Peter McEwan: Tummo, Dzogchen, Lineage, and Healing

00:01 — The Field and embodied practice

Pranab · 00:01

Hey Peter, welcome.

Peter · 00:02

Hello. Good to be here.

Pranab · 00:05

Good to have you here. Nice. Let's get started. Do you mind introducing yourself?

Peter · 00:11

My name is Peter McEwen and I am a meditation coach, teacher, instructor at an organization called The Field. And we're located here in Boulder, Colorado. And one of our missions is to bring together some of the brightest minds in contemporary meditation instruction to put on courses, individual coaching, and an array of outreach, including low-cost meditation for people who are from a BIPOC background. So that's me.

Pranab · 00:46

Nice. Can you tell me a bit more about your upcoming course on tummo and who you're teaching it with?

Peter · 00:52

Tummo is a component of this course I will be teaching called Awakening Embodied Presence. And so we'll be doing some work at the cross section of therapeutic modalities or relative experience and then also doing fruitional modalities like Dzogchen in order to provide some structure and practices to help people kind of drop their agenda of self-optimization or even self-acceptance and just experience more moments of open awareness. And I’ll be teaching that with famed nervous-system regulation instructor Jonny Miller and also renowned Buddhist therapist Bruce Tift, who I'm also extremely excited to be working with in a course.

I don't think he's really done any online courses and he's been a mentor of mine for over 20 years. So it's just tremendous for me to be able to work alongside him.

Pranab · 02:06

Yeah, I’m not as deep into Already Free, his book, as I'd like to be. I know it's really great and I've gotten a lot of recommendations on it. And Jonny Miller, I've done his Nervous System Mastery course. His stuff is great. Really helped me understand how the nervous system related to everything.

02:26 — Self-improvement and self-acceptance

Pranab · 02:26

It's an interesting point. I'm curious: when you said dropping self-improvement as well as self-acceptance, it seems like it gets into an aspect of the fruitional view or kind of the nondual view. I'm curious if you could talk about that more. What's the value of dropping self-acceptance?

Peter · 02:46

Well, I think maybe one of the neurotic expressions of too much self-acceptance would be bypassing. And so I think sometimes when we're coming up and learning meditation, we can attain some really incredible states of open-mindedness through self-acceptance, accepting where we are, what we're doing unconditionally. But over time that can kind of calcify into like a style or a predilection or maybe a compulsive way of handling the complexity of our lives. And so to me, self-acceptance on its own has no sort of essential nature. It doesn't exist, so to speak. It's sort of a style. And then on the other side of that, I see a lot of self-optimization techniques, which are also very appropriate depending on what your goals are. But maybe one of the more neurotic aspects of self-optimization is that once your healing is done, then you can show up totally. Then you can fully engage with the immediate stream of your experience. So you're kind of like putting off the messiness of one's life in order to somehow earn through self-optimization techniques, your right to experience your life. So I think my interest is to oscillate between this more Dzogchen, fruitional experience methodology and then maybe using therapeutic modalities or healing or tummo which are path oriented ways of working with the channel system, how we breathe, how we sleep, our interpersonal dynamics, working with emotion, transforming our view of things. And as we oscillate between both ways of doing things, we may find that we can just utilize those methods in a practical way to work with what's coming up in our experience from moment to moment instead of a more compulsive—

04:57 — The fruitional view and everyday responsibility

Pranab · 04:57

Peter, could you talk more about the fruitional view and the view of practice from Dzogchen that you're trained—

Peter · 05:08

That's a broad question.

Pranab · 05:11

Or maybe more specifically, what is the fruitional view relative to kind of the self-improvement, self-acceptance, and then path approach to practice?

Peter · 05:22

I would say the fruitional view would be more an analog of self-acceptance, unconditionally accepting what is happening in your experience right now. And so in the course, we'll be using sensation level experience as an analog for Dzogchen practice. And we'll also do some Dzogchen practice. But when you're in your sensations, engaging in your immediate experience without reservation or without hangups, that's sort of an analog of fruitional experiencing. So, fruitional is a view. And in Buddhism, we have the two truths. We have relative experience and we have fruitional experience. And so it’s not one, not two. So they're not two disparate things.

They're actually two descriptors or reference points we can use as a skillful means to approach our own enlightened nature. So when we're doing fruitional practices, we're sort of practicing this: everything’s fine. This is it. This is everything. We probably don't really experience the world that way. I think most people, their sense of self is still quite robust and intact. I think if you're a person, and this is very rare, whose sense of self has completely collapsed, that's sort of what Dzogchen experience would be like. It's just sort of the inner play of energy and cognizance happening. There's no person experiencing it.

But when we're doing a lot of the more method driven versions of fruitional experiencing meditations, sadhanas, embodied practices, that's like an analog. And so sometimes, you know, a sane expression of that would be unconditional kindness towards whatever is coming up in your experience. I think a neurotic version of that would be letting the garbage pile up, ignoring your children's needs, not going to work, not paying the bills and just saying something like, it's all Dzogchen, I don't need to do any of these things. You know what I mean? But still, there's probably a sense of self there that's saying, yeah, I don't need to do these things.

