How to Lose Your Mind Part 10

 Recall Gampopa’s fourth instruction:

As energy shifts arise, keep practice and meditation consistent until any sense of mind is gone.

In the last newsletter, I discussed how to meet unsettling energy shifts. Today the focus is on settling energy shifts, or how mahamudra unfolds. Gampopa writes:

For settling energy shifts, first the shift into mind resting arises, then the shift into presence emptying, then the shift into knowing arriving, and then the shift into clinging unwinding. 

These shifts arise on their own and in their own time. As we develop the capacities and skills that enable us not to fall into reaction and not to fall into conceptual confusion, actual meditation practice consists more and more of doing nothing. Here, Gampopa describes four kinds of settling shifts that may arise when we sit and do nothing: 

mind resting, 

presence emptying, 

knowing arriving, and 

clinging unwinding.

These are not four different practices. They are four shifts that may happen when we sit and do nothing. While each shift makes the succeeding one possible, these four shifts do not necessarily arise in a predictable order. Shifts, both settling and unsettling, arise as the web of conditioned patterns unravels. How those patterns unravel is not predictable. Thus, in any meditation period, nothing may happen, one or more unsettling shifts may arise, one or other of these four settling shifts may arise, or combinations of all the above may arise. Whatever happens, practice consists of doing nothing, that is, experiencing what arises without falling into confusion or distraction or doing anything with or to what arises.

In mind resting, for instance, a resting in clarity and stability is experienced that is both deeper and vaster than the union of resting and insight that leads into mahamudra. This resting is a profound relaxation — not something we do, but something that happens. Mind is truly at rest. If thoughts arise, they arise like flashes of light or like snowflakes landing on a hot stone. They arise and subside in the same instant. 

Gampopa then says:

When these shifts arise, don’t be content with your practice. Keep moving forward steadily.

Gampopa means keep doing nothing. In the case of mind resting, there will be other shifts. In each case, the point is not to work at doing something in your practice, but to become familiar with the shifts that arise. Here, practice shifts from cultivation (Tib. sgom) to becoming familiar (Tib. goms). For instance, shifts may arise in which experiences arise like apparitions in a dream, a dream in which you know you are dreaming. In other words, what you experience is empty of any presence or substantiality. 

First, don’t be content with just mind resting.

Practice seeing presence emptying again and again.

Doing nothing has shifted to a deeper level. 

Still, Gampopa says keep going. Keep doing nothing.

Don’t be content with just seeing presence emptying.

You need to practice coming into knowing arriving again and again.

In writing this, Gampopa may engender an impossible and counterproductive expectation in you, i.e., there is a specific experience you should have again and again. The expectation is impossible because the second time presence emptying arises, it is different from the first time. The expectation is also counterproductive because when you try to have a specific experience, you have already lapsed into controlling what arises.

All these settling shifts come from doing nothing. Don’t misinterpret Gampopa’s wording. He is saying, “Keep doing nothing,” or, to quote the actual text, “... consistently place mind without distraction and rest without affectation.” In other words, do nothing. Even when your practice is going crazy with unsettling shifts, Gampopa still says, “... without suppressing them, settle in the outlook and practice of thatness and practice from there.” Again, do nothing.

As a teacher, when students report settling shifts, you seek to find a way to keep them engaged in a practice that is obviously being fruitful without creating an expectation that re-engages a sense of “I”. Teachers do this in different ways. Kalu Rinpoche, for instance, would often say, “Not good, not bad. Keep going.” On other occasions, he would confirm the significance of the shift, and then make a joke or say something that would immediately deflate any sense of pride in the student. Sometimes he would point to an aspect of the shift that the student had not noticed, subtly rounding out the shift in a way that enabled the student to rest more deeply. Dezhung Rinpoche, another of my teachers, would usually flood a student with the warmth of encouragement. Every teacher with whom I’ve worked had his or her own distinct way of pointing the student forward yet giving the student as little as possible to hang onto.

