Introduction to Buddhist Practice

What To Do

Why You Do It

Buddhist practice has no strict definition because the core idea of Buddhism is that there is no inherent fixed quality to anything. So why this particular format? If I don't argue with my spouse no matter how angry I am, isn't that a form of practice? If I don't complain about work but just accept it, isn't that a form of practice? To that I say yes, they are all forms of practice. But this kind of an approach dictates that for each problem you experience in life, you'll need a distinct practice just to specifically overcome that problem.

What if there was a general practice you can do to overall benefit all aspects of your life? That is the motivation for the above practice. At the core of this approach are three requirements:

• Challenging
• Voluntary
• Humanly possible

In the appendix section you will find alternative options for the above practice, but even in those you will find that they are challenging, voluntary, and humanly possible. The requirement "voluntary" can be a bit vague. What it means is you will take on a practicing activity purely for the sake of practicing, instead of making it a side effect of something you're already going to do. For example, if you were going to go to the gym regardless of practice then adding five more sets of squats won't qualify as Buddhist practice from my perspective. Taking a longer route to / walking to work also doesn't count because you'd go to work anyway.

You're probably interested in changing your life because you're not happy with your current life. When you sit down and reflect upon your life, what drives your decision making process? Why can't you do the things that you think would change your life, the possibilities that you already know? They most likely feel too hard for you.

Doing abstract and meaningless challenging tasks directly trains the mental muscle involved in changing the direction of your life. Changing your life will involve making changes to the choices you make in your day. In those moments your nervous system will be activated. You will feel scared. You will want to run away from it. But what if you were so used to being okay in the midst of all those feelings? These practices are meant to help you comfortably be in challenging situations over time.

Challenges & How To Overcome Them

You can expect all parts of the practice to be challenging, and if you quit this will be the most likely reason. So while this guide is a step by step instruction it's also important for me to tell you what challenges you're likely to face, and how to overcome them based on my experience of overcoming them. I tried my best to give you my honest experience along with different things I've tried through trial and error and by reading them and applying them to your practice I hope that your progress will be much easier than mine.

In general, treat practice like eating. You'd eat every day with no exception. If you couldn't eat because of an illness or bad timing, you'd eat a bit more than usual on the next meal. When you've had too much to eat you'd take it easy with the next few meals. Some days you want to treat yourself to a gluttonous meal, some days you want to exercise restraint and eat healthy. All of these are possible with practice as well.

Of course you can stress over eating but in general eating is a regular part of life that you don't even think about making it optional. When practicing becomes as natural as eating, you'll be sure to notice the many different parts of your life that completely changed.

What To Do

Wake up at 5AM. Then without lingering, get out of bed and walk to where you will start bowing.

Why You Do It

Sleep is obviously important for everybody, but it is a major source of stress for many. This was the case for me as well: my life was controlled by sleep. Every single decision I made regarding what I was going to do in the day was governed by whether or not I'll get enough sleep. Another part of life closely related to sleep is energy, because having bad sleep means less energy in the day. This motivates the classic loop of sleep stress.

• I don't sleep well
• I'm tired the next day
• I try as best as I can to get a good night's sleep
• This stresses me out, so I don't sleep well (repeat)

Being able to wake up at an early age regardless of how tired you are will be very difficult at first. As hard as it is, I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages by a large margin. For starters, you just have way more time in the day to YOURSELF. This is a very important point: you may wake up 3 hours earlier when you wake up at 5AM so you may go to bed 3 hours earlier. Doesn't that make this a meaningless zero-sum game? Yes it does, but when you wake up at 8AM how much of your day is completely dedicated to you and only you?

There's nothing wrong with practicing in the afternoon or evening. But two factors make this difficult. One has to do with the world around you. What do you do when your spouse or parents need you during the day when you're meditating? What do you do when you get an emergency work call while you're bowing? Repeated occurrences of interruptions is likely to stop the practice altogether.

The other difficulty is that our mood tends to heighten up over the day. When we wake up, we're "low tension" and it might be a side effect of being sleepy but we're generally more relaxed. As the day goes by and you look at posts on social media with work emails your tension gets tighter. By the evening you just want to escape from your reality with a dopamine based activity. It is very difficult to engage in practice when you're in this state and again, this increases the chance that you'll drop the practice altogether.

Challenges & How To Overcome Them

I used to believe it would be impossible for me to wake up at 5AM. I loved sleep, and in particular I loved my morning sleep; I would get up at like, 10-10:30AM. My dogs actually got used to sleeping in instead of waking me up. If I didn't sleep until then it always felt like I had some lingering fatigue and it became an obsession to keep sleep the highest priority in my day to day life.

But now I'm a person who wakes up at 5AM every day. How? I think it happens in 3 "layers", so to speak.

