Ken Mc Leod - Career

Career

Ken McLeod was born in Yorkshire, England (1948) and raised in Canada. He holds an M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia. In 1970 he met Ven. Kalu Rinpoche at his monastery outside Darjeeling, India and began studying Tibetan Buddhism. Kalu Rinpoche became his principal teacher and thus began a long association between the two. Other significant teachers included: Dezhung Rinpoche, Thrangu Rinpoche, Gangteng Tulku Rinpoche, Karmapa XVI, and Kilung Rinpoche.

In the 1970s and 80’s, McLeod received training, plus travelled, translated, and worked on Kalu Rinpoche’s many projects. He was the translator for Kalu Rinpoche’s first two tours of the West (1972 and 1974-5). Also, he translated texts: Writings of Kalu Rinpoche; A Continuous Rain to Benefit Beings; and The Great Path of Awakening by Jamgon Kongtrul, which he published as "The Direct Path to Enlightenment." In 1974, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche offered his own translation of the basic slogans therein, and criticized McLeod's translation of the title — although he liked the translation generally. McLeod publicly accepted the criticism and Shambhala Publications published it in 1987 as The Great Path of Awakening. Trungpa Rinpoche's own book on the slogans included McLeod's translations for comparison. In 1976, he joined Kalu Rinpoche in Central France to help establish and then participate in the first 3-year retreat for Westerners (Kagyu Ling). This was the first of two three-year retreats (1976–83). His fellow retreatants included others who also went on to become senior Western teachers and translators, Sarah Harding, Ingrid McLeod, Richard Barron, Anthony Chapman, Denis Eysseric, and Hugh Thompson. In 1985, at Rinpoche’s request, McLeod translated and published The Chariot for Traveling the Path to Freedom: the Life Story of Kalu Rinpoche. Also in that year, Kalu Rinpoche authorized him to teach, and asked him to be the resident teacher at his Dharma center Kagyu Donga Chuling (KDC) in Los Angeles. McLeod was an interpreter for several other Kagyu teachers, most notably for Jamgon Kontrul III (of Pepung) at the 1990 Kalachakra Empowerment in Toronto.

After several years at KDC, McLeod saw that the traditional, religious center approach wasn’t meeting his students’ needs. So he began evolving a new, non-traditional model based upon regular, one-on-one practice consultations; small, highly interactive teaching groups & meditation retreats; the notion of the individual practice path; an informal student-teacher relationship; and a “pragmatic” way to present material. These key elements would become the core of his teaching.

In 1990, he left KDC to set up a non-profit organization, Unfettered Mind, as a vehicle for this approach. At the time, the notion of a Buddhist teacher establishing a private practice went against accepted convention. It caused much controversy in 1996 when he presented the idea to the Buddhist Teachers Conference but has since been adopted by many teachers. During the 90’s, McLeod established a corporate consulting business, organized three conferences on Buddhism and Psychotherapy, and developed the curriculum that eventually became his book Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention (2001).

After 15 years, he realized that this model couldn’t accommodate the ways in which Unfettered Mind was growing and evolving. His practice as a business consultant gave him an understanding of how the flaws that characterize organizations and institutions could also be found in Unfettered Mind and most other Buddhist organizations. So in 2005, he went on sabbatical; in 2006, he re-invented Unfettered Mind. In an effort to avoid the structure & hierarchy of most Buddhist institutions, UM is now modeled as a network. In addition to the usual, teacher-driven activities (classes, workshops, retreats), UM is developing a wide range of web-based resources from which a practitioner – local or non-local – can find information, guidance and teachings that meet their own individual needs and enable them to shape their own, specific path, outside of the established, institutional framework.