It’s a normal Tuesday afternoon in my therapy office. My client is talking about his father. Nothing dramatic. A man who was in the room but not there at all. My client learned early not to reach, not to turn toward anyone when he needed something, and we’re talking about what that has cost him in his relationships. This client is a composite of many people I’ve sat with. The story is very common.
I’m describing to him what a person needs in order to feel safe, truly safe, with another person. Someone consistent and reliable. Someone who notices you. Someone who sees who you are, and you feel it. Someone who can settle you when you’re upset, and teach you to settle yourself. Someone who is glad you exist, not for what you do but for what you are. Someone who is with you and behind you when you go out into the world.
Halfway through the sentence, I hear it: I’m describing what I meet every morning at my altar.
Before my family wakes up, I walk down the stairs and through the garden to my shed. The candles on my altar are set to a timer, so I can see them glowing through the glass door. It’s like coming upon a treasure chest in the dark.
I enter and set the altar: I light incense, offer water, acknowledge the wooden flowers and torma (sculpted ritual offerings). I chant while I make mudras. I offer prostrations. I take refuge and generate the heart of compassion, confess, then offer the mandala, a symbolic offering of the entire universe, before I finally join my mind and heart and breath with my teachers and the lineage behind them. After that, I sit.
This is ngöndro, the preliminary practices found in Tibetan Buddhism and in Bön, Tibet’s indigenous spiritual tradition. It is the foundation laid before anything else is built. I practice in Bön, which carries its own lineage and runs parallel in many ways to Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. In Opening the Door to Bön, Geshe Nyima Dakpa Rinpoche lays out eight preliminaries, each to be accumulated (which is to say, practiced) a hundred thousand times.
I’m a boy from Indiana who grew up in Los Angeles, doing prostrations in East L.A. before sunrise. Part of me finds all this pretty odd. The rest of me feels it comes with the dumb luck of having found a beautiful lineage. I’m grateful I can hold both the oddness and the luck.
For years I tried to keep the shed and the therapy room separate. But after enough years in both, certain structures have settled into a steady rhyme. They have worn their way into me as a shared practice.
For years I tried to keep the shed and the therapy room separate. Ngöndro is not a clinical intervention, and attachment repair is not a spiritual practice. They have different aims, ethics, and methods, and I still think those distinctions matter. But after enough years in both, certain structures have settled into a steady rhyme. They have worn their way into me as a shared practice.
One of my core teachers in attachment work was Dr. Daniel P. Brown. Dan lived deeply in both worlds. He was a psychologist and attachment researcher and an accomplished translator of Tibetan sacred texts. With Dr. David Elliott, he wrote Attachment Disturbances in Adults, the book that lays out the Ideal Parent Figure Method at the center of my clinical work.
Dan cautioned me against bringing the two together. Don’t do it, he said. It would be problematic. People don’t take you seriously when you blend psychology with esoteric dharma. Ritual and science don’t seem to mix.
And then I would watch him do it. Sometimes in an aside. Sometimes in the way he described the capacity of the mind, or what he believed became possible in a person as they grew secure. His spiritual practice was always informing how he taught. You could feel it in everything, though he never presented it as clinical method. It was omnipresent. He was thoughtful and it never felt reckless. Still, it was impossible to hide.
When I began to feel these intersections emerge, and the joy in them, I asked him if it was all just one thing.
“It’s all one thing,” he said.
I didn’t hear that as permission to turn the dharma into psychotherapy, or psychotherapy into the dharma. I hold the boundaries. But the overlap delights me.
***
We tend to think of attachment security as something we either received in childhood, or didn’t. But what persists is not simply our history. It is the expectation that our history creates: what I imagine will happen when I reach for someone. What I believe another person can tolerate in me when I’m scared, needy, angry, happy. Whether I can imagine anyone being glad to see me without needing me to be different.
That expectation can evolve over time. And it can be changed by a figure you develop and then carry with you.
The list of needs I was reciting to my client that Tuesday is close to what Brown and Elliott called the five conditions for secure attachment: feeling safe and protected, being seen and known, being soothed, being expressly delighted in, and being supported in your exploration toward becoming your best self.
In the Ideal Parent Figure Method, I guide clients, often in a relaxed and lightly hypnotic state, to imagine a different set of parents. Not their own parents improved, but new figures, developed by the client with the clinician, who are exactly what this particular child needed: Parents filled with unmistakable joy when the child walks into the room. Parents who notice when something is off and move to soothe. Parents who are there when the child comes back from the world, however things may or may not have gone.
