Preliminaries are practice

Two years and 11 months ago, I started ngondro, the preliminary practices in vajrayana Buddhism. A week ago, I reached the required number of accumulations of prostrations, offerings, and mantras.

I didn't know I could do this. In fact, two days into the weeklong retreat where I and others learned the ngondro practices, I went up my lama during a break in teachings and told her tearfully that I didn't think I could. She laughed gently and said, "you don't have to do this," pointing out another path of study that I could follow.

I went through the next few days taking notes and doing practices, all the while thinking that I would not be doing them again, thinking I was good with that. Then I met with my mentor, my kalyanamitra, and immediately burst into tears, telling her that I didn't think I could do this.

She also laughed gently. "You can't do it perfectly," she said. "No one can. ... But you can do it."

And so I did it, imperfectly. One hundred thousand prostrations, 100,000 times to stand, slide, lay my body on the ground, and rise back up. One hundred thousand mandala offerings, more than 1 million mantras, sliding mala beads between my thumb and forefinger.

Along the way, I had to give up the idea that I could not do this. I had to give up a lot of ideas about myself: that I was incapable, that I couldn't take this time for myself, that I was not someone to mumble in a foreign language and perform ancient ritual practices I couldn't always parse out.

Over almost three years, I learned to hold my selves much more loosely, to not expect them to perfectly match my own or others' projections. I learned to let go of the things that I thought defined me, to see them washed away without giving myself time or space to explain or justify why they were there, to just let them go. And that meant forgiving the other players in those stories for their parts -- letting go of their storylines freed them to be new people in our relationships.

I learned to sit, to stay when I wanted to get up, to come back to the focus, to offer the mistakes and the errors as gifts of sincere effort, imperfect but genuine. To see the beauty of the imperfect but genuine, which is deeper than the merely lovely. To trust in the process, the map laid out hundreds of years ago, and to keep moving step by step through the fog of confusion until I found clear views again.

I had to prioritize in order to finish in three years; that was the deadline for the program I'm in to move on to the next practices. I don't know that much about what they involve. I'll find out. I'm more comfortable with uncertainty now.

You can learn more about the program here

You can't win meditation

We're entering heavy sports season here in the U.S., with the month-long college basketball championships wrapping up -- March Madness that now extends into April -- and playoffs looming for professional basketball and hockey, even as baseball opened its season Monday.

In a world where ambiguity muddies most situations, sports offer blessed certainty: Someone wins and someone loses. There's comfort in that. (Of course, if you look into the elements that go into those wins and losses, it can get fuzzy. Someone used performance-enhancing drugs. Someone violated recruiting rules.)

We'd like to be able to apply that certainty in our lives -- remember when Charlie Sheen 
popularized the "Winning" as a description of his life -- but life's not like that. You could see it as a series of games, I suppose, but there's no championship to end the season, declare a winner, and let everyone go home to rest. Life is about getting up and doing it again.

We'd really like to bring the game dynamic to our meditation practice -- we'd like a score, a quantifiable result that says we've won (or at least made the shot, hit the pitch, touched the rim).

The 17th Karmapa, who's touring the U.S. for three months, touched on this attitude in a talk over the weekend. Asked about ngondro, the preliminary practices students of Tibetan Buddhism undertake to get ready for vajrayana practices, Karmapa noted that attention tends to focus on the uncommon practices: 100,000 prostrations, 100,000 purifications mantras, 1 million or more devotional mantras. Students like to count, he said. Numbers make them feel like they've achieved something.

But in truth, it's the common practices, the ones that don't require any particular initiations, that are most important, Karmapa said. Those include contemplations of the Four Reminders that turn the mind to the dharma: Precious human birth, impermanence, karma, and the suffering inherent in all six realms of samsara.

The problem with those contemplations is that there's no way to quantify the results, Karmapa said. Your mind and your personality improve through those contemplations, he said. But there's no score, no stat line, no trophy that tells you that you've done it right or that you're the best in the league at appreciating your precious human birth, you know impermanence better than anyone. There's just you and those around you experiencing how you live your life.

We find that "boring," Karmapa said, interrupting his translator to say that precise English word. (He speaks in Tibetan, but he occasionally corrects his English translators.)

Those who play sports, who aren't just fans following the hot team, know the truth of what he says, though. Games aren't about the score -- they're about the practices, about building muscle memory so that the body knows what to do. Breanna Stewart doesn't have time in a game to think, now I'm going to block that shot by jumping up; she's well-trained and reacts. Games are about showing up for every play, being present in the moment, no matter what the score. If you're focused more on the score than on the play, you'll screw up and let the opponent win. You need, as the sports cliche says, to keep your head in the game -- and out of dreaming about the victory trip to Disney World.

In shamata meditation, each breath is the only breath. In walking meditation, each step is the only step. In ngondro, every prostration is the only one. Each day starts fresh with no score.

Maybe someday, as secular meditation becomes more popular, there will be meditation competitions and there will be a meditation champion, just as there are yoga competitions now. But there is no outside acclamation or accumulation that can tell you when you're doing it right or doing it better than everyone else.

You'll know you're winning at meditation when that no longer matters.