Catching up - the life and times of Nor'dzin, February to September

Life’s been busy since January . . . here’s a whistlestop summary:

• February: winter retreat with our students, in our home ─ Losar celebrations in Penarth, where we danced a Tibetan folk dance, and ate Tibetan recipe food ─ Ying’khor teachings with Lama Bar-ché
• March: St David’s Day Service ─ started receiving acupuncture and Chinese medicine ─ taught about Living, Dreaming and Dying in Bristol
• April: taught The Five Principles of Awareness in Cardiff, looking at the precepts ─ started work on turning our garage into a meditation room ─ went to see a Gothic ballet, Sleeping Beauty, which was fantastic

• May: had a wonderful weekend in Cornwall with a few Dharma friends ─ my birthday (61!!!) ─ decided £600 was too much to pay to rescue a tooth, and had it removed ─ taught sKu-mNyé in Hamburg, Germany ─ gave notice for the Aro Ling Cardiff venue in Whitchurch village

• June: a wonderful garden party to celebrate my Teacher’s birthday ─ attended the opening of the Vth Welsh Assembly ─ opened our new meditation room as the new Aro Ling Cardiff ─ had a tooth abscess, the most painful experience imaginable, and lost another tooth

• July: summer retreat with our students in a field in Shropshire ─ new tent, a Lotus Belle, which is the best tent ever and will see us out ─ created a Georgian outfit for myself and for ’ö-Dzin
• August: our son, Daniel, finally completed on selling his flat, and moved in with us for a while ─ a week’s retreat with our Teachers and sangha ─ danced Georgian dances in our Georgian costumes at the Natural Dignity banquet ─ lost my hearing aid
• September: two glorious weeks in Pembrokeshire, staying in an apartment located on North Beach, Tenby ─ acquired a new hearing aid

So I could have─and possibly should have─blogged about all of this. Sadly I did not . . . so I am just going to move on into October in my next post. Another thing that I have started again this month is art journalling, which had also been neglected since March. Illustrated above are my art journal pages for April, May and June. This is as far as I have caught up so far. 

Aro gTér Lineage retreat at Treowen Manor House

I have been away on retreat for a week. The event took place in Treowen Manor House near Monmouth. It was a wonderful venue with large and beautiful rooms, lovely wooden floors, fabulous views and excellent facilities.

There were new-born lambs in the surrounding fields.

The house is on high ground and commands fine views .

Our bedroom faced west and we were treated to magnificent sunsets.

Here is a group photograph taken at the fire ceremony.

Shock, amazement retreat – Vienna

We have just been away for a long weekend on retreat in Vienna. It has been quite a while since we attended an open teaching retreat with our Lama, Ngak’chang Rinpoche. The topic was the four naljors of Dzogchen sem-dé. It was a wonderfully inspiring event attended by about sixty people.

A snowy landscape at Forchtenstein, about 50 miles from Vienna,
where we stayed.

Skaters in the park by the Rathaus in Vienna.

Dinner at Café Central with Rinpoche and fellow retreatants.

The beautiful vaulted ceiling at Café Central.

Living, Dreaming, Dying - a successful event.

I declare our first weekend retreat at Aro Ling Cardiff a great success. We had a good group of people for all 5 sessions. They asked great questions and enjoyed the topic of Living, Dreaming, Dying.

We decided to try weekend events this year rather than running evening classes. It looks as though it will be a popular change. As well as local people, three people from Bristol attended and one from Cornwall. We had hoped that changing to weekend events would attract people from farther afield, and clearly this is the case.

There will not be a weekend event in Cardiff in February because we are teaching at our sister centre in Bristol, but we will certainly be planning one for March.

Weekend retreat at Aro Ling Cardiff Buddhist Centre

Happy New Year! 

We have had a good first week back at Aro Ling Cardiff with attendees for most of the sessions. I am looking forward to our first weekend event next week. It is good to have a few complete weekends free again, rather than teaching every Saturday, and—as was hoped—people are travelling from a distance to attend Living, Dreaming, Dying. This will increase the range of possibilities for Aro Ling Cardiff Buddhist Centre.

