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Guru Viking Podcast

Ep264: Vajrayana & Performance Art - Naljorma Tsül'dzin

In this episode, filmed on location in Boudhanath, Kathmandu, I am joined by Naljorma Tsül'dzin, an internationally acclaimed performance artist and ordained apprentice in the Aro gTer sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

Tsül'dzin recalls her childhood in rural Ireland, early cultural and occult explorations, substance abuse and recovery, and her international career as a performance artist under the name “Kira O’Reilly”.

Tsül'dzin traces her history with the Aro gTer sect of Tibetan Buddhism, from first encounter to full ordination, reveals her religious robes and the reactions they provoke, and explains her ongoing fascination with the Great Stupa in Kathmandu.

Tsül'dzin also considers the intersection of art and religious expression, the tension between practice and performance, ritual and spectacle, and reflects on her long-standing work with Serbian conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović.

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Video version: https://www.guruviking.com/podcast/ep264-vajrayana-performance-art-naljorma-tsldzin

Also available on Youtube, iTunes, & Spotify – search ‘Guru Viking Podcast’.

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Topics include:

00:00 - Intro 01:04 - Inspiring example of Jomo Samphel Dechen Rinpoche 06:30 - Working with body and physicality as a practitioner 09:34 - Childhood in Catholic rural Ireland 11:55 - The 80s goth scene 12:43 - Linda Montano’s insight on Tsül'dzin and subcultures 14:07 - Occult explorations 15:09 - Substance abuse and entering recovery 16:29 - Studying fine art at university 17:36 - Encountering the Aro gTer Buddhist sect 20:22 - Group practice format in the Aro gTer 22:44 - Attraction to the Aro gTer 23:37 - Internationally acclaimed performance art career 29:08 - Deepening Buddhist practice 30:47 - Ordination and Kathmandu 31:28 - Performance art and religious ritual 32:50 - Meeting Marina Abramović 35:25 - The Golden Bough and ritual as performance art 36:16 - Working with Marina Abramović 37:50 - Performing at Marina Abramović’ recent London retrospective at the Royal Academy of Art 39:16 - West/East influence 41:34 - Marina Abramović as a teacher 43:45 - Wearing religious robes 44:48 - Conversations arising from wearing robes in public 47:08 - Explaining the colour scheme 49:56 - Robes and participation 53:00 - Fasting and preparing for the 12-day Royal Academy performance 57:41 - Street Dog Care 58:43 - Reflecting on spiritual experiences 01:00:20 - Time and space 01:02:27 - Why spend so much time in Boudha? 01:06:22 - Practice vs spectacle
01:07:15 - Prostrations 01:08:08 - Art and the Aro gTer 01:09:44 - Secular vs religious art 01:12:04 - Disappointment with Western Buddhist art 01:14:08 - Recommendations for when visiting Boudha 01:14:36 - How to have impromptu conversations

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Boudhanath Interviews playlist:

  • https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlkzlKFgdknwvU82dU487LhF_mF4AkGek&si=gFGJpi-fnLtxeyZ5 
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To find our more about Naljorma Tsül'dzin, visit:

  • https://www.instagram.com/naljormatsuldzin/
  • https://www.kiraoreilly.com/

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For more interviews, videos, and more visit:

