Strengthening Our Minds through Meditation Practice

This is a very good subject. I am a recognized lama or Rinpoche, but still, as you were just saying, it is also a challenge for me to practice off of my cushion. Yes, it is sometimes difficult for me to maintain my practice away from my cushion. But I don’t give up. That’s it. It is important not to give up. I don’t want to give up. When I practice on my cushion, I appreciate what I learn there. I also appreciate what I’ve learned from my teachers. But still, I know that my dedication is not complete. 

Dedication comes from the process of meditation. Meditation gives us that kick, encourages us toward deeper dedication. In Buddhist language, we call our personal meditation “space-like” and what happens post-meditation in our everyday life as “illusion-like subsequent realization.” It’s good to do meditation. But often we don’t fully see the importance and need for practice as a part of our lives. In Tibetan Buddhism, there are certain obligations that we take upon ourselves. There are things that we need to read, certain sadhanas that we need to read. There are certain prayers that we need to do. But, as time goes by, these obligations become things that we need to force ourselves to do.

I know that in every moment, in every situation, I can choose how I should react. I know I always have a choice, and I know that with all the knowledge and experience I have, I should be able to choose the right response. Of course, I am very familiar with my first choice. That choice comes from my deluded mind. I want to protect myself and hold on to my deluded, negative feelings. Often, I’m still unable to practice the antidotes that I learned in spiritual education. I still do not carry the wisdom of personal practice into my everyday life. But then as the problem and my flawed and negative response present themselves, I think to myself that maybe this is an opportunity. And then, at that moment, when I take the time to really look at my situation, I begin to understand that maybe this is a situation that really should be happening to me so that I can learn to use it as an antidote to overcome my negative response.

When I practice on my cushion, my motivation is good. My practice is okay. We know meditation is important, but it is hard to see how our meditation actually connects us to what we are going to do afterwards, those hours after the meditation. We don’t always feel that we need to connect what happens in our personal meditation to our everyday experiences, to the things we do after we finish meditation. I admit that I do not always practice the antidotes that I have learned in my spiritual education. I don’t always have that wisdom. We often don’t connect this. That is true for me. Even I find it difficult to connect it.

I want to talk a little about the movie Braveheart. It is a movie that I very much enjoyed. Maybe some of you also saw it? In the movie, Mel Gibson’s character, William Wallace, knows that a huge army is approaching to attack him and his men. They are all very fearful, but somehow Wallace is able to encourage them, and finally none of them wants to surrender. Instead, they feel that the coming day is worth dying for. They all stand very strong. Mel Gibson’s character gives a passionate speech, and even though I was just watching and not myself part of the movie, I was very much drawn into the drama I was watching. I felt like I was part of the movie. I felt like I was part of Wallace’s small army. I felt like I wanted to be there with the rest of his men.

Now, when we are sitting there on our cushion, actually we are doing a similar kind of practice. We want to be strong instead of trying to escape by sleeping or taking drugs or choosing some other sort of escape that will separate us from our problems for a few minutes or a few hours. Sitting on our cushion brings us strength, and once we feel that our strength is strong, then we have the confidence that has been lacking in our practice. 

One of the great masters of the Kadampa tradition meditated on the ten destructive actions and how they arise from negative emotions, and from this practice he felt, “Today, my job is to stand with the big stick of ethical contact and protect myself against negative emotions arising to take advantage of me and weaken me. My job is to stand still and be strong.” We sometimes say, hold the floor. Doesn’t that sound like a brave heart? Yes, that truly is a brave heart. You have protection from the negatives of your situation. Like our immune system – the best way to fight the disease is to make your immune system stronger.

Taking that medicine might be controversial, but we stay strong. It might take a little time, maybe a month, let’s say, then after that, we feel it really can protect us and help us. And then nobody needs to tell us, “Don’t do that.” Even if somebody says that to us, you feel compassion toward them, not anger, because they do not have this experience. They feel that I’m doing something stupid, but I know this is really helping me. Buddha said, “You are your own protector. There’s no one outside to protect you. It’s up to you. You are your own protector.” 

The time we spend in meditation is not the time we want to run away from reality. We want to strengthen ourselves, to strengthen our awareness, to bring strength, to bring power, into our meditation process. And with time, as we feel stronger, our self-confidence grows.

