Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew provides detailed instruction on preliminary meditation practices, starting with the nine-round breathing concentration—visualizing expulsion of negative karma as black smoke through the right nostril while breathing in the Buddhas’ wisdom and compassion as white light through the left. She covers the eightfold posture of Vairochana, explaining each physical point (spine, mudrā, head position, shoulders) and addressing common obstacles. McAndrew stresses that preliminaries are foundational, not steps to skip, preparing the mind for deeper work. She guides practitioners on adjusting restless minds through breath counting and responds to questions about bodhicitta motivation and why meditation results emerge gradually in daily life rather than during formal sessions. For those beginning systematic practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 P P P 1998 03 21.mp3
UUID: 14ff7a1f-6a3f-4d0f-89b5-5128f6fd86ee
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Prayers, Prostrations and Preliminaries (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-03-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.6 minutes
Words: ~5,955
Keep it all organized. But I’ll oh, we can start off with with a few minutes of breathing concentration anyway. And I thought this week, we’ll do the nine round breathing concentration where you breathe out the black smoke and breathe in the white light. Do you you’d all know that one, would you? Does anybody need a refresher?
Yes. Okay. With this one, of course, you sit in the normal posture. We’ll be going through that later. That’s one of the things we have to go through.
Then after that, you focus on your breathing and in this meditation you’re imagining that the breath all goes out through one nostril and in the other but you’re not actually blocking off the nostrils you don’t have to physically block them off. It’s just a question of visualizing. So in actual fact the air will be going in and out of both but you think that it’s all going out through the right nostril and that actually has an effect on the subtle energy flow that’s connected with the nostrils so it’s quite effective and the visualization is that you visualize your body is filled with all the pollutions of your negative karma, disturbing emotions plus all the problems that are the result of those, such as sicknesses and emotional problems and so on. And you can think that they’re all breathed out of the body with the first breath. So you start off with breathing out.
Nine rounds starts with an out breath, an out and an in. That counts as one. You imagine that all this filthy black smoke gets expelled from your body and goes out through your right nostril. It just keeps on going way beyond the bounds of the universe so that you’re completely rid of it and it can never come back again and you have to put the energy into the feeling that you’re really clear of that. Then when you breathe in again, you imagine visualize if you can, if if not just imagine but think that all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are all around you in all the ten directions sending you blissful white light which is the realization of their blissful wisdom and skillful means and their loving compassion towards you and they send all this light to you and as you breathe in it comes in through your left nostril that you visualize that all the air comes in through your left nostril and with it comes in this radiant white light that fills up your body completely and it’s a good idea to actually concentrate on the area around the center of your heart both when you’re clearing the obscurations and when you’re bringing in the white light particularly illuminate that area but also think that the illumination goes through your whole body right from the top to the bottom and that there isn’t any part of your body that’s still shadowy and then you just repeat that again so you fill yourself up with white light and then all of a sudden you switch over to expelling the shadows again because we have keep on doing this you know it’s something that our feeling of having these shadows these obscurations and negativities and so on within us is so strong that we have to keep on doing this kind of practice again and again and again so we repeat that three times out through the right nostril and in through the left and then you reverse direction and expel the pollution out through the left nostril and the light comes in through the right nostril three times And then you do it three times each through the the two nostrils at the same time.
Is that clear? So then we’ll just do that for a few minutes. So we should start off by setting our motivation, trying to really give rise strongly to the thought that we’re doing this practice not only for our own benefit but in order to be able to benefit all sentient beings thinking that they’re suffering so much and thinking that if we want to be rid of our own suffering then how much more important it is to work for the suffering of others since there are so many of them and since we can see that they’re in the same situation as ourselves and that we have been very closely connected with them again and again they’ve been our mothers again and again and we shouldn’t just ignore their plight but we should make this a very heartfelt motivation for carrying on our various forms of Dharma practice and particularly this action that we’re engaged in today of studying the preliminary practices because this is a a Mahāyāna practice it’s a preparation for doing Mahāyāna meditation and so it needs to be done with this bodhicitta motivation. So does anybody have any particular questions to ask before we start off?
