Lady Niguma 30-Hour Immersion: What to Expect

Interested in diving deeper into your spiritual practice? Want to know what the chakras are really about according to Sanskrit scholars? We sat down with Rachel Webb, executive director at Three Jewels and lead practitioner of the Lady Niguma module, to find out what you can expect from this 30-hour training. This 30-hour immersion begins on April 16th and you can register here.

What can people expect from this 30-hour Immersion?
The training is over the course of three weekends starting April 16th. It includes nine practice sessions and six 2.5-hour lectures. Friday evenings are guided asana, pranayama, meditation and chanting. Saturday and Sundays are guided practices plus two-and-a-half hours of philosophy, like Lady Niguma's history, lineage and the stories about her including who she was, how she taught and the ways she lived. Students are going to experience the entire practice, I'm going to guide them through it. And then I'm going to contextualize the practice, like what is yoga, why yoga, who is Lady Niguma? What's her history, what's her context, what's her style of yoga, what does it mean to work with the chakras, mapping the subtle body, in-depth of the mantras, examining the elements, etc. 

We're also gonna go through the Sanskrit and the Tibetan for these anatomical reference points and how they relate to states of mind. So it includes the inner and outer methods of yoga. Inner methods are your state of mind, what you're meditating on. It's basically having compassion and wisdom in your mind. Outer method is the physical stuff. If the practitioners body is related to their mind. If our body is fucked up because we're suffering all the time, you put compassion and wisdom in your mind. And at the same time, move that energy, comb that energy out using the physical practices like pranayama.

Who is Lady Niguma and why is she important?
She just has an amazing story. First of all, we don't have many women as reference points in this lineage. She's the partner of a very famous yogi named Naropa. She is so cool because she basically learned these practices in secret because of her partnership with him. He was this famous monk and doing all these studies and she kind of just lived near the monastery and he would teach her these things and she would teach them to townspeople who were ready and interested to practice in that way. This was about a 1000 years ago in India. 

Her name itself implies emptiness, which is the highest view in this system. So 'nir' means 'beyond' and 'guna' means 'concept.' It's like beyond category, beyond concept. So even her name, Niguma or Nirguna, she was known as the woman of emptiness.

We do have a rich yogic lineage, but in Buddhism, yoga is considered to be a secret teaching. Yoga as people are practicing it now is a very slight echo of an extremely deep, extremely profound and very secret body of teachings called Tantras, which you have to qualify to receive. Traditionally, you would go to a monastery and then you would study for two decades and then you would have to pass your exams and be in the top two percent of your class in order to receive a download on the tantras. You don't get accepted into tantric teachings just by being a monk. You need to have an extremely high degree of compassion and extreme insight and wisdom into the path in order to receive those teachings. It's not exclusive in the sense that you have to be deserving, but it's just like I'm not going to go study rocket science if I don't know the first thing about engineering. So that's the history of yoga in Buddhism. There's other types of yoga and many many other practices that are called yoga. In our lineage, there's one style of yoga which is publically taught, which is Niguma's yoga. The rest exists but you have to mature to a certain state spiritually in order to receive those teachings. The cool thing about Niguma is that we can teach it publically. We've gotten permission from the lineage holders to teach this publicly even though technically it is a Tantric teaching. 

The other reason why I'm teaching it is because it had results for me. It affected me emotionally, it helped me balance out my emotions. I was dealing with a lot of anger and a lot of fear and sadness around that time and it did something different to my mind to do those practices. And then I just got really excited because the reason I got into Buddhism in the first place is because I was a yogi. I had been practicing for years before I realized there was a way to take it as a spiritual path. That's when I found Three Jewels and this amazing philosophy. And then I found out that this philosophy also had yoga in it, so I was like ‘woah, this is where both of my worlds are meeting.’