As you become familiar with the experience of presence emptying, another shift becomes possible, a shift that Gampopa calls knowing arriving. Here you start to touch a direct non-conceptual knowing which does not stand apart from what arises. In this shift, all experience has a common flavor: it is empty of any kind of substantiation.

Again, Gampopa says to keep going:

Don’t be content with just coming into knowing arriving.

You need to practice clinging unwinding again and again.

The shift into clinging unwinding arises when the basic pattern of a world out there and an apprehending self in here frays or unravels, if only for a moment. You may sense this when mind is very clear and quiet. When mind moves, a subtle impulse to take hold of the movement arises, either as a sense of self or as a sense of other. When resting in clarity and doing nothing is deeply familiar, the impulse does not elicit a reaction. It is an arising and it subsides. The deep subtle pattern of taking hold of experience unwinds a bit and the direct non-conceptual knowing that is mind nature is able to operate more freely. Absent that clarity, however, the impulse elicits a reaction, self and other reassert themselves and samsara welcomes you once more.

Even at this point, maybe especially at this point, Gampopa’s instruction remains the same: keep doing nothing:

Don’t be content with just clinging unwinding.

You need to practice until your mind is freed in pure being,

any sense of mind is gone, and you are completely awake.

Gampopa’s description of this progression and his quiet encouragement to do nothing no matter what arises is the clearest instruction I have encountered for the practice of mahamudra. Though a trained scholar, Gampopa does not dress up his instruction with either the enumeration or description of stages. He sticks to the bare bones of instruction: what do you actually do at each point of practice? Nothing. 

There are numerous pointing out instructions, many of them magnificently effective. But most texts then lapse into traditional descriptions of the four stages of mahamudra and the essential instructions are often buried in what have become descriptions of results. This is why I treasure this text. Gampopa keeps the essential practice utterly clear: learn how to rest in clear stable attention and then do nothing. Keep doing nothing as the patterns that chain you to samsara fall apart. Keep doing this until there is no longer any sense of mind separate from experience. Keep going until there is no sense of mind at all.

As Kyer-gong-pa (sKyer.sgang.pa, 1154-1217) writes in Recognizing Mind as the Guru (https://unfetteredmind.org/practice/recognizing-mind-as-the-guru/)

If contemplatives who look at mind without distraction

Are free from the mind that looks, what's the problem?

If deep meditators who continuously meditate on no separation

Release what meditates, what's the problem?

If practitioners who constantly practice with awakening energy

Understand the natural presence of no practice, what's the problem?

If truth masters who carefully guard against managing mind

Do away with mind itself, what's the problem?

One final note. As your ability to rest and do nothing evolves, keep the fundamentals active in your life. Set aside time to pay attention and reflect on the ways change and impermanence manifest in your life. Cultivate compassion on a regular basis and remind yourself that everything you understand and everything you do is to help others. No matter how deep or wonderful your understanding, pray to your teachers every day to guide you, whoever they are, wherever they are. Finally, in your life, in every thought, word, or deed, aim to move the world in which you live a small step in the direction of balance.

How to Lose Your Mind Part 9

 Gampopa’s fourth instruction is:

As energy shifts arise, keep practice and meditation consistent until any sense of mind is gone.

This may not seem like much to go on, but Gampopa packs a lot into this one sentence. He immediately notes that energy shifts arise in two ways: energy shifts that are unsettling and energy shifts that are settling, that is, are moving in the direction of awakening. The latter will be the subject of the next and final newsletter in this series. In this issue, we focus on unsettling energy shifts.

Once you have touched the clear empty knowing of mind nature, how you practice changes. As I have said in a previous newsletter, the metaphor of a flower blooming becomes just as important as the metaphor of making a journey. Once a bud has formed, there is little we can or should do to influence how the flower blooms other than provide the plant with the right conditions: light, food, and water, not too much, not too little. With respect to the flower itself, the best we can do is do nothing. The flower takes care of itself.

