A Guide to Tsoknyi Rinpoche's Fully Being Teachings with Scott Tusa

In Episode 28 of Redesigning The Dharma by Sahaja Soma, Adrian Baker interviews Buddhist meditation teacher Scott Tusa about spiritual materialism and Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s Fully Being teachings. Tusa describes spiritual materialism as using spiritual practice to bolster ego-clinging, noting it can appear in obvious cultural trends and in subtle fixations on beliefs, identities, and “getting rid of” suffering; he recommends tools like mindfulness, hope-and-fear awareness, and curiosity. He outlines Fully Being’s core somatic practices—dropping, vase breathing, and handshaking—developed to address modern disconnection between thinking and the “feeling world,” and explains how they relate to Mahamudra-style letting-be and support deeper Vajrayana practice as “ngöndro before ngöndro.” The conversation covers subtle body theory (tsa, lung, tigle), modern “speediness,” anxiety and lung disorder, essence love as basic okayness, and parallels with plant-medicine experiences, emphasizing meeting feelings compassionately rather than reinforcing stories. Episode Highlights: - 00:00 Introduction to Scott Tusa - 01:34 What Is Spiritual Materialism? - 11:26 What Is Tsoknyi Rinpoche's Fully Being? - 18:29 Subtle Body and Speediness - 26:42 Tibetan Subtle Body Basics and Fully Being Practices - 32:46 Drop the Story Your Experience - 39:37 What is Essence Love? - 47:14 Nonduality Without Bypass - 49:50 Wrap Up and Offerings Guest Bio: Scott Tusa is a Buddhist meditation teacher and practitioner who has spent the last 25 years exploring how to embody and live meaningfully through the Buddhist path.At age sixteen, his mother's death sparked a deep longing for healing and spiritual wisdom that eventually led him to Tibetan Buddhism. He spent my early twenties seeking out and learning from a variety of Tibetan Buddhist masters, and was ordained by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as a Buddhist monk at age twenty-eight. He spent the next nine years as a monk, deepening his understanding of the Dharma, engaging in solitary meditation retreats, and continuing his studies with teachers in India, Nepal, and the United States, including his main teachers Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche. Since 2008, he has been teaching Buddhist meditation in group and one-to-one settings in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and online, bringing Buddhist wisdom to modern meditators, helping them to deepen and develop more confidence in their practice. SCOTT TUSA’S WEBSITE FULLY BEING WEBSITE TSOKNYI RINPOCHE’S WEBSITE CONNECT WITH SCOTT ON SOCIAL