Transforming Your Life Through The Three Doors

Edited excerpts from Tenzin Rinpoche's  Summer Retreat Teachings

My tradition of Tibetan Bon has much wisdom to offer to others. Over the years, I have witnessed teachers with so much to give but few able to receive the benefit of their teaching. This is sad to me. So I have lived with the question of how to bring these teachings to those who can benefit. In teaching and traveling throughout the world, I have met many people who are not interested in Bon particularly, but are very open to the core message of the teachings—connecting with the inner refuge and the power of naked awareness to transform their lives. As a result of my deep reflection, the vision of The Three Doors came. It has taken a long time to manifest, and now we have more than 100 people around the world who have entered the three-year training that is offered. Everyone I have spoken to in this program is so enthusiastic and experiencing so many changes in their lives! They are committed to the practices, and I can clearly see the power and potential of this approach.

Can the core message of dzogchen play an important role transforming our society? Rather than dropping everything and going into seclusion, can those who are engaged with their lives and families benefit their families and their society through engaging the view, practice and behavior of these teachings? Many of us have had the experience of receiving wonderful teachings on emptiness and boundlessness and felt refreshed and peaceful during a retreat only to manifest as a terrible human being as soon as we enter traffic on the way home. The boundlessness is gone! We have not made the connection between our experience in meditation and the traffic jam. In my personal life I am discovering more and more opportunities to make these connections of the boundless view of dzogchen and the ordinary circumstances of life, and every time I make a connection it is like a light going on.

When I was growing up in the monastery, we were encouraged to make connections from one line of a text to another, and to make connections between texts, but we were never encouraged to make links to our ordinary life. Making these links is what is so exciting to me now, and is the core principle of the transformations participants are making through The Three Doors training.

I am now telling my students, if you are following me, I want to see actual changes in every aspect of your life—spiritual, psychological and in your ordinary behavior. Whether you start from a good place or a bad place is not the point. The point is to change, to get better all the time. We are not trying to value our current state of craziness; we are interested in improvement. Can you see that improvement? Can you see improvement in your life through the practices of dzogchen, through this beautiful unbounded view which encompasses every emotion and thought and theory of the whole universe, and this precious awareness, the infinite intelligence in each one of us? As you connect intimately with these teachings and acknowledge the power of nonconceptual awareness, try to make some changes in your life and bring benefit to others.

Tenzin Wangyal, July 2012

Spaces are available in the Three Doors Academy beginning October 4, 2012. Visit www.the3doors.org for more information and to apply.