Much of our training in meditation is actually sadhana practice, so it is important to know how to do it well.  

The literal translation of sadhana is “method for receiving attainments.”  By engaging in the sadhanas purely and sincerely, with a good motivation and an understanding of emptiness, we will receive attainments within our mind.  Essentially, this means that we will realize directly by personal experience the benefits of the practice.  

When Venerable Geshe-la introduces any meditation, he first begins by explaining the benefits of engaging in that meditation.  This inspires us to do so.  Ultimately, since we are desire realm beings, we do what we want.  Right now, we want samsaric happiness.  But by contemplating the benefits of Dharma in general and sadhana practice in particular, we can change what we want to be spiritual attainments.  When we want spiritual attainments and we recognize that our sadhanas are methods for receiving them, we will be very motivated to engage in the practices purely and sincerely.  

Practically speaking, sadhanas are guided meditations that we take ourselves through.  The sadhanas themselves were written by our lineage gurus.  They give us these sadhanas so we can then train in them throughout our entire life, gaining deeper and deeper experience of them.  They lay out a sequence of minds we should generate and, when we do, we forge a path within our mind from our current state to the final state promised by the sadhana. One shortcut for knowing the main benefits and final destination of any sadhana is look at the dedication prayers. They explain the principal function of the sadhana and then we dedicate our engage in that practice towards the attainment of those goals. 

To make our sadhana practice qualified, it is important that we make every word count.  I have found practically this has two dimensions:  what we focus our visualization on and what is conceived by that appearance.  In this way, we unite three things:  the words, the meaning, and the appearance.  And we do this for every word of the sadhana.  As we recite each word of the sadhana, we focus on an aspect of the visualization that corresponds to it and then generate in our heart the realization implied by the meaning of the word.  It is important to not just do this intellectually understanding the meaning, but instead we generate the meaning of each word in our heart so the words are the song expressing the feelings in our heart and spontaneously appearing as the aspect of the visualization that corresponds to those words.

The power of our sadhana practice – well really the power of any of our Dharma practices – depends upon four things.  First, the degree of our faith in both the deity of the sadhana and the sadhana itself.  We can view each word of the sadhana as a subtle emanation of our guru’s mind coursing through our mind mixed inseparably with our inner winds, purifying them at a very deep level.  Since our spiritual guide is the synthesis of all Buddhas, by viewing both the deity and the sadhana as an emanation of our spiritual guide, all the Buddhas will enter into our practice, multiplying the power of the blessings by the number of Buddhas, which is countless.

Second, the power of our practice depends upon the purity of our motivation in reciting the sadhana, ideally bodhichitta.  When we engage in practices for the sake of ourself, the practice has a power of one.  But when we engage in our practices for the sake of others, the power of our practice is multiplied by the number of beings on whose behalf we engage in the practice.  If we engage in our practices with a bodhichitta motivation, it multiplies the power of our practice by infinity since there are infinite living beings.  Bodhichitta is the true quick path to enlightenment.

Third, the power of our practice depends upon the extent of our single-pointed concentration as we recite the sadhana.  If our mind is wandering everywhere, there will be little power because our mind is only fleetingly engaging with it.  But if we have single pointed concentration, bringing the full force and attention of our mind into each word, then it is like gathering all the lights of the sun into a single powerful laser that cuts through the darkness of our mind.  According to Sutra, we try engage in our practices with a mind of tranquil abiding.  But since that is a very high attainment, we do our best to gradually train in the different stages of tranquil abiding.  Simply reaching the fourth mental abiding is also a stupendous attainment which will bring great power to our practice.  According to Tantra, we try engage in the practice with our very subtle mind of great bliss.  The mind of great bliss is many, many times more powerful than the mind of tranquil abiding, primarily because it is a subtle mind and thus closer to our root mind and because it is blissful, so it is naturally free from distractions.  Once again, it is an extremely high attainment to generate the very subtle mind of great bliss, so in the beginning it is enough to correctly imagine we are meditating with the mind of great bliss.  Like all meditations on correct imagination, the more we engage in it, the closer we become to it being our reality.

And fourth, the power of our practice depends upon the thoroughness with which we combine all of this with an understanding of emptiness.  Emptiness makes everything possible.  We understand that all living beings are aspects of our mind.  We understand that the deity is not separate from our mind.  We eliminate the duality between our mind and its object.  Emptiness makes everything subtle and a delicate dance.  It is naturally blissful.  In particular, we train in the union of appearance and emptiness with every word of the sadhana.  Instead of seeing the deities and mandala we normally see, we imagine we see everything directly as emptiness in the aspect of the different visualizations.  I sometimes find it helpful to imagine there is basically only the clear light, but it is refracted along the contours of the visualized object like seeing the outline of things that are invisible to others.  We see the dance of emptiness.  We perceive only emptiness, but it is in motion according to the visualizations of the sadhana.

In other words, by training in these four aspects, we bring the entire Lamrim into each word of our sadhana practice – faith, bodhichitta, pure concentration, and the wisdom realizing emptiness.  

How deeply our sadhana practice goes depends upon at what level we are engaging in it.  In the teachings on mantra recitation, it explains there are three main ways we engage in mantra recitation – verbal, mental, and vajra. Roughly speaking, we can say that verbal recitation purifies our gross inner winds, mental recitation purifies our subtle inner winds, and vajra recitation purifies our very subtle inner winds. Vajra recitation is supreme. Here, we imagine our guru is reciting the mantra in our mind for us, like performing some sort of spiritual surgery on us, and we are basically hearing him do so. We take everything we know about relying upon the guru’s mind alone and activating the inner spiritual guide and bring that into our mantra recitation.

In exactly the same way, we can engage in our sadhana practices at these same three levels – verbal, mental, and vajra.  Verbal recitation occurs when we verbally sing the sadhana.  Mental recitation occurs when we recite the sadhana within our mind.  This is why it is helpful to memorize the sadhana.  Vajra recitation is when we imagine that our guru is engaging in the sadhana for us in our mind and we are allowing him to carry us along its current to enlightenment.  Vajra recitation of sadhanas is supreme.

Finally, we can also increase the power of our sadhana practice by engaging in it as all living beings.  Our “I” is just a label that we can impute on anything.  If we impute our I onto all living beings and then engage in our practice, we will feel like we are the entire universe of living beings engaging in the practice.  Alternatively, we can dissolve all living beings into our heart and then, as them, engage in all the practices strongly believing that by doing so they are receiving the same karmic benefit as if they were engaging in the practices themselves.  This way of practicing is extremely powerful for not only multiplying the power of our practice by the number of beings we are imagining we are, but also in terms of creating a very, very close karmic connection between ourself, the deity, the practice, and all living beings.  This functions to ripen their karma to find, enter into, progress along, and ultimately complete the path.  

Taken together, when we engage in our sadhana practices, we should imagine that we are all living beings, engaging in vajra recitation of the sadhana, with deep faith in our guru, a pure bodhichitta motivation, single pointed blissful concentration, all conjoined with a realization of emptiness of ourself, the practice, all the Buddhas, and all living beings.  If we bring these recognitions into each word of our practice, it will be like rocket fuel powering us quickly to the final goal.  It takes training, but with familiarity, it can become entirely natural.