Welcome
Throughout this course, you'll find the text of each video beneath the talk. You don't need to read these, but they may pull out key ideas and exercises for reference. These materials will be collected for download in the unit's workbook.
Welcome to Training the Mind
Welcome to our course on Lojong and Mindfulness, a transformative journey into Buddhist wisdom and compassion through the lens of the Eight Verses of Mind Training. Over six comprehensive modules will explore the fundamental practices of Buddhist mind training, compassion, and nondual wisdom. You'll learn practical techniques to cultivate deep awareness, transform challenging relationships, and develop genuine compassion for yourself and others.
Our approach combines traditional Buddhist teachings with contemporary life, making ancient wisdom accessible and relevant.
Each module includes guided meditations, practical exercises, and weekly integration tasks to help you embody these teachings in your daily life.
The Eight Verses of Mind Training
Our exploration in this course is going to be based on the text, Eight Verses of Mind Training. This text was written by Geshe Langri Thangpa and has been treasured in all Tibetan Buddhist lineages for hundreds of years.
Many practitioners from all walks of life have not only studied and treasured this text but have actually put it into practice, transformed their relationship to their own thoughts and emotions, and also transformed their relationship to others and how they perceive the world and what they value and what they seek as happiness.
So not only has this text been treasured and practiced, I believe it has applicability across generations, across cultures and across times. These teachings although originating from Shakyamuni Buddha around 2,600 years ago, stand the test of time. And as we can see, if we put them into practice in our own life, we not only find more ease and openness to our thoughts and emotions, but we can start to transform a relationship to others. And if we wish to, to traverse the Buddhist path of awakening.
A vital Tibetan text
For many hundreds of years, this text has been used as a way for practitioners to deepen, their compassion, to deepen their understanding of the mind, of what binds us to stress, how to relieve that, and how to help others, how to benefit others.
And so for many practitioners, this text is considered vital. Actually, some would include this in a list of three core texts. Or maybe for some of us, it's like a desert island text. If we had access to only one text, this would be one of those texts we could take with us in order to grow in our practice and for our practice to be complete.
What is lojong?
Lojong (mind training) is a corpus of teachings that encapsulates many different distillations of the Buddhist teachings on compassion and wisdom. And essentially, lojong focuses on relational dharma: on how we can open up more space in ourselves in relation to our emotions and thoughts, as well as space in our relationships.
Lojong is particularly treasured because of its practical nature, because it doesn't require one to be an erudite scholar or to know that much about buddhadharma.
It just requires one to have diligence in the practices to have some interest, some faith in them, and believe that they're useful—and then to put them into practice. There are many stories of practitioners over the years, both monastic and non-monastic, householders and famous saints, who have benefited from these teachings.
A complete path
So this text is complete. Even though it's succinct and it's only eight verses, it sums up the entire Buddhist path within these eight verses. And although this text can be challenging at times, it's meant as a lifelong guide, as a lifelong friend, to steer us along on our path to awakening.
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My hope is that this text will become as transformative for you as it has become for me, and that this course can serve not only as a basis to encounter these amazing teachings but also to contemplate, practice, and develop your own relationship to them. I do hope that this text can become a companion and a friend to you as a speaker, as it has been for me—and will continue to be. I'm just really happy to be engaging on this journey together. Thanks so much and looking forward to seeing you soon.