Transform Fear into Freedom
through Chöd Healing

Join our waitlist, if you are interested in Chöd Healing practices, teachings and retreats.

Chöd practice creates a safe container for healing and awakening, inviting us to turn toward, not away from, life's unwanted experiences. This orientation is a potent medicine that transforms the root of fear and painful psychological patterns into the wakeful qualities of love and freedom. 
​This is the closing talk from a Chod Healing Retreat offered at Dharma Refuge, Oct 2025. It integrates the bodhisattva path and overviews introductory aspects of the Vajrayana. It includes a response to the question, "what is an empowerment?"
What is Chöd practice?
It's a powerful meditative practice that radically cuts through the belief in a separate self and severs the root of negative emotions. Developed by the 11th-century Tibetan yogini Machig Labdron, Chöd is a liberating medicine prophesied for widespread use during this time of collective confusion.

Chöd is one of the crown jewels of the Vajrayana, practiced and revered by all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Traditionally, Chöd practitioners are guided and authorized by a vajra master after years of preliminary training.​

What is Chöd Healing practice?
Chöd Healing is a guided meditation practice, sometimes offered as a ceremony. It's an approach that makes the essence of Chöd accessible to all meditation practitioners, without requiring years of preparatory practice. As a healing protocol, Chöd calls upon the enlightened mother archetypes of Tibetan Buddhism, known as Dakinis. Through meditative practice and visualization that connect us with the Dakini Mandala, we create a field of energy that's highly responsive to the practitioner, manifesting in whatever form is needed—peaceful or wrathful—to awaken our innate wisdom and love. 
Chöd healing mandala
With enough sangha interest and sangha support, Dharma Refuge will create a Chöd Healing Mandala. This will focus on:
  • sharing the essential teachings of Chöd, through the blessings of the Dudjom Lingpa lineage and Machig Labdron's body of teachings
  • guiding chöd healing practices
  • integrating contemporary modalities, frameworks, and disciplines such as Mindful Self-Compassion, Sustainable Compassion Training, Internal Family Systems, and Contemplative Neuroscience
who is this for?
  • Meditation practitioners who are interested in adding a new, liberating dimension to their practice
  • People interested in post traumatic growth through the integration of psychological and spiritual modalities​
  • Anyone interested in practices and healing ceremonies that tap into and transform the collective and personal energy of suffering and turmoil into wisdom and love.​

CHÖd healing and our lineage
Sue has been asked by her teacher, Anam Thubten Rinpoche, to share the blessings of his lineage, specifically to offer teachings and guided Chöd Healing practices based on Dudjom Lingpa's Troma Chöd, The Sadhana of the True Mother Krodhikali
recommended readings
Three books may be helpful to support those interested in this path. We plan to draw from the wisdom of these books throughout the year.

Anam Thubten's book Into the Haunted Ground, A Guide to Cutting the Root of Suffering, is a highly accessible introduction to the essence and practice of Chöd, from our sangha's root teacher and lineage master. 

What is the Haunted Ground?
This is a metaphor for our personal and collective negative patterns, the places we get stuck in confusion, rage, shame, and grief. In Tibet, Chöd was practiced in charnel grounds, where people used the visceral fear and aversion that arises when confronting death to bring the most difficult emotions into the field of practice.

How Compassion Works. A Step-by-Step Guide to Cultivating Well-Being, Love, and Wisdom, By John Makransky and Paul Condon
This book offers in-depth guidance on Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT). Meditation Teacher Deborah King is offering a monthly study of this book, along with teachings and guided practices. We highly recommend this program for those interested in Chöd Healing.

Outshining Trauma, A New Vision of Radical Self-Compassion Integrating Internal Family Systems and Buddhist Meditation, By Ralph De La Rosa, Foreword by Richard Schwartz

Ralph De La Rosa, he/they, was a pioneer in integrating Internal Family Systems and Buddhist Meditation. They's book offers a path of healing, post-traumatic growth, spiritual insight, and deep compassion for the most challenging parts of yourself. 

Sue has participated in a series of in-depth trainings offered by Ralph. She also had the privilege of working 1-1 work with them, integrating Buddhism and IFS.
Picture
Machig Labdron, Rubin Museum Collection
PictureSue Kochan
Meet the teacher
Sue has long held a vision of integrating her training in Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC), Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT) and Internal Family Systems (IFS) with Chöd. Her teacher, Anam Thubten Rinpoche, and IFS pioneer and author, Ralph De La Rosa both enthusiastically encouraged this integrative approach.

Sue participated in her first Chöd retreat in 2001. Her dedication to this practice began to blossom in 2007 when she participated in her first Chöd retreat with Anam Thubten Rinpoche. Sue has been teaching the Dharma at the request of her teacher Anam Thubten Rinpoche since 2008. Learn more about Sue, here.