Elizabeth on The Spark with Stephanie James
Stephanie James
Living From a Better Place
2020 was such a crazy year filled with so much chaos and uncertainty but there is a way to start 2021 off cultivating deeper happiness, calm, and resiliency in your life. Join me Stephanie James and author, presenter, and amazing soul Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel as we talk about the ways to navigate through the uncertainty and bring our deepest purpose together with action.
Sharon Salzberg and Elizabeth in 2019
For Episode 109 of the Metta Hour Podcast, Sharon and colleague Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel explore the topic of Faith. Elizabeth is a teacher and author, and has studied and practiced the Buddhadharma for 35 years under the guidance of her teacher and husband Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. She is the retreat master of Samten Ling in Crestone, Colorado and has spent over six years in retreat. She holds a degree in anthropology and an M.A. in Buddhist Studies and teaches worldwide. This episode was recorded live in the Spring of 2019 at New York Insight Meditation Center, where Sharon and Elizabeth bring their own unique perspective of faith from each of their respective Buddhist traditions. The episode closes with Elizabeth leading a seven-minute guided meditation.
Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel has studied and practiced the Buddhadharma for 35 years under the guidance of her teacher and husband Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. She is the retreat master of Samten Ling in Crestone, Colorado and teaches throughout the U.S., Australia, and Europe. Learn more about Elizabeth and her offerings at elizabethmattisnamgyel.com.
Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel joins Raghu Markus for a conversation around the roles that grace and faith play in our journey of awakening.
The Road to Becoming Nobody
Elizabeth reflects on the attachment to roles, identities, and patterns of thinking that become the source for a lot of suffering in our lives. She and Raghu talk about how service can offer liberation from our destructive narratives.
Cause and Effect (13:30)
Raghu and Elizabeth discuss the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination, exploring the central role that identity plays in the cause and effect nature of suffering.
“(Dependent origination) is essential to everything the Buddha taught. Basically what he is talking about is cause and effect. How we live our life effects how we see the results.” – Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel
The Hook and the Ring (27:00)
How does grace factor into the student/teacher relationship? Elizabeth looks at the way grace relates to faith and dependent origination. She shares what grace means to her and how she sees grace interconnect with faith and spiritual practice.
“They say the relationship of the teacher and student is like a hook on a ring. The student doesn’t create the ring, which I think is a sense of awe and humility – a longing to give up the causes and conditions for suffering. If the student is to develop that then the teacher can hook the ring. That is the kind of relationship they have, an inerdependant relationship, a very powerful agreement.” – Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel
The Logic of Faith (42:00)
What does faith mean to you? Raghu and Elizabeth talk about the importance of faith, even when we can’t all agree on what it looks like.
Elizabeth in conversation with Windhorse Community Services:
Finding the Right Relationship
In this follow-up to their previous conversation on “Taking Faith Apart”, Elizabeth is joined at Windhorse Community Services by Gretchen Kahre (Windhorse Senior Clinician, and Elizabeth’s fellow student and close friend), and Chuck Knapp (Windhorse Co-Director). The previous podcast on faith may be found here.
In this particular conversation, Elizabeth and Gretchen are primarily focusing on two principles that are foundational to the Windhorse Approach; that we are fundamentally sane, or to use Chogyam Trungpa’s term, basically good, and that we’re also completely interdependent with our environments. When we can connect with and cultivate environments that are compassionate and wholesome, or put another way, “sane,” we invite our intrinsic sanity to be ever more present. And in a striking counter-intuitive twist of conventional logic, Elizabeth also suggests that as we become more confident in our basic health, we may make a discovery about our confusion; that by comparison to the unconditional nature of our sanity, our confusion is actually quite fragile.