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Start Where You Are
Hello Everyone,
Pema Chodron wrote a book called Start Where You Are. In it she introduces a Tibetan practice called Lojong which consists of a meditation practice called Tonglen and study of 59 dharma slogans. I'm just now seriously beginning to study the slogans and I would like to get feedback from some of you if possible on some of the slogans.
I've been told on other sites that I really need a teacher to guide me, but I don't have one and probably won't have one till next Spring. I've also been guided towards the study of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight Fold Path perhaps as a prerequisite for the Lojong study. But I really want to study Lojong too.
Pema Chodron says clearly--Start where you are and not start only after you've mastered the basics and gotten yourself a teacher. She presents the Lojong Practice in a very accessible way, as if it were basic Buddhism. Do you consider the Lojong Practice to be suitable for beginners or do you consider it an intermediate practice? Personally, I think I'm going to take her advice and continue with my study, but it would be nice to connect with some of you along the way. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
May you be well,
Kate
Pema Chodron wrote a book called Start Where You Are. In it she introduces a Tibetan practice called Lojong which consists of a meditation practice called Tonglen and study of 59 dharma slogans. I'm just now seriously beginning to study the slogans and I would like to get feedback from some of you if possible on some of the slogans.
I've been told on other sites that I really need a teacher to guide me, but I don't have one and probably won't have one till next Spring. I've also been guided towards the study of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight Fold Path perhaps as a prerequisite for the Lojong study. But I really want to study Lojong too.
Pema Chodron says clearly--Start where you are and not start only after you've mastered the basics and gotten yourself a teacher. She presents the Lojong Practice in a very accessible way, as if it were basic Buddhism. Do you consider the Lojong Practice to be suitable for beginners or do you consider it an intermediate practice? Personally, I think I'm going to take her advice and continue with my study, but it would be nice to connect with some of you along the way. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
May you be well,
Kate
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Comments
That's a good point, but I'd be very happy to start with the first slogan too. How long has it been since you first began to study the slogans? Do you still touch on them in your daily practice? I am very much a beginner, but even I find it easy to respond to slogans such as "Be grateful to everyone" and "Always maintain only a joyful mind". Other slogans are definitely a lot harder for me to grasp, but therein lies the challenge I think.
Kate
Meditation on death and impermanance
Meditation on the six realms
Meditation on the elements and emotional reactions
Meditation on the four immeasurables
Then tonglen, then what I'm doing now. It's kind of the classic recommended sequence, at least in Tibetan Buddhism. I have jumped around between these, and they build on each other, so I keep going back to all of them. But there's definitely some wisdom to the sequence. For instance, everybody's different, but the practice I'm doing now would be impossible for me personally, had I not done that preliminary work. (I know this, because I tried to do it earlier, and it wasn't helpful.)
Also, get a good teacher. The work would have gone a lot faster if I'd connected with one earlier.
But I'm still puzzled. Pema Chodron has put in a lot of time and effort to make the Lojong Practice accessible to people, particularly Westerners, considering she was born in NYC and raised in New Jersey. But there are no Lojong study forums that I've found on the net. Perhaps I'm overestimating her popularity. Anyway, I'm frustrated yet also happy to be where I'm at--in the beginning of some kind of half-assed practice. Better to be on the path or at least approaching it, than to be stuck in a ditch somewhere...
So, the preliminaries: a) this precious human birth which can give rise to contact with the dharma, b) the fact of death, it comes for us all, c) the existence of karma--the entrapment of cause and effect and d) the unsatisfactory nature of the cycle of existence--samsara.
That's a lot to study right there.
It's interesting to note that Pema Chodron in her book Start Where You Are defines the preliminaries this way: "The preliminaries are the basic meditation practice--beneficial, supportive, warm-hearted, brilliant shamatha-vipashyana practice." She doesn't even mention the four parts -- birth, death, karma and samsara... Weird.
Kate
Perhaps there are no lojong study forums on the net because the practice itself is dead simple. There is this, though.
You can get a fair distance in lojong without the birth, death, karma, samsara sequence. It's just that tonglen will cause you to run into all of those things, and studying them separately can be helpful. I don't think what you're doing is half-assed at all. I think it's admirable.
Going on those retreats must have been interesting. I've never done anything like that. In fact, I've lived a rather isolated life. At some point I think I need to be in a communal setting like that. Pema Chodron compares the ego to living in a room where you control everything and have it just the way you like it, but in the process you shut out the world and then when you go out into the world, you get very uncomfortable. Well, I'm sort of in that "ego cocoon" right now. Reading Pema Chodron and Chogyam Trungpa and Jamgon Kongtrul and B. Alan Wallace on Mind Training is like opening the door a crack and then coming here is doing that a little bit more and finding you up ahead on the path is so refreshing.
You say the practice is dead simple, and I do find it approachable, but it would be so much richer to get feedback from people practicing tonglen and meditating on the slogans. It seems to me that there is a lot to say along with there being a lot to practice.
Thanks for the link, someone else hooked me up to it from the E-Sangha site before it crashed.
Stay Well,
Kate