Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Thubten Chodron introduces this series of guided meditations on the Lam Rim, or gradual path to enlightenment, which combines the analytical practices transmitted from the Buddha through centuries of teachers and systematized by Tsongkhapa. Rather than assuming listeners already know how to work with these powerful meditations, Chodron sits down and walks practitioners through them directly. She covers the practical foundations: finding a quiet space away from screens, setting up a simple shrine if desired, adopting the proper meditation posture with straight back and lowered gaze, beginning each session with prayers and breathing practice, then working through the meditations themselves, which range from thirteen minutes to thirty minutes. She emphasizes making meditation a daily habit like brushing your teeth, ideally in the morning, cycling through the meditations to build deep familiarity before targeting specific practices for particular problems. Suitable for beginners and experienced practitioners alike.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 GM.mp3
UUID: d9fad5f7-af1d-4d2d-bf91-7e0d8de4ba41
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~1,051
Guided Meditations on the Lam Rim, the Gradual Path to Enlightenment, led by Venerable Thubten Chodron. This series of guided meditations on the gradual path to enlightenment is designed to assist people in learning the analytical or checking meditations on the topics of the lam rim, the gradual path to enlightenment. The teachings contained in the gradual path originated with Śākyamūni Buddha. They were passed down from teacher to disciple for centuries and were introduced in Tibet by Lama Atisha in the eleventh century. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Lama Tsongkhapa systematized the vast array of the Buddhist teachings, creating a step by step method for training and transforming our minds, the gradual path to enlightenment.
Ideally, these CDs would be used in conjunction with oral teachings on the gradual path from a qualified teacher. However, since many people live far from their teachers or a Dharma center, the hope is that these CDs will enable them to begin and continue a daily meditation practice. The meditations on these CDs are suitable for beginners as well as for intermediate and more advanced practitioners. Each person will find meaning and insight according to his or her level of understanding. And now, Venerable Thubten Chodron.
The checking meditations are so important in these lam rim meditations where you’re taking the Buddhist teachings and looking at your own life through the eyes of the Buddhist teachings, using the Buddhist teachings to understand your own mind and transform your own life. And yet very seldom do people really know how to do them. Often, we’ll go to teachings and the teacher will describe how to do them, but nobody leads us through. So that’s why I decided, well, let’s just sit down and put them all on CD. It’s remarkable because the lam rim gives you so many tools for understanding your life, your mind, and helping you with what goes on in your life and helping you, you know, to make a solid foundation for your spiritual practice so that that can continue on to future lifetimes as well.
So it’s really good if you can set up a meditation practice. I always advocate meditating in the morning if possible because you wake up and you’re fresh. Some people are evening meditators. That’s fine if you’re an evening meditator, do it then. But if you’re not sure which you are, I would advise doing it in the morning because sometimes what happens is we’ll say, Oh, the alarm’s going off.
Let’s sleep a little bit later. I’ll meditate later in the day. And later in the day, oh, I’m so tired. I’ll meditate tomorrow morning. And tomorrow morning, oh, I’m still too tired.
I’ll do it later. And, you know, that way no practice gets done whatsoever. So I think it’s very good to have a certain time that we meditate every day and make it regular. Put it into our daily life, our daily habit because we all have our little routines. You know, we get up in the morning and brush our teeth and do this and that.
And you just put your meditation practice as part of your daily routine, something that you just don’t imagine or can’t imagine doing the rest of your life without. And then it becomes very easy to do, it becomes very organic, and it becomes very pleasant because when you get into a rhythm like this then you really start to feel the benefit and see the benefit that’s going on inside of you. If it means getting up a little bit earlier, I think you can make it. You know? I mean, we’re okay getting up early to go to work early, aren’t we, if we get paid overtime?
Well, we should value our spiritual practice and nourish ourselves spiritually. We don’t skip meals, so we shouldn’t skip our meditation sessions either. Yeah? Because we wanna nourish ourselves. And so with the CDs, you know, we just try to make it as easy as possible for people to learn how to do these.
So find a quiet area, not in front of the television and not in the computer room, but, you know, some quiet, peaceful area in your house. It’s nice to set up a little shrine if you can, if you want to, with the pictures of your teachers or the Buddhist image, something that’s very peaceful. And then you sit in meditation position. You have a comfortable cushion set. So with your legs crossed and then your hands in your lap, the right on the left, and the thumbs are touching against your body, and your back straight, your head level, and your eyes lowered, but not completely shut because that leaves a little space for light to come in.
It’s very good for each session. You know, you do some prayers beforehand because it gets your mind in tune with some kind of virtuous ideas in good direction. You do some breathing meditation next to settle the mind. And then you can do one of the meditation sessions. They vary in length from maybe thirteen minutes to some or about a half an hour.
And it’s very good to go through the meditations in order. And then when you get to the end, then come back to the beginning and keep cycling through them. Because you get a lot of familiarity with the subject matter, and then you begin to see how the meditations at the end relate to the ones at the beginning and how the beginning ones relate to the later ones. And so your practice becomes very, very rich in this way. If someday you have a particular problem and you know that a certain meditation is the one that you need to do for the problem you’re having that day, then go right to that meditation on whichever CD it’s on, you know, and do that one so that you learn how to work with your own mind and you learn how to solve your own problems.
And the more you learn to do that, then wherever you go, whoever you’re with, whatever you’re doing, you know, you’re gonna be able to be happy and be content and be open to the situation.