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How to Establish a Daily Practice
 Ven. Rene Feusi Prayers give you the blessing. They open your heart. They ensure that the meditation works. Studying and meditating without doing prayers, without receiving blessings, you will feel that your meditation dries up, that the softness is missing. You have the words, the words are clear, you know them, but somehow they don’t move your heart, they just move your head. Then your spiritual practice will split between your head and your heart. Your head knows, but your heart is not able to do. The prayers should comprise prostration, refuge, bodhichitta, the seven limbs, mandala offering, then request to the master, and receiving the blessings by reciting the mantra. During this retreat our prayers have been made to Shakyamuni Buddha, but you can do your prayers in relation to Chenrezig, Tara, Vajradhara, or whatever other practices or deities you have connection with. If you have a spiritual master, to increase the fastness of the blessing, you see the deity as inseparable from your spiritual master, from all your spiritual masters. The second point to work on is calm abiding, because without calm abiding you have no penetration. Nothing sticks in your head. It just stays at the surface. Even if you understand emptiness correctly, you are not able to make any use of it because your mind doesn’t penetrate and it doesn’t stay. The same thing is true with bodhichitta. You might have some good heart, but if you don’t have a certain level of concentration, you cannot stay in that state. The mind just moves around too much all the time. Third, analytical meditation on the Lam-rim is based on the blessings and on whatever calm abiding you have developed. The two main meditations on the Lam-rim are the two bodhichittas, conventional and ultimate bodhichitta. Personally, I do both together… This article can be read in its entirety in Mandala
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