Take Charge of your Practice
byDzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche
Nowadays, even older people in their seventies feel they have a lot of time to fool around. I don”t know where this comes from. Maybe it”s because in modern cultures people stay healthier, active, and mobile longer due to a better diet, more vitamins, and the latest medicines. You hear people say, “The forties are the new thirties, and the fifties are the new forties…” People put a lot of effort into staying and looking young. This kind of thinking changes our concept of aging and how we relate to growing old.
It”s good to look at life pragmatically, rather than as how we might want it to be. Taking care of our bodies is intelligent enough; we certainly don”t want to get old and infirm prematurely. We don”t want to lose our sense of curiosity and interest in life, our spark. But the focus on prolonging life rather than accepting death is futile. Youth goes by in a flash, and then we enter adulthood and old age. That”s about it. Patrul Rinpoche suggests we look at our life cycle as the length of a day: infancy at dawn, childhood and adolescence in the morning hours, adulthood at noon, and old age with the setting of the sun. If you want to prepare the mind for death, putting time into perspective is a realistic thing to do.
Organizing Your Time
I”m not a planner by nature, but some years back I realized that if I didn”t take charge of my schedule, it would take charge of me. So now I fill my schedule with as much dharma practice and activity as I can. I fill the pages of my calendar—one year in advance—with my mind”s intention, then I follow and meet it. I know how many hours of practice I want to do each day, and I organize my time to complete that. I figure, this is my life, and if I don”t take charge no one else will. I find myself thinking a lot about time, how much I have, and what I want to do with it.
Practically speaking, there are only twenty-four hours in a day. How do we want to spend them
Some of that time we need to sleep. But how much sleep do we actually need
More than seven or eight hours usually doesn”t support us, unless of course we are a teenager. Most of us have jobs. We may work nine hours a day—that seems standard. This still leaves us with seven or eight hours of spare time. Then there are family obligations, and we need to tend to those with care. With our remaining hours, how can we fit practice time into our lives
I am a night person, so I practice late at night. Some people prefer to start before dawn. These are quiet hours—guaranteed practice periods—because everyone else is asleep, or maybe practicing too. Sometimes at night I get sleepy, but when I stay with it for a bit, I find a whole new reserve of energy that sustains me throughout my session. Anything that brings our actions together with our intentions energizes us and brings deep meaning to our lives. I used to have trouble sleeping, but now that I have a regular practice schedule, I have a restful unbroken sleep.
Making a Clear Decision
If we have an aspiration to practice, we should make a clear decision to do so. It won”t help to have a “split mind.” In Tibetan there is a term: yi nyi te tsom. Yi nyi means that we have two minds, or in other words, conflicting interests. Te tsom means that we have doubts concerning which way we want to go. We may want to practice, yet somehow we fail to bring our aspirations together with our actions.
I see a lot of people wanting to practice yet not finding the time. It affects their self-esteem. We need to ask ourselves what prevents us from meeting our aspirations in life. Are we using our life well, or are we simply working to maintain it
How are we using our time
Are we considering what”s at stake
Are we tending to our desire fo…
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