Как выполнять ежедневную практику 08 — Дом благоуханного света (1998, Нью-Йорк), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Okay, the purpose of this class is to talk about how to do a daily practice, especially for people who don't have one or haven't been doing one. And I'm going to review a little bit about what we talked about before and then we'll start talking about the next step. First you have to wake up.

This is assuming you do your meditation in the morning. Almost everybody prefers the morning. It's quiet in the morning.

You're fresh. You have a little free time. Your stomach's not full of food yet.

Your body's not tired from work yet. The other members of your family might not be awake yet, which is good. And generally morning is a good time.

If you work a crazy schedule, some of my students work in the evening, then whenever fits you. A lot of people find that night time is better for them, late at night. So it depends on your own schedule and your own life.

If you do it in the morning, wake up. It's a custom to go and splash some water on your face. Get yourself awake.

It's said to be important to clean your mouth, like to brush your teeth and make sure your mouth is sweet. When you're meditating, if your mouth tastes like Chinese food, I just spent like 10 minutes trying to get some out. It's distracting and it disturbs your meditation.

So mouth should taste sweet. Go wash your mouth, brush your teeth. Good to have something to drink.

While I'm setting up for meditation, I put a cup of tea near me or a cup of water or something just to get your body hydrated before you meditate. Then you identify a part of your space, your living space, where you're going to do your meditation every day. You make that place special.

Unlike the rest of your house, this... By the way, if you only have a small apartment, you can still do it. I have friends who use these Japanese screens.

I have friends who use long bolts of cloth and they just hang them from the ceiling or something. But anyway, make a little space for yourself. This is your meditation space.

Don't use it for other things. Let all the vibrations of that space be for meditation. And then every time you enter that space, you'll be meditating.

You'll start meditating even when you sit down. So set aside a place. It should be very beautiful and very nice.

In our tradition of our monasteries, the first thing you do in the morning before you meditate is to clean the space. And so in the monastery, you hear people start sweeping at 4.30 in the morning. You hear sweeping all over the monastery.

And it's a custom to sweep and to clean the space. This has a lot of practical benefits. One thing, it wakes you up.

It's some kind of moving your body around and having to bend over and do things. And that kind of gets you out of your sleeping mode. If you go straight from your bed to your meditation cushion, it's a little dangerous.

So the idea is to get active in the morning and cleaning up something. There's a custom that as you clean the room, you should think that you're cleaning your mind. That it's a metaphor for cleaning your mind.

So as you clean the room, you think, this is how I'm going to clean my mind later. And it's kind of cool because you get into this mode where there's one part of your meditation area which is a little dirty and you don't feel like cleaning it. Like the part of the altar is dusty or there's a little bit of something stuck on the floor and you're not in the mood at 6.30 in the morning to get down on the floor and scrape this thing off the floor. And then you realize that that's how you approach your mind also. You see what I mean? And it's a good exercise to clean something.

Because as you make that little room, that little space, perfect. And if there's a little hard to clean thing on the floor, get down there and scrape it off and clean it and make it spotless. And you'll find yourself getting lazy and you'll scrape off half of it and you'll say, okay, that's enough.

I got to go to work after this. But that's a metaphor for your mind. And think of it that way.

As you're cleaning the floor, think about, this is how you meditate, isn't it? You get halfway there and then you stop because you don't have time or you don't think it's important or something like that. And the whole cleaning part can be a nice exercise.

So do that. Clean the room. Then set up the altar.

Put out some nice offerings. Something pretty. The altar should be a little place where you keep a Buddha image.

Try to find a holy book to put there. And then every morning put out some fresh offerings. Something small, fresh, pretty, every morning is good.

Like a flower. Simple. Flower or something baked or something.

Something that you pick up the night before. Something nice, something pretty, something beautiful. It doesn't have to be expensive.

In fact, in Tibet, they often offer water because it's just simple and it's pure and it's beautiful and it's easy. And you can be joyful while you offer it. So put out some kind of beautiful offerings.

It's like when I was a kid, my mother and us, we used to put out Christmas cookies and milk for Santa Claus. And it should be the same feeling, this kind of excitement about it. That maybe somebody will come and take it while you're there.

And then make sure your meditation seat is good. You should have a larger cushion under all of your thighs and knees. So one base cushion like this square one that's under your thighs and knees.

