Recognize that suffering arises from latching onto impermanent things, avoiding dislikes, and imposing preferences onto reality, which helps to alter your mindset.
Engage in daily meditation, even for 15 minutes, to avoid reacting to external events, tune into yourself, and make more on-track decisions throughout the day.
Seek out a meditation teacher who is accomplished and knowledgeable in the scholarly tradition to significantly improve your practice, similar to learning an instrument.
Try different meditation lineages and traditions, ‘road testing’ methods to see what feels right and resonates personally, as no single path suits everyone.
Engage in total immersion retreats, even for a weekend, to accelerate changing mental habits and leap ahead in your practice, much like learning a foreign language.
Use the ‘Tibetan nose blow’ (lung rosell) by forcefully expelling air from alternate nostrils while visualizing the expulsion of negative emotions (ignorance, desire, aversion) to quickly settle into clear, calm meditation.
Actively use visualization in your meditation, as the brain reacts similarly to imagined and real experiences, enabling deep transformation of the mind.
Take common mental activities, like internal conversations and visualization, and consciously turn them toward more positive, reality-aligned directions to increase happiness and reduce suffering.
Engage in Dong Lin (Tonglen) by visualizing a suffering person, breathing in their dark suffering into your heart, and breathing out bright white happiness to them, starting with yourself and gradually expanding to all beings.
Consistently practice loving kindness meditation every day, as this daily effort is the key to improving your capacity for compassion and connection.
Approach new ideas and experiences with an open, questioning, and investigative mindset, avoiding snap judgments to make more room for learning and growth.
Fuel your meditation practice by recognizing how self-centered thinking leads to unhappiness, preferring mindful moments, and acknowledging the inevitability of death to reduce fear.
Cultivate compassion and loving kindness without ego-tinge or sentimentality, focusing instead on a genuine, expansive desire to take away suffering and replace it with happiness.
Consciously work to loosen your identification with fixed aspects of your ego, such as your name or roles, as this can lead to a ’lightening up of the grasp of ego’.