Liz talk
Mind way ahead of the body, or vice versa. No synchronization.
Turning everything into an expansion of personal territory.
Highly competitive - with other people or some imagined version of ourselves.
Keeping ourselves very busy so we don’t have to feel the hard emotions.
Fixation on self is lifted so the energy can flow
Flow state
Action of Destroying - Calling out STOP when I saw a blind person about to get hit by a car.
Aikido
Being a CEO - prioritizing but letting go.
Buddha Amogaciti. Female buddha is Green Tara.
Chakra is solar plexus - martial arts, the place where the movement comes from.
Windhorse Lung Ta
Liz’s notes on Windhorse
WINDHORSE
RECOGNIZING THAT YOU EXIST IN AND AS A SACRED ENVIRONMENT
AND SYNCHRONIZING BODY/MIND/WORLD SO BEAUTIFULLY, TREMENDOUS WAKEFULNESS, TREMENDOUS NOWNESS ARISES IN YOUR STATE OF MIND.
· WINDHORSE IS A TRANSLATION OF THE TIBETAN LUNGTA. LUNG MEANS "WIND" AND TA MEANS "HORSE."
· RAISING WINDHORSE, RAISING A WIND OF DELIGHT AND POWER AND RIDING THAT ENERGY.
· SUCH WIND CAN COME WITH GREAT FORCE, LIKE A TYPHOON THAT CAN BLOW DOWN TREES AND BUILDINGS AND CREATE HUGE WAVES IN THE WATER.
· THE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF THIS WIND COMES AS A FEELING OF BEING COMPLETELY AND POWERFULLY IN THE PRESENT.
THE HORSE ASPECT IS THAT, IN ADDITION TO THE POWER OF THIS GREAT WIND, WE ALSO FEEL STABILITY.
NOT SWAYED BY THE CONFUSION OF LIFE OR BY EXCITEMENT OR DEPRESSION. WE RIDE ON THE ENERGY OF OUR LIFE.
WINDHORSE IS NOT PURELY MOVEMENT AND SPEED, BUT IT INCLUDES PRACTICALITY AND DISCRIMINATION, A NATURAL SENSE OF SKILL.
· SYNCHRONIZING OURSELVES WITH THINGS AS THEY ARE, WE RAISE A WIND OF ENERGY AND DELIGHT IN LIFE.
· WE FEEL NATURAL POWER AND UPLIFTEDNESS MANIFESTING IN OUR EXISTENCE.
· ACCOMMODATE WHATEVER ARISES IN OUR STATE OF MIND.
· WE EXPERIENCE A STATE OF MIND THAT IS FREE FROM SUBCONSCIOUS GOSSIP, FREE FROM HESITATION AND DISBELIEF.
· WE EXPERIENCE THE VERY MOMENT OF THIS STATE OF MIND - FRESH AND YOUTHFUL AND VIRGINAL – THE ESSENCE OF NEWNESS.
Start
Ok, great. So we are in touch with our emotions now. We have a little more bravery in touching them, experiencing them.
What do we DO? Karma is all about what we do and how.
This world needs Action.
Specifically, it needs awake people, people connected to our hearts and the elements, to Act. It’s clear that there are plenty of other people with other more damaging agendas acting as quickly and as effectively as they possibly can.
I don’t want to set up a good/evil dichotomy here. There are lots of different priorities, perspectives, preferences. What to me looks like a clearcut to another white 50 something guy looks like a tiny slice of forest that will turn into other peoples’ homes.
But without people arguing and acting on all sides of an issue, the default view wins. And the default view to date, at least for the last three hundred years, has caused a ton of suffering.
Motivation
But before we get into what to do, we have to get clear on our motivation. Without the Why answered, it’s hard to follow through on the initial burst of inspiration.
As Lama Liz said this morning, blocked Karma energy is all about jealousy, envy, wanting what someone else has.