  • https://www.guruviking.com

Music ‘Deva Dasi’ by Steve James

Duration:
1h 15m
Broadcast on:
26 Jul 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
In this episode, filmed on location in Bode at Kathmandu, I am joined by Naljorma Sultsen, an internationally acclaimed performance artist and ordained apprentice in the arrow-terre sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Sultsen recalls her childhood in rural Ireland, early cultural and occult explorations, substance abuse and recovery, and her international career as a performance artist under the name Kira O'Reilly. Sultsen traces her history with the arrow-terre sect of Tibetan Buddhism from first encounter to full ordination, reveals her religious robes and the reactions they provoke and explains her ongoing fascination with the great stupa of Kathmandu. Sultsen also considers the intersection of art and religious expression, the tensions between practice and performance, ritual and spectacle, and reflects on her longstanding work with Serbian conceptual and performance artists, Marina Abramovich. So without further ado, Naljorma Sultsen. - After the pandemic, when Nepal opened up, I wanted to get out here as quickly as I could, primarily to visit Jomma Sampo Dejna in Pache. You know, because she's elderly and because I felt such a valuable connection with her and because we'd all been through COVID and lockdown and it'd been a while, and of course, Nepal had been closed and I had experienced a very strict lockdown that I'd been somewhat following through social media. So I got on a plane as soon as I could and came out here and was invited to accompany Jomma Sampo Dejna in Pache to practice Kora for many mornings, most mornings, not all, but many. So I would go to her home just off Mount Karl Road for about this time of day, 7 a.m. And she would come down the stairs. She lives on the top of the building. So there's about four stories, maybe. She would descend the stairs very, very slowly, but not needing assistance. She's an elderly lady, so she needed to have someone with her. She couldn't practice Kora by herself. So my job was to walk with her from Mount Karl Road down here and to practice Kora. And sometimes we would go for a breakfast at a local place. But what was really remarkable about each walk down here and each time we practice Kora was how as a very elderly person, she would manifest this incredible determination, you know. There she was with quite diminished mobility. There was a wheelchair, but she wouldn't use it until she absolutely had to. She would use it as a support and push it. And you'd have people looking at me as if to say, "What you doing? "Why aren't you pushing the lady in the wheelchair? "Why are you letting her walk, pushing this thing?" But she would use it as, I can't remember what they call, but these supports on wheels. And then we would navigate our way through such a monastery, which at the time was undergoing these massive landscaping ground renovations. So the ground under our feet was literally different every day. And she would direct, "Namos dei, how are you? "Nice to see you." By the way, it's a fantastic Coppa Smith, one of the local Coppa Smiths, who's just, his place is just up there. And he's been making things for me and for Arotaire, and he's just fantastic. This is the gorgeous thing about here. You can't stay on one trajectory for too long, because there's always people to say hello to, "All these threads that weave themselves around them "from the church." But so what was very special was a company in Gemma Sumpadit, Gemma Sumpadit, Gemma Sumpadit, almost every day, and witnessing this incredible navigation of this shifting terrain of, literally, road work, section being dug up, it's now impeccably flagged, but you'd never know it. The ballads up there, trying to figure out how to support this elderly lady, this great yogini to move around Boda. So it became, for me, a practice, really, a practice of never quite being able to anticipate the pathway we would take, responding to whatever she decided, which would vary every day, even though there was a very simple task of getting to the church and walking around it. And witnessing this extraordinary determination as well, there was no real obstacle, it seemed, to me, in her mind. Her mind was completely clear that this was the practice and this is what she was going to do. And I would, you know, with all of my ideas about what it is to be an elderly body, and someone who perhaps mightn't have the same fluency of movement, I would have all these kind of anticipated blocks and concerns and worries that just seemed to be completely and utterly absent from her. And what would happen as well was, people would just appear spontaneously to assist us. So it was very rarely that I'd have to look around for help, it would just sort of suggest itself as if the circumstances were able to conjure up what was required in order to get German sample dachian Rinpoche and a wheelchair through some bollars or down some steps or up some steps, as well as her incredible fortitude and ability to work with her own physicality, which I found and I still find, actually, when I go and visit her now, is one of the most compelling aspects of her, this how radiant she is, but also how that communicates with her physicality and how she moves, which is fascinating to me, and very important as a practitioner, and as a practitioner wanting to work with body, with physicality. What do you mean by when you say that you'd like to work with body and physicality as a practitioner? Well, in the agitär we have these phenomena, zogchen longte practices, such as cune, which for me were very remarkable to encounter, because, you know, when I first came to Buddhism, I didn't know very much, and I didn't know, I knew even less about Vajrayana Buddhism. I knew I was drawn to a sensibility, to an atmosphere, to feelings and sensations and things that I couldn't, you might want to move forward a wee bit there, the tea lady setting up. Yes, so when I encountered the agitär, it was, you know, not coming from an informed place about dharma, I wasn't learned, I'm an artist, so I was just really attracted to language, to the language that Makturam Shaink Andrew Deitchen used, to its poetics. I was very strongly drawn to yogic song, and how it may be feel, so very ephemeral, sensory, atmospheric experiences, rather than, you know, formed, solid, intellectual concepts of what dharma was, and included within all of that was, Kumeye, is such a long day practice of 111 exercises, which activate ones, is our long system to cultivate zapnyams, which are profound meditation experiences, and I just found this extraordinary, as someone who is very committed to, as an artist, working with physicality, working with my physicality, working with the simplicity of having a body, hello, good morning, how are you? Good, I was just, you know, this just felt like the best thing ever, you know, I was working primarily making performance artwork, so having flesh and allowing one sensibility of what it is to be embodied, to have a body, was always something that was very key to me, and very valuable to me in very precious, and allowed me to be artistic, and to find context that reflected that back, so I had no idea that this could exist within dharma, to the extent that it does, despite having done things like Ayangha yoga for some time, so, you know, completely different tradition. This whole aspect of working with having a body, being a body, being of body, was, and continues to be really tremendous. Can you tell me a little bit about your life before the Arrotear, your career, and perhaps even we could start with your upbringing, what was the context of your upbringing? Oh, my goodness. I'm just going to put the bag down there for a sec, because it's distracting me. I was born in Dublin and grew up, you know, parents, as many, many people did, moved to London in the 60s, so they moved there with me when I was very little, so I grew up for the first ten years in London, west London, and then my mother, you know, the dad had left, and my mother moved us back to rural Ireland, south west Ireland, county Kerry, north county Kerry, so in 1977, so rural town, small town, gorgeous town, a town well known for great writers. Oh, I have, thank you though. No, it's a beautiful mala, but I