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.