Desire as Creative Power: Notes From a Dzogchen Town Hall

On a Sunday morning, a video gallery fills with small squares of faces, and a teacher asks everyone to take a breath with their mouth open. That is how Lama Surya Das opens his free weekly Meditation Town Hall, posted November 1, 2026, with Timo Spekkens sitting in as guest host. There is no lecture stand and no formal sit. The hour moves between breathing, pointed remarks about how people approach meditation, long passages of contemplative instruction, a set of blessings, and quiet pauses in which the teacher invites the room to simply be. Underneath the conversational tone is a single, carefully built argument: that the goal of meditation is not to get better at it, that the thing we are trying to reach is already present, and that our most ordinary wanting, including the wanting that feels like a problem, is a doorway into that presence rather than an obstacle to it.

What does "spontaneous presence" mean in a meditation session?

Lama Surya Das returns to the same phrase again and again. Early in the session he asks participants to "just be here" and to let their presence be "very spontaneous." He describes the whole practice as staying in touch with what he calls the liquidity of being, and he frames meditation as something you do in the sunshine of already knowing your own awareness, rather than as a set of techniques you perform to earn a result.

That reframing matters because it changes what a breath is for. In this session, the breaths are not a warm-up for a serious practice. They are, in his words, a refresh, a way to keep the room intimate with the spontaneous presencing that everyone already is. Early on he puts the point bluntly:

"I don't really care if you're an excellent meditator. I just want you to be profoundly free."

— Lama Surya Das, Meditation Town Hall, November 1, 2026, early in the session

He follows that with a qualification that gives the line its edge: freedom may take some meditation to reach, but the aim is to be free among all the circumstances of life, not only on the cushion. For a teacher, that is a sober standard. It asks students to measure their practice by how they live afterward.

Why does meditation slide into self-improvement, and how do you stop it?

Lama Surya Das names a trap that most practitioners recognize. The moment we sit down to meditate, he says, there is "right away" a lean toward self-improvement: the sense that we should be calmer, clearer, more open than we are. His remedy is a shift in perspective. Take the view, he suggests, that "the person we wish to be is already perfectly present right now."

"Let's just take the perspective that the person we wish to be is already perfectly present right now."

— Lama Surya Das, Meditation Town Hall, November 1, 2026, at 2:07

In practice, this means feeling into what he describes as the all-at-onceness of your emotional field in the body, without particularizing it. Rather than picking a feeling apart, naming it, or drifting off toward thoughts that are inspired by it, you let the whole field be felt at once. He notes that he has heard Eckhart Tolle call the heavy, recurring version of this felt sense the "pain body," and then adds, with a wry aside, that he sometimes feels nice emotions too. The point is not to sort the emotions into good and bad. It is to stop treating any of them as something to fix before you are allowed to rest.

He also gives the practice a name he borrows for the purpose: praxis. For him, praxis is less a technique than the way the practice resonates through daily life, the loving, boundless, luminous presence of timeless awareness showing up in time. He calls this nexus the place where the timeless meets the story of a person's history, hopes, and worries, all of it shimmering together, and he invites listeners to find it in the felt resonance of the body.

What is the difference between habitual mind and open awareness?

The most concrete teaching in the hour concerns attention. Lama Surya Das describes attention as something that, left alone, shoots outward like little laser beams, aimed at objects in the inner mind, at thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and at the world around us. Attention is restless by nature, and it cascades from one object to the next. He observes that this restlessness is simply part of the habitual mind.

"Notice that attention always shoots out and is restless and starts cascading."

— Lama Surya Das, Meditation Town Hall, November 1, 2026, at 5:35

The alternative he points to is not a blank or empty state. It is a field. He asks listeners to know that they are aware, let that awareness arise, and mingle it with the space all around, until it becomes the field of being itself. In that field, all experience arises "without center and without periphery," and it is suffused by knowing. Objects and the open field of being, along with the clear knowing that accompanies them, become one unified field.

Crucially, relaxing in this sense does not mean slumping. He is explicit that it is not "feet on the coffee table" relaxing. It is a relaxing of attention. Once attention rests, things can arise into the field, and upon arising they are already known. The instruction is to avoid modulating or changing them. Let each thing arise and dissolve. He frames this as the difference between meditation as a performance and meditation as recognition: you stop trying to make the mind behave and start noticing what it already is.

Can desire be part of the path rather than a barrier to it?

This is where the session takes its most distinctive turn. Lama Surya Das does not ask participants to get rid of desire. He asks them to look into its purity. When you examine any wish you have, he suggests, what sits underneath it is a desire for beingness and for being fullness. Desire, in this reading, is a fundamental aspect of the primordial nature, and the wish to recognize this fullness matures into the wish for all beings to recognize it too.

