Last year, I stumbled across “Dzogchen Practice in Everyday Life,” a short essay by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the great Dzogchen masters of modern times. I always seem to come back to his words just when I need them most.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche at Thubten Choling. Photo credit: Marilyn Silverstone.
Like tonight, for instance. Just wrapping up a 16-hour day at the office. Wiped out. Can’t possibly go upstairs and sit before bed. So instead, I spend a few minutes, reflect on Dilgo Khyentse’s words and find peace.
When engaging in meditation practice, we should feel it to be as natural as eating, breathing and defecating. It should not become a specialised or formal event, bloated with seriousness and solemnity. We should realise that meditation transcends effort, practice, aims, goals and the duality of liberation and non-liberation. Meditation is always ideal; there is no need to correct anything. Since everything that arises is simply the play of mind as such, there is no unsatisfactory meditation and no need to judge thoughts as good or bad.
Therefore we should simply sit. Simply stay in your own place, in your own condition just as it is. Forgetting self-conscious feelings, we do not have to think “I am meditating.” Our practice should be without effort, without strain, without attempts to control or force and without trying to become “peaceful.”
He says that we, as sentient beings, are already symbols of our own enlightenment. Liberation is already here — we don’t need to sit on a cushion to find it. “The everyday practice of dzogchen is just everyday life itself.” Such amazing clarity contained within his words.