Q: Would you be willing to share what your coffee meditation is? Intrigued. Coffee is my favorite ritual of the day – I haven’t found a way to weave it into my practice.
A: Coffee meditation is deceptively named! It actually refers to a nightly rejoicing practice—and it’s one of my personal favorite practices of all time.
What we do is rejoice (replay in our mind + feel good about) the ways we’ve helped other people that day, as we fall asleep.
I do this practice every single night! Geshe Michael Roach says it’s the fourth step of planting a karmic seed, and a very important one—so we should make sure that we do it!
I find this practice in particular very effective at putting us on an “upwards spiral” trajectory in our mindset, as it helps us catch and correct the tendency of our mind to ruminate and worry at night—which would only plant further seeds of rumination and worry. Sooner or later, if we do this practice consistently, we will find that we default much more often to a positive and optimistic mindset.
I also love how this practice literally is a form of meditation. Meditation just means we choose an object and train our ability to keep our focus there. Just like how in our Shamatha practice we use the breath as our object—and joyfully return whenever we get distracted—we do the same exact thing in our coffee meditation, except our “meditation object” is “kind things we did to help others today”.
We think about them, replay them in our mind, feel good about them, and think about how because of Emptiness, those seeds will ripen into beautiful results. It can be especially enjoyable and powerful to replay the moments where we witnessed our help brought someone else joy, safety, security, wisdom and etc. Replay the moment that they smiled, became happy or grateful, or had an epiphany. And feel happy. 🙂
(By the way, if we literally can’t think of a single kind thing we did for another person that day—but I can almost promise you, if you think hard enough, you’ll find something—then you can replay a kind thing you did further in the past, or a kind thing you saw someone else do).
Whenever we get distracted and start ruminating, worrying, or thinking about something negative, we gently return our focus to our intended object—kind things we did for others today—and resume the practice! Do you see how it literally is meditation?
And we do that until we drift into sleep!
Over time, this practice becomes an immense joy! You’ll become genuinely excited to hit the pillow at night because you get to do this practice. It feels so good to review our day and think about how we helped other people.
As mentioned above, this meditation is even more potent (in that it plants the most powerful seeds) if we also think about why the fact that we helped others is such a good thing. Namely, since things are empty of an inherent nature, then the seeds we planted by helping others, will ripen into beautiful results on the blank canvas of our reality.
I hope you enjoy this practice!
All credit to my teachers. 🌹
—George Poulos
Want to learn more about the Coffee Meditation and why it works?
I highly recommend checking out The Diamond Cutter.
You can also check out these videos.
George Poulos 
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