I haven't been here, now Gaia, formerly Zaadz for a while, as grad school has kept me busy. But in case people still cruise through, I wanted to share the book by my Lama, John Makransky, the teachings of his inspired much of my sharings here, from these practices of love.
His Book is called "Awakening Through Love-Unveiling Your Deepest Goodness".
Here are some reviews from Wisdom Publishing

here are some Articles nd Essays by lama John

And I just found out that there is a book club and a Pod here at Gaia devoted this book and teachings!

My practise lately has been simply sitting aware of the constant Presence. The Presence of love.
This has evolved out of a more formal Tibetan Buddhist  practice of visualizing spiritual benefactors and their wish of love, receiving it, then sending it out to a ever wider circle. But it has morphed and simplified. It has essentialised into just the wish of love or compassion, in its essence it has just become the spirit of bodhicitta.

In sitting in the stream of this wish, I become transparent, there is no differnce between the sender and the receiver, there is only the wish, which keeps on transmitting. This wish,  It is the nature of reality, the ground of being, this love, this enlightened heart-mind.

This is what any meditation becomes. This is what they all collapse into. This is what I had been trying to remember.

Constantly radiant, It becomes the foreground, form recedes, is permeated, is of this radiance.
This is why we do dedication of virtue, to make explicit this truth-to recognise this truth the truth of this illumination.
Because that is what is happening. What already is.

I just came across this quote by Sogyal Rinpoche. This really helps me make sense of my experiences.

Our buddha nature has an active aspect, which is our "inner teacher." From
the very moment we became obscured, this "inner teacher" has worked
tirelessly for us, tirelessly trying to bring us back to the radiance and
spaciousness of our true being. Not for one second, my master Jamyang
Khyentse said, has the inner teacher given up on us. In its infinite
compassion, one with the infinite compassion of all the buddhas and all the
enlightened beings, it has been ceaselessly working for our evolution-not
only in this life but in all our past lives-using all kinds of skillful
means and all types of situations to teach and awaken us and to guide us
back to the truth.


Sogyal Rinpoche

I came to live with my grandparents right before Christmas, and my 6th birthday. In the preceding year my sister and brother and I had been taken from our mother and placed in a state institution, then in a couple of foster homes. Our grand parents welcomed us, wanted us, loved, us, and it was coming home.

They used to call my grand father "Berry", that's what we called him too. (He was a minister, and had been an Elder first, and had gotten the name from Elder-berry. His real name was Albert, I don't know if Bert and Berry are that close, but that's what stuck.)

He used to get up early and make a big old fashioned farm-style family breakfast for all of us. We all sat together round the table. This story is about what happened, one morning, very soon after we came to live with them, one morning at breakfast.

Berry simply asked me, "Do you want some honey, Honey"? The honey was in a bottle shaped like a bear. His words carried with them so much love, that I felt that love like a stream of thick, golden honey pour down on me. It hit me with a visceral force. I started to cry. He was the honey bear. (Berry, Beary, I didn't read or write yet, it was all the same to me!) He was dismayed that I was crying, he had no idea, nor was I capable of understanding or explaining what happened, or even why it made me cry.

It was a powerful enough memory to stick me over the years. I now know how the force of love can bring tears. When I began the Tibetan Buddhist Love and Wisdom practices, and was directed to recall a benefactor, one who had the wish of love for me, of course, my grand father (and grandmother) came to mind. This practice asks us to visualize love pouring down on us. I know it does, and not just as soft sun light, but as thick, sweet honey with a visceral power and force that can break your heart wide open. This practice is based on a reality that is lived, and known, even to little children.

Today I attended the Dzogchen Center's Love and Wisdom practice session. This practice involves visualizing one's "benefactors", people who have the wish of love for us. We start with people in our life, pets, and move on to include spiritual teachers, and possibly deities or the great spiritual beings like Buddha or Christ. The wish of love is specifically the wish that we have deepest happiness, joy and wellbeing. We absorb that wish from them. We visualize it beaming on us as if we are sitting in sunlight. Today we were directed to have these benefactors send us compassion, the wish that we are free of suffering.