It's not good to have your ankles and your knees and your calves on the bare floor. And it's not even good enough to put them on like a carpet or something because the circulation will get cut off and you'll start feeling these pins and needles. And your mind will go from the meditation to your legs.

The very important thing about your meditation posture is that it should be so comfortable that your mind doesn't grasp on to how your legs are feeling. Because that's a very bad tendency and it happens a lot to people. Their back starts hurting or their knees start hurting or their legs start falling asleep.

And then the whole... You say, how did your meditation go? And they say, well, around five minutes into it, my knees started to hurt.

About ten minutes into it, my back started to hurt. Then the knees started to feel tingly because they were falling asleep. And then my left leg got hurt a lot.

And then after that, my neck. And then you say, but did you meditate during that time? And they say, oh yeah, a little bit.

Don't be like that. If it's not comfortable, forget it. Find a position that's comfortable.

The point is to park your body and get it out of commission so you don't have to think about it. There were some lamas that said Americans maybe should lie down on a couch. That's a little extreme because you tend to fall asleep.

But if you have to stick your legs out, stick your legs out. If you have to sit in a chair, sit in a chair. It doesn't matter.

What position is more comfortable for you to get your mind away from your body, to park your body and leave it still for a while? What's the most comfortable position for you? In my class in the monastery, there was this one kid.

When he studied scripture, he would lay down on his back. Tibetan scriptures are these long things like up there. And he'd be like this with the page.

And he'd have a walkman going illegally. He would sit there and he would be so comfortable. He would just read page after page and he would never say anything.

And then in the debates, he would wipe out everybody. It was really weird. We were all thinking maybe we should lie down and study.

It means get comfortable. Park your body and don't worry about your body. Find a position which is comfortable.

I'll teach you the classic position. We went through it. But if it's not comfortable, for God's sake, then change and do some variation on it because we don't want you thinking about your body.

Classic position should have a cushion under your thighs and your calves and your knees. Especially I think your ankle, that ankle bone, I don't know what you call it, but that digs into the ground when you're trying to meditate. That one's important.

Then should be a cushion under your rear end. A separate cushion. And the back of your butt under your spine should be higher than the front.

Under your spine, the cushion should be higher than it is down in front. The custom is to put your, you can do a full lotus or a half lotus. If you do a half lotus, you put your left ankle up on your right thigh first.

And then you put your right ankle up on your left thigh after that. And that's a full lotus. For most people this is excruciating.

And don't worry about it and don't try it. Unless you're studying yoga or something like that, it probably will not be comfortable. And you probably shouldn't sit like that.

And the scriptures are very, even the ancient scriptures in the Tengyur, like 16 centuries ago, they say the same thing. I can show you. And they say, try to sit in a full lotus.

If you can't, then sit in the warrior's posture. Which means you put your right ankle up on your left thigh and then you let your other leg down flat. Just let it stay wherever it stays.

So, right ankle up on your left thigh. And not so much that it twists your ankle. Something comfortable for you.

If it's more comfortable, then your right ankle would be up on your left calf. Like that. And that's fine.

Left hand goes down first and then the right hand on top of it. Left palm and then right palm. And then join your thumbs together like that.

If you do a full lotus, the soles of your feet are supporting your two hands very nicely. If you can't do a full lotus, which I can't, and I don't bother because it would be painful and it would distract me, then do a half lotus, that warrior position. And then that's going to drop your feet down a little farther than normal.

Now, it's supposedly important that your hands are up so that the thumbs are at the level where the thumbs join is at the level of your navel. Like if you pressed them into your tummy, they would be into your navel. Now, different people's navels are in different latitudes.

So, depending on where your navel is, most people would like to put some kind of a cloth, like roll up a piece of cloth and keep it on your feet. And that brings your hands up to the right place. That brings your hands up to where they would be if you were doing a full lotus.

It's important in the later, when you get to advanced meditations, that the hands be at about that level so that if you press them in towards your belly, your thumbs would be in your belly button. Back should be absolutely straight. If you find yourself getting slouchy a little bit, try very slightly bending forward and bending from the hips.

Like if you find yourself getting like that, then straighten up really well and then go forward just a touch, like this. They say that if a drop of water dropped off your nose, it would land in your hands or something like that. And that'll help you keep your posture.

