In the midst of this global pandemic of fear driven greed, hatred, delusion, I am reposting a slightly edited version of “Reflections and Prayers: Nurturing a Life of Natural Awakening”. Many of you are familiar with Daily Puja and use it as part of your ongoing practice. Parts of Reflections and Prayers could serve a similar purpose.

Here is the Preface and Contents page to whet your appetite.

Preface

Friends on the path, ‘yogis of the natural world’, lovers of life in all it’s abundance; as I write this preface, news media is filled with depressing images and reports of violent death, genocide, and the dis-integration of many of the social and ecological values and structures that we humans have come to rely on. In the face of all this suffering, I felt the need to re-post these reminders of love and clear seeing.

Throughout history inspirational poetry has been treasured by those who try to live a life of authentic spiritual practice. Traditions of deepening wisdom and compassion, great and small, are often distinguished by the metaphors and poetic allusions they use. This can inspire way of living that is both wondrous and ineffable: a blossoming of love and clear seeing and an expanding capacity for radical inclusivity in the midst of whatever situation or circumstance is arising. Such a participatory wholeness can leave us tongue tied and mute in a wordless state of reverential awe and wonderment.

The collection of poems and encouragements contained in these pages breathes with the spirit of all that I have tried to teach over the last 50 years. Contemplating these themes, thinking about them, reflecting on them, and then experimenting with ways of creatively putting them into practice in the course of your daily living, will surely help nurture wisdom and compassion both in yourself and in those you meet.


In the hermitage of life-unfolding, 

these words blossomed in my mind.

Though still a work-in-process, 

may they benefit many beings.
Tarchin (revised and refined, 2026)

Contents

A Circle of Blessing . . . . . – 4
The Heart of Practice . . . . . – 6
Silent Prayer . . . . . – 7
Refuge, Life Roots and Profound Sense of Belonging . . . . . – 8
Bodhisattva Vow . . . . . – 11
Five Wholesome Life Trainings . . . . . – 12
The Wisdom of Embodiment . . . . . – 13
Impermanence . . . . . – 14
The Four Immeasurables . . . . . – 16
Prayers for Eating . . . . . – 17
Essential Practices of Awakening . . . . . – 17
Dedicating to All Beings . . . . . – 19
Supplementary Contemplations . . . . . – 20
Hints from the Heart . . . . . – 21
The Heart Breath of Timeless Living . . . . . – 22
We Are In this Together . . . . . – 27
Concluding Reflection . . . . . – 32
Endnotes . . . . . – 34

Click here to download the full PDF

To further support the monthly teachings which will be available for viewing on the GDT Youtube channel, a five page PDF supporting the first class has now been posted and is available by clicking here.

Future PDFs will be added after each class and will be listed in “Resources/2026 Amitabha Retreat”

May all beings, everywhere,
be graced with the knowing of loving presence.
Soldiers and weapons makers and politicians and financiers and corporate executives, scientists and artists, healers of myriad modalities, farmers and factory workers, employed and unemployed, obscenely rich and desperately poor, homed and homeless, infants and aged, religious and agnostic, greedy and generous, healthy and ill, able and disabled, emotionally balanced and mentally disturbed, physically incarcerated and nominally freed;
May all of us be strengthened with deeply felt kindness.
May we know the blessing of living lightly on the earth.
May we use our current circumstances, however they may be,
to share beauty with those around us.
May we never close our eyes to suffering and, in the face of whatever we do,
remember our kinship with this planet wide sangha of life and living.

In the immeasurable expanse of nature-in-process,
In faith and trust and wonderment,
We give ourselves to this suchness,
This seamless mystery of birthing/dying.

Spacious, loving,
With feet solid in the earth,
We nurture the hints at blessedness,
The myriad faces and masks of luminous knowing.

Moving as this flow of compassion and deepening enquiry,
We engage with all beings, in ways that support
The integrity, the stability and the beauty,
Of the entire field of life and living.

with season’s greetings and warm good wishes to all of you
Tarchin and Mary

(Here are few photos of Orgyen taken yesterday.)

What We Love

There is a fragility about life.
My left eye is failing.
My biorhythms seem increasingly out of sync.
Cancer whispers within me.
Meningiomas push on my spinal nerves.
Hatred and fear eat up my communal soul.

And the temperature rises.
Seas become hot and acid.
Birds cry out and polar bears emaciate
as icecaps melt
and oceans swell,
and humans plan holidays,
paid for with money earned through making bombs.

