This teaching continues the series generously sponsored by Samye’s Indonesian Sangha. In this recording, Tulku Migmar Tsering talks about how to effectively practice meditation during times of great suffering, chaos and change.
This teaching continues the series generously sponsored by Samye’s Indonesian Sangha. In this recording, Tulku Migmar Tsering talks about how to effectively practice meditation during times of great suffering, chaos and change.
In “Preparing to Die, Learning to Live,” Tulku Migmar discusses how preparing to die is fundamentally about how we live. When we live with aims like accumulation of wealth, and we have a lot of attachments, facing death can be quite difficult. Death comes for everyone—anyone who is born will die. And the only thing that we bring with us is our Dharma practice.
What determines the success of our Dharma practice is our own mind, and the eight worldly concerns are what keep us from authentic Dharma practice. Worldliness means we seek to gain protection from what we fear and to gain happiness, so our motivation is actually hoping for some kind of profit from our practice.
Being radically happy refers to happiness that comes from within, which is unconditioned, and unrelated to any outside cause.
Tulku Migmar Tsering introduces the concept of Buddha-nature using a series of traditional examples.
Understand ignorance. Why would we need to do that if we are studying our minds? Most of us come to meditation retreats or Buddhist teachings because we are searching for answers. We know that we are unhappy, or anxious, or we may just feel like something is not quite right. If we have studied for some time, we may have heard a lot about how we are confused by ignorance. But why do we need to understand ignorance? Because if we just think that we suffer from ignorance, we may start to think of ignorance as something solid and unchanging.
Repeated Placement is the third stage of our calm abiding meditation. In shamatha meditation, our practice proceeds gradually so that we are able to quickly recognize when our attention wanders off. Here, Tulku Migmar Tsering explains how repeated placement works.Repeated placement means that as soon as we notice we are distracted we bring the mind back. Here Tulku explains that if we allow our wandering to go on, it makes the mind very “heavy”. And then it is harder for us to be mindful and to meditate. So he suggests that we learn to do this in three seconds–don’t forget our focus.
Continuous placement, or establishing continuity, is the second stage of calm abiding meditation. When we practice calm-abiding or shamatha meditation, we’re gradually retraining our minds. When we practice continuous placement we don’t have more thoughts than we had before. In fact, we are making a big step in managing our minds. We are noticing when the mind wanders and how many thoughts we have. Normally we don’t pay any attention to that process.
Tulku Migmar explains that Mindfulness is an exercise everyone can practice, notwithstanding their religion or lifestyle.
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