Stillness · “Stillness Reveals”
Lojong Slogan Practice
To take up one short Tibetan mind-training slogan as a daily contemplative reminder that reshapes how you meet difficulty, blame, and ordinary life.
Lojong slogan practice: Pick one mind-training slogan (e.g. “Drive all blames into one,” “Always maintain only a joyful mind”). Contemplate it for a few minutes, then carry it through the day so it surfaces in charged moments and flips your habitual reaction. One slogan at a time, applied on the spot, repeated until it rewires you. Companion to tonglen.
What it is
Lojong (“mind training”) is a Tibetan practice built around 59 pithy slogans — terse, often paradoxical phrases compiled by Geshe Chekawa in the Seven Points of Mind Training.
Pema Chödrön’s practice is to take up the slogans as living, daily reminders: you hold one phrase in mind, contemplate it, and let it work on you as you move through ordinary life, especially through difficulty.
The slogans are deliberately blunt and memorable — “Drive all blames into one,” “Always maintain only a joyful mind,” “Start where you are,” “When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of awakening” — so that they surface in the heat of a real moment and flip your habitual reaction.
This is mind training in the literal sense: using repetition of a wise phrase to gradually rewire how you relate to blame, adversity, and other people. It belongs in meditation stillness because it is a contemplative practice — sitting with and inwardly turning over a phrase — that then radiates into daily conduct.
The Method
- Choose one slogan. Pick a single slogan to work with — for a day, a week, or longer. Pema often suggests starting with foundational ones, e.g. “Drive all blames into one” (stop the reflex to blame others; pause and look at your own reactivity instead) or “Always maintain only a joyful mind” (apply cheerfulness and gratitude even to difficult emotions, for their power to wake you up).
- Contemplate it. In a quiet few minutes, sit with the slogan. Turn it over; let its meaning and paradox sink in. Don’t analyze it to death — let it resonate.
- Carry it through the day. Keep the slogan accessible — repeat it, post it where you’ll see it. The aim is that it arises on its own in a charged moment (a conflict, a setback, a wave of self-pity) and offers a different response.
- Apply it on the spot. When the moment comes, let the slogan reframe your reaction in real time — e.g., “Drive all blames into one” interrupts the search for someone to blame; “Always maintain only a joyful mind” meets a hard feeling with curiosity instead of dread.
- Reflect, then continue. Notice what the slogan revealed, and keep working with it (or rotate to a new one). The transformation is cumulative, through repetition. Pema teaches the slogans alongside tonglen; the two are companion practices in the lojong system. (Faithfully summarized from Pema Chödrön’s slogan commentaries in Start Where You Are and Always Maintain a Joyful Mind, not reproduced. Slogan wordings are the traditional lojong slogans of Chekawa’s Seven Points.)
Source & Lineage
The lojong slogans were compiled by Geshe Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1101–1175) as the Seven Points of Mind Training (Lojong Dön Dünma), distilling instructions brought to Tibet by Atisha (982–1054).
Pema Chödrön (b. 1936), American Tibetan Buddhist nun in the Shambhala lineage and student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, devoted two of her books (Start Where You Are and Always Maintain a Joyful Mind) to making the 59 slogans usable for modern Western practitioners, leading month-long retreats on cultivating compassion through the slogans and tonglen. → (chodron pema).
Common refinements
Working too many at once. One slogan, given real time, beats skimming all 59. Depth over coverage.
- Misreading “Drive all blames into one” as self-blame. Pema is explicit: it means dropping the blame game altogether and looking honestly at your own reactivity — not piling guilt onto yourself.
- Turning slogans into clichés. Repeated mindlessly, a slogan goes dead. The practice is to let it genuinely confront and reframe you in real moments.
- Intellectualizing. The slogans are for practice, not philosophy debates. Apply on the spot.
- Refinement: pair each slogan with tonglen and the pause — the slogan reframes, the pause creates the gap, tonglen opens the heart.