I think maybe a real example of Dzogchen experience would be you just do those things. You just take care of the baby. You listen to your spouse's issues and request to have their needs met without aggression. But I think many people who are in a kind of self-acceptance, maybe a younger version of self-acceptance, there can be a real bypassing mechanism at work there unconsciously, and that can lead to a lot of messy and hurtful behaviors for the people around us. So we have to be really careful with Dzogchen and thinking we're some sort of like Dzogchen or Zen master, I think, personally.

Pranab · 08:51

Right. It's often a mistranslation or even just a misinterpretation co-opted by sense of self or neuroticism around, especially, you know, nothing to do or like no effort or fully accepting. It can often be a cover for just inaction or kind of like aversion to action. Is that a good way to think about—

Peter · 09:16

I don't know if it's an aversion to action. It's probably an aggression towards reality, basically sort of like, I don't want to experience this, so I'm just going to dissolve. I'm going to dissolve any sort of sense of being a significant, solid self. But that whole agenda can only come from someone who really believes themselves to be a significant and solid person who does and doesn't want to do certain things. So I kind of think of that as like a more masculine style of spacing out or just checking out. And instead of valuing the connection in their lives, they just go ride their bike or they go climbing or whatever it is, whatever it is that kind of like supports that capacity to ignore their immediate experience and the needs of those around them.

10:12 — Working with difficult emotions

Pranab · 10:12

Yeah. How do emotions play into this in the way you teach or I should say emotional healing more than just emotions by themselves?

Peter · 10:26

I'm not sure we need to heal the emotions. I think of meditation as a recovery practice to naturalness. And so maybe my version of that would be processing disturbance more efficiently by actually being kind towards, inviting, tolerating these very disturbing emotional states that we tend to recapitulate over and over. And those emotional states seem to have some sort of emotional function, because they're a reliable way to distract ourselves from our immediate experience. So I think my reference point would be wholeness, recovery, and working with the sensations in the body and watching how those disturbing sensations can almost spontaneously render as a self-aggressive narrative or an aggressive narrative about what we're experiencing and how we don't like it and how can we basically jump out of those vulnerable feelings and distract ourselves so we don't have to consciously experience things we don't like, which I think works very well when we're children.

And I think it's a survival necessity when we're children. We can't metabolize divorce. Bullies at school or the dynamics that go on in our families of origin. They're very challenging for us to metabolize and understand. So we just learned very quickly how to put that out of our mind and distract ourselves with the next thing. Because we can't really command our emotions, we don't have a lot of command over our totality at that point. Unfortunately, we bring that into our later lives and that sort of mentality that there's a dangerous part of ourselves that we can't bring into conscious awareness starts kind of running the show from under the hood.

And I think the tax on that can be quite expensive over time. So typically in a practitioner's arc of development, they'll eventually maybe come into this knowledge that, these distractive habits I have are very expensive, they're very costly, and they're operating anyway. So maybe I need to create a conscious relationship to these emotions instead of let them unconsciously drive my behaviors. And so that would be more on the side of the path work. And tummo is one inner technology I've found really beneficial to work with those very difficult energies.

13:20 — Tummo and the subtle body

Pranab · 13:20

Could you get into what tummo is and your experience with—

Peter · 13:25

Tummo, strictly speaking, is the inner fire practice of the six yogas of Naropa. And this warmth and bliss that manifests in the central channel near our navel center spreads throughout the body and sort of clears up these knots in our energy system. So over time through bad breathing, maybe dietary habits, habits of closure, our subtle body kind of gets crinkled and crunched up. And so we use this warmth to spread throughout the body and let that luminosity and bliss straighten out sort of this subtle organization. Strictly speaking, you use an imaginal topology and that topology includes veins or channels which contain prana or the air.

And those airs go to various hormonal centers or chakras. And so basically we're moving this air through the chakric system or hormonal centers and purifying sort of these outmoded or inaccurate ways of perceiving reality. The three main channels kind of represent subject and object on the side. And that’s where we exist most of the day in a subject object relationship to reality. And so from the tantric perspective, that's an errant way of operating. We would prefer a more accurate depiction of reality would be when the air or prana is trapped in the central channel. And when you can trap it in the central channel, and tummo albeit is a forceful way to trap these airs in the central channel, Dzogchen is a more gentle method to trap the air in the central channel.

Subject and object drop. And so there is seeing, but no seer. There is hearing, there's no hearer. So this sense of being a significant solid self collapses. Being able to reliably access that experience is a very powerful way to not only transform your confidence as a practitioner and give you a totally different viewpoint, it can kind of train you in the intensity that comes along with feeling a sense of well-being. Many of us have a very low tolerance for feeling good, We are only able to feel good for brief moments of time, seems like, without kind of like being captured again by a neurotic way of operating.

So tummo is a really nice way to activate some confidence.

Pranab · 16:27

We're going to bookmark that because that gets into some of the Jhana stuff that's interesting. Could you explain the subtle body prana and central channel to someone who's not familiar with those concepts in a way that, you know, maybe the TLDR version or something, maybe someone who comes from a more like physiological point of view about things.

Peter · 16:49

Yeah, I mean, I think practitioners in the seventh and eighth century, they are also very interested in clarification, just like a science-minded person was. So maybe they didn't necessarily use a mathematical or third-person objective way of understanding, but what was more probably accessible to a yogi was first-person subjective way of understanding things. So this way of actually investigating how the energies of the body operate. And so we're breathing people. Similar to Chinese medicine, too, we have the container, which is the channel system and the contained which is the energy that runs through the channel system.

