I am writing from the Dieppe – Newhaven ferry, returning from a week of solitary retreat in my beloved Normandy. My hope was to immerse myself in 10 to 12 hours of practice each day – the practice at hand being Guru Yoga, the fourth practice of the Vajrayana preliminaries, or Ngondro¹. Practicing for that time period each day would bring me close to completing Guru Yoga and therefore Ngondro – a process that is five years in the making.
The hope was met, indeed it was surpassed. I completed Guru yoga, and with it Ngondro. And in that I move from being a tantrika to a sadhaka: In describing this to graciously interested friends, this is akin to completing my apprenticeship. And, I am now entitled to work with the yidam offered to me at the empowerment I attended back in the early summer.
Those sentences appear so matter of fact. Yesterday evening, after closing the shrine, there was a complex “bucket” of emotions and physical exhaustion – let no-one tell you retreats are “relaxing” and meditation is “calming the mind”. Holding a visualisation for 12h a day (pretty much from waking to sleeping) and reciting a mantra is physically demanding and quite claustrophobic; other times when the mantra gathers speed, it can leave you feeling a little heady. For sure, I was ready to complete this practice (all 1,080,000 repetitions of the mantra); and yet there is a complex mix of underwhelm and overwhelm. For five years I have been working toward this point; and now it is here there is that post-event anticlimax. I felt the same with my PhD viva.
Other than the general structure (opening the practice, breakfast, shower, yoga, practice, lunch, afternoon walk, practice, dinner, practice…all the while holding the visualisation and mumbling) not one of the six days felt the same. The bliss of arriving in a land like home to me; the reality biting I was here for a week; the getting bored, resentful, recognising the pushing, not trusting, acknowledging the fear lurking (and having to learn that cycle more than once!), relaxing into whatever, my heart breaking, and then not wanting to leave, sigh².
I had to pause, because in that moment its dawning on me – I have finished Ngondro!
Given how stuck I had been in this practice, it wasn’t on my radar to complete Guru yoga in 2024…let alone by the time of my annual solitary retreat week! When my meditation mentor had asked me for the dates I would be going to Normandy, I found myself declaring “I’m thinking I might finish Ngondro there”.
Gulp! “Who said that?”
I realised a day or two later how embarrassed I was to a) have said that so boldly and b) that I was “worthy” to finish Ngondro. “How dare you, Carter!” My disbelief at what had come over me with that pronouncement touched a certain shame. In part, I imagine a declaration made so spontaneously called to my romanticism: after all, this little corner of Normandy is where I got engaged, where I finished my MSc research, where I finished my book; its also where I made the decision to receive pointing out (the initial step toward starting Ngondro), where I started Ngondro (five years – almost – to the day I completed it). Most significantly, my cat bears her name! Yet all that said, I believe there was also an aspect of my blurting coming from another source: Psyche dangled a tempting carrot; she knew. She knew what I needed to learn (still) in the dialectic of accomplishment and surrender – and where better: a land that always evokes the dance of the feminine.
Me and this land have history³…
- In 2019, my first foray into prostrations hurt me, real bad. Bruised body and bruised mind. I felt so much shame that my physicality was called into question by this spiritual practice. I was humbled.
- In 2021 (after a pandemic blip) I was now onto the second practice of Vajrasattva mantra. Migraines blighted my week. Thankfully, I was also attending an online workshop with Judith Blackstone, and she suggested I move the visualisation and mantra lower down i.e. move the energy out of your head, Helen. I still smile at Judith’s words: “The Gurus won’t mind”
- In 2022 I was still in the practice of Vajrasattva mantra; I was really needing to lean into the soothing quality of this practice as I had only last minute felt comfortable enough (after hospital tests) to feel an ongoing experience of chest pain was not serious. But my body mind was still reverberating and there were moments of needing to surf waves of panic.
