A Daily Practice for Anyone Who Wants One!

My daughter is working this summer at a local and wonderful bakery here in Salt Lake. I went over there tonight to see her and have something to eat (by the way – the food at the Avenues Bakery is great!).

So anyway, I walk in and come across a fellow Buddhist practicitioner who had previously asked me for a suggested a basic daily practice. Since we had not ever gotten together for me to provide her with a practice, we decided that now was a great time put it together. The great part, for me, is that I did not have advance warning to think about the perfect daily basic practice. I pulled it together right from the heart!

So I just started to write out a daily practice. Maybe it is my deluded thinking - which is very likely if you know me – However, I am still really happy with what I wrote down while my soup awaited me.

It might be worthless but I decided to put it down here for my own future benefit. I am getting older and at some point, I am likely to loose my memory. So as long as the blog remains on the web, I can look it up and remind myself of what I need to do. Assuming that I can find it on the web.

So here it is:

1) Get on your Seat – find a time every day to sit down – same time every day is the best and it’s a great way to get some discipline. Set a place in to sit everyday. Start with maybe just 15 minutes – you can extend this as time goes by but the most important thing is to do it every single day. Got it? Don’t do 2 hours one day and then nothing for the next week. Such inconsistency will accomplish nothing.

2) Settle your Body, quite your words, and relax your thinking (your mind, if you prefer) – After sitting down, it is time to rest into your time to practice. I lik to start with my feet and move up my body. Go from your feet to your ankles to calves, to your knees. Eventually you get to your head where I work on each sensual intake separately. My mouth, my nose, my face, my ears, my eyes, the forehead, my crown chakra. If I am lucky, I come out of this practice calm and ready to go into deeper practice.

3) Purify your channels – I did not put this one down tonight because sitting in the restaurant was not the best place to teach someone how to do the 9-Wind Cleansing. But if you know what this is, do it at this time. It is the process to cleanse out negative energies of hatred/anger/aversion (the first three), the negative energies of desire/greed/attachment (the second three), and the negative energies of ignorance/delusion/wrong thinking (the final three). They are stored in your left channel, right channel, and central channel respectively (reverse the first two for women – it’s a mirror image).

4) Shamata – Meditate using your breath as the focus of your thinking. I like Khenpo Choga Rinpoche’s suggestion to do three (3) sets of seven for a total of 21. This is to train our mind in one-pointed focus and attention. Many texts or teachers say that if your mind wanders, you are suppose to start over. However, I feel that if we were really honest with this “rule,” we would never get through all 21 breaths. So don’t be too hard on your self. Just do the best that you can. With time, it seems that there is improvement. Maybe I will be able to get all 21 done without distraction before I die. By the way, the reason we work on this is because it helps with all of the rest of the practice. The better we have trained our mind to focus, the greater the power and force our practice will have.

5) Take Refuge in your Teachers/Guides – Whoever you regard as your teacher or teachers, place them in front of you. Visualization seem strange but it is amazingly powerful. I think that you should put whomever you regard as your teacher/guide/advisor. In fact, I load up every single teacher that I have or have had in front in front of me. There is no reason to leave any of them out. Jesus, Ghandhi, Buddha, our living teachers, our grand parents, put them all there. If they can help me, I don’t want to leave them out. For a Buddhist, we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, The teachers are the Buddha. They are the messengers of the path to awakening (the Dharma). There are others that are traveling the same path (the Sangha).

6) Offering to your Teacher - Visualize wonderful and magnificant things of beauty and offer these to your teachers. We do this to practice the generosity of giving all to them. We are training to realize that there is nothing in this world as sacred and great as the teachings to reach full awakening. Everything we have, everything that we would like to have, see, or hold can never compare with the sacredness and importance of the teachings. We therefore, offer all that we can imagine to our teachers.

7) Purify your Mind/thinking. Recall a situation over the last say 24 hours that you regret which might be an action, something that you said, or simply something that you thought – This is the purification practice but taken to a very personal level. Rather than dealing with it on a conceptual level we are bringing it right down to the real thing: Something that you really did, said, or thought.
a. Confess it in front of your teachers and guides including deities if you practice with such practices.
b. Regret it.
c. Promise not to do this again for a set period of time. If you can only commit for a few hours, then do this. If you are prepared to do forever, that is even better but mean it!
d. Commit to do something, anything, that you feel is appropriate to make amends – Its your confession, create your own amends. Maybe it is simply to give a homeless person 50 cents. Maybe you should let someone cut in front of you on the freeway and you are happy to let them in. You have to decide what you should do. (By the way, after you have completed the task let go go of your regret! You are done with it. Let it be over!)

8) Rejoice in your good deeds. Recall a good action, words, or thought over the last 24 hours – take your pick and hopefully you can find something.
a. Rejoice in whatever you have recalled
b. Dedicate the merit of this to all sentient beings, don’t keep it for only yourself.

9) Consider those that are suffering. Think of someone you know who is suffering right now or a group of people that are suffering – this is the arousal of the mind of Bodhicitta if you want the formal term for this part of the practice.
a. Wish that they be free from suffering (this is compassion)
b. Wish that they be happy (this is love/loving-kindness)
c. Wish that they never be separated from the unchangeable and indestructible happiness/bliss (this is Joy)
d. Wish that that they remain forever in equanimity beyond hope and fear (this is equanimity).

10) Ask your teachers to remain with you for the day – This is where you can place your teachers in your heart (heart chakra). They can stay and guide you throughout the day. Anytime you need their assistance, they are there to help.

11) Spreading the light of love and compassion - Once your teachers have been safely place in you heart chakra, we can then visualize waves of light coming from our heart chakra. The rainbow of lights are in the colors of blue, green, red, yellow, and white (representing the 5 Buddha families, their attributes, and wisdoms), the rays of light pass through the world spreading love, compassion, and enlightened prayers to all beings. With some practice, such visualizations become more and more a reality that you are truly sending waves out to the entire world and all beings.


12) Rejoice in whatever merit you have accumulated through today’s practice – You can increase this bundle by rejoicing all the merit created by all sentient beings and accumulated by all enlightened beings in the past, present, and future. Load up the pile of merit.

13) Give the Merit away for the swift awakening (aka the Enlightenment) of all sentient beings – If you keep all this merit for yourself, you will lose it in a single moment of anger, greed, pride, envy, or ignorance. So give it away and then it will never be lost. This is for certain.

14) Close your practice and Smile – Keep your piece of your mind. When you mess up: reflect on the error, regret, forgive yourself, and get back to being that wonderful and amazing person that you are.

Many Dharma Blessings,

Geoff