How to Combine Jobs

How to Combine Jobs

Date Posted:
October 2005

A student wrote asking Rinpoche’s advice on how to combine her work at a local Dharma center with her job as a yoga teacher and shiatsu therapist. She was wondering whether she should be trying to focus on one job at a time, and also asked Rinpoche’s advice as to what practice she should concentrate on.

My dear Nina,
Work with bodhicitta!

In everyday life, you should always remember these two verses:

1) The first stanza of the Eight Verses of Thought Transformation:

Every person and animal is wish-fulfilling for all the happiness of all your numberless future lives, for liberation from samsara, and for full enlightenment. One cannot achieve this benefit with skies of wish-granting jewels. They (sentient beings) are the most precious ones.

2) The stanza by Nagarjuna:

May I become that which fulfills all the desires of sentient beings. May I become all the objects desired by all sentient beings, like a wish-granting jewel, like an unfathomable, unimaginable tree, fulfilling all sentient beings’ wishes.

Practice like this and do your work for the benefit of beings. Working for the Dharma center is helping to spread the Dharma, and in that way you are helping sentient beings, because that is the only cause that liberates them from samsara.

According to my observations, your work as a shiatsu therapist was very good.
With much love and prayers...