Happy new Year of the Dog, dear Dharma brothers and sisters!

May all your aspirations bear beautiful fruit this year. May the sun of wisdom shine throughout your daily lives and the fragrant breeze of compassion lift the wings of your practice.

With a new year ahead, and I’ll leave the analyses and predictions what “Male Earth Dog” year entails to others, we need to remember this precious human life. Every day of the year, every minute of every day, if we can.

In everyday life, full of worldly concerns, surrounded by social habits, it is easy to forget the Dharma, to slowly and gradually lose our practice.

And while causes and conditions give rise to positive experience, ‘happiness,’ now, if we don’t remember the actual causes for that, and keep creating them (i.e., practice, practice, practice), they will sooner or later be exhausted. At which point we won’t only be unable to practice but we won’t even remember that there is such a thing as the path and the practice.

I will do my best throughout my activities this year, traveling and communicating with all of you, to help all of us remember this and keep practicing.

Especially if you are in one of the obstacle years, you may want to practice Heart Sutra, Tara, and Guru Rinpoche, which of course are all good for everyone else, too.

Whatever practice you do, keep doing it. Every day if you can. Whatever the new year may bring.

To support that, and to support the activities of the Buddhadharma in general, friends and students from around the world are launching the Auspicious “Accumulation for the Dog Year” project, dedicated to “Peace and harmony in the noble four-fold Sangha (monks, nuns, laywomen, and laymen), auspiciousness and benefit in all activities, and the flourishing of the Buddhadharma in the ten directions.”

As with all accumulations recently, I would like to strongly encourage you to please log your practices on https://dharma.online every day.

I will share more about the wonderful method of joint accumulations later.

For today I wish everyone of you (and of course all beings) a Year of the Dog filled with auspiciousness, wisdom, compassion, and merit!

Yours in the Dharma, Dupseng Rinpoche.