Why is lineage important?
A lineage means somethings alive, that it works. It's like the difference between buying a laptop at the Apple store vs buying a computer at a thrift store and plugging it in and hoping it works. Maybe it works, but it might be broken and you don't know who you bought it from or who was using it last and why they gave it away. With a lineage that's alive because the person who's teaching it has had the benefit and that's why they're passing it on. Right now the way the world is working is that you get a buffet of all these random practices that exist and you get them completely out of context of the entire rest of the practices that support that practice. The path to enlightenment isn't just tonglen meditation or shamatha meditation. That is just one tiny piece of the puzzle that includes all these other things. Like you want to know the school of thought that it came from. You want to be able to connect with teachers who know more than you or have gotten further down the path who can say ‘hey, there's a turn over here.’ When you study in a lineage where you don't really know where it's coming from or you just picked up a book somewhere, it's a lot more difficult to figure out how to get the goal of the practices.

Three Jewels has a lineage that really does trace back to the Buddha. That's what functions. It depends why people want something. If I just want to go buy dumplings somewhere, I don't really care where the chef learned to make dumplings as long as they taste okay. But if I'm talking about my own personal enlightenment and how to destroy my mental afflictions, I really do want to know who's giving me this practice, who's passing this on and do I trust them? You can't download everything in three weekends, but it is a way for someone to get a taste of something, that if they wanted to, could become a lifelong practice.

What is the point of studying these things?
This goes back to the teachings on inner and outer methods toward enlightenment. So whenever anyone engages in these types of practices like yoga, meditation, spiritual study- the goal is to be happy. So when we say enlightenment, what we mean is a happiness that doesn't end. That's what everyone wants. That's at the core of going to any sort of wellness class or training. That's what people are looking for. The answer in this lineage, the Gelugpa lineage. You can do your inner methods like practicing meditation and loving people and contemplating the highest views of emptiness. And you can do the physical practices, like moving your body around to shift the energy which will help you get to love and wisdom. We know that the body and mind have a relationship, so why is it that we're just using our mind to get happy? Meditation will do something, but if you want it to happen faster, add the physical practices. Take care of your body, too. Move your energy by moving your body. It's just more effective. Not all yoga classes are designed by a yogi who's had direct realizations into how their subtle body works and understanding how to move their subtle body in a way that brings happiness about. 

Who else teaches these things?
It's mostly within our greater sangha. Three Jewels is affiliated with a nonprofit that literally goes around the world and finds and translates yogic texts for the first time. So we're inheriting and practicing texts that are being translated and then interpreted by master practitioners who understand how to work with those texts based on their experience. I'm not sure what other lineages teach openly or privately because so many of these deeper teachings are secret. 

What else should people know?
One of the biggest realizations I had in conjunction with this practice is with the chakras. I was told they are these energy centers in the body that are either too open or too closed. Then I met this practice and realized that the chakras are what actually kill you. So the fact that the energy is restricted in a way that creates that flower pattern, like the reason why they take that shape is because of the presence of ignorance in your body. It blocks off and constricts the energy from going to the place where it wants to go, which will actually bring you to the highest realizations. So when it comes to chakras, it's not about ‘I'm more of a heart chakra person and the color is green,’ it's more like 'no, you have to destroy the chakras." The reason why you die, the reason why you age, why you get angry, why you get sick is because of the chakras. The way you start to untie them is through your spiritual journey.

People don't really talk about it in terms of subtle body and how we want to loosen the chakras so energy can flow into your central channel, which is what's really going to help you and the most people. That was a big aha moment for me. I was going around thinking something like 'oh i need to close my throat chakra it's too open,' but really you want to remove all of the chakras. You want to break free from or dissolve the left and right side channels, which create the chakras, into the central channel and that's how you get what you want. Many of those interpretations of the chakras do not come from Sanskrit scholars who are interpreting texts, which is again why lineage is so important. If you have someone who understands the context of a teaching and the way the words would have been used in 1000 AD, then you have someone who can teach you.