Discovering Your True Identity
By Tergar Meditation Community • 4 min read
Your true nature is perfect. When you hear that, your first thought might be something along the lines of, “Surely you jest.” That’s a normal response, but in all seriousness, the key to meditation is to realize your innate qualities.
It’s not that in meditation you’re transforming something into something new. No, what you’re doing is discovering yourself. Within you is an infinity of possibilities. Awareness, love, and compassion, which are with you in every moment, are aspects of basic goodness. They are qualities of our fundamental nature.
The Sanskrit word for suffering is dukkha, or “dissatisfaction.” We are never satisfied; we always want more. Worse, no matter how much we get, on a deeper level there’s always a nagging sense of being incomplete: we are a bit insecure, a little lonely, longing for something we can’t exactly name. This is what is meant by dukkha. This feeling can manifest in various ways, like sorrow, pain, discomfort, panic, depression, stress, hatred, desire, or ignorance. Such manifestations are traditionally referred to as “obscurations,” because they obscure our basic goodness, our inner light.
“The more we recognize awareness, the more access we have to our own loving qualities. Loving-kindness and compassion are the natural expressions of awareness because genuine expressions of an open heart transcend conceptual ideas and attitudes, and exist beyond duality, beyond words and logic.”
– Mingyur Rinpoche –
So our wonderful innate qualities are always pure, yet obscured. The traditional example is a diamond that’s covered in mud. No matter how filthy it might be, the diamond is not itself the mud. We’re all lost in the “mud,” and confused by it . . . but mud is not our true nature.
On the fundamental level, we know this, which is why we have that homesick, incomplete feeling. What we’re really yearning for is to be free from dukkha. The heart knows that the self is, in fact, complete, but the mind hasn’t caught on yet. All your mind knows is that you want to feel better and you don’t want to suffer. Here’s the amazing thing: this wish to be happy is love, and this wish to be free from suffering is compassion. So when you are aware of those desires, you are connecting to your essential love and compassion. In other words, you’ve been home all along.
Mingyur Rinpoche will introduce practices of the imagination that can help us unlock our fundamental goodness.
Tergar Meditation Community supports individuals, practice groups, and meditation communities around the world in learning to live with awareness, compassion, and wisdom. Grounded in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage of our guiding teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, our online and in-person programs are accessible to people of all cultures and faiths, and support a lifelong path toward the application of these principles in everyday life.
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