Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Margaret McAndrew opens this 45-minute talk by responding to recent tragedies—bombings and natural disasters—as opportunities for compassion and understanding karma. She explains how adverse circumstances ripen negative karmas and interrupt karmic chains, introduces the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, and covers the four opponent forces of purification. The core teaching concerns transforming obstacles through practice: patience, compassion, impermanence, emptiness, and bodhicitta. Central is the enemy as our best teacher, anchored in Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s extended teaching on “seeing the enemy in beauty.” She offers concrete practices: giving and receiving suffering, mental offerings to transform attachment, analyzing emptiness through words. Throughout, mindfulness is the foundation. Warm and practical, grounded in personal anecdotes.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 32 MaTT 1998 05 29.mp3
UUID: aaef728b-1658-4a54-b55c-ce95d44ada55
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-05-29
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,875
Yes. So, yes, so if you’re feeling compassion, that’s a virtuous thought, and that virtuous thought can be dedicated for the others too. You can dedicate for their benefit. And particularly when you hear about things like all these people who have been killed by bomb explosions and such and so on recently, you can make prayers for them and dedicate prayers for them in this way. It can be something that you can do for them.
It’s been very there’s been a lot of terrible things happening lately, hasn’t there? I was just wondering whether there’s been some sort of astrological situation. Does anybody know about these things? I don’t know, but when you look at it in the last few weeks, there’s been that tidal wave in New Guinea. There’s been so many things.
Particularly when we experience situations if we don’t like ourselves, particularly adverse circumstances that we see as being obstacles to our Dharma practice, then to reflect in this way that these things are actually ripening our bad karmas and that we’re getting these bad karma out of the way. We’re getting these obstacles to our practice out of the way by experiencing them. By accepting them calmly, then we’re putting a stop to that sort of series of karmic actions and reactions, which could have been going on since beginningless time leading up to this point. Perhaps if there’s another person involved, if somebody’s giving us difficulties, then if we retaliate, if we get angry with them, if we reply verbally or harm them or whatever, then that’s going to create another karmic situation for ourselves to experience. It’s going to create more strong karmic links to this person to be interacting with this with them in this way again.
They’re going to we’re going to hurt them. They’re going to retaliate again on us. And this is going to go on life after life. But by accepting this calmly now, by feeling compassion towards the person instead of getting angry, if we can manage to do this, or at the very least, restrain ourselves from retaliating and go away try to deal with our anger in a positive way through meditating and through Dharma practice, then we’re actually stopping this chain reaction. We’re stopping this ongoing situation.
And in the future, we won’t have to experience this. And we’re sort of getting ourselves out of the other person’s way as well by cutting off this karma. So that’s one less person that they’ll have karmic problems with. So we’re helping that person as well. Does this make sense?
So in actual fact, we’re in the present because because of all our different karmic links with others that we tend to be a problem for other people. They’re a problem for us, we’re a problem for them a lot of the time. But we can transform that into something positive, and our karmic links can stop being something that creates problems for other people. And eventually, when we become qualified as teachers on the path, our karmic links can ripen. They say that it’s better even to have bad karma with the bodhisattva than not to have any connection with them at all because bodhisattvas will transform these karmic links into even if you’ve done wrong to a bodhisattva, that gives you a karmic link with that bodhisattva, which will lead you to be drawn to that bodhisattva again in future lives.
And the bodhisattva will become your teacher. Bodhisattva will transform that situation and become your teacher. So if we become when we become bodhisattvas ourselves, we can act in that way to others. So the text that’s particularly good for explaining to us about our karma and our karmic links for others is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons. This is a really interesting text because it explains all the different bad situations that we have to experience and gives us the karmic causes of these results.
And then it goes on and tells us when we experience these things. Is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons returning full circle upon us from things we have done. That’s the refrain that comes up again and again. So that’s it’s a really, really nice poem. We’ll have to read it sometime.
It also brings in Yamāntaka, and so says also says come on, Yamāntaka, and whirl whirl around your Wheel of Sharp Weapons now. And this is talking about the sharp weapons of wisdom cutting off these these. Yes. Yes, something like that, yes. Yes, it must have been a bit startling to somebody just starting off.