So I’ll start off by fitting it into its context in the graduated path. So, the outline for the graduated path starts off by giving you several main outlines. The first one is the greatness of the authors as a graduated path, so that you can have confidence in the teachings that they’ve given. The second one is the greatness of the Dharma, which is also for the same reason. And the third one is the right way to teach and listen to the Dharma that has these two greatnesses of the author and of the Dharma.
So we’re onto this section today. And the fourth one is the sequence in which the disciples are to be taught the actual instructions so that’s what you do in the actual meditation session and what we’re concerned with now is what comes before the actual meditation session how you set up your situation and how you prepare your mind for the actual meditation. So then that has various subdivisions, and that includes the way to listen to the Dharma, the way to teach the Dharma, and what the disciples and teachers should do together at the end. So we’re actually, I’m a bit wrong there. I’ve given you the wrong thing.
We are actually on the actual meditation of the way that yourself is to be taught, the actual instructions, which is the third the the fourth of those four that I mentioned in the first place. But it’s divided into different aspects and one of those is devotion to a spiritual guide and that has several subdivisions and that is divided into the preparatory rites how to pursue the main part of the session and what to do in the last part of the session and we’re in the first part of that the preparatory rites Okay. So I hope I didn’t confuse you with that. So anyway, we started on this last week, and we got to we we went through various of the things that we had to look at in the first part of the session in the preparatory part of the session and that included starting right from the beginning, how to set up your altar, how to clean your room. It starts with the most basic thing.
The first thing of all is about cleaning a room, the meditation space, and setting up your altar, what kind of images you need to arrange on the altar and what sort of offerings you need to arrange on the altar and how in particular how to arrange the water bowl offerings including not only the actual physical arrangement but also the mental practices with that and so on so we went through all that last week and that was there’s quite a lot to learn about all that some of you weren’t here last week but if you want to check up on the the instructions for that, I’ve actually got a a book list here with a couple of books mentioned on it. The actual source that I’m using is this Liberation in the Palm of Your Hands which is now available also in a paperback edition which is a bit cheaper than this hardback edition. On the other hand, if you’re going to be very earnest about studying the Gelugpa tradition’s presentation of the Mahāyāna teachings and this is pretty much the basic text for students that’s available at the moment in English so it’s really something that’s worthwhile getting even in the hardback if you think you might be using it a lot.
I’ve also got these if anybody hasn’t got one of these, I’ve got a few more, would you hand them around? That’s the, the setting out of the the basic outline that we’re following today. Some of you would have got one last week. So So this comes under the heading of devotion to the spiritual guide, but don’t worry if you haven’t formed that sort of a connection don’t worry if you haven’t formed that sort of a connection with the spiritual guide all this stuff is pretty relevant to you in any case it’s still something that you’ll need to do if you’re interested in setting up a basic practice and meditating on the graduated path for example all of these practices come into that and it’s also related to tantra because you find a lot of these base practices are also taught in tantra. Are a few differences, but if you understand these basic things, then it will be very much something that you’ll find is helpful to understanding these practices when you come to them in the tantric context.
We might want to get on to meditating on the graduated path, and doing the different sādhana practices which start off by doing these preliminary rites. You find that generally most of the sādhana practices do start off by including at least the most basic of these preliminary practices. Really, it’s something that goes all the way through our meditation practice. You might feel that you want to rush through the preliminaries and just get straight into the meditation. But in actual fact, preliminaries are very, very important and they’re what prepare the mind to actually achieve an understanding of the subsequent meditation teachings.
So there’s no question about their importance. Pabongka Rinpoche, actually in this book, spends a lot of time on these preliminaries. He goes into them in a lot of detail and he spends several days talking about them in the teaching that the book is based on. This really indicates the fact that these practices are not just something to be rushed through or to be thought of as unimportant. They’re actually something that’s very important as a practice in themselves.
So The next one, after what we did last week, the third one is seated in a comfortable place in cross legged or half cross legged posture with the body straight, take refuge, and generate bodhicitta successively and together. In actual fact, what it usually refers to is the eightfold posture of Vairochana. Maybe some of you know who who Vairochana or Vairocana is. It’s usually pronounced Vairochana by the Lamas, but actually I understand the proper Sanskrit pronunciation is Vairochana. Anybody know?
Yes? Isn’t she there? No, it’s not a she. To begin with, it’s a male aspect. It’s One of the heads of the it the five families?