have a good mala. Thank you though. No, my life. So grew up in Catholic rural Ireland, you know, all the usual things, so very, maybe growing up feeling like many of us do a bit of an outsider, a bit of a weirdo. So for me, many things were, you know, important to find, things like, you know, music is really important to me, as a way to kind of reflect back what I was. Music is in, listening to post-punk records and things, and reading the NME by, you know, getting it by mail order and getting into Irish bands like the Virgin Prunes, anything that was somehow reflecting an alternative to the cultural and emotional context that I surrounded by, felt like an absolute lifeline. David Bowie, you know, all that, all those kind of beautiful, alternative, strange, important, glamorous people. I left, I left where I grew up, left the town when I was about 17, went to Dublin, and just did University of Life stuff for a few years, ended up in London at 19, working in nightclubs, normally bar work, part of that whole kind of gothic period. Were you a goth? Oh my God, I was a turtle goth, absolutely. I think, you know, it was just because there was some, at that time, it wasn't really so packaged. There was just this inventiveness with clothes, with music, with scenes. Yeah, there was a sort of, you know, maybe overarching kind of, milieu or trend or orientation, you know, towards the melancholic and the dramatic, perhaps, but certainly in the late 80s, there was this incredible variety in how people would do that. It was a much more DIY and self-made and inventive, I think. And I was interviewed recently by the great American artist Linda Montano. Linda Montano is very well known for performance art and for extended performance art. Performance art over long periods of time. And she was interviewing me recently online, we were having a Zoom interview, and she asked me a lot about my childhood and growing up, and she concluded that I was self-taught, which I thought was interesting. I'd never thought of myself as being self-taught. But there was probably enough rebellion in me that I was rejecting so many things that are in my kind of naivete and arrogance. There probably was a bit of rearing myself to some extent, but I think there was also a lot of peer bringing each other up. I think that's what you do in subcultures and scenes. You know, with your peers, you support each other, you introduce each other to things, and you teach each other. And that's maybe part of the gorgeousness of subcultures and young kids, young adult scenes, where there's this sense of helping each other create worlds, world-building through music, through literature, through spending time together, through cub culture, through what clubs are, spaces that are valuable and precious. So I dabbled with various occult ideas, none of which I pursued with any great experience. It was mostly just reading, but just being curious and interested. So those were mostly just western, high ritual, magical stuff. And again, it was probably, for me, more of a literary investigation, you know, recognizing that I was seeking and looking for something, but not necessarily finding whatever that was. And so, you know, moving through a lot of that material. There was some fantastic... At the time I was in London, and so London was replete with really good bookshops, like Compendium in Camden, and it was a Atlantis bookshop, which I think is still there in Bloomsbury. So I would just, you know, go to these places and use a bit of my bar made money to buy these books and swap books and exchange books with people. So, yeah, that was kind of, you know, until late 20s, when I just became very, I think, very, very convoluted, exhausted, and, you know, that lifestyle is sort of worn its way out. There were substances in that nighttime lifestyle that were depleting, exhausting, and I just needed to break and have a rupture completely, which I was lucky enough to be able to do. So I ended up in recovery, and finding myself in Plymouth, and then moving to Bristol, and as part of an extended, it was very, very lucky in the early 90s that the UK, you know, at the time had funding that could support people to find the kind of resources that they needed. It was a very, very, very fortunate for me that there were the circumstances there to spend a long time working with great counselors and, again, great peers and just being able to kind of rest, heal, rejuvenate, and begin to reposition and ask questions about what matters to me and because I have a kind of second chance, extraordinary second chance, what am I going to do with that second chance? So for me, at the beginning, that was things like identifying that I wanted to study art, and in Bristol, that was available to me. So I did a foundation course, a really fantastic foundation course, and then went on to do an undergraduate degree in Cardiff, and ended up in studying fine art. And in Cardiff at that time, there was a fine art department that had the traditional sculpture printmaking, painting, what else did it have? Those were the main things, but it also had a small time-based department. And time-based was really working with media, new media like emerging internet and moving image, robotics and things like that, but also performance art. So that's where I grounded myself in how I wanted to make art. So I did that for a study for three years, graduated and moved back to Bristol, and that's where I encountered the Arota. I encountered despite going to her acupuncture, and the acupuncturist turned out to be Nakma Mitzel, and she would chat as she does fantastically and wonderfully, as part of her conversation. She would just mention things that Muncha Rimschain Contradation had said. Sometimes there'd be a little quote from something. I remember her mentioning a spacious passion and passionate space, and just thinking, "That's exquisite." That's absolutely exquisite, and it just landed in me. You know, without their needing to be a sort of a committee of chasses to what that meant. You know, there was no need for any sort of figuring that out. It just landed as this poetic event, and that led to me then beginning to lead the conversation much more towards tell me more, tell me more about Dharma, tell me more about Buddhism, tell me more about who these people are, which of course made it so good with her terrific generosity and humour. Great, great humour, which is gorgeous, isn't it? To be welcomed into a whole conversation about Dharma and the specificity of a lineage and its context, with this kind of everyday warmth, humour, natural ease. And one of the first conversations we had, and in a way one of the first teachings I received was Menzel talking about the vehicles, the Yarnas, as a way to introduce me to the Arotare, and why knowing what the Yarnas are can be very, very helpful in terms of understanding why the world of Dharma, the different methods and practices of Dharma can present so very, very differently, and yet not being conflict with each other, where as Rinpoche and Candidation would often say, their principle and function can be so helpful to know in order to understand what practices are, and of course that's so very, very helpful here in Boda, where ones may be meeting many different practitioners, different lineages, and just able to kind of have some sense sometimes of where and how something's functioning and where and how that might connect to what some of the practices and methods of practices are, and the Arotare, so that's been very, very helpful. But the other thing that happened in that early stage, so there was a bit of talk, a little bit of teaching, but also just going to practice sessions, which were always very informal. The first ones I went to were in Mates' Home, and those were open to whoever wanted to come and attend, and those followed the format and continued to follow a format of what we would do when we gathered together, apprentices gathered together and do morning practice in an apprentice retreat, where we'll have about two hours session of practicing yogic song, and that alternates with periods of silent sitting. So yogic song might be singing seven-line song, we have different melodies, might be Guru Rinpoche and Mantra, in which we have different melodies, different speeds, practicing the larmy and the archer of Madras Labdron, practicing