Learn to Meditate

Free Your Own Mind

While many modern people come to meditation to reduce stress and cultivate coping skills for their modern life, meditation was not originally designed for this purpose. The purpose of meditation is to familiarize your mind with the way things truly are. In the process of this familiarization you will develop many skills of concentration and flexibility that will enable you to ultimately free your own mind. Every single one of us has Buddha-nature, a perfectly peaceful strong capacity to cope with everything. This is the nature you will come to be familiar with when you free your own mind. This means you already have a limitless capacity to be peaceful, free from stress and cope with anything. It’s just been hidden from you. So whether you are starting to meditate for the first time or you want to understand an authentic way to practice, you will definitely benefit from the books and course below. Regular, consistent and authentic meditation practice leads to increased awareness of ourselves so we are able to have more mental capacity for constructive responses and decisions. This affects how we cultivate positive relationships with others, handle stress and cope with difficult situations. It can also benefit our  cognitive function and physical health. For any meaningful change, just like brushing our teeth or eating healthy, it needs to be part of our daily routine.

Get Started a Few Minutes Each Day

In our modern world, we all want instant results. We also think the more we try the faster the result will be. But when you are new to something and starting it for the first time, you need to start gradually. People start something like meditation and expect it to be easy. They do not expect that with other new things like learning a foreign language but then when it comes to something masters spent years training themselves in they expect it to be easy. It is. not easy when you start. But, there is no reason to be discouraged. This practice is a mind training. The first time you try to ride a bicycle, you are not ready to race it in Tour De France. So like this, the first time you try to meditate, you may not find the peace and capacity to cope with life that you are longing for. In the beginning you may even feel like your mind is worse than you expected filled with stress and anxiety. Your mind is not getting worse so why does it seam that way? It’s because you never took any time to look at it before. It was always there distracted, filled with endless chatter, sensations and emotions but you never looked carefully before. You never fully concentrated or focused on it. That is why like anything it is better to start gradually step by step.

If you just stop for a few minutes, a few times each day to be present, this is already moving in the right direction. Just as when you learn to ride a bike you may not be able to go far before falling off. When you first meditate you may not be able to hold your concentration for more than a few moments or a few minutes. There is no reason to try to force yourself as a beginner to sit for an hour or days at a time. Khentrul Rinpoche has cultivated the course below and some guided meditations that are very short to help us to get started. As your training develops then you can meditate for longer and longer. Then you can sit for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour or even many hours in a day. With just a first tiny step in the right direction you can move towards cultivating the warrior capacity to meditate in all moments.

Study the Buddhist Meditation Roadmap

Some people are drawn to meditation as they see it as a means to improve themselves, or to become something or someone else, usually for a more worldly goal. However, the ultimate goal of the Buddhist path is to find what we already have but cannot see, our pure innate true nature. Our perfect Buddha-nature has unlimited compassion and skillful means to serve others and limitless power. Recognizing this nature this leads to ultimate and permanent happiness beyond this life. Specific meditation techniques and other methods used for this path have been practiced and passed down by many lineage spiritual masters to successfully achieve this goal. Many people claim to be meditation teachers and there is a lot of new age information out there. So it’s important to make sure you have and understand instructions that were tested and handed down through the centuries by masters who actualized their teachings. It’s also important to have a map for your journey on the meditation path. Then you do not need to wonder or worry if you are doing it right or if you are headed in the right direction. You will know through your study of the Shamatha and Vipassana path what to expect. Gain a clear roadmap by reading Khentrul Rinpoche’s books. For those who want to improve your meditation practice you can start with An Authentic Guide to Meditation. You will benefit from it even if you are not Buddhist. For those who want to understand where meditation fits into the Buddhist path, you can read Unveiling Your Own Sacred Truth Book 1. This book provides an overview on how to train yourself on this journey.

How Fast Do You Want to Transform? 

How fast you cultivate meditative realizations depends more on your apsiration and goal rather than just how much you practice. Two people can practice for one month full time but the may not get the same benefit due to different motivations. This is why some people can practice meditation for 10 years and have no realization and another can realize the whole path in 10 days. 

This may seem strange or counter intuitve at first. So let’s understand this practice on a deeper level. If your aspiration is to achieve stress reduction for yourself, then your aspiration is very limited. It may seem large, like something already difficult for you, but in the big picture it is very small. If you have an aspiration to help liberate all sentient begings as limitless as space so they will find ultimate peace and happiness and unveil their own scret truth, this aspiration is huge. The later motivation relies on the power of Bodhicitta which is on an ultimate level inseperable from your own nature. So you are trying to reveal the peace of your true nature and relying on the limitless peace of your true nature to guide you. Every moment you spent meditating with this apsiration is multiplied by limitless power or you can think infinity. If you only focus on reducing your stress so you can cope better in samsara, you are not relying on your true nature for the transforamtion. You are relying on samsara. And in samsara there are over 8 billion people on this earth. You are not concenred that everyone else also has peace so your focus is very narrow. Therefore every moment you spend meditating you can think is multiplied by maybe 10. It’s not nothing because you are practicing meditation but it’s not powerfully transformative because of the limitated power of your minds motivation. Your progress relies not only on the wisdom you gain but the amount of good karma or merit you accumulate in your life. The more good karma and merit you pocess the faster your practice will go. Aspiring to help others accumulates good karma faster for you then only focusing on yourself. So if you want to be truly selfish and have less stress in your life, you need to care about helping others as well. This bigger aspiration will help you reach your own goal of stressing less sooner. To understand this motivation better, Khentrul Rinpoche encourages you to study the Bodhisattva path.

Advanced Meditative Practices

Once you have the basics of meditation down, Dzokden offers many profound and advanced meditation practices based in the secret mantrayana. In general our community focuses on these more advanced practices that connect practitioners as fast as possible with their true nature. This is because our lineage the Jonang emphasize experiential wisdom. They want practioners to reveal their own Buddha-nature as quickly as possible through the non-conceptual meditation practices. For those who are serious on the path to enlightenment, Khentrul Rinpoche offers the path of the Kalachakra completion stage experiential practice of the 6 vajra yogas.  Each of the Yogic practices have profound meditative skillful means that rely on revealing your own Buddha-nature. To. do these practices effectively you need to study and practice the Kalachakra Tantra, cultivate the 3 confidences in yourself, the guru and this lineage’s path. The practices range from single-pointed chanting of mantras, meditation in the dark while isolating your body, speech, and mind, meditating at the sky, meditating while performing secret pranayama and yoga asana that work with your subtle body directly, working with your emotions and many other profound skillful means. All of these practices only work, when the disciple has love and devotion for the lama, confidence in the path and prioritized Dharma as your number one life goal. Remember the most important aspect of how fast your meditation path goes is what motivation you have while practicing. These practices work the same way. They do not rely only on skills and techinques. They rely on Bodhichitta, pure perception and devotion to the Lama.

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