---
title: "Edwin Kelley on 50 Years of Dharma Practice"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/edwin-kelley-on-50-years-of-dharma-practice/
date: 2026-04-28
modified: 2026-07-03
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction Edwin Kelley began practicing Buddhism in 1975 after attending a 10-day Vipassana retreat near Perth, Australia, following a serious motorcycle accident that had turned him toward questions of meaning,..."
categories:
  - "Eastern Traditions"
  - "Interviews"
  - "Meditation"
tags:
  - "dharma"
  - "Theravada"
  - "Vajrayana"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Edwin-Kelley-Interview-with-Perseus-1024x576.png
word_count: 5411
---

# Edwin Kelley on 50 Years of Dharma Practice

## Introduction

Edwin Kelley began practicing Buddhism in 1975 after attending a 10-day Vipassana retreat near Perth, Australia, following a serious motorcycle accident that had turned him toward questions of meaning, meditation, and spiritual practice.

In 1992, he travelled to Burma with his wife, Myoshin, for six months of intensive retreat under Chanmyay Sayadaw, where he ordained temporarily as a Theravada monk and immersed himself in Mahasi-style insight practice, Abhidhamma, and metta meditation.

He first encountered Vajrayana Buddhism in Dharamsala, India, in 1993, and became a student of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in 1998. Edwin later served as Executive Director of the Insight Meditation Society and helped establish the global Tergar Meditation Community in 2009, where he held roles including Executive Director, Co-Executive Director, and CFO.

Retired from administration since 2022, Edwin continues to teach and support students of Mingyur Rinpoche as a Tergar instructor. His teaching draws on more than 50 years of practice across Theravada, Vajrayana, and Western Dharma communities, with an emphasis on clarity, kindness, and recognizing one’s true nature.

Edwin Kelley can be found through [Tergar International](https://tergar.org/tergar-guides-instructors-and-facilitators), Tergar Australia, and his author profile at [Lion’s Roar](https://www.lionsroar.com/author/edwin-kelley/).

---

![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/V5A6508.webp)

## Training and Early Journey

**PAA: Your journey began with a meditation retreat in 1975 near Perth. What first drew you to that experience, and how did it shape your path in meditation and the Dharma?**

**Edwin Kelley:** Although I attended my first 10-day meditation retreat outside Perth in 1975, my journey really began about three years before that, when I had a very nasty motorcycle accident during the mid-year break of my first year at university.

I had gone back down to where I grew up in the Bega Valley for the break and had gotten a job milking cows on a local dairy farm. On the Saturday night, after finishing two weeks of milking, I was riding a motorcycle back to my friend’s place. Essentially, I ran out of road and left the road rather than hitting an oncoming motor vehicle. I was thrown through the air headfirst, hit an embankment, and was heavily concussed. I was unconscious for well over an hour, fractured my sixth thoracic vertebra, spent three weeks in hospital, and lost university time.

It was a major shock to my system. I lost my drive to study and to be somebody. The next year I dropped out of university and, with a friend, hitchhiked to Perth. During those next two or three years, I spent a lot of time looking for the meaning of life: reading Western and Eastern philosophy, meditation books, and the classic books circulating in the early 1970s — *Autobiography of a Yogi*, Ouspensky, Alan Watts, Hermann Hesse, Ram Dass, and many others.

I wound up in Perth in 1974 and was working two jobs because I was saving money to go to Europe. A woman I was working with at a restaurant in Perth was organizing a 10-day Vipassana retreat, and she talked me into signing up. I do not think I had any real idea what I was getting into, but it seemed like it might provide answers to what I was looking for.

The retreat was about 100 km outside Perth, in a rural facility, completely in silence, with a teacher named Robert Hover, an American who had been a student of U Ba Khin in Burma. It focused primarily on anapanasati and body scanning, similar to the method taught by Goenka, though subtly different.

That program irrevocably changed my life.

When I had the motorcycle accident, I had lost the memory of what had happened. I knew I was going to leave the road because a car was coming, but I did not know how I left the road or how I hit the embankment. I had been severely concussed for well over a week, perhaps ten days.

During that retreat, two or three years later, I had a dream in which I reclaimed the somatic experience of being thrown off the motorcycle and hitting the embankment. I woke up around four in the morning, bolted upright in bed, and thought, “Wow.” Then, sitting on the cushion over the next hour or two, I realized I had reclaimed the memories I had lost from the accident.

That demonstrated to me the power of the practice.

