Transcript:
Denise Quinlan:
Grant, you are going to lead retreats at Wangapeka in 2026 with your first one coming up on the 17th of February. But your relationship with Wangapeka has a longer history. Tell us about that.
Grant Rix:
Most recently, I led a retreat at Wangapeka in 2016, but because of all the work with Pause Breathe Smile (Grant’s Mindfulness programme for schools), I haven’t been in a position until now to consider leading more retreats. But now there’s a bit more time and space to be able to do that again. Back in 2016 Tash (Grant’s partner) and I led co-led a weekend and then I stayed on for a week with a very small group, so it was able to be very personalized, lots of Q and A.
What I remembered most from the weekend and on that following week, was seeing the softening in people. You see it in retreat – you feel it in retreat yourself – you really see people change physically in front of your eyes. Their faces soften, their body softens. Conscious awareness is reaching into areas that have long been blocked or neglected. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. And that, I guess is something that keeps us going back. Those of us who really get into this practice, it keeps us going into retreat and ideally maintaining daily practice too, because it has the power to genuinely transform.
DQ
Your connections with the Wangapeka and its teachers goes back farther than that.
GR:
Prior to the School of Living Dharma which began in 2005, I’d done a three-month silent retreat at the Wangapeka in 2003. That was my first visit to Wangapeka, but I had met Tarchin Hearn almost three years earlier at Te Moata Retreat Centre in the Coromandel. A few weeks after that life-defining event I spent 10 days with him, Mary, and the Sangha from the Queenstown Dharma Centre on Rakiura (Stewart Island). I ended up living at the Queenstown Dharma Centre after that, when Jangchub Reid was the Resident Teacher there. At the end of that year (2001), Tash and I went travelling with Tarchin and Mary through Nepal, receiving empowerments, visiting sacred sights and meeting a number of great meditation masters. This journey culminated in a visit to Myanmar and the chance to meet the Sayadaw Utila Wanta – Namgyal Rinpoche’s first Buddhist teacher when he was ordained as a Bhikkhu in the Theravadin tradition. Similar to being in the presence of the great teachers in Nepal, I remember an incredible joy in the presence of the Sayadaw – the hallmark of a being who had dedicated his life to training the mind and understanding its nature and supporting others to do the same.
This was a fertile time in a young life new to Dharma. Shortly after Myanmar, we flew to London and during that time we attended two retreats (and received many empowerments) with Namgyal Rinpoche. The reverberations of those retreats continue today.
DQ:
In 2005 you were part of the School of Living Dharma at Wangapeka, organised and facilitated by Tarchin. Tell us about that.
GR (06:28):
What’s amazing is how long ago it was now! It happened in 2005, 2006, 2007 and was totally transformational. It was a very precious opportunity for those of us who participated and a huge undertaking by Tarchin and Mary and the Wangapeka community to support and facilitate it. Tarchin held the teaching programme together. There was a small core group of us, who participated in the whole programme and stayed at Wangapeka for six months of the year over three years, and there were plenty of others who came in and out. Tarchin led explorations and retreats, and a number of other teachers came in each year. Lama Mark Webber led 10-day retreats each year, as did the wonderful, late Sonia Moriceau with her beautiful injection of Zen and Leander Kane and her excellent liberation through the body work. Terry Hagen came through with Namgyal Rinpoche’s ashes and there was a big ceremony for that. I remember Keith Rowan facilitating a great weekend and the renowned Canadian watercolour artist Robert Sinclair, with his blend of painting mastery, Tai Chi, and Dharma making for a great week. “Could this be finished” was Robert’s enduring mantra throughout that week and is something I have asked myself regularly over the years, whether engaged in something creative like writing, leading a workshop or Dharma class, tree pruning… and parenting (actually, no I don’t ask that about parenting 😉)
The three years itself was framed around the themes of Body, Speech, and Mind, and spanned Satipatthana (foundations of mindfulness) studies, Ngondro and Yidam practices, psychotherapy, deep ecology and Mahamudra teachings. Between visiting teachers and retreat blocks, we’d have near daily classes with Tarchin and we weren’t always in the silence. It was sort of mindful living and studying together in community during those times. The programme each year would end with a six-week silent retreat to really deepen everything studied.
DQ:
What was the impact for you of those three years of retreat and dedicated practice ?
