Bringing practice into everyday life

To integrate practice into everyday life, you can let go of the sharp divisions between the times when you’re sitting and the times when you’re not sitting.  You should allow the spaciousness you discover in your sitting to overflow into your ordinary life experience.  You can start by allowing the postpractice period to be a time when you remain completely with whatever you’re doing.
If you sit for an hour, make sure that you have at least fifteen to thirty minutes for the postmeditation period.  When you get up from your sitting session, stand up slowly and with awareness.  Continue to find the presence of your awareness in whatever sensation arises—but avoid conceptualizing about the process.
You could get up and make a cup of coffee.  You could do the washing up.  But whatever you do, simply be with what you’re doing.

p153-154, Roaring Silence: Discovering the Mind of Dzogchen, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Shambhala, 2002, ISBN 1-57062-944-7

The sparkling-through of enlightenment

Enlightenment is our natural state, and so it is not surprising that it manifests from time to time. Unenlightenment is the constant activity with which we engage. We have to work at it all the time. So when life circumstances intervene, in terms of short-circuiting this continual effort, we experience glimpses of realisation. These glimpses can radically change people’s lives, but it is a hit-or-miss affair to hope that life is going to ‘do it for you’ when the time is ripe. You have to cooperate with the sparkling-through of enlightenment by disengaging from referentiality and continuing with presence of awareness.

p122, Roaring Silence: Discovering the Mind of Dzogchen, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Shambhala, 2002, ISBN 1-57062-944-7

Painful emotions

Painful emotions are maintained though the process of thinking about them.  We continually regenerate our painful emotions by intellectualising about them – rather than experiencing them at the non-conceptual level.  The only way out is to let awareness find itself in the dimension of whatever emotion has arisen; and to experience it purely.  When we are able to let go of justification we are no longer as involved in maintaining the integrity of our self-image.  When this neurotic involvement is reduced, the energy of anger is no longer coloured by the need to prove our existence through the manifestation of aggression.

p145, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8

Just be in the present moment

In the practice of shi-nè—remaining uninvolved—if thoughts come and go, simply allow them to lap like the tide.  If you get caught up in a thought-story and lose the presence of your awareness in the movement of breath –  just return to it as soon as you become aware of having drifted off.  There is no need to get angry or irritated with yourself – these reactions are just opportunities to indulge in referentiality.  Maintain an open, humorous and relaxed attitude.  Expect nothing.  Be attached to nothing.  Reject nothing.  Just be in the present moment. 

p83 and p85, Spectrum of Ecstasy, Ngakpa Chögyam with Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, 1997, ISBN 0-9653948-0-8