## Early Communities, Disillusionment, and Karma

**PAA: Looking back on your journey, is there a particular moment or insight that felt truly transformative for you? What was the context of that moment, and how did it change your outlook or practice?**

**Edwin Kelley:** There is a part of my life that I do not normally put in any public bio. After that retreat in Perth, I spent another couple of years traveling around Australia. I finally wound back up in Perth at the end of 1976.

Some of my friends from my earlier time there were getting into Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his teachings. I ended up going to a centre just outside Perth. The Rajneesh community had a very strong presence in Perth, but this was right at the beginning. There were hardly anybody involved, maybe half a dozen people.

I went to the facility they had in the outer suburbs of Perth, ended up taking sannyas, and stayed there for the next 18 months or so before going to Pune, India, at the end of 1978. I spent the next two or three years, off and on, in Pune, until Bhagwan moved to Oregon. I spent about ten weeks getting from Pune to Oregon in 1981 and was in Oregon very early in the commune. I was there pretty much from the beginning to the end. I left in November 1985, after everybody else had left.

This was a very formative part of my spiritual development.

The strongest thing I recall from that experience was the sense of community. I shared intimate daily relationships with hundreds of people, many of whom, nearly fifty years later, I am still close friends with. Although our spiritual journeys diverged, the friendships remained.

Why I got into the Rajneesh world is another story. How it fits into the whole Dharma or Buddhist experience is another story. But it was definitely a profound part of my early life and spiritual journey.

Things also went horribly wrong. At one point I was personally drugged and made incompetent because of certain actions I had taken. I did not work in the inner circle, but I worked in the support team for someone who was in the inner circle, in accounting. That is where I learned the fundamentals of my accounting skills, which served me well later.

In terms of my subsequent journey, it taught me what can go wrong. Although we can aim for ultimate reality, liberation, and freedom from suffering, if we do not attend to the details of the law of karma, things can go horribly wrong. We cannot use ultimate reality to circumvent the realities of relative reality.

There is no question that this was the biggest lesson I took from there.

It is also worth noting that this is where Myoshin and I met, in Oregon in 1983. Here we are more than forty years later. That has been a huge part of our lives together. So good came from my time there as well.

## Practice, Partnership, and the Return to Dharma

**PAA: In 2009 you and your wife Myoshin moved to help establish the global Tergar community. How has practicing and teaching alongside a lifelong partner influenced your perspective on the Dharma and on teaching?**

**Edwin Kelley:** After the Rajneesh community in Oregon fell apart in 1985, Myoshin and I spent about 12 months in the United States and Canada, got married, and moved to Australia at the end of 1986. We lived together in Sydney for a couple of years, then went up to Byron Bay. We were seven years together in Australia, except for about a year we spent in Burma and Asia, primarily in Burma.

After we moved up to Byron Bay in 1989, Myoshin did a weekend retreat with an American teacher named Alan Clements, who had been a student of Mahasi Sayadaw and had been a monk in Burma. It had a major impact on her.

In the meantime, I had gone back to university and enrolled in an accounting degree because that was the skill I had that could most easily support me. I thought that if I finished my degree, I would be more financially secure rather than just doing bookkeeping.

Myoshin went down the rabbit hole. She started practicing. She went and did a month with U Pandita in Bowral, NSW, and later went to IMS in Barre, Massachusetts, and did two months with U Pandita. I was left at home working for a public accounting firm and doing my studies.

It was a challenging time for me. Every now and again she would say, “Do you want to come and practice with me?” I was still quite reactive to anything spiritual, having gone through the disillusionment that occurred when the Rajneesh community collapsed. I did not want anything to do with it.

Finally, a year or so later, she convinced me to do a 10-day retreat, which was a struggle for me. Then, a year later, Chanmyay Sayadaw, another Burmese teacher who had also been a student of Mahasi Sayadaw, came to Australia. I did two weeks with him, and that was a major turning point.

I really got something from that retreat.

When I came home and went back into my accounting office, I saw all the piles of people’s shoeboxes full of accounting receipts and had this epiphany: “Oh my dear, this will never really be satisfying.”

Chanmyay Sayadaw had invited Myoshin and me to come to Burma. Within six months, we were both in Burma, where we spent six months, and I ordained as a monk.