So that would kind of describe the tsa, or the channels and the prana or lung which is the air. And so being able to channel that air into a more sane organization, breaking up stagnation, breaking up old habitual patterns, maybe you get specific kind of maladies in certain parts of the body and that could be attributed to stagnation, too much heat in the body, things like that. And so we would also maybe view the chakras as hormonal centers, crown chakra, the brain, throat chakra, heart, navel center, metabolism, sexual areas. And so purifying the liquids that exist at these various centers would be one of the charges for the tummo practice.

Over time as you get more adept with these methodologies, there are more and more advanced ways of moving energy in the body. So all we're really talking about is from a subjective standpoint, how do we work with our own energy? I think what happens is those of us who grew up, maybe in the West specifically, but all over the world, we unconsciously take materialism to be true. So we always have sort of a third-person objective way of viewing these things. Tummo asks us to suspend disbelief and just look at it as an interior experience of energy instead of sort of like an anatomy book made of meat.

19:19 — A first-person account of healing

Pranab · 19:19

Yeah, that makes sense. And to me, this brings up some of the modern concepts of The Body Keeps the Score or how habitual patterns are often kind of can be seen as located in certain parts of the body and it can be felt that way and experienced that way. Would you say that is a way or a lens of seeing some of this work as well in maybe this more trauma informed view that is so pervasive these days?

Peter · 19:46

Yeah, there's actually a few studies that I can put in the notes later that sort of that were done on vets with PTSD. And yes, bringing attention to certain parts of the body from an interior subjective perspective does kind of loosen up this fixation on avoiding these very intense sensations that sort of get trapped in particular parts of our energy system. Once we get these really intense sensations, we typically jump into a narrative about what they mean. There's a problem. What can I do to solve it? And oftentimes the solution is an exogenous substance like drinking, trolling people on the internet, gambling, aggressiveness in general, right?

That's a way to get out of these really vulnerable, uncomfortable feelings that get trapped in our energy system. So yes, I would say one of the main charges for tummo practice is healing. It's to recognize your innate wholeness and goodness and have an attitude of unconditional inclusivity towards trauma. Trauma is kind of like a hangover maybe, right? So we never know when it's gonna arise. So it might be the trigger. We don't know in advance always, sometimes we do. But I think it's good to have a reliable way to operate once that trauma has been aroused and surfaced. It's sort of like a knot in the body that it's sort of like a joint that's been operated on and it's just sore there.

You know what I mean? So we want to bring some flexibility and pliability energetically to that area.

Pranab · 21:37

It's interesting to make that connection between the more modern, now more scientific view of habit change, behavior change, trauma, healing, and linking that with this more first millennium Tibetan view of energy work and channels, and how that is actually probably a more phenomenological first-person sensory experience way relating to a lot of the similar stuff that's talked about now in scientific papers and therapy offices.

Peter · 22:12

That's one of the interesting things about Buddhist Tantra in general. It's a tradition of outsiders, of people who did in many cases come from traumatic organization. Prostitutes, servants, slaves, low caste participants in Brahmanic India. And so of course those people, I'm sure, had trauma kind of wired into their energy system. The body is the same body that humans have had for, right, 100,000 years at least. I think the cultural inflection and the way this technology is propagated is probably the more malleable component that we're all trying to understand how to best disseminate.

But the actual way the body works and the way energy flows in the bodies, from my perspective, limited perspective, is probably the same as it was when the early tantric practitioners were doing their work.

Pranab · 23:19

Different ways to conceptualize it or frame it or package it. That's not to discount modern day. Like I'm sure there's a lot of new stuff that's interesting and novel innovations. And at the same time, probably does a disservice to say it's never been discovered—

Peter · 23:37

And to your point, I think, you know, when we start doing tummo practice, we're, we've entered the realm beyond symbol to some degree. Symbols are still serviceable in the investigation of these practices, but you're actually feeling things happening in your immediate awareness. So that can be symbolized by Vajra Varahi or also known as Vajrayogini and by chakra systems. But when it's actually happening to you, the curtain has been pulled back and what has been revealed is energy and luminosity warmth, visceral experiences. So in alignment with what Joseph Campbell always preached, the cultural habituation of the symbol kind of protects us from the experience of God.

And that's why there's a little bit of edginess and this symbolic death when we actually encounter these energies, because we've kind of gone beyond the disseminated view of like what God is and how does God appear or Buddha or whatever it is.

24:52 — Teachers, training, and spontaneous awakening

Pranab · 24:52

Yeah. Very cool. How were you influenced for all this? What were your influences? What were your trainings? What kind of brought you to where you are in your practice? Clearly Tibetan influence, but yeah, I would love to hear you talk more about—

Peter · 25:12

This is an interesting question. I was just reading through my teacher's social media guidelines. My teacher is Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. His Dharma activity is like infinite from my point of view. He runs a chair at UC Berkeley, another chair at Australian university. He runs, you know, very like probably three or four nonprofits at least he's responsible for a monastic community. He teaches the young Tulkus and he's always espousing this view of like, don't tell anyone your empowerments, don't tell anyone who your teacher is, don't post pictures of tantric deities, because it's speaking a language that the probably broader continuum of people are interested in this stuff, they don't speak that language and it's really open to misinterpretation.

