You’re Already Loved, You Just Forgot—Makransky and the Lazy Monk’s Path
How a Tibetan-trained lama taught us to stop trying so hard, start where the love already lives, and send blessings without burning out.
Let’s be real: most spiritual practices sound like unpaid internships for enlightenment. Hustle harder. Heal everything. Manifest your destiny before 6am or you’re just not trying. Virgin Monk Boy tried that path. Or rather, was conjured by our collective exhaustion from it. As a tulpa—formed from spiritual overachievers, burnout mystics, and sass-laced saints—he carried the karmic scar tissue of every enlightenment intern who ever tried too hard. It led to three hernias, mild disillusionment, and a deep yearning to just sit the hell down.
Then enters John Makransky, the lama who basically whispered, "Hey... what if you started in love instead of trying to earn it?"
Makransky, a professor and Tibetan Buddhist teacher, offers a model that is both scandalously simple and cosmically subversive:
Access the love that is already present
Rest in natural awareness
Let that love radiate out
That’s it. No 47-step vibrational attunement. No grinding your chakras until they squeak.
This practice, known as Sustainable Compassion Training, doesn’t begin with striving. It begins with remembering. Remembering that there are beings—seen or unseen, divine or mundane—who already love you, not because you meditated correctly or earned good karma, but because love is their nature. And then it gets even wilder: you are one of those beings too.
The first time this practice emerged through Virgin Monk Boy’s field of awareness, he wept—not because it was dramatic, but because the truth was embarrassingly obvious: trying to earn love from the universe when you are love is like trying to get into your own house by digging a tunnel through your neighbor's lawn. As a tulpa formed from the forgotten wisdom of exhausted mystics and sassier saints, even he had to laugh at how far we go to find what’s already holding us.
Lama Makransky invites us to return to what he calls our "innate goodness" — that quiet place behind all the ego negotiations. And when you sit there long enough, something starts to soften. Not as performance. Not as spiritual cosplay. But as presence. Raw. Radiant. Undeniably real.
And here’s where it gets edgy: you don’t have to "send love" like a spiritual missile. You just rest in it until it leaks out of you like sunlight from a cracked jar. You bless the world without lifting a metaphorical finger. You become the kind of lazy monk who is somehow always on the job.
So next time someone tells you to fix your shadow, raise your vibration, or align your quantum destiny, you can smile and say, "Actually, I’m just sitting here being loved. Want to join?"
Makransky didn’t give us a new path. He reminded us the path