## Burma, Ordination, and Theravada Practice

**PAA: In 1992 you spent six months on intensive retreat in Burma with master Chanmyay Sayadaw. Could you describe what that retreat was like and what insights or challenges emerged during that time?**

**Edwin Kelley:** We arrived in Burma in August 1992. Initially we went just for three months, but there was something incredibly enticing about the whole experience.

Chanmyay Sayadaw was offering temporary ordination to anybody who wanted to ordain. For me, it was a little like “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Maybe it was also a kind of value-added thing: if I were really going to immerse myself in these teachings, then I would ordain. So that is what I did.

It was difficult. The conditions in Burma were challenging: the monsoons, the bugs, and the very intense method of moment-to-moment concentration on psychophysical experience. I found my practice very difficult at times. I crashed and burned.

Chanmyay Sayadaw encouraged me to get back on the horse. He also strongly supported me in doing loving-kindness meditation — metta meditation — for myself and for all beings. I think that was the saving grace for me.

I did have remarkable meditative experiences. Sayadaw taught Abhidhamma every night, drip-feeding it to us as an approach to understanding psychophysical process. I had some remarkable experiences associated with the five aggregates, the Four Noble Truths, and the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. Seeing the way the mind creates reality was incredibly profound for me.

After three months, although we had only planned to stay for three months, I could not leave. I felt that if I went back to Australia, I would end up being a public accountant again. I needed to stay beyond the point where I would pick up the mantle of accountancy again. I did not want to go back and put on the accounting robes, so to speak.

So we stayed another three months in Burma, largely because I felt I needed to stay beyond the point of no return. I have no regrets about that.

Burma was definitely a major experience in my life.

> Ordained bhikkhus coming together, chanting the Pali, doing these rituals — there was something incredibly deep and meaningful about it. A sense of belonging, I suppose, as ancient as the teachings themselves, going back to the time of the Buddha.
>
> Edwin Kelley

**PAA: During that Burmese retreat you also ordained temporarily as a Theravada monk. What was meaningful about that monastic experience, and how did living as a monk influence your understanding of the Buddhist path?**

**Edwin Kelley:** One thing to add about my time in Burma — and this was equally true when I returned in 2004 and ordained again for six weeks — was the sense of being part of an ancient brotherhood, a lineage going all the way back to the Buddha.

The rituals we did as Sangha, reciting the Patimokkha, daily confessing our indiscretions, and then at the end of the rains retreat, the Kathina ceremony and the offering of robes to a monk — there was something about all of that which gave me a deep sense that this had been happening every year for over 2,500 years.

Ordained bhikkhus coming together, chanting the Pali, doing these rituals — there was something incredibly deep and meaningful about it. A sense of belonging, I suppose, as ancient as the teachings themselves, going back to the time of the Buddha.

That left a deep impression.

I have no idea how many lifetimes I may have spent as a monk, but I am sure it has been many, both in the Theravada tradition and in the Tibetan tradition. Fascinating.

## IMS and Dharma as Work

**PAA: After returning from Burma, you joined the Insight Meditation Society and eventually became its Executive Director. How did your time at IMS, a major Western meditation center, influence your own practice and your approach to teaching the Dharma?**

**Edwin Kelley:** After returning from Burma, although I had been studying for an accounting degree, I had only finished two-thirds of it. I still had a full year to complete.

I really did not want to go back to being a public accountant where I could only study part-time, so I enrolled full-time at university. For 12 months, I lived separately from Myoshin during the week and we would get together on weekends so I could devote myself to my studies.

I did really well. I enjoyed it. It was much easier to focus on academic work when I was not working.

At the same time, Myoshin and I helped form a local community that sponsored meditation teachers to come to the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales to teach retreats. We invited different teachers from the Insight Meditation Society, including Steven Armstrong, Steven Smith, and Michele McDonald-Smith.

At one of those retreats in March 1994, I learned that the position of Director of Operations at IMS was vacant. I still had a couple of months to finish my degree, so I wrote off and applied for the job. After some back and forth, I was hired. IMS sponsored me, I got my green card, and I came to IMS in July 1994.

I think I believed I would be able to do more practice. That was partly my motivation. But of course, if you have ever had a leading or executive role in any organization, even a Dharma organization, there is never a good time to take time off, go on vacation, or do retreat.

I had to devote myself to running the place. Within about 18 months, I became Executive Director. A few years later, I was able to sit for six weeks, half of the three-month retreat there. During that retreat, I made a vow to myself that I would not be Executive Director when I turned 50. I saved up money, opened a CD, called it the “Edwin Liberation Fund,” and put money aside so I could quit work and devote myself to practice.

