Today was a wondrous day. Today we received the highest yoga tantra empowerment of Buddha Heruka, an experience, as Genla Khyenrab pointed out, of great good fortune. And don’t we know it … as the meditation hall gradually filled, the air was full of anticipation.

Gen-la Khyenrab conducted the empowerment with exceptional clarity and concision. The Heruka empowerment consists of a series of empowerments through which which we receive the blessings for our future attainments of Heruka’s body, speech and mind. Gen-la kept his explanations brief, focusing instead on the individual empowerments, allowing each one to flow into the next seamlessly. This allowed us to remain undistracted, absorbed in meditation, throughout the empowerment.

Even those experiencing the empowerment for the first time commented on the clarity. One person said to me, ‘it wasn’t as complex as I’d been led to believe’. Among all the newly empowered that I spoke to there was so much joy and gratitude.

Having just received the empowerment of the blue deity Heruka, we spilled out on to the Toronto streets only to be met by thousands of blue clad people streaming by us. Were we still in Heruka’s mandala? Or were these people Toronto Blue Jay fans on their way to the game? Of course, as we’d just been training in, that depends on our mind. With a pure mind we will experience a pure world. The empowerment is such a powerful event, directly showing us the pure land as an actual possibility. Great good fortune indeed. And there’s more to come ….