Coaching practices for Three Difficulties Lojong

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

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

• There’s a mental pattern I keep trying to change all at once and then giving up when it doesn’t budge
• 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
• Right now this feels totally solid and permanent, like the worst thing and it’ll never shift
• I’ve started catching a smugness in myself
• I sit down and it just isn’t working, so I keep doing the one thing I know

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. 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
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. The Five Hindrances: Diagnosing and Working with Meditation Obstacles
   The five hindrances (sensual desire, ill will, sloth-and-torpor, restlessness-and-worry, and doubt) are the classical Buddhist taxonomy of what blocks meditation and clarity of mind. Each has specific antidotes. The framework is practical, not metaphysical — it gives meditators a diagnostic vocabulary for what is actually blocking concentration. Evidence is largely mechanistic; modern psychology corroborates each hindrance's pattern under different names.
7. Precise hindrance identification before applying antidotes
   Before doing anything about a meditation obstacle, name which of the five hindrances is actually present.
   The Five Hindrances: Diagnosing and Working with Meditation Obstacles
8. Practise with the unexpected
   When things go wrong unexpectedly, use that moment as the actual practice rather than a break from it.
   Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
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. Working with doubt (vicikiccha)
    When doubt about the practice, the teacher, or your capacity paralyses meditation, investigate it rather than resolving it conceptually.
    The Five Hindrances: Diagnosing and Working with Meditation Obstacles

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