Buddhist Exercising

My mom thinks I'm doing prostrations to lose weight and doesn't know I'm actually doing my meditation practice, so she heartily endorses them. Otherwise, she would say, "Stop wasting time, do something productive!"

Here's a teaching from what must be the most entertaining Rinpoche ever. It's not how we are taught to do them, but the general idea is the same.

One reason we take refuge in the Buddha is because he is free from the 4 obscurations: karmic, emotional, conceptual, and habitual.

I realized that those four things are, indeed, obscurations. They lie in front of everything we see, think, and do, blocking our view of what actually is.

We can't think our problems away or solve other peoples' problems for them. Everything we do has to come from the heart. Not the emotion-laden heart filled with hope and fear. The heart of compassion.