Preliminary Practices

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...

Recognizing Our Mental Blocks The mahamudra teachings also emphasize the importance and need for extensive preliminary practice. The point of such practice, for example making hundreds of thousands of prostrations, is to purify ourselves of the grossest levels of obstacles...

Review  The six-session yoga practice is a way of helping us to fulfill our commitments from the anuttarayoga tantra initiation, by reminding us of the vows that we’ve taken and also the 19 closely bonding practices, or damtsig (dam-tshig), to make a close connection with...

Taming the Mind All of us wish for happiness and none of us wish to have any suffering. This is true of everybody, but it is very difficult to come upon all the circumstances that will bring this about. If we look merely at external circumstances, we find it nearly...

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...

The Salutation The text begins with the verse of salutation in which a distinction must be made between the eight qualities of Ishvara (dbang-phyug), the king of the gods, and the eight king-of-the-god types of qualities. The former are the qualities of the king of the gods,...

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,...

(1) To gain hold of that precious mind, I offer sincerely to you, the Thusly Gone (Buddhas), to the stainless Rare Gem of the hallowed Dharma, and to you, the offspring of the Buddhas, with oceans of good qualities: (2) Whatever flowers and fruits there are and whatever...

Reasons for Preliminaries Becoming Flat People engaged in preliminary practices sometimes find them becoming flat. The primary fault lies with our motivation. The main measure to prevent this is continually reaffirming our reasons for engaging in the preliminaries. If, as...

The Ceremony for Wishing Bodhichitta, Together with Advice  When we talk about developing bodhichitta, of course, this is a process that we need to work up to and that requires a great deal of work and effort to sincerely feel. There are stages of meditation for...