Daily Reminder: Once You Relax, Practice Truly Begins

✨ Relaxation: Where Practice Truly Happens

In practice, within relaxation, there can be purification. There is bliss, joy, equanimity, compassion, and many other things.

In everything you do, practice must be relaxed. Not only practice: your whole life must be relaxed. Relaxed: that is the point.

So in practice, everything you do must carry that same relaxation. When you chant, you must do that. When you check your body, you must do that. Even deity yoga: all practices are within this relaxation. Relax in the deeper sense. Whatever sound you hear, make sure your heart is not tightening.

Things cannot always be in a pure condition. Mixed conditions will come, because everything in life is mixed conditions. Even when you pluck the fruit or the grain, it comes with accumulated dust and particles. So you need to purify, to make the conditions right: you need water, care, extra effort, to rub things clean. Even when you pluck a fruit fresh from the tree, you need to wash it, and even if you are too lazy to wash it, you rub it. As conditions arise, you purify. This is the truth in life, and it is equally the truth in practice.

But we practice with stress. We do everything with stress, and so practice never truly happens for us. Therefore we really need to know what exactly is going on within us, what exactly our problem is. That is the message of the so-called truth of suffering: know your weakness, your weak point, know exactly what is bothering you. This is what the Buddha showed in the truth of suffering.

Suffering is not only about lying in a hospital or breaking your bones. Of course that is one part of it, but we are struggling all the time.

If we look at this from an athletic perspective, it becomes very clear. For elite athletes, the real training is actually relaxation, flow: making sure there is no unnecessary emotion, no tension, no anxiety, clearing all of these away. Even marathon runners are never trying to exhaust themselves. Through the exhaustion, they are finding the path that leads to no exhaustion.

The same is true for playing the piano. The moment tension enters, everything seizes up. Progress only happens through relaxation: mental response and physical response working together, while still catching every note. Relaxation drops, the note is caught; relaxation drops, the note is caught. When these two things come together, that is when something is truly achieved.

We must apply it. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we must apply it: relaxation is where the practice happens.

GarTul Chimi Dorjee Rinpoche