Someone asked me recently if I am afraid to die. Truthfully, I am more afraid of not living my life fully — of living a life dedicated to cherishing and protecting myself. This fear-driven approach to life is like covering your couch in plastic so it won’t get worn. It robs you of the ability […]
If we’re not too confused or hard on ourselves, we will discover the sanity beyond habitual reactions. Identifying less with habits and more with our basic nature lightens things up. With more space in our mind, we take our reactions less seriously. We can watch them the way we would watch children at play – […]
Don’t think you have to leave most of your mind behind when you become a practitioner. That would be a wrong view of the spiritual path. The ground of practice is your direct experience – regardless of its content. You don’t have to act out or indulge in these emotions. Just give them space and […]
What is keeping me away from what I want to do as a practitioner? We must ask ourselves this question. Great practitioners of the past would not have the distractions that we have, however noble these aims of ours seem, because those practitioners took impermanence so deeply to heart. So we must address honestly all […]
Sometimes practitioners resent disturbing thoughts and emotions or feel they should be exempt from them. This reflects a mistaken view of the purpose of practice. Instead of resenting mind’s vitality, we can use it to deepen and enrich our practice. The point of practice is to work with both peaceful and unpeaceful states of mind. […]
When we accept ourselves as human beings – having similar needs, similar conditions, and similar basic experiences as all others – then we can think of our suffering as human suffering, rather than MY particular suffering or pain. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
If someone is to become a true student of Dharma, that person has to know that practice is an essential part of one’s life, intimately woven with one’s own experience. Of course we need to keep our jobs and our responsibilities, but none of these become essential. Rather, they become important in support of what […]
As we get older, we naturally cultivate renunciation. We can nurture this quality by reflecting on the variety of experiences we’ve already had. This automatically diminishes our craving to repeat similar experiences. We find ourselves no longer so driven to crank up our life in an attempt to have more and to accomplish more, since […]
