📿 Mind-Training Slogans for Increasing Joy and Gratitude
2 ancient sayings meant for modern times
My life’s work to date has, to a certain extent, been about taking the more esoteric teachings of Buddhism and bringing them to bare on our modern world. I have very few original ideas; I just seem to have a knack for translating these teachings into applicable uses for living in the 21st century. With that in mind, over the next however many weeks, I want to explore one of my favorite collections of Buddhist teachings: the lojong, or “mind-training,” slogans.
These fifty-nine short phrases were brought to Tibet by the great Indian Buddhist master Atisha in the eleventh century. They are wonderfully compact, sometimes a little cryptic, and relentlessly practical. They aren’t meant to be intellectualized. They’re meant to be lived.
This week’s first slogan is:
Be grateful to everyone.
We’ll start with the easy part of this slogan: it’s important to practice gratitude for the simple things (and people) in our life. Every morning—before I even get out of bed—I wake up and ask myself, “What am I grateful for today?” After 30-60 seconds of contemplation, I am already mentally embracing my wife, my child, our dogs, the people who care for my family in myriad ways, my online community of meditation students and more.
It’s a great way to start the day. I can’t recommend it more highly. Simply hit your alarm and, before you look at your phone, ask yourself that question:
“What am I grateful for today?”
You will be glad you did.
Now onto the juicy part.
Last time we looked at how complaining drains our life force. This takes those slogans a bit further: what if, instead of looking at the people in our life as issues in need of solving, we actually were grateful for them?
“Uhm, actually Lodro,” you may say, “I have no reason to be grateful for my ex. He’s a jerk and broke my heart.”
I get that. I’ve been there. But when I look back at the big breakups from my past, I don’t think of the pain anymore. I think of the good times and what I learned from them.
This mind-training slogan shows us that we can be grateful to everyone, which includes the people who have caused us pain and suffering. Even if it doesn’t feel good, that pain makes us spiritually stronger. It challenges us to grow spiritually.
There’s an old story about Atisha that before he took off to spread the lojong teachings in Tibet, he had a very specific method of preparation. He had heard that Tibetans were very nice people and thought, “That won’t do. I can’t grow spiritually if everyone is nice to me all the time.”
So he decided to bring along this tea servant who was just the worst: always dropping things, saying the wrong things at the wrong times, and generally a thorn in his side. That way, he would have opportunities to grow his patience, compassion and more.
The joke goes that when he got to Tibet, he found many challenging people there too because that’s life; there will always be people who will annoy us. The practice, according to him, is to be grateful to them for offering us these opportunities to grow these most excellent qualities. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Traleg Rinpoche once commented:
“We are only mature spiritually and psychologically when we are tested.”
Which brings us to our second slogan today:
Always maintain only a joyful mind.
Maybe you were with me on the first half, but this feels too Pollyanna to you. I am not a Pollyanna person, so don’t worry my friend.
A big part of each week for me is meeting one-on-one with meditation students and bringing meditation into the nooks and crannies of their lives. Of late, I have been meeting with people who are navigating divorce, health challenges and uncertainty, career transitions and more. In short: I’ve been holding space for a lot of grief and fear.
I work with incredibly wise people though, who know that they don’t want those two qualities dominating their lives, so I find myself asking a question quite often: “Where would you want to put your mental energy instead?”
The thing about a meditation practice is that it unlocks the door to a fantastic secret: we have the ability to work with our minds. Just because we are encountering difficulty, it does not mean we have to mentally dwell there. We can acknowledge our situation and also focus on some of the parts of our lives that bring us joy.
Responses I’ve heard of late include:
enjoying time with my dog
focusing on exercise because it makes me feel good
spending time with supportive friends who remind me who I am
eating good food and slowing down enough to taste it
sitting outside and letting myself have the space to relax
These are simple activities, but they become joy generators because the person is deciding to relax into the present enough to discover a sense of contentment with what is going right, instead of just focusing on what is going wrong.
To be clear: life can and will go sideways. The question this mind-training slogan asks is, “Can we choose joy over fear?”
How many times a day can we purposefully make this choice, to hold our mind in a state of relaxation and joy, instead of giving in to the “What if…” stories that so often plague us?
By way of homework this week (should you be up for such a thing), I recommend noticing when you’re spiraling in frustration or fear and writing down one thing you’re grateful for. At the end of the week, if you’re like me, you’ll likely have a great list to review.
These small shifts—from fear to joy, from frustration to gratitude—is where real mind training begins. I’ll be right there in the trenches this week, doing it with you. Thanks for reading The Laundry.
P.P.S. Since this piece was originally written, I’ve encountered some very visceral ways of being tested in regard to the first slogan and boy, when we do these practices, it does wonders to make the heart feel lighter