Meditation

When we come to a Dharma center, we find in the West that people come with various interests and various motivations. Some people of course are very serious in terms of seeking some type of spiritual path, but there are others that come just to satisfy their wish for exotica,...

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 third preparatory practice is to arrange a proper seat, sit in the eightfold posture, and in a positive frame of mind take safe direction, or refuge, and reaffirm our bodhichitta aim. Arranging a Proper Seat According to the text, it is best (if you can do it) to have...

QuestionsLet’s start our session with some questions if you have some.KarmaI wonder if this statement is right or not. Every perception that we have that we perceive by our six senses, along with the mental factors – urge, discrimination, and so forth – these are our karma,...

Calming Down Working on ourselves in terms of safe direction or bodhichitta entails listening to, pondering, and meditating on the teachings. Focusing on the breath to quiet down (which some people believe is the full extent of shamatha) is just a preliminary to all three....

Differences in the Direction of the Energy in Discerning and Stabilizing Meditation I must share with you, because His Holiness was so incredibly profound and helpful in explaining, the difference between analytical meditation (so a vipashyana type of thing) and shamatha...

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...

Buddha taught in terms of the four noble truths: problems, their causes, the state of their total elimination, and pathways of mind that lead to that elimination. Therefore, to deal with difficult experiences that arise in meditation and in retreat and to eliminate them, we...

Feasibility of Improvement Examining ourselves honestly, most of us have probably discover that we have experienced many of the possible sensitivity imbalances. This need not daunt us. Although the task of developing balanced sensitivity is complex and challenging, it aims for...