long-life wish paths, and we moved between practicing these songs in different ways. Most of the time, what we're doing is practicing with sensation and awareness, rather than lingering on conceptual meaning, we're just simply entering into the experience of song, and what that is. So that means that potentially means you don't have to be a very good singer, it's not about being able to hold a tune, it's about entering into the practice. And then the silent stages are where we practice the full analogials, so that's the Sogchen-sem day Nondra. So I was able to go to these domestic, residential, small gatherings, mainsaws, and then some in Cardiff as well, which were led by Nakma Nordsen and Nakpa Urdsen, and sometimes there'd be teachings always given in a very convivial, friendly circumstances with cups of tea and opportunities to ask questions and to listen to other people ask questions and hear the answers. So I think for me entering into the beginning, I had no sense of, oh, this is going to become my life, I had a sense of being really intrigued by something that wasn't institutionalized, that was happening in small, intimate spaces and with this great friendliness and this opportunity and this potential and possibility for a profound practice in the kind of everyday ordinary circumstances of one's life and to see that demonstrated was extremely moving for me and very compelling. So there you go, that's a long answer. A long answer, I've totally exceeded the grown-up bit into the, but there you go. Well, what did happen after you studied art in terms of your life, you began to, your life as an artist? I did, yeah, no, I did, I was very fortunate. I graduated from what used to be called University, oh God, it was UIC, University Institute of Wales Cardiff. I graduated in 1998 and at that time, in Wales and England and Scotland, there was a real golden moment, I don't think we realized at the time how golden it was, there was tremendous enthusiasm for what was called live art. And that was a coinage, live art was a coinage to try and, an umbrella term to try and include lots of artistic practices that fell in between the traditional disciplines. So it might include the edges of experimental theatre that was strained into the more performance art practices that we might recognize coming from the visual arts, where artists were perhaps less, less interested in creating objects, a more interested in process and what it is to present that process or something that's task-based and durational within the gallery circumstances or other visual art circumstances. Or it also included people who were exploring and experimenting with technology, particularly new technologies in terms of asking what are they, what doesn't mean, what is it, you know, things like telepresence, what is telepresence, what is it to have a presence remotely that doesn't require your body but might require a network. And it's also looking at networks, what are the networks that emerging world-wide web, where it was a utopian idea or questioning of what and how these technologies might afford us. And so this was all before things became somewhat colonized by corporations and so on. So I entered into this kind of milieu of making work, making performance art work, so I was really preoccupied and passionate with this idea of hello, hello again, with physicality and there were curators and there were festivals and there were platforms and crucially there was funding that invited and created these opportunities. So I thrived in UK scene but also in the European scene. Europe has had a performance or a series of performance art scenes for a long time and so I was welcomed into those. So I made work, I showed my work, I exhibited work. And that was the primary thing I did, a little bit of teaching here and there, you know, to give workshops in performance art. Normally in universities that had fine art courses or experimental theatre drama, dance kind of courses. There was also this burgeoning in higher education that really facilitated artists, students, academics to keep coming together. So I was working out of having Bristol as my base. I also became very involved in arts and science and particularly an area that we called and laugh about because, you know, labelling can be so limited. Bioarts, I went off to Australia for about just under a year to do a residency at a place called Symbiotica, which was in a university and which put artists into the laboratories where science researchers were working in the life sciences and put into the hands of artists, the tools of biotechnology. So I was learning how to do things like cultivate cell cultures and how to try and work with and think of living material as art media. And Symbiotica was somewhere again that was creating a scene, a scene of peers, different researchers, different artists, different thinkers, writers, theorists, philosophers, an extraordinary scene that lasted for over, well probably for about two decades, and created this kind of extended conversation again around bodies, materialities, human, non-human, human as animal, and then also non-human animals. So my work also began to question the ethics of this, the ethics of what it is to work with living material, very, very influenced and inspired by the artists who founded Symbiotica, Oren Katz and Younazur, and other artists, artists like Kathy High, who were also looking at our relationship to other species, other animals. So all of this was going on, this very rich, compelling, challenging time, where you're literally, you know, when you're working in the life sciences as an artist, you're constantly being confronted by the practices of life and death really, you know. So, and at the same time in parallel to that, or maybe parallel is the wrong word, but intermingled with that, I was also, I hadn't yet become an apprentice, but I was also practicing having spent time with Meksal, and Nordsen, and Erdzen, and other Aretare practitioners. I had these questions going on, I was in Perth, Western Australia, staggering, you know, beautiful environment around Perth, north, south, east, and so on, west. And practicing, and asking myself questions about, you know, where do I want to make my commitment? And so it was, it was a really, what's the word? I can't think of the word confronting time, I suppose, in the best way possible to, for me to think about what is it I want to do. And then a friend of mine became an apprentice, I remember she sent me an email saying, and I just felt that fire, that kind of sense of, "You've gone for a good few, I want to do that." So I came back, and applied to the apprentice of candidates in the lecture in Bache, and they accepted me, which is fantastic. So that sort of went on, and I've continued as an art practitioner since. It's still very informed by a lot of those formative ideas and scenes, but also this, I was ordained in 2011. Having made my first visit here, one of the requirements when one's working towards ordination, there's many requirements, there are practice requirements, retreat, study, as well as needing to experience pilgrimage, Nikor, and so we're encouraged to come somewhere where Vajrayana Buddhism is around us, and to experience that. And so my first visit here to Bodha was in, well not just Bodha, to Nikor, was in 2009. I'm wondering about the links, if you see any links between live art and Buddhism as you practice it. I'm thinking in particular of Buddhist ritual of various types. I think that I'm going to understand certain performance artists. Marina Abravitch, for example. I recall watching that documentary of hers, which is the famous, I don't recall that, it's that famous one about which climaxes in her, sitting across from. Oh yes, the artist is present. That's the one. Yeah, yeah, gone. No, you go on. I'm sorry to interrupt. And in that she trains, she does a sort of boot camp for young artists, and they put their phones away and they don't eat several days, and they separate different colored M&Ms or something like that, camp rise and things, you know, they camp rise, I think. And so... Training the house. Yeah, that has a kind of echoes, I think, of certain kinds of spiritual disciplines, perhaps Zen in particular. So I'm curious if you see any overlap there or links between your art explorations and your religious life? Absolutely, no, 100%. And