But at the same time, you see the Vajrayana community wearing the robes in public, posting pictures of whoever their guru is. And that's something really interesting to me is that there's like conflictual attitudes built into Buddhism and built into Vajrayana specifically. So we just have to do our best with how we operate. My background was I started having really powerful, spontaneous awakenings when I was 21. And they left me confused, disheveled, and feeling alienated because it seemed like no one around me understood what was happening. I suddenly realized what I think was not what the world was comprised of. So basically, It was like I had been living in a cocoon my whole life and it's almost like someone unzipped it and then I looked out and there was just big open creative spontaneous space.

And it took me a really long time to recover from those experiences. But the descriptions I found in Vajrayana Buddhism and the inquiry by Western scientists at the Mind and Life conferences really fired my imagination and my commitment to learning more about these practices. I started practicing the Tummo practice tsa lung in 2004. I took refuge from a khenpo from strangely enough Chögyam Trungpa's monastery in Surmang, Tibet when I was really young. I started, I did my first ngöndro under Bhaka Tulku Rinpoche, who is the incarnation of Pema Lingpa. I later met through Bhaka Tulku Rinpoche, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche and started three-year retreat curriculum and was ordained as a yogi at that time, also in the mid—[date unclear]. And I started very gently practicing with permission, or teaching with permission, Vipassana and Samatha modalities.

And at this time, I'm allowed to teach small groups. I don't give empowerments publicly. And I'm only interested in teaching in my capacity, but the tantric modalities for me, I feel very aligned with those modalities. And I learned the tsa lung practices from Lama Pema Dorje Rinpoche, who lived in Oakland.

28:53 — Lineage, secrecy, and authority

Pranab · 28:53

Yeah. I remember we were chatting before about the difference between lineages, and lineages and secrecy. And just kind of, could you, for someone who's like never heard of these Tibetan names or these terms, could you kind of give a sense of like what a lineage is like and like what these traditions feel like on the inside and how they're wanting you to communicate to the outside? And how that might be different between lineages.

Peter · 29:24

Well, I do think like, for instance, within my lineage, I'll get an invitation to go to a teaching. I just got one actually. And it specifically states, do not tell anyone, even in your own cohort that you're invited to this teaching. So some of the, some of the secrecy, it's like living in a vacuum to some degree. And so when I see people talking about their teachers online, talking about their cohort, it's so alien to me. I'm not allowed to tell anyone the teaching I got, where it was, who was there. And there's something really special about that. But there's also maybe an opacity those of us in the West would find off putting.

And so I think in the West, we're trying to find our footing because we're trying to acclimate to a system that is very different. For instance, if you are the son of a lama in a small village in the Himalayas, you're probably elected to be the next lama, right, or the next healer. We don't really live in that world of apprenticeship in the West. So the way the lineages work in the East, my main teacher, his grandfather was Dudjom Rinpoche, who's a very celebrated and powerful Dzogchen teacher. And he was trained by another famous Lama named Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. And his other grandfather was a famous six yogas teacher and practitioner in Bhutan.

So from the West, we would say, this is nepotism. It's going from generation to generation. It's a blue blooded kind of Knickerbocker kind of way of doing things. And that's very alien to us. The other thing about the guru-disciple relationship in Vajrayana Buddhism is it's fundamentally an autocracy. Like there's someone at the top and then there's everyone else. And so then we wonder later why there's so much corruption and abuse. You know, there's no checks and balances on the actual teacher. You just have to examine the teacher to make sure they have as much as possible up to date behavioral standards and what their version of like crazy behavior will be and how that's going to impact you psychologically.

Cause they only have one mission purportedly and that's to rouse you out of this cocoon of self absorption. But operating within my lineage, it's so large that there's some people who are probably operating, if we're going to use spiral dynamics, maybe at a blue or orange, right? Very ethnocentric, very religious in style. And they worship the guru like a God on earth. And then some people have more of a self-optimization kind of style. And they're really heavy into doing big retreats, six-year retreats, things like that, and just becoming like the ultimate yogi. Some people see it through the lens of social justice and plurality.

And then some people have an integral view. And as we go through these developmental stages, there's fewer and fewer practitioners, of course. So I would view a big lineage like my own lineage as being all over the place. The hub of it is Buddhist teachings and my teacher. And there's all kinds of things happening: infighting, family dynamics, nepotism, confusion. It's all over the place.

33:08 — What a monastic structure can offer

Pranab · 33:08

In the West, in the internet age, there's definitely a vibe and kind of an implicit understanding that information should be spread and free, open source, a very like flat level kind of thing. And a lot of what you described around lineages is quite counter to that, especially meritocracy versus, you know, family nepotism. We'll bookmark getting into how that manifested in your experience in Boulder with some of the communities you've been a part of, but could you kind of steelman or kind of explain the value of why Tibetan lineages are the way they are? Maybe if not now, why were they like that?

And what is, how beneficial can they be? Like what might the West be missing in kind of skipping—

Peter · 33:59

Within these lineages, right? There's like smaller lineages of yogis, householder types, visionary experiences. Some teachers didn't have any earthly teachers, so to speak, right? And they weren't necessarily associated specifically with a monastic tradition. But later the monastic tradition will subsume those teachings and turn them into intellectual property of the monastery. So I would say our Western view on all this is probably framed through the Dalai Lama sect, the Gelugpa, which is a scholastic sect, and they are monks, celibate monks for the most part. And so I think when we think of Tibetan Buddhism in general, we think of monasticism. My teacher has a girlfriend.

