Here’s a true lojong slogan for the moment: safety first. Last week, I invited you to write your own lojong slogan. When I asked myself what I most needed to remember to train my mind for compassion over the next few weeks, the answer felt pretty…
This week, write your own slogan! Judy Lief teaches that slogan practice is always practical and applies to everything we do. That’s why the ninth lojong teaching tells us, “In all activities, train with slogans.” It always helps. She writes, “Once you understand the underlying point—to…
In all activities, train with slogans. That’s the ninth lojong slogan. It serves as a kind of resting point along the way, reminding us why we do this mind training in the first place. We do it to cultivate compassion as not just a response, but…
Once again, I love Norman Fischer‘s zen take on the lojong slogan for this week. He simplifies it into three words (on purpose? By accident?! Who knows, but I like the thematic consistency): turn things around. Fischer says, “Where there’s confusion or pain in your life,…
Practicing the eighth lojong slogan is how we learn to live beyond the buckets of passion, aggression, and indifference. When we work with the three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of virtue, we’re really doing another form of tonglen. As you remember, in tonglen we…
Lojong 8 has a trio of threes: Three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of virtue. This slogan feels more like a grocery list than mind training, doesn’t it? So: what does this trio of threes mean? Basically, it means paying very specific attention to three…
Pema Chodron reminds us that tonglen, the practice of taking in pain and sending out light, relief, and peace, can happen right in the middle of our day. At any moment, we can respond to the suffering we see by breathing it in, and sending out…
Lojong 7: Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath. Sending and taking describes a powerful Buddhist practice of compassion called tonglen. In tonglen, we practice taking in the pain of the world as we inhale, and then send out light…
Being a “child of illusion” as the sixth lojong slogan teaches means tapping into our childlike innocence. Norman Fischer writes, “Spiritual practice requires a certain degree of childlike innocence. What could be more childlike, if not childish, than to believe that radical spiritual transformation is possible,…
Here’s the sixth lojong slogan: “In postmeditation, be a child of illusion.” When I first began to meditate, I would hear my teachers use this phrase “postmeditation” and I had no clue what they were talking about. Was there some kind of ritual or practice we…