Below are the details of the weekend event, 16 - 18 January. Hope you can make it!

Living, Dreaming, Dying

– a weekend retreat: January 16 – 18, 2015

£6 a session or £25 for the whole weekend – attend any or all sessions

---

Session 1:  Friday January 16th  19:00 – 20:30
Dream Yoga – learn the practice of dream yoga and how to make sleep-time useful

Session 2:  Saturday January 17th  10:00 – 12:00Living and Dying Every Day – death and impermanence as the natural ebb and flow of existence

Session 3:  Saturday January 17th  14:00 – 16:00
Changing Mind Moments – the realms of existence through which we move because of our emotional responses

Session 4:  Saturday January 17th  18:00 – 20:00
Tantric Empowerment – transmission of the practice of Yeshé Tsogyel, the female tantric Buddha

Session 5:  Sunday January 18th  10:00 – 12:00
Death & Birth of Each Moment – discovering the continuity of discontinuity through the nine bardos of the Aro Lineage

Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin will lead this weekend of teachings. They will explore how we can we live with honour and integrity, ensuring that we are always existing as open-hearted human beings, rather than falling into other less human states of mind. Learn the practice of dream yoga and discover how dream consciousness differs from waking consciousness, and how can we make this time valuable rather than a period of unconsciousness. Discover living and dying, permanence and impermanence, as a natural and continual flow throughout our lives, rather than fearing death as a single future definitive event.

On Saturday evening, Ngakma Nor’dzin and Ngakpa ’ö-Dzin will give empowerment into the practice of Yeshé Tsogyel. She is the female tantric Buddha from whom the Aro gTér Lineage originates.

Yogic encampment - an inspiring retreat

It is time for our yogic encampment in the lush green vale near Church Stretton. I always look forward to this week of camping on the land of one of our students.

Part of our encampment

We gather for a week to practice yogic song, meditation, dance, Tantric craft, Tibetan yoga and much more.

The shrine in the yurt we use as our gompa

​This is always a splendid and most inspiring event. The regency dancing is part of our practice of Natural Heroism. Regency dancing requires precision but also playfulness. It requires concentration but is also flirtatious. If everyone is moving in the same manner at the same time with the music it is a startlingly beautiful and meditative experience. I have three new dances to teach on this retreat, so I am looking forward to that.

 
The​ photographs ​are from last year’s retreat. 

Aro Ling Cardiff will be closed for that week: Saturday 28th June to Sunday 6th July. For more details see the blog, meetup, or aro-ling.org.​

​

Vajra Romance in Vienna

The Open Teaching Retreat in Vienna, on the subject of Vajra Romance, went very well. We taught Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday morning, but did not leave for home till Tuesday. Sunday afternoon.and Tuesday we explored Vienna, and on the Monday we explored Forchtenstein, south of Vienna, where we stayed Sunday and Monday nights.

Here are a few photographs. Vienna is beautiful; a peaceful and delightful city. We took many photos and this is just a sample.

Sad-looking horses outside St Stephens's Cathedral

Refreshments Vienna-style, Sunday afternoon

Burg Forchtenstein

A fountain in Vienna - an example of the many fine sculptures on and around buildings.

Morning exercise at the Spanish Riding School (we found out after this that photography was not allowed).

Inside St Stephen's Cathedral with dramatic lighting

At the retreat

Palace and statue of Franz Joseph

Fabulous and delicious cakes at Central Café

Dinner at the strangely decorated 'North Pole' after teachings on Saturday

Vajra Romance

Romance as an aspect of Vajrayana practice that is little known in the West. We are teaching on this topic in Vienna this weekend. We look forward to meeting Vajrayana practitioners in Austria.

