Как выполнять ежедневную практику 14 — Полная медитация (1998, Нью-Йорк), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Alright, so get your hands right. Make sure your back is straight. Make sure your shoulders are relaxed, your mouth is relaxed.

Put your head as if you were looking straight forward, like not too high, and don't get your chin down on your chest, because then you'll get sleepy. It should be like at attention. And then if it feels more comfortable, close your eyes.

If you'd rather not close your eyes, then you can just glance downwards, with half open. And you might find that very nice. And then now just watch your breath.

Watching your breath means try to keep your mind at the opening of your nose, the two nostrils, at the opening. And imagine that the mind is staying there and watching the air go by. As you feel, the cold air hits your nose and the warm air comes out.

So your mind is focused on your two nostrils. And on the feel of the air going past that place. We'll do that for a few minutes.

Try to make it very quiet. Try not to shift after this. Do your last squirm and then try to stay still, at least for the sake of the people around you.

Then without moving, take your mind to what we call refuge, thinking about refuge. That's thinking about your life, thinking about how it goes up and down, thinking about how you're getting older, thinking about the prospects of a normal life, which are bad. You just get older until you can't work anymore and then slowly die.

And think about making a goal of understanding how to stop that process, how to move to a different kind of existence, which you can do in this lifetime. Think about the reason of meditation for that. That's the ultimate reason you're going to meditate.

If you can meditate well, you can see emptiness directly. If you see emptiness directly, then you can see your future. You know where you're going to go after you die, and you can make it something very, very good.

It's good to do that for about ten breaths, and then you can move on to the next part of the meditation. It's important to go through the meditation in a good order. Don't get hung up and don't stop for ten minutes on one thing.

About ten breaths is good for the preliminary, so the warm-up. Next, take your meditation on to bodhichitta or compassion. Think about someone you know who's in trouble, physically or mentally, and then think about how you'd like to help them.

Then think about if you could see emptiness directly or reach some kind of real serious spiritual level, you could help them. The next step is to invite a holy being to come here. Try to imagine inviting to sit in front of you.

Somebody you take as holy. It could be the Dalai Lama. If you grew up as Christian, maybe Jesus, or your Lama, if you have a root Lama.

But some being that you believe is holy, and picture them in front of you. Picture that they come and sit in front of you. You go through a slow process of visualizing their silhouette, and then their eyes, and then filling their eyes with color, and then their face, and then their hair, and then their whole body, and then the warmth from their body, and then the little motions like their eyebrows, their eyelids twitching, or the breath in their chest going up and down, and then the scent from their body.

Make them real.

[Speaker 2]
Try to imagine how they think and how their mind feels so sweet to them.

[Speaker 1]
Now you do a specific meditation about their good qualities. What is it that you admire about them, that you would like to be? At this point especially, it's important to think about how they maybe have been following you around for a long time, trying to get you to do all these things.

Then lastly, you make them some offering or some gift in your mind. The basic offering is to imagine the whole sky covered with flowers, and offer them that. The offering that makes them happiest is to offer them something good you did during the day, to someone, or some good plan you have shortly to do something very good for someone.

So try to think of something specific that you did that was good, or something specific that's good that you can do for them in the next few hours. Next part of the meditation is to imagine some kind of negative thing you did today, like you thought something bad about somebody, or you felt jealous of someone, or you got angry at someone, and bring it up in your mind very, very specifically, like you're playing a videotape. Play it back a few times, and watch how stupid it seems now.

Then try to feel some kind of idea. Think a little bit about how you could stop doing that the next day, tomorrow or the next day. So some very specific little negative thing you did to someone today, and very, very clear, very specific what you said, why you said it, and then some thoughts about how you can avoid it tomorrow.

Again, keep one part of your mind on your breath, and counting out tens, and then after ten or something, go on to the next part of the meditation. The next part of the meditation is to think of something good you did today, something that you thought kindly of someone, or you took care of someone, or you put someone else's interest before your own today. You did what they wanted before you did what you wanted, and be happy about it.

Think about how you can maybe do something else like that tomorrow, but make sure it's very clear. Something very specific that you did.

[Speaker 2]
Remember where you were, what you said, what you thought, who it was, what they looked like. The next part of the meditation, you think about getting teachings.

[Speaker 1]
You're praying that you can get good teachings. They could be formal teachings like classroom teachings, or they could be teachings that your children give you, or your spouse, or your friends, or your fellow workers. They could be positive teachings, sweet teachings, or they could be negative lessons that someone teaches you by disappointing you or hurting you.

Then you learn more about your own mind, and you learn more about being patient. So at this stage in the meditation, we ask to meet teachings like both of those kinds of teachings in our lives. Then there's a joke in the monastery.

They say, then you can't complain if tomorrow someone hurts you or disappoints you, because you asked for it. The last part before the squirming part is to pray that the good teachers in this world stay alive and stay well. You could pray for the health of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, or pray that Ken Rinpoche, our root lama, that they stay in the world.

All the good teachers that you know, even your friends who teach you good things, the good people you're around, that the good influences on you, the people who affect you in a positive way, that they live a long life and they stay with you and they stay close to you. Then relax and move around a little bit. That's the warm-up.

Then we'll start the real meditation after that.

[Speaker 2]
We'll start again.