- And then in 2023, holding the mandala plate (which is a representation of the universe in the third Ngondro practice) aggravated a recently operated arm. The swelling was so concerning that I ended up driving back to the euro tunnel at 4am in the morning on the third day.
Such has been this dance with the feminine, the body being the ground in which the dance plays out, that my meditation mentor insightfully asked me “what needs to be held in mind?”. She knew I had been experiencing ongoing neck pain and headaches since the early summer.
Sure enough…
I crossed a big threshold three days into this year’s retreat. I had woken up rather grumpy that day – I knew it was bad when I wasn’t enjoying my pain au chocolate! By lunchtime, I had taken paracetamol, applied ibuprofen gel, looked at my watch and hoped taking ibuprofen pills would be okay…I practiced in a chair rather than the traditional half lotus I am normally so comfortable in. Thankfully, I knew the teachings on hot and cool boredom: and I was recognising my inflamed body in the context of an inflamed mind.
My neck and head were symptoms of a known pattern for me: my tendency to connect to the world “out there” energetically “up and out”. Since becoming a student of the enneagram (especially in its somatic dimension), I have come to understand how Six process has as its bodily signature straining neck muscles and a jaw jutting forward. We live in the front of our bodies, projecting ourselves into the future⁴. I had come on retreat with a list of expectations – the numbers being first and foremost. Having completed a few weeks of intense practice in the lead up to the retreat, I knew I was accelerating and that had a momentum. Furthermore, those weekend sessions (3 to 4 hours) lulled me into the false security that I “knew” what was ahead – after all, 4h is already long, another 6h a day can’t be much harder?
Wrong! Like I said earlier, to have one’s mind occupied by a sitting tenant is not easy – not quite the repeated erosion of Chinese water torture, more like a fullness and expanding pressure. But actually, the real toll was that I was straining: I was trying too hard a) to imagine the diety form and b) ‘trying’ through it to see the nature of mind⁵. Back to that accomplishment and surrender dialectic; and enter the wisdom of the Guru….
…and not solely the one I was visualising on my head. As I was sitting, staring out into the middle distance and the bank of trees in my visual field, I realised another expectation I held was for the beauty of the place and space to “save me”. Her beauty had struck me when I first arrived; and out of my awareness I had also placed the onus on her to deliver beauty, bliss, awe “to me”. Yet my “up and out” to her “out there” was met with a resoluteness; a firm and kind “no” to my demand. She was just doing her thing. I wrote in my journal after that lunchtime sitting…
“Like the trees do their thing. I watched the stunning colours of them, blowing in the wind. Others, dead now, not protesting the natural order of things”
Over the course of the next hour or two, maintaining my looking out to the horizon and looking in to the Guru, it started to become clear that my job here was not the numbers, and rather to surrender. That was the beckoning of the Guru above my head. To let go, don’t strain – “it” is all, already here. And “it” is kind of ordinary. The trees know “it”…but I had to plummet into the depths of my experiencing: the boredom⁶, the fear that came up, the irritability, the inflammation of body and mind. Only then could I see that in here / out there are not separate.
I too am that ordinariness…and that is extra-ordinary.
In seeing that ordinariness, I too fell into – and somehow aligned with – the natural order of things. It was like a trust-fall into the arms of the Guru. A shift into a different mode of contact, “down and through”; an invite to trust my own experience. I leaned into my back body, my chest opened. A wave of relief, followed closely by a wave of tears. I touched the pain of fearing my unworthiness. All those who have facilitated this path came to mind, their love has illuminated all the places I didn’t want to accept; and that is a challenge to receive. Others love, and my own capacities.
I often speak to trainees about this paradox – the more we surrender “in and down”, the more we extend “down and through” to Other. Inward allows connection out. The more I dropped into what I was actually experiencing on retreat, the more vivid the visualisation became. I didn’t have to strain; Guru appeared from the empty clarity of mind. Nature of mind cannot be created – because it IS, already.
