I get angry during sections of my Ngondro practice. There are nine different sections to it with about as many different chants to learn in English and Tibetan. The chanting’s supposed to go on at the same time as some vastly detailed visualizations and sometimes complicated mudras are involved. I am ashamed to admit it but sometimes I swear from frustration during my practice. One of the first three activities is kind of a confessional called “Admitting Misdeeds” where you work with a recent transgression, such as an angry outburst, and experience sincere remorse and desire not to do it again. Before I’ve finished the entire Ngondro I have inevitably racked up some more misdeeds.
Meditation practice does so much for me, but at the same time I resent and resist doing it. A vat of internal cranky stays on the boil while I’m engaged in or thinking about meditation, and the fumes pervade my internal atmosphere in a very distracting fashion. I stumble upon truly aware moments almost by accident, and then I get so excited about them I lose them in the excitement.
I’m happy I’ve stuck with my weekly practice of the entire Ngondro so far, but I want to experience it more deeply. I’m in such a hurry to get it over with, I don’t pause and abide after each section, which is causing me to miss a lot of the benefit. Because I fear I’m going to get fed up and quit before it’s over, I rush through.
Even though I’m not doing it well, it still feels like it’s working. Though I’m still quite short-fused, more of my emotional states are starting to feel separate from me and not as energetic. I’m having moments that feel like lucid dreaming. Here’s an example:
My friend’s daughter died last week. It’s been a long time coming, but it still caught me by surprise because I thought she at least had a few more weeks. I got home from work Friday and got the message. Immediately, my mind started to fidget. What do I do now? How do I feel? For seconds at a time over the next few hours, I truly felt and understood the immediacy and truth of this loss as something raw and in real time, not confined to intellectual understanding and internal dialog. I’ve also had brief windows where I truly get it that I’m going to die, that I’m already dead at some point in the future.
Last night I went out to eat with some old friends. In our 20s we took our lives together for granted, as well as the wild and exciting times we had. That stuff was so memorable and dramatic we never dreamed we’d forget it. Then they got married and left town, and we all lost touch. Recently we all made contact again and they got babysitters for the evening last night. We went out to eat.
They are still the same funny, enjoyable people, and seeing them again reminded me of how much I miss them. And it took all of us to piece together details from events in the past, and there were still gaping holes in those stories. We’ve forgotten so much. It made me sad. How could I have forgotten the times when we all used to stare at J.G.’s ass at work, and editorialize on its magical qualities? How could I have forgotten who FatHand Carl was? I was the one who almost dated him, but they were the ones who remembered him.
In a way I wish I’d been more aware at the time how valuable those days were, but at the same time if I had known I’d have already been sad about how they would one day end. Part of the fun was in being so casual about everything, and so sure that the good times would keep rolling. I guess at some level we knew that and tried not to get too hung up on it. Or we were just too distracted by thinking about things we didn’t have and how we were going to get those things.
