Coaching practices for Three Marks of Existence

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

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

• I keep telling myself "this is just how I am, I always end up here," like the pattern is some fixed thing built into me
• I can’t tell if what I’m feeling is sharp pain from a real loss, grief that a good thing ended, or just a low background sense that nothing ever stays satisfying
• A single bad moment quietly hardens into a verdict about who I am
• When something good happens I grip it like it’ll last forever, and when something bad happens I treat it like it’s permanent and says something true about me
• It feels like this ache is just how I am now, permanent, and I can’t quite believe it could ever actually lift

Practices that may help

1. Anicca: Working Practically with Impermanence
   Anicca (impermanence) is the first of the three marks of existence in Buddhism: all conditioned phenomena arise and pass. Its practical value is not consolation — "this too shall pass" — but precision: seeing impermanence directly in experience (not just as a concept) dissolves the misperception that generates clinging and aversion. Evidence for impermanence practice is primarily mechanistic and contemplative-clinical.
2. Nagarjuna's insight: no link exists independently
   Each link in the chain is empty of inherent existence — which means the chain has no necessity, only conditionality.
   Dependent Origination: How Suffering Arises and Ceases
3. Distinguishing the three types of dukkha
   Correctly identify which of the three dukkhas is present: obvious pain, the ache of change, or existential unsatisfactoriness.
   The Four Noble Truths as a Practical Framework
4. Watching the becoming-link: how identity solidifies into suffering
   Notice the moment an experience tips into "this is who I am" — that is the bhava (becoming) link hardening.
   Dependent Origination: How Suffering Arises and Ceases
5. Recognising ignorance as active misperception, not mere absence
   Avijja (ignorance) is not just "not knowing" — it is actively misreading impermanent things as permanent and selfless processes as "I".
   Dependent Origination: How Suffering Arises and Ceases
6. Third noble truth — establishing that cessation is actually possible
   Hold the fact of cessation as a genuine empirical hypothesis, not just a hope.
   The Four Noble Truths as a Practical 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. First noble truth — recognising dukkha honestly
   Acknowledge suffering as it actually is — without dramatising it or spiritual-bypassing it.
   The Four Noble Truths as a Practical Framework
9. Receive experiential meaning fully — in love, beauty, and truth
   Practice fully absorbing the experiences that matter most rather than rushing past them.
   Frankl’s Three Sources of Meaning
10. Second noble truth — finding the craving behind the suffering
    When suffering is present, trace it to its cause: which craving, clinging, or resistance is feeding it?
    The Four Noble Truths as a Practical Framework

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