In fact, she painted a picture back there of Kurukullā. So we have all these artisans, my teacher is a film director, all this kind of thing is going on. But I would say the overarching thematic is the safety of the monastic structure in order to enforce a container where hopefully not too many people are having schizoid breaks or being harmed through really practices that are inappropriate for them. But it's impossible to pin down. I think one of the reasons Trungpa set up his kingdom here in Boulder and in Vermont was because when he was coming up as a tulku, he was just like it's a mess.

Like there's all these different lineages. There's all these kind of teachers. He's like, I wanted to kind of like structure it in a way like a westerner could actually comprehend. But for the most part that lineage has kind of collapsed for abuse issues. So now we're kind of back to square one, I think a lot of the infrastructural reference points that we're used to in the West of, you know, the DMVs of spirituality, we don't, we don't have that kind of licensure process that Westerners really love, like we really love army kind of things, right? And Trungpa tried that with his Dharma army.

We want to know who the general is, who’s the colonel, who’s the major. Who can we trust? And according to Vajrayana you trust the Buddhist teachings and your guru and that's probably not going to work very well for Westerners because they're going to be maybe backed into a corner where they have to assimilate cultural habits that may be retrograde to their developmental stage. And so you really want to be when you're examining a teacher you want to be careful. Is this teacher at a developmental stage that's previous to mine because then maybe we won't be able to like have a rational discussion about how to practice because then you can be enlightened but developmentally or relatively at a more—what’s the word? I don’t want to say regressed, but you'd be at a less inclusive stage of development.

So from the lineage perspective, it's all over the place. It's really hard.

37:31 — Choosing a teacher

Pranab · 37:31

Teacher quality, or picking a teacher, or understanding the aspects that you would look for when advising someone to look for a teacher. You mentioned developmental stage and inclusivity of scope. If you could go into that and given your range of experiences with lineages and just practices in general, what are things you would kind of point someone to to evaluate teacher fit?

Peter · 38:03

I would say probably someone who has some psychotherapeutic training would be really helpful. We in the West, my generation at least, we grew up seeing therapists on television and there's all this talk about mental health and therapy and wellness. So, you know, a guru is not going to really want to have a detailed exchange about your personal history, they want to talk about now and they want to talk about how you're doing practice, how you're framing your experience now. My favorite teacher is a psychotherapist. His name is Bruce Tift. He's the person I found that had an accurate understanding of Vajrayana practices through being trained by Chögyam Trungpa, but he's someone I could talk to about life management, my girlfriends, professional issues.

And if you're working with a monastic person, yes, maybe they do have a fundamental understanding of ignorance and human nature. But I don't always know if that's appropriate for all of us. I think sometimes we want someone we can really be vulnerable with and talk to and who can be an accurate reference point for us in a world full of dissonance and confusion. Also someone you could see more frequently. I see my teacher very infrequently, you know, and so you probably want to see someone. Maybe you want to see him once a month, every six months, every other week, right?

That's probably something you want to look for someone you can have an actual relationship with who has been trained by someone you respect, but maybe feels like a little bit more avant garde to you than the monastic style of teaching, which tends to be focused through the lens of either ritual arts or long retreats. Those are two of the main modalities, and conduct, of course. But some of that conduct stuff— And that's why I wear my robes today. My ngakpa outfit is kind of, you know, you have to say, okay, I'm wearing this Tibetan outfit.

Where did this come from? What happened to me? Why am I dressed like this? Does this really accelerate my personal growth where I'm ready to dissolve my fascination with personal growth and just engage fully wholeheartedly in my immediate experience without exception. Those are questions you can ask yourself. But I would say a safety thing you could do is work with a monastic and start from there. And over time recognize where they're at developmentally and then you can look for teachers that seem more in alignment with your attitudes and your current life circumstances.

41:06 — Boulder and the legacy of Trungpa

Pranab · 41:06

Right. What has your experience been with Chögyam Trungpa and that community? Because I know that was a major part of being in Boulder for you. And that whole influence has shaped some of your views around safety and practice as—

Peter · 41:29

Yeah, so I don't want to talk too much out of school, but I do know the children of the first wave of Trungpa’s students. And in fact, one of my teachers, Bruce Tift was one of Trungpa’s first students. And I worked with a woman named Cory and her father, Sherab was one of Trungpa’s first translators. And so through the Cohn family, I met, you know, like Pema Chödrön and all these like really old school, amazing practitioners. Then I met Ösel Tendzin's children. I started the field with Michael Rich, who’s one of Trungpa’s successor’s children. So Vajra and Anthony and Michael Rich. And as a sort of an outsider, but I had a view into their world.

I was like, I think we can do better. I'm not, you know, like an enlightened person, but I think just structurally we can like figure out how to communicate these teachings in a more up-to-date way. So I was really inspired by meeting a lot of the Boulder Dharma brat community and going to their parties and practicing with them and just kind of hanging out, but also not wearing it. Right. I had that privilege and opportunity to not be part of that band, but I could kind of like bring my own energy to something that I thought had a little more sanity to it than what they grew up in.

And in Trungpa’s sangha, there was a lot of drinking and this sort of like really wild party scene that left a trail of bodies in my perspective. And I even dabbled like practicing that way, you know, lot of drinking, a lot of big parties, lot of transgressive kind of like tantric behavior, but it's just in the end, it's just really tiring and the return on it is not worth the tax. So for me, I'm more into taking care of this body and working on having better interpersonal communication skills and those kind of things are more interesting to me than some of the ways that the Shambhala community was structured.