Commitment

Waking up ONCE at 5AM isn't that big of a deal to anybody (but I'll be honest, for old Billy it would have been a big deal to just get up ONCE at 5AM). But the kind of practice that I do, cleansing my karma, is a 3 year commitment. 3 years of daily morning prayers to actually change yourself. And this isn't a casual 3 year commitment where you keep practice in your mind for 3 years; you do it for 3 years every day, no exceptions.

When I travel, I do my bows. When I'm sick, I do my bows. Although there are times where I'm actually incapacitated, if it isn't that I always do my bows and a bit more every once in a while (300, 500, whatever I decide on as a challenge for myself). When I give myself a day's grace because I'm tired that day, guess what's going to happen? I'm going to want to continue giving myself grace.

This is actually what keeps my commitment. I know what it's like to not do the bows. At first I'd probably wake up at like, 6AM out of habit. But before I realize it, I'm going to start waking up at 10AM again. Why? Because that's how I lived my life unconsciously for the first 36 years. It was the path of least resistance for me and as with everything else, we return to the path of least resistance when there is no more energy being applied.

With the 10AM, I know what also comes back. My inability to sleep well. My sensitivity to noise at night. My sensitivity to fatigue. My irritability. My worrying about my physical condition. So much suffering is tied to how I unconsciously lived my life and I've HAD it with my suffering. I really don't want to live like how I lived.

Mothers are all able to sustain very irregular sleep schedules if it means taking care of their baby. It's grueling and very stressful, but it's definitely possible. Why? Because there is a selfless kind of love in parenting a newborn. Nothing else is more important to you at that time.

So just like that, I'm prioritizing my life. Nothing is more important than me. Sleeping isn't more important than me. Not being tired isn't more important than me (and guess what? Even if I sleep a lot, I'll always be tired because that's the human condition!).

When I think about motherhood and compare that to my life, guess what? I just have to wake up and take care of myself which is so much easier than waking up to a crying infant and changing their diaper. Also, I used to sleep in sleeping bags in the army and India. Now I sleep on a bed with a comforter. What is there to complain about?

This kind of reframing and a deep sense of self-interest helps greatly with the first layer, commitment.

Getting Out of Bed

When you do this practice, you will inevitably go through a period of waking up but staying in bed. Why? Because the bed is so comfy and nice. You can't just seem to shake the sleep off and wake up consistently. Some days you're sort of up already because you're tossing and turning, but most days it will be very difficult to actually get out of bed.

Doing this comes down to experimentation. I observed myself staying in bed when I had the phone alarm next to me. It was too tempting to just hit the snooze button, so after a while of experimentation I now put the phone in the living room away from me.

That's stopping a physical attractor to the bed. On the mental side I needed to have a reason to wake up. I told myself, I'll do one more bow for every minute I stay in bed. One day I overslept for two hours because I didn't hear the alarm at all, so that day out of the blue I did 300 bows. That sobered me up super quick and it got a LOT easier to wake up on time.

The whole not even hearing the alarm also was a recurring problem, though not as frequent as the other problems. I currently deal with this by having a double alarm system where I use my smartwatch as the first alarm and the phone alarm in the living room 7 minutes later. I naturally worry about my wife's sleep so if I don't wake up now, it will wake my wife up and I really don't want that to happen so it's a very good way to just get up.

The important thing to note here is that it's human, it's natural to want to continue staying in bed. After you wake up it seems like a matter of willpower but the moment you're up and you're hazy, there's a window of time where you're lingering between sleep and awake. The more you accept that this is a natural part of having a human body and learn to work with it, the more success you'll have. Over time you'll just wake up the moment you hear the alarm.

Getting Up From Sleep

Yes, there are two alarms and yes, I know waking up and bowing and meditating is what's good for me. But that doesn't mean I won't have days where I just want to hit pause on everything and sleep like, five more hours. 108 bows takes around 13 minutes for me now and some days I don't even sweat because I got used to it, but when I first did it I was so tired I just couldn't resist the urge to sleep more.

As I noted above, this is part of being human. This is still hard for me. I think I can count on one hand I didn't have the urge to continue sleeping. Moreover, I'm still sleepy throughout the day and it took months for me to not nap during the day (there are no guidelines on whether you should nap or not, you're free to actually just go to sleep again after the morning prayers if you want).

Though it is super hard, the core insight I got from my morning prayers is that things being hard is not a reason to suffer. I can happily do hard things. That idea seems so bogus, it seems improbable and unrealistic but the moment you come to understand that you can be happily tired, you finally break away from the binding tethers of obsession over sleep.

I've noticed that Korean Buddhist monks in general really dislike sleep. I don't know if other Buddhist monks hate sleep, but sleep is a major obstacle to practicing as evidenced by the prevalence of tea in Buddhism. It's the preferred drink of choice for monks because it helps them stay awake during meditation.