But it’s a really powerful book. So it’s really useful from this point of view because it gives you a feeling for the different karmas. Then having read these different things, you can understand whenever all these different things happen to you, what sort of causes you’ve created in the past. It gives you more understanding of what it is that we have to avoid. So each verse in the Wheel of Sharp Weapons ends up with a resolution that you’re going to avoid these kinds of activities of harming others in the future.
So in this way, reflecting this way really helps our practice of moral conduct. Observing karma, in other words. And we can understand that by experiencing even a small suffering, even just a headache, then a person who’s practicing Dharma can be purifying a karmic seed which could otherwise have ripened to cause eons in the lower realms. This might sound a bit unlikely, but in actual fact, it works like this. When we’re working at purifying our negative karmas through the four opponent forces, which got explained in the section of the small scope, then this practice of purification causes these negative karmas that we’ve created to not be able to bring their result.
So we don’t have to experience results such as rebirth in the lower suffering realms. But sometimes, as these karmas are being purified, sometimes there’s small result that comes up in this life, and then it’s over and finished with. So we can think that some of these problems and sufferings we’re experiencing, because we’re practicing Dharma, putting the four opponent forces into action. Does anybody want to tell us what the four opponent forces are? There’s only three r’s, but there’s four OF’s.
For what? Opponent forces Oh, f’s. Regret? Yes. Refuge.
Yes. That’s right. Refuge. And there’s another one that goes with refuge. It doesn’t begin with a.
bodhicitta, right. Yes. That’s two. Reliance, actually. That’s reliance.
So they’ll start with ah, because both refuge and bodhicitta are counted together as reliance. Relying on the Buddhist teachings and relying on bodhicitta. Repudiation. Resolution. Resolve, not ology.
Same thing. Repudiation, it’s usually called, yes. And the fourth one? And your recognition. Yes.
I think the fourth one didn’t really start with a na. It didn’t really start with anything. The fourth one was doing some sort of virtuous Restitution. Not quite restitution. Restitution usually means something like paying back money you’ve stolen or doing something like that, doesn’t it?
It’s not quite the same, but it means you do some sort of a similar idea, I suppose. Means you do some sort of Yes. Some sort of positive action, but not necessarily to the same person. It could be something like doing prostrations to the thirty Buddhas reciting the Dugnak practice. Say like in Vajrasattva.
Yes. That’s right. Yes. Yes. So Vajrasattva and the thirty-five Buddhas are the ones that are most often used in this tradition as purification practices.
It can be any virtuous action. But we’re particularly advised to do these practices and of course they are done with the four opponent forces. Yes. Repudiation. Yes.
Actually yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Seeing it as being a mistake.
Repudiation is promising not to do it again. And if you can’t promise to never to do that again, don’t worry because you can make a promise for twenty four hours. So as long as you feel you can keep it. And then of course at the end of twenty four hours, you have to promise again. And the the fourth one is doing some sort of virtuous activity.
So anyway, that’s the In the context of of practice Mhmm. There can be any of those things. Any virtuous action can be undertaken as purification. But when we’re doing what’s called preliminaries, some of them emphasize more purification, some of them emphasize more accumulation of merits. It’s really not different.
The two activities go together, but somehow there’s a different emphasis. So when we’re doing things like the thirty five Buddhas and Vajrasattva and some of the other practices, there’s more emphasis on the purification aspect. Whereas when we’re doing mandala offerings, water bowls and so on, the emphasis is more on the accumulation of merit. So find my place. So so we can use these circumstances, difficult circumstances, to help us with all kinds of meditation on Dharma topics.
So we’ve just been talking now about the four opponent forces and purification, how it helps us with our practice of morality or ethics. That’s just one example. We can use it to help us with our practice of patience and compassion. We can use it to help us with our understanding of impermanence. We can reflect on the impermanence of the situation.
We can bring all sorts of different Dharma teachings into these situations and in this way have a deeper Dharma understanding. For instance, we can take it as an example. When we’re suffering, we can take this as an example to help us to understand the suffering nature of saṃsāra, to increase our renunciation. Practically any topic in the graduated path can be enhanced by looking at these difficult situations. Certainly it helps us with our practice of compassion and our understanding of karma.
There are so many benefits that can be engaged from these kinds of practices. At the same time we’re purifying our negative karmas. I think in this way then we can start to see all sorts of benefits and start to think that we’re really learning so much from these practices. We can think if we’d been born in the god realms, we wouldn’t be able to learn all these things. So the worldly gods can’t make much progress in the Dharma because they don’t have our advantages of having all these problems.