It's a little trick to keeping your posture. The head should be straight forward. This is not good, to have it up like that.

And it's not good to have it down. And it's not good to have it off to the side. By the way, these are called the posture of Vajracana.

And that's a Tantric deity. Apparently they're somehow connected to this deity or maybe this deity taught it. But it has seven or eight points.

One of them is that the head should be straight. The chin should be just normal, like that. Not down and not up.

The head shouldn't be turned to one side or the other. It should be equal, even. And the shoulders should be even.

I have students who end up like that halfway through the meditation. Shouldn't be like that. Should breathe through your nose.

If you have a very bad cold, don't suffocate yourself. Breathe through your mouth. Or if you have any other obstruction in your nose.

In the monastery, they teach us in the morning when we get up to go into the bathroom just we lean over the sink, we turn the water on and we're supposed to blow like that forcefully into the sink. We don't use a handkerchief or tissues or something like that. Just like that.

And clear out your sinuses and clear out your nose. And you get a lot more out. It's kind of gross, but it works.

Then you try to clean the sink. And it's important that the air intake not be blocked. One good trick of meditation is to keep your mouth loose.

Because scriptures say people tend to bunch it up here, especially if you're under stress. If you had a couple of bad days at work in a row or a fight with your spouse or something, the corners of your mouth tend to get tight. And it's a barometer of how your body's doing in your life.

People tend to get right here in the corners. You get tight. So see if those are loose or not when you meditate.

Depending on how your mouth is, you're supposed to just keep it natural. Don't try to purse your lips or anything. It should be just natural.

And some people it's even comfortable to have it very slightly cracked open. They say the tongue, you should just leave it the way it normally is. And they say the tip of the tongue can touch the back of the lower teeth, lower front teeth.

And the palate should be touching the top of the tongue around here. So just it's totally natural. It's the way you would sleep or something like that.

It should be loose and not tight. And that's about all I'm done. The eyes, you can either close your eyes or close them completely.

Which if you tend to get sleepy when your eyes are closed, then open them slightly. And when you open them, you keep your eyelids halfway down. You keep your head erect, but you focus your eyes down at an angle like that.

Down that way. So a lot of people tend to look down. If I say down, they go like that.

No, keep your head erect. And then the eyes go down like a visor. They go down like about at that angle.

And they say it's important not to focus on anything. So in my experience, it's important not to have any written material in front of your face. No magazines, no books, no newspapers.

I don't know about you, but my eye tends to catch on those things. A plain color. I try to sit right in front of the altar and not have like a paisley or a patterned cloth, but have like a red cloth or a blue cloth coming down.

Plain. And then your eye doesn't have anything to catch on. And the whole point of meditation is that you withdraw from your senses.

You want to withdraw from your eye. You want to withdraw from your ears and your tongue and your body. So the idea is to not have anything in front of you that might distract you if you're keeping your eyes open.

It's either way you want to do it is fine. In Tibetan, they call it dam khan. Dam khan means it's optional.

You can close your eyes or keep them slightly open and gaze downwards. If you gaze downwards, try not to focus on anything. Try to withdraw from your eyes.

After you get into meditation, there are certain warm-ups that you do. And we went through one last time. I want to do it again once now shortly.

This is called breathing meditation. This is a practice which is just meant to slow your mind down and to get it ready for meditation. It's like an announcement to your mind.

Okay, now we're going to meditate. I'm going to make you watch your breath for a while. And then about five minutes from now, we're going to start some serious meditation.

It's like an announcement to your mind. And the object is not to put your mind into meditation, but to get your mind off of what it's been working on for the last 20 hours or so. And that's an exercise that you go through.

So we're going to do a little breathing meditation now. Try to get into a good posture. I'd like you to rattle around now.

And when I say go, very important thing about meditation is don't move after you take your position. And your mind will say, wait a minute, my nose itches. And say, sorry, you're not allowed to move for the next five minutes.

And your mind will say, wait a minute, the ear itches. And you say, no, no, you can't move. Or if I could just move my left leg about an inch, I'd be really comfortable.

So you have to say to your mind, no, we're not moving. I told you twice already. The tickles are the worst, the itches.

It's very interesting. If you watch an itch, they fade away in about two minutes. And first they get kind of, mine, I know about yours, mine just get kind of weird, like somebody's touching me with something hot, and then they just fade away.