When we do nothing, mind takes care of itself. Like the sky, mind does not care what arises. Just as the nature of clouds is to form and dissolve, so the nature of experience is to arise and pass. 

However, most of us are not used to letting things come and go on their own. As we rest, the web of patterns which comprise our personality, our way of perceiving the world, and our way of operating in the world begins to unravel. As it unravels, energy that was locked up in one or other pattern is released. How and where that energy will flow is impossible to say. 

Sometimes it flows into what we are cultivating in practice. Possibilities include:

• Strong and deep surges of faith, reverence, or any of the four immeasurables, equanimity, loving kindness, compassion, or joy,

• Experiences of bliss, deep well-being, sometimes without any clinging or cloying quality,

• Experiences of clarity, even the ability to know other people’s emotions or thoughts, or

• Experiences of non-thought, non-self, emptiness, or vast depth or space, or

• An unfathomable imperturbable peace that is beyond any conceptual understanding.

When such experiences arise, we usually try to hold on to them, extend them, or replicate them. Such efforts put us straight back into the striving mind — wanting things to be a certain way. These kinds of shifts are usually unstable. If we take them to mean something in terms of progress or who we are or what we can do, we fall into another trap, the trap of identity. The best way to practice here is to do nothing. Make no effort of any kind to control what we experience and let the thoughts and chatter of progress or ability or whatever dissipate on their own.

Gampopa writes:

For the first, whatever unsettling energy shifts come up — unstable attention, illness, panic attacks, doubts, and so on — they come from your practice. 

Sometimes energy flows into other old patterns, and we experience unpredictable, unexpected, and often disturbing shifts in our experience. Possibilities include:

• attention becomes scattered and we are unable to focus on anything with any stability,

• wild thoughts about anything and everything come and go uncontrollably,

• obsessions about things past, present, or future arise and won’t let go,

• shorter or longer bouts of depression, anxiety, and confusion come and go for no apparent reason,

• physical and emotional pains arise out of nowhere,

• physical disturbances may also arise for no apparent reason, including sleeplessness, lack of appetite, digestive disorders, headaches, or muscle pains in any part of the body,

• panic attacks, extreme irritability, or desperate needs, including food, money, power, or sexual obsessions, or

• devastating doubts about oneself, one’s abilities, or spiritual practice, 

Gampopa then writes:

Knowing all these to be energy shifts, without suppressing them, settle in the outlook and practice of thatness and practice from there. 

Gampopa notes that all these unsettling shifts come from our practice. One way to view them is to see them as resulting from the unravelling of the web of patterns that maintains samsara experience, that is, dualistic perception and conceptual confusion along with the associated emotional reactions and patterns of behavior.

Gampopa’s advice here is to maintain outlook and practice, and practice from there. What is the outlook? Here we go back to Part 1 and Part 2:

• Mahamudra has no genesis,

• Mahamudra has no causes,

• Mahamudra has no method,

• Mahamudra has no path, and

• Mahamudra has no result.

That is the outlook. As we rest and let each of these points about outlook sink deeper into us, the shifts I described in the outlook section may arise more vividly. No matter. We do not do anything with them

What is the practice? Here we go back to the first three instructions in point 3:

• Practice teacher-union with faith, devotion, and awe three times a day and three times at night.

• Consistently place mind without distraction and rest without affectation.

• Once all that appears is experienced as mind, refine the vitality of awareness.

The first point keeps our relationship with practice full and alive. The second point helps us to develop skills, abilities, and capacities. When the third point arises, we move to the metaphor of a flower blooming, that is, there is nothing for us to do but let awareness and the various shifts unfold on their own. From time to time we may enhance our experience of awareness using any of the practices described in Part 8.

