What has Lojong been like for you? For example, my neighbors constantly fight and I can hear them shouting. I might have a flash of anger or something, then I’m tempted to think “I repent. May all their anger and consternation be directed towards me, and may all sentient beings’ anger and consternation be directed the same way. May they have all my good fortune and freedom from consternation”.

What have you all been doing? I’m interested to hear how others’ practice has been going.

I've noticed that not training and living wholeheartedly has often allowed me to becoming easily distracted and caught pursuing small, insignificant pleasures.

Some notes from Norman Fischer's Training in Compassion. The first slogan really hits on some of the motivation I sometimes find hard to connect with in Buddhism.

1. Train in the Preliminaries

View your entire life, all the suffering, with a sense of resolve and personal responsibility.

Traditional Reflections of Tibetan and Mahayana:

First, The rarity and preciousness of human life.

• Highest way of fulfilling your potential? Go beyond your self-centeredness and self-concern and manifest wisdom and compassion.

Second, The absolute inevitability of death.

Third, The awesome and indelible power of our actions.

• EVERY action, big or small produces a result
• we may never know the measure of the consequences though they are extensive and powerful
• every moment we participate in creating the world than now exists for ourselves and others. Everything in our lives is important. Everything matters.
• "How am I living?"
• "What kind of actions am I taking?"
• "Am I a force for good in the world or am I just another person doing nothing to help and therefor making things worse?"
• We can do better. Much, much better. We have to do better. To do better is an urgent necessity.

Fourth: The inescapability of suffering.

• Should we take our lives in hand and make a serious effort to develop wisdom, compassion, and resilience?
• Prepare (guard and strengthen) our minds and hearts for suffering?

I've been working with this one a bit.

Beginning at the beginning can be as simple as encouraging a calm and positive frame of mind. It could also be getting in touch with the urge to benefit others and be active for the benefit of all beings.

Slogan 13, among others, comes to mind for practicing with Covid19, strangers, and friends: Be grateful to everyone.

Every encounter, good, bad, or neutral allows us to practice mind training.

When our lives are going relatively smoothly and predictably it is easier to maintain our mindfulness. But when things are happening fast, it is hard to remember to join what we encounter with meditation. It is also easier to think of others if we ourselves are not currently either in the midst of some crisis or caught up in some amazing opportunity. But it seems that no matter how hard we try to stay on an even keel, we keep being blindsided by unexpected events.

According to this slogan, taking an attitude of compassion and awareness does not need to be some formal or long drawn-out process. It can be done in an instant, in the tiny gap that occurs at the very moment we are surprised by something unexpected, whether positive or negative. Of course, that is the same point where we are most apt to “lose it.”

When we are at that point of just about to lose it, before we have gone into reaction mode or dragged out our usual arsenal of habits, we can pause. We can interrupt that momentum. Instead of joining whatever we meet with our bundle of preconceptions, self-absorptions, fixed views, and programmed responses, we can immediately join it with meditation. We can insert awareness and compassion.

Throughout the slogan teachings, we keep being reminded that each and every situation is an opportunity for growth and awakening. To take advantage of such opportunities, we need to keep expanding the boundaries of our meditation to include more and more aspects of our life. By cultivating an attitude of ongoing mindfulness, by becoming genuine practitioners, it is as if we create a well of loving-kindness and awareness that we can tap even in the midst of sudden changes and challenges.

Today’s Practice In order to join experience and meditation, it is helpful to begin by noticing when that does not happen. So today’s practice is to pay attention to “losing it.” Strangely, simply seeing such moments more clearly, without too much judgment or commentary, is a way to extend an attitude of practice more consistently and deeply into our ongoing activities.

• Judy Lief is a senior student of Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, who authorized her as a teacher in the Buddhist and Shambhala traditions. She is the series editor of the Dharma Ocean Series of Shambhala Publications, and the Executive Editor of Vajradhatu Publications in Halifax.

From Tricycle

This is an interesting slogan if we are learning to see through the illusion of separateness. Perhaps understanding which is the principal witness is important.

"...begin to see that the games going on are not even big games but simply illusory ones."

"It is like swimming: you swim along in your phenomenal world. You can't just float, you have to swim; you have to use your limbs. That process of using your limbs is the basic stroke of mindfulness and awareness"

"It is 'first thought, best thought.' When you look at things, you find that they are soft and that they bounce back on you all the time. It's not particularly intellectual."

-Chögyam Trungpa

Even if we diligently practice mind training, our fortunes will continue to wax and wane. We’re constantly dealing with beings who have differing karmic patterns and interconnections, so situations won’t always go in our favor. Contrary to what we might sometimes think, things never remain the same. We’re either feeling as if we’re making progress or we’re backsliding and losing any gains we might have made. Mind training is the only thing that can center our lives. Without it, we’ll be swept by the winds of change as if we had no control over our existence. Despite this fact, we rarely do anything that has a galvanizing force in our lives, and as a result, our ups and downs are often quite extreme. As the following traditional verse makes clear, an intelligent form of patience is required if we’re to avoid being hurt and destabilized by the vicissitudes of life:

Even if you are prosperous like the gods, Pray do not be conceited. Even if you become as destitute as a hungry ghost, Pray do not be disheartened.

Life’s trials often reduce us to damaged, bruised, and battered emotional wrecks. If we can bring a modicum of intelligence to our patience, we won’t become so exhilarated by our highs or self-defeated by our lows, as if we were suffering from bipolar disorder. Whichever of the two occurs, we’ll be able to maintain a sense of stability and groundedness. Patience is not a form of passivity, where we have no power over what life might throw at us. The lojong teachings are not advocating that kind of acquiescence. Even when life’s trials are unpleasant or upsetting, patience allows us to face them in a creative and beneficial way, with courage and dignity.

Lojong practice is not just about trying to survive the rough patches in life; we’re trying to transform ourselves into better people as a direct result of our experiences. If things always went our way, we wouldn’t be able to develop high ideals and live a meaningful life. Instead of responding to difficulty the way we normally do, with frustration or impotent rage, we learn to approach life’s contingencies with patience and intelligence. The skillful exercise of patience will make us less flaky and predictable, and we’ll be able to utilize situations to our advantage. Sangye Gompa illustrates this point with the following story:

If you possess this [instruction], even though you might appear ordinary to others’ eyes, whatever you do can become nothing but a cause for attaining omniscience; everything turns into a great act. [Chekawa] embraced this as his sole heart practice such that even at the threshold of death he would say, “There is no more melodious sound in this world than the sound of mind training. Pray make this sound in my ears.”

Kyabgon, Traleg. The Practice of Lojong (pp. 202-204).