And we argue and debate and fervently discuss,
rights, and injustice, and anti-semitism, and genocide, and ecocide;
while despair and sadness and ferocious resistance
and determination to live otherwise burns within.

“Why is this happening to you?” she asks.

I pause,
remembering Vimalakirti.
The ancients knew it well.
We are in this together,
and together
we seem to have lost our bearings;
lost touch with the mysterious awakening heart-of-togetherness.

I sit in the pre-dawn stillness,
horizon streaked with golden red,
spreading into the fullness of a living world,
while quietly wrestling with grief.

All tathagatas,
wherever you appear
in the immeasurable expanse of spacing and timing
I am listening.
All of me/you/us/them,
softening  . . .
listening.

Symphonies of sentience
singings of stars,
and oceans and forests and
moving mountains and flowing waters,
stirrings of something almost remembered,
an expanse of worshipful reverence
– ineffable presence –.

Devastated in beingness,
listening.

A world~cosmos,
increasingly buried in soundbites and screen grabs.
Billions of years of creative endeavour flowering as this!
And still . . .
this opening,
in humble wonderment,
softening in a blessing
of luminous love.

We will only work to save what we love.

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/5/16/mohsen_mahdawi_columbia_university

with love and good wishes
Tarchin

Age and health; these days, my cells, and organs and muscles and bones are in a process of reorganisation. Faculties such as balance, sight and memory, once familiar and taken for granted, are increasingly fluid and unpredictable revealing our collaborative world-ing in new and wondrous ways. I feel kinship with Vimalakirti as the various sufferings of the world, or should we say the ‘growth spurts’ of the biosphere, reverberate in the workings of my body. I sense a symmetry in this. As an infant, my world was one of constant transformation and my life work was one of learning and relearning my body and it’s capacities in a living planetary process that seemed to be unimaginably vast and powerful. After puberty, things unwittingly settled into an assumed relatively stable continuum and, confident in our understanding of inter-beingness, we set about making a better world. Today, a new puberty and infancy is upon me and the rate of change is again accelerating. To survive, I need to continuously pay attention, learning this body, – this trikaya – again and again and yet again. The process seems endless; who I am now and what I’m capable of doing, and so, breath by breath we let go into something fundamental.

I am animate.
I am an animal.
I am born from life and living,
And so, dear friend, are you.
Everything we experience reverberates with these truths.

These days my geographic horizon has shrunk to a garden hermitage in the Bay of Plenty. The macadamia nuts are fattening. Ripe plums are dropping. Much of the vegetable garden is resting after a spring and early summer of bountiful growth. A thin trickle of people come to visit and enjoy some respite – a pause to remember – to refresh connection with this ever evolving, living mystery of birthing/dying that we are. All this, while internet messaging of calculated callusness, violence and neglect – these age old sagas of us and them-ism in myriad shapes and forms – remind us of suffering throughout the world.

I’m finding much of the news today whether political, social, or ecological, to be increasingly grim and disheartening. Granted, a certain amount of news can be enlivening – it can wake us up and realign and strengthen positive direction. But too much news of mindless exploitation, of rampant hatred, bigotry and madness beyond anything we could even dare to imagine is toxic to our bodies and our minds and ultimately to the world. With this come veils of blind forgetfulness, wilful ignorance, and stultifying finger pointing. Back in 1995, I birthed a poem that seems just as pertinent today as it did then.

My finger is pointing and my mouth is saying “ethics”
My finger is pointing , “Look at him and look at her.”
My finger is pointing and my mind feels very righteous.
My finger is pointing over here and over there.

My finger is pointing but it seems to be quite maddened,
It runs around in circles in a tanglement of parts.
My finger is pointing, it fascinates to watch it
My finger is pointing and it’s pointing to my heart.

My heart it seems is aching, it wants so much to care
Replaced by pointy finger, that scratches here and there.
It’s time to take that finger, and join it to a hand
To reach out with some goodness and help where helping can.
It’s time to see that ethics is not the finger part.
Its time to see that ethics rises only from the heart.

Given such a situation, which anyone reading this post will surely know and and to some degree painfully experience, I offer a potential antidote in the form of a bouquet of beautiful ‘mind’ flowers. Each blossom is very different, yet each of them can help us to remember our essential nature – our humanity, our capacity for forgiveness and love, for reverence and sublime gratitude.

Blossom #1
“Beethoven’s Ninth: Symphony for the World”
Liberation through music, the language that links all of us. This is a Youtube documentary that will surely pluck some deep strings and remind you of something truly precious. It can be found at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il4N9v92T50>

Blossoms #2 and #3
We have recently added a new section to GDT called Sangha Sharings which can be found under ‘Resources’. Over the years, a growing number of people who have studied with me, are broadening their dharma explorations through actively sharing their skills and understanding with beings that comprise their local communities. In “Sangha Sharings” you will find writings of some of those people.

