Meditation

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...

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...

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...

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...

Reaffirming the Motivation We need to have a proper motivation for listening to the teachings; otherwise we will miss an opportunity to build up a great deal of positive force and to incorporate this teaching in our mental continuum. We try not to be motivated by wanting...

Review  We’ve spoken about how on any spiritual journey, like going on a caravan, we need to make preparation for the various things that we’re going to bring with us on our journey. What’s usually referred to as the preliminary practices is the preparation; it’s the...

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...

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...

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...

An Environment Conducive for Meditation To actually engage in meditation, we need circumstances conducive for it. There are many lists of factors that will be conducive for meditation, but these are usually discussed or presented within the context of doing a meditation...