Training the Mind: Lojong and Mindfulness

Unit 1 | The path of compassion and wisdom

In this first unit, I'll offer an introduction to lojong as well as an introduction to the path of compassion and wisdom that is Mahayana Buddhism in general.

The combination of lojong and mindfulness is about opening our awareness to life and opening our awareness to where we tend to get stuck, where we tend to contract and constrict into our ego clinging... and how to open that up.

Unit 2 | Cultivating awareness

In our second unit, we'll work with the third verse from our text, as well as the practices of meditative awareness. We'll talk about how to use awareness to grow more agency in our practice and in daily life. We'll also focus on working with challenging emotions and how mindfulness applies to lojong practice.

Unit 3 | Transforming challenges through equanimity and compassion

In our third unit, we'll explore the themes of equanimity and compassion—especially developing compassion toward others. This also includes self-compassion because, personally, I don't view compassion as travelling on a linear path, in/out. I think of it as spiralling out, then right back toward oneself, and again toward others. And ultimately we start to see there's less of a distinction between ourselves and others.

Unit 4 | Breathing compassion: the art of giving and taking

Now we'll take a look at tonglen practice and the general topic within lojong of exchanging oneself and others. This is a nuanced topic that I find needs to be unpacked otherwise it can easily get misunderstood or the power of it may or may not be evoked.

We'll discuss how to exchange oneself with others, why that's important, how to understand that within your meditation, and of course, how to actually do it in meditation practice.

Unit 5 | Seeing clearly: nonduality and freedom from delusion

We turn to an exploration of the Buddhist teachings on nonduality and emptiness, especially as they relate to lojong and verse eight in our text.

This is really where the exploration of liberation and enlightenment happens on the level of how we're perceiving reality, how we're perceiving our emotions, our thoughts, and our sense of self and other. These teachings open up a lot of possibilities.

Unit 6 | Embodying lojong in life

For our final unit, we'll review what we've learned so far and I'll share advice around making these teachings as practical as possible. In particular, we'll focus on integrating these skills into both our formal meditation and our daily life in deeper ways than we've already explored.