Blossom #2
Stillness, the Contemplative and Creativity
an essay by Bill Genat
With the humbleness of a serious practitioner and the clarity of an experienced university researcher, Bill reminds us of the heart of contemplative living. This essay is bound to be appreciated, both by thoughtful beings who are just beginning to explore meditation, and by more experienced people who are refining the craft of teaching contemplative arts to others.

Bill is a semi-retired professor in the field of Aboriginal public health. He lives with his partner Kathryn Shain near Melbourne, Australia.
Click here for Bill’s essay.

Blossom #3
Reflections on Aging, Words, and What is Meaningful
written by David French
Many of us are getting to the stage in life where memories are slipping and faculties are unpredictably failing. In the light of this, how does a dharma practitioner proceed? David, who is 84 years of age, crafted these reflections at the retirement community to which he recently moved in Vermont, after a long life of aspiring to help others, including working for the U.N. and other aid organizations in Africa and Asia.
Click here for David’s writing.

Blossom #4
A Seminar with Humberto Maturana
Through his writings, Chilean biologist, Humberto Maturana, has been a major source of inspiration throughout my many years of integrating Buddhist contemplative practice and ecological science. For me, he exemplifies the very heart of contemplative science as a path of natural awakening that emerges from the living process that we are. For those of you who delight in studying dharma through the language and metaphor of science, I have uploaded these eight classes on the Green Dharma Treasury Youtube site.
Click here for the full playlist.

This seminar was originally recorded on video tape and is not up to Youtube HD standards of today. However if you persevere through the occasional poor patches you will be rewarded with a master class in clear thinking about life and living and how we can make sense of the world particularly from an evolutionary perspective. Themes touched on include, the nature of scientific enquiry, autopoiesis, structural determinism, emotioning, languaging, the roll of culture, and the centrality of love in the process of evolution and particularly in the emergence of a fully functional loving human being.

For a more extensive study of his work, I recommend the following books:
The Tree of Knowledge (co-written with Francesco Varela)
The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love (co-written with Verden Zoller)
Autopoiesis and Cognition
From Being to Doing (a conversation between Maturana and Bernhard Poerksen)

Blossom #5
Luminous Presence: A Path of Bare Bones Awakening
This last blossom is an invitation for you to join us in a 16 day residential retreat at the Wangapeka Study and Retreat Centre from March 28 to April 13, 2025.
Click here for more information about the retreat and how to enrol.

There are no tricks, no shortcuts, 
no quick paths for realising a life of awakening. In some blessed way, we 
 gather all the resources of our life; 
 gradually learning the art of mingling interest and need, 
intellectual inquiry and feeling intuition, 
while all the time perfuming everything that we do with curiosity and wonderment – a life koan.
 Resting thus, the subtle teaching of mind practice is being learned. Releasing, arms open wide, heart warm, mind clear, the ordinary – as blessing – and we learn to live in the world we find, and come to do this well, with courage and luminous presence. Feeding the hungry, comforting the distressed, encouraging delicate shoots of goodness wherever and however we find them. May all beings be graced with opportunities for learning these sacred arts of wonderment and love.

For all of us, it’s been a rich exploration of communal creativity-in-action, a distillation of many conversations, three days of filming, gigabytes of data, artistic editors, composers, technicians; all of us contributing the best we could offer, trusting the others to work with sensitivity and integrity to produce a 17 minute film which is bigger than any of the individuals involved. Isn’t this how life works!

Click here to download the entire text in PDF A5 colour format.

If you wish to print the text in black and white, click here.

It’s Christmas day in NZ. A gentle rain is thwap, thwap, thwapping on the palm leaves and a vast chorus of birdsong is celebrating the moment. Wherever you are and however you find yourselves, Mary and I send warmest good wishes along with a few links and announcements.

“Ten Love Letters to The Earth” This is a beautiful meditation composed by Thich Hhat Hanh who has been a central inspiration and teacher for me. You can either read the essay or you will also see the option of listening to it being read by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. My thanks to Emergence Magazine for posting this. Click here

On a much more somber note, yet equally inspiring in different ways, here is a link to a talk given by an extraordinary medical bodhisattva who has recently been working in Gaza. It’s called Wounds of War: The Gaza Experience Through the eyes of Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta. My thanks go to Kelvin Falconner for pointing this out for me. Click here

Closer to home I have uploaded the latest version of “Gifts of Wonderment” Section 1. The text has been further edited and refined, especially in the last two chapters. Some people have kindly enquired as to how section 2 is coming. I’m pleased to say that although the process is slow, it is happening and we might have it ready for posting in the coming year.