In the film Braveheart, Mel Gibson’s character, William Wallace, said it’s necessary to develop the courage to love and protect ourselves from the consequences of life’s situations. In the same way, we can say this about our body’s immune system. If we are fighting a disease, we need an immune system that is strong and resilient. If we take medication to help us fight our illness, it may be that the medicine is effective, but there may also be negative side effects from it. What is best is to develop our own strong immune system – being able to fight illness naturally. 

Similarly, our goal should be to improve our own personal practice. Building our own practice and developing our confidence within our practice takes time and effort. We need to continue our efforts with determination and the belief that we are strong enough to be successful. Should we encounter a problem in our personal training, we must be able to look at that problem calmly and carefully. If we encounter a problem that poses a risk to our practice or threatens to disrupt it, we must be able to control and manage that threat. Building our personal practice is our own responsibility, and with strength in our heart and with strength in our mind, we continue with our personal training. As Buddha said, “I am my own protector. Who else will protect me?”

Our practice should not focus on subduing or controlling conditions external to ourselves. Rather we should look within, at our own minds, and find ways to make our mind stronger. Shantideva in Engaging in Bodhisattva Bahavior offered this example. We wish to protect ourselves from the sharp rocks and stones that we walk on. But in order to protect ourselves, should we try to cover all the land we walk on with pieces of leather? Is this the best way of protecting ourselves? Consider how many pieces of leather we would need to cover all the land? Rather than trying to find enough leather to cover all the land, it is, of course, far more reasonable to find a good pair of shoes that can protect us from those stones and rocks. 

Shantideva’s example counsels us to make our own minds stronger. In addition, the Kangyur texts, which contain the actual words of Buddha, as well as the Tengyur commentaries by the Indian masters who followed him, teach that we must work to develop and strengthen our own minds. 

It is important to ask why we wish to develop our minds. To what purpose? What is the reason for awakening the mind? This is also true of our practice. We hear others talk about how perfect their practice is, but we don’t ask what makes it perfect. What makes it so good? Consider our response when a new version of the iPhone is released. Immediately we want that new version. We don’t ask what makes it the best. We want it because we believe that since it is the latest version, it must be the best. And our children want the newest iPhone too. They want it not necessarily because it is the best cell phone, but because other children have it. 

Similarly, when we practice the Dharma, we practice because it is good and will improve our minds. But more than that, we should want to know what will work to awaken our minds and to understand the shortcomings of an unenlightened mind. Then, should the day come when we face our own personal problems or difficulties, we can turn to our personal practice for guidance, like the medicine we are prescribed for an illness, and discover at that time what works or what doesn’t work. 

We all experience suffering in our lives, and with each experience, we gain insight into what suffering is and how we are affected by it. For instance, the deep and heartbreaking sadness that we feel as the result of a loved one’s death shows us one of the most painful occasions of suffering. As we examine the subject of suffering and experience it within our own life, we develop a deeper understanding of it. This is the lesson that Buddha taught. It is our responsibility to learn that lesson. 

As our understanding develops, we ask whether there is a final freedom from it. We know suffering occurs throughout our life, both presently and also in our future. Is there a way to avoid the inevitability of suffering in our future? We ask, must we experience the emotional pain of future suffering or is there a way to completely stop all the causes of it, both for today and for the future? When we have a headache, we can take medicine to stop the pain, but that medicine will not guarantee that a headache will not cause us pain and suffering again at a future date. We would like to find a medicine or a certain dosage that will completely stop our headaches. In the same way, we would like to completely remove all the causes of our future suffering. 

Our Dharma practice teaches us the causes of suffering and how we can eliminate those causes in the future. When we consider the Three Jewels - the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha - the Dharma is the main jewel. The Dharma teaches us about suffering and the causes of suffering. This is the most important part of the teachings of the Dharma. 

These lessons come from our spiritual teachers. Our teachers are the representatives of the Buddha, so we understand therefore, that they are the teachings of the Buddha himself. These lessons teach us how to stop the causes of suffering. They are the teachings that most concern our own personal situation, and we need to understand them and apply them to our own life. 

Suffering and the causes of suffering are the main focus of the four noble truths. They are the most important focus of our meditation. First, we listen to the teachings. Next, in order to gain further insight and understanding, we spend time thinking deeply about the teachings we’ve heard. Then we meditate on our understanding of these teachings. First, we do what is known as analytical or discerning meditation. We use our reasoning in order to come to a correct understanding. Following that, we use mindfulness, as well as our attention and concentration, in order to stabilize the understanding that we’ve attained.

To help us reach that goal, there is a meditation method by which we train our minds to be focused and one-pointed, where our minds can examine and evaluate a certain subject as much as it wants. We might think that this process seems very difficult, and so we don’t want to pursue the training. We want to know how developing our ability to stay focused will help us.

