Meditation

The Thai Theravada System of Four Close Placements of Mindfulness Many people nowadays practice so-called “mindfulness meditation.” Mindfulness meditation is one adaptation of the Theravada practice of the four close placements of mindfulness. The Pali term for the close...

What Meditation Does Meditation is a method for transforming and improving our lives. How? Well, our lives are affected by our personality and moods, which are affected by our living and economic situation, the people we spend our time with and so on. If we have any experience...

Questions and Answers Let’s start our session with some questions. Karma I wonder if this statement is right or not: Every perception that we have through our six senses, along with the mental factors, is our karma, our past accumulated karma. Are perceptions which I perceive...

Making Life Meaningful Now we will continue with the text. We are on the second verse. (2) Listen with a clear (mind), O fortunate one, whose mind would rely on the path pleasing to the Triumphant through being unattached to the pleasures of compulsive existence and eager to...

Introduction to the Seven-Part Practice We need to realize that guru-yoga, a type of meditation practice, is one of the preliminaries. It’s a ngondro (sngon-’gro) practice. Ngondro means preliminary practices, and there are special preliminary practices that are shared in...

Review In our first session, we had a basic introduction to the topic. We saw that when we speak about refuge in Buddhism, we are not speaking about some passive act of turning to some higher power to protect us, but rather, we are taking certain measures to prevent our own...

Recognizing the Alaya for Habits In dzogchen meditation, we first access and recognize the alaya for habits, then effulgent rigpa, and then essence rigpa. How to recognize the alaya for habits? The alaya for habits gives rise to seeing and hearing, as well as to imagining and...

In our discussion of this practice, The Yoga of the Spiritual Master Inseparable from Avalokiteshvara, we have discussed taking safe direction and reaffirming our bodhichitta motivation, and now we are up to the four immeasurable attitudes, which is a very essential part of...

Review of the Preparatory Practices We have been looking at this text by the Fourth Panchen Lama called A Root Text for the Precious Gelug-Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra, and we saw that after his salutation verses, and his presentation of what the subject matter of this text...

Once we have practiced for a while, trying to maintain this deep awareness of nondual profound and clear – the profound understanding of voidness and the clarity of the visualization – then we practice the four types of mental stability. Not necessarily that we practice all...