The Importance of Lojong Practice: Transforming Adversity into the Path of Awakening

Lojong is a Tibetan word that directly translates as "mind training." Of course, mind training encompasses all of the Buddhist path, but more specifically, what we're often referring to is transforming adversity into the path of practice—into the path of developing wisdom, compassion, and loving-kindness, as well as the path of awakening. We're also talking about transforming our view, transforming our perspective, and transforming any biases or rigidity we may hold in our ideas, beliefs, and actions. So Lojong is quite a big category.

What is Lojong?

Often we think of Lojong as slogans—certain catchphrases to help us transform difficulties and challenging emotions throughout the day. But actually, it's a lot more than that. The Lojong tradition stems from an earlier lineage in Tibetan Buddhism called the Kadam tradition. This tradition was heavily influenced by Atisha Dipamkara, one of the great Indian scholar-saints who traveled from India into Tibet to help Buddhist practitioners develop their practice.

From Atisha, one of the things he taught and emphasized was direct Lojong practice: mind training, working with challenges, everyday challenges to practice and to life—difficult emotions, thoughts, and especially those thoughts and behaviors that are stagnating our practice or taking us in a misdirection, in a direction that's not going to serve our dharma practice as a whole.

Why Incorporate Lojong into Our Practice?

Today, I just want to emphasize some of the benefits and why it's important to incorporate Lojong into our practice. I think some of it is going to be obvious already. What do we face when we try to practice meditation or try to practice the dharma authentically? We face obstacles. We face all kinds of difficulties—not just in the practice itself or showing up to practice or working with thought rumination and all the difficulties of distraction that arise, but also difficulties in afflictive emotions like excessive attachment, desire, and excessive aggression, as well as misperception where we may not fully understand what we're doing. We may have doubts about it, and all of that is actually not unwelcome. It just sort of happens. It happens to me, and I'm assuming it happens to most of us when we're trying to practice the traditional Buddhist path.

Either way, Lojong is there for developing courage in the face of adversity. Here, more specifically, we're talking about the adversity to bodhicitta—to developing the mind of awakening, to developing loving-kindness, compassion, and non-dual wisdom. Specifically, Lojong focuses on what are the obstacles to that and how do we remedy them, not just on the cushion but in daily life. How can we transform adverse experiences on the path—obstacles, distractions, even doubts on the path?

Of course, with that said, Lojong can also be used when we are just struggling with life, when we're struggling with everyday emotional challenges: running out of patience with our kids or our partner or our work, having difficulties with excessive desire that's causing behaviors that are harming ourselves and others, or excessive aggression. All of that can be brought into the path.

The Structure of Lojong Practice

Typically, Lojong is organized starting with equalizing oneself and others. I'll even give a preliminary for that in a moment, but equalizing oneself and others really has to do with relational activity—all of the relationships we're in, the challenges that arise in our daily life in relation to friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, people on the news, whatever comes up for you.

We're recognizing that fundamentally, even if we don't hold the same beliefs as someone else or the same value system, when you really look at our own behavior and the behavior of others, we all want happiness and we all want to be free from suffering.

Of course, there can be a major difference in how we pursue that happiness and how we pursue remedying or removing pain or dissatisfaction from our life. But either way, the foundation is there. When you really look at people's behavior, at their conduct, at why they do what they do—if we look at why we do what we do from moment to moment—it's because we're seeking what we think is happiness, and we're trying to move away from what we think is painful, dissatisfactory, or suffering. That's food for thought. I'm not laying that on you as a spiritual trip. That's really something for you to reflect on and decide for yourself: is that true or not?

Once we establish that, we can proceed with the practice of equalizing oneself and others, which has huge benefits. Where does a lot of our frustration and difficulty come from? Of course, it comes from difficulty with our own emotions and thoughts, and we'll talk about that in a moment. But it mostly comes in relation to others, in relation to situations around us. What triggers our challenging emotions has a lot to do with how others behave and act around us—whether we agree with them, whether we don't agree with them, whether they're doing something we like or dislike.

Again, here we're not trying to remove the idea that something can be more harmful or more helpful. We're not trying to remove that idea. On a relative level, obviously there can be more skillful and more constructive ways of behaving and less skillful and more harmful ways of behaving. We can talk about what those might be another time—the Buddhist path actually lays those out. The general system is avoiding the ten non-virtuous actions. The first one is taking life, because we can see nothing wants their life taken. We can all agree on that as sort of a universal discipline or ethic. But anyway, not to get too much off track.