One of the biggest lessons from running a major Dharma retreat center like IMS was that I got to know all the primary teachers in the Insight tradition in the United States and Europe personally, on a first-name basis. I helped organize their schedules and bring them to IMS to teach.

But the deeper lesson was to give myself over to the job from the perspective that this is the path.

After some time, I realized that although I was not spending time on the cushion every day, I was working with the paramis — the perfections of patience, generosity, loving-kindness, diligence, and so forth.

My understanding now is that if we make our life and work the path, if we make our spiritual practice one of kindness, generosity, and presence of mind in all our dealings — our personal interactions and our business dealings — that is as powerful as any time spent on the cushion. It can totally and absolutely transform our hearts and minds.

That was my major lesson from serving as Executive Director of IMS, and later from serving in executive roles with Tergar.

## Vajrayana, Mingyur Rinpoche, and Lineage

**PAA: You first encountered Vajrayana Buddhism in 1993 and became a student of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in 1998. What aspects of Mingyur Rinpoche’s teaching resonated with you, and how has his guidance influenced the direction of your practice?**

**Edwin Kelley:** After I quit as Executive Director of the Insight Meditation Society in 2003, I did a six-month retreat at the Forest Refuge. By this point, I had already met Mingyur Rinpoche.

My connection to Vajrayana Buddhism began in 1993, after we had been in Burma for six months. I went to India and spent a month in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama lives, at Tushita Meditation Centre. That was my first real exposure to Vajrayana Buddhism.

I was fascinated to see the similarities between the Theravada tradition and the Vajrayana tradition. Tushita was an FPMT centre, and there were a lot of similarities. It was also an absolute delight to get to see the Dalai Lama, shake his hand, and attend teachings.

In 1998, before I quit as Executive Director, I met Mingyur Rinpoche. After I quit, I traveled around America and did many retreats with him. During that time, I got to know him personally. I was invited to help care for him. I helped sort out his visa; we drove to Montreal and back, he did teachings there, and we got his visa sorted out. That meant we got to know each other personally, which was quite profound.

The first teachings I did with him in 1998 were when he was there with his brother. His brother gave Dzogchen pointing-out instructions and nature of mind teachings, while Mingyur Rinpoche taught from the Four Noble Truths and early Buddhism.

I was struck by the similarities between Mingyur Rinpoche and Chanmyay Sayadaw, my Burmese teacher. In many ways, Mingyur Rinpoche provided the perfect bridge. I did not see any separation, distinction, or conflict between Vajrayana and Theravada.

I felt that he tied a ribbon around all of my spiritual practice — the Rajneesh world, the Theravada world — and tied a big bow around it, as if to say: “Do not throw any of it away. It has all been in service of understanding your own heart and mind and eliminating confusion.”

That reflects in my teaching now. Unless somebody is engaged in a practice that I feel is actually harmful or unsuited to their personality, I am not a black-and-white person when it comes to practices, lineages, or teachings. Whatever works for you, whatever you want to explore — another lama, another tradition, another religion — you should do it.

It is your journey. It is your path. You need to discover what works for you. It is more about following your heart than deciding what is right and wrong in some rigid way.

## Theravada and Vajrayana: Relative and Ultimate Reality

**PAA: You trained intensively under Chanmyay Sayadaw in Burma and later under Mingyur Rinpoche. How do the methods and lineages of these very different teachers complement each other in your own approach to meditation?**

**Edwin Kelley:** Having said what I just said about the similarities between the Theravada and Vajrayana traditions, obviously there are also significant differences.

For me, and I came to understand this through discussions with Mingyur Rinpoche and teachings from him later, the Mahasi Burmese Abhidhamma approach really focuses on relative reality: the way our psychophysical process happens, how it works, and how the three characteristics — impermanence, not-self, and suffering — are intimately embedded in all psychophysical experience and phenomena.

When one practices in that way and goes deeply into awareness or mindfulness of that process, at some point wisdom arises and says: “Samsara sucks. I am out of here.”

In the *Visuddhimagga*, it says the mind seeks nibbana as an object. That is very much a Theravada way of looking at it. In my mind, it is the causal vehicle. It is relative reality. It is primarily working with that.

Vajrayana practice, particularly as it comes to us from Mahamudra and Dzogchen, is very much about ultimate reality: rigpa, the union of clarity and emptiness, the mind that is freed from clinging to anything.