And if you don't itch them, they just stop after a while. So just let it go. We'll do about five, ten minutes of breathing meditation.

The way you do breathing meditation is to fix your mind on the feeling of the air hitting the front of your nose. When you breathe in, there'll be some cool air hitting the very front of these nostrils here. And it'll be like a vacuum cleaner.

We want to concentrate on the very end of the tube of the vacuum cleaner, which is right here. So if you do it well, it'll be a sensation of two little donuts here or something. Because the whole rest of your body, you're forgetting about it.

You're concentrating on the tactile sense, on the feeling of the air hitting the front of your two nostrils. And when you breathe out, you're concentrating on the feeling of the warm moist air passing by the same place. It's like sitting at the gate of Hercules between Africa and Spain and watching ships go in and out of the Mediterranean.

You're on both sides of the shore there and the air has to pass through there. And you're just watching it at that point. You're not thinking about your lungs.

You're not thinking about outside. You are parked. Your mind is parked right there at your two nostrils on the feeling of the air.

It's a practice in Buddhism to try to count to ten breaths. What you do is when the breath goes out, that's the first half of the first breath. When the breath comes in, that's the second half of the first breath.

It's the opposite of the Western way. In the West, they say take a breath, you go, and they say hold it. In Buddhism, you do the opposite.

One out breath is the first half and then the in breath is the second half. That counts as one. The trick, the exercise when you're starting to meditate is to try to get up to ten uninterrupted breaths without your mind being distracted.

If your mind gets distracted, you're supposed to start over. If you're really honest, you won't get past two or three. And it doesn't mean any distraction at all.

If someone slams the door, if a taxi honks outside in the next five minutes, I don't think there's anyone in this room whose mind won't go outside. But you have to bring it back before the next half a breath. You see what I mean?

Don't lose count. If you lose count, you have to start over. It's okay if your mind goes to the taxi but it has to come right back like a basketball.

It can go boom, boom. It has to come right back. If you find your mind dwelling on the taxi and staying there, especially so long that you forget your next count, then the exercise is you have to start over.

If you're really honest, it'll be hard to get past four or five. A special kind of distraction is when you reach 13 or 14 and then you... I think the record is 20 something before they caught themselves.

That was me. But anyway, we'll do that. Try to do 10 breaths.

We'll do about five minutes. This is not the purpose of Buddhist meditation to sit there and watch your breath all day. That's not going to get you enlightened.

But it is a very effective technique that's been done for about 20 centuries to get your mind ready for meditation. So we'll do that. Take your last squiggle or whatever you're going to do.

Do your last... Get that one boogie. Okay.

Be about five minutes. Remember you're trying to count.

[Speaker 2]
Just decide you're not going to move. And you won't. Okay, take a break.

[Speaker 1]
Next thing we'll do is to prepare your motivation for the meditation. That's the next step in what we call the warm-up. Meditating is like jogging and if you don't warm up it'll never turn out right.

The breathing is the first part of the warm-up. And if you just try to sit down and close your eyes and think about something, it won't go too well. There's a very subtle effect on your physical body by thinking about some great motivation.

And if you don't do that, you'll never be able to meditate properly. It'll never be good. The thinking some very good thoughts has an actual physical effect on your body that you're not aware of.

If you go through some kind of mental exercises before you meditate, it actually changes the ability of the body to meditate. This is very profound and very subtle. But you'll notice it after a while.

First thing to do is, after you've gone through the breathing exercise, we'll do another one and I'll snap my fingers. Then you have to think of all the reasons why it's important to meditate. Why are you going to meditate now?

First I'll tell you the reasons that are lousy and then I'll tell you the reasons that are good. Lousy reason to meditate is to get calm. If you want to get calm, go drink something or take something.

Being calm is a side effect of meditation, but that's not the purpose of meditation. The purpose of meditation is not to impress anybody else. Spiritual things in general, it's probably better if nobody ever knows if you meditate.

Which means you don't have to look good when you meditate. We don't care if you're doing a full lotus or not. The meditation is for yourself.

And if you meditate, you can get certain powers. If you meditate well for a long time, you can read other people's minds. You can perform miracles if your meditation is very good.

