Lojong: The Art of Transforming Adversity
Lojong (Tibetan for “Mind Training”) is a practical, 900-year-old Buddhist system for turning the challenges of daily life into a source of inner strength and compassion. Rather than trying to escape difficult situations, Lojong provides us with a set of “mental tools” or slogans to retrain our habitual reactions.
It is a practice for the middle of a traffic jam, a difficult meeting, or a moment of personal loss. It teaches us that every obstacle—no matter how painful—contains the fuel for a more open and resilient heart.
How It Works: The Seven Points
The training is organized into seven concise points that guide you from the basics of meditation to a complete transformation of your perspective:
- The Foundations: Grounding yourself in the reality of life and its potential.
- Developing the Awakened Heart: Cultivating both deep wisdom (seeing the open nature of reality) and active compassion (using the breath to “take and send” kindness).
- Turning Problems into the Path: Learning the radical skill of “driving all blames into one”—taking responsibility for our own reactions rather than blaming the world.
- Making it a Lifetime Practice: How to maintain this mindset through every stage of life, and even through death.
- The Test of Success: Real progress isn’t about feeling “holy”; it’s about seeing your self-centeredness naturally decrease.
- The Commitments: Ethical guardrails that keep our practice grounded and honest.
- Practical Guidelines: Pithy advice on how to make kindness a spontaneous habit.
Why Practice Lojong?
In a world that often feels chaotic, Lojong offers a path to stability. It doesn’t ask you to change your life; it asks you to change your attitude. As the slogans suggest, we can “change our attitude but remain natural”—staying fully engaged with the world while internally letting go of the ego-clinging that causes us so much stress.
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Thrangu Rinpoche Lojong Teaching
Please view this document for a very useful teaching by Thrangu Rinpoche on the Seven Points of Mind Training
Lojong Overview: 1 hour YouTube
Click here for YouTube overview