This is an incredibly prevalent emotion in our society. Managers want to be directors, directors want to be vice presidents, VPs want to be EVPs and SVPs. Many successful, accomplished, wealthy people can hardly enjoy the fruits of their efforts (and luck) because they are too busy trying to get more.
Anyone seen any of those “Housewives of…” shows? “Housewives of Orange County”? It’s Jealous gods all over the place. These women live in these enormous McMansions, with every comfort a person could want. But their entire day is spent drinking white wine and sniping at each other.
Why is that? What’s driving that?
One way to think about it is intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic motivation means you are motivated by something outside yourself. In this case, in the Karma energy case, you are motivated by what someone else has.
This is not an absolutely, categorically bad thing. Just like every other blocked emotional energy we’ve talked about, it’s a very human experience.
The problem with extrinsic motivation, and with the jealousy that inspires it, is that it creates a lot of suffering. It’s painful. Just like raging lust or raging anger, it’s excruciating.
I vividly recall being wracked with jealousy because my once-girlfriend had a summer job in a greenhouse and there was a cute guy there that would get to spend all day hanging out with her. I was totally paranoid that they were going to start a thing and she was going to leave me.
That’s the realm of the Jealous Gods - here I am living with my beautiful girlfriend in sunny Boulder for the summer and most of my waking hours are consumed with envy. That feeling colored those three months completely. I would lie awake at night next to her, hearing her breathing, and dreading the morning when she would leave and go to work with this other guy.
Dealing with Difficult Emotions
At the risk of repeating myself, but in hopes of making these teachings as clear as possible, I have to repeat the most essential point of this retreat.
We are not telling you that you should repress these neurotic, painful, blocked, feelings. We are not encouraging you to hide from them, ignore them, be ashamed of them.
Take it from someone who has tried to do that for far too long… it DOES NOT WORK.
Buried blocked energy does not self-resolve.
It needs to come back into our lived experience. We need to develop a new relationship with it.
Imagine your body as the crust of the earth, or a deep lake. The top is sunny and peaceful, but as you go down deeper, in meditation, on a long hike, in retreat, it gets darker, more mysterious. You discover things down there that you didn’t know you had inside you.
Like my long-buried memory of yelling at my son suddenly comes up to the surface.
This is not a practice of reburying those feelings, memories or experiences. This whole place, this entire retreat environment, is organized so that you have the support and the techniques to look at that buried treasure or that sunken treasure in a new light.
Guided by your inner guru, which helps you know what you are ready for and what you are not, you can bring up those treasure chests of blocked emotion. Experience that poverty mentality, that anger, that lust, this jealousy.
Only by actually unearthing those things can your relationship with it change.
But here’s an important wrinkle - you can’t go into it with that deal in mind. You can’t tell your anger or your lust “I’m digging you up, but only so I can get rid of you.”
Instead, you have to dig it up with curiosity, with appreciation, with patience and with love.
Based on everything I’ve experienced, if you go deep sea diving or spelunking into your heart-mind with the attitude of an explorer or a national geographic photographer, you will come back with all kinds of treasures. They might look like junk, all covered in muck. But there are treasures in there.
Then, as they enter your experience, all by themselves, as a natural and unforced result of your patience and your love, these energies will become unblocked.
They Self-Liberate.
You don’t have to force anything. You have done the work to get yourself here, to learn these techniques, to sit in this room, to do these practices. You have brought them up and into space, into awareness.
Any transmutation or transformation can take care of itself. It might take a while, so be patient. But at least now it can happen.
Developing Intrinsic Motivation
At the end of that summer, I drove my girlfriend to the airport. She couldn’t wait to go. As soon as we got in the car she said she wanted to end it. We spent the 45 minute drive talking - me bawling, her uncomfortable and wishing she had taken a taxi.
My months of jealousy had made her feel so claustrophobic that there was no way she wanted to continue with me.
