Reaffirming Safe Direction and Bodhichitta

Introduction

In outlining this third of the six preparatory practices, the texts say first you do prostration, then you sit down, then you clear the mind by focusing on the breath, and only then do you reaffirm your motivation of refuge (safe direction) and bodhichitta. But from my experience, I’ve found that when people, before a teaching or before meditation, just do prostration without anything before that and then sit down, the prostration is quite mechanical. So because it says to sit down first and then focus on the breath and then the refuge and bodhichitta, I think that this indicates that you also would need to reaffirm your motivation before that initial prostration; otherwise you have no motivation.

The whole point of focusing on the breath is to get your mind in a neutral state – what’s called unspecified (it’s not specified by Buddha to be either constructive or destructive) – and on that basis, then you can generate a positive state of mind. If you just try to generate a positive state of mind on the basis of starting with your mind all jumbled with the busyness of the day or of the traffic of getting here, and so on, then it’s very difficult. So first a neutral state, which is attained through just focusing on the breath, and then the positive motivation. Therefore, in the manner in which I teach, I have added this preliminary or preparatory step of focusing on the breath and setting the motivation before doing the initial prostration and sitting down. One can repeat it again, of course, in the proper order. I think there’s no fault in doing it twice.

What we want to try to avoid is having our practice become mechanical, and that is very, very, very easy to have – a mechanical type of practice in which there’s very little feeling. You just sort of rush through it because you feel – for whatever reason – obligated to do it, you would feel guilty if you didn’t do it, or it becomes such a strong habit it’s like brushing your teeth and you wouldn’t think not to do it but nevertheless there’s no feeling in it. Once your practice becomes mechanical and you’ve built up a habit of doing mechanical type of practice, it’s very hard to break that habit.

So if you’re just starting out, try to be careful not to establish a habit of doing mechanical practice with no feeling behind it. Because it’s very easy to get into that habit. Why? Because our lives are very busy. We don’t have very much time. You have to get ready in the morning and go to work or take care of the kids. You want to get through the practice, and even though you have this very strong intention that you’re always going to do the practice every day, the tendency is that you want to rush through it and get it finished as quickly as possible because there are so many other things you have to do during the day. This is the reality that we have to deal with. This is why it’s important to be able to generate the motivation, the intention, the feeling, etc., instantly, although that, of course, can only come after a great deal of familiarity and meditation. Although we reaffirm our motivation, our motivation needs to be there all the time on some sort of an almost unconscious level. So before making prostration and sitting down, we visualize in front of us an object for refuge and then we take safe direction and reaffirm our bodhichitta motivation.

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