The client doesn’t need to picture these parents clearly. Often clients don’t “see” anything at all. What matters is what they feel: what it feels like to be the child of those parents, to receive that care, and to notice what that does in the body. And we return to it, session after session, until the body begins to expect it.
That returning is where ngöndro gets interesting.
A single experience of safety can matter enormously and still not change what a person expects. Repetition alone isn’t enough either. We can repeat things endlessly that confirm exactly what we already believe. What changes us is the experience that contradicts the prediction:
I expect that if I reach, no one will be there. And then someone is there.
I expect that if I show what is difficult, the relationship will evaporate. But it remains.
I expect that I have to do something special to be welcomed. Instead, I’m met with delight simply for existing.
Once can be dismissed as an anomaly. Then it happens again, and again, and eventually the exception starts competing with the rule.
Ngöndro is a ritual made of returnings: coming back, morning after morning, to the same relationships of trust. The traditions don’t need to be made equivalent to speak to one another. But a few of the preliminaries show what that returning looks like.
First, we take refuge. Before entering the unknown, we establish a relationship with what can be trusted. Attachment work calls this a safe haven: somewhere to turn when we’re frightened, before anything else is asked of us. When friends ask about my practice, I often just say, I take refuge. I mean it literally.
I go to.
I go into.
And refuge isn’t an idea I agree with just once. I return to it every morning.
Then, we confess. The tradition speaks of four powers of confession: the presence of the witnesses before whom we confess, sincere regret, the resolve not to repeat it, and the antidote that counters the harm. This isn’t confession in the Judeo-Christian sense I grew up around. It’s a willingness to look at what I’ve done, in the presence of what I trust, and stay in relationship anyway.
Fundamentally, confession is about repair. So much of attachment work is learning that a rupture doesn’t have to end a relationship, that it can become a door into a deeper one. The preliminaries build return into the foundation, and then ask you to practice it a hundred thousand times.
Then there is the mandala offering, in which one is turning oneself into a gratitude list. You gather everything beautiful in the world in your mind, and you give it away, yourself with it.
In attachment terms, something interesting happens here. The direction reverses. I’m not only the child being delighted in. I’m the one offering the delight.
And it is received.
Then there is guru yoga: joining your mind with the teacher’s and, through the teacher, with the whole lineage. If refuge resembles a safe haven, guru yoga begins to resemble a secure base, something reliable to explore from and come back to. I think of it, perhaps irreverently, as the secure family of the cosmos. I explore from it.
***
The ngöndro continues with the three heart mantras, the essential mantras of Bön, which I chant.
And the next morning I do all of it again. Some mornings it feels electric, as if it’s happening through me. Some mornings I’m distracted, carrying the dull weight of a tired mind. But I return. That’s familiar in the clinical room too: the frame you come back to.
The scale of the return is astonishing. At 108 repetitions a day, one accumulation of a hundred thousand takes about two and a half years. Eight of them, one after another, could take about twenty. This is why practitioners work at higher daily counts, practice intensively in retreat, increase their practice on sacred days, or simply absorb the accumulations across a life. Ngöndro is something you tend to live inside. My 51-year-old body is aging inside of it. I feel it creaking in my knees with every prostration.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han, writing about ritual, puts it simply: “Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.” Routine passes over you. Repetition goes down inside you.
But the mind does not come to practice empty. We bring our attachment histories with us, and the practice gives them a shape to live inside.
A practitioner can give a sacred figure everything they already expect from relationship. A person who has known warmth may imagine the figure as warm. A person shaped by harshness may instead expect a cold figure: withholding, demanding, cruel, or simply unavailable.
I know this from the inside. It took me a long time to find my way into one particular tantric practice. The instructions felt strange. The practice felt distant. I knew the feeling. It was the one I had as a kid: Am I doing this right? What if I get this wrong?
When the practice finally unfolded, it did so with such power and grace that I was stunned. It didn’t feel as though I had learned something, but that something had found its way into me. And something settled. It felt like security.
Clients bring similar histories into Ideal Parent Figure work. Invited to imagine the parents they needed, their minds can quietly rebuild the familiar ones: the distracted mother, the father who doesn’t have time for you. The imagined parent seems pleased, but not quite delighted. Available, but not quite. Safe, but not quite. The mind is very efficient at reproducing familiarity, and familiarity can outrank safety.