Our aim here is not to accomplish anything per se. To try to accomplish anything at this stage of practice  puts us straight back into doing something. The unravelling of the web of patterns stops, but the energy already released continues to stir up and reinforce old patterns. As I described in Chapter 3 of Wake Up to Your Life (bottom of page 87ff), any attempt to control what arises usually involves some kind of repression, the results of which may be tragically problematic:

Finally, there is one pitfall in meditation practice that you must avoid. Meditation practice raises the level of energy in your system in the form of active attention. The higher level of energy inevitably brings you into contact with reactive emotional patterns. If you now become selective and repress certain emotions, pushing them out of attention, two things happen. The higher level of energy in your system flows into the reactive pattern, making it stronger. The higher energy also flows into the repressing pattern, making that stronger. Both the reactive patterns of the emotion and the repression are reinforced. You end up splitting in two. One part of you is capable of attention and response. The other part becomes increasingly rigid and inflexible. It takes over unpredictably whenever the repressed emotion is triggered by events or situations. Typically, a person becomes more arrogant and self-indulgent, obsessed with power, money, sex, security, or other fixations, and acts in ways to control or amass the object of the obsession. Long-term practitioners and teachers who protect areas of their lives from their practice frequently run into this problem with unfortunate and sometimes tragic results. We run the risk of a similar fate if we protect any area of our personality or lives from the increased awareness that develops in meditation.

If possible, we ride out these energy shifts as best we can without being carried away by the good and pleasant experiences or being disturbed or overwhelmed by the difficult and unpleasant experiences.

Sometimes, however, they are so strong that we are not able to do so. In this case, it is better to make small movements in the direction of balance. The point here is not to remedy the disturbance. Nor is it to achieve a state of balance. We just move in the direction of balance indicated by the unsettling experiences that arise. 

A light touch and a delicate sensitivity are important here. Our sense of who we are and how we function in the world is falling apart, quite literally. New possibilities are opening. Drastic decisions and heroic efforts are not advised. Best is to let these unsettling experiences resolve themselves. Next best is small steps in the direction of balance. These induce a shift in the imbalances. We check to see if we still need to do something, and go from there. Our aim is to be sufficiently close to these disturbances to experience them without engaging them yet without being overwhelmed by them.

As we experience this unravelling without engaging or trying to remedy them, at some point, as Gampopa notes, things change. The unsettling experiences resolve themselves. It is as if we have been through a storm and the sky is inexplicably completely clear. How long do we have to endure such difficulties? It is impossible to say. How many times will we go through unsettling experiences? It is impossible to say. There is no rhyme or reason here. The point is that the unsettling experiences that may arise in practice are not necessarily a sign that something has gone wrong. On the contrary, they may indicate that something very profound and good is taking place, even though subjectively, we are unlikely to see it that way.

We do not and cannot control how the web of patterns unravels. Our effort in practice is to build the skills and capacities that enable us to touch mahamudra and the skills and capacities that enable us to rest in the unravelling without engaging what arises. More than that we cannot do.

Gampopa’s final instruction in this section is:

At some point settling energy shifts come alive on their own.

No matter how challenging these shifts may be, no matter how powerful their allure to hold onto them or replicate them may be, no matter how painful or unpleasant they may be, if we rest and do nothing with them or to them, at some point, they fall apart and settling shifts arise strongly and deeply. What to do or not do then is the subject for the next newsletter, the last in this series.

Remember, if you try to make a perfect cup of tea, you may end up with something that tastes almost, but not entirely, unlike tea.

Additional reading:

https://unfetteredmind.org/practice/pith-instructions-on-mahamudra/

How to Lose Your Mind Part 8

 We continue with the third section of Gampopa’s text How to Lose Your Mind. Of the four topics in this section, we now turn to the third:

For the conclusion, once all that appears is experienced as mind, refine the vitality of awareness.

That is how I originally translated the sentence. Now, however, I am dissatisfied with the translation because the English word “conclusion” is misleading.

The preceeding section, the main matter, is about the ineffable clarity, the empty, clear knowing, or whatever you prefer to call it, that you have touched. As I have said elsewhere, once you have touched that empty, clear knowing, the metaphor of a flower blooming is often more helpful than the metaphor of making a journey from A to B. What is being refined is not the empty, clear knowing, but the vitality of that empty clear knowing, that is, how it arises and plays out in your experience of life.That vitality is like a flower, gradually or suddenly blooming in your life.