We're not using this practice of equalizing oneself and others to talk about specific behaviors necessarily. What we're looking at is the fundamental: what's behind our motivations and what's behind the motivations of others? Now, there can be a lot of confusion behind those motivations. What I said earlier was something like we seek what we think will provide happiness and we move away from what we think will make us suffer or cause pain, but that's not necessarily what actually happens. The path of dharma is actually working through that on a personal level, gaining an understanding and then a deeper experience of what that actually is. So we get more clear on what causes lasting happiness, lasting joy, awakening, and freedom, and we remove what's actually causing suffering.

Generally, in the tradition, many teachers have said that as sentient beings who have confusion in the mind and get caught in our destructive emotions, we often actually turn away from happiness and turn towards suffering—not on purpose, not intentionally, but that's what happens because there's confusion in the mind. So a lot of Lojong teachings are about actually shifting that confusion, transforming it, and waking up from that confusion.

Equalizing oneself and others has to do with that because when we recognize we're all generally looking for the same thing, though we may be confused by that, then what we can start to infer and what we can start to embody is a warmth and love and compassion for all beings—even those we dislike. Not because we agree with them or we like what they say or we like what they believe or we like what they do, but because we fundamentally hold them with a sense of warmth. This is a tricky one. We often have to think about this. What does real compassion mean? It means being able to look at or work with someone we're having difficulty with where we don't have to agree with them, but we can see their fundamental value. We don't undermine their fundamental value or worth. Equalizing oneself and others really helps with that.

The Preliminary: Equanimity

I did say I wanted to back up a bit in relation to this. First, we need to develop equanimity. Equanimity is a preliminary for equalizing oneself and others because we're not necessarily including ourselves within equanimity, though of course indirectly we're included. Often with equanimity practice, we imagine three different kinds of relationships, and this can shift each practice session: someone we like, someone we dislike, and someone we're indifferent to. We slowly start to recognize that most of our relationships, if not all, fall into one of these three categories.

What we do with equanimity is we start to open up the idea that any one person in front of us—we just pick three figures in the beginning—is more or less valuable. We start to have equanimity towards them. We also start to see the holes or the faults in our beliefs around liking, disliking, or holding others in indifference. Then, of course, over time we shift that, which is not a short, easy process. That takes quite a bit of time and work. It's not like saying, "Oh, you should be equanimous," and then just doing it. No, it's a training we have to engage in over quite a long period of time for most of us. Every day, we put in a little bit of work on that.

Just going back, because sometimes equanimity needs to be the preliminary for then equalizing oneself and others, where we add ourselves into that mix and we start to see that yes, at a fundamental level, we all want happiness, we all want to be free from suffering, and so no one is higher or lower. Also, we are not higher or lower—we're just another being trying to live our life, trying to figure this whole thing out. That's important.

That's one huge category of Lojong practice. Again, I'm just giving an overview of the importance, but if you want to go into the depth of the practices on how to actually do that, like I said, any Lojong text is going to have practices and teachings on this. I already recommended the Eight Verses of Mind Training. There are so many Lojong texts that we can work with. The Seven-Point Mind Training is probably one of the most widely studied ones, so you can check those out. There are also many modern commentaries as well.

Exchanging Oneself and Others

What I was going to say next is that equalizing oneself and others is the first category. Then we start to move to what's called exchanging oneself and others. Now, this is when it gets a little bit hardcore, in the sense that if we really take the practices seriously, it can be challenging at the beginning or challenging for a beginner to recognize the point or what we're actually doing here.

We're working with practices like Tonglen (giving and taking), which is a practice to imagine taking on the sufferings of others and giving others our own happiness, well-being, health, wealth, etc. In the beginning, that's a process of imagination. But that can trigger a lot for people, especially when we don't yet embody our own internal worth and value.

A preliminary to the preliminary—meaning even before we do equanimity—we may want to do some work on just finding our basic okayness, or what my teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche calls "essence love." If you are not familiar with it, I recommend searching for his teachings on it.

If essence love is not there, often the Lojong practice doesn't necessarily go in the right direction, and you'll see why in a moment. So I highly recommend working with that. Then we have equanimity, which is part of the traditional Buddhist path. Then we have equalizing oneself and others. And then we have exchanging oneself and others through Tonglen and other sets of practices.

What is Tonglen and Exchanging Oneself and Others?

Here we're recognizing that when we put 100% of our value just in our own needs and wants and wishes, and basically in this ego framework of "me, I, and mine," from a Buddhist perspective, what ends up happening is it causes suffering down the road. Maybe we get some temporary pleasure because of that—we get what we want, we're able to do our life in the way we want, etc. But down the road, we're neglecting others.

