Postings

Ringu Tulku Rinpoche in conversation at Kellogg College, University of Oxford

(recorded Tues 13th June 2023)

click here to watch the full video 

also available on Youtube - In Conversation with...Ringu Tulku Rinpoche - YouTube

The session covers Ringu Tulku’s answers to questions on the following topics (in order): 

Living and working in harmony with each other

His Holiness’ Dalai Lama’s guidance to include learning how to be calm and unafraid in our general education system

Fulfilling the role of leadership

Wisdom and the different depths of understanding it

Facing death and understanding 'what dies and what doesn’t die’

How to approach the climate crisis

What Ringu Tulku has learned himself from over 30 years of travelling throughout the world teaching and meeting people

Kum Nye 

Kum nye comes from the Tibetan traditions of both healing and Buddhist meditation.  While it is like yoga in that we use our body to make movements and mobilise areas which get little attention, mindfully, it also offers something a little bit different.  Meditation is woven into the very fabric of the movements and elaborated in pauses between exercises.  It can be deeply relaxing and help restore us to our natural balance, ease and clarity.

The basic premise of kum nye is that our natural spontaneous nature is open and free, joyful and flowing.  

Life and our habitual reactions to it, tend to clog up this flow and block our clarity and ease.

Rather than analytically unpicking these habitual patterns that then take up residence in our being, in kum nye we directly tackle them through simply feeling directly and freeing up our energies and so our way of being.

Through physical postures and movement, we open up the flow of our body’s energy.

Through mindfulness throughout the movements, we bring the mind into harmonious connection with the body.

Through meditation practice, interspersed through a session, we allow the inherent clarity and creativity of the mind to come forward.

In this way, kum nye is a holistic practice for mind and body, tuning our senses and bringing us into harmony 

with the natural flow of life and the seasons.

All welcome to come and join us to explore this in practice, and deepen your own understanding and experience of well being.

"Let your meditation be like the sea: bottomless"

Kum Nye practice this Autumn

We shall especially explore the meditation instructions:

“ Meditate like a mountain, with stability "

And choose some exercises, self-massages, movements and guided meditation to support an exploration of what this might mean to us.

In a recent teaching, attuned to our times, Tai Situpa spoke of how we often live as if we are on top of a very small, very high-up, platform.  We don’t have much leeway to bear things, and react to everything all the time, always up and down.  Its rather stressful to live like that, with constant fear and anxiety we will topple off our platform.  So, how would it be if we could make that ‘platform’ we live on, big and wide and expansive?  So we feel really stable.  It is, of course, all about our state of mind.  Imagine a really stable mind, where we could aspire to remain the same in all circumstances life throws at us.  I’m not suggesting we can do that straight away, but even a small step in that direction can transform our lives, and our way of relating with all sorts of situations. 

Kum nye is a wonderful tool to empower this ability, to expand and free the mind, so it can settle and stabilise.  To help us find that way of living as if our platform is broad and wide and stable.  We will explore what these words might be pointing us towards, through the medium of meeting online to practise these body-based disciplines and see how such teaching relates to our own lives.

MAY 2020 : Bardo, an 'in-between' kind of place

There is a concept in the Buddhist traditions of the Bardo - an ‘in between’ kind of a place or state, a state of transition.  And this is one of those teachings that could lend itself particularly well to getting our heads (and hearts) around the place we currently find ourselves in.  I thought it might be helpful to remind ourselves of some teachings of Ringu Tulku’s on this subject.  Below is a short précis of Ringu Tulku’s chapter on the Bardo below, the full version is found in his book published by Bodhicharya Publications: 'Being Pure.’ 

The word bardo is a Tibetan word, which means ‘in between’ - ‘hanging in between.’  It can also be translated as ‘transitory’, ‘in transit’ or ‘transient.’  Sometimes people understand the Bardo to mean only the experience after death, but it is not just that.  From the point of view of the Bardo teachings, every situation and every moment and every experience is a bardo experience, because it is a transient experience.  It is something transitory.  It is between things; it travels; it does not stay put.  So, therefore, the whole cycles of life and death are all described as bardos.

Every moment is seen as an opportunity to free oneself from the bondage of samsara.  Samsara is a state of habitual tendency, a state of mind, of reacting with ignorance and aversion and attachment.  We have continuous pain and problems for this reason.  But there is also, always, continuous opportunity to get out of this situation, to become free of this state of mind.  Every moment allows us the possibility to understand that it is not necessary to have all these sufferings and pain and problems.  At any moment, at any stage of the transition, there is this opportunity: not only during our lifetime, but also at the time of death, and also after death, and also at the time of rebirth.   At any time of transition, there is always the chance and possibility to free ourselves from this bondage.

Therefore, we need to be aware.  That is the reason we need to tame our mind.  It is why we need to purify our mind.   It is why we have to transcend our samsaric way of reacting.  It is why we need to understand and experience the true nature of ourselves and the true nature of phenomena, of everything.  If we can truly experience that, then there is nothing that is actually binding us.  What is binding us is our own misunderstandings, our own habitual tendencies; our own way of seeing and our own negative emotions; our own experience and nothing else. 

The idea is not that I try to bring some other culture into my life, or I try to become something different from what I have been, or the way people do things normally around me.  It is not about bringing something else into my life.  It is about living my own life in a way that is good for me, with compassion, with understanding, with wisdom; in a way that I can experience much more peace, much more tranquillity, much more kindness and joy, much less negativity.  That is the practice. 

To me, these teachings help bring out the spaces in our lives, the potential for rearranging and reaffirming, realigning and starting afresh, possible in every moment.  And the freedom that can bring.  But if your life is anything like mine, I also notice there can be an enormous dull heaviness or confusion, when we don’t know where we’re going anymore, when the government or health concerns have to put restrictions on our plans and movements, when we don’t know how long these will last or when or how they will change.  When our expectations and dreams have all been dissolved, what are we to run on?  

I think actually this is exactly the place of practice, the moment to realign, to remind ourselves of our basic motivations in life, our aspirations, to open to how they might be brought out into reality; to reconnect with basic kindness and draw out our compassion; to try and see things as they are, clearly, truly, and relate with them honestly and wholesomely.