Practice mindfulness to create a space between urges or lines of thinking and your reaction, allowing wisdom to emerge and enable choices aligned with your values and higher intentions.
When experiencing urges or discomfort, recognize that you don’t need to automatically act on them or push them away. This creates a crucial choice point to respond more wisely.
Engage directly with your moment-to-moment experience to understand it, enabling you to make choices that are aligned with your personal values and higher intentions.
Begin your meditation practice with mindfulness of the body and breath, as this fundamental training helps you to work more effectively with the mind.
Instead of thinking about or conceptualizing your body, feel and know it from the inside to deconstruct solidified views and understand its impermanent, unsatisfactory nature.
Observe every conditioned experience for its feeling tone: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Recognizing this universal law helps in understanding reactions.
Become aware of the habitual tendency to chase pleasant experiences, push away unpleasant ones, and space out during neutral ones, as these reactions are a root cause of suffering.
Practice observing your mind states, including emotions and meditative qualities like concentration or restlessness, simply noting their presence or absence without judgment.
Clearly recognize the presence of unwholesome mind states like greed or aversion without judgment. This opens a choice point to not automatically act on them.
Make an effort to notice and appreciate moments when unwholesome states like greed or aversion are not present in the mind, counteracting the tendency to only focus on what’s wrong.
Cultivate mindfulness to observe pain or unpleasantness without resistance, allowing you to decouple the suffering (your reaction) from the inherent pain itself.
Use the fourth foundation of mindfulness (dhammas) as a map to skillfully engage with difficult experiences in your meditation practice and daily life, understanding their construction and how to respond wisely.
Identify the conditions that cause hindrances like sleepiness or restlessness to arise or dissipate. Skillfully avoid encouraging conditions that foster unhelpful states.
Recognize whether positive qualities like joy (awakening factors) are present. If not, explore what skillful actions or conditions could help you access and cultivate them.
Establish a consistent daily meditation practice, supported by resources like meditation apps, to integrate teachings and develop mindfulness over time.
Commit to attending meditation retreats, as the extended time and immersive environment are crucial for absorbing and integrating the teachings and practices into your being.
Approach your practice and learning with a ‘beginner’s mind,’ maintaining openness to always growing and learning rather than assuming you know everything.
When faced with challenging interactions or internal reactions, become aware of them, breathe, and ground yourself to prevent unskillful responses and maintain a choice point.
When encountering challenging behaviors or difficult emotions in yourself or others, remember their impermanent nature to create space for holding the experience without buying into reactive thoughts.
Engage in teaching as a way to both support and challenge your own practice, fostering growth through inquiry and engagement with the material and students’ experiences.
When preparing to teach, consider what would be helpful and interesting for students, looking up resources and structuring the material to benefit diverse audiences at their current level of understanding.
When meeting with students, engage in a dynamic, moment-to-moment mindfulness practice, drawing on your own experience and understanding to respond with empathy and provide helpful support.
Approach conversations with an open mind, recognizing each interaction as an opportunity to learn about yourself, your limits, and how to be more skillful in supporting others.
Learn how to speak skillfully and empathetically to diverse communities, understanding and addressing suffering, pain, or confusion related to their unique backgrounds and experiences.
Frame and understand your experiences, including modern-day challenges, through the lens of Dharma language and practice terms to cultivate a wise view and integrate them into your practice.
Read books, such as Joseph Goldstein’s ‘Mindfulness,’ to deepen your understanding of the four foundations of mindfulness and related practices.
Utilize dharmaseed.org to access hundreds of free talks from meditation teachers, including Sally Armstrong, to deepen your understanding of Buddhist teachings and practices.