In this context, the Tibetan word rjes (pron. jay) is not a conclusion in the sense of wrapping up everything. Rather, it points to possibilities that are open now that the main matter has been engaged. 

With this revision, Gampopa’s instruction becomes:

As to what follows, once all that appears is experienced as mind, refine the vitality of awareness.

In that empty, clear knowing, all that arises, that is, sensations, thoughts, and emotions, arise is mind. It is not a case of you knowing that sensations, thoughts, and emotions are mind. Knowing based in a sense of self is inevitably conceptual. Gampopa is referring to a knowing in which sensations, thoughts, and feelings are known directly to be movements in mind. What knows here, indeed, the knowing itself, cannot be put into words. The words, the descriptions, all come later, a clumsy confused echo of the actual experience. 

Some teachers have likened the first experience of empty, clear knowing to a bright light being turned when you are in a dark room. At first you are blinded. Then your eyes adjust and you can see everything in the room. In the same way, initially, the clarity, the brightness, or some other quality of mind nature floods everything. As we become accustomed to the shift (and that may take time), bit by bit, sensations, thoughts, and emotions are known to be mind. That, in essence, is what Gampopa means when he says “refine the vitality of awareness.”

There is nothing you can do to make those shifts happen. All you can do is to create the conditions in which they can happen. On this subject, Gampopa does not say anything, possibly because when he wrote this text, he had in mind a retreat context in which he could counsel each retreatant as to a suitable way for him or her to refine the vitality of awareness. No method works for everyone, and one of the more important roles of a teacher is to help you find a way or a path through which your practice deepens.

Almost any practice can be used to refine the vitality of awareness. Vajrayana, for instance, is highly regarded because it offers a large number of energy transformation practices for this refinement in the context of deity practices and their associated completion phase practices. Vajrayana is called the result path because it assumes one has touched clear, empty knowing and is practicing with that understanding as a basis.

The essential point in these energy transformation practices is the mixing of the experiences that arise from doing energy transformation with the empty, clear knowing of mahamudra. That mixing is how the vitality of awareness is refined. If you choose to use energy transformation methods, make sure you know what you are doing. It is best to  learn from a person who knows not only how they work, but also how to adapt them to different physiologies and how to remedy problems should they arise.

There are other methods. The 12th century Shangpa master Kyergangpa once wrote that there are three doors to freedom: impermanence, compassion, and faith. Of these, I have become most conversant with compassion and faith.

For impermanence, one of the simplest ways to refine the vitality of awareness is to take in our mortality more and more deeply. One way is to sit in the central dilemma of human existence: I am going to die and I do not and cannot know when. Another is to go through the stages of dying that I described in chapter 4 of Wake Up to Your Life. A third is to sit with the question “What dies?” Any of these three will refine the vitality of awareness. 

For compassion, I have relied principally on Mahayan Mind-Training and taking and sending in particular. This has been an inexhaustible well, its cool waters quietly quenching the madness and chaos of emotional reactivity. It takes time for the practice of taking and sending to mature, but the effort is well worth it. As Dezhung Rinpoche, in a more or less off-hand remark, once said to me, “You take heavy black smoke through your nostrils into your heart, and then you breath out silvery moonlight from your heart to the whole world and beyond. Every seven or eight breaths, you remind yourself of what you are doing, taking in the pain and struggles of others and breathing out your own joy and well-being.” He didn’t say anything about visualizing per se, and I think this is important. It’s the felt-sense of taking and sending that counts. 

