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How is training in the preliminaries going for you? Have you been mindful of how precious life is, how certain death is, how important your actions are, and how suffering happens to everyone? Before we move on to the next slogan, Zen teacher Norman Fischer offers…
The first lojong slogan is "first, train in the preliminaries." Here's what it means to start with the basics. …
Introducing this year's Soul Ninja project, Living with the Lojong. The 59 lojong slogans help us practice awareness and compassion.…
The Four Divine Abodes are noble qualities of mind that bring us into the fullness of wisdom. As this post marks the end of our journey through practicing the Eightfold Path, I wanted to end with a meditation on these four Divine Abodes. (Lama Surya Das…
This week, what if you try sky-gazing? Many forms of meditation invite us to concentrate on nature. We must know somewhere deep within that nature calms us. Especially right now when we feel frazzled and at our wits ends, many have turned to sitting outside, going…
When you meditate, let your thoughts be background noise. Here’s one of the main questions I get when people are learning to meditate: How do I stop thinking? Listen, you don’t. Take this from a girl whose mind will always, always, forever run at a hundred…
Marion Gilbert said that one of her meditation teachers taught her that “if you can stay present with one thing in an undivided way for two minutes, you are bursting out of the conditioned realm where you’re captured inside of it- you actually burst out of…
Right Concentration is not escapism. That sounds obvious, but it’s actually pretty easy for us to mistake absorption into a task or experience as concentration. If we do that often enough, we get into a pattern of avoiding the stuff that actually helps us stay present.…
Lama Surya Das offers the five Ts of Concentration as a way for us to deepen our understanding of this practice. The first T is taming. We’ve often heard our minds described as wild monkeys, and that feels true, doesn’t it? For a moment, though, picture…
When you learn to concentrate, your thoughts and feelings dissolve like bath salts dissolve in water. That’s the first level of concentration. Right Concentration has eight levels of awareness. But for most of us, understanding the first level is probably all we need. This first level…
