The ngondro is a noisy practice – so many words, so many repetitions. I wake up in the middle of the night with Vajrasattva still rattling around my head like wooden wheels on a stony road. In Long Quiet Highway, Natalie Goldberg tells this story:
Just recently I had this experience: I had planned for six months to go this December to India and as my brain made a budget and travel plans I noticed my body was moving toward being at Taos Pueblo for Christmas Eve, I even heard myself say to a friend in California, “Yes, I’ll be here over the New Year,” as though a part of my life moved in its own dream. I did consciously, finally, drop the idea of going to India in an instant one afternoon as I put a bag of groceries in the back seat of my car. Suddenly, it seemed obvious. I wasn’t going. Nothing in me wanted to go this December except my head.
My head, too, is often going to India, while all the rest is staying in Taos Pueblo. The songline that I’m really dreaming is half submerged and mysterious. What I’m saying is not what I’m actually doing, and I’ve learnt that what I’m doing is a more reliable guide than my loquacity. While I complain about the ngondro, while I tell myself that I long to excede to the gravitational pull of moving practices, I’m still doing the ngondro. And my head can't work out whether this is one great loop of a pointless diversion, whether it’s another way in which, for all sorts of reasons, I can’t quite give myself permission to just move; or whether the ngondro is really something I need to complete in order to deliver myself totally into my body moving. But I am doing the ngondro, and even if it goes against all sense and prior experience, I trust this underlying process of emergence.