I was having a hard time opening up to receiving this love, this compassionate wish to be free of suffering. I have visualized my teachers, and name them, but felt the deepest connection to the nameless lighted presence that has been in my life, more and more it seems. It was as if the visualization took on a life of its own, perhaps in response to my difficulty with opening. This lighted being in front of me, began gazing at me, holding my face in his hands. He held me in this intense gaze of love, tenderly, magically lighting my mind as well as my heart, sharing the essence of his openness as a loving act. This was intense bliss, but I could not fall into it there in the sitting room with all those people!

The practice is guided, we move on but we stayed a long time with receiving this wish, and as we did, I realized that I did not really believe on some level, that it was ever even possible to be free of suffering. My benefactor began repeating to me, "it is possible to be free...it is possible to be free". This phrase touched me so deeply, this is the wish of the bodhisattvas for us, to be free, yet we need to be open to it even being a possibility! It was as if I was attached to suffering!

This practice moves into a sending phase, sending out this wish for others to be free of suffering, first to loved ones, then strangers, then those we dislike, then out to all sentient beings. We blend our heart with our benefactors, we visualize them sitting in our heart, and then become their radiance going out in all directions blessing all beings as we chant the mantra of compassion, "Om mani padme hum".

Through this practice I could glimpse that freedom is found through this all inclusive love, this lighted heart of bodhicitta. It is this compassion for others, when we hold them tenderly in our open heart, this is the means, the source, of freedom from our own personal suffering. That loving gaze, it transmitted the wisdom mind, the openness, the clarity, the light, the bliss of freedom, all penetrated through and through with the intense love, the intense wish for my freedom. What a blessing. May all beings be free, may all experience that love.

I am still in contemplation over the shift in my relationship with my spiritual teacher. It was a shift that came on over a couple of years though, not suddenly. I remember driving home from leading a meditation on the goddess, a group I helped lead, and sensing the presence of a teacher. Like he was in the car with me. And the message was that a new teacher was coming into my life. It was so real. I didn't want to hear it. I loved my current teacher.

I have been blessed by the opportunity of having teachers on the physical plane. I have been even more blessed in that I had ready access, easy access, could sit and talk, ask deep questions, could send emails on questions that came up in meditation, could process the difficulties, the joys, the bliss.

When I came across Sogyal Rinpoche's words I felt they spoke directly to my joy, my gratitude in having found a manifested teacher in this lifetime; "When we have prayed and aspired and hungered for the truth for a long time, for many, many lives, and when our karma has become sufficiently purified, a kind of miracle takes place. And this miracle, if we can understand and use it, can lead to the ending of ignorance forever: The inner teacher, who has been with us always, manifests in the form of the ‘outer teacher,' who, almost as if by magic, we actually encounter. This is the most important encounter of any lifetime."

I really appreciate Sogyal Rinpoche, he has been a teacher for me, through association with his words, not his physical presence. (Like so many seekers today, we find many of our teachers in books.) In Buddhism they speak of the three jewels, of the "body, speech and mind" of the Buddha. It occurs to me that the teacher, the guru takes on any one or all of these parts, or jewels as an expression of the Buddha, or Buddha nature. My physical plane teacher may have been the embodied form, while Sogyal Rinpoche may be one of my teachers through the vehicle of speech.

But, is there a point on the archetypal spiritual path, when one moves out of association with either the teacher in embodied form, or written words? To an association instead with the teacher of the formless realm, the realm of "mind" as known in Buddhism?

In deep contemplation on the question of, "who is my teacher", this idea came to me. That yes, one moves into a place, or time, when one's teacher must be the Wisdom Mind, emptiness, or the guru within. It was This that we related to all along anyway in our physical form teacher and found in the words of other teachers. In my understanding there is a residual sense of a teacher, who is not myself, an inner guru. I can ask questions of him, he blesses me with the deepness of his mind, his wisdom, his love. It is he who suggested this answer to me- that we progress to a relationship with a teacher of the formless realm, the realm or jewel of "mind".

