Meditation

We have been looking at methods for integrating the various aspects of our lives. We’ve seen that in order to deal with the various things in our lives and in order to follow the spiritual path in a more whole-hearted way, it’s very important to have a clear idea of all the...

Exercise to Enhance the Five Types of Deep Awareness In the last session we spoke about enhancing the five types of deep awareness in terms of directing them toward others. However, we can also enhance them toward ourselves. We’ll begin with an exercise, because it’s far more...

We have been discussing the Fourth Panchen Lama’s text on the Gelug-Kagyu tradition of mahamudra; and we saw that the presentation is divided into the preparation, the actual teachings, and the concluding procedures. And with the preparatory practices, we saw that this...

Review Thus far, we have discussed two of the aggregates that make up our experience: forms of physical phenomena and the feelings of some level of happiness. Each of these aggregates of changing phenomena is made up of many items, and we experience an assortment of them...

Discerning Meditation In general, meditation has two stages: discerning meditation and stabilizing meditation. In discerning meditation, we work through either progressive steps or a line of reasoning, as we did in the thinking process, to build up to a state of mind that...

The Fourth Practice: Visualizing a Bountiful Field for Spiritual Growth The fourth of the six preparatory practices is to visualize a bountiful field for spiritual growth (tshogs-zhing, Skt. punyakshetra). That’s usually called the merit field, but there is a meaning to...

Reminders before Trying Mahamudra Meditation on the Conventional Nature of the Mind We were talking about these mental factors or subsidiary awarenesses that are very much involved in any meditation practice – alertness, mindfulness, attention, concentration – and we saw...

The Difference Between a Healthy and Inflated Ego Firstly, some questions. There was one question during the break, which was what is the difference between the “self” and the “me,” or the “I.” I think that since this question was asked by a psychologist, and terminology is a...

Exercise to Harmonize the Various Aspects of Our Personalities Another application of this meditation method using the five types of deep awareness is as a method to become more aware of all the various facets of our personalities and to try to integrate and bring them into...

Many meditation practices involve visualization. “Visualization,” however, might be a bit of a misleading translation, because we’re not using our eyes. We’re working with our imagination, so it’s not just visual, but we have to imagine sounds, smells, tastes and physical...