With the new lunar month my kitchen turns into a workshop again after a two-week break, which was spent getting the Saga Dawa namkhas to their owners and my other projects. Several namkhas were distributed around Prague, three were posted to Germany and two to France. It was deeply moving to receive the powerful responses and I’m strongly encouraged to continue this extremely meaningful work. In fact, I’ve made a commitment to care for my namkhas for life. Whoever has such karma as to receive a namkha from me is entitled to a lifelong service and I’ll be empowering their namkha regularly. I bow to them: though they have requested tge namkha for their own benefit, in fact they are also supporting this precious, potent practice and create a lot of good karma to benefit the world, as well. I’m forever their servant.
I have three namkhas planned for this month, so as to ease down after last month’s Saga Dawa namkha retreat, when I made 9. I start with cleaning the rods with a damp cloth. Then I measure each of the one-metre beechwood rods and cut them to size. Each 1m rod (6mm diameter) is enough for one 35cm namkha. Grooves are sown to allow for the joints. Them all the rough edges are filed smooth. With practice, it takes about an hour to prepare one namkha frame.
The frame segments are then smudged in Tibetan incense smoke. Then it’s time for meditation before I mark the central joint with the seed syllable and start weaving. The namkha is woven with a special kind of mind engrossed in meditation supported by mantra recitation. I follow exactly the method taught by the Tibetan master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu.
NAMKHA 