It was suggested that one way we can view this is that we move our relationship to teacher/guru out of the plane of our physical form. In the physical form, much of our communication is not effective. We don't communicate what we really mean, and our teacher doesn't meet us the way we need. The joy of an enlightened teacher is that they, so much more than others, can do this. But in physical form, there is ego, and the baggage, the social and mental conditioning that makes us think differently from each other, enough so that even speaking the same language; we don't mean the same things with the same words. In the relationship to the wisdom teacher on inner planes, we operate in a telepathic mode. We are understood deeply. Teaching becomes more efficient. Our difficulty is only one-sided, we need to be able to translate ideas, concepts from the formless through the framework we know, the language we have.

So it comes to me that this is a stage on the Path. The teacher, after manifesting to us in physical form, and teaching us to remember, as Sogyal Rinpoche says, that the inner teacher has been with us always, releases us to that teacher. We come to a point where we need to trust that inner teacher and rely on that, to take refuge in that, to know that inner teacher as our true teacher.

That in moving toward the teacher within, we are taking a step toward owning enlightenment. It is the movement that occurs in tantra when the guru and student merge minds, and realize inseparability.

May all realize this wisdom within, may all be illumined.

My practise has been to open to love's presence and then share it. But this time there was no inflow, no penetration, no rising up, just opening through a gentle softening. A slow melting of boundaries, that needed close, almost breathless attention. I stayed open to the new and different. Love came as emptiness, with no feeling component, and acted as a mirror showing me that It was inside me, I am That. Then I sent this love, this invocation of wholeness-as a blessing-that it open up organically within all.
With boundaries melted there is a certain knowing of the fact that what happens within the microcosm happens within the macrocosm-indeed that it has already happened, has always been, and was just a remembering of what is. That love and light permeates All. Perhaps one's remembering spurs the remembering of all, and that is the wish.

This practise is my sadhana, as an expression of the bodhisatva vow and as a way cultivating bodhicitta. Along with this I take refuge daily in the three jewels that they become my nature.
I asked myself if this sharing was neccesary. If there is even a possibility that it seeds love and joy, then yes. So I send it you.

I went to meditate with the Dzogchen Sangha last night. I had a pretty ripe head cold, and found my stuffiness extended to my mental state as well. My constant and greatest hindrance in meditation is sleepiness, or a dreamy state. This was the case last night.

The practice there is one of chanting then silent meditation, then breaking that up with chanting periodically. At one point we chanted the, "Path Clearing and Wish Fulfilling Prayer to Padma Sambhava";
Precioius guide, one with all the Buddhas of the past, present and future,
Blissful presence and source of all spiritual accomplishments,
Fierce destroyer of illusion who dispels every obstruction,
We pray to you for blessing and inspiration:
Please remove all outer, inner, and secret obstacles,
And spontaneously fulfill our aspirations.

Honestly, many times these prayers and chants take on a rote quality, I just go through the motions, though even that has its effect. 
Last night I decided to take this prayer to heart, to take it seriously, to really mean it as a plea for help with my meditation, as I really hate to waste the gift of being in sangha, that opportunity for deepening of practice. But it takes a leap of faith to believe that the guru listens and helps you.

Perhaps it is not such a bad thing to be a dreamer, as from out of my inner state I felt the presence of a guide, a helper. He put his arms around me, enveloped me and guided me. In my mind's eye I saw the image of an archery teacher, the intimacy of the arms wrapped around the student, but set on intense focus, clarity, aim. This presence woke me up, he may have arisen out of dream, or imagination, or not, but the effect was one of dispelling my obstruction, my mental fogginess. I was so acutely aware, aware of the intimacy of this being held, being breathed, being guided in clarity of focus. The archer was the Buddha, he merged within me yet enveloped me. His mind became one with my mind. The spaciousness was what he showed me next, consciousness just opened up, wider and wider, deeper and deeper. Each breath was a pulse of expanded consciousness, like the sky breathing, like energy pulsing.