Unlike other compulsive urges, sleep is actually a necessary factor in survival. You'll never really be free from it until the day you die. But hey, it's what you're born with; so you can be happy with it.

A nice side effect of constantly being tired is that you can sleep any time you want. Whether it's a bus, on the floor, a sleeping bag, it doesn't matter; you're always going to be tired enough to just immediately fall asleep. This is particularly good for travel because as long as you continue waking up at 5AM in your local time, you're more or less going to feel exactly the same wherever you go. Since I started my practice I've never really had jetlag.

Also you'll stop waking up so much because… again, you'll be too tired to wake up and waste the few hours of sleep you get. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from going to bed at 8PM to catch all the sleep you want before 5AM but my experience told me that because people get used to everything, you get used to waking up at 5AM regardless of what time you go to bed.

So those are the 3 key layers that helped me wake up at 5AM every day. Literally the only downside is that you'll feel tired a lot. Aside from that I got more time in the day to work with clients, I have guaranteed time to myself and nobody else, other challenging things in life feel so easy compared to this, I sleep like a baby, and I could go on and on and on about why I'll continue to live like this for the rest of my life.

Nobody is forcing me to. And I'm not forcing you to. But I'm just telling you: I'm willing to bet it will be a good experience for you too.

What To Do

Why You Do It

Bowing is a cultural practice in most of Asia. When you meet people in a formal context you bow your head to say hello. When you meet someone in an important context where you need to demonstrate the respect you have for them, you fully bow down to the ground. It's similar to the French bisous; it's a normal part of the culture when you grow up with it but a little foreign when you didn't grow up with it.

To be a Christian you become Christened. Then you go to church and attend service. Buddhism also has an initiation ceremony where you declare that you seek refuge in the three jewels: The Buddha, The Dharma, The Sangha. Then you accept the five precepts:

• Do not harm another physically
• Do not harm another verbally
• Do not take what is not yours from another
• Do not sexually harass another
• Do not get intoxicated to the point of being inebriated

A quick note: the first page of this guide is actually saying all of the above in Pali.

So what is the bowing supposed to do?

Buddhism is all about the liberation from suffering. Suffering primarily comes in 3 forms: greed, foolishness, and anger. What do the 3 have in common? They all have to do with the ego. Greed is the desire to get more for ME. Foolishness is the insistence on MY ideas instead of working with reality. Anger is the reaction to the idea of ME being trespassed by another person. It all has to do with this strong idea of ME.

Bowing is about letting go of ME. Not in the way of "Oh my god, I was wrong and I have sinned" but more in the way of "I was SO sure I was right but now I see that from your perspective I was wrong, and now I repent for my stubborn insistence of me". The body language of the bow is lowering yourself to the ground, which in most cultures signifies the lowering of the ego.

And you do that 108 times every day. You let go of this insistence on the idea of you. What also happens a lot is obsession over the 108 number and the 108 bows become a dogma; people start feeling horrible when they miss a day and they suffer because of the 108 bows, which is precisely against the point. To that we advise, one sincere bow to relinquish you is better than 108 bows you do just for the count.

Another type of practice is meditation. But why we recommend the bows the most in our order is, it has the quickest effect in changing people's lives simply because it is the most accessible challenging activity. A practice is meaningful in overcoming karma when it is voluntary, challenging, and humanly possible. To make meditation challenging you need a lot of time. To make mantras challenging you again need a lot of time and focus. But 108 bows, all you need is around 20 minutes and I guarantee you'll be challenged a lot.

Challenges & How To Overcome Them

In this challenge lies your ego. Surprisingly everybody has a different reaction to why they don't want to do the 108 bows. When I do it together with them some people get sad, some people get angry, some people actually give up; but I've never seen a completely duplicate reaction to 108 bows. It does such a great job of revealing who you are. And when you want to stop, it's that insistence on YOU that wants to stop.

So every morning you wake up and meet yourself. And you simply let that you go by just bowing one more time. No rationalizing. No justifying. No distractions. Just doing it.

Injury

Of course it would be silly to press on with bowing when you have a medical condition. If you don't want to take chances, the best thing to do is consult a doctor and get the worry over with. My general rule of thumb was if I could function throughout the day I could bow. If I couldn't walk or otherwise needed recovery, I replaced the bow with an alternative practice and made up for it after the recovery.

The nice thing about bowing that goes forgotten over time is that there is no time limit. When you take your time to do the 108 bows with a slow, slow pace it actually aids with recovery because it forces circulation to the injured parts. Nobody is rushing you but you; when injured, it's important to take time to do the bows.

Too Many Breaks

When I was first starting out I took a lot of water breaks. But guess what would happen inevitably with every water break? A quick look at the phone. Which turns into a 3 minute scrolling session. You cool down a bit and your body temperature starts to drop down. At that point you might as well kiss that day's bows goodbye because it's actually harder to get started again at that point compared to starting fresh.