It wasn’t lost on me that my final day of retreat, and my final day of Guru Yoga, coincided with All Saint’s Day. I mention this auspicious coincidence as the visualisation I held above my head was not only of the guru alone: the field of merit also contained the ‘saints’ of the Kagyu lineage; and guru yoga is an invitation to sit among this ‘elite’ as equal: to become a lineage holder, too. There are two Saint Helen’s: Helena and Elen. The etymology of Helen is ‘light’ – and so it’s quite fitting that these two saints are the patrons of archaeology and travellers. My final day was also the 3rd of Diwali, the festival of lights.
This retreat has shone more light on my process. I am reminded of my last blog post week, and exploring the dialectic between freedom FROM the wound, and freedom FOR the wound. I know, with deeper clarity, my path has a trajectory of the latter. It is to shine light FOR the wound to dance in the dark, not to dispel the darkness.
It has also had me question if I want to do “this” anymore. Being away from home, my loved ones, my work, my extra-ordinary lifeworld has been hard. Completing one thing invites a question “what next”; and I have been questioning “this” – taking up another / the next practice that takes me away, again (maybe physically, for sure another time investment). Exploring this a little on the cushion this week, it became clear I want to know mind in service of understanding healing and serving others. I feel like there is need for a pause and contemplate how these practices support my bodhisattva role of “bridge of maitri”. The psyche-naut in me loves the “nature of mind” (or mahamudra) thread of the Vajrayana; and this retreat trip has helped me understand a little more experientially the how and why of the more ‘esoteric’ practices of deity yoga and yidam (visualisation).
Of one thing I am confident: the enneagram holds much wisdom in unravelling any knots. I cast my mind back to Bono’s imagery of holding the negative and positive terminals of a battery, and surrendering to the power surge. If one terminal is the absolute (the exploration of mind), the other the relative (my work as a wounded healer) – the life force between is our own unique way of living that dialectic out. I believe this is what the enneagram unlocks. For those readers who know something of the Vajrayana path, it is the practitioner sitting under the deity and letting the life force flow through the three kayas. For those of you less familiar, imagine the blue sky (the space that is enlightened mind, or dharmakaya) that surrounds the deity (the conduit for energy, or sambogakaya) and flows into me (the physical form – nirmanakaya – of the bodhisattva in training, plugged into the source of enlightened mind). Like all experience, a totality consisting of space, energy and form. Friends, colleagues, and trainees have had to endure my recent (and incessant) ramblings about murmurations. I see space, energy, and form in that contracting and expanding, formlessness and form. The sky, the movement, the starlings. My process as a Six is when that murmuration gets stuck in one plane and doesn’t realise it has infinite possibilities. I get stuck in doubt; an axis spanning across not knowing and needing to know. On the wisdom front, this might be emptiness and form. And it’s interesting to me as I contemplate this that the Six disintegrates to Three (accomplishment) in confusion; and integrates to Nine (spaciousness). Taking shape or surrendering to the fall.
A week later, I read back over the above. A week that has been full of energy and movement – in my personal realm, and certainly in the geo-political realm. A week in which I see a trap for the Six is to get smug when they come up with a model (that they think finally cracks it, and phew we are all safe after all). Models help…but they are not a parachute and we are falling….the good news is, there is no ground.
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¹ The four practices are prostrations, Vajrasattva mantra, mandala offering, Guru Yoga.
² Obviously, not as simple as that reads. Microcycles within cycles, fractals within each practice session, each hour, each minute even. But I got “better” at knowing and seeing through.
³ I also struggle with my sleep here – whether on retreat or on holiday
⁴ to nail down the unknown yet to come…aka mission impossible
⁵ nature of mind practices are another thread of the Vajrayana path.
⁶ Not the first time I have learnt this, it as a Dathun lesson in 2018 – finding contentment through boredom. Like all lessons, we keep learning them until we don’t need to anymore.