What we call samadhi is very good. You can actually do things like turning objects into other substances or things like that. Turning a brick old or something like that is possible for a person who's meditating very, very well.

We say that even those are not very good motivations for meditating. You will be able to do amazing things if you meditate a lot. You'll be able to remember past lives, things like that.

Be able to remember your future. You'll be able to foresee your future lives and things like that. If you meditate very seriously, after a while you'll be able to do those things.

But that's not even the goal of meditation. The reason in Buddhism to meditate is very simple. And this is how I want you to do this mental exercise.

After you do breathing, we'll do one more breathing. And then I'll snap my finger. Then I want your mind to go directly to this meditation.

Count up all the good things in your life. Make a short list. Between five and ten good things.

Like what? I have a few good friends. I have a good mother or father.

I have a nice place to stay. I have a pretty decent job. My health is okay.

I have a child that I love. I can think well. I like that.

People seem to like me sometimes. Something like that. Go through all the nice things in your life.

Go through the nice things. Count them all up. Then you'll have a list of five to ten things.

Then start meditating on your death. Start thinking about your death. One by one go through those nice things and realize.

By the way, you won't have to die. Life itself will tear away those things from you. Everybody here will lose everything on that list.

Whatever it is. You look nice at this present time. You have a pretty face or something.

You're going to lose it. I had all these girlfriends in high school. They all swore they wouldn't look like their mothers.

And all of them do already. And I look like my father and I said I wasn't going to either. You will.

Or worse. People say, I won't get chubby like that. I'll keep exercising.

You can. It doesn't work after a certain age. You will lose whatever job you have.

You will lose the ability to hear well, see well, and think well. Those are not God-given rights. They are temporary conditions.

They will go away. Your grandmother or your grandfather is not some stupid person. They were just like you.

They were smart. They were active. They had incredible parties wherever they lived.

They danced. They had good times. They had their favorite songs.

They had their good friends. They drove cars faster than they do now. And it went away.

It goes away forever. It always goes away. And you will be like them.

And the reason to meditate is to stop. We're trying to stop that process. If you do meditation very, very well, if you do these Buddhist practices very, very well, certain changes happen in your body and your mind.

And these pictures of these beings, like Tara here, Woman Buddha. Those pictures of a being whose body is made of light and who lives in this blissful place and who's totally compassionate and totally omniscient. By the way, this is a very lousy picture.

This is a painting of a being who really exists. And she's much, much foxier than that. And by the way, by that point, you have the ability to look whatever way you want.

You see what I mean? And I've seen early thangkas, early paintings of these deities from before Buddhism reached India, China, Tibet. You see?

I mean, before it reached Tibetan China, it reached the Central Asia, the Silk Road, due to the trade. Before Buddhism ever entered Tibet, before they ever drew Taras with nice Tibetan faces, in the same way that they draw Jesus as this nice, white, pleasant-looking guy now. You know, pleasant-looking Caucasian guy now.

The early paintings of those deities look just like you or me, actually. It's very interesting. They're very Western.

The original paintings that came out of India looked very different. What I'm trying to say is that by that time, you can control how you look. And you will look however you want to look.

And it'll be this incredibly beautiful thing. And you have the power to do that. And many beings have already done this.

And you can't see them. So it's a little hard to prove it exists. In the end, those pictures exist because those beings exist.

Somebody saw Tara and painted this lousy painting. Somebody met her. Somebody met her directly and painted what she looked like.

You have the ability to go there. You have the ability to do that. Every human mind has this ability.

You can't unlock it unless you meditate well. And hopefully by the end of this exercise of learning to meditate and doing it regularly, you'll actually be able to change. And you won't be, how do you say?

You'll be exempt from losing all those things that you're going to think about. You really will. And that's the reason to meditate.

It's very extraordinary. You can be going through the world and experiencing it like she does. And all the people around you are still experiencing it the way they used to.

Got it? And they're not aware how you're experiencing the world. Like I don't even know how you're experiencing this room, frankly.

Don't assume that your experience and my experience of this room are the same. They may be completely different. Absolutely different.

Don't assume that what I see when I look in the mirror and what you see when you look at my face are the same. You see what I mean? You don't know, do you?

You don't really know. It's possible that some people in this room are already in a very special place. But it doesn't look like that to you.

