Yesterday and today I read from Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are. She is an American Buddhist nun, and she founded a Tibetan monastery in Nova Scotia for Westerners.
The first chapters of Pema’s book deal with bodhicitta, the awakened/saddened heart, and the beginnings of tonglen meditation, which has as its focus breathing in the pain and suffering of the world and breathing out the light of the bodhicitta.
Her first lesson is to lighten up. Which is a lesson I need to learn. All dharmas are dream, is the first slogan of Tibetan Buddhism. Everything is a dream–so stop taking the world so seriously: it is no big deal. This is obviously more easily said than done, but practice makes perfect. Today, I worked on naming my thoughts with a “gentle” label of thinking. As you breath out, you follow your breath into the world and if thoughts begin to unravel, you gently say to your mind, “thinking.”
I am still doing a lot of thinking when I sit, but today it felt easier to see it happening.