Machig Labdrön's chöd teaching cuts through the illusion of self

Rootlessness in chöd is not a mood of drifting or loss. In Charlotte Rotterdam’s July 14 teaching, it becomes a direct inquiry into how the mind keeps manufacturing a solid "me" out of passing roles, preferences, and fear. Coming out of a solitary retreat, the piece has the lived feel of a meditation that has been tested in silence, not just explained from a distance.

Chöd as severance

Machig Labdrön’s lineage gives Rotterdam the language for that inquiry. Tricycle describes Machig’s teaching as severance, chöd, "cutting the root of suffering," not just trimming away the branches of confusion. That distinction matters in insight practice because it names the level at which dukkha persists, not in each new thought or mood, but in the reflex to claim experience as mine.

Rotterdam’s point is that the work can become endless if it stays on the surface. A practitioner can keep cutting through irritation, fear, and distraction forever, but still leave intact the deeper assumption that there is an enduring observer who owns them. Rootlessness, in this teaching, means cutting into that ownership reflex itself, the self-clinging that keeps rebuilding a separate self in a dualistic world.

Machig Labdrön and the lineage of chöd

Machig Labdrön stands at the center of that inheritance. The Treasury of Lives identifies her as a female Tibetan philosopher-adept best known for articulating and codifying the philosophy and praxis of Chöd. It places the practice in the Prajñāpāramitā stream, where wisdom is not a concept to decorate the mind with, but a way of seeing through the errors that keep experience pinned to ego.

That broader frame helps explain why chöd traveled so widely. The Treasury of Lives notes that it was taken up by multiple monastic and lay lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, and it also has a Bön corollary. Chöd is not a narrow ritual curiosity, then, but a method that different communities found workable for confronting ego-clinging and the errant patterns of mind that keep reinforcing it.

Rotterdam’s teaching leans into that same practical edge. The question is not whether the self can be philosophically disproven in the abstract, but whether the felt habit of selfing can be seen through in real time. In that sense, chöd belongs beside vipassana: both ask for a sharp look at how experience assembles itself, and both make room for a freedom that appears when the assembly stops being mistaken for an essence.

Rootlessness and the Buddhist question of not-self

Tricycle’s broader not-self coverage sharpens the point. The Buddha warned monks against getting lost in questions such as "What am I?" "Do I exist?" and "Do I not exist?" because they tend to harden into a thicket of views. Later Buddhist debate literature turned the issue into a more explicit doctrinal question, but Rotterdam’s teaching returns it to practice, where the issue is less about winning an argument than noticing how the mind grasps.

That is where the wave image becomes useful. Rotterdam compares the self to a wave that does not exist apart from the ocean, a way of saying that identities, preferences, and roles are temporary configurations rather than solid entities. For an insight meditator, the image points to something familiar: what feels like a stable person often looks, under observation, like a shifting pattern of conditions, relations, and habits.

The teaching’s force comes from how intimate that recognition can be. To realize rootlessness is to loosen the desperate grip on me-ness and see that what seems like a defended inner territory is always already relational, impermanent, and interdependent. The result is not emotional blankness. Rotterdam frames it as good news, because once the mind stops trying to protect a tiny self against the world, awareness can open more widely to the life already moving through it.

Charlotte Rotterdam’s contemplative frame

Rotterdam’s own teaching role gives the piece an institutional and practical grounding. Drala Mountain Center identifies Charlotte Z. Rotterdam as a Buddhist teacher, meditation instructor, and contemplative educator, and says she received the title of Magyu Lopön, or lead teacher of the Mother Lineage, from Lama Tsultrim Allione in 2016. Stanford event material says she has been on Naropa University’s faculty since 2002 and directs the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education in Boulder, Colorado.

Naropa describes her as someone who teaches Buddhism and meditation in the United States and abroad and says she was authorized to teach by Lama Tsultrim Allione. That combination of retreat experience, lineage authorization, and academic work helps explain why the teaching lands as both spare and substantial. It is rooted in practice, but it also speaks fluently to the way contemporary Insight circles talk about anatta, selfing, and the shock of seeing identity as process rather than possession.

Working with rootlessness in practice

For practitioners, the most useful move is often the simplest one. In the next sit, when a thought about status, hurt, or identity tightens around the body, notice the tightening as self-clinging rather than as truth, and do not follow every branch it sends out. Return to the breath, the sounds in the room, or the plain texture of sensation, and see whether the "owner" of experience can be found anywhere other than in the mind’s habit of claiming.

That is the cut Rotterdam is pointing toward, and it is why chöd feels less like an esoteric Tibetan specialty than a blunt instrument for insight. The teaching begins with severance, but it ends with a relief that is immediate and concrete: the strange ease of discovering that the self you have been defending was never a fixed root at all.