Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Thubten Chodron guides students through a foundational meditation on how to live with meaning and purpose in daily life. She opens by encouraging practitioners to recognise their good circumstances rather than fixate on obstacles, then establishes why preparation for death and future rebirth matters — not as distant abstractions but as urgent, inevitable realities. Moving outward, she presents three nested goals: securing a good rebirth, attaining liberation from cyclic existence, and ultimately achieving full enlightenment. The heart of the teaching is integrating spiritual practice into every moment through bodhicitta, the altruistic intention to become enlightened for the benefit of all beings. She offers concrete, practical methods: setting a clear motivation each morning, remembering it throughout the day, reviewing progress each evening, and transforming ordinary activities—eating, working, interacting with colleagues—into steps on the path. This guided meditation is pitched at practitioners familiar with core Buddhist concepts and keen to bridge the gap between formal practice and daily life.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 GM.mp3
UUID: 2a066a81-1921-40f5-b1bf-33549b12199a
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~888
So we have so many good conditions going for us in our life, and it’s important to focus on them and not get distracted by the few minor things that may present difficulties. In addition, it’s important to think of the purpose and meaning of our precious human life. What is really important for us to do? The most immediate thing is to prepare so that we can die well and have a good future rebirth. We may feel that that’s a long way off, but it may not be.
And even if we have many years of life left to live, for sure our death and our next rebirth will come. We make many plans for our old age, but we may die before we become that old. So it makes sense to make plans for our future rebirth, which will definitely happen. And we do this by practicing as much as we can, transforming our mind, abandoning destructive actions, practicing positive ones. So try and get some sense that this is an important thing to do while you’re alive.
Get a sense that you don’t want to arrive at the time of your death without having prepared for it, and you don’t want to be thrown into your next rebirth without any preparation either. So our present life affords us the opportunity to make this preparation so that death can be something smooth or even something joyful And so that our next rebirth provides us with another good opportunity to continue progressing along the path. Preparing for our future lives is something worthwhile to do. It’s also a temporary goal that we have in the sense that having good rebirths isn’t going to solve our whole dilemma. But we also, with this precious human life, have the possibility to solve our whole dilemma of being in cyclic existence.
And we can use our life to attain liberation from cyclic existence, to free our mind completely from disturbing attitudes and karma. And with this life, we also have the ability to attain full enlightenment where we’ve eliminated every obscuration and defilement from our mind stream and developed each good quality to its fullest potential. So this is something that we can do with the human body and human intelligence that we have now. There have been many sages in the past who have done this. We can do it also.
So it’s important to feel that this is a goal, a purpose in your life, something to make us the centerpiece of what provides meaning and what you want to do. And while we work for our temporary and long term goals in our spiritual path, it’s important to remember that we have to live our life moment by moment and make each moment meaningful because there’s no way to get to an ultimate meaning or an ultimate goal if we don’t do it in the moment that we are living in right now. So with our life, we have the possibility to make each moment meaningful and to transform it into the path to enlightenment. So we have the possibility to eliminate the gap between our spiritual practice and our daily life. We have the possibility to unify our practice in our life so that everything we do becomes something worthwhile and valuable.
And the way we do this is by practicing the bodhicitta, by generating this motivation to attain enlightenment for the welfare of all living beings, and using that motivation to act in everything we do in our life. So when we get up in the morning, first thing to think, today as much as possible, I won’t harm others. Today, as much as possible, I’m going to be of benefit and service. And today, I want all my actions to be for the long term purpose of becoming a Buddha in order to benefit others most effectively. So if we generate that motivation every morning, then everything we do during the day is going towards that.
And then during the day, we try and remember that motivation frequently. And in the evening, we check up and review and evaluate how we’ve done, making a determination to continue with our bodhicitta practice in the next day. And so by really bringing this loving and compassionate thought into our daily life, it makes everything we do something valuable and worthwhile, not only in the present moment, but it becomes part of our path leading to the fully enlightened state. So think of how you can integrate this in your day to day life and develop a determination to do so. So make a determination to use each moment wisely.
For example, offering your food before you eat. We eat anyway. But if we offer it, we create a lot of positive potential by offering to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. And when you go to work, generate a good motivation to be of service and to bring happiness to your colleagues and to learn from everything that happens to you at work so that you can grow in the Dharma and apply the Dharma to whatever arises. So think of how you can practice just with the ordinary occurrences that happen daily to you.
Make some kind of plan with specific things that you can do.