“Tantric sexuality is a vast field of living knowledge in which coital union is infinitely modulated in terms of all the sense-fields. It voluptuates in: the soft silence of falling snow on bare branches; the succulent stickiness of a budding twig; the glorious unreserved unravelling of blossoms; and, the cool moist fire of autumnal foliage. It is the art of the way in which the eye sees, and the poetry of the way in which the ear hears. Eyesight penetrates visual phenomena, and is engulfed by the field of vision. Hearing penetrates sound and is engulfed by the auditory dimension. Every sense-perception and sense-field performs, and is performed by, the same ecstatic dance. Male and female qualities of existence are the play of reality itself. They continually interpenetrate and inter-engulf each other as nondual dance. The tantric vision of reality is one in which sexuality is the meaning of every nuance of existence. To see the colour of a bird’s plumage is to be in sexual embrace. Listening to the bowed strings of a cello is to be in sexual embrace. Inhaling the saline scent of sea air; savouring the taste of a heavily tannic wine; caressing the intriguing surface texture of a weathered stone; contemplating the delicate elaborations of a cognitive pattern; all these sensory communications are sexual embrace. They are self-communicated communication – and they are continuously arising from and dissolving into emptiness.”

Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon, Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, Aro Books, pg. 100

Beneficial intention

This year was our third retreat on Samten’s land, and every year it has got a little better and easier.  As usual it was a magical place to spend a week practising Vajrayana together. 

In the afternoons we practised namkha weaving and also made amulets.

The weather was so fine we were able to work outside.

’ö-Dzin wove a few single sky namkha and hung them in trees in the copse by Samten’s field.

 Towards the end of the retreat we had a fire ceremony where many of the namkha were burned to activate their beneficial intention.

 We enjoyed a number of wonderful skyscapes.

 After dinner most evenings we practised regency dancing before settling down for the evening’s teachings or empowerments.  Here we are dressed in elegant clothing, having enjoyed a fine meal, and are practising Mr Beveridges Maggot as part of our retreat celebration.

Cat on retreat

On June 17th one of our cats had to have an operation.  Spots is a white cat and had developed cancer on the edges of her ears.  The treatment was to remove her ears.  When I first saw her after the operation I could not help myself and burst into tears.  My poor little cat.  She had to have a protective collar on for 10 days which she found quite distressing but gradually got used to.  When the collar was able to be removed she still needed careful care – but we were due to set off on our yearly camping retreat only three days later.  We did not feel able to leave her with a cat sitter and so the only solution was to take her with us.  So this year Spots attended our annual camping retreat.

We made a secure area for her in our camper van for the journey and she travelled quite comfortably, considering she had never before been on a journey longer than the 5 minutes drive to the vets.  She was pretty frightened when we first arrived at the camping field.  Her only experience has been our home and garden, and the gardens of the houses around us, so she had never seen such a large open space.

We had bought a cat harness and lead but it quickly became clear that it was going to be distressing for her to be constrained for any length of time, so we had to risk letting her loose.  We felt confident that her bond with us was strong enough that she would not go too far away for too long.  We kept her in the van over night every night, but otherwise let her be completely free.

At first she only felt safe in the yurt and the van.  She was not keen on the tents as the walls flapped in the wind.  Gradually she became more confident and would settle in our tent and carefully traverse the space between our tent and the yurt (which was used as the shrineroom).  By the fourth day she had started to explore the woodland that adjoins the field.  On the final morning we in fact had to leave an hour later than intended because Spots had gone off wandering and took ages to come to call.

We feel she is a remarkable little cat and it was a pleasure to have her with us on retreat.  In these photographs her fur still has not grown back around her head and neck where she was shaved for the operation.  She looks a little odd without ears but will look better when her fur is its normal length again.   She has adjusted to her new condition and behaves completely normally.  Her mother hissed at her at first but it turned out that it was just because of the collar as she has been fine with Spots since that came off.  Other cats who visit our garden seem to treat Spots normally as well.  She is now a healthy and happy cat once more.