But it wouldn't, would it? You see what I mean? You don't know how they're experiencing this room.

You don't know how the person sitting next to you is experiencing this room. You really don't. Don't assume that they're experiencing it the same way you are.

And the point is that you could be living in the same New York City and your body would be different. And your experiences would be different. Completely different.

And that's the purpose of meditation, is to reach those places. And according to Buddhist scriptures, you can't reach those places unless you learn to meditate. You cannot reach there.

The only way to go there is to learn to meditate. You have to. You can't do it.

There's no other way. You can go to classes and study and that's very good. But the actual movement between this place and that place is done in meditation.

It has to be done in meditation. So we'll meditate. And when I snap my fingers, you're going to watch your breath.

When I snap my fingers, get your motivation right. Motivation means, think of all the nice things in your life and then honestly evaluate how you're going to lose them. Tune into the fact that you're going to lose every single good thing about your life.

It's a mental exercise. It has a subtle effect on your body. And then your meditation will be deeper.

These instructions were kept secret for a long time. About a thousand years ago, they were kept secret. Now, about 900 years ago, they decided to open them up a little bit.

Thinking these train of thoughts changes your body. And you can meditate better. So when I snap my fingers, make a short list of all the good things in your life.

And then try to review how you're going to lose each of them as you get older. And you will. Believe me, every person over 40 honestly believed they wouldn't be like that.

Trust me. They really thought it would never happen. They honestly thought it would never happen.

You have to overcome that obstacle. That's a spiritual obstacle. If you don't overcome that blindness, you'll never be able to meditate well.

So you've got to start now. Be honest with yourself. You will be like your grandparents.

If you say they're dead already, that's true. You will be like them. Here we go.

First, watch your breath. Please don't move after you take your position. If you've got to move, do it now.

You don't have to try to control your breathing in any way. Just let it go naturally. You're just counting it and watching it.

[Speaker 2]
Take a break.

[Speaker 1]
And next part I'd like to do in this meditation is when you're warming up to do your real meditation, there's a practice to bring a holy being into the room to meditate with you. This is a custom. So you try to think of the being that you think is holiest in the world.

I think for a lot of people it's whatever they grew up with, like Jesus or Moses or whatever. And at this point, that's fine. You just want to bring some very, very holy being in the world to come and meditate with you.

A lot of people like to use his holiness, the Dalai Lama. Or if you have a Lama, another Lama, then try to visualize them. If you don't have any particular connection with any Lama or you don't feel like you have any much holy being in your life, you can try Tara.

She's very beautiful. This woman Buddha here. I think a lot of people find her easy to visualize.

Dittso kappa is very good if you have any feeling towards that. Whoever it is, it doesn't matter. If you want to make one up, it's okay.

It should be someone said, it's what you had in mind when you were a little kid and they said, Jesus walked in the room, what would he look like? Or something like that. It should be someone that you relate to.

Some holy being. You're going to visualize them or you're going to picture them sitting with you as you meditate. This is part of the warm-up.

It's important to have the blessings of some kind of holy being. Is this just a make-believe? Not really.

There are holy beings like that. They can appear any way they want. They're not restricted like we are.

They can look any way they want. Your dog could be one of these beings. Don't know.

You really don't know. They have the ability. But put one in front of you, sitting in meditation with you, who's very, very real.

Seems very, very real. And they're going to help us meditate. We'll do a very short one like that.

I'll teach you how to do that visualization. How to get it ready. So we'll start again.

It's good to do, at the beginning, it's good to do many brief meditations. We'll do just a short breathing practice. And then I'll lead you through how to visualize this person who's sitting in front of you.

Ready? Do all your, what do they call it? Do all your, what do they call it when kids do that?

Fidgeting now. Get all your fidgeting done now.

[Speaker 2]
Watch your breath.

[Speaker 1]
Try to count it. Don't lose track. When you come back from your three-minute distraction to what you're going to do after this class, pick up at one again.

Now try to visualize this being in front of you. It's about the same size as you, facing you on a cushion. And first, just get their silhouette.

It's like a black and white silhouette. There's a light behind them. And all you can see is their outline.

Don't try to do anything more. Just get a definite sense of their outline. Go around the outline.

Make sure it's all detail is right. Where their hair is, where their arm is, where their leg is. Now try to do the outline of their face and their hair.

