Heart Practices for Life

Do Lama Chöpa daily as guru yoga, to receive the blessing of the guru and lamrim realizations.

Motivation for life

The essential thing, the motivation for life, is bodhicitta and meditation on impermanence. Read different teachings on impermanence, like Heartspoon, a teaching by Pabongka Rinpoche that was translated by me. There is an extensive commentary on Lama Chöpa by his Holiness the Dalai Lama that you can get, and also the commentary by me, in bits and pieces, that you can get from old students and the office.

This should be your fundamental practice, the basis of your lamrim meditation realizations. It is also good for you to try some meditation on calm abiding, to have some experience of the graduated path to enlightenment.

After completing a cycle of lamrim meditations, if you still haven’t had any realizations of the lower capable being, put effort into that until you achieve stable realizations, whether it takes months or years.

Next is renunciation of samsara by meditating on the general suffering of each realm, the evolution of the 12 links, and the shortcomings of delusions. After that, achieve a stable realization of bodhicitta, no matter how many months or years it takes. Then, put effort into the two stages of tantra, mainly the generation stage and some completion stage.

This advice is the heart practice. No matter how many things we have to do in life, the main project is to become liberated and cease quickly our samsaric suffering. Not only that, the most important thing is to liberate numberless kind, precious, wish-fulfilling sentient beings in each realm and bring them to full enlightenment.

This is the happiest life; you are the most fortunate nun. You have the most meaningful life, more than most billionaire and zillionaire people in the world and most presidents and kings, because they create so much negative karma, like rain showers, and don’t have bodhicitta. They have to kill and harm so many sentient beings with anger.

Daily practice and motivation for life

Cleaning the room, which is part of the six preliminary practices, doesn’t depend on having dust. It’s cleaning your delusions and the delusions of all sentient beings. Then perform water offerings, then prostrations by reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas’ names (or you can do prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas during the verse in the Lama Chöpa). Do this practice either before or during Lama Chöpa, with strong application of the four powers, and then do the concluding confession prayers.

Blessing the speech can be done before or after your “motivation for life.”

Do meditation on the lamrim. After Lama Chöpa, you don’t need to do the last verse, the absorption of the merit field and guru—just leave it there and then do an expansion, direct meditation on whatever topic you are working on, or you can do it within Lama Chöpa. This way, if you do another session during the day, you can have the merit field there and start by doing refuge, the seven-limb prayer, and a short mandala offering, motivation, and then meditation.

In the last session, absorb the guru into you before going to bed. If you like, you can do one set of prostrations to the Thirty-five Buddhas, and then one, a half mala, or 21 mantras of Vajrasattva.

Practices

• Mandala offering: 50,000
• Vajrasattva: 16,000
• Dorje Khadro: 50,000
• Water bowls: 4,000
• Tong-len with Nagarjuna prayer, also you can do Verse 95 of Lama Chöpa: 300,000