See it before
you name it.

How the practice works

Contemplative photography is a way of training your eye and mind, and it works with any subject and any style.

Everything in this course comes back to one question: did you photograph what you saw, or what you thought about it?

One word you’ll see everywhere

A flash (or flash of perception) is the instant something catches your eye, before you’ve had a single thought about it.

It’s the moment just before you name what you’re looking at.

(The other kind of flash, on your camera, stays switched off for this whole course.)

Every perception has 3 stages

1. Flash. Something stops you.
2. Discern. Stop walking and look. What stopped you, and where does it start and stop?
3. Form the equivalent. Raise the camera and frame exactly what you saw, with nothing extra and nothing missing.

These stages come from Andy Karr and Michael Wood. Week 00 walks through each one.

The weekly routine

1. Read the week on a quiet evening, because the idea behind it matters as much as the task.
2. Practice daily without the camera, using the week’s daily prompt.
3. Shoot once for about an hour at a good time of day (more often if you can).
4. Go through your frames slowly with the week’s questions, and keep 8 to 12.
5. Write a few lines in your journal. Then move on, or repeat the week if the photos didn’t match what you saw.

How a frame turns out

• Equivalent. The picture carries the perception, so a viewer gets the same flash you did.
• Seen, but buried. The flash is in there somewhere. Walking closer or a light crop usually fixes it.
• A different perception. You really saw something, just a different form from this week’s. Make a note of it and move on.
• A picture of a thing. It shows an object or an idea. Let it go.

Ground rules for every session

• Put the phone away, skip the headphones and go alone if you can.
• Take about 60 frames an hour at most.
• Give each perception 2 tries, then let it go.
• Keep the flash off and the drive on single shot.
• Walk over and fill the frame.
• When you’re done, close the session properly (Week 01 explains how).
• Take real breaks and stay relaxed.

Where this comes from

Miksang means “good eye” in Tibetan. It started with the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa, who taught about perception and art and called it dharma art.

In the 1980s his students Michael Wood and John McQuade turned those ideas into a photography curriculum. Nalanda Miksang and the Miksang Institute teach it today, and this course follows the first-level sequence they share.

A wider family

Plenty of photographers outside Miksang work the same way. Alfred Stieglitz called his cloud photographs “equivalents.” Minor White taught photography as meditation, Zen teachers like David Ulrich and John Daido Loori followed him, and Christian writers like Thomas Merton and Howard Zehr wrote about receiving an image as a gift.

Each week includes a few Other voices slides so you can hear them alongside Miksang.

A note on the history

Miksang grew out of the Shambhala Buddhist community founded by Chögyam Trungpa. That community’s leadership has a documented history of serious misconduct, including by Trungpa, Ösel Tendzin and Sakyong Mipham.

This course draws on the contemplative practice of seeing, which many teachers have carried on independently.

What you need

• Any camera that lets you set the exposure. A phone is fine to start with.
• An hour a week to shoot, plus 10 minutes a day to look.
• A notebook for the journal prompts.