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18 EASTERN HORIZON | TEACHINGS

Your mistakes are Progress

By Lama Kathy Wesley

Lama Kathy serves at the Columbus Karma Thegsum Choling Meditation
Center as its Resident Teacher. She also travels to other Buddhist centers
around the country to teach. Lama Kathy has been a student of Khenpo
Karthar Rinpoche since 1977. She participated in the first three-year retreat
led by Khenpo Rinpoche at Karme Ling Retreat Center in upstate New York,
completing retreat in 1996. She is a graduate of The Ohio State University
with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She lives in Central Ohio with her
husband Michael.

It’s natural to be disappointed that solid and separate entity, we spend
you haven’t been able to vanquish all of our time trying to protect and
your own worst faults. But do you gratify it. Fixation is the engine that
have to continue feeling that way? makes it “go.”
The teachings of lojong say: No,
you don’t have to continue feeling But beyond the self, we can cling
that way! In fact, you can use the to anything— people, possessions,
mistakes you make to propel situations, ideas—and sometimes
yourself further along the path. we may feel as though we’ll never
gain control over ourselves. When
Lojong, which means “mind we make a mistake as a result of
training” in Tibetan, is the term attachment, we often beat ourselves
for a set of meditations and daily up about it. Oh, there I go again, we
life disciplines that tame and may think. I can’t believe I lost my
transform our mental afflictions, temper. That’s what I do, anyway.
simultaneously uprooting the But then I remember something
source of our suffering—our ego- my teacher, Khenpo Karthar
fixation. The practice set consists of Rinpoche, taught me—my favorite
59 aphorisms written by the 12th- lojong slogan:
century Tibetan saint Chekhawa
Yeshe Dorje; they’re also known as Three objects, three poisons, three
the Seven Points of Mind Training. seeds of virtue.

Every one of us has ego-fixation. In a 19th-century commentary on
The Buddha’s teaching about this the lojong teachings, the Tibetan
goes all the way back to the second master Jamgön Kongtrül (1813–
of his Four Noble Truths—that the 1899) explains that the three
cause of suffering is clinging and poisons are attachment, aversion,
fixation, and the greatest of these and ignorance, which are always
is fixation on our concept of self. arising in the mind in response to the
Once we conceive of it, seeing it as a three objects: things you like, things