[presented at Natural Dharma Fellowship, February 1 2026]

Welcome. I’m Matthew Bellows. I’ve been a member of NDF for six years. Before this, I practiced in the Shambhala lineage for about 25 years. This is my first Dharma Sunday talk. Plus this is a topic close to my heart and also somewhat new to NDF, so I’m a little nervous.

[let’s sit for five minutes to settle down together]

Start with homage to my teachers, especially my mom and dad, Trungpa, Rinpoche, dharma mentor Robert Spellman and dharma brother Lucas Dayley, my wife Ruth Webb, Lama Willa and Lama Liz.

Introduction:

Do you know that feeling when you are expecting a loved one home and they are 20, 30, 40 minutes late? Maybe it’s raining or snowing out. It’s nighttime. You can’t help but start to worry. You wish you could pick them up and scoop them right into a chair by the fire?

Or what about that feeling when you are watching a show on the couch or playing a videogame. You’ve seen two episodes and the third one starts in five, four, three, seconds… A voice in your head says “Actually, let’s turn this off and get some sleep.” and you turn it off to go up to bed instead of staying up too late, not getting the rest you need?

What about dropping a teenager or a lover off at the airport for a trip without you? They are going out into the wild world. You will be very far away and completely unable to help them. They are going to have to deal with whatever comes up on their own maybe for the first time… you just ache to surround them with armor and body guards and strong, loving energy because they mean so much to you and there will be nothing you can do to help them if something goes wrong.

Those are all examples of the feeling of the protector principle. We’ve all felt this before. It’s an intense feeling of caring, of wishing safety, protection, ease, joy for another person. Or for yourself… In the binge watching example, you have a choice - another episode, the pleasure from that, or the sleep you need to take care of yourself. By turning off the third episode before it starts, you are protecting your body and your mind.

That feeling of care, of extending good wishes, safe travels, to others and to yourself is what I want to talk about today. In Vajrayana Buddhism, we call this the Protector Principle. We have meditations, visualizations, rituals, mantras etc. as a way of cultivating a relationship with the energies of the protectors.

All of these practices are aimed at developing a sense of strength, well being, safety and protection for the most precious things in our life.

Because the world is a dangerous place.

It’s beautiful and wonderful of course, but it’s also speedy and crazy and wild.

Our mind, our experience is the same: beautiful and wonderful and wild.

You never know what’s going to come up next. Most of the time, whether we are talking about the world or our mind, it’s mundane, normal everyday stuff. Familiar thoughts, dreams, wishes, resentments, gaps. Familiar jobs, commutes, family, friends. We construct our daily life in many ways to maintain this comfortable, familiar, constrained existence.