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.