Bowing is hard. You will want to stop for just a quick second. And after that second you'll want to take another second. You have to learn how to see the future, you have to see that yes you could take a break but you probably know what happens then. Also need to re-emphasize: if you're taking too many breaks it's probably an indicator that you're rushing through the bows.

Obsessing

Some days you'll miss the bows for various reasons: sleeping in, unexpected life events, travel, and so on. As mentioned in the introduction you can relax into continuing the next day, just give yourself an extra 50 bows or something to account for the loss.

The practice is supposed to be a value add onto your life, not a source of stress. You have to be able to look at the bigger picture, be the type of a big person who says "that's okay, I'll start the thousand days practice all over again; as a matter of fact, I started it once so what's the loss in starting twice?". When you become the person who can genuinely think along those lines, the number of days will stop mattering and your practice will become a part of life.

What To Do

Relax your body and mind. You have nothing to do, nothing you have to regret, nothing you have to plan. With a relaxed body and mind, focus your attention to the tip of your nose. Notice as air goes through your nostrils with each inhale and exhale. Every time you lose focus, just come back to the tip of your nose.

Why You Do It

Meditation is not something that you do for relief of an acute symptom. It's not like a cold medicine that you only take when you're having a cold.

Throughout my career as a change worker / life coach / healer / whatever you want to call it, my primary struggle was finding an approach that works universally. That struggle is why I resonate so much with the idea in Buddhism that says there is no requirement for happiness.

Buddha led the lowest of the castes, a serial killer, the most attractive prostitute in the village, a woman driven mad by the loss of her only son, a mentally challenged person, and a person who just couldn't "get" the idea of awakening to their individual path of happiness and freedom from suffering. Because why? There is no requirement for happiness. You don't need anything. The only requirement is the ability to breathe.

The neat feature of meditation is that it is a truly ongoing practice that you can do at any point in your lifetime regardless of your circumstances. You can meditate without arms or legs. You can meditate when you're in prison. You can meditate when you have cancer. You can meditate as you're about to die. As long as you have a breath, you can meditate. As long as you are alive you can be happy.

What does meditation have to do with that? All forms of meditation have one thing in common: focus. When you're feeling angry, when you're thinking self-sabotaging thoughts, there's a YOU that's doing the feeling and the thinking. But in the heat of moments or deep suffering you lose that sense of yourself and you enter this state in which you are consumed by what you are feeling or thinking, rather than you doing the feeling and thinking.

Regular meditation practice puts a lot of fixed variables in your system. You're meditating at the same time, for the same amount of time, always sitting at the same spot. But somehow you find that every day's experience is completely different. The more time you spend with just yourself having different experiences every time, the more you notice a sense of stability.

And you get to understand with your body, the experience of suffering is just that: an experience. It has nothing to do with fundamental suffering of your soul, because if your soul is meant to fundamentally suffer because of some inherent reason you should be suffering even inside your meditative practice. But when you're breathing in and out, is there suffering there? You get to decouple the experience of suffering with the idea of inherent suffering.

Challenges & How To Overcome Them

Meditating With an Agenda

Everything I explained in the previous sections are side effects and they are not goals you need to have with meditation. When you're "meditating" with a goal in mind, you're just sitting down and thinking and that's not meditating. Meditating is just relaxing and letting yourself do whatever your focusing activity is without trying to get to a result.

Any time we yearn for something, we set ourselves up for two choices: we either don't get what we want and be sad, or we get what we want and we become happy. The unfortunate reality of life is that happiness doesn't last because your brain gets used to the existence of the stimulus. So we keep wanting new things, more additions to our lives without recognizing the pattern. Meditation is not inviting you to participate in this loop. Meditation is inviting you to observe this phenomenon.

Compromising

As you observe your breath you will see your mind constantly drifting away to answer your unconscious desires. 'My arm is itchy, let's just scratch that real quick'. 'My leg's losing circulation, let me just stretch for a bit'.

If you break your focus to scratch your itch, stretch your leg, check your cell phone for an email, then you're not really meditating; you're just briefly sitting down with your eyes closed. This is why you use a timer: for the next ten minutes, all you are doing, and the only thing you are doing, is watching your breath with a relaxed body and mind.

For the next ten minutes, you are not compromising and you are committing to watching your breath with a relaxed body and mind.

Pain

For a person who grew up in a chair culture, it will be extra difficult to maintain meditation because of body pain. This is the time I would recommend meditation aids for your comfort. After all it is RELAXED body and mind and you can't really relax if you're in constant pain.

As your capacity for meditation increases you will sit for longer periods of time. Because of this I strongly advise you to work on your hip mobility. Not only is it good for your meditation but it's just generally good for your health.

My #1 recommended way of improving mobility is a yoga routine by a Korean monk who used to be a bodybuilder.