Meditation

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...

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...

The second preparatory practice is taking care about obtaining offerings without hypocrisy and setting them up in a beautiful arrangement. Different Types of Offering When Atisha went to Tibet, he recommended that people make water offerings. People were poor, obviously,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...