For me, one of the most empowering aspects of the Dharma approach taught by Luang Por Thoon’s students is the use of methods, tools, to structure my practice. Though I incorporate many different tools into my contemplations (I will call-out a few special ones in some of these blogs), there has been one in particular that has supported almost all of my contemplations —  this method, which I will outline here, was adopted from what I understood from a teaching by Mae Yo and LP Anan at the 2010 KPY retreat. I suspect I have changed it, altered it, made it workable for my own thinking style. It is simply a series of  5 questions/steps as seen below.

The reason I share this with you is not to dazzle you with technique or bore you with details .It’s because one of the greatest assets in my dharma practice has been a notebook and a system, some kind of outline to put down on a blank page to get me started. Then whenever I  have felt sad, angry, afraid stressed, etc. (which is actually a little dashboard warning light that I have a wrong view), I could just pick-up a pen and paper and start working some predefined steps till something shook loose. This has really helped me train myself to be systematic, organized, fast and structured in my thinking and I have been rewarded for that effort with clarity, progress, and alleviation of stress and suffering. So without further ado… the 5 steps:

1) Tell the story or situation. Make it elaborate. Spill what’s in my head so that I can read it for clues about what the real issues are. Back in the day I used to go back to all the permanent words in my story (always, never, must be, can’t fail,  etc.) and underline them as a starting place.

2) Find the wrong views in the situation. What is it that I believe that is contrary to the actual impermanent nature of the world. I can look for things that surprise me (showing me what I expect must be permanent or I wouldn’t be surprised by a different outcome), things I want to control, things that I think are/should always be a certain way.

3) Find the concepts. This is where I peel away the specific details of a situation and find the  themes that underlie the wrong views in # 2. This step is critical because these themes tend to come-up again and again in our lives, by learning to strip away details we can see patterns much more effectively.  So, in Sue’s story for example, one of my wrong views is if Sue loves me she will lose weight. Some of the  wrong concepts behind this include: people all express love the same way, or there is a necessary  link between people’s feelings and their actions, or being loved gives the beloved control. There are more…

4) Identify the Tuk, Tok, Bie, or the risks, suffering and consequences. These are basically the bundle of unpleasantness that comes from my wrong views and the behaviors, beliefs and situations that those views give rise to. They can affect affect me and affect others.  Sometimes, especially at first, it was hard to see “suffering” —  that seemed like something that is happening to those starving kids in Africa, not to me in my charmed SF hipster life. So instead, I started by  think of the costs/tradeoffs, what I pay (not just in money but in time, in loss, in emotion, in effort, in risk, etc.) in exchange for holding these wrong views and the behaviors, situations and beliefs that they give rise to. For me, it’s very very easy to see that everything in this world has costs. The better I get at seeing them, the easier it is to decide whether I’m willing to continue paying them or not. Is it worth it?

5) Find the Dharma. This is the step where I apply all this to the dharma concepts I am currently contemplating. Stuff like rupa (form), self and self belonging, the four elements, the 8 worldly conditions, karma, etc. At first I found this hard, I really didn’t understand any of these things, so I  just did a  quick pass mostly considering form (rupa) and checked it off the list. Eventually, this step gave me a place to add details, it evolved naturally over time because –and this is critical– seeing the impermanence and the suffering is in fact seeing the dharma. Doing that over and over helped clarify these other fancy ideas, it brought them to my mind naturally (or my teachers nudged me a little, but because I had practice seeing the impermanence and the costs, I was able to run with them). I say this in case you out there, dear reader, are following along and thinking, “well, I was ok till step 5, totally doable, but now I’m lost, what the heck is rupa or worldly conditions…I give up.” But if you made it this far, you were on board till you felt confused by step 5, don’t give up! Just start to see the impermanence, the broken views and the costs, and the fancy stuff can arise from there.

X) Floater Number –Tie in other stories/ Evidence — This is something that has became much more central as my practice has grown.  I tie together the concepts across multiple stories or situations so I can better understand the tendencies of my mind and/or overcome those tendencies (ie wrong views) with evidence. I do this in different sections depending on the story and my own goals or practice at the time.  The important thing here is that I take the opportunity to tie things together over time, to reinforce my understanding rather than just trying to solve a single story/problem.

At the beginning I used these bullets as a template, I would write them out and then fill-in; I was very diligent about following the method and each step in order. I think that was a huge help in really making each step, each part of the thinking process very clear and ingrained. Overtime  I have become more flexible, ordering more based on story and need (so sometimes suffering comes before wrong view for example) or lumping together different steps for different segments of a story or concept and then tying everything together in the Dharma section. Still, each distinct step is a part of 100% of my contemplations. They work when I consider actual stories that are mine and they work when I, internalize, put myself in other people’s shoes and imagine how I would feel in their stories.  Best of all, when I get stuck (or so emotional it’s hard to think straight) I can always go back to this structure.

Most of these blogs have been written for readability, so I am not outlining each step, but you can see if you can identify them as you go. In the next blog however, I will give a story about going to the dentist as an example that follows these steps in a clear way. So, read on…