[Speaker 1]
Also, don't try to do too much at the beginning. Slow and steady wins the race. It's much better to do 20 minutes a day and build up than to do an hour for three days and then quit.

It's very important to do a little bit each day. Then naturally you'll get better and better at it, and then you'll enjoy it more and more, and then you'll want to do more and more. We talked about the ultimate benefits of meditation, but there's a lot of worldly benefits.

Your concentration gets much, much better. You can accomplish anything you ever want to. Your intellect starts to improve.

Your health starts to improve. Your body gets stronger. You're able to solve problems that you couldn't solve before.

In your whole life, like your relationships with other people, everything starts to improve because your mind is getting more and more clear. So it's very good to do a little bit each day and then build up. Same time each day.

Now we'll do an actual meditation. This is called a basic SON DEP. SON DEP meditation is where you try to get some blessing or energy from a holy being.

Je Tsongkapa, who taught the first Dalai Lama, the teacher of the first Dalai Lama, was a specialist at this. He did it about half his meditations. Even after he became a great master, even after he got very close to being enlightened, he would still do this meditation.

So it's a very good meditation.

[Speaker 2]
So put your hands back. Then take your position and then decide you're not going to move. Then watch your breath again.

[Speaker 1]
Then build up that vision again of the person in front of you, sitting in front of you like a holy being. Build it up from their outline first. Their silhouette.

[Speaker 2]
See them with a light behind them and just get their outline right. Then see their eyes. Then the rest of their face.

Then add their hair and their shoulders with color. Then the rest of their body. Then add their warmth and their scent and movement in their body.

Then imagine how they think and what it feels like to be in their mind.

[Speaker 1]
Then try to think of the one or two spiritual qualities or the good qualities that they have that you would like to have, or things that you're not very strong about, that they are very perfect about, that you'd like to learn from them or have from them.

[Speaker 2]
Then imagine that they agree to help you. You ask them in your mind to help you and they agree. Then imagine that they put their hands on your chest, in the middle of your chest, and you can feel the warmth in their hands.

[Speaker 1]
Then imagine that the things that you would like to learn from them are coming into you through their hands and then spreading around your body like your blood. In Tibetan, it's like a golden light. Some beautiful, warm, golden light is spreading around your body.

Then imagine that your body is made of light and that it's very, very beautiful like their body, and very, very pure, and your mind is very, very pure.

[Speaker 2]
Imagine that you've become like them.

[Speaker 1]
Then imagine that the light goes out of your body. We say it goes out from the little pores in your skin. Little rays of light going out, touching the other people around you and helping them, giving them some kind of strength and some kind of compassion for them.

Then at the end of the meditation, you imagine that you ask that person to come into you and stay inside of you and continue to bless you during the whole night while you sleep and then in the morning. Then they agree with joy and then they start rising up off the ground. They're still facing you and they get smaller and smaller and smaller.

Then they rise above your head and then they turn around to face the same way as you and then they settle down on your head. At this point they're very small, like maybe three inches high and they're resting on the top of your head and try to feel them there. Then they get smaller and smaller and smaller and they start to come down towards your heart from the top.

They sink into your body and they come down. They follow a path just in front of your backbone. It's about a half inch or a little more in front of your backbone and they're coming straight down very slowly and they're shrinking smaller and smaller.

Then just before they get to the level of your heart, imagine like a small capsule at the level of your heart, just in front of your backbone, about a half inch or a little bit more. It's like a little chamber about the size of a pea. From the outside when you look at it, it seems like about the size of a pea, but when you put your mind inside, it's this big beautiful chamber full of beautiful lights and soft cushions and silks and incense smells and make it a beautiful place.

In the center put a big soft flower, like a rose, laid down open, open flat. Each petal is a really, really soft silk cushion. Then they come down and they sit in the middle of it.

Imagine them there and imagine them like blessing your mind, blessing your body the whole day. Then remember when you need something during the day or you're about to get angry or you feel sad, then you can go and meet them. From the outside it looks like a little pea.

Then when you put your mind inside, it's this big nice room, very, very beautiful, a nice quiet place to go.

[Speaker 2]
They're always waiting there for you.

[Speaker 1]
They really, really care for you. They're always watching out for you. We don't believe in a God who made the world.

We believe it comes from your mind. But we do believe that there are beings like that who have been watching you your whole life. They've been around you.

Sometimes they pretended to be the people you knew. They've been trying to help you and guide you. Then imagine that they are, that that one is staying in your heart and very happy to be there.

We say Buddhas can move at the speed of mind and they can be anywhere they want to be and they don't take much space up. They say you can fit a million Buddhas on the head of a pin. So it's no problem for them to be in your heart really.

They really do come. As soon as you think about it. The last step is to, this is coming out of meditation, then you dedicate that good karma.

You made a lot of good karma and you try to imagine that all the people that you meet during the whole day, there'll be something slightly different about you, like 1% different about you. You didn't just eat all morning or read the newspaper. They can sense something different about you.

As you walk through the day, even people who meet you on the street, they sense something slightly different about you because you did something completely different in the morning. So imagine them. The last step of meditation is to think about it, that as you meet people during the day, when you feel upset or angry, you tend to pass it on to other people during the day and then it passes on to another person.

It passes from person to person. But if you did some kind of meditation in the morning, there's a certain calmness about you that spreads from person to person around you. So dedicate it to that.

[Speaker 2]
You can relax.