Complete vibrant awareness

If you are successful in staring into the face of your emotions, then it is also possible to treat your pleasurable experiences in the same way.  It is generally easier to learn from sorrow than from joy; so most people are content to let happiness be, rather than to risk it in any way.  Real joy and well-being, however, are not threatened by the keenness of staring.  Radiance is based on taking insecurity as security, so if pleasure is real, it is experienced as complete vibrant awareness that extends itself infinitely outward to all beings.

p243, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8 

Cutting through conditioning

Every time you try to stare into the face of an arising emotion, you confirm yourself in the practice of cutting through conditioning.  Even wanting to start is a success.  If you begin to practice you will experience a difference in your life.  The ultimate goal is always both very close and very distant; and when one day you come to realise that the path is the goal, the concepts of failure and success will no longer have any meaning.

p242, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8

Sudden glimpses

There is no sudden breakthrough that remains forever – there are only sudden glimpses.  But the glimpses encourage us to see more until, gradually, we develop the ability to integrate these experiences of unconditioned being with the rest of our life.  The process of being total in the moment enables us to embrace our emotions; and, through doing so, to discover our beginningless enlightened nature.

 p241, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8

Ecstatic sensation

When you can simply be with the sensation of your emotion and experience it fully at the non-conceptual level, you will notice a dynamic reversal taking place.  The spinning energy that seemed to be generating rivulets of words and ideas has a vast still centre: like the eye of a hurricane.  From that experience of stillness it is possible to perceive that the obsessive spinning is not caused by the emotional sensation, but that it is in fact the cause of it.  When you realise the empty nature of the emotional pain, the pain dissolves into an ecstatic sensation of presence and awareness.   

p240, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8

Free energy

To relinquish analysis allows you to stare directly into the face of an arising emotion.  You can accomplish this by focusing on the physical sensation of the emotion as the subject/object of meditation.  Your whole field of attention needs to be immersed in the wordless sensation of the emotion as it manifests in the body.  If you can maintain the presence of your wordless gaze, the emotion becomes a free energy.

p240, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8