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The Buddhist trust fall: Letting go with guru yoga

Exploring faith and trust in Dzogchen: How guru yoga helps us let go and recognize the nature of mind.
The Buddhist trust fall: Letting go with guru yoga

Faith is a term a lot of Buddhists find a fundamental aversion to, and yet faith is key to the non-dual traditions of Mahamudra and Dzogchen. In Western discourse, faith is usually equated with blind belief—accepting something without question or evidence. However, in the Buddhist tradition, faith (Tib. dad pa) is far from blind. It is an active and truth-seeking, built on the understanding reality as it is–the unfailing logic of dependent origination and the ultimate truth of emptiness.

The Nature of Faith in Buddhism

Faith in Buddhism is not about wishful thinking or passive acceptance; it is about trusting a path that leads to direct experience. Generally, Buddhists describe three types of faith:

  1. Clear faith: An immediate sense of inspiration or joy upon encountering the Dharma, often sparked by hearing teachings or seeing the realized qualities of a teacher
  2. Aspiring faith: The deep longing to understand and embody what one has glimpsed
  3. Confident faith: The certainty that arises through reasoning and direct insight, knowing that the path is genuine because it has been personally verified

This evolution of faith is grounded in understanding the nature of reality and calls us to move beyond concepts into the domain of direct experience, the nature of the mind itself.

Guru Yoga: A direct encounter with our true nature

Guru yoga plays a crucial role in Dzogchen because it creates the conditions for a direct experience of the nature of mind. While study and contemplation can clarify concepts and move us forward on the path, only direct experience leads to liberation.

Guru yoga plays an important role in the pointing-out instructions, allowing practitioners to shift from a conceptual understanding to immediate recognition of their own innate awareness. The teacher serves as a mirror, reflecting the student’s own nature back to them. The nature of mind cannot be grasped through analysis alone, we need to see clearly for ourselves what is being pointed out by the teacher.

Faith in this context is not about obedience to the guru, but about openness to recognizing our own buddhanature. The teacher does not grant realization; rather, they create the conditions for the student to discover it for themselves. Faith here means trusting the process enough to let go of preconceptions and habitual doubts that keep us trapped in narrow conceptions of the self.

One of the greatest challenges in Dzogchen is that we do not recognize what is already present—our own primordial awareness. Guru yoga helps bridge this gap by establishing a relationship with realization before we have stable, direct experience of it. Through devotion and practice, we gain alignment with something that is beyond our ordinary mind or ordinary dualistic experience.

This process requires trust—like a spiritual trust fall. At some point, we must let go of our conceptual grasping and step beyond our narrow sense of self. Just as in a physical trust fall, where we must release our fear and tension and allow ourselves to be caught, in Dzogchen, we must release our identification with thoughts, emotions, and self-grasping to encounter the vast, open awareness that has been present all along.

The Paradox of Guru Yoga

On the relative level, the teacher is a guide, and faith is a necessary bridge to move us forward on the path to awakening. On the ultimate level, the teacher is not separate from the nature of mind itself. In the end, guru yoga is about letting go of the illusion of a separate self and entering into non-dual open presence.

Faith in guru yoga is not about placing power in another’s hands but about trusting the method that allows us to encounter the true nature of reality. It is a radical act of trust in our own awakened potential, a leap beyond ordinary mind into the vast, open clarity of rigpa.

The invitation of Dzogchen is simple but profound: relax, let go, trust, and recognize what has always been present.