Finding Freedom from Lenchak: Examining Our Obsessive Attachments
byDzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Lenchak is a term I have been using for a number of years, I have been equating it with attachment, but experientially lenchak is felt as an emotional, almost physical, pain in the chest. It consumes your peace of mind and has the effect of lowering your lungta. Lenchak is like the Epstein Barr virus. When Epstein Barr comes on strong and takes a strong hold of your body, you feel lost in tremendous sense of fatigue, it feels like hard work even getting up and going to the bathroom. In this way, lenchak attacks the “nervous system” of your lungta or energy, and you are brought down to the point of collapsing into a mode of pathetic existence.
If we look back, we can see that this experience of lenchak has been something that has come up for most of our life, and it seems like it will continue into the future. In this way, we do not really even have a notion that it is possible to be free of it.
From my point of view, people are in incredible pain because of their lenchak. If you really look at your life, one thing that is an absolute suffering is your lenchak towards the world, towards beings that you are closely connected to, towards material goods, towards ideologies, and ultimately towards yourself. Lenchak doesn”t leave us alone at all.
Lenchak to Beings
Lenchak is obsessive attachment. For example, in the case of having lenchak to a person close to you, regardless of how the other person feels, you want to be the sole possessor of that person”s heart. If that person wants to offer his or her heart to you, then yes! Why not
However with this kind of obsessive attachment, you fail to recognize how your dignity gets affected, how it leaves you in a desperate place and state of mind. You become reduced to the desperate state of needing that person”s heart in your possession. You want their heart locked inside a box with an easily accessible combination, so that you can access its magic at any time.
Whether it”s between couples, students and teachers, children and parents, or between friends, this is “over-excessive” attachment. In this way, lenchak gets in the way of having a simple, decent and wholesome relationship with the world.
Lenchak or “over-excessive” attachment to beings, especially those close to you, also manifests in another form, it begins to blur the lines between the other person”s pain and your own; you begin to feel their pain, and react and struggle with it, almost as if it were your own. Of course, it is not your pain, and there is not much you can do to resolve it, especially when the lenchak is strong. This leads to resentment and frustration with the other person and in particular leads to feeling of being trapped: you feel stuck with that person”s emotions and pain. This is another sign of a strong lenchak taking place.
Thoughts and Lenchak
When you say, “I”m suffering!”, there are many thoughts popping up in your head like: “He”s bad, she”s bad, I hate this person, I am totally disgusted with that person, and I don”t want to even have a glimpse of this person in my life ever again.”
Now there is a freedom to actually have all of those thoughts in your mind: in fact you cant do much about it when they pop up in your head like that because of this natural, unavoidable freedom in the mind that allows for thoughts to assert themselves.
However, what”s happening in your chest is another story. This physical or emotional pain of lenchak is very dense and makes you collapse in large, medium and small ways, causing you to lose your seat of lungta or strength.
The best way to describe this pain in the chest is that it consumes both you and your peace. Yes, you could get mad, but that is a desperate form of c…
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