Yes. Yes. That’s right. You think of the heads of the Buddha families, but it’s the same thing. Dhyani Buddhas is actually a Sanskrit, Sanskrit term.
I think that came really from the Chinese. The Tibetans call them the the victors. It’s a Tibetan term, but it it often seems to be used in translations. It seems to have caught on, so we use that term quite frequently, the five Dhyāni Buddhas. Dhyāni simply means concentration or, like, Samādhi or something like that.
It’s well, yes, deep concentration. It’s it’s actually the word that Zen is a corruption of. Dhyāni. D H Y A N I. So there are five of these Dhyāni Buddhas, and between them they represent the purified aspect of our five Skandhas.
Have you had any explanation about the five Skandhas? Okay, well I’ll just run through them briefly, but I don’t want to get sidetracked onto that. But they’re form, feeling, recognition form feeling recognition volition, and sometimes it’s called consciousness or sometimes it’s called compounded phenomena. It’s the fifth one. And the last four are mental aspects.
The first one, of course, is physical form. And Vairochana is the only Buddha who represents the purified aspect of form and so naturally his posture is one that is particularly one that’s suitable for meditation practice and so if you see representations of Vairochana Buddha, he’s sitting in the full lotus posture, which some of us aren’t able to sit in, but it Pabongka Rinpoche also mentions I have to find a place. Anyway, Pabongka Rinpoche also mentions that it’s okay to sit in either half lotus or ordinary cross legged posture and in addition to that if anybody has difficulty sitting even in that then the lamas always say that it’s alright to sit in some other posture provided that you’re able to keep your legs straight so in actual fact some people who aren’t able to sit in the cross legged posture find that they’re able to sit well either on a kneeling stool or on a chair perhaps with a straight back. The essential thing is to keep a straight spine. So So before we sit down, the the first thing that we have to worry about is setting up our seat.
And we have to arrange a suitable seat for ourselves particularly if you’re going into retreat there’s various different arrangements that have to be made Pabongka Rinpoche goes into quite a lot of detail about this and talking about the various different kinds of grasses that you have to place under your seat and drawing a swastika under it and all that sort of thing. These are things you particularly need to do when you’re going into retreat. Maybe it’s not so important to worry about these things for your day to day meditation, but it’s important to have a good comfortable seat which feels firm and stable and if you meditate in the same place every day then it’s it’s good to have a fixed seat and to to stay to keep that particular little place there especially set aside for your meditation and to use this particular seat cushions and so on for your meditation and not to cart them around all over the place and that way they acquire a sort of energy, a vibration from your meditation that doesn’t get disturbed but gets stronger and stronger so it’s very helpful for your settling easily into your meditation practice so anyway, it’s advised that the cushion should be that you should be sitting on it.
You should have a sort of a comfortable mat or flat cushion or something underneath you. And on top of that, underneath your bottom, you should have a slightly raised cushion. How raised you have it actually depends on the person what they find comfortable but it needs to be at least slightly raised. This is explained in the scriptures. It should be rectangular.
Actually, have a lot of round cushions here. Some people find that the round cushions seem to be alright to sit on, but it is suggested in the scriptures here that the cushion should be rectangular. Is there a reason for that to be in the room? Well, I don’t know the reason, but the lamas would probably be able to tell you. Myself, I find the round ones quite impossible to sit on, but I have a problem with scoliosis, so I think that has something to do with that.
But I think your bottom is more of a rectangular shape, really, so the round ones don’t seem to fit your bottom. Well, you know, well, this you know, sort of the rectangular shape seems to allow you to have the fullness of the cushion in the right places, whereas with a round cushion you have the fullness right in the middle, whereas you sort of tilt this way and that way. I think the reason a lot of people use the round ones is because the Japanese like them, and I think that’s because the Japanese do a lot of kneeling as well as cross legged sitting, and the round ones seem to be very adaptable for kneeling on, often kneeling around. But, anyway, the Tibetan the the scriptures, which probably go back to the old Indian days, definitely do mention a rectangular one so it would probably be something to consider anyway if you’re doing a retreat or if you’re having trouble working out your most comfortable arrangement and you haven’t tried a rectangular cushion perhaps that’s what you need to try So there’s then to get on to the it’s actually the Eightfold Posture of Vairochana. There are seven points that have to do with the actual posture and the eighth has to do with breathing awareness.
