Practice of Emptiness, Practice of the Lightbody
(from a facebook post)
Dealing with trauma ain't no funny business. That's what you're left with after purifying bhumis, (if one has proper trauma). It can make one feel infested with strong negativity, just very negative world view. And the difficulty is not that you can't "purify" it but because the whole way of seeing the world is distorted. This means that the energy system where the trauma is stored is broken. That's psychic injury or trauma.
I
am not sure if the past generations of masters understood trauma the
way our generation experiences it. It is logical that they did and
there are many central practices like smiling meditation, shamatha,
loving-kindness or jhanas (skt. dhyana) that are excellent for
healing trauma and have been practiced for millennia but I'm still
not sure. I've met a few lineage holders who had no clue about trauma
though. They just thought it was a form of compelling self-delusion.
In Amrita Mandala we dive deep into the world of emptiness insight (skt shunyata) from the beginning. We do this because our primary concern is to remove self-delusion that gives brth to existential confusion (skt duhkha). Our method is built to get one from ignorance to wisdom (skt prajna) very quickly because the priority of dharma is to awaken. We don't have a period of shamatha/calm abiding meditation to prepare and no mandatory preliminaries, apart from doing 1 year of Rainbow Body Yoga Lite before taking up the full version of Rainbow Body Yoga. In traditional systems, new students would practice simple calm abiding or do preliminaries at least for one year before even giving them empowerments and practices like RBYL/RBY.
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| Amrita Sundari |
I have built the method in this way purposefully because removing of dukkha needs to be a priority. You can't get true relief from shamatha if you're very much troubled by the sense of self. I know that from experience, having started with lots of shamatha practice leading to a dead end of sorts where I was existentially as miserable as I was before I started practicing. Same happened to Shakyamuni who practiced jhanas for 6 years. My point is that from the purely dharmic perspective the sense of self with all its friends and buddies needs to go first, i.e. emptiness or wisdom needs to be established first.
Traditional methods start differently. They start with calm abiding (skt shamatha), preliminaries, jhanas or such and usually don't give instructions of emptiness insight from the start. There are exceptions but this is how it usually is. The reason why these kind of practices can be extremely frustrating to someone whose hair is on fire due to existential discomfort is because shamatha and jhana meditations work on the subtle body made of meridians which is not where self-delusion is even located. The good side of these practices is that one purifies the meridian system but the bad side is that one's existential issues remain intact.
I think that most lineages and traditions don't even know that there are two different types of subtle bodies: 1. one made of nadis and 2. other made of meridians. These two systems are closely related but are different and have different laws.
If we practice shamatha or jhanas, the cultivation happens in the body or field of meridians which is the subtle system closest to the physical body and its organs. The sense of self as defined in buddhadharma and doctrines of awakening is not there so from the perspective of wisdom awakening these practices are utterly pointless and useless. They just prolong one's existential pain. But, and this is very important, from the perspective of healing of trauma these practices can be golden. I say can be because I also know many people who practiced shamatha for years and still had huge traumas.
Something that I do not understand and do not agree is when shamatha or jhanas are marketed as techniques that develop concentration. I don't think developing concentration is that important when compared to healing. In my zen days I developed concentration to very high degree that I could burn holes into sheets of paper, figuratively speaking, but that skill is quite useless. I wish shamatha had been presented to me as a way to heal but because it wasn't I missed a huge opportunity to heal my traumas because my teachers didn't even know that sphere of human issues and I also didn't even get awakened which is what I had come for. What a miserable sorry ass pancake.
If we look at the human subtle bodies from a different perspective after one has purified the body of nadis (bhumis), which is where the self-delusion is stored, one can be fully and completely awake and yet still have lots of trauma stored in the body of meridians. In traditional systems this doesn't happen, or ideally shouldn't happen because the meridian system should by that time be already purified. But in our system it is the opposite way, the traumas and echoes of the former samsaric mind are still there because the body of meridians hasn't yet been adressed.
During the past few years I have given empowerments and teachings of the Ten Wisdom Goddesses (skt Dasha Mahavidya) and various hingu guru yogas that adress the meridian system but I am just now about to really get the engines started regarding this matter.
I have been working on this question in my lab day and night for over a year now and I am glad to say that my work has produced results. I have given trauma healing teachings before but the best is yet to come. I found that an excellently effective way to adress the meridian system and get the traumas washed out from there is in my old old friend - kriya yoga. For those who don't know I used to teach a form of kriya yoga called Sundara Kriya Yoga until about 10 years ago before switching over to buddhist tantra.
These years and the constant experimenting with various tantric practices have been both very fruitful but to me also very frustrating at times because I haven't been given ready-made answers by my gurus. I had to dive deep into my system and contemplate my butt off to come with solutions and results. An example of this is figuring out whatboth myself and my students were experiencing after bhumi perfection stage when they started feeling distant echoes of the former samsaric mind or still had the same psychic injury they had before. It took me a while to figure out that they are coming from a *different energy system*. Then I had to find out *how to adress* them effectively. This investigation has been a massive undertaking but I am finished with the processing now and have everything my students need.
So just to be clear when it comes to wisdom we have RBYL and RBY, guru yoga with Yeshe Tsogyal and Guru Rinpoche, vipashyana instructions, bodhicitta, basic prayers and so on. No change there. I will, however, introduce a different set of hindu tantric exercises side of these buddhist tantric exercises. The name for this set of exercises of Amrita Kriya Yoga.
Our sangha members have seen glimpses of this already. Few weeks ago I posted an image of Amrita Sundari, which is a form of Tripura Sundari given by mahasiddha Agastya. Amrita Sundari is the main deity of Amrita Kriya Yoga. There are other supplementary practices such as Amrita Sundari Astottara Shata Namavali or 108 names of Amrita Sundari. Like Rainbow Body Yoga, Amrita Kriya Yoga is a program that consists of different yogic exercises.
When Rainbow Body Yoga results in realization of emptiness of all phenomena, Amrita Kriya Yoga results in lightbody, healing traumas and removing old samsaric imprints from the meridians along the way.
Monsoon blessings your way,
Baba, 23 Jan 23