So I came across an interesting point while I was studying this topic. In the seven point mind training, one of the points that came up was always meditate on those closely related. And the commentary on that, that Pabongka Rinpoche made, was that we need to particularly meditate on our relationship with our friends and relations, and also on people that we seem to have karmic problems with. In other words, the ones that we find it very easy to have strong attachment or strong annoyance and anger towards. And it’s easy for us to get much more strongly emotional in our reactions towards the people that we’re close to every day, our friends, our relatives, and the people that we share our house with or whatever.
And to the certain people that we seem to have some sort of karmic relationship of difficulty. There are some people that we just seem to dislike, even without necessarily having terribly much contact with that person. Somehow that person just seems to awaken some instinctive disliking us and we can’t see any good in them because of some sort of previous karmic connection. And these kinds of people are the ones that we need to do particularly strong practice on. Somebody once said to me, I was talking about my problems with my sister.
My sister’s a very good person, a very nice person, but we always seem to end up sort of having these comparatively mild, but rather annoying confrontations. And she said, this person, I was talking it over, she said, oh, your family always know how to push your buttons. And it’s true, you know, she just knows how to push my buttons. And I started to realize then that I know how to push her buttons too. I can never resist, you know, whenever we get together for a while, everything goes really nicely and I’m being very well behaved and I’m really resisting pushing her buttons.
Eventually, a time will come when I can’t resist pushing a little button or other, and she’s doing the same thing to me. So it sort of ends up that there’s a little bit of tension. And so really these kinds of things are what happens with the ones that you’re close to. And it doesn’t mean that you’re not very fond of each other, but it just sort of seems to be part of the parcel, part of the deal. And I think that it’s these karmic situations that really give us something to work on.
So we have to recognize this situation and do extra meditation on them. And it’s an interesting thing that even Bodhisattvas and high lamas seem to have problems with their families, with their relatives. They don’t always seem to be able to deal perfectly with all of these family relationships. So if we’re practicing bodhicitta, we can that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. On the other hand, it means that we just have to keep on trying all the time because we’ve got quite a lot to work out there.
The reason why these great lamas still seem to have a few sort of hangover karmic things to sort out is because some of these things go back a long way and take some time to sort out. So the sooner we start, the sooner we’ll get it all over with. So if we practice bodhicitta, always have to remember we have this obligation to other sentient beings. When we slip up in our practice, we’re letting these sentient beings down. We’re not just letting ourselves down, but we’re letting these others down because they’re relying on us to help them.
They’re relying on us to attain the level of practice where we’ll become able to guide them towards happiness. So they might not know it, but they are. So we have this tendency to dislike some sentient beings. There are some sentient beings that we just feel some sort of dislike for and aversion for. So when we encounter these kinds of sentient beings, we can think that if a Buddha was to appear in front of us, then we’d do everything we could to please that Buddha.
We’d we’d make some offerings. We’d be running around to bring flowers and cups of tea and everything that that would make the the place nice for them, which we do of course when a great lama comes. But the greatest way to please the Buddha is to work for the welfare of sentient beings. And every single sentient being is held by the Buddha to be dearer than themselves. So when we act out of aversion and harbor aversion and anger towards sentient beings, then we’re doing the opposite to what would make the Buddhas pleased.
So we can think that if feel that we’d really like to please the Buddha’s then we can think that by overcoming this tendency of ours, we would be really working to please the Buddha’s, really doing something that would be giving them satisfaction. So if we can keep the bodhicitta motivation in our minds, then we can turn all our actions into work for sentient beings. It’s explained that we should set our motivation at the beginning of each day. If we wake up in the morning and first thing just think that we’re setting our minds on the thought of bodhicitta for the day, thinking that we’re going to work for sentient beings today, that motivation somehow carries through the whole day. So this is really important that we should in the morning set our motivation and in the evening dedicate our merits for the day.
Also, of course, look back and consider where we’ve done good actions and where we’ve done wrong actions and purify our mistaken actions for the day and rejoice in our good actions and dedicate the merits. So in this way all our ordinary actions like cleaning, as I mentioned before, become helpful rather than just being mundane, meaningless activities. And we can use our imagination to think of all sorts of different ways. Lama Zopa in The Wish-Fulfilling Golden Sun mentioned quite a lot of different techniques. Instance, when you’re going through a door, can think that you’re leading all the sentient beings out of saṃsāra.