He reaches for a Tibetan word, dompa, which he says is often translated as "longing for." The longing he has in mind is specific: "I long for this space of freedom," the teacher says, pointing toward a place where our own hearts and minds become a refuge, right now. Ordinary desire, the kind that reaches for objects in the world, is in this framing a partial expression of the same longing, one that can be liberated rather than suppressed.

"Desire not as a lack or a deficiency but desire as a creative power."

— Lama Surya Das, Meditation Town Hall, November 1, 2026, at 8:18

That reframing has real consequences for a student. If desire is a deficiency, every wish becomes evidence that something is missing, and meditation becomes a campaign to fill the gap. If desire is a creative power, a field of orientation rather than a single impulse, then the same energy can be turned toward freedom. He also makes clear that this is not a one-time insight. It depends on relaxing attention and letting experience arise in the openness you already are.

What is the wisdom of perfect discernment?

Lama Surya Das connects this liberated desire to a named wisdom. He uses the Tibetan word yeshe for wisdom and then the phrase kun tok yeshe, which he translates as the wisdom of perfect discernment. The ordinary desire for objects, seen from the perspective of the mind, is in his account transformed into this discernment. He is careful about the condition, though. Discernment arises only when you relax attention and allow experience to arise in the openness you are experiencing yourself as.

For a lay listener, the useful point is that discernment here is not judgment. It is seeing clearly what is happening, including what is wanted and why, without grasping at it. A transcript this rough cannot capture every nuance of how he distinguishes the two, so it is worth hearing the teaching in its full sitting. What comes through clearly is the sequence: attention rests, experience arises, desire is seen for what it is, and discernment follows.

Why does a sangha's collective resonance matter?

The town hall is not only a solitary practice performed on screens. Lama Surya Das speaks of coming together with desire as a sangha, and he describes a sympathetic resonance between the people present. The image he uses is Indra's net, the old metaphor of jewels reflecting one another, which he says lights up with the actuality of being. The resonance comes "even prior to skillful means," he suggests, simply through people sitting in liberation together.

"We need you. Help us intensify in the collective."

— Lama Surya Das, Meditation Town Hall, November 1, 2026, at 11:24

That request reads as a teacher asking his students to be part of the practice, not an audience for it. Group meditation, in this framing, amplifies what each person is already doing. A small, quiet wish for freedom becomes louder when it is held by others who are also resting in the same field.

What happens when awareness starts to sound?

In the session's later movement, the teacher moves from silence toward voice. He describes desire maturing into languaging, a sounding that comes directly from timeless awareness, from the field of being and the resonance of direct Buddha nature, bypassing the habitual mind. Every sound and gesture, he says, is meant to facilitate the self-liberation of everyone we meet and of those who came before us. To ground that aspiration he recites a prayer he attributes to Amida, which begins with the lines "May you be embraced by infinite light" and "May fear dissolve in the radiance of boundless compassion."

"May you be embraced by infinite light. May fear dissolve in the radiance of boundless compassion."

— Lama Surya Das, reciting a prayer he attributes to Amida, Meditation Town Hall, November 1, 2026, at 12:47

The prayer runs through a sequence of blessings: clarity at the moment of transition, awakening into luminous peace, rest in effortless freedom, and the wish that a journey be unobstructed. Blessings of this kind are a traditional way of pointing practice outward, and he presents them not as sentiment but as an extension of the same openness the session has been cultivating all along.

Where does the practice lead when we let everything transform?

The teaching closes on the idea of transformation without effort. When you remain in the knowingness of knowing, he says, and allow any movement to arise and dissolve freely, everything that arises transforms into its highest potential. He links this to the teaching of primordial purity and describes how, when we stay out of the way and awareness awakens to itself, a kind of automatic liberation begins to operate. The session ends with a gentle request to take the heart essence and its wish for happiness, and to rest there rather than looking outward for happiness.

"Remain in the knowingness of knowing, a wearing awareness itself. Allow any movement arise, completely free, and dissolve."

— Lama Surya Das, Meditation Town Hall, November 1, 2026, at 16:18

The hour closes warmly, with an invitation to a beautiful day and gratitude to the room. Nothing about it is dramatic. Its power is in the consistency of the message: meditation is not a project to complete, the self we wish to be is already here, and even our longing is a form of that already-present freedom.

Where to go from here

The town hall is one of a series. Lama Surya Das describes it as a free weekly gathering, and the event description points viewers to dzogchen.org for registration and for dana donations. If you want to work with these ideas, a few practical steps follow from the session itself. Start by noticing that you are here, without adding a self-improvement agenda. Feel the emotional field in the body as a whole, without breaking it into parts. Let attention rest, and let each arising thought or feeling be known and then released. Then, when a wish appears, ask what it is reaching for underneath, and whether that longing can be seen as creative power rather than lack.

Above all, take the teacher's own standard. He asks not whether you are an excellent meditator, but whether you are profoundly free, and whether that freedom holds up in the ordinary circumstances of the day. That is the test the town hall is really asking you to take.