Week 1 practice

Challenges

The main behavioural challenge this week will be to do five (5) sessions of practice, on different days. This is a very easy practice since it will take less than 15’. For bonus points, you can add two more sessions. Ideally, you will practice every day but if you want to take the weekend off, that’s ok.

Yoga

All ritual, all yogas require some demarcation. The work yoga itself means “union”; like an ox and a yoke (which shares the same linguistic root of yoga) we will join our practice with our life. So, at the beginning and the end, we’re going to mark the period of practice by reciting invocations to the Buddhas. This will connect us to the Buddha clan and help us mark the time for practice.

We will start each session by reciting the following prayers:

Refuge

With the aspiration to free every living being,

Until the essence of liberation is reached

Without ceasing, I go for refuge

In the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Bodhicitta

With wisdom and with heartfelt love,

Diligently, for the sake of sentient beings,

I place myself before the buddhas,

And give rise to Bodhicitta, the mind of awakening.

This is called the Refuge and Bodhicitta. We will cover what those mean in this training. But for now, repeat it three times at the beginning. You can do Refuge three times and Bodhicitta three times or read them together three times, as you see fit.

Then, at the end of the session, you can say the following prayer:

The Concluding Dedication

May all merit gathered through these prayers and practices,

Together with all the three trainings and the three vows,

That fully embody the intent of the Paramitas and Wisdom,

Be dedicated to the liberation of all sentient beings

In the ten directions and three times, and overturning

The six realms, may all places, arise as a harmonious, pure land,

And all beings as Buddhas, totally free of suffering.

This is called the dedication of merit and will finish your practices. With the Refuge and the Dedication, you have a container for your practice. So, let’s dive into it.

The Practice: Absorption and Insight introduction

The general practice of Buddhism is twofold: you generate a particular state of Absorption through a meditation technique (called in Sanskrit Shamatha) and use that Absorption coupled with Buddhist concepts to generate Insight (called Vipashyana in Sanskrit).

Now, Absorption and Insight are not two techniques, but two modes which contain a multitude of techniques. When people say “I’m going to take a Vipashyana retreat” they actually mean “I’m going into a retreat on a system which focuses on Vipashyana by a variety of techniques”. We will cover several of those techniques within this training, but remember Absorption and Insight are two modes of training. You use Absorption to produce Insight and that liberates all beings.

Absorption

This week’s practice is quite simple. After having done the Refuge and Bodhicitta prayer, sit comfortably. Having done that:

·        Check that your back is straight.

·        Take three deep breaths.

·        Relax.

·        Don’t move for five (5) minutes.

·        That’s it!

Yes: stay still for five minutes is the first practice. You might think that this is stupid. The first time you do it, you will get bored as fuck. You will try to escape visualizing deities, etc, thirty seconds in.

That’s ok. As long as you don’t move or watch a screen, use the telephone, or anything else to distract you, this is fine. Just set an alarm for five minutes and think of what you want. Just don’t move.

Why are we doing this? Why are we not doing things like cool guided meditations or Guru yogas?

I used to teach that, at the beginning. And then, slowly, introduce more complex practices. And you know what? It was a mess. Because in today’s world, boredom is the greatest obstacle for modern meditators. We expect to be overstimulated all the time. We expect visions, perhaps Buddhas coming to talk to us, and then we get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. This is an obstacle to the experience.

Most of your practice will settle in. Practicing the Absorptions for hours, day in and day out. Things will get boring and that’s ok. We need to get over it, and as soon as possible. This doesn’t mean that things will always be boring, but if we learn to relax through the boredom, we will be ready to continue when we don’t have an exciting experience.

So get those five minutes in!

Insight

Having spent those five minutes, we will turn the mind towards thinking on a particular topic. This topic will be Impermanence. In Buddhism, there’s nothing that is Eternal. The Buddha observed everything appears, decays and disappears in time: from the Cosmos to ourselves, everything changes.

This doesn’t mean that we need to accept this as a gospel. We need to look by ourselves, think of things that we have experienced, see if they don’t change. This means observing feelings, memories, objects that we have familiarity with. You may think, but isn’t the Christian God eternal? Well, not in Buddhism. Do the idea of the Christian God changes? Sure it does, you might say, but the essence does not. So, do you have access to observe it and chart it across time? I’m going to bet that no, you don’t. So let’s restrict ourselves to check things we can observe and that we can answer: do they change or not?

Why are we doing this? Because often we think of things as immutable: those people who are assholes to us are always like that or something that we dislike (an institutional policy, a tv show) is always like this. We know intellectually that everything changes but we continue to act as if phenomena are both eternal and simple: either good or bad. With this practice, we generate the Wisdom (Sanskrit Prajña) to counteract that confusion.

Spend five minutes more thinking and examining things and then close with the dedication.

Whew! That is quite a lot for the first week!

So, to recap:

1.     Open with prayers

2.     Keep five minutes still

3.     Examine how things change for five minutes

4.     Close with dedication

And do that on at least five days to complete week one.

See you on the next Week!

Lesson Summary

Week 1 practice Challenges

• Main behavioural challenge: Do five (5) practice sessions on different days, ideally daily.
• Bonus points for adding two more sessions.
• Start and end each session by reciting prayers to the Buddhas: Refuge and Bodhicitta.

Yoga

• All yogas require demarcation; yoga means "union" like an ox and a yoke.
• Recite prayers to connect to the Buddha clan and mark practice time.

The Practice: Absorption and Insight introduction

• In Buddhism, practice involves generating Absorption and using it for Insight.
• You use Absorption to produce Insight, leading to liberation.

Absorption practice:

• Sit comfortably after reciting prayers.
• Check posture, take deep breaths, relax, and stay still for 5 minutes.
• Deal with boredom and avoid distractions like screens.

Insight practice:

• Focus on Impermanence, the concept that nothing is eternal.
• Observe how things change over time to counteract confusion.

To recap for Week 1:

1. Open with prayers
2. Stay still for 5 minutes
3. Reflect on Impermanence for 5 minutes
4. Close with dedication