When it comes to taking, it is important not to think about the pain and struggles of others, but to feel their pain and struggles in you as you take them in. For instance, with the six realms, take in the actual feeling of anger, a red hot iron rod burning you from the inside out. For hatred, take in what it is like to be so frozen that you cannot move even a finger without it cracking and breaking. At the other end of the spectrum, take in the raw horror and absolute terror the gods feel when, shortly before their death, they realize that their seemingly endless time in the god realm is done. When you do taking with ordinary situations in life, put yourself in the place of the person you are considering. What would you be experiencing in their position? How would you be reacting? Feel it in your bones, and then take it in from the other.

As for sending, give away what you love and treasure. This is all in your imagination, of course, but feel what it would be like to give away your home, your intelligence, your artistic or musical talents, your spouse, or your children in order to make others happy. Unless you are inhuman or superhuman, you will feel your heart wrenching, and that is the point. Stand in the wrenching, and do the practice.

If you can bring yourself to practice taking and sending this way, you may not enjoy it, but something will change in you. I do not want to describe what those changes are because to do so will only set up expectations, and that will undermine the whole endeavor. The only thing I will say is that the deeper you go in this practice, the less you will feel that you are in any way special.

For devotion, the main practice is prayer. I wrote about prayer in Part 6 of this commentary, in the context of groundwork and teacher-union. Here is one of many places in the spiritual path that you return to what you think you have already done only to do it again. But you don’t do it again, because you are different. The practice of prayer takes on new dimensions, and you discover things in you you did not know were there.

Find a prayer that speaks to you. Quite a few years ago, a friend asked me to write a short prayer in English to replace a long Sanskrit formula that meant little to him because he did not know Sanskrit. The prayer I wrote is:

Buddhas and bodhisattvas,

Wherever you may be,

Please help me to find a way,

It became part of a practice I wrote, The Magic of Faith, and from there, many people have taken it and used it in their own practices. It has also become one of the prayers that I use in my own practice. I usually say it one line at a time, one line on each exhalation. My mind usually quiets down quite quickly, and I find myself feeling a quiet deep faith in buddhas and bodhisattvas, wherever they may be. This faith easily extends to a feeling of devotion to all of my teachers wherever they may be, for most of them are no longer here. With the third line, I am confronted by the brutal fact that, even after all these years of training and practice, I really have no idea where I’m going, what I’m doing, or why. That may seem strange to read, but it is true. This is where faith comes in. 

That fact, the fact of mystery, may be brutal and unavoidable, but it does not in any way, deter me from practice. In a strange way, it is the reason I continue to practice, and why I value Gampopa’s text so much. The aim of mahamudra practice is to lose your mind, to lose any sense of being something apart from experience. In this text, Gampopa lays this out more clearly than I have seen in any other mahamudra text I've read. If the aim of practice is to lose your mind, it is only natural that at some point, we will probably have no idea of what we are doing or where we are going, and be completely at peace in that. Life continues to unfold and we are very much part of it, but the great questions, the Great Matter as they say in Zen, are no longer there.

Groundwork for Mahayana Mind-Training

 The first instruction in Mind-Training in Seven Points is:

Do groundwork first.

Tibetan instructions such as "Do groundwork first" can be deceptively concise. 

The Tibetan word for groundwork is ngon 'gro (pron. ngöndro) and in this text it is in the plural — do the different kinds of groundwork first.

In the context of Mahayana mind-training, there are three kinds of groundwork.

• General groundwork for spiritual practice, that is, practices that change your worldview,
• Specific groundwork for Mahayana mind-training, that is, practices that connect you with loving kindness and compassion, and
• Practice-session ground work, that is, what to do to bring emotional energy into practice.

General Groundwork for Spiritual Practice

What follows is a different approach to the general groundwork, that is, the four thoughts that turn the mind. 

Starting on pg. 58 in Wake Up to Your Life, I distinguish four aspects of any practice: purpose, method, effects, and result. Over the years, I have come to appreciate that a great deal of teaching, both oral and written, consists of descriptions of results that are meant to encourage and inspire. However, many people take these descriptions as practice instructions, i.e., method. This confusion is understandable, and it is unfortunate. 