when I was studying in Cardiff, Marina had a retrospective in the Museum of Moderna in Oxford. She wasn't there. It was sound, video, objects, and some of the work were black and white for the photographic documentation of performances that she'd done. And another room contained mineral stone objects that you could rest parts of your body against, with this idea that you would be invited into, or not invited into, but there was a possibility or a potential to have, engage in other states of consciousness and mind through one's engagement, through line, sitting and resting on these objects. And I remember the combination of both of these, the performance art room and its explicitness and its immediacy, and then this other room with a very different sense of flavor, the connections were so apparent to me. And again, very much as a series of sensations rather than as intellectual concepts. And I came out of that room and spoke to my friend and I was feeling very emotional about it and very sort of inspired by it. And like, this is what I want to do with my life. How can I possibly do this? And, you know, read a lot about Marina Brownovich and of course discovered within that that she had been, that she had travelled to different parts of the world, including to the Himalayas. I'm not sure if she came to Nepal or India, but she'd certainly engaged in retreat. She'd certainly sought out Dharma practitioners and she had found and discovered, and she'd also collaborated with the monastery. But again, I wish I knew the specifics of who and where, but she'd certainly come away with enormous reverence and appreciation for mind, nature of mind. And how in performance, certainly for some of us at least, what we're fundamentally working with is mind. And how that manifests and flourishes, including through physicality. So yes, that was absolutely a kind of a foundational experience, one that was really important, that gave me great sense of possibility. And I'd also done things like looked at books like The Golden Bow, which has the beautiful cataloging of rituals. And reading it in an art school context going, "This is performance art. I could see these actions and these rituals so much as performance art." And it was also there, I think, through my upbringing in Catholicism, and then my reading and interest in occult ritual as well. So absolutely. And again, I think it's something that allows one to enter into practice without needing to have always this mental chronicling of what's going on, because one's engaged in, as Marina would say, presence. Maybe from a such end point of view, we might look at the words, or we might use the word awareness. But funnily enough, Marina Bramovich is someone who's been part of my life over the last few years. I've worked with her a few times now. She's been a phenomenal and very significant influence and inspiration, but also someone who I've had the great privilege and joy of getting to know of it. And every now and then, you know, I'll tell her the story about encountering her work for the first time. And we've told stories. I was with her in Madrid when Qunzan Doji Repushe passed into Parin Nirvana. And I remember just having lunch by myself, needing a quiet moment. I had just heard of his passing. And she came and sat with me, and I told her about him. I told her about Jean Massamplodetien Rinpoche. And she was so receptive, so warm, so intrigued. But also, you know, as a young woman, had read extensively people like Chicken Trimper Rinpoche. You know, she had grown up in that cultural world where arses were interested in what people like. Trimper Rinpoche had to say. And they recognized the implicit relationship between practice and the arts, the secular arts. There was no sort of barrier of how these things can communicate and how we see maybe the same, how we see an extension from one thing into another. So just now, just before Christmas, Marina had a huge retrospective at Royal Academy in London. And I was invited. I was one of three arses invited to re-perform the house with the Ocean View, which is a 12-day continuous performance artwork where you live in the gallery, you live in the installation. There are conditions for your existence during that time. And in many ways, it's working with that idea of thumb or retreat, you know, borders and parameters of what you're going to do. You have time parameters, you have limits on what you're going to, you know, whether you're talking or not. The work also involved, not using for 12 days. And in many ways, it was a total pleasure for me. Well, it was complete, a total pleasure, I absolutely loved it. But one of the things I loved within it was this recognition of retreat. This is retreat. This is, I don't mean retreats and retreating from the world. I mean retreat in terms of marking and time, space, schedule, commitment, intensifying one's activities in order to support accomplishment or outcome or possibility thereof. So, yeah, for me, there's a very intimate, integral relationship between performance art. And also, I was a wonderful curator here the other day, and I was asking him about, you know, the influence of maybe more European and North American influences on Nepali performance art. And he was saying, well, you know, you've got to realize that it goes both ways. There are artists from Europe and North America and other places, or what we might problematically call the West, came and looked towards the East for influence, you know. And this was huge in the 70s, the 60s, where Dharma masters were going to North America, and people were becoming very interested in martial arts, which had a huge influence on dance. So, it was just great to be here in Kathmandu and to be reminded of, you know, it goes both ways. These influences go both ways. I think we're so used to in Europe, at least, questioning ourselves and this kind of colonizing, you know, we've become perhaps in a good way, but maybe overly concerned at times with influence and how influence operates, you know, where people might talk about. Or my questioner in useful ways, but I felt like he was very liberating and saying, well, you know, influences move. So, because Kira O'Reilly is the name on Facebook, that's my artist thing. Oh, yes. I do recognize that. Yeah. I mean, most of the time, so I post the odd thing there, and of course, you know, I was so... We're good. Most of the time, yeah, it was just a huge big deal for me to do that performance for Marina. I was just thrilled, but to experience it as well, and what's fantastic about her, like many people, like many good teachers is not defining the fruits of the practice, just giving you an instruction, leaving you be, going away, and letting you get trust in you to get on with it. Trust in you to have the motivation, the intention, the will, the discipline and the stamina, just to crack on with it, you know. Do you consider her a teacher? Not a Buddhist teacher, but yeah, absolutely. I think so, yeah. Oh, goodness, yes. I mean, from looking at her work, from seeing how she works, we have great similarities, we have enormous differences, and I think she's someone who really appreciates difference. She appreciates the variations in art. She's an huge enthusiast about art. She doors art. She gets excited about art, and she's also someone who's not particularly content to rest on her laurels. You know, she wants to see what she can achieve now, as opposed to, you know, decades ago. So yeah, I think for me, she's a phenomenal example. I'm 57. She's just over. She's 21 years older than me. And when I chat with her, she won't allow me to kind of go, "Oh God, you know, I'm getting on a bit, aren't I?" You know, it's continually about what's happening now, what you can do now, which I think is also the same thing I see from practitioners who I meet. And it's certainly what I see with Rimschain-Kandra Deitchin. It's what I see when I meet Jomasampa Deitchin-Rimpeche, and Kalsanglama, who's this wonderful practitioner who lives in the apartment next to her, and Doma. The people around Jomasampa Deitchin-Rimpeche, the Tibetan people who I have the privilege of practicing with, and other people who come into their killcore. All I think keep reminded me about, you know, what's happening now, you know. But yes, I would consider Marina a teacher. Partly through allowing me to re-perform such a