And I think it all came to a head when Sakyong Mipham was accused of abusing various female students and threatening them if they didn't perform specific acts. And so that kind of, there's no room for that. But that can be symptomatic of a cultural habit that's imported here. It's always hard to say if someone's really enlightened and if they're really unconditionally kind. And if they're really that skilled of a teacher. It takes time to get to know. So I would say to anyone listening, take your time when you're examining your teacher.

Pranab · 44:41

Yeah. And the unconditional seems to always interplay with the relative around social structures and norms and behavior and some of the complications of modern day life.

Peter · 44:56

I think we're Americans too. And I think I was watching this documentary about the Grateful Dead and it's amazing to me that band still tours without the main front person, Garcia, but the English person who managed the band, he's like, one thing about Americans is they always are trying to figure out what is it to be an American. And I feel like I think that's part of American Vajrayana is we want to know what is it to be an American Vajrayana person. We're still finding out. And I think there's a real art to finding out. I think that's really creative and fun and illuminating to kind of make it our own.

45:40 — Bruce Tift and practical honesty

Pranab · 45:40

What makes Bruce Tift your favorite teacher?

Peter · 45:44

I love Bruce because he seems to have a very practical expression of Dharma practice and interpersonal dynamics. I think he found in his clinical work, his work as a university professor and just as a father and husband that no single view can sort of encompass the complexity of reality. And I think when we talk to Buddhists or people into therapy or parts work, they tend to have this attitude that their way is the way, like this is the way to operate, this is the way to teach, this is the way to practice and I think he has this really special capacity to kindly and penetratively work with whatever is coming up in our discussion, basically. He seems to be a location of accuracy and that's really hard to find. It's really hard to find that friend or that teacher who doesn't have a bias about where your life is going, and just wants to render for you what you're actually doing and maybe the ways you've lied to yourself about what you're doing.

I think that's such a special quality. And to me, that's really what a Vajrayana teacher should be doing is to help you recognize what you really are. It might be the environment of awareness with a lot of, you know, creative and spontaneous energies rendering in all kind of different directions. But once we latch on to those creative energies and we render them as a formula, we almost slavishly try to recapitulate that formula so we get the same result over and over. And so I think his style has this kind way of dismantling our addiction to seeing ourself as just a formula or a symptom of ideology, maybe so to speak.

So that's been really helpful for me, is to pull myself out of that. Also, I was raised by my grandparents. My grandfather quit school at age eight. They're from Southern Arizona in the Chiricahua mountain range. And my grandmother dropped out of school at age 14 and they're indigenous people. And I think just coming up in that kind of codependent, survival-level culture that indigenous people kind of subsist in, they survive in, teasing apart those unconscious narratives I had about personal worth, what is legitimate in America, who I am, where can I go? Using food or money as a way to secure like an illusory sense of safety.

He really helped me with those kind of out of date programs and that sort of generational trauma that was a part of me and an unconscious part of me for I would say most of my life.

49:07 — Bringing therapy and awakening together

Pranab · 49:07

Yeah. I remember you mentioned that on another podcast and I was really curious listening to it. So, I think it's quite rare for meditation teachers and even non-dual teachers to talk about trauma or developmental work and those knots. Maybe the question is how did that integration between the two happen for you? Were they kind of separate projects for a while? Were some just not on your radar? You mentioned the spontaneous awakening experiences in your early 20s. Kind of curious to get an arc of how these all come to form the way you teach now. And you're 50, 51?

Peter · 49:52

Yeah, so over the 30 years—big guru mistakes I made in my 20s. I was sort of like a local, I had had these insights and then I read everything about Buddhism and Joseph Campbell and all this kind of new age stuff. And I think people in my community thought I was like different, maybe wise. They knew I was from an indigenous background, which was like a fascination for all the white upper-middle-class kids who were going to UC Santa Barbara at the time. But I was bypassing at that time. And I thought, you know, my shit didn't stink.

And I could just say kind of like rude or mean things to people, or I didn't owe people an explanation because everything was big open emptiness. And after a while, That really drew me back into a sense of being a fundamentally problematic person. So I had, I went from this really amazing sense of openness, spaciousness, electric energy. And I was right back at square one and being captured by really dramatic circumstances. No, nothing illegal, but it just, was like, I was kind of like, wow, I'm really abusing this kind of like little bit of power I have. I'd like to get more into alignment with being kinder, conscientious, feeling connected to the people around me.

And that's when I started working with a therapist and started like cleaning up my life. I think that was really—you can be enlightened and have just a really messy life and kind of an abusive attitude towards people. You can recognize that everything is openness, irresolvable, big heart. But if you don't, if you're not cleaning up your own emotional environment, you're not going to stay in that, openness for very long, you're probably going to get captured because we're connected people. And if you're making mistake after mistake, people are going to remind you that you're behaving inappropriately. And if you're behaving inappropriately, usually not always you're doing it out of sense of self interest or aggression.

And so I think for me, you know, that confluence of therapy and fruitional work like Buddhism, really important for me to kind of curb the indulgent way of operating clean things up so I could show up in the world, you know, using the Wilberian pedagogy so I could show up in the world and actually try to help people have more moments of open awareness and have some more experience of their own innate goodness. But I don't think that would have been possible without the therapeutic work. Not in the Western culture I live in.