Practice that is based on taking a description of a result as a method of practice is rarely effective. I know far too many people who, unaware of this distinction, have tried to do so for years or even decades without experiencing any result from their efforts. Many of them just came to the conclusion that they don't have the karma to practice effectively. This is very sad. 

I make a point of this distinction because when people do understand clearly what is method and what is result, their practice suddenly becomes effective and they find themselves able to understand and experience matters that they just could not do so before. 

In this spirit, here is a way to develop and deepen your motivation for practice by starting with your own yearning. Please let me know what you think.

Ask yourself, "Why do I practice?" or "Why do I practice mind-training?" If your answer is in words, go deeper. For instance, your answer might be "to attain buddhahood" or "to be able to help others" or "to be free of suffering." Whatever your answer, question it. Why do you want to attain buddhahood? Why do you want to be able to help others? Why do you want to be free of suffering? Go through these steps several times. For every answer you come up with, question it with "Why this?" Keep going until you cannot come up with any words. At that point, you will probably have a visceral feeling that you cannot put into words. 

That feeling, the one you feel viscerally but cannot name, is why you practice. 

Listen to it. Listen to it with your mind, with your heart, and with your body. To listen, you have to grow quiet in mind, heart, and body. When you do, that visceral feeling gradually becomes clearer. It begins to speak to you, but usually not in words. Do this at the beginning of every practice session.

Little by little, you may find that how you view life and practice changes. You may see that you are deeply fortunate to have the opportunity, the time, the inclination, and the wherewithal to spend part of your day practicing. Not many people do. The time you spend listening to yourself deeply becomes very precious.

Over time, and it may be a few days or a few months, as you continue to listen, you may come to appreciate that spiritual practice really is not just vitally important to you. It puts you in touch with something that is more meaningful to you than anything conventional life can offer. You see that everything conventional life can offer is transient, subject to change. Bit by bit, you make practice part of your life. As time passes, it becomes the core of your life, and you are able to practice consistently without struggle.

As your listening grows deeper, you may see that your struggles in life come from you. You cannot control what arises in life, but you might be able to do something about how you react or respond to the ups and downs. It is your life, and you alone are responsible for how you act. This is an inescapable fact, and it changes how you approach your life.

As you continue down this road, other understandings may arise. You see more and more clearly the difference between reacting and responding to the ups and downs of life, and you see that whenever you are carried away by your own feelings, things don't go so well. You begin to seek a different way of living, a way in which you are not ruled by your emotional reactions, a way in which you can see things clearly and not fall into confusion.

This is one way to lay a foundation for spiritual practice — by listening deeply to what your heart tells you about why you practice.

Specific Groundwork for Mahayana Mind Training

The specific groundwork is loving kindness and compassion. Taking and sending enhances and deepens those qualities, but it does not generate them. You have to develop a relationship with these two qualities first 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 pain of the world and 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 go beyond the conceptual mind, know and experience the groundlessness of experience, and thus touch the peace and freedom that lies at the very core of our being.

There are many ways to cultivate loving kindness and compassion and equanimity and joy, that is, the four immeasurables.. 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.

Groundwork for Practice Sessions

As for the groundwork for a practice session, heartfelt prayer is one of the best ways to start. Again, touch into the unnameable feeling of why you practice. Feeling it viscerally, however it is in your body, reach out to what you want to know. Express that longing in a short prayer, and repeat it slowly, perhaps synchronizing it with your breathing. Pray for about 1/3 of your regular practice session.

One prayer that speaks to many people is:

Buddhas and bodhisattvas,

Wherever you may be,

Please help me to find a way.

Whatever your prayer, pray for what is beyond your current capabilities, understanding, or experience. In prayer, you are reaching out to what you do not know. With your reaching out, you start to form a relationship with what you are praying for. Through that relationship, through your own yearning, energy from that higher level of understanding and experience begins to flow into you. In reaching out this way, you raise the level of energy in your system, and that higher level of energy brings non-reactive emotional energy into your formal practice. It makes a difference.