Before diving into deeper Buddhist practices, teachers across disciplines recommend familiarising yourself with the preliminary preparations – priming the soil for the planting.
There’s no use giving you driving lessons if you’re racing down the motorway in the opposite direction of traffic. What you need is a fundamental restructuring of your mind, a reshaping of priorities, otherwise any later lessons are not going to bear the intended effect.
You don’t need to be Buddhist or even spiritual to benefit from turning your mind to these thoughts. They are intended to wake you up and question your routine, and who wouldn’t benefit from that?
- The Precious Human Body
Whether you believe in reincarnation or different realms, it is clear that existing in a human body, let alone one that has the free time to read articles online, is statistically rare. We usually don’t have to worry about food, shelter, and healthcare too much, have access to teachings and vast knowledge – so not only do we have a human existence, we’re among the very fortunate where survival is not our very priority.
We forget this fact, or take it for granted, perhaps because we attribute it to luck or circumstance. If it isn’t achieved, it isn’t worth praising.
A common comparison is a turtle leaving the bottom of the ocean once every hundred years, surfacing exactly within a ring floating on the surface.
Your existence is incomprehensible rare and precious, take advantage of it!
Allow this thought to bring you motivation to practice towards your goals while you can, because… - Impermanence
Everything and everyone will cease to exist as we know it.
The tea in your cup used to be a cloud, the cloth with which you wipe it used to be worn on a sheep. You’ll blink and, if you’re lucky, be old and in pain soon.
Listen, this doesn’t have to be a sad thought. We flinch away from all mention of death and decay, but embracing reality allows you to understand the interdependence of all things. Death does not have to be feared. Often people seem to think that the more they ignore death, the less likely it is to find you, as if it isn’t the only certainty in our lives.
I have found that leaning into grief and change specifically allows you to be truly present so that when death does come, there are no regrets. - The Law of Cause and Effect
Understanding impermanence sheds light on causality: nothing exists inherently, everything depends on other factors. The seed of your action will always yield fruit, so be mindful of what garden you want to sit in.
If you perform an action you think is wrong, the ripples of your conscience will be felt for eons. If you prioritise your own well-being over others, you cultivate a delusional mindset that identifies happiness as solely your own, ignoring the true nature of impermanence and interbeing.
False views are the root source of suffering, and we are clinging to wrong beliefs which snowball into more suffering. - The Disadvantages of Samsara
Samsara is the Buddhist term for the cyclical nature of existence that perpetuates suffering. As long as we’re unaware of the consequences of our actions and our short precious existence, samsara will always be nothing but suffering. Nirvana on the other hand is not even a separate realm – it’s a matter of perspective.
So why do we remain in samsara? Attributes of it, pride and sense pleasures, never truly made us happy before, so why do we keep chasing them?
Unless we pierce through these ideas of happiness to examine their hollowness, we will forever be trapped in samsara.
Luckily, the preliminary practices are quite simple, but not easy.
They force us to look at aspects we usually ignore to shed light on the entirety of our existence. But what benefit we reap from venturing into these unknowns!
Don’t give in to the tendency of jumping into advanced theory without minding the preparatory practices first.
Sit with the uncomfortable, and watch your life flourish.
Reparent Your Soul 
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