52:47 — Waking up, growing up, cleaning up, showing up

Pranab · 52:47

Yeah. So Ken Wilber's four pillars, wake up, grow up, clean up, show up. Correct me if I'm wrong. So wake up is more on the spiritual development or ego identification with beyond the sense of self. Grow up is the personal development axis, like more inclusiveness within one's perspectives and being able to be more multi-perspectival. Cleanup is on the therapeutic shadow work side of cleaning up some scars and knots and kind of these triggers. And show up is what I know the least. Is that just kind of embodying all of that moment to moment? Would love.

Peter · 53:30

Cool. Just sort of like taking your new, your maybe updated stream of values and creatively disseminating them and walking the walk, so to speak, in consensus reality.

Pranab · 53:43

Do you have a take on the order of how those should be done? Maybe that's different for people. I know it's a thing on Twitter that people talk about sometimes. Curious your opinion.

Peter · 53:56

I mean, I think any path is just a construct to help us get along. I think you can do the things all at once. You can focus on one thing one year and another thing, you know, like a lot of people I know who do really advanced Buddhist practices. They think that the preliminary practice is the most profound of the practices. They really enjoy and get off on just really basic meditations on compassion and taking refuge. So I think nothing has to go in a specific pattern that would be a fruitional view about it, but it might be to our benefit to follow that pattern as a placeholder.

But I think it's good to, if you feel like you're getting really absorbed in shadow work, maybe you should go back to waking up for a little while and kind of like refine your awakening practice. Maybe you've turned shadow work and sort of evoking these neurotic subconscious motives and self-sabotage patterns as another pattern of escape of your embodied immediate sensation level engagement with reality. So we don’t want to get too absorbed in any specific stage, in my opinion, because it's very, we're humans and we addict to everything. And so even shadow work, you know, I don't want to spend my time digging up my shadow material.

If neurotic organization comes up and I feel off, I'll work with that then. I don't necessarily go chase it, but when I was doing a lot more therapy, yeah, I was like, fuck, I got some work to do here. I have some afflictions that are hurting the people around me and I need to work with those, surface those, invite those and be kind towards those in order so I can dissolve my fascination with recapitulating those behaviors. I'm not really sure though. You could ask Vince Horn. He's like one of the experts on the Wilber perspective in my opinion.

56:14 — A low tolerance for well-being

Pranab · 56:14

Nice. Yeah, and then we bookmarked it earlier. How do you view the way that people often block their pleasure or their joy or their happiness? Maybe way earlier in the conversation you mentioned a low tolerance for well-being.

Peter · 56:36

It's probably from a standpoint of an out-of-date self-care pattern. They probably feel, if I show up fully, I'll only end up disappointed. And so, you know, maybe they had experiences as children where they were wild or they were, you know, a musician or actress and constantly kind of like had this flourish to their behavior. And maybe that was stamped down by some people like parents or some other figure who thought that was just a little bit extra gratuitous. That child internalized that and no longer feels safe feeling authentic, as it were. So I think, you know, we often have specific areas of our life, like wellbeing that actually strangely make us feel very unsafe because we're just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And so we're already armored and we probably already have an unconscious directive to sabotage that sense of wellbeing because it's very dangerous to us. It can lead to a really catastrophic feeling of abandonment or disappointment. You know, I won this award. If I don't win the next one, everyone's going to abandon me or it's going to be heartbreaking and I can't handle that. So I'll just be happy with this award. So I think that—yeah, I think so. That would be my perspective. I used to teach meditation to stock traders and they had a lot of self-sabotage. They have a very polar relationship to winning and losing.

That's the nature of the investing world. So, you know, those parts of their young psyche, why would they be interested in probably working in investing and trading? They probably have a lot of energy about winning and losing in there. There's probably a lot of like both gratification and masochism kind of baked into that like profession. And so you always have this possibility of having some sort of polar, volatile relationship to your own feelings.

58:54 — Self-sabotage and small steps

Pranab · 58:54

And could you kind of with maybe with that example, walk through like a case study or an example of how you might work with someone. Like what does a before or after, before and after look like maybe through the lens of the four pillars, like the wake up, clean up, grow up, or just in general, from what we've talked about so far, like what does it look like to actually untangle that knot or act in a way that's more free or less patterned or conditioned?

Peter · 59:22

I don't think one can know. I think really what we're doing is where we have content arising into our cognizance, is the Dzogchen word we use, Rigpa, cognizance, and you have this vivid display, [unclear Tibetan terms], of energies being illuminated by knowing. And that's the really interesting thing about this spontaneous creative world we live in is we don't know what's going to come up next. What we try to do is ensure we do know what's going to come up next. So we build patterns in order to have sort of like this stabilized sense of struggle because that stabilized sense of struggle is probably existentially preferable to not knowing what's next.

So. If I'm working with someone, we probably want to bring into conscious awareness the ways someone is framing the world as being knowable, not mysterious, and what energetic patterns are they replaying in order to feel like they have some sense of control. So someone who has a self-sabotage pattern, that pattern is probably a control. So they're not like taken by surprise. Maybe if they're taken by surprise, they act out in ways that are really harmful. Maybe they go on a drinking binge or they max out their credit card or they don't feel in control of their behavioral intervention when they have something surprise them.

