How To Assess Your Practice

Lead the circle in an exploration of assessing practice within four domains of maturation.  Include your own personal experience. Share the suggestions after the circle has completed each of the domains.

The Main focus of the exploration should be on : I. FOUNDATIONAL OPENNESS & COGNITIVE CLARITY, II. EMOTIONAL, SOMATIC & RELATIONAL MATURATION, and III. PURPOSE, EXPRESSION & SOUL-LEVEL ALIGNMENT. Only explore IV. ENERGETIC, AFFECTIVE & FIELD-BASED SIGNS if you need to fill the time.

THE CORE QUESTION:

Are we becoming more open, more clear, more compassionate, more natural, and more responsible in daily life?

If yes, practice is maturing. If not, practice is immaturing.

I. FOUNDATIONAL OPENNESS & COGNITIVE CLARITY

How might we assess our practice of Absolute Bodhichitta?

(Absolute Bodhichitta — the View maturing)

• Reduced grasping and reactivity
• Shift in basis of operation (identity resting in awareness)
• Clarity, brightness, decreased dullness
• Openness, unfindability, ease in groundlessness
• Insight into projections and constructed stories
• Collapse of inner argument with reality
• Trust in the immediacy of the present moment
• Decreased need to monitor progress
• Increasing naturalness, simplicity, non-striving
• Continuity of awareness through daily life

II. EMOTIONAL, SOMATIC & RELATIONAL MATURATION

(Relative Bodhichitta — compassion becoming embodied)

How might we assess our practice of Relative Bodhichitta? Emotionally? Somatically? And Relationally?

• Motivation becoming cleaner, less self-centered
• Spontaneous care and responsiveness
• Greater capacity to stay present with suffering
• Openness within relational disturbance
• Decreasing defensiveness and self-protection
• Ethical sensitivity and relational attunement increasing

III. PURPOSE, EXPRESSION & SOUL-LEVEL ALIGNMENT

(Nirmanakaya — realization expressing in the world)

How might we assess our practice as it influences our sense of Purpose, Expression and Activity in the world?

• Emerging sense of sacred individuality
• Clearer intuition of one’s role or dharma-function
• Responsiveness, reliability, and steadiness increasing
• Action arising more from alignment than ambition
• A felt sense of participating in the whole

IV. ENERGETIC, AFFECTIVE & FIELD-BASED SIGNS

(Sambhogakaya expressions — the field harmonizing)

How might we assess our practice based on the transformation of our energy affect, and field-based signs?

• Subtle joy, bliss, or luminosity emerging
• Increase in synchronicities and felt field-resonance
• Natural gratitude arising without object
• Greater spontaneity, humor, and playfulness
• Lightness and unpredictability replacing rigidity