Point 2: Practice

 The second point in Mind Training in Seven Points is practice. In a spiritual context, practice is what you do to make an instruction come alive in your life. It involves a steady refinement of skills and capacities that typically proceeds through three steps. The first step is to learn how to do the instruction. The second step is to train that instruction until it becomes second nature. The third step is to remove everything in you that prevents the instruction from taking expression when it is called for. 

These three steps, learning, training, and removal, must all take place at three levels, the level of the body, the level of feeling and thinking, and the level of awareness—in other words, the whole of your being. In some traditions, you begin with the body and work up to the level of awareness. In other traditions, you might start at the level of awareness, and work down to include feeling, thinking, and the body. Some train all three levels simultaneously.

Because Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes mind, many people practice with little or no engagement of the body. In a compassion practice such as taking and sending, for instance, they are often unaware or worse, ignore, how emotional resistance to compassion takes expression in the body and ride over it. This, of course, is a form of suppression, and results in problems down the line. The body level is important because, for me at least, it is where I most reliably detect imbalances. 

Another important element in practice is listening, listening to the body, listening to feelings, even the small ones that are often afraid to make themselves known, and listening to the sound of your own voice, both the voice you use to communicate with others and the interior voices that various parts of you use to communicate with each other. There are other levels of listening that are more difficult to describe, but these three give you a good start. 

Listening doesn’t mean that you take what you hear at face value. Just because something feels right doesn’t necessarily make it so. Take listening deeper, until you know not only what is being said but also who or what you are listening to and who or what is listening. This knowing is not arrived at through analysis, inference, or deduction. The knowing on which you rely on in practice must be a direct knowing, a knowing in which you have gone empty.

And that is probably the most important point in practice, that you learn how to go empty, whatever practice you are doing—whether it is a physical practice, a ceremony or ritual, a prayer, the cultivation of some quality be it compassion, loving kindness, or devotion, or a way of experiencing life, be it as a dream, a mirage, or a reflection. It sounds simple, and it is, but simple does not mean easy. Going empty is a letting go not only of self, but also any self-investment in doing the practice or in the results of practice. 

That self-investment can often recognized by a clinging to the illusion of control that arises when a transition begins, a transition from you working on the practice to the practice working on you. If you can, when that clinging to a sense of control arises, let it be like any other thought or movement in mind. Let it be and don't do anything with it as you step, perhaps for the first time, into the unknown.

Point 1: Groundwork

 In Chekawa Yeshe Dorje's Mind Training in Seven Points, the first point is:

First, do the groundwork.

Tibetan instructions such as this one can be deceptively concise. The Tibetan word for groundwork in the text is in the plural—do the groundworks. Let's dissect this a little.

In the context of Mahayana Mind Training, this one line refers to three kinds of groundwork:

• The general groundwork for spiritual practice, namely, the four reflections to change your view of life
• The specific groundwork for Mahayana Mind Training, that is, the four immeasurables, particularly loving kindness and compassion
• The practice session ground work, that is, teacher-union or guru yoga—a way to begin a practice session.

When you engage a practice, any practice, it is helpful to know and understand the intention of the practice. What is it meant to do?

The four thoughts are the precious human birth, death and impermanence, the workings of karma, and the shortcomings of samsara. Their intention is to re-orient your life to spiritual practice. In order to engage spiritual practice effectively, you must value spiritual practice more than anything the world has to offer (death and impermanence). You must also understand and respect that the genesis of your struggles is in you, in how you act and react to what happens in your life (karma). And you must be clear that emotional reactions, no matter how justified or understandable they may seem, will never bring about peace (shortcomings of samsara). The four thoughts are tried and tested practices to develop those understandings, but they don’t work for everyone. How you find a way to those understandings is up to you, but you need to come to them somehow, through reflection, through life experience, or through some other way. But keep in mind that, as someone once said, “Experience is the best teacher, but her bills are horrendous.”

The specific groundwork for Mahayana Mind Training is loving kindness and compassion. Taking and sending enhances and deepens those qualities, but it does not generate them. You have to have developed a relationship with these two qualities in order to do taking and sending. The loving kindness and compassion here are not ordinary loving kindness or ordinary compassion. They are spiritually motivated, that is, they arise from touching the universality of the human condition, they are cultivated without regard to social or cultural contexts, and their aim is the wish that every being goes beyond the conceptual mind, knows and experiences the groundlessness of experience, and thus touches the peace and freedom that lies at the very core of our being. For a power approach to the four immeasurables, see Chapter 7 in Wake Up to Your Life. For an ecstatic approach, see The Four Immeasurables—Practice.

As for the groundwork for a practice session, in teacher-union practice you pray to your teacher or other figure that embodies what you, yourself, seek to know. Through prayer, you form a relationship with what you do not yet know, and that relationship provides a basis for your formal practice session. In prayer, in reaching out this way, you raise the level of energy in your system, and that higher level of energy also acts as a basis for your formal practice. 

Many people regard groundwork as the preliminaries to practice (as ngöndro is often translated), the stuff you have to do before you do the real stuff. I felt the same way for a long time. It wasn’t until I encountered pretty severe difficulties (those horrendous bills that you have to pay when experience is your teacher) that I began to appreciate the importance of groundwork. In particular, I found that working at groundwork practices brings about three changes: 

• It brings out and strengthens the willingness to practice,
• It develops skills and understandings that mature only through repetition and experience, and
• It builds capacities and abilities that are needed to engage practice fruitfully.

Thus, when I began to teach, I consistently encouraged students to take the time to build a solid foundation.