When I first began my ngondro right before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic I was planning on finishing within three years. I had assumed I was dedicated and focused enough to manage to practice at least a couple hours a day and finish within that time frame. Within a couple months, however, my initial burst of motivation had burned out. I was only accumulating a decent number of any of the sections in sporadic bursts, and even when I did sit down to practice (or stood up in the case of prostrations) it was not always the case that I was focused, or that I really meant all of the words I was reciting in the liturgy. There was certainly a part of me that really did, and actually considered the Vajrayana path the most important part of my life, but at the same time my time and attention was caught up in a dozen other parts of my life.

Part of the issue was that my initial connection with the dharma was more on the intellectual and emotional side of things. I would spend time studying and carefully considering everything I was reading, but that activity was not necessarily closely integrated with how I would spend my time on a daily basis. That is not to say I would treat people poorly, behave in overtly self-destructive ways, or that whatever connection I felt with the Dharma was “just words”, but rather that most of my time was still spent on relatively pointless activities. It was easy to waste away endless hours on cheap entertainment and distractions, or even at work, but somehow it was much harder to sustain even a couple hours of focused Dharma practice each day.

In many ways it was a question of renunciation and refuge. If I felt lonely, dissatisfied, disoriented or confused, if things did not go the way I wanted them to or I was dealing with pain and exhaustion, how would I orient myself towards those difficulties? Where would I look to find some kind of relief? To what extent did I still think that pursuing wealth, entertainment, romance, or worldly success would bring lasting satisfaction to the restless desire and dissatisfaction that drove me on a daily basis? That is not to say that these things have absolutely no value or are strictly “bad”, but what portion of the desire and motivation I felt on a daily basis, and perhaps more importantly what portion of the time and effort I would expend on a daily basis, was directed towards worldly goals (both large and small) as opposed to the Dharma? And if I told myself that I had chosen to follow the Vajrayana path, and that all these things could be carried onto that path, to what extent was I actually doing that?

More often than not when I sat down to practice in the morning I was already anticipating everything else I wanted or needed to do during the rest of the day, or recalling the events of the previous day, and the session would become a tug-of-war between ngondro and whatever else was drawing my attention away. Even when I was more focused, it was still far too easy for something as profound as the recollection of the Four Thoughts at the beginning of a session to become merely another habit. Like entering into a room I had seen a thousand times before, I did not look very closely but instead simply skimmed across the surface of the meaning of the words.

As much as all of this may sound relatively self-critical, I really do not mean any of this in a harsh or self-deprecating way. Working my way through all of this, to whatever extent I have managed to begin that process, has been important and necessary. I was not born with my life and daily habits already structured in a way that was integrated with Dharma practice. I did not even grow up with a close connection with any Buddhists, nor did I really know (or seek out) any other Buddhists for the first five or so years after beginning to connect with the Dharma. I simply grew up around other members of my generation and developed my daily habits along the same lines as most everyone else in modern secular America. The inertia of all of those habits was not something that easily dissipated simply because I chose to begin practicing ngondro, and transforming those habits is something that takes time and effort.

Fortunately, even if there was something habitual and repetitive about the manner in which I engaged with ngondro most of the time, even just skimming across the surface of the meaning of each section each day would keep everything close to the surface of my mind. At times the significance of one or another of the sections of the ngondro would hit me in a much more meaningful way, but often that was not actually during sitting practice but rather while just driving to work or going about my daily activities. However, as time went on those moments became more and more frequent, and most importantly they began to become more integrated with my baseline state of mind and daily habits.

After a couple years of sporadic practice I reached the point where I had finally become relatively consistent in my practice, and beyond that I was becoming increasingly exhausted by the parts of my life that consumed my time but meant relatively little to me. I was not in a place in life where it would make sense to engage in a full-time retreat, but at the very least I could take finishing my ngondro seriously.

Around the same time Pema Osel Ling began to open up again after the first couple years of COVID restrictions, so I was able to go to the yearly ngondro retreat for the first time. That time I just stayed for the first weekend, but the year after that I stayed for the full retreat and really enjoyed my time there. In many ways the value of going to the retreat, at least for me, had more to do with beginning to form a connection with the community at Pema Osel Ling than clarifying the practice in a more technical sense. The Dudjom Ngondro Program has plenty of resources available to help make all of the details of the practice clear and easy to follow, there are many wonderful ngondro commentaries in publication at this point, and I had already been practicing for a couple years before I first went. However, in the Vajrayana so much depends upon human relationships, and there really isn’t a substitute for connecting with others in-person. Everyone there was extremely welcoming and helpful, and I really had the sense that it was a community that could support me not just for ngondro, but for however far along the Vajrayana path I was able to travel in this life.

During those last couple years I managed to push through and finally finish my ngondro. In the end one of the main benefits was simply learning how to carve out space in my life for practice, and cultivating the motivation that drove that process. On many levels I still feel like I am just beginning to work on all of the foundational aspects of the path laid out in the ngondro, on renunciation and refuge, on Bodhicitta and generosity, on maintaining stable mindfulness in practice and life, and all the rest. But in many ways these “basics” are both the foundation and the final aim in the Vajrayana, and everything I aimed to cultivate in the ngondro will remain a central focus of my practice and life going forwards.