It is like going from the infinitesimal to the macrocosm: resting the mind in spacious, open clarity, the union of clarity and emptiness, where anything and everything that does not inherently exist is known and liberated upon arising.

That is how I would characterize the two different styles.

I think both are equally important. There are a lot of people who come to Vajrayana Buddhism wanting to touch the sky — Dzogchen, rigpa, nature of mind — who would be well advised to go back and take a look at their psychophysical process and deal with some of their own suffering before they attempt to realize their true nature.

> All the drama, kilesas, challenges, stress, worry, and conflict come from clinging to a sense of self, identification with who we think we are, and the appropriation of our experience: “I am,” “this is mine.”
>
> Edwin Kelley

**PAA: You emphasized that Abhidharma knowledge can itself “mitigate confusion and delusion” by informing how we view our experience. How do you help students translate such theoretical understanding into real insight through meditation practice?**

**Edwin Kelley:** From my own practice standpoint, I should say a little more about the differences between the Theravada and Vajrayana approaches, and why I think both are incredibly valuable.

When one brings attention, mindfulness, and awareness to the minutiae of one’s psychophysical process, it is mind-boggling what one sees. It is really interesting to challenge the misperceptions we have about the single, solid, separate sense of self — a phrase I coined to capture what I perceive to be the way we cling, the Second Noble Truth, and how we create our suffering.

All the drama, kilesas, challenges, stress, worry, and conflict come from clinging to a sense of self, identification with who we think we are, and the appropriation of our experience: “I am,” “this is mine.”

There is something really valuable about the Theravada approach, and about the Abhidhamma approach, whether it is Vasubandhu, Buddhaghosa, or another system. Bearing witness to the process of mind-body experience is incredibly revealing. It compels one to understand the mechanism of the Second Noble Truth, and it compels one to seek the answer of the Third Noble Truth.

Of course, all of that is also there within Mahamudra: shamatha, the Four Immeasurables, vipashyana. It is all there. It comes at it from a different or slightly different perspective.

To be introduced to the nature of mind, to get a glimpse of ultimate reality, and to understand how to work with appearances from the perspective of the liberated mind is an incredibly valid tool.

The view contained within Vajrayana — and within Mahayana too — that we are all endowed with inherent good qualities, that we are perfect, whole, complete, and that nothing is missing, is supreme. This is our true nature. This is Buddha nature.

Of course, we do not believe it. We struggle to accept it. But the practice is to come to an acceptance and realization of that, to develop the capacity to understand it, take confidence in the recognition of it, pitch a tent there, take up shop, and live from that place of true nature.

That is remarkably profound and transcends all other practice.

## Personal Practice, Struggle, and Transformation

**PAA: You once mentioned it took about ten years after your initial instructions to gain “any reliable level of confidence” in your meditation practice. Can you reflect on what sustained you during those years and what milestones or insights helped build that confidence?**

**Edwin Kelley:** It has now been over 50 years since I did my first 10-day Vipassana retreat in Perth in 1975. As is apparent, I have tried many methods, done different practices, had different teachers, and had the great privilege of being part of three major spiritual communities: the Rajneesh community, the Insight Meditation community in North America, and now the Tergar community.

My practice has varied. I would not like to imply that it has all been a cakewalk.

I definitely struggled with challenges, particularly beginning when Myoshin began to do deep practice and I was left alone. That was a difficult time for me. Even up until I did the six-month retreat at IMS in 2003, I would say I struggled with being alone.

There was something incredibly rich and rewarding about life with a spiritual partner and all the intimacies that come from that. In Myoshin’s absence, I definitely felt challenged.

I consider myself a greed type, a desire type, and I have had a lot of compelling thoughts around sexual desire. Chanmyay Sayadaw helped me work with that in Burma. I have also talked to Mingyur Rinpoche about it. Once, when I asked him about it, he pointed his finger at me with the most intense look I had ever seen from him and said, very briefly, “That has kept you in samsara since beginningless time.”

That was a profound teaching in and of itself.

Slowly, slowly, and particularly through the nature of mind teachings, I began to understand. I do not know how many times I have had the great benefit of receiving pointing-out instructions from Mingyur Rinpoche and his brother — twenty or thirty times, perhaps. I could try to count them.

At some point, probably not until the late 2000s, around 2009 or early 2010, after having received pointing-out instructions many times, I began to really understand what it means to have Buddha nature, and what those qualities are: awareness, loving-kindness, compassion, and wisdom.