So the first one is the legs, I already mentioned that, and the second one is the hands. So Vairochana has his hands in this mudrā, the concentration mudrā, which is with the right palm on top of the left one, the fingers straight, the thumb the thumbs upwards with the tips lightly touching each other. And that should be, ideally, you should have your thumb tips around the level of the navel, which is something that happens naturally if you’re sitting in full lotus posture, but it doesn’t seem to work out quite so well if you’re in some other posture. So But I find it hard to sustain. I get sort of I have been in pain this all the time.
Find this more stressful. Yes. Well, it is recommended for our tradition. They always recommend this posture. I I don’t know what to say about that.
Thought I’d get very distracted because I just need to retrace. Yes. Well, if you have to use force in keeping your hands in that position, it might be better to look at some other way of keeping your hands in position such as putting something across your lap, a pillow. The only thing that does help, especially in the winter, is keep your hands warm. Is it?
That’s right, yes. Rolling up your sweater. Yes, or if you don’t have a suitable sweater, you can tie a cloth around for your meditation session. That’s a good idea. That would be less uncomfortable than a cushion.
Yes. We’re supposed to have our arms rounded out from our bodies. This, again, something that doesn’t really happen naturally unless you already have your body in a good position. Getting the ideal posture is something that comes with the person’s development of their meditation too. You have to work and work towards it.
Pabongka Rinpoche quotes Milarepa saying that his meditation posture was worth the meditation of thousands of yogis or something, just the way he said. I can’t remember exactly how it went, but saying that just by his sitting in the right posture was something that was so powerful that it sort of outranked the meditations of lots and lots of yogis. So this is something that’s the fact that we find it difficult at the beginning is something to be expected, and as you accumulate your merit and wisdom and gradually develop mental and physical ecstasy and so on, well they say that these things really start to come together. And in particular when you achieve this stage of single pointed concentration, when you’ve achieved the nine levels of concentration and go beyond that to the point where you achieve the physical and mental pliancy, then apparently you feel very light and your body becomes very very flexible and you have no trouble with your sitting at all. So that’s something that would be very nice to look forward to.
So you might be interested to know that a practical reason for having our arms out from the body is to allow the circulation of air between our body and our arms so that the sweat doesn’t accumulate. There’s often very practical reason. I think there’s also some very interesting connections with the psychic channels. They say that these two thumbs should be together because of the bodhicitta current that runs between the thumbs when you put them in that position. That helps to develop the energy of bodhicitta.
In general, I was reading a book called Silent Music. I don’t know whether any of you have come across that book. It was published sometime in the 70s, I forget the name of the author, but he’d been a Jesuit priest at one stage, and he was somebody who’d done a lot of research into the scientific aspect of meditative states. He made a point about the importance of circuits and making circuits in the body, about how the energy currents in the body will flow when you make circuits. And when you sit in this meditation posture, you’re really making as many circuits as it’s possible to make, because you have your legs making a circuit, you have your hands making a circuit, and you have that particular special circuit through the thumb.
I think that’s one reason why we sit in this posture. It has something to do with the circuits. Possibly, if you sit like this, might be making some other sort of circuit, but it wouldn’t be combining the left and right sides of the bodies, whereas sitting this way, you’re combining the left and right side energy flows. So, anyway, that isn’t explained in detail in the teachings, but it seems to be something that is very much relevant here. So the back of the spine should be straight.
That’s the most essential thing. They say like a stack of coins so that you’re not having to put a lot of energy into keeping the spine straight, but so that it stays straight naturally. So this is very easy if you’re able to sit in full lotus posture. If you’re not able to sit in full lotus posture, you might have to very careful about what sort of seat you set up for yourself, so as to help the process. So, for instance, I find that I have to use a bit of tension around the base of my spine to stay upright when I’m in this position, and that doesn’t really help.
But if I, say, put another little cushion there so that it it isn’t under my bottom but just under the tailbone, it it really helps. Then the teeth, lips, and tongue so that’s three points. The legs, hands, and back make one, two, three. The fourth one is the teeth, lips, and tongue. So that’s the mouth.
