Question & Answers #6-7 with Lama Christie McNally

For the first time, Lama Christie McNally has agreed to answer a few questions regarding her extraordinary life and her new book The Tibetan Book of Meditation. Each week we will be sharing her answers to some very direct questions.

6)    Isn’t meditation just about clearing your mind and watching your breath?

Clearing your mind and watching the breath is the first step you should take in any meditation.  This brings the mind out of its busy-world mentality, and into a calm, neutral state.  But just getting your mind calm is not the goal of meditation.  That is merely a platform, a jumping-off point.  The real goal of meditation is to transform your mind completely, which you cannot do simply by watching the breath.  You must teach your mind about the true nature of things, and you must teach your heart how to love.  And the Tibetans have very wonderful and specific meditations to help us reach both those goals.

7)    Tell us about your yoga practice: how does it relate to the practice of meditation?

I love yoga; at this point, I can’t imagine what life would be like without it.  We do yoga every single day, just after our meditation, for at least an hour and a half.  This can be quite a challenge while traveling, but you can see us pulling out our yoga mats in various airports all over the world.  I am getting used to the stares!

There is a practice of yoga in Tibet, and it is quite similar to that found in the Indian lineages.  In the Tibetan tradition, yoga asanas were regarded as extremely high secret practices, and were not given to a student until they had been studying for something like 15 years.  This is because, to the Tibetans, the asana practice is not simply a physical exercise, but a very deep method of affecting our inner body—the inner winds and channels.  And it is through these subtle inner winds that we can so deeply affect our mind.  For, where the winds go, so the thoughts follow, and vice versa.  So we say that yoga is the outer method of taming the mind, while meditation is the inner.  Both are necessary.  When you are doing your yoga practice right, it should be very much like a moving meditation, like a meditation dance, where you are deeply absorbed in your object of focus as you move through a flow of poses.

Question & Answers #3-5 with Lama Christie McNally

For the first time, Lama Christie McNally has agreed to answer a few questions regarding her extraordinary life and her new book The Tibetan Book of Meditation. Each week we will be sharing her answers to some very direct questions.

3)    How much of your life do you spend in meditation?

Starting from around 1996, I have pretty much meditated every single day for at least an hour a day.  This is not counting other meditative practices such as mantras or reciting ritual texts.   Then in 2000, I began my deep silent retreat of 3 years, 3 months, and 3 days.  After I emerged from there, I made a commitment to do two 2-month deep retreats per year, which I have done steadily for the past 6 years, in-between our strenuous teaching schedule.  And whenever I am not in deep retreat, still I try to get at least an hour of deep meditation per day.

Meditation is kind of like running in that way; you have to do it regularly, day by day, for it to have any kind of desired result.  And, you have to keep exercising your mind daily, in order to maintain the results you have reached.

4)    For you, what’s been the main benefit of meditation?

I became a person who can really help other people.

5)    What did you set out to accomplish with The Tibetan Book of Meditation?

I wanted to bring meditation to the girl I used to be, in college, the one who was searching so desperately for answers, for a path.  I am hoping that this book will find its way to all those out there who are still searching.

Questions & Answers #1-2 with Lama Christie McNally

For the first time, Lama Christie McNally has agreed to answer a few questions regarding her extraordinary life and her new book The Tibetan Book of Meditation. Each week we will be sharing her answers to some direct questions.

1) Buddhism (like every other religious or political institution) has been dominated by men. As a woman teaching, do you feel you are changing the face of Buddhism?

I have definitely changed things, although I really can’t take any credit for it. It was my Lama, Geshe Michael Roach, who had this vision, and he was expanding on the vision of his own root Lama, Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin.

Khen Rinpoche was the first Tibetan Lama ever who taught the monastic course to women. He was an extremely high Lama in Tibet, having been granted the very highest doctorate title of Hlarumpa Geshe. Shortly after receiving that great honor, Tibet was invaded, and he fled to India along with 100,000 other Tibetans. And just after he got there, the Dalai Lama sent him to America, to teach us crazy westerners. For someone who had come from an exclusively monastic culture, what he did next was truly revolutionary. Rinpoche had the foresight to realize that, if the teachings were to succeed in this country, they would have to be offered to men and women equally.

Geshe Michael, my own root Lama, was his closest student, so how surprising is it that he took this revolutionary idea and ran with it? After we completed the three-year retreat, he literally dragged me up on stages with him to teach. I was very hesitant at first, not fully understanding the importance of what he was trying to do. But strange things started to happen—women who didn’t feel comfortable talking to a man started coming up to me to ask for spiritual advice, and I realized I was serving people by being up there. And then, I started to notice the faces of all the people in the audience, especially the younger women, looking at me and thinking, “I could do that.” Just by being up there, I was empowering them, giving them a dream.

I do not wear red robes, and I am an ordinary-looking young woman from California, and yet I too have learned these things, and learned how to pass them on to others, in perfect keeping with the ancient lineage from Tibet. So yes, I have changed things, and am changing them, mainly by virtue of just trusting my Teacher’s vision of who I could be.

It is a beautiful thing to be able to help people in this way, in an ultimate way. I am so lucky. And I am so very happy that I am part of the process of bringing these holy teachings, these precious instructions for transforming people’s lives, into the west.

2) What can you tell us about your extensive training?

Hmmm…to answer your question briefly, I have been trained extensively in all the texts that the monks in the Tibetan monasteries spend twenty years mastering, in order to earn their much sought after Geshe degree; and I have gone on from there to immerse myself in the higher teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, what they call the secret teachings. All of this I have learned from sitting at the feet of my root Lama, day after day, absorbing the lineage, just as he once sat at the feet of his own root Lama.

I could tell you in detail about all the amazing and difficult texts on philosophy that I have studied, and it would impress some people. I could talk about how I learned the Tibetan language, and all the incredible texts I have translated, and that might impress them even more. But honestly, that was the easy part.

The hard part of the training is trying to embody the teachings in your own life, in your own mind. The hard part is the day after day struggle to perfect yourself, under the eagle eyes of your mind-reading Lama. I have sat for twelve years at the feet of my Lama, and struggled, and that is the extensive training I am most proud of.