I’m happy to be posting a new Commentary on The Seven-fold Prayer.  This essay is a greatly expanded version of a chapter that originally appeared in “The Unbroken Wholeness of Sublime Understanding and Love”. 

The seven-fold prayer, or seven-fold contemplation, or seven-fold practice, or seven-fold training, is a core component of many Tibetan sadhanas. Readers who have explored with me either the Sadhana of Samantabhadra or the Sadhana of Buddha Amitabha, will be familiar with the base text. In this essay I will refer to the text from the Amitabha sadhana but with a bit of mental editing, you should be able to apply these reflections to any of the many versions of this prayer/practice.

Personally, I find it useful to think of it in terms of seven trainings since each of the seven sections is potentially a profound contemplative yoga in and of itself. As an important component of a longer sadhana, this seven-fold practice is often introduced after the yogi has come to recognise, at least to some degree, the nature of mind, or put another way – the wholeness of inter-being~inter-knowing. 

The training then provides various ways of deepening that recognition/realisation through applying it’s implications in the activities of our daily living. Reflecting on these themes again and again and experimentally allowing them to shape the way we interact with the world becomes a rich path of maturation that can reveal an immeasurable field of vast activity integrating body, speech and mind, inner and outer, self and other, micro and macro, in short, everything.

Click here to read or download the essay in PDF format.

May your explorations be rich and fulfilling