significant challenging work that allows time to be such an important component, which I think is something that we, you know, constantly. And how things accumulate, so you have time that you also have methods staying with something, allowing something to develop through remaining with a method, a method of practice. But you'd ask me about the robes, so I don't want to forget that question because that's an important one, because of course that's a communication continually in here, it's a communication with many people who know what they are. So I'm wearing the robes of the Gokar Changlode, which in Tibetan means white skirt and uncut hair, so uncut scalp hair, so the white shantab. I'm wearing the robes of the naljorma, so I have a white polina, a waistcoat, and the gontag, sash, and then the zen, the shawl, so this is the naljor shawl. And I should have conch earrings on, and they should be around my ears, I should have little gold earrings in there and white conch earrings, but my earrings had little accidents, so unfortunately I'm remiss in not having those on, which I apologise for because they are as much part of the robes as anything else. Yesterday I was in the looking shop, and I was purchasing something, and there was a lady in the older Tibetan woman, and she looked at me, and she exclaimed with great delight, and then out of a bag she produced her white shantab. She wasn't wearing it, but she pulled it out and showed it to me, and then she produced her shawl, and she's practising in a different lineage, she just completed a course of teachings. But even though we didn't share a language, it was just the shared enthusiasm, and I said, gosh, it's great to see someone else wearing the white skirt, and it's great to see another woman wearing the white skirt as well. She was dead proud, and again, just another lovely communication, so this is what happens from wearing robes. Most of the time people want to talk about them, they normally ask me who my llamas are, lineage, I normally say something like ningma, aroter, zaue llama, and nag chum shan chan chan chan chan chan chan. And then if they say, who's that, I'll say ningma llama, and show them a picture. It's good to have a few pictures on the phone. And then sometimes what I do is mention rimpeche incantradations. Teachers, I might mention, comes on doji rimpeche, doji rimpeche, doji rimpeche, doji rimpeche, doji of course I mentioned, because his presence is so pervasive, his memory is so pervasive, but his presence as well. And also because people know who he is. And he was such a, as you know, such a key person when nag chum shan chan chan came to bode back in the 70s. So yes, I had a lovely encounter with someone the other day, and I say, "Oh, I'll look at the gom tag." This time people have been really commenting on the gom tag. That's been one of the main topics. Quite often with a thumbs up or a question, curiosity. And I was laughing with one Tibetan fellow recently saying, "Look how grubby it's got with a Kathmandu dust." And he said, "Sign of practice." Like, you know, this is something to be proud of. This isn't something to be worried or uptight about, you know. What did the colours signify? We were mentioning before when we were discussing the robes that, that's something people comment on or ask questions on quite a bit, the particular colourings, they're unique. Particularly with the gom tag, people want to know what it is. And so, you know, I mentioned to them the channels, the central channel, and then we have solar and lunar channels. So, I'm wearing it this way round as a female practitioner, but if I was a male practitioner, it would be flipped with the white here. So, this shows the arrangements of the channels. So, that's one thing. And then with the blue. The blue is very special, I think. And this is sometimes where burn practitioners comment, because they see the blue and they're like, "You burn, or what are you?" And we, so the blue tona symbolises the kujuk, which is the kuku. And the kuku is the symbol, it sings that the kuku appears at springtime, and, you know, it's heralding spring. And in the soc chen symbolism, it's heralding, it's atiogas symbol, it's heralding the realisation. So, there's a beautiful sense of, you know, what that blue is, and it's this lovely royal blue, so it's meant to be the blue of the kuku. And then there's then, of course, again, the channels, the dance of the channels, and there are different patterns, depending on whether one has the naujour or the nak ordination. The whole, all of it really is symbolising that ones are vowel holder, tantric vowels. And it was a fantastic quote that Machin Rinpoche put on Facebook recently, which was Kumslandojir Rinpoche, speaking about this, and speaking about people's rights to wear the white chantab, where the ones are a naka, or a nakma, or a naujourma and naujourpa. And saying, you know, it's simply communicating that one is a vowel holder, that one has taken the 14 tantric vowels. So, I thought it was beautiful because, of course, to wear the robes and to be a vowel holder is a practice. It's not necessarily a status per se, it's a practice, and certainly it's an awareness practice to work with the folds, to work with all the bits. Before I leave where I'm staying, I always have to do a little checklist of, you know, do I have all the bits and pieces? But it's a wonderful practice, and I really enjoy how it does communicate. I remember, years ago now, it would be 2011, it was my second visit to Nepal, it was the winter time. It was probably around the solstice, or just after, I remember visiting Propping, some other Areta practitioners. And the previous Dijum Rinpoche was there, Dijum Rinpoche, Sangye Paymashepo Rinpoche was there, and he'd just come out of retreat. His hair was on cut, and he was giving a long life empowerment. And I was very newly ordained, I'd been ordained that summer, and there I was in robes. The gompa, it was heaving, and the gompa itself was completely crowded and full. And then there were people sitting outside underneath tents or whatever it was, endless people. And I remember my absolute astonishment that I was ushered in and shown into the gompa, and given a seat inside the gompa, I was expecting to be outside. And I remember sitting there in the most astonished sense of privilege of such an overused word at the moment. It may be usefully overused, but it's the word that we tend to use. But the sense of privilege was so exquisite, realizing that my place there was because of the robes, because of what I was wearing, and that that's what was being positioned there inside the gompa. And that's what was visible and being read by people. And this sense of, I suppose, emptiness, we wear these robes and we're empty to what they are, to their form, and the practice that the robes allow us to do through moving in them, being visible, communicating through embodying and working with their symbolism. But also just the exquisite preciousness of that experience. And there almost sitting there as a white Irish woman, just feeling the kind of like, everything had just led to that moment, and being so incredibly grateful to natural regime, candidation. I'm so aware of the promise that they'd made to the previous duttere m'vishay, jidreolli, ashi dorje, and how there I was, part of that promise, part of that lineage, part of that larger, wider story, that epic, epic story, was just absolutely gorgeous. So I'm almost lost for words. That's a difficult thing about chatting about this stuff sometimes. You know, you kind of stumble across that space where you need the poetry. And I'm unlike Rinpoche and candidation, sometimes I'm a little lost for the poetry, you know. That's very fascinating, thank you. So perhaps we should walk a bit. Can't coffee really work, didn't I? I'm checking my head off. You had coffee? Yeah, I did, yeah. And it's not good. When I was preparing for Marina's work, I got so sort of good with not having coffee, et cetera, et cetera, all these things. I worked with a fabulous nutritionist and then bit by bit some of those, not such great habits of Crepton again. How do you prepare for something like that? With an amazing nutritionist. The Royal Academy were really, ashi dulae, were really, really good. And they got this great nutritionist Lucy Slater who works in London to consult for the