By Pema Chödrön and Alice Walker — 1999
Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön and novelist Alice Walker on how tonglen meditation practice opens our heart, expands our vision, and plants the seeds of love in our lives.
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CLEAR ALL
Grounded in our formal practice of meditation, we can relax into the vast, open awareness that is our ultimate nature. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche tells the story of his own introduction to the Great Perfection.
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We can temporarily push our ego away or try to rearrange our personality to be happier, freer, or more realized. But ego comes back. And that’s where Diamond Approach inquiry comes in. We all have awareness and inquiry helps us harness awareness to dissolve ego instead of pushing it away.
As human beings, our predominant agenda is to survive. The instinct is deep in our DNA. Of course we want to stay alive, but now this instinct has become more of an emotional response. It's less about a threat to our actual existence and more about the barrage of perceived threats to our ego.
As long as we have bodies, we will have physical pain. Buddhism promises no escape from that. What we can change is how we experience pain.
One of the most in-depth meditation studies to date shows that different practices have different benefits.
By meditation we mean something very basic and simple that is not tied to any one culture.