And when you’re lifting something up, you can think you’re lifting the sentient beings out of the lower realms and so on. So just by getting the general idea, can use your imagination and always think of some sort of application and just try to think. So for instance, I was just going to have a drink of water, instead of just thinking, I’m thirsty, I’m going to have a drink of water. Maybe I could think, Oh, well, you know, I could be relieving the thirst of all the thirsty beings that there are in Samsāra. And when you think of that, you know, there’s plenty of thirsty beings.
There’s all the hell beings in the hot hells are thirsty, and all the all the hungry ghosts, and the a lot of animals, a lot of human beings. So anyway, the idea is to just have this sort of thought coming into your mind all the time so that automatically whenever you do something, rather than it being some sort of meaningless activity, you can think of some way to apply it to the bodhicitta practice. So the enemy or the person giving us a hard time, we think is actually our best helper. This is an important point. And it’s perhaps a hard one to really convince ourselves of, but the Lamas really make a lot of emphasis about this one.
His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, mentions it again and again. Lama Zopa Rinpoche once was requested to give it was over in Nepal. Was requested to give a Dzambhala initiation, which is a a wealth deity, some of the he was going to give this initiation to some of the heads of the different FPMT centers, because it would be helpful for the centers. But what happened was that everybody else wanted to come along too. And it ended up all these people turned up for this initiation who weren’t originally intended to be part of the core group.
And we had everything all set up for the initiation. And Lama Zopa Rinpoche came in and he sat down there. And he started talking about seeing the enemy in kindness, in beauty, was his expression. And he talked for several hours about seeing the enemy in beauty. And finally it was lunchtime and he hadn’t even started to give the initiation.
He’d given us a beautiful teaching on seeing the enemy in beauty. And then we arranged another time to come back for the initiation. And when we came back for the initiation later, he continued to talk for another couple of hours about seeing the enemy in beauty. And finally, we didn’t get the initiation at all. We had this wonderful teaching.
The whole point was that the enemy is our best friend because the enemy is our teacher of patience. So by by having love and compassion for the enemy, we are able to develop bodhicitta and gain all the benefits of bodhicitta. So what this is all about is understanding that our real enemy is our unsubdued mind, our disturbing emotions, and not the external enemy, not the external person who disturbs our mind, who annoys us. So in actual fact, this person is our real helper, because they help us in a way that nobody else can The people who are kind to us don’t give us opportunity to practice patience. We don’t get an opportunity to practice patience on the people who are nice to us, who do the things we want them to do, or who cooperate with us.
And our dear friends and relatives and so on, or even our holy teachers don’t give us this opportunity to practice patience. It’s the people who give us a hard time, give us an opportunity to practice patience. And if you can see the benefits of practicing patience, the benefits of practicing patience are really infinite. When really start to bring patience into our minds, then patience really brings such happiness, such contentment into the mind. Even a little bit of patience brings so much benefit to our lives.
So if we’re able to keep on practicing patience and really develop strong patience, then this is incredibly beneficial. We really owe it to these people who are giving us this opportunity to practice. So really, when we come across somebody like this, as it says in the Eight Verses of Thought Transformation, when you come across does anybody remember the exact words? It’s in here somewhere, so I’ll read it. What which page is it?
Whenever I encounter beings of wicked nature ah, here it is. When seeing a being of wicked nature who is forced by violent wrongs and sufferings, I shall hold dear this one so hard to find as though discovering a precious treasure. Page eleven. And it’s the fourth verse. Oh, yes.
The Chinese. Yes. He always says that the Chinese were were his great teacher of compassion and so on. That’s right. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama always says that he learned a great deal from the Chinese because of the opportunity they gave to really put the Dharma into practice.
Other lamas also say that Lama Yeshe for example, I think it was Lama Yeshe said something like that it wasn’t until the Chinese invasion that he really had a chance to put the Dharma into practice. And then, you know, when they were flung out of their homes and forced to become refugees and wander off and establish themselves in India and so on. These things really enable them to see the real power of the Dharma. So, if we think that all these others have the same nature as ourselves, then it helps us to understand them and to be patient. We can see that we have these tendencies in our own minds, and we can see that the other beings like ourselves want to avoid suffering to have happiness, and they’re going the wrong way about it.
