Coaching practices for Lojong Three Principles

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Lojong Three Principles, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I’m kind and openhearted with the people I already love and quietly closed off to the ones who get under my skin, and I’m realizing that warmth that only flows toward easy people isn’t really the practice
• I’ve started catching a smugness in myself
• There’s a mental pattern I keep trying to change all at once and then giving up when it doesn’t budge
• My whole instinct is to push pain away and grab at anything that feels good, and I’m tired of how walled-off that makes me
• I keep trying to work on these things one at a time, like a checklist to get through, and my practice feels lopsided and fragile

Practices that may help

1. Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
   Lojong is a Tibetan Buddhist mind-training system, codified by Atisha and later Chekawa, built around 59 slogans that train the mind to transform adversity into awakening and to cultivate compassion for all beings including oneself. Evidence is primarily contemplative-clinical; some practices (loving-kindness, tonglen-adjacent exercises) have been studied, but the full system is practitioner tradition rather than a clinical protocol.
2. Always abide by the three principles
   Maintain your vow, don’t show off, and practise impartially with everyone — not just the people you like.
   Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
3. Don’t make gods into demons
   Don’t let spiritual practice become a source of pride, judgment, or superiority over others.
   Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
4. Train in the three difficulties
   Notice the habitual pattern, decide to interrupt it, and then work on making the interruption automatic.
   Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
5. Tonglen: sending and taking
   Breathe in suffering (yours and others’); breathe out relief and well-being.
   Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
6. Seeing the eight factors as a mutually supporting system, not a checklist
   Practise one factor well and notice how it naturally improves the others — this is the integrated structure of the path.
   The Noble Eightfold Path as a Practical Life Framework
7. Train with the two truths throughout all activities
   Hold both relative reality (things matter) and ultimate reality (things are empty of fixed essence) simultaneously.
   Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
8. Use flash tonglen in the moment of encountering suffering
   A single in-breath of someone’s pain and an out-breath of goodwill is a complete act of tonglen.
   Tonglen: The Tibetan Practice of Taking and Sending
9. Drive all blames into one
   When conflict arises, examine how self-grasping is the root, rather than blaming the other person.
   Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
10. Right intention — clarifying motivation before action
    Before a significant action or conversation, briefly ask: "Am I moving from renunciation, goodwill, or non-harming — or from craving, aversion, or delusion?"
    The Noble Eightfold Path as a Practical Life Framework

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