avalokiteshvara. Other people it is resting with the breath. There are many, many practices, and the important thing is to find a way of practice that speaks to you. I really hope you can move in that direction. And then it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing because you have something which speaks to you and brings about change in you when you do it. And that’s what’s really, really important.

Once you get into a center-institutional thing and people are doing this practice, and this practice, you get into this comparison game: who’s getting ahead of whom?

One of my students at an retreat many years ago—it was an insight retreat—I gave them a couple of options. One was to do the traditional insight practices and the other one was to work with Nasrudin stories. She was pretty good practitioner, so she was working on her third Nasrudin story in this particular retreat. At the end of the retreat [laughs] she says, “How many other people got to three?” And I said, “You’re never going to know,” [laughs] because it was the comparison game again.

And this stuff comes up all the time, and it’s worse than useless—it’s counterproductive. It works in the wrong direction. And so to the extent that it’s possible I’m trying to create a way of practice... None of you, at least at this point, I don’t feel any of you are in competition with anybody else.

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How Dakinis Transform Experience

Over the years I’ve listened to each of Ken’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; I had 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 moment of that while listening—just a 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.

Working with the Unfettered Mind Website

I’ve spent more than twenty years practicing with the Unfettered Mind website as a key resource. It was my doorway to Ken’s teaching, and eventually led me to contact him and to begin studying with him. Since 2009, I've helped with site design and development and supported the volunteers who prepared the transcripts. In the process, I've come to know the material quite intimately.

Some people say that they find the site overwhelming because it invites you in, but doesn’t tell you much about where to go. There's no curriculum, no progression of levels—just a vast collection of resources in different formats and a first steps page.

I've written these notes for those who feel unsure about where to begin. They aren't a map or a set of instructions. Instead, they offer ways of approaching Unfettered Mind so you can find what speaks to you and let your own practice lead the way. It draws on my experience of working with the material, and on what I’ve learned from using the site to support my own practice.

These notes have five parts. You can begin anywhere:

• Part I – Understanding Unfettered Mind
• Part II – Orienting Yourself
• Part III – Working with the Resources
• Part IV – The Living Ecology of Unfettered Mind
• Part V – Letting Unfettered Mind Become a Companion

My hope is that something here helps you find your own way into the "labyrinth" of Unfettered Mind, and into the deeper terrain it opens up.

→ Read the notes here

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 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, 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 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.

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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Mantra of the Heart

I bow /
to the Lady of Wisdom, /
clear and boundless. //

The Buddha sat upon Vulture Peak, /
surrounded by monks and bodhisattvas. //

He entered a deep absorption — /
where everything arises, shines, and is known. //

Avalokiteshvara, /
looked into the heart of wisdom /
and saw the five streams of being /
empty of their own nature. //

Then Shariputra asked: /
To live this deep wisdom/
How should one train?//

O Shariputra, /
see this clearly — /
Replied Avalokiteshvara /
this body is emptiness, /
and emptiness is this body. //

Body is not other than emptiness, /
emptiness not other than body. //

The same is true /
for feelings, /
for thoughts, /
stories, and awareness. //

All experience is open — /
not fixed, /
not born or destroyed, /
not pure or impure, /
not lacking, not complete. //

Therefore, Shariputra, /
in emptiness there is no thing to grasp: /
no form, no feeling, /
no thought, no story, no awareness. //

No eye, no ear, no nose, /
no tongue, no body, no mind. /
No color, sound, smell, taste, touch, or thought. //

No ignorance, /
no end of ignorance. /
No old age and death, /
no end of old age and death. //

No suffering, /
no cause, /
no cessation, /
no path. //

Nothing to know, /
nothing to gain. //

And so the bodhisattva rests, /
trusting the heart of wisdom. /
With nothing clouding the mind, /
no fear arises. /
Delusion falls away, /
and awakening unfolds. //

All buddhas of past, present, and future /
awaken by this same wisdom. //

Therefore, know this mantra of the heart — /
the great mantra, /
the clear mantra, /
the unsurpassed mantra — /
that ends all suffering. //

It is true, not illusion. //

Say it — /
feel it — /
know it — //

Om gāte gāte / pāragāte / pārasaṃgāte / bodhi svāhā. //

These lyrics draw on the wonderful translations of the Heart Sutra by Ken McLeod and Thich Nhat Hanh. I created the music with suno.com.