GR:
Dharma practice in essence, is more of an ‘undoing’ rather than a doing of something. It’s undoing all of those tendencies towards grasping and aversion and ignorance about reality, until we realise we’re already home where we are – not intellectually, but as an actual experience. While we learn an array of skilful methods to support this, we’re not discovering something that doesn’t currently exist. We’re rediscovering, or remembering, the mind’s nature. I think you go through something like that three-year programme and you feel like you’ve done something really significant, and then you discover that it’s the beginning of the undoing, and that it’s a lifetime of unfolding. You reached a place, and you thought that was the destination. But it’s just the new ground for the new beginning. I think the more mature a practitioner becomes, the more you see that it’s always this way, and slowly, slowly, the tendency to grasp after an imagined goal loosens into an increasingly easeful abiding and engaged responsiveness with whatever is occurring.
Tarchin’s approach, which I think is really important for Dharma practitioners in the West, is to come to this realisation that your real retreat is your life. It’s your living. It’s great to go on retreat and have these deepening periods. But if that’s all we do and then we let go of our practice in between times, then the value is really undermined. Whereas, if you can realise that actually, as Tarchin would drill into us, that your life is your path, then every time you’re deeply contacting the present moment and resting in your nature, that is going into retreat. We can take many retreats every day, and we should be doing that. I think that the three-year School of Living Dharma really helped me understand how to do that, and how to take this work on as a craft, a lifetime craft, that I’m working with, and doing my best to refine each day.
DQ: For people who are earlier in their journey, what would you recommend to help develop the craft or strengthen commitment to daily practice?
GR: Yes, it’s all good and well to say that we could be taking many mini retreats everyday, but you only really get that if you have some familiarity with the taste of non-conceptual awareness. To experience that, we need retreat centres like the Wangapeka. Don’t pass up the opportunity to go on retreat if it’s something you’ve been considering. Don’t miss it. Honestly – don’t rob yourself of the opportunity. Outside of retreat, establish a daily practice and find good mentors. People that have a recognised ability to teach and share and facilitate a good wholesome space in which you can ask questions and refine your understanding of practice. That’s really important.
People have different restrictions on their time, but we can always make time for what’s most important in our lives. When people say, “I’m too busy, I haven’t got time to practice”. That’s a mental habit. It’s symptomatic of a mind that needs calm and clarity, and that’s where daily practice helps. If you get a taste for something that actually supports you to be more loving and open, provides the skills to weather the highs and lows, to really understand your mind, something that helps with your relationships and actually helps you become more efficient in how you’re using your energy throughout your day, then you can get beyond that very human habit pattern of mistaking frenzy for efficiency.
That said, some people are busier than others of course. So it’s important to drop expectations around what ideal practice looks like. Some people can sit for an hour, no problem. They’ve got the time, they’ve had enough training, they’ve done enough, they can do that. Other people struggle to sit for 10 minutes. If that’s you, start with five minutes, just do that each day and then after a week or so, build up to 10 minutes, then 20 minutes and just establish something.
DQ:
I remember reading ‘Buddhism for Mothers’ and the author talked about how in her busiest times of motherhood, her meditation practice was mindful walking from the living room to the back of the house to the bucket of nappies.
Grant Rix:
Yeah, that’s right. That kind of domestic mindfulness is so important, especially for us in the West. Dharma is so new to the West – it’s natural that there’s a tendency to look to replicate models of Dharma practice from the East. Of course, we need to be informed and inspired by traditional forms of Dharma practice. We need to have the humility and openness to learning from the great traditions of Buddha Dharma. At the same time, we must be cognisant of our context: the different ways we’re living our lives, and the different societal structures. To take retreat as an example, people sometimes take a very intense approach to doing retreat. Under the right conditions that might be valuable, but if not managed well, it can sometimes lead people to feeling fatigued and burnt out because they’ve already been living very intense lives out there in the world.
Domestic mindfulness – or mindfulness in daily living – is important. If we go back to Tarchin’s view that ‘my life is my path’ then you can ask yourself, “what does my life look like? How can I bring the principles of mindfulness training and compassionate engagement into what I am already doing?” Rather than thinking that you need to be doing something totally different, identify the unwholesome things that you do and take steps to change those. Identify the wholesome that you are engaged with and remember them – can they be enhanced? Pause at the washing line to take a few breaths, notice your breathing while listening to the jug boiling. Feel your hands against the steering wheel and your body on the seat while stopped at a red light (don’t close your eyes and try to meditate though!). These are all examples of domestic mindfulness. And as I said earlier, establish a discipline of formal practice, even if it’s five minutes or 10 minutes of something like mindful breathing, it just really, really helps to establish a foundation and then carry it into daily activities.
DQ:
I recently heard you suggest a practice of mindfulness of the breath in the morning and compassion in the evening. Is that something you think is helpful for many people?
GR:
A helpful daily structure for calming and studying the mind could include some mindful breathing in the morning, having some sort of good intention for how we go through our day, and then reflecting in the evening and sending love and compassion to the beings we met and even our ‘former selves’ that were present throughout different periods of the day. The sort of wiser, more compassionate being in that reflective moment can send love and hold some space for that earlier you that did get caught in patterns of reactivity or whatever. And then over time, we retrain the brain, we retrain the heart, we retrain the whole system to rest in a space where ego is not the dominant player.