So they go to a more youthful way of operating, which provides some like sense of stability and safety because then they feel like they can control when their life takes a shit. Then life doesn't just like crush them. And so I think, I guess we could say awakening would be like, hey, what you’re telling me is that you have a pattern of self-sabotage or harming being harmful in your relationships or jumping from relationship to a relationship. Maybe that serves as an emotional function to protect you from having a relationship. So that to me is like waking up. Then growing up would be something like, well, what’s happening now is you're probably using like a youth orientation, a youthful way of intervening when something disappointing or disturbing comes up.

How would it be to grow up and activate your adult capacities when something has woken you up or you've gotten like a rude awakening from life. How would it be to stay in your adult capacities and work consciously? And when you find yourself regressing to a more youthful organization, wake up and then choose to grow up and realize that you're going to be constantly doing the counterintuitive work for the rest of your life of exerting adult capacity or even spiritual capacities instead of youth or biological capacities. And then you could probably start the work of cleaning up, which would be again, like disciplining oneself to do the counterintuitive thing.

The intuitive thing is usually what gets us into trouble. So sometimes we want to do the counterintuitive thing of like doing a little, starting small, not turning it into some big, dramatic effort to resolve our lives. But dealing realistically being adult, you don't have to go run a triathlon. How would it be to do a hundred pushups a week? Something small, something where it's not gonna rebound on you and then you're gonna not do any of it. Cause it's so overwhelming that you end up just eating Cheetos on the couch or something. And then regressing all the way back to the waking up pattern.

And then showing up again, you want to use small iterative steps. We don't need to have a black and white way of operating, which is again indicative of youthful organization, right? Black and white, right, wrong. Instead we use small iterative steps. We try to do those kindly and we show up for our neighbor. We show up for our children and we do it in a way where it doesn't take over our lives or become another escape from our immediate embodied existence. So I think a lot of the way my reference point for a lot of these practices is to do, just like in Buddhism,, just do small steps, very simple things to bring ourselves into alignment with our adult capacities.

And then it feels like once we've stabilized our relationship to behaving like an adult, when we would rather behave like children from our families of origin, maybe then we can start doing some spiritual work and feel confident in that sense of like, mystery, openness, a broader sense of spectrum of existential intensity without folding and feeling like you're going crazy because you don't know who you are. So I think these patterns, there's a lot of fear around this in this lineage discussion that's been feverishly executed on Twitter and these other social networks. I think there's a lot of fear that, well, people are going to have these spiritual attainments.

But what's going to happen is they're going to almost immediately revert to the way their youthful way of organizing reality. And that might create more harm. I think that's my view on why this discussion is so charged. It's actually resonating for people around how black and white their own way of organizing reality is. And I think that's why there's a lot of aggression in the online discussion. There's a lot of fear. I think the fear is misplaced. I think sometimes you should work with your own ability to stay in your adult capacities and maybe worry less about other people staying in theirs.

Because you shouting at them on Twitter is not gonna improve the situation, probably. There's a big difference between like bringing something and like raising, waking up or bringing something into conscious awareness and then aggressively foisting it upon someone, which is basically treating them like a child.

01:06:14 — Finding Peter and the 2024 course

Pranab · 01:06:14

Awesome. Awesome, Peter. Thank you. Where can people find out more about you or the upcoming course that's starting in August 2024, a couple of weeks, I think.

Peter · 01:06:27

August 28th. I want to really focus on that Bruce Tift's taking part because he's, you know, one of my heroes. We’ll be teaching a lot of his work. The thing I bring to this is maybe more depth in my background as far as like the tantric methodologies from the Nyingma sect of Vajrayana Buddhism. And then Jonny Miller is also taking part in this retreat. And I want to make sure people who participate have Jonny’s sequence of working with nervous system regulation. So if they do feel overwhelmed or they do feel like, my gosh, this work with my channels or chakras or whatever, it's like, it's making me feel really like a live wire.

We want to be able to do non-sleep deep rest or some of Jonny’s modalities to bring ourselves back into engagement with a feeling of stability, rootedness and calm so we can sleep well. So I don't foresee that being an issue, but I just wanted to say that as a caveat. I have a therapist and I have a nervous system regulation professional and we'll be doing some light work with Dzogchen and Tummo in getting people embodied. And if you want to learn more about the course, you can go to thefield.us. And right on the front page there's a link to the page that has a detailed description of the class.

Pranab · 01:07:59

Wonderful. And people can find you on Twitter at techgnostic.

Peter · 01:08:04

Yeah, you can find me at techgnostic on Twitter and I stole that from Erik Davis, the amazing writer, because he wrote a book called TechGnosis, which was really important to me in the mid 2000s. I really loved that book. So I kind of lifted that handle from him and he's been kind enough to let me keep it.

Pranab · 01:08:28

Nice. And you do Sunday community hours?

Peter · 01:08:33

Yeah, also I have open office hours. If you want to come in, talk about embodiment work, your Vajrayana practice, no charge. You know, you can come in, the classes are not shared. You can come in, be vulnerable, talk about what's going on in your practice and the community and myself will do our best. Last week we had David Chapman, who is a really amazing contemporary voice in Vajrayana and Technology in general, he came and helped do the open office hours and I'll continue to have special guests. So if you want to engage on that level, please do. You can just reach out to me at the field website or on Twitter.

Pranab · 01:09:22

Thank you.