Ngagpa practitioners engage in Chöd and related tantric disciplines as fully committed tantric householders, holding refuge, bodhisattva, and tantric vows while remaining outside the monastic framework. Transmission is received through empowerments, oral transmissions, and instructions from qualified lineage holders, often within established family or teacher–disciple lines. Extensive preliminaries such as prostrations, Vajrasattva practice, mandala offerings, and guru yoga commonly prepare the ground, purifying obscurations and stabilizing devotion. Within this context, practice is often personalized and adapted to the practitioner’s circumstances, allowing shorter but intense sessions and the integration of mantra, visualization, and mindfulness into daily activities, work, and family life.

Chöd itself is cultivated as a radical method of cutting through ego-clinging and fear by transforming one’s own body into an offering. Practitioners generate themselves as the yidam deity, dissolve the ordinary sense of the body, and re-manifest it as a vast feast of flesh, blood, and bone offered to deities, protectors, demons, karmic creditors, and all beings. This is supported by the use of ritual implements such as bell, damaru, kangling, and skull cup, together with liturgy and distinctive melodies. Chöd is frequently performed in charnel grounds, borderlands, and other fearsome or liminal places, often at night, where confrontation with images of death, spirits, and danger becomes a direct training in recognizing all appearances as the empty play of mind.

Ngagpa training in Chöd unfolds on outer, inner, and secret levels. Outer Chöd emphasizes practice in frightening environments and the offering of one’s own body to perceived external threats and spirits. Inner Chöd focuses on cutting attachment to the physical body and to deeply rooted emotional patterns such as anger, desire, pride, and jealousy through vivid visualization and offering. Secret Chöd deepens this further by recognizing all thoughts, perceptions, and “demons” as manifestations of awareness-emptiness, using the ritual as a vehicle for Mahāmudrā or Dzogchen realization. In this way, fear, conflict, illness, and hardship are all treated as opportunities to expose and release self-clinging.

Alongside Chöd, Ngagpas perform a wide range of specialized tantric rituals that serve both personal realization and communal needs. They undertake intensive deity practices and retreats focused on yidams such as Vajrakīlaya, Hayagrīva, Guru Rinpoche, Yamāntaka, or Tara, engaging in development-stage visualization, mantra recitation, and, where appropriate, completion-stage yogas. Wrathful and protective rites, including fire rituals, torma offerings, and protector practices, are performed to pacify obstacles, protect communities, and negotiate with local spirits and territorial deities. Life-cycle rituals such as phowa, funeral and bardo practices, healing rites, exorcisms, and prosperity or harvest ceremonies are also part of their repertoire, often integrating mantra, visualization, and sometimes medical knowledge.

What most distinctly characterizes this path is the integration of rigorous tantric discipline with ordinary life. Ngagpas maintain strict bodhisattva and tantric commitments while marrying, raising families, farming, practicing medicine, or traveling as ritual specialists. Fields, homes, marketplaces, caves, and hermitages all become practice grounds, and sound—through mantric recitation, song, and ritual music—serves as a powerful means to reveal emptiness and cut through fear. Through this continuous engagement, Chöd and other tantric methods cease to be confined to formal sessions and instead permeate the entire fabric of experience, transforming both personal challenges and communal responsibilities into the path of awakening.