This Shit is Real

Well, I returned from India and Nepal over a month ago. It was a productive journey. I changed, although as I remain connected to samsara, it does wrap its tendrils around me. One sign of change is my deepened practice commitment. It happens with some regularity over the years that I will drift out of practice and end up not doing any at all for months at a time. One way or another,  I always connect to it again. This had happened to me for about a month prior to going on the pilgrimage. and indeed for the first part of the pilgrimage, although I was participating in dharma activities (like sojong vows at the Kagyu Monlam) I was still neglecting my daily commitment. Somewhere toward the middle, when we got to Nepal, I became inspired to start it up again, and on one free day I hiked up to Pullahari Monastery and sat and did my practice for a while. My current practice is called  Lha Shi (Four Deities) and the instruction we were given were to chant 125 Vajradhara mantras followed by 100 mantras each for each of the four deities. While at Pullahari (which I was drawn to since it is Jamgon Kongtrul's monastery and also because he is a holder of the Shangpa Kagyu lineage, of which Lha Shi is a practice) I decided to do 5 times as many mantras, and that felt so good that I've been keeping to that number ever since. Rinpoche told us that the Shangpa Kagyu practices are very special in that they are easy to do and carry a lot of blessing. I certainly feel that way about Lha Shi.  Very often I get a tingling at the top of my head when I do it, even when I am very distracted. Once I did it and it dissolved a bad headache. The pain turned icy and seemed to melt down my scalp and dissolve. It is therefore obvious to me that the vajrayana vehicle is not simply superstition and that scientific materialism is simply not correct. How could the chanting of certain words and creating certain visualizations cause physical changes in the body otherwise? Of course, skeptics will not find this convincing. Indeed I would not find it convincing if someone told me about it. The argument would be that I am somehow creating the sensation myself, and maybe the headache thing was a coincidence or perhaps even by bringing attention to my scalp, I caused my muscles to relax. Possible, I suppose, but I don't think so. As I was reflecting today while doing the practice it brought to mind an even more convincing experience I had and which I've mentioned previously on this blog  associated with me meeting Rinpoche for the first time. When negative thoughts started to appear, I prayed that he would have happiness and its causes as an antidote--this was on my way to his talk by the way--and I had such an intense and powerful physical experience as a result of this that my behavior has been forever altered. I immediately became a devoted student and joined the Dharma Path program. Again, since this was an internal felt experience (albeit like nothing that had ever occurred to me prior), skeptics will not be convinced. However, consider that the experience I had, knowing next to nothing about Buddhism, matched very well experiences I would later read about when students first met or heard the name of their teacher. At least one text refers to the sense of having all of one's hairs stand on end, a text I only read later. As I succinctly put it to myself while practicing today: "This shit is real." And that brings about a reminder not to let my habits and distraction carry me away from the path that will take me and others out of samsara.