I also began to understand how the paramis are the path, and how developing the capacity to simply rest one’s mind as it is can be profoundly transformative.

That has now become my practice, pretty much exclusively.

**PAA: What does your current daily meditation practice look like, and how has it evolved from the early days of your practice?**

**Edwin Kelley:** My current daily practice is very simple.

When I wake up in the morning, I have a little ritual of chants that I do: taking refuge, bodhicitta, loving-kindness, compassion, the basis of the Four Immeasurables, and guru yoga.

Then I live my life.

I was given a beautiful, succinct poem by Mingyur Rinpoche as a practice, and that is my daily practice. It is really about just resting in the present moment.

Sometimes I will sit, but rarely do I do formal practice anymore. It is mostly trying, as often as possible, to remember to rest in recognition: short times, many times, anywhere, anytime.

Sometimes it comes naturally. Sometimes it persists for a few minutes or whatever. There are many places where I have learned to do it: sitting, resting in nature, driving the car. I love driving meditation.

I have coined the phrase for driving in traffic: when you stop at the traffic lights, when the car comes to rest, the mind comes to rest. Then remain there with the mind at rest until the lights change. I am convinced you would be the first person to know the lights have gone green.

That is pretty much my practice.

At night before I fall asleep, I dedicate the merit in whatever way. It is really that simple.

I will do retreat from time to time, and that is basically what I do on retreat as well. I no longer do much formal liturgical practice, sadhanas, Mahamudra liturgies, or that sort of thing as daily practice. Occasionally I will do chants in a group situation, but they are not part of my daily practice anymore.

Through Mingyur Rinpoche’s guidance, I have also practiced quite a bit with lucid dreaming, which is way too much fun to be called Dharma practice. I have enjoyed that thoroughly.

## Teaching and Dharma in the Modern World

**PAA: In our fast-paced, modern life full of distractions, what do you feel is the core message of the Dharma that Western practitioners most need to hear, and how do you convey that message in your teaching?**

**Edwin Kelley:** From the perspective of Dharma in modern society, I am not sure what to say.

As a teacher, the biggest privilege I have been given is to have a front-row seat to the transformation of the minds of others. That is really what is most important to me.

There is certainly a wealth of knowledge I have acquired from years of practice and study, and from time to time there are appropriate moments for me to share my understanding. It certainly informs my teaching. One of the things I hear most commonly from people is that I teach with clarity, or that I can articulate reality with significant clarity, which seems to be very helpful for people.

But when communicating one-on-one with somebody in the context of their practice, what is most significant to me is being able to see the ways in which that individual’s mind might cling, grasp, or fixate on a person, idea, or perception.

Invariably, that is what it comes down to: the Second Noble Truth, the cause of suffering. How do we as individuals misperceive reality? How do we, through perception, impute an understanding that is erroneous, false, or misleading?

To the extent that I can reveal that to somebody and give them a key to help them see how their own particular brand of misperception is perpetuating their suffering, that seems to me one of the most significant things.

There are many techniques out there. Unquestionably, this is a biased opinion, but I think Mingyur Rinpoche’s and Tergar’s approach — through awareness, Anytime Anywhere Meditation, Joy of Living, and Path of Liberation — is a complete path. For anybody who seriously wants to practice, there is no question that it is profound.

I do think there are some practices out there that are very tight. I would steer away from practices that are too tight. I do not think the modern mind needs more tightness. We already worry too much. We are too stressed out. We are too fixated on perfection, making ourselves better, and improving our situation.

I love Mingyur Rinpoche’s teaching: not meditating, but not distracted; not fabricating.

There you are complete. There you are whole. There you are a Buddha in your true nature. It is just covered by confusion, delusion, misperception, and erroneous belief.

We can work endlessly to purify those misperceptions, but the direct path is to understand how our true nature manifests here in this moment: the knowing, radiant quality of the mind; the open, loving, caring heart of kindness; and the capacity of the mind to see things truly as they are.

These are the qualities of our true nature. These are the qualities of our Buddha nature.

To live a life focused on recognizing how those qualities manifest in our own hearts and in the hearts and minds of others — that is the best practice, the best path, and the best commitment.

Of course, it comes packaged with refuge, bodhicitta, guru yoga, and dedication. But seeing our true nature and dispelling the doubt that we have Buddha nature — that is the path.

**PAA: What an inspiring interview. Thank you for sharing the journey, perhaps in the future we can revisit some subjects after your retreat.**

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