Ken McLeod's translation of the Heart Sutra is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 and was used with permission. Thich Nhat Hanh's translation is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

"Other" as a Doorway to Practice

During a recent discussion about tonglen with other practitioners, someone spoke about “doing tonglen for myself.” Another person demurred, noting that it felt strange, and I shared that feeling. Something didn’t sit quite right, and this passage from Ken came to mind.

Ken makes a sharp distinction that cuts through a lot of Western psychological language: compassion is the wish that others be free of suffering; the wish to be free of suffering oneself is renunciation. And the ability to stay present with one’s own pain isn’t self-compassion—it’s mindfulness. Hearing this again clarified why “self-compassion” can feel subtly off. It easily becomes a way of protecting the very sense of self we’re trying to see through.

Tonglen has been a central practice for Ken, and he talks about it in many classes and retreats. This passage from Guru, Deity, Protector is especially incisive because he points out how tonglen works with anything that feels “other,” even if that “other” is a part of ourselves we’ve avoided or pushed away. Working with a younger version of myself, for example, isn’t directing compassion toward “me”; it’s opening to something locked inside that needs to be experienced fully.

When seen this way, the question mark around “doing tonglen for myself” makes sense. Tonglen is about dissolving the separation that creates “self” and “other” in the first place. The way I practice is to look at wherever that separation is felt most strongly.

From Guru, Deity, Protector 3

John: Do you have to have self-appreciation or love yourself before having the confidence to do that, the faith of longing?

Ken: I don't think so.

John: Thinking of that, how possible is self-love?

Ken: Well, in Tibetan, and maybe in Pali and Sanskrit—I don't know them well enough—the idea of self-love or self-compassion is a contradiction in terms. And we have these concepts flying around really because of the influence of Western psychology.

In Tibetan Buddhism for instance, the wish that others be free of suffering is called compassion. You want others to be free of suffering, that’s compassion. The wish that you be free of suffering is not called self-compassion. It’s called renunciation. Or if you want another translation it’s called determination. “I want to be free of suffering, I gotta do something about it—I gotta get out of this mess.” And so that is the wish that I want to be free of suffering is disenchantment with the current state of affairs which leads to that renunciation.

And, the capacity to be present with your own pain, that’s not self-compassion—that’s mindfulness. That’s what mindfulness is—just that. I tend to feel—and this may be a bit harsh on my side—that these concepts such as self-love, self-compassion, self-forgiveness are often covert or not so covert ways of protecting a very explicit sense of self that does not want to meet the actual state of affairs. It’s a protective mechanism usually centered around a very explicit sense of self.

Student: Doing mind training, it seems to me that part of that is compassion with yourself in doing that with mind-training.

Ken: It’s accepting the pain. What do you mean compassion with yourself?

Student: Sending yourself light or taking in the pain.

Ken: Yes, but when we’re doing that we’re doing it with a very explicit conception of self. And the purpose of it is to undo that particular conception. For instance, an instruction I give to people: they have a piece from their childhood where something very uncomfortable, very painful happened like some form of abuse or something like that. I will instruct people to do taking and sending with that child.

What they’re doing taking and sending with is something that is locked inside them. And by doing that, they’re actually opening that up and experiencing what’s in there. And when they experience it completely, it literally dissolves, and now they’re free, not necessarily from the pain but from having to avoid it.

Student: And it’s almost like an agenda; you’re looking at that part of you.

Ken: Exactly, because the way you’re relating to it inside, is like it’s another.

Student: Yeah.

Ken: Okay, and when you were doing the taking and sending retreat last year, anything you feel a sense of other with is appropriate to do taking and sending with. You follow? Which I feel is different than trying to feel compassion for yourself, whatever that is. The other problem I have is there isn’t any self to feel compassion for. People don’t like that.

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Dangers in Spiritual Practice

In this passage Ken 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. 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 stops being a path and becomes a source of imbalance.

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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