I am in awe of these practices, these prayers, and these gurus who are so real. Their love is real, and their wish for our enlightenment and their ready aid in its attainment.

Sometimes it makes it more real to put down an inner experience in words, to bring it out, to share it with others. I wonder if we should ever keep these experiences to ourselves, then I wonder if it is only ego's desire to share? So with the best of intentions, to share the love, and pique curiosity and spiritual inquiry, I will share. Responses, and sharings in return are most welcome!

The night before last, I was meditating before sleep. I had just watched, Ram Das' Fierce Grace DVD. I was filled with the wonder and grace of that, and in particular the obvious love of student for guru, and the radiant love of Maharaji Neem Karoli Baba.

It is said that everyone has a root guru, though I've had issues in my western upbringing, even calling my teachers "guru". But I do know the love I have for them is un-like the love I've ever had in any other kind of relationship. As I went into meditation, my heart reached out almost instinctively for my teacher. Physically I have not seen him in five years, and have had very limited contact, only brief emails, rarely, as he is in deep retreat work. What happened was the most intense transmission of love that hit me so hard, so un-expectedly, so powerfully, it cracked my heart chakra open, sending me into intense sobbing. Being touched, being flooded, being Graced, I knew It was Real.

As I composed myself within my meditation, being the witness to this Love, I knew that the guru opens you to this, is the reflection of this as your own nature, as Gods nature as the One State of All. You are opened to share in this, if you can stand it. I know that one is never separate from the heart of their teacher, their true guru. Though in experiencing this, the who-who is guru, this becomes more transparent, its not "his love" except that he connects you with It, that is his loving gift. I wondered also if somehow Maharaji's, and Ram Das' presence from the DVD hadn't opened me up, or softened me up for this to occur? If all true teachers aren't one great Presence behind their forms?

This Love purified me, shook me out of my habitual state of self pity, left me, even the next day, radiantly happy, joyous and so grateful.
May you all receive this blessing, this Grace.

Last night's Dzogchen meditation was introduced with a talk on the practice of Tibetan Sky Gazing, a form of Treckchod, or cutting away to emptiness. During the meditation we were encouraged to practice this even within the walls of our meditation hall, to dissolve into the empty expanse, to expand our boundaries into limitlessness. We were directed when watching our breath, to follow the out breath.

I understand the opening up and out and dissolving out with the out breath, this leads one to direct one's attention out of the confines of the smallness of self and form, to dissolve into the expanse of the sky that the breath dissolves into. But as I have been contemplating immanence vs. transcendence I contemplated whether this was a form of transcendence practice. I wondered at the preference for the out breath vs. the in breath.

My natural preference tends to be toward following the breath inwards and the feelings it creates, the energy it stirs, and the quickening it creates within. Conscious breathing can create bliss energy to arise within. This energy dissolves the form as well. This works similarly to the way mantra/sound dissolves the solidity of self in practice, and I believe that there is some connection between sound, breath and energy, all sambhogakaya manifestations?

I asked about all these contemplations after the meditation. One woman spoke about pranayama, and how the in breath and out breath need to be in balance. It wasn't until I was riding my bicycle home afterwards that I realized that the two breaths were means to the states of emptiness and bliss. That the natural balance of the two was our body's inner wisdom of the union. The out breath is our experience of emptiness and the in breath is our access to bliss, in natural balance, in natural union, both leading toward the same unified state, with no preference. When we practice we breathe and follow the out breath till it dissolves us into spaciousness, emptiness, boundlessness, and then follow the in breath till it dissolves us into the lighted energy body of bliss, and back and forth till it all dissolves together and there is no more distinction. Breathing is tantra. Breathe -bliss- emptiness.