weaving your practice together this spring

Posted on by Lama Lekshe

Our practices at Dekeling fall roughly into three categories at this point in time:

    • meditation (shamatha and vipassana for now; and for those who wish to integrate movement into their daily routine, qi-gong on weekday mornings via Zoom

    • lojong (mind/heart training, including tonglen) and the four immeasurables practices, designed to decrease self-cherishing and increase wisdom and compassion and

    • yidam practice (Green Tara and Medicine Buddha and soon, Chenrezig).

    My aim with the scheduling this year is to strengthen your practice in each of these areas. 

    For meditation, we have

    • Weekly free public Monday evening sits and discussion and
    • 5 days a week, we have free group shamatha sits in the morning and afternoons.
    • And you had access to Lama Yeshe’s February sessions of learning 14 different shamatha and vipassana practices across a two-week period. 

    For the Four Immeasurables (compassion, loving-kindness, joy and equanimity and the practice of Tonglen and Mind/Heart training) we have coming up soon:

      • A full-day face to face and Zoom practice day in all of the Four Immeasurables (March 18th)
      • The 6-month long, every other week study/practice group on Seven Points of Mind Training (which includes Tonglen) and the once-a-month Saturday 2-hour group tonglen practice sessions. (Starts March 9th)
      • A Thursday night through Sunday at noon retreat (face to face and Zoom options) at Great Vow led by Lama Lekshe on loving-kindness, from a Tibetan approach. (May 4th – 7th) 

      For yidam practice, we have coming up

      •  A talk by Lama Sarah Harding on why we do yidam practice (March 5th) 
      • A Green Tara full day at the temple both face to face and Zoom (April 15th) 
      • An on-going, informal weekly gathering of Green Tara practitioners on Zoom
      • An on-going, informal monthly gathering of Medicine Buddha practitioners on Zoom
      Late in the year, we’ll have a week-long, face-to-face rural retreat where you can learn and spend time integrating these powerful practices into a continuous stream of dharma, across seven days in the solitude of rural Oregon. 

      And, as always, you can meet with me one-on-one for individual practice guidance. 

      I hope that you can avail yourselves of as many of these opportunities as possible. To have this cogent thread of practice laid out sequentially is an unusual opportunity and if you avail yourself of these times, you lay the foundation for other practices in the future and a life-long continuously-evolving path of liberation. 

      Thank you for your practice. May it benefit beings until not even the word for suffering remains. 

      —Lama Lekshe