Green Dharma Treasury Youtube channel continues to have classes added. There is also a collection of audio and video teachings available from the treasury itself under Audio/Video.

Here at Orgyen, May and I are both well. Miraculously, on the cancer front, I seem to be in remission. We now have two self-contained retreat facilities, Kowhai Cabin and Forest Hut. As our travel days seem to be drawing to an end, we invite people who would like retreat with us to come and enjoy the beauty here at our little hermitage. If you’d like more information on this, contact Mary

We take refuge in love and clear seeing
We live courageously in this world of birthing/dying
Our hearts embrace all companions on this path of lucidity and freedom

I am crafting this post this with a heavy heart. Around me the sun is shining, birds are singing, the gardens are beautiful with life unfolding and at the same time, on the other side of the world, unimaginable suffering is being brought upon millions in a tornado of insanity that is degrading our moral foundations and normalising the outrageous, the appalling and the inhumane. I invite you to watch the following interview and allow yourself to feel. https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story/2023/11/30/why-have-so-many-palestinian-children-been-killed-by-israel

As I and so many others have said again and again, “we are in this together”. The living world is an evolving web of communal responsiveness. All creatures along with all their environments are profoundly inter-dependent. The actions that we do, contribute directly and indirectly to the lives of everyone and so shape the future world. This inter-becoming comes with a challenging implication. It means that no individual person or creature can be in complete control of their life. Our very existence depends on others. We rely on situations and activities; on movements of creatures; and on cultures and ecosystems, beyond our control. I suspect that an unconscious recognition of this fragile and vulnerable nature of life contributes to states of fear, anxiety, hunger, desire, anger, aggression, depression, confusion, and even deep withdrawal. The same reality however, can nourish increased empathy, compassion and aspiration to support beauty and wellbeing throughout the world.

I watch the news, and fear for the too many people who actively or tacitly kill and maim and dehumanise others. I tremble for the people and corporations who make money from inventing and supplying tools, weapons and systems of coercion. Settler colonial mentality has become commonplace. It can apply to all humans wherever they see the earth as being merely a place to live, the biosphere as a larder and material storehouse to plunder, and other humans as either useful or threatening objects in one’s personal living space. Given various nation state’s support for Israel’s slaughter and persecution of so many Palestinians through supplying weapons and discouraging all forms of critical analysis of this tragic situation, it seems we are rushing towards a living hell. Through loosing touch with empathy and caring, through supporting situations in which we are increasingly consumed by concern for our individual and clannish well being, we are destroying the basis of life that sustains us. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

I wish I could tell you how to ‘fix’ this. But the idea of fixing things is perhaps still a vestige of colonial enterprise and human hubris. What we can do is to open our hearts to the non-negotiable interbeingness of everything and then to encourage the skills we need for living with uncertainty, ambiguity and collaborative action.

The Sanskrit word sila can be translated as ‘wholesome relating’. Sila points to an ambiance of serenity and open heartedness that blossoms with truly ethical behaviour. Is your tax money supporting weapons of destruction? Does it support institutions and tools of coercion? Does your consumption enhance the world or degrade it? Are we actively remembering to support and appreciate the lives of all living beings? Are we intentionally cultivating a heart/mind of spontaneous generosity? Are we using our senses and sensitivity to explore dharma and to come to know the world more profoundly and more compassionately? Are we refining our abilities to listen deeply and to speak truthfully? Are we learning to nurture each other in ways that support awakening? These questions deserve to be contemplated again and again and again.

It is true that we are inter-dependent phenomena but no-one can force us to hate, and no one can make us love. Namgyal Rinpoche said on a number of occasions that, “the practice of dharma is not a hobby”. A life of dharma demands courageous choice and sometimes even a patient doggedness. Only then will we see a such a life as a blessed treasure.

Over the last weeks, these contemplations and wrestings with conscience have been with me continuously. Wherever you are dear friends, I invite you to join me in this. Deepen your investigations, risk finding tears and wobbly stomach and the challenging vista of not-knowing. Utilise the various supports and contemplative techniques you have discovered in the course of your living, to deepen in wisdom and compassion and to share the radiance of this wherever and whenever you are able.

May wisdom and compassion,
the very heart and substance of being,
blossom continuously
for the sake of everything and everyone.

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