The Dharma is quite different to modern ideals of wellbeing, where “being your best self” seems to be the catch cry. I’m too lazy to be my best self, that sounds like endless hard work… I could go to all this effort to reach my best self, only to find it slips my grasp and now I need to buy a dedicated ice bath to reach the new, better best self. It’s endless because the self is a construct. That’s what the Dharma spotlights. When we see that clearly, it’s a relief. This isn’t about perfecting me; it’s about seeing clearly what is actually occurring moment by moment. This is to see and live in accord with the natural laws that are already governing our lives – everything’s impermanent, interdependent, always in flux – including our sense of self. When we stop clutching at that shifting fabric of experience, we notice the thread running through it all (ever-present, spacious, open, timeless awareness). Recognition starts to pull on that thread, and with dedicated practice the whole illusion of “me” starts to unravel as the sweaty self walks away (Yep, that’s a feeble Dharma Dad joke for all the 90’s kids out there! Go listen to Undone (The Sweater Song) by Weezer if you have no idea what I’m talking about!).
Something Tarchin said that has always stuck with me is, “the greatest realisation you can have on this path is the realisation you’re in it for life.” That hit deep for me, and I took it on board. It’s really like, ah, this is about slowing down, being present, trusting. We’ve got to come to a place in our practice where we trust what the Dharma teaches, that the awakened nature is already present and is awaiting our discovery. If we learn to trust in that, then those moments of being quiet, open, really patient in our practice, that’s where the gold is mined. What we’re looking for starts to reveal itself in those quiet moments. And that’s why you need that discipline of daily practice so that you’re giving yourself that opportunity by creating that space. Patience is like a fine wine. All of these qualities, patience, acceptance, compassion and so forth, all of them, they’re like fine wines, they mature with time.
DQ:
You’ve been teaching at Queenstown Dharma Centre, and you’re keen to share the experience of retreat at Wangapeka with people who’ve been attending teachings there. What do you hope people will get on retreat at Wangapeka?
GR:
Wangapeka is a special place to go on retreat. The land itself is stunning – the maunga and awa – and it’s been built by the community over so many decades – there’s ancestry there of dharma practitioners of 50 years now. I think it’s a national treasure and it’s blessed. The Sayadaw Utila Wunta came and oversaw the construction of the Peace pagoda there which contains relics of Sāriputta and Moggallāna – two of the Buddha’s chief disciples. It holds some of the ashes of Namgyal Rinpoche who led the first ever Buddhist retreat in New Zealand and instructed students to remain and build a retreat centre here. That’s Wangapeka. All these wonderful teachers that studied directly under him for so many years have held that space. It’s got the power of transmission there. There’s so much loving, wise energy being put into that place. It’s phenomenal.
I think that retreat is that moment where a lot of people who are just starting to practice, start to really get what is being pointed to. It takes practice to a whole new level. For a lot of people, it can really help with establishing more of a daily routine and discipline after the retreat.
DQ:
And that’s where community comes in again, isn’t it? If you are back out on your own, it’s harder to maintain practice.
GR:
Yes. I think this is where places like the Queenstown Dharma Centre is so valuable because it is a community Dharma centre – not a retreat centre or a monastery. It’s a place where people from all walks of life come once a week, maybe twice a week, and then they’re back into their daily lives. But you get a chance to hear about the teachings, to do some practice in community and then to move that into your life. I think it’s a really good model for the West. If every community had a Dharma community, that would be amazing. It has its limitations – your practice is very unlikely to go as deep as it can go on retreat. But together, what a beautiful combination, to have a place of community where you can go regularly and then to deepen into retreat to let it all integrate and reveal. That’s why I’m keen to see people come through to Wangapeka from the Queenstown Dharma Centre. You see the yearning and the eagerness to deepen practice. It’s like, all right, let’s go. Let’s drive north.
DQ:
What’s your advice to people considering their first retreat?
GR:
Come with no expectations – that’s the ideal way to go into retreat. It comes back to allowing yourself to be undone, allowing yourself to be rediscovered by your own nature rather than going in with goals of trying to achieve something – like a state of calm, or a state of clarity. I mean, it’s natural that people come in with that, but sometimes we can become too invested in those ideas and it actually blocks those qualities from developing. So come with no expectations, because what you’re looking for is already present. Allow yourself to be guided. Have curiosity of course, and don’t be afraid to question what’s being presented. That’s important too. But, in the end, take up the invitation to get out of your own way for a while – that’s what retreat offers.