We live today in a cellular world. It seems we just can’t be without our cell phones. We can’t sit alone without scrolling through them looking for the latest news. Most of us can’t go to work or leave our homes without them. At every opportunity, we check to see if something new has appeared on our cell phones that demands our attention. This has become a habit. 

A few days ago, my brother came to visit me. At one point during our time together he said he had to use the bathroom, but after only a few seconds in the bathroom, he reappeared. I asked, “Are you done?” He answered, “No, but I forgot my cell phone, and I cannot sit in the bathroom without it.” Even in the bathroom we must have our cell phone with us!

As we work on developing our one-pointed focus, we want to know how it will be an advantage in our life. The answer has little to do with our culture or our religion. As children, it was easy to focus our minds to have one-pointed concentration. When a child plays a game, even if there is little point to the game, still they are able to be focused as they play. A young child has very little responsibility, and this also enables them to more easily concentrate. 

As we become older, we learn to focus on more complex things, especially on things that attract us. But we need to develop the ability to be one-pointed not only with things that attract us, but also with any subject that will be helpful for us and lead to our becoming more constructive persons. So, we need to develop our ability to focus, in a one-pointed way, on all topics. We also need to develop our meditation practice, called “shamatha” in Sanskrit, to the point where our ability to focus single-mindedly is combined with a sense of fitness – an exhilarating sense of our mind and bodies being fit to stay focused on any topic we choose and to stay focused for as long as we wish. 

Lama Tsongkhapa, the great Tibetan master, taught that the topic we choose to focus on should be one that entails understanding – for instance, focusing on our understanding of impermanence or voidness, or staying focused with compassion directed at all sentient beings. In order to do this, Lama Tsongkhapa emphasized, we need to have correct information about these topics. He said that if someone ordered us to get angry, it wouldn’t work. We need information about something that we should be angry about. Similarly, we need correct information about impermanence, voidness and compassion in order to develop them with correct understanding. 

Developing anger about something is not going to benefit us. So, gaining information about something that will incite us to get angry about it is of no beneficial use. What will help us in daily life is gaining correct understanding of beneficial topics, like impermanence, voidness and compassion, applying them in situations where they are needed and staying focused single-pointedly with these understandings while applying them.

To have the clarity and sense of fitness to be able to apply our understanding with single-minded focus, we need to develop that understanding, and that we gain through analytical meditation. In order to best practice analytical meditation, we must gain correct information about the topic or state of mind we want to develop and then study it until we understand it. Based on that, we can practice staying focused in that state. 

Meditation requires us to have an excellent motivation. But before that, we need to find pleasure in the process itself. Our meditation practice should be something we enjoy. We need to feel pleasure in our time in meditation. If there is pleasure and joy in what we do, we naturally want to do it again. We will look forward to doing the next exercise in the future. It is very much like watching TV. If we find a new series, and we watch a few episodes and find them boring, we won’t want to watch any more. But if we really found them interesting and enjoyed them, we will look forward to watching new episodes in the future. 

This is also the approach to meditation that we need. When we begin our meditation practice, we need to feel like, “Yes, this is what I need. This is what I’ve been looking for.” This is the motivation we need. We need to feel joy in the exercise itself, and we need to work to make this feeling arise automatically. This motivation will help us. 

Buddha taught that there is only one truth. What he meant by that teaching was that there is only one truth, the deepest truth, that can finally put an end to suffering and the causes of suffering. Truths that are agreed upon, that are arrived at by convention, are called conventional truths, but they cannot put a final end to suffering and the causes of suffering. 

Just as we need conviction in the fact that deepest truth is the antidote to suffering before we can successfully apply it as an antidote, the same is true with our meditation. Before we start our meditation, we need conviction that this meditation will improve my mental state and by that, help me deal with difficult situations. To have that conviction, as I’ve said, we need correct information about this mental state and how to develop it and correct understanding of both. With this conviction comes a sense of gratitude that there is such a method and that Buddha taught it. 

That knowledge, understanding, conviction and gratitude will provide the inspiration that will bring us success in our meditation. That inspiration should be strong enough that we feel goosebumps or even feel tears in our eyes. Then, after spending the first part of our meditation session on generating this inspiration, we then generate the state of mind we wish to focus on and just stay one-pointedly focused on it. We should not leave our understanding on just an academic level, but as we develop these beneficial states of mind, we need to apply them in daily life.