Makes the fourth one. And the the mouth should be closed, but not tightly closed. The lips should be together, but not pressed together, but just together in a relaxed way. The teeth should be slightly apart, and the tongue should be resting lightly against the palate, against the upper palate. And there’s a reason for that too, and that is that if you go into very, very deep concentration and forget where you are for hours and hours and hours, you won’t dribble.
But it’s also a natural and comfortable position where you don’t have to think about where where your mouth isn’t going to be distracting you. Then the the fifth point is the head. So the head should be slightly bent forward from the neck. So your spine should be really very straight up to the base of the neck, and then your head should be rather forward but not too much. So the they say that if if your head is too high then you’ll be distracted and if your head is too low you’ll fall asleep.
You’re finding that middle position, which should be comfortable and natural and not put too much stress on your neck muscles. So what we’re aiming for is a position which is as relaxed as possible, where we’re only using the minimum muscles to hold ourselves in position, and not using, not tensing unnecessary muscles. The the seventh is the shoulders. They should be level. And the eighth one is having taken up this position, then check the mind.
See where the mind is. And you might find that your mind is already in a virtuous state, you’re already feeling quite calm and concentrated, and in that case you can go on to the next step without having to do anything to adjust it. But if you find it so often happens that when you first sit down to meditate, your mind’s all over the place, or there’s some sort of disturbing thought such as anger in your mind, then you have to adjust that. And so the way to do that is by doing a brief breathing concentration. And one way of doing that is simply counting the breaths.
This is the way that the Tibetans explain as being the most generally suggested way of just getting your mind into position, and that is to try to count your breaths up to twenty one, just being aware of the breathing in and out. So each in and out breath counts as one. And if you lose count, just go back to the beginning again until you can count up to twenty one. And if you get to twenty one and you want to keep on going, you don’t keep on counting, but you go back to one again. So you don’t go past twenty one.
But you can keep on repeating the exercise if you like for as long as you feel is is necessary. I think it’s probably because you might get hum up on the counting. I don’t really know, but I think because the idea isn’t really to prove to yourself that you can count up to a hundred or whatever without losing concentration. It’s just to get the mind into position for what you’re going to do. It can be very distracting when you start thinking, how many breaths can I count?
Well, think all these kinds of things are a bit of an ideal, and if you find that you can’t get up to twenty one, which in particular if you’re not in a retreat situation, is not easy because your mind tends to be more distracted in day to day life. You just do the best you can. I think so, yes. It’s better to do what you can and be satisfied with the fact that you’re making the effort because that’s really making a very powerful imprint. Just the fact that you’re sitting there and making this effort to control the mind is very powerful even though you don’t always see it in the session sometimes in the session it looks like your mind’s getting worse and worse in relation to that I like a story that was told by a chap named Patrick Jensen, who is a Jungian psychologist who used to give some weekend courses at Chenrezig Institute before he moved over to Perth.
Although he was a psychologist, he was also interested in meditation, but he wasn’t doing Buddhist meditation. He was a Christian, a Roman Catholic, but he had looked at different kinds of meditation. He used to teach some basic meditation to some people and one of the people who was learning meditation from him used to always complain that he couldn’t meditate he just wasn’t getting anywhere he never got any results at all and that Patrick used to just encourage him to keep on going so he kept on going and one day he came into him and said oh I had this wonderful experience today I was walking on my way to work I was just going through this public garden and all of a sudden I just felt filled with peace and the sun was shining beautifully, all the flowers were lovely and I just went into this very peaceful relaxed state that I’ve never experienced before and Patrick said there you are, know that’s your meditation working. But anyway this chap kept on meditating, he kept on complaining that he was getting nowhere with his meditation and one day he came back again for his meditation instructions and he said, Oh, I had this really good experience at work yesterday.
My boss was telling me off and instead of getting angry and making an argument out of it, he said I just kind of stood back a little bit and was able to treat the whole thing objectively and instead of it blowing up into a big incident it all just passed over quite peacefully and Patrick said there you are again you know that’s your meditation working So the whole thing is that you don’t always see a lot of results while you’re actually sitting there, but it really is working. If you watch what’s happening to you over the years, you’ll be able to look back and really see that you’re getting something out of it. So when you start off meditating, tend to have expectations and to be, particularly if you’ve been hearing or reading all sorts of marvelous stories, you tend to be looking for something out of the ordinary. What you start to realize after a while is that what is happening is really quite on the ordinary level but it’s extremely rewarding. Maybe somebody has some interesting stories they’d like to tell to that about how they see their Dharma practice paying off.