That doesn’t mean the practice has failed. It means the old expectation has revealed itself. In the clinical room, we don’t argue with it and we don’t dig into it. We notice it, and then we invite the ideal parents to do what the old ones couldn’t. Again and again, we repair the scene until it feels right. This is the new repetition.
In spiritual practice, this is one reason having a teacher and a living tradition matters. Otherwise we can mistake an old expectation for revelation, and the limits of our own imagination for the shape of reality.
But the relationship with the teacher is also where attachment histories run hottest. The longing to be fully seen by someone who seems to see everything is exactly what a frightened attachment system carries into a shrine room. Communities have paid dearly for not understanding that, through teachers who exploited that longing and students who couldn’t see it or say it. A teacher can help correct one’s distorted relationship to a sacred figure. But nothing automatically corrects a distorted relationship to the teacher. That takes time, a sound tradition, community, and practitioners willing to say what they see.
The same is true in the therapy room. Attachment repair asks a client to let someone near the most tender ground they have, which makes the clinician’s ethics as important as any technique.
This is where the two paths begin to separate, and where the order of things starts to matter.
Clinical work wants, among other things, a coherent and stable self capable of real relationship. Security is not solitary. It shows itself in how we move toward and with people. And it makes autonomy possible. You can venture out because there is somewhere to return to. You can be separate without experiencing separation as catastrophe.
Tantric practice eventually asks something different. It invites us to look through the apparent solidity of this continuous project of being a self.
For a long time I thought of these aims as opposites: you build the self in order to see through it. Now I think of a stable, secure self as ground. You need to be standing on something before you can bear to find out how solid it is. The psychologist and Buddhist teacher Jack Engler put it this way in 1984: “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.”
Without that footing, detachment can pass for nonattachment. Not needing anyone can look, at least, surprisingly spiritual. Withdrawal can masquerade as equanimity. Emptiness can become another place to hide. John Welwood called this “spiritual bypassing”: using spiritual ideas and practices to move around psychological wounds rather than through them. I’ve felt it in my own practice living in Los Angeles, arguably the bypassing Mecca.
The trouble is what groundlessness means to us when we’re already braced for loss. Without enough security, the unknown is not merely unknown. It is danger. And the nervous system will have already decided what will happen: Someone will leave. I’ll be hurt. I’m alone. I need to protect myself.
Security doesn’t tell us what is going to happen. Rather, it changes our relationship to not knowing. The unknown gets to be actually unknown. And then it can open.
When I sat down to write this, I thought it would be about “the yidam as secure base.” My tantric practice rotates through several yidams, meditational deities each embodying particular enlightened qualities: Sherab Chamma, the Medicine Buddha, Yeshe Walmo, and others. I experience them as a secure family I get to take part in. But writing this showed me something I hadn’t seen: the ngöndro is the field through which I enter all of that. I personally couldn’t find the security in the deities until the repetition of the preliminaries had prepared my mind for the connection.
Here the two paths touch, and then they part. Attachment work moves toward being steady enough in yourself to be deeply with others. Practice keeps going, and eventually turns toward the one who seemed to be doing all the receiving.
They don’t share an outcome. They share an order. You learn something about safety before being asked to enter what cannot be made safe.
***
On that Tuesday afternoon, the man across from me was learning to reach, or more accurately, learning what reaching can actually be. In the imagery, he was discovering that he could have a different experience of care. That new experience was beginning to change how he moved toward people in his life. Done again and again, it could change far more than that. His old prediction was still there, and it was powerful. But it was growing fainter. It no longer had the last word, because the imagery work had let him begin to trust relationships and explore a life he actually wanted.
I kept listening. And the way I listen is informed by all my years at that altar.
Dan had told me not to mix these things. But then he showed me, carefully, what it looks like when one life holds both: “It’s all one thing.” I’m not sure I would say it this way anymore. What I’ve found is that they steady and nourish one another. My altar, and the ritual of tending it, keep showing up in my voice, my pace, my tone on Tuesday afternoons. In the morning I go back to it. I get quiet and listen again.
Here is something to try: Tomorrow, before you leave the house, stop at the door. Bring to mind a presence that makes you feel protected. A teacher. A grandparent. A figure from your practice. Someone real or imagined. If what arrives feels cold or critical, notice that, and choose someone else.
Don’t analyze it. Let yourself be seen by them. Let them be glad that you exist. Notice what your mind and body do with that.
Then walk out the door and see if you can look at the world through those eyes.
And tomorrow, do it again.
