Penn trip – spiritual part
July 30, 2008
The main reason for the trip up to Penn was to hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama give a 6 day teaching on Lama Tsongkapa’s The Great Treatise. This text outlines the path to enlightenment or the lamrim chenmo. It’s a large text to undertake in 6 days and His Holiness did a summary teaching as he said it would take months to do properly. But even that summary was very in depth and over my head at times.
During the 6 days I was at the teaching, I started learning more about myself, more about where I was in the path and pushed through some of the confusion I had. I know now that I was trying to go to fast and not putting down a foundation to higher practices. I feel now my taking the White Tara empowerment last Dec was a bit premature. I do still feel like doing the ngundro practice with it’s cleansing practices of prostrations and Vajrasattva recitations but I know now where I need to complement it with the lamrim.
My next task on the path to spiritual enlightenment is to get back on the path. I have gone too long without serious practice. With my new understanding, I can better set up a practice that I hope will work for me. I know I will need to talk more with Lama-la when I get deeper in it, but for now, I feel I can start and have a worthwhile meditation session. Just need to keep at it, maintain the proper motivation and not get discouraged along the way.
Preliminary realizations
July 15, 2008
Being here at the Dalai Lama’s teaching has got me slowly realizing that everything I do and am interested in could turn into Dharma practice; it just takes the right motivation and mind set. I won’t bore you with technical stuf but if my motivation is to help others in some way and to not be attached with things or people, then the action can be virtuous in the Buddhist sense. This helps me ease a lot of confusion about how I can be in the BDSM lifestyle and still be a practicing Buddhist. This also applies to my crossdressing but I’ve not been as confused about the mixing of those two. I’ll go more into my issues with this mix later.
