Retreat Advice

My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling one,
Thank you for your kind letter. I am sorry for the long delay. Regarding your question, I checked and service at a center is best, then retreat is best. That means sometimes you can do retreat.

You can offer service during the day, then do retreat at night time. Or you can do retreat and when that is finished, then you can offer service, then again do retreat. You can also do like that.

For you, the main lamrim text to use is Lama Tsongkhapa’s Middle Lamrim. If you can, study that five times from beginning to end. Read it mindfully and in that way, it becomes meditation.

Also, the Guhyasamaja root text—if you can, read it every week for your whole life. I don’t know if it is translated into Spanish.

Taking the eight Mahayana precepts is the best one, especially on Buddha days or when there is a lunar eclipse or solar eclipse. In Tibetan the eclipses are called moon-catching and sun-catching. During moon-catching [a lunar eclipse] any merit you collect is multiplied 700,000 times and during sun-catching [a solar eclipse] the merit you collect is multiplied 100 million times.

On Buddha days the merit you collect is multiplied 100 million times, so it is unbelievably powerful. You also collect more merit on other days, like the Tibetan 8^th, 15^th and 30^th, but you can take the eight Mahayana precepts at any other time, when you can.

Attached is the morning motivation, [The Method to Transform a Suffering Life into Happiness (Including Enlightenment).] Please do that and also please follow my general advice on practice.

Please make your life most meaningful with the thought of bodhicitta in every action you do.

With much love and prayers ...

My most dear, most kind, most precious wish-fulfilling one,

This is my advice for your practice:

• 200,000: Guru Yoga. Read my commentary and count migtsema.
• 300,000: Water bowls
• 30 recitations of the Sutra of Golden Light

You should do Heruka Body Mandala retreat, then Cittamani Tara retreat. Do Vajrayogini now. Then after all that you can do Yamantaka long retreat. That would be very, very good.

The most important thing is bodhicitta motivation; you have to put effort into that all the time.

Practice guru devotion, seeing one guru as all the buddhas and each buddha is all the gurus from the heart, one hundred percent. You can see like this for days, weeks, months, years, not changing. I am not saying that I am a buddha, no!

According to my observation it looks negative for you after the age of seventy. So it’s important to practice now, very important.

Thank you very much. Good luck.

With much love and prayers...

My most dear, most precious, most kind, wish-fulfilling one,
Thank you very much your kind letter. Your experience is very precious. Continue and don’t degenerate.

My suggestion is you can do what many people are doing: a loose retreat, so loose in the daytime. Do work and things [during the day] and in the morning and evening do retreat. So do light retreat and it gets done. 

If you are waiting to finish your job and then do long retreat, it may not happen, so you can do loose retreat. This way, you can do loose retreat and it gets done. Loose means not very strict, so do sessions in the morning and evening, and go to work in the daytime. You should have the boundary very far, quite far, because you have to travel for your job, so make a big boundary. It’s excellent for you to continue.

Yes, you are right, we need to serve our parents when they are old, but the best thing to repay their kindness is by you learning Dharma, understanding Dharma and actualizing Dharma. That is the best way, and to be free from samsara and to achieve enlightenment.

Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche was expert on Kalachakra and he saw the Kalachakra deity when passing. For a long time he was holding his hands in the mudra of prostrating, as he was seeing the deities. That happened. Alak Rinpoche was worried he would be tired with his hands up, but Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche explained he was seeing the deity. However, Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche passed away, unfortunately.

With much love and prayers...

My very dear one,
Maybe you can do Vajrayogini retreat; the other one is mahamudra retreat—a mahamudra sutra retreat. After the guru enters the heart, then meditate on emptiness, however, it’s not necessary to do the same analysis all the time. You can use a different analysis, as you want, for the sessions, so the evening time can be different from the morning time. You can do different analysis in the different sessions, as you like.

See my advice on meditation on the lamrim—this gives a general idea of the practice. You must do lamrim meditation, then also do the morning motivation and morning prostrations by reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas three times.

Also in the evening, do prostrations by reciting the Thirty-five Buddhas just one time , then do Vajrasattva practice.

Please continue to make your life most meaningful with the thought of bodhicitta.

With much love and prayers...

My most dear one,
Thank you for your email. You should do retreat on the life practices that I gave you previously. Do whatever you feel from that list. You can do two different practices a day; you don’t have to do just one. You can do a different practice each half day. Whichever practice you would like to do or feels closer, you can decide.

The practices I gave you before are extremely good and beneficial, making your life most meaningful for sentient beings. They make your life most beneficial for every sentient being that comes into your room to bite you and for every worm, every maggot, every fish in the water, for everyone—even the smallest that you can’t see with the eye but can only see with the machine—and for every human being, every worldly god, sura and asura.

Don’t worry about finishing the practice. Just do it slowly, slowly, and then you will finish, like the turtle. Tibetans say the turtle goes very slowly and finishes, while a flea jumps everywhere but doesn’t get anywhere. The center is going very well and benefiting others, thus I want to thank you billions and billions for your effort. Please rejoice.

With much love and prayers...

My most dear, most precious, most kind, wish-fulfilling one,
I still appreciate from my heart all that you do. You are so active, so alive, doing so many activities for the center, helping me, helping His Holiness, helping Lama Yeshe, helping the teachings of the Buddha and helping sentient beings. Thank you so much, a billion, zillion times.

So my suggestion for the two weeks is to do prostrations by reciting the names of the Thirty-five Buddhas in the morning and also at the beginning of each session, and to do retreat of Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga. Please listen to the teachings from the recent Light of the Path retreat. [Held in May 2014, North Carolina. Video recordings of all the retreat teaching sessions can be viewed on the FPMT website.]  Do meditation on my recent teachings on guru devotion given at the Light of the Path retreat, then recite migtsema.

At the beginning do guru devotion meditation, after you have done meditation using quotations and logic that prove to your mind that the Guru is [inseparable from] the Buddha. Before that, you saw the Guru and the Buddha as two separate things. When you have proved that they are one in essence then recite Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga and migtsema mantra and do visualization, purification mainly.

Then you can do receiving the four [of the seven] wisdoms—great wisdom, clear wisdom, quick wisdom and profound wisdom. Then whichever wisdom you want to expand, you can do more of that one. There is a secret meditation, but you need to receive it after you have received a Highest Yoga Tantra initiation. I can do the lung by telephone for you, then you can do the meditation, if you have previously received a Highest Yoga Tantra initiation.

Before you start your retreat you can study my commentary on Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga, if you are a follower of Lama Tsongkhapa. I was advised by Kyabje Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche that this guru yoga practice is such an important meditation.

Then at night of course do Vajrasattva practice. Please read my general advice for retreat also.

With much love and prayers...