I was a mess for that fall. I sort of recovered after a bit, but it really wasn’t until I moved to a retreat center in northern Colorado, worked in the kitchen, and had a lot of time to meditate that I found my ground again.
That was the best year of my single life - cooking for three or four hours a day, making $50 a week, plus room and board. Studying and meditating the whole rest of the time. I grew up that year.
I discovered was a sense of what I wanted out of life. But I only got there by going through a lot of old feelings of doubt, anger, jealousy and all the other things we’ve been talking about this week.
I learned about the Four Karmas and got A LOT of opportunity to practice them.
I learned a lot about Windhorse, which I wanted to share with you now:
WINDHORSE IS A TRANSLATION OF THE TIBETAN LUNGTA. LUNG MEANS "WIND" AND TA MEANS "HORSE."
· RAISING WINDHORSE, RAISING A WIND OF DELIGHT AND POWER AND RIDING THAT ENERGY.
· SUCH WIND CAN COME WITH GREAT FORCE, LIKE A TYPHOON THAT CAN BLOW DOWN TREES AND BUILDINGS AND CREATE HUGE WAVES IN THE WATER.
· THE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF THIS WIND COMES AS A FEELING OF BEING COMPLETELY AND POWERFULLY IN THE PRESENT.
THE HORSE ASPECT IS THAT, IN ADDITION TO THE POWER OF THIS GREAT WIND, WE ALSO FEEL STABILITY.
NOT SWAYED BY THE CONFUSION OF LIFE OR BY EXCITEMENT OR DEPRESSION. WE RIDE ON THE ENERGY OF OUR LIFE.
WINDHORSE IS NOT PURELY MOVEMENT AND SPEED, BUT IT INCLUDES PRACTICALITY AND DISCRIMINATION, A NATURAL SENSE OF SKILL.
· SYNCHRONIZING OURSELVES WITH THINGS AS THEY ARE, WE RAISE A WIND OF ENERGY AND DELIGHT IN LIFE.
· WE FEEL NATURAL POWER AND UPLIFTEDNESS MANIFESTING IN OUR EXISTENCE.
· ACCOMMODATE WHATEVER ARISES IN OUR STATE OF MIND.
Having worked through a lot of tough emotions on the cushion, and internalized some new approaches, like Windhorse, the Four Karmas, and other disciplines that we used to call “Warriorship” my life started taking a different turn.
About halfway through the year, I started writing my ex letters. Maybe a month later, she wrote me back. Lots of “lets just be friends” vibes, which was fine by me. But she did write back…
I resolved to not get hopeful. But I also resolved to not get involved with anyone else, because no one else needed my particular brand of chaos at that time, and I wanted to stay clear.
By the spring of that year, I knew I had to go back east and figure out if this relationship was going to work - one way or another. I felt like I had grown up enough to re-connect. I had a sense of intrinsic motivation and direction the way I never had before.
Well I did move back, and we did reconnect. Eventually we moved in together and then got married and then had kids…
So your mileage may vary but I do feel like I’m living proof that these teachings work. As a CEO, as a dad and now as an investor, I completely relate with the clarified karma energy. When it’s flowing, things just get done and it takes almost no effort.
and it makes sense. The name of the lineage of the retreat center I was living in is KARMA Kagyu. It’s an action-oriented lineage. I learned a WHOLE lot about karma when I was involved with that organization.
Let me close by saying again
your mileage may vary. But one thing I feel great about recommending to you all is, if you can,
Live in a retreat center for a while. At least half a year. A year is better…
Even two years - you can totally rejoin the working world, the householder yogi world, after two years at a retreat center. It’s easy to explain in job interviews. People remember you.
I remember calling this hiring manager up to check on how my resume was progressing through the system after getting back from that retreat and looking for a job.
He said “We really like you. We have no idea what to do with you. We keep having meetings about this and everyone says “And what do we do with the Buddhist cook?”
So if you can find a great retreat center to live in for a year or so, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Thank you.