Busy Buddhists

November has been an extremely busy month for us!  In a period of five weeks we have had three retreats.  The first, at the beginning of November, was an open teaching event in Paris.  The second was a four day retreat with our students in our home in Cardiff.  The last one starts in two days and is a weekend retreat with our Lamas.  I also started my new Welsh class this month – having missed the first day in September.  Two full days of Welsh was pretty intense.  I had no idea what was going on a lot of the time!

lunch break in a restaurant near the teaching venue

In Paris we taught on the emotions as the path of transformation in the colour and element system of tantric psychology.  The retreat took place in a pleasant basement yoga studio in north Paris, near the Gare du Nord.  We were a group of about a dozen people which was a good number – small enough for a sense of intimacy, and big enough to generate questions.  Our teachings were translated by our student Ngakpa Zhal’mèd.  There were many good questions and people seemed to find the teaching helpful.  At the end of the event one lady came and told us how she had used what we had taught to help her with a difficult encounter with her teenage son that morning.  Fantastic.

We were pleased this visit to also have time for a day and a half of sightseeing.  Last time we taught in Paris we had to dash straight home after the last session.  On the Sunday afternoon we had a pleasant boat trip down the river Seine.  Apart from being extremely cold on the upper deck, this trip was about as perfect as was possible.  We began in daylight so we were able to enjoy the beauty of the buildings.  As the sun began to set the golden statues on some of the bridges shone magnificently.

twinkling Eiffel tower

It was starting to get dark as the boat turned.  By the time we had travelled back down to the Eiffel tower, the sky was a dramatic deep purple with flashes of sunset colours.  This created a fantastic backdrop to the Eiffel tower as the city lights started to be lit.  Zhal’mèd had just said “I hope we get to see it twinkle” when indeed the thousands of small lights on the Eiffel tower began flashing – a most spectacular sight.  I had not really appreciated before how elegant a structure the tower is.

Notre Dame

The following day we took the metro and explored the area around the Louvre and Notre Dame.  I liked that they asked for silence inside Notre Dame so that it retained a feeling of being a place of worship.

Dance practice

We always include some form of physical practice in our retreats.  It helps to keep the body relaxed and supple so that the mind is more alert in meditation.  For this retreat I taught several period dances as an aspect of natural heroism.  Practising in a damp field—with some dancers wearing wellington boots—may not be an exact expression of the elegance of Jane Austen, yet the sense of engagement, dignity and refinement were present nonetheless.  For most of the time there were only six of us available to dance, so this made Hole in the Wall and Mr Beveridge’s Maggot a little limited.  Everyone learned the dances really quickly – perhaps because there were so few of us and we were constantly in or out and changing from a first to a second.

Samten's land is bordered in part by a delightful stream in a small woodland.

A firepit was created and a fine evening was spent keeping warm while gazing at the dancing flames.

Pulses and amulets

The theme of our late spring camping retreat this year was the medical practices of the Aro tradition.  This includes pulse diagnosis and elemental balancing, plus we also worked on creating elemental amulets.  Pulses are heard in the brachial artery of each arm using a sphygmomameter and a stethoscope.  This process identifies the solar and lunar pulses.  Originally a tourniqué and yak horn would have been used.  The sounds of the five elemental pulses—earth, water, fire, air and space—are both subtle and obvious.  The difference in sounds are subtle, but clear once one is able to discern them.  As well as listening to pulses, the primary element to treat can be ascertained by placing a ringing tuning fork on the subject’s head and asking them to identify the sound’s location.

Once the elemental diagnosis has been found treatment takes the form of dietary and lifestyle advice, and the therapies of massage, moxibustion and pressure points.

Camping Retreat

This year we are going to have two camping retreats, and the first one was last month.  We are gradually sorting out our site and making it more comfortable.  Last autumn we bought a combi camp trailer tent and the retreat was its first outing.

Our student who kindly hosts the retreats on his land now has a good-sized yurt which we used as our shrine room.

We created a combination of two awnings and a gazebo to be our kitchen and dining room, and a second gazebo with sides formed an efficient washroom.

Samten had a delightful Victorian washstand which added a touch of class to the washing up.

The yurt's skylight.

The combi camp was fantastic – so comfortable.  It folds out into a bedroom with a king-sized double bed, and the awning makes a roomy living area.  Last year we were rather cold during the retreat, but this year we were nuch better prepared.

There is a stove in the yurt, and we installed a frontier stove in the awning of our combi camp.