How to Practice

general edition

Dear dharma friends,

So many times I’m giving a talk or writing to all of you and thinking, I’m sure they know this. They intuitively know this. I don’t need to spell it out. Then I remember my own confusion, which happens frequently, and how often I have wanted and been grateful for an explicit ladder out of the well of despair, grief, clinging. We do actually know what we need to do if we can relax into our own beautiful nature. Sometimes it can feel impossible to access that. Impossible, like a high wall around a beautiful castle. Impossible like swimming endlessly in the pull of the ocean. Impossible like looking down a ski mountain—you’ve taken a wrong turn onto a double black diamond—and thinking: I’m supposed to get down there!?

In case you are in this place right now or ever, here are pith reminders on how to walk the path. These are general instructions. I will share How to Practice, Chod edition, soon.

What Path?

We are all on a path of practice, whether we know it or not, because we are all alive and subject to the push and pull of hope and despair, dreams and delusion. Even choosing to climb entirely into samsara is a choice on the path. Choosing to live on social media, waiting until the day we can upload our consciousness to the AI, is a choice on the path.

We are all moving through a tapestry of decisions and their consequences.

How To Practice:

1) Use Your Circumstances

Samsara can be the ground of our awakening. Difficult circumstances can be the fire of our awakening. Losing your job—yelling at your kid—falling off sobriety—getting that diagnosis—are the circumstances that could wake us up in this very moment. Sometimes “extremely bad things” are the beautiful wakeup calls from the universe. It means it’s time for your inner wisdom self to be born.

Remember to view the confusion of samsara as opportunity. Samsara comes with everything we need to wake up in the human form. Instead of reacting as we usually do, which is to push away difficulty, resent it, take it personally, or project it on another person, we can change our orientation. When we welcome the difficult circumstances of samsara we begin a different dance. We begin to see that we change in response to our difficult times, our trauma times, our I-fucked-up times. Those moments are motivation.

Many who come to the path with sincerity and devotion do so from a place of suffering. Everyone who is ready to put their forehead to the ground and say please, teach me—has suffered. It is when we are humbled by life that we arrive at ego-effacement. Self-dilation gives dharma the chance to drop all the way in.

2) Stand in Love

Could it be that one of the most radical things we can do right now is to stay in the love lane? I mean it. The winds of anger, bitterness, cynicism, addiction to material goods, hatred, judgement, greed, desire—we are living in a windstorm that doesn’t seem to be abating.

Stand in love. Refuse to strip any sentient being of their humanity—divinity—inner light. Because they are alive they are worthy of your love. In this time of division this is a big practice. Stand in Love.

Can your heart feel every other person’s heart? I have been advising my sangha to try this. One could spend a good lifetime making this your mantra: Can My Heart Feel Their Heart?

To try this practice, make an inner connection with your heart. Then visualize that love emanating from your heart, up through the central channel, out of the top of your head, over to the other person’s head, dropping through their central channel, and into their heart.

Check: can your heart feel their heart?

Sometimes you really won’t want to. Sometimes, honestly, you won’t be able to feel the other person’s heart. But sometimes you will. If you do this enough, you will get better at this quick touch in with the common taste of humanity. Your heart will enlarge. There is only benefit in this.

I’m tapping away on my laptop, writing this Dharma Bite to all of you from the wooden pews of jury duty. Is anything more beautiful than the American experiment in democracy? This crazy, knee-to-nose exercise in sitting among our fellow citizens?

Stand in love.

3) Hold It Lightly

I love the story of the Tao philosopher Chung Tze dreaming that he was a butterfly, and waking up wondering if he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. This has stuck with me as a parable of the strange delusion that we grasp onto and call MY LIFE. Instead, the instruction is to hold the “I”, hold “me”, hold “mine” – lightly. As if it were a bubble or a dream.

This is not to be confused with detachment and numbing out. I am still responsible to my kids even when I hold lightly. I am still feeding them and tending to them. We hold our identification lightly. Our clinging. Our wants.

Another example: we recently opened a temple at Heart Sangha, where I am the guiding teacher. It is an exciting milestone. It is a delight and relief to go to the same place, with the same set up, and teach without so much exertion each time. That said, the temple could go away at any moment. Maybe we don’t have the funding we need to continue, or maybe I get sick, or maybe there are no volunteers who want to step forward for karma yoga. Maybe I move, or the building changes ownership. There is so much we don’t know. It will equally be okay if the temple goes away. I am holding it lightly. Having or not having a temple does not mean anything. Teacher or not being a teacher—I’m holding it lightly.

You might think of the equivalent thing in your life that you are holding tightly right now and see if you can loosen your grip. Hold the butterfly dream of your life lightly.

4) Don’t Give Up

Maybe you’ve been on the path a long time. In that case you will have gone through periods of great exertion and periods of a kind of despair, which is that fallow, dry place where you have sat and sat. You aren’t sure why you’re meditating anymore. You could not hear another dharma talk if your life depended on it. Big teenage feelings! We all have them.

That is a part of the path too. It’s a sign that you probably could change things up. Maybe you need a new practice, a new teacher, a new sangha. Maybe you have dried up because you’ve lost touch with your heart. Has your practice gotten intellectual? Are you the world’s greatest dharma-corrector?

I’d suggest doing action. Maybe you want to volunteer. Teach kids to meditate. That’ll get your playful juices going. Make food for the food pantries. Serve people and look them in the eye. Donate tickets for kids to get to an Eagles game. Shake it up. But don’t give up.

I take heart in the refuge of the Buddha, that first part of the refuge chant. Take a moment to connect the dots here. We aren’t swearing allegiance to a Buddha-god who was once Prince Siddhartha. We are saying thank you for an example of a buddha in human form. One example was Prince Siddhartha, who became the Buddha Shakyamuni. Another is the Buddha Machig Lapdron, and the Buddha Sera Khandro, whose treasure texts I am currently reading. Also the Buddha Yeshe Tsogyal. These women had hard lives. They found liberation from human form. They were women who were oppressed. Caught, captured, beaten, starved. Women like Sera Khandro who journeyed east across the Tibetan plateau from her birth as a noblewoman in Lhasa. To practice the dharma. To find her teacher. To become a buddha.

We are built to liberate our consciousness and then liberate others. Take heart in the examples of all the buddhas, so many that they fill the refuge tree, so many they fill the sky. If they can do it, we can do it.

This is my last post of 2025. Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here. If you feel so moved, please like, comment, restack or interact in any way with this post so more people can find Dharma Bites.

I teach at Heart Sangha in Philadelphia. All of the Sunday Sanghas are streamed live, for free, on Zoom.

Have a peaceful holiday season. May you turn toward the dharma in the new year, as we begin again, renewing our practice.

See you in 2026 ❤️

Sunisa