A Challenge For Your Practice

A Challenge For Your Practice

Date Posted:
April 2008

Rinpoche sent the following advice to the director of a Dharma center, on how to practice.

Rejoice every day. It is essential. This is how to be a fortunate person, as rejoicing eliminates ignorance and delusions and causes happiness. Nagarjuna advised kings who are busy to rejoice in others’ good works and dedicate the merit. Then, success in business or whatever just comes easily.

Jealousy is an obstacle to your happiness in samsara and for your longterm wishes. We should rejoice in others’ good fortune. Practice contentment. Problems arise from desire. Practice forgiveness for those who hurt you.

As a director of a Dharma center you face a lot of things that hurt your ego. This is a great challenge for your practice. When you live in a cave or a tree you don’t see many of your mistakes, you think, “I’m a good person with no delusions,” but still the mistakes are inside.

Being director of a center, so many people are like a mirror teaching you (not from books), forcing out your pride, jealousy, and anger, so you see what has to be purified, you have to apply the antidote. It all shows what impurities you have, the suffering that you have. It’s like a dirty cloth. When a dirty cloth is cleaned with water, not much dirt is seen, but when you add soap it makes the dirt come out. That’s good!

People who talk in a way you don’t like and hurt your attachment are like soap. Accept people who hurt your attachment and self-cherishing. They are helping you by showing you your delusions, to help you be free from samsara, helping you to be perfect, pure, to practice the path.

In the practice of chöd, you invite spirits to you; they create disturbances for you in the cemeteries and haunted places. Your ego, self-cherishing, blows up like a balloon and becomes clear; you see the false “I.” Then you realize emptiness. Washing the dirty cloth of the mind is like army training for many years, so see that you are here in this job, this position, to defeat delusions.

Anyone can chant mantras. Real Dharma is rare. Cherish and care for sentient beings from the heart. When someone creates an angry situation, it is so important to practice patience. This is the real Dharma.