What this teaching assumes is that actually giving to others, practicing generosity, wishing others well, activating compassion with others in our life is the path to genuine lasting happiness. On a deeper level, it helps us to uncontract or shift or desolidify ego-clinging at the center of our universe, which from a Buddhist perspective is the root cause of suffering.

This is a big topic, because when we start to desolidify ego-clinging, some people wonder, "Does that mean I don't exist, or we're trying to not exist?" No, we're just trying to understand what does exist and what doesn't exist, because one of the foundational teachings of Buddhism is that there's some sort of confusion around that for us, and that is the root cause of suffering. Again, if this is interesting to you, I highly recommend going into more Buddhist studies, checking out these teachings on Buddhist non-duality, because for me, it's kind of the foundation of everything. If that's not there, then all the dharma ends up just adorning our ego-clinging and not actually interrupting it, which is the way we find freedom—through interrupting ego-clinging, recognizing we don't have to live that way. We don't have to live in an ego-centered structure.

Exchanging oneself with others comes from that context of the deeper Buddhist teachings, as well as its foundations. Then there are a bunch of practices for doing that. Originally, practices like Tonglen and exchanging oneself with others were kind of private. What I mean by private is they were passed down from teacher to student directly, not openly taught in groups. I think at that point—we're talking like a thousand-plus years ago in Tibet and India.

Nowadays, they're mostly available. They're public. You can find lots of public teachings on this—the Dalai Lama, Pema Chödrön, many teachers. So they're there, but we also have to do our due diligence to see, "Hey, am I open to this? Am I ready to take this in the right direction?" Which is to desolidify any of my beliefs, reification, ideas about myself and others. Thankfully, this is a slow process, so I don't want to scare you. It's not like it all happens at once, like you take some pill and then it all happens. No, it's slow. But we have to be open to what that really is, and we have to be somewhat interested and ready for that.

Like I said, if we're not, there are preliminaries we can work on: developing and connecting with our own essence love through Healthy Human Being practices taught by Tsoknyi Rinpoche, as well as going into the Four Immeasurables, which have equanimity as part of them, along with loving-kindness and compassion, and then equalizing oneself and others. These are all ways of working to build up to exchanging oneself and others.

Of course, I know a lot of people love Tonglen. It does sort of have an effect of making you feel good. I don't know if that's a good thing or bad thing, because sometimes that can just become an adornment of the ego, if you know what I mean. But if we take it in the right direction, feeling good is not a bad thing, because compassion is an innate state. Loving-kindness is innate to our mind and life. So it's not bad to feel that. If that's making you feel good, great. But we want to make sure we don't just use that as a pill to only feel temporary pleasure. We want to ultimately move towards opening ourselves up, opening up the ideas and beliefs we have around others and the world, and of course starting to soften with ourselves and others. This helps to then connect into the wisdom teachings, which we also find in Lojong.

Summing It Up

In a way, just to sum it up, Lojong is kind of the whole path but put into packages for a simpler structure of practice. Simplicity is deceptive, because that doesn't mean easy. It just means a simpler package that really anyone can understand once you know the foundations of Buddhism. You don't have to be a scholar. You don't have to be super developed as a practitioner. You can work on them. I think that's why Lojong is really important—any of us can do it, and it essentializes the Buddhist path of wisdom and compassion.

I'm not talking too much about the wisdom teachings of Buddhism here. I did a little bit when I was talking about ego solidification—desolidifying that, opening up reification, shifting things. That's all inferring the wisdom teachings of Buddhism. But we can find them more directly in the Lojong teachings, and so I encourage you to go search for them there. Then, of course, having teachers, having mentors, having people to help you understand those teachings and put them into practice is vital, because like I said, they may seem simple, but there are a lot of sidetracks. We want to make sure they're not adorning our ego-clinging—they're helping to actually open it up and reduce and remove it.

With that said, I hope that inspired you a little bit to practice Lojong, to incorporate it into your meditation practice. I find it's a great addition if we're already a Buddhist practitioner and we're just looking for ways to transform everyday relational activities into the path, to grow more wisdom in our daily life, to help foster compassion for ourselves and others. If you're newer to Buddhism or a secular meditator, they're also great. They can really help you. Of course, they include some Buddhist ideals and philosophies, so it may take some time to warm up to those if you're not familiar with them. But either way, if you take a lighter approach, no big deal. You can work with them, and over time they'll open.