It’s easy to have patience. If we can keep this in mind, it makes it easy to have patience and to develop compassion to the other person. So this person is actually the agent of our karma. It’s our own karma that’s really hurting us. So this person is behaving like a stick that’s being wielded.
If we were being beaten by somebody, we wouldn’t get angry with the stick. So in actual fact the person who’s harming us is acting like the stick they’re under the control of their own delusions their own disturbed mental attitudes and so there’s no point in our getting angry with that person because they’re under the control of these harmful mental attitudes and they’re really the object of our compassion. And so this also brings in a little bit the idea of remembering emptiness. If we understand that the person or the situation that’s annoying us is not as it seems to be. We relate to this person or this situation as being something concretely existing from its own side.
And there are some techniques of understanding that that we are projecting this truly existent, self existent situation onto this situation, which is really a dependently originating situation. For example, the technique Lama Zopa Rinpoche suggested was that if somebody is saying things to you, rather than if they’re saying, for instance, you are terrible, then the we get annoyed with that with that. We immediately react with anger because somehow there’s something terribly concrete and terribly self existently offensive about those words. You are terrible. And if we analyze the words separately, there’s nothing in the word you by itself to make us angry.
There’s nothing in the word are to make us angry. There’s nothing even in the word terrible to make us angry without the you are attached to it. So where is it? Where is the essence of this of this phrase that makes us so angry? We can’t find the essence.
And yet, we have this feeling that there is an essence there. And if we keep on looking at it this way, trying to find the essence, it can actually help us to understand the emptiness, the interdependence of the situation there. It can also help if we understand if we look if we take this as an opportunity to look for our own truly existent self, we have this feeling that not only is there some sort of concrete essence in the words that are being said to us, but also we ourselves have this idea of some sort of truly existent self from our own side that is being attacked by these words. What is this truly existent self? Where is it?
When we get upset, this is a good opportunity to see this sense of truly existent self arising and try to locate it, try to get a fix on it. If you’ve been studying the teachings, you’ve got some sort of idea of what it is you’re looking for, of how you’re trying to distinguish the relative self, the conventional self, from the false, truly existent self, the false sense of a truly existent I, then this is the most brilliant opportunity to really see it when it becomes very, very hard and concrete. The sensatory existent self becomes more prominent, becomes stronger at times like this, and it gives us an opportunity to check up. And we might actually get some insight through that. And of course if we do start to feel that we’re getting some insight, then we’ll probably be so happy that we’ll stop feeling angry with the person.
Then anyway, if we get some insight, we’ll probably see that there’s no need to feel angry. It’s only our false sense of the truly existent nature of things, both external and our own sense of self. It’s only because we have this distorted sense of true existence that we get angry, that we experience various different deluded emotions, whether it’s attachment, aversion, or whatever. So that might not if we haven’t had a lot of experience with that one, that’s probably not a good one to use when we’re really upset. But if we’ve had a bit of practice with it, if we’ve got a bit of a feeling for it, then it’s the most powerful thing.
There are some other things that are particularly powerful if we haven’t had a lot of practice at emptiness, it might be more powerful to think about impermanence and death. That’s always the very good, powerful thing to calm us down when we get upset or when we become overcome by any powerful distorted or disturbing emotion. Whether it’s on the side of attachment or the side of aversion. If we can remember these things it always helps us. It calms our mind out, it brings us back to being more balanced and then we can bring in the bodhicitta motivation.
Then we can think about love and compassion and so on as well. Impermanence is the most powerful help which we need to make use of. And then, so we have to not only, I’ve been tending to focus on unpleasant situations, we can also have problems of course with attachment and that can cause us a lot of problems. So we have to be able to deal with attachment too. Some of these practices we can use for any sort of situation.
Meditate on the emptiness of the situation Meditate on the impermanence Meditate on our own deaths and the impermanence of the object that we’re attached to All of these things help us to control our minds With beautiful objects we can offer them mentally to the Buddhas. So if we feel tremendously drawn towards some sort of thing that we feel we absolutely must have this thing, then rather than wanting to grab it for ourselves, if we think, oh, what a beautiful thing, I can mentally create it and offer it to all the Buddhas. You don’t even have to have it, don’t even have to possess it yourself. Anything beautiful you see, whether it’s something you possess yourself, or whether it’s something that’s just out there in the world, doesn’t belong to anybody at all, or whether it’s something like the sun and moon, whether it’s something that other people own and you don’t, like say a terrific car or something like that. You can think that you offer these things to the Buddhas and make the offering in your mind as beautiful, as perfect as possible.
