Dear friends near and far
I am sending you many happy wishes for Guru Rinpoche Day. This Saga Dawa month is a very important month. Please practice well. I’m going to focus on more practice this month, and will think of all of you.
This time, I want emphasize that how we apply practice and how we check ourselves is very important. I want to share with you about compassion or caring. I think they are very important. I think many of us like the idea of compassion. We try to practice caring and compassion, but it is very important to have the knowledge of how to apply them in our life. And to continue applying on a daily basis.
At the same time, it’s very important to check how to see, “Am I really practicing or applying correctly or am I not practicing correctly?” It is very important to have a re-confirming, re- checking, or re-noticing tendency. It’s very important. Many of us enjoy practicing compassion. But after we practice compassion in our session, we don’t apply compassion in our daily life. We don’t behave compassionately. I’m just saying this through my own experience. And I saw many things in my life and others. It is very important to discover ourselves, you know.
I think compassion and caring is really one of the most powerful practices. Moodiness, complaining, pessimism, anger, hatred, grudges. All these things can actually be reduced and healed by practicing and behaving with care and compassion. I like to send lot of important points like this as a reminder on Guru Rinpoche’s Day.
Our beloved teacher, Guru Rinpoche, explained to be able to reduce our anger, we need to apply and practice loving-kindness. And to be able to reduce attachment, Guru Rinpoche said we need to practice compassion. To be able to reduce ignorance, Guru Rinpoche, our master, said we need to practice bodhicitta. So, to reduce these three poisons in our life, we need to practice compassion, loving-kindness, and bodhicitta.
This is a very basic important point. And I really think many of us need to remind ourselves in this practice. We need to learn to behave or we need to learn to apply. Many of us in our life and practices always sit and practice. But applying is a little bit difficult and I really accept that sometimes it is difficult for me too.
It is very important to watch your mind, and especially our judgmental stickiness, clinging, and habitual tendencies. We really need to be careful with these. So, practice compassion, loving-kindness, and bodhicitta. That is what Guru Rinpoche taught to tame the three poisons. So with that, I want to say to all of you please practice, please apply, and please re-check your practice. Thank you very much.
I’m sending much love to you guys and hope you all practice and apply.
I am happy to announce again that this month’s video message has subtitles in English, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. Please click the settings wheel in the bottom right corner of the video to access these options.
Sarva Mangalam,
Phakchok Rinpoche
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