Actively work to clear away grasping energy in your life. This creates space for positive qualities like joy, compassion, and equanimity to naturally emerge, leading to a state of liberation.
Learn to take your thoughts and emotions less personally. This practice helps you become less owned by them, allowing you to lighten up and reduce self-centered suffering.
View emotions (e.g., fear, pride, doubt, joy) as impersonal phenomena “of the public domain” rather than “yours.” This prevents pain that arises from personal appropriation and allows emotions to be liberated.
Walk through life understanding that everything is an aggregation, impermanent, and unreliable. This prepares you for change and loss, reducing suffering caused by expecting permanence.
Use the lens of the five aggregates (materiality, feeling tone, perception, mental formations, consciousness) to examine your experience. This deconstructs the notion of a solid self and reveals constant appearance and disappearance.
Practice deconstructing your immediate experience into its component parts (the five aggregates). This helps you identify how you get stuck, experience confusion, and suffer, leading to their eventual end.
Watch how all aspects of your life, such as youth, intelligence, opinions, and body sensations, are constantly changing and conditional. This helps liberate the heart/mind from identification with unstable phenomena.
Reflect on how you appropriate material forms and relationships, holding them with fluidity rather than rigidity. Acknowledge that things are conventionally “mine” but not “absolutely mine,” reducing clinging and suffering when they change.
Be aware of the mind’s tendency to “proliferate” by adding on, embellishing, and building stories around perceptions. Renounce these embellishments to stay closer to immediate reality and avoid being trapped by mental constructions.
Engage in meditation to return to the very immediate experience of body, sitting, and breathing. This practice helps to renounce the mental embellishments and constructed stories that lead to feeling “encaged.”
Pay close attention to the feeling tones (pleasure, displeasure, or neutrality) that accompany all experiences. This reveals their unreliable and unstable nature, helping you avoid clinging to pleasure or having aversion to displeasure.
When experiencing pleasure, notice it and observe how it appears and disappears without clinging to it. This practice helps you see its unstable nature and cultivate freedom amidst changing experiences.
When encountering unpleasurable experiences, investigate how they can be opportunities to develop positive qualities like calm, integrity, patience, care, honesty, healing, compassion, or humor. This shifts your response from irritation to growth.
Do not exclusively pursue comfort, safety, fun, and pleasure in life. Understanding that displeasure and neutrality are inevitable parts of experience reduces stress and unrealistic expectations.
Pay attention to how you perceive things, recognizing that your perceptions are often subjective, influenced by past conditioning, and not objective reality. This helps you avoid misinterpretations and gain freedom from fixed views.
In meditation, observe that perception (labeling, organizing) happens impersonally, on its own, rather than as a personal act of “you.” This helps to unhook from the self and see mental functions as natural processes.
Pay attention to mental formations, which include emotions, thoughts, and intentions, as they arise in your mind. This practice reveals how you engage with and react to events.
Recognize that mental constructions (stories, thoughts, emotions) are ephemeral, like a “banana tree trunk” with no solid core, rather than solid facts. This helps you avoid being trapped by them and see their arising and passing nature.
Observe intentions and thoughts, recognizing that thinking often arises from habit and compulsion, not from a personal “I” deciding to think. This reveals the impersonal nature of mental processes.
Pay attention to the knowing quality of mind (consciousness) as moments appear and disappear. This helps to deconstruct the illusion of a solid, permanent “I” and understand that “knowing is just knowing.”
For advanced practitioners with a quiet and stable mind, investigate the selflessness of consciousness by asking “who is hearing?”, “who is thinking?”, or “where is the I?” This probes the assumption of a central observer.
Experiment with removing the “I” from your internal language when observing experiences (e.g., say “hearing is happening,” “fear is known,” “joy is happening”). This technique helps to perceive experiences without personal identification.