How long have you got for me? It depends how good the story is. We’ve got all day if it’s a really good one. That’s right. Yes.
It works, and it works sometimes in ways that you’re not looking for. That’s right, yes. All these wonderful things will eventually come anyway, but they’ll come when you’re not looking for them. That’s the catch, you know, that you have to stop looking for them before they can come. So anyway, yes.
Then, having done that, having so the purpose of this is really to neutralize the mind, because you can’t cultivate a virtuous attitude until you’ve got the mind rid of its previous non virtuous state. When you check that your mind’s already in a virtuous state, you can skip that if you want to. There’s an explanation in relationship to the mental factors and primary minds and so on that the primary mind is influenced by whatever mental factor it might be harboring, whether it’s virtuous or non virtuous and you can’t have the two together in the one primary mind or the one primary mental consciousness and so that’s the technical explanation of why we have to do this practice. So you neutralize it first and then that leaves space for the imprinting of a virtuous mental state. So the example that Pabongka Rinpoche uses is that if you want to dye a piece of cloth that has dirty marks on it, you’ll wash the cloth first before it can take the dye effectively.
And so then we have to set our mind. And in the in the in the outline, it mentions two states of mind that we have to cultivate now, which is taking refuge and generating bodhicitta. And when we say the prayers, it comes in this order. But in actual fact, when we come down to this actual doing of the preliminary practices, we find that we’re having to do the motivation of bodhicitta first. Pabongka Rinpoche is explaining the bodhicitta motivation first, and then having done that, then we go on to do the practice of taking refuge.
So there’s a lot to be said about developing bodhicitta. And, Pabongka Rinpoche goes into a lot of detail about that. We’re having to cultivate this meditation we’re having to cultivate this mental state as the thought that’s going to possess our whole practice session and then this is going to be the thought that is going to bring the result that we’re going to go for. So I’ve got a question to ask. Is reciting a Tārā prayer a Dharma practice?
Okay. What what is that? Not just the same words and beginning the. Mhmm. Does anybody else have anything to say about that?
Well, that’s what I’ll be talking about. Okay. Yes, well there are prayers associated with it, but the main thing is the actual motivation. In actual fact, it can be either spoken or silent. Pabongka Rinpoche isn’t specifying here at this point, he’s not talking about a particular prayer, but it can be very very helpful to have a specific prayer to help you to remind yourself of the different points that help you in this generation of bodhicitta, things like thinking about the fact that all beings have been your mothers, thinking about their sufferings, and thinking about the particular qualities of enlightenment that enable you to relieve their sufferings and so on.
There are any number of prayers that can help with this. It doesn’t have to have a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t If you if you’re trying to generate some care for other people. It should be warm. I don’t know about fuzzy. We always try not to be fuzzy.
Okay. Well, it is terribly hard to extend our thought of caring to all sentient beings in the world so it’s probably better to start off in really trying to just extend it to the people around us especially including the ones that we don’t like and we don’t really have to worry so much about the ones that we’re not being concerned with and we can gradually if we deal with the ones that we meet on a day to day level and particularly learn to have love and compassion towards the ones that we that we don’t care about then we can gradually extend our minds to embrace all the others anyway and it will come naturally but I think we should at least keep this thought in our minds that we are trying to extend it to all, but really practice on the ones that you have actual contact with. And the of course, you might also find that there’s somebody who you absolutely hate whom whom you’ve never met, such as the prime minister or the leader of the opposition or whatever. And that would be a very good person to practice on also. But, you know, the ones that you feel that you have some sort of attitude towards.
And, of course, there is this practice that comes later on where we have to overcome our attitudes of hatred of the enemy, attachment to the friend, and indifference to the stranger. And that helps us to feel that all these other people are not strangers, but somebody that we’re connected with. So it’s something that comes gradually. Are you Yeah. Asking a question?
Or scratching your head. Yes. That’s very true, isn’t it? Especially of our own family members. And that and they feel the same about us, of course.
Yes. How could they see it? Yes. Okay. So the answer to that, of course, is the motivation with which you perform the practice.
I suppose it partly includes