[Speaker 2]
Now get their eyes right and make it in color. Their eyes looking at you. Now color in the rest of their face and their hair.

[Speaker 1]
Don't lose your concentration. Keep focusing on them.

[Speaker 2]
Now color in the rest of their body.

[Speaker 1]
In the scriptures you have to make their body as beautiful as possible. It's not made of bone and blood and flesh. It's pure light.

Pure, beautiful, warm, radiant light. And their health is... I mean, physically they are perfect.

They're made of light. They're like angels of light. Now give their body some breath.

They're breathing. You see their body moving slightly. Breathing and eyes moving slightly.

Give their body some warmth that you can feel slightly. The warmth of their body. So it's important that visualization of a being shouldn't be for you visualizing a painting or something like that.

It's not like that. They're living, real being. In your meditation, the picture in your mind has to be perfect.

Three-dimensional, warm, breathing. Now give their body some fragrance. Some slight perfume smell.

It's hard to visualize a smell. But you have to learn to do it if your meditation is going to be good. So visualize one of your favorite sweet scents.

And it could be a smell of a flower or a perfume or something, the ocean. But a wheat field, grass cut, the desert after rain. Some sweet smell.

Make their body smell like that. Now visualize their state of mind. Visualize some kind of pure joy, beauty.

A mind that's not at all like our minds. Like their mind is very, very happy. Very pure, very clean.

Imagine a mind that doesn't have any negative thoughts all day long. Just all they think about is beautiful, happy. I think slower than our minds.

And in some kind of bliss all the time. So try to imagine how they feel in their own head as they're looking at you. Now imagine that that fragrance and the warmth of their body moves around both of your bodies.

So that you're both together inside a sphere of that warmth and that fragrance. It's enveloping both of you. And imagine that you're both inside a large...

The light from their body is surrounding you also. And the smell of their body is surrounding you. And the warmth of their body.

And then ask them for some blessing or some strength. Both for your meditation and for your whole life. And ask them in your mind, in your heart.

And then imagine that they're very pleased and their chest opens slightly. Very slight opening in their chest. And then this white light starts to come out.

Very slow, like a ray. A single wide ray of light. Like maybe half an inch across.

And very slowly bridging the gap between you. It's coming out very slowly. And imagine it's coming towards your chest.

[Speaker 2]
And then imagine it's very close to your chest and you can feel the warmth of the light. And then imagine your own chest is opening slightly.

[Speaker 1]
And then finally you feel the light coming from them into your own heart. And you can feel the light, the beam is connecting you both. And you feel this warm like nectar coming into your chest.

Like honey, like warm honey. And imagine that it brings you a little bit of the happiness they feel all the time. Just a little bit.

And imagine that it's filling you. And you feel just a little bit of how they feel all the time. And enjoy it.

And just sit there and enjoy it. And don't think about other things. Just enjoy it.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, then the last part of this meditation.

[Speaker 1]
You think about someone you know who's in trouble today. Someone who's sick or upset or lost somebody or unhappy. And dedicate this good energy of this meditation to them.

So put them in your mind and dedicate this good, this very beautiful energy to them.

[Speaker 2]
Relax them.

[Speaker 1]
So it's important at the end to give it to somebody. When you do your meditation, don't try to do more than like a half an hour at the beginning. It's enough.

Try to do it at the same time every day. And try to do it every day. It doesn't work very well if you don't do it every day.

Ten minutes every day is better than nothing. Ten minutes every day is better than two hours on the weekend. And try to do it every day.

And then next week we'll go a little bit deeper into that meditation. We'll start the actual meditation. All right?

Oh, what is it? What's the event next week? Okay, there will not be this class next Monday, but it'll be two weeks from tonight.

Okay, next Monday is a special ceremony here. Not here, but somewhere else. So two weeks from tonight.

And try to practice that at home. Every morning. All right?

We'll do some prayers. During these prayers, imagine that, think about that person again, and try to see that this energy will help them. Okay?

Help them get through whatever is hurting them right now. Okay? SON NAM YOD SHES TSOR RDZOGS SHES SON NAM YOD SHES RIGS CHUNG PHYI DANG PA GUNG YID RTOG PA SHOG Okay, good.

Thank you. Thank you for coming and thank you for meditating. It's nice.