You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to teach anything. You just have to be who you are: a bright flame shining in the darkness of despair, a shining example of a person able to cross bridges by opening your heart and mind. Tsoknyi Rinpoche
It doesn’t make sense to grab at the highest teachings and reject the rest. It is the kindness of the buddhas to provide us with a complete path, and the preliminary practices are part of that path. All great teachers of the past have taught the identical message: ‘Gather the accumulations, purify the obscurations, and […]
If we look absentminded but are completely occupied by thoughts and don’t even know it, then we definitely need some shamatha in the sense of relaxing. Whatever we are sitting and thinking about, obsessing about, just let it go and relax. Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Look at your life. Look at the ways in which you define who you are and what you’re capable of achieving. Look at your goals. Look at the pressures applied by the people around you and the culture in which you were raised. Look again. And again. Keep looking until you realize, within your own […]
Be kind to yourself as you proceed along this journey. This kindness, in itself, is a means of awakening the spark of love within you and helping others to discover that spark within themselves. Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Sometime go outside and sit, In the evening at sunset, When there’s a slight breeze that touches your body, And makes the leaves and the trees move gently. You’re not trying to do anything, really. You’re simply allowing yourself to be, Very open from deep within, Without holding onto anything whatsoever. Don’t bring something back […]
The true bodhisattva spirit grows out of this personal sense of freedom. You discover that you don’t feel so needy anymore. You don’t crave another refueling – with shamatha or with other people’s love and attention – because you know within yourself how to be free, how to be confident. With this sense of security […]
Most people suffer from being afraid of themselves, afraid of not being able to liberate the thought or emotion that is about to arise. At the moment the thought arises, they single it out as no good. You often hear that negative emotions are bad, but you don’t know how to let them go. All […]
We do not have control over the arising of discursive thoughts. Discursive thoughts do not arise according to a schedule; they can and do arise at any time whatsoever. Exactly in accordance with that, meditation needs to be something which can and does arise at any time whatsoever. In other words, given that the arising […]
What usually happens is that whenever something is seen or heard, we feel that it demands our attention. We fall under the command of the visible form being seen and we feel that we have to get involved in discriminating what it is. So we stay busy attaching values and defining and pigeon-holing it. If […]