And offer it to them. In that way you can really start to transform your attachment. Not just overcome it, not just subdue it, but really turn it into positive meritorious action. So you can be so happy making all these offerings to the Buddhas that you don’t even think of wanting it for yourself. I was doing mandala offerings.
Once I was doing a lot of mandala offerings, and when you’re offering a mandala, you’re visualizing the whole world so you can put anything you like into it. Somehow, when I was making all these mandala offerings, it seemed to be bringing up a lot of old attachments. And one of the things that kept on coming up was the thought of going skiing. This was I’d only been in the Dharma for a couple of years at this time, and it wasn’t that long since I’d been in the habit of going skiing pretty regularly. And so I was doing all these mandala offerings, and I would find myself thinking all the time about going skiing.
So I thought, oh, well, of letting that be a distraction, what I’ll do is when I’m visualizing up in Mount Meru and the Four Continents and so on, I’ll put all these fantastic ski slopes and, you know, sort of ski lifts and all these sort of things onto the into the mandala. So you can do that kind of thing. And another practice that we can do all the time as we’re going about is doing the practice of giving and taking. So when we see suffering in others, or when we’re suffering ourselves, we can take on that suffering. If we see suffering in others, then we can think that we’re practicing taking it on.
Of course, it’s an imaginative practice. The idea is to develop the state of mind that wants to take this suffering on. Usually we don’t actually relieve the suffering of others. There are some stories where particularly Lama’s bodhisattvas are able to relieve sometimes the suffering of others that they have strong karmic links with. Normally it’s just a mental practice, but it’s a very powerful practice for developing compassion.
We were talking about this last week, you bring the suffering on and you don’t put it on yourself as such, you put it on your self-cherishing at your heart and blow up the self-cherishing and you give away your happiness and your merit and good karma to others. Also, if you’re experiencing some sort of suffering yourself, rather than this suffering, whether it’s a headache or some sort of problem, perhaps some sort of emotional problem, some sort of difficult situation in life such as financial problems or employment problems or whatever. You can think that many other beings have these kinds of problems too. How wonderful it would be if by experiencing this problem myself, I could take it off all the other sentient beings. And you just visualize that you’re taking this problem off all the other sentient beings, and taking it on yourself, and then putting it on yourself.
Also when you have good things, when you’re experiencing happiness, when you’re experiencing the results of good karma, think how wonderful it would be if you could share this with all the other beings and if you could give it out to all the others. And you can practice this giving out. So this is a practice that’s done secretly. You don’t let it be known that you’re doing this practice, but you just quietly to yourself think in this way. And you can combine it with your breathing if you like.
So that’s the practice that you can do when you’re sitting on your cushion, but you don’t only have to do it then, but you can keep it in mind. As you’re going about, you often see opportunities for doing this practice. And it’s, as we learned before, it’s a really very powerful practice. So Does anybody have any questions? Anyway, to finish up, I think the main thing to do in order to really get these practices going, and of course the hardest thing, what I find is really difficult, is to be practicing mindfulness, is to keep it in mind.
And when I first went to a Kopan course quite a lot of years ago, one of the things that really struck me was that Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa were always saying check out. It seemed to be their favorite expression, and they were always telling us to check out. What they meant by that was to be watching our minds, to be aware of our minds, and in particular, be always watching whether our minds were, first of all, in a virtuous situation and avoiding or counteracting non virtue, and also bringing in this bodhicitta motivation. So really, the key to the practice seems to be bringing in this mindfulness and then using these various techniques and applying them according to the different situations. There are different techniques that we can use, that we can find will work for us, that are effective for us.
We can also use our imaginations to deal with situations that we haven’t got the specific technique for. And as we keep on practicing and getting better at it, then we can build up our practice more and be more and more effective. And I just wondered, before we stop, does anybody perhaps have any stories that they could share with us about successful mind training practice? And and talking to him for a bit, I realized, like, how incredibly lonely he is and sat in his life. And and, yeah, just thinking that, like, Oh, very good.
Very good. Yes.