three of us who did the performance at different times. And Lucy came on board and she, I think we had something like five long sessions where she does a consultation, gets to know you, gets to know what and who you are, including, you know, what might be going on in your gut and your gut health. And then just got everyone eating just really good, very clean, really good, high nutrition. So you could last the top days? Yeah, and really she's looking for things like, you know, working with your cortisol, dopamine, that kind of thing. So you do something where really what your nutritionist is doing is just calming all of that down so that during the fast, you're not looking out for that dopamine reward thing all the time. So it's a very kind way of working. And it also means that when you're on metabolism shifts, you know, around day three, you don't necessarily have that, what people call the keto flu, where you're shifting, where you're shifting from one metabolic pathway into another. So we did practice fasts. What else did we do? Diet, practice fast, doing things like working on sleep, working on hydration. And for me it was great because it's all, you know, it's that sense of I can use performance art experience, retreat experience. I did talk with Rimschain-Cantidation about it as well, and they recommended and provided Chulen, Chulen-Rilbu, which was great. I spoke with Marina about that and she was delighted. So it's not a nutrition in terms of calories, but it's certainly a nutrition in terms of energy. During the 12 days, I also at times worked a bit with a practicing cune. So I was very interested in terms of energy and how I was going to sustain energy and what my way into that was going to be. So I did different things like working with, you know, cold shower and knowing that that would kickstart the adrenaline, aerobic, short bursts of aerobic exercise. But I did an awful lot, as well as other practices, I did an awful lot of rhythm breathing, which is a practice that we have where one's simply working with, you know, extending breath, extending the hold of breath. But that's a deeply nourishing practice if one's not eating, and a cune, which I think my experience was that I had extraordinary energy at times. Not all the time, sometimes I was very fatigued, but there was always a way out of the fatigue. So in the mornings, I would normally wake up and just feel very, very, very fatigued. I would wake up very early practice before the gallery opened. Were you living in the gallery? Yeah, oh yeah, the pieces is absolutely 12 continuous days, 24 hour days. So there's a structure of three units that's part of it, and you're living in that structure, in an installation. So there's, so the use, the arses within the work and the structure and the gallery aren't separate aspects, they're all one thing. So of course the pieces is much about what happens when the gallery is closed, is when the gallery is open. So there you go. And when the gallery is closed, you know, you have the security people, the modulators, you know, there's the, not just the audience from the gallery is open, there's the other audience, which are the people who are supporting the work. The production people, we have some very vocal doggies. The street dog life here in Bode is very important. There's a really great organization here who I'm a huge fan of called street dog care, and they work with, with supporting the dogs, street dogs, feeding them, veterinary care. They do a, they do a health camp every Saturday on the Quora, where people can bring dogs who are ill and get veterinary care. They do a little bit of hygiene work, they also do a rabies vaccination once a year, and they're really, they're brilliant, I love them, I love them to bits. And they also promote some dogs to be adopted, including internationally, so I, I spend time with them and the dogs when I can. And they're run by Buddhist principles, which is important as well. So no, no youth in azing. It's really about supporting dog persons. Have you ever had any spiritual experiences, the like of which you might have in your Buddhist religious life doing something like that 12 day work? Well, I don't know, I think it's sometimes, you know, that idea of a spiritual experience. I find a little tricky because it suggests something that doesn't have, isn't part of an ongoing, everyday, quite ordinary process of where being or where of conducting one's life with all the kind of consistency that one might wish to have as a practitioner, as a dharma practitioner, as an artist. So yes, there are maybe experiences that one has that suggest that I'm going to stick with it, this is a good idea. You know, I'm going to keep on at this thing. But I don't think I'd particularly want to emphasize anything that sounds too special. Because I think sometimes there can be a sort of glamour around that that's not very useful or can become a little bit of a hangup. But I think, I suppose what I would say is that certainly for me when I'm working with performance art, there's a sense, one of the reasons why I'm interested in duration and one of the reasons why artists such as Marina are so important to me. And there are other artists, not just Marina, but she's I think a very significant one, is certainly how one can find a tremendous spaciousness within working with time and space, you know, and what we often refer to in performance as duration. And that also normally invites or involves a kind of a focus, a precision, and giving room for things to come together. So in performance art that might be working with a material, working with a movement, and working with a sensibility of where and what that is within time and space. And I don't know if that's so dissimilar from, you know, what we're doing now, walking around the church and practicing chora. It's a kind of, it's ordinary, it's walking, but there's an openness. Interesting things happen, of course, and formal practice isn't divorced and separated from the ordinary, you know, ordinary life. So it's much more that these things are continually sort of intermingled. I understand that you're sometimes spent several months at a time here. I suppose the most I've spent, God, you have the aspiration to spend several months, but yeah, two, three months I've done that, maybe this is the third time doing that now. And I found just having made shorter visits that I, it just seemed like an opportunity to spend more time here, sometimes engage and retreat, sometimes just simply live in here. So that's been, it's been fantastic actually, and that sort of wish to do that just keeps growing. I think it does for many people, I keep missing people who've been here for years or who want to be here longer. But I think a big part of that for me has absolutely been, I suppose a combination. One is the presence of jama sumple de chingre and poshé, and how significant that is. So that time just after COVID where I was able to come here and spend so much time with her. Prior to COVID, I'd been here for, well, between here and Bhutan, I'd probably spent about six weeks or something here. A short visit to Bhutan, maybe ten days for a pilgrimage led by Naikma Maitsel and Naol Japa Jaguir, which was phenomenal, very special. And then I spent a few weeks here in retreat and realized that I could do it, that I could be here by myself and that felt good, I enjoyed it, that I would get to see jama sumple de chingre and poshé, and the other remarkable people in her circle around her, like Kalsang Dorma. And I think that's where there was just a real sense of how connected I am was to everything, including through the larger story of natural machine candidation coming out here, and particularly with their involvement in Kalsang Dorma Jaguir, Bhutan, as well over the previous years when he was still alive. But I've also become inquisitive about other places around Kathmandu, I adore the city, and I love just walking in the city. It's a great city to walk, and I've always loved this in cities, just simply walking, allowing, you know, allowing a bit of the drift or the wandering to happen, and Kathmandu really lends itself to that. And that kind of interest happened when I wanted to walk from Bauda up to Nagigompa and back again one day, which is about, I think it's 29, the loop I did is about 29 kilometres, and because the city has become so built up around Bauda, Bauda used to be separate, but now the city has sort of gobbled up all the empty bits and filled it all in with this terrific density of a city of urban space. So I made this walk through the city, through the edges of the city, and then into the villages, and then into the parkland, reservation, and then up to Nagigompa, where I spent some time and then came back again through a different route, entering into that sort of the threads of the city where you just have these little indications that the city's beginning again, and then you become immersed in it more and more, and then before you know it, you're back in Bauda, 12 hours later, or whatever it was, you know. So I've done quite a bit of walking in the city. It's a place of shrines and temples. There are so many sites, so many beautiful Tara sites, Vajra Yogini, and of course Guru Rinpoche, Yeshya Sogil. And I'm still learning about what those places are and where they are, so each visit I try and learn about somewhere else and go to it, walk to it if I can, or spend time there, and practice there. You see there's a man there prostrating his way around there, the stupor. What do you make of that as an artist, that practice? Well, I think, I suppose I don't really think of it as visual spectacle so much. I relate much more to the doing, rather than the watching or the looking. Of course, I don't know if I can separate, you know, artists from practitioner in that way. If I see someone practicing, I'm just very moved, very delighted to have the inspiration. But there's always a bodily mirroring or sense of connection. I remember in Bhutan, particularly how much I appreciated practicing prostrations as we went round from lakan to lakan, and of course wanted to observe the practice of prostrations. And I remember at this time thinking, this is exactly what I want to do. This feels so right. This is exactly the kind of gesture. Not right from our kind of outside etiquette point of view, but from an inside embodied feeling. Almost like doing a dance or something where there's that, the circumstances and the gesture suggest themselves. There's a mutuality. When you were asking me about art and being an artist, and what's important about that and how that relates to dharma, the absolute fundamental thing I have to mention is natural Rinpoche and candidation, and what they encourage in us as practitioners is the arts. Is Vadriana, as the arts, as an expression of the arts, that the arts are absolutely fundamental in so many different dimensions, but also the secular arts as well. There's that wonderful story that Rinpoche tells about coming out here as an art student. As a young man, as an art student, and having these questions, very understandable, questions about, the plan was art school, becoming an art teacher. He was also someone who was in love with the blues and a blues musician, and had a very, had experience in being a blues musician with his band Savage Cabbage. And so, here he is in Boda with this tremendous teacher, Dajur Rinpoche, Dajur Rinpoche, Dajur Rinpoche, but these questions about what to do, and then Dajur Rinpoche teaching, saying, you know, the arts are important, don't abandon the arts, don't abandon the arts of your culture and your world. And then in Rinpoche's telling of this, he goes on to explain, and he's quoting Dajur Rinpoche, Dajur Rinpoche, about how, for a yogi or a yogini, it's all the arts. It's the secular arts as well. There isn't this kind of division in terms of, you know, the traditional Dharma art forms, and then the artistic forms that we might have grown up with. There's a practitioner, they're all important, they're all the arts, and they all become practice as well. They all become an expression of the hires of the dance of emptiness and form. And I think, you know, when one's working with any art form, that's what one's experiencing as well, you know, which is that extraordinary. It's creativity, really, isn't it? But I love that story, and when I first heard that story, I've heard it many times, and I'm very grateful that I've heard it so many times, because I've realized that one of the best things is to hear a good story time and time again, not just as a reminder, but how one receives it keeps opening up. You know, you just keep on realizing, oh my goodness, this is even more relevant than I realized, or this is even more helpful, or has more personance, or I'm beginning to experience that rather than just receive it. So I think that's something that's extremely important for me in terms of being here in Boda. You know, being here is like, it's a Neikor, it's a way of encountering and being with those stories and that lineage history, but its relevance is everywhere and everything. I had to laugh on my way down to meet you, my phone went, I have an alarm on the phone, and it's "Ode to Joy" by Beethoven, and there it was, blaring away, and I was like, where is that coming from? Oh, it's coming from my bag. And I've got that there because Rinpoche sent it to me one day in a WhatsApp. I think I'd asked him a question about something, and as a reply, he'd sent "Ode to Joy". And I just laughed at this sort of gorgeous incongruity of that moment, and yet it made perfect sense in terms of, you know, this connection we have. Two of the arts and all their dimensions and all their forms and how that is, that's practice. So I don't know if that makes any kind of sense at all, it does to me. But you know how we don't have to separate ourselves off. Sometimes I've been a little disappointed in quote-unquote Western Buddhist art, and by that I mean, you know, artists such as myself trying to make art that looks and sounds a bit Buddhist, and how quite often it comes out a bit like when you're mixing paint, you know, it comes out a little bit of a indistinct muddy colour, and maybe to be a bit relaxed, and to let the art happen. It's why I'm partly why I'm such a fan of the late, great visual artist and poet John Giorno, because he wasn't really trying to make Buddhist art. And yet in his work, when I look at his work at least, you know, I see or reads or experience Tantra, you know, this incredible, you know, that he is making these big, loud statements on canvas, these short little sort of, they're almost like little aphorisms or something. They're these short, sometimes very cheeky, funny, witty, smart-ass statements, full of humour and full of mischief that cause a little quake, cause a little sort of oscillation, and you go, "Ah, yeah, for me, I, you know, I relate to that as Buddhist art." But there you go. So I think that's probably the most important thing out of the whole conversation with you, that I could say really in respect to natural machane conjugation, and just, again, how something like that becomes like a seed and just how that seed just keeps flourishing, flourishing, flourishing. That was something very much, you know, when I'm chatting with someone that's extraordinary as Marina Brahmovich and re-performing a work of hers or doing my work, that is able to haunt that, you know, and inform that, I hope, to the best of my ability. So one of the things I always recommend to people when they're visiting Boda and they're encountering the Chirton and the pathway around the Chirton is to investigate all the spokes of the wheel, to go down the little arcades, to go down to the ends of things, you'll find great shops, great places to eat, all sorts of fantastic nooks and crannies, to be inquisitive and to just be curious, and to go and some of the best conversations I've had have been strangers when I've gone to little local places at the bottom of some of these arcades for a breakfast or something. And again, it's quite often prompted because someone sees the robes and they say, you know, it's your Tsarwe llama or whatever, and you end up having some kind of fascinating little chat. No small talk, small talk doesn't really happen here. It's normally about lineage, llamas, storytelling. And just enjoying the moment, just enjoying the kind of the moment tickling you, being tickled and tickling back. You are a very good questioner, I have to say. I love how people get into their thing. Thank you for listening to another Guru Viking podcast. For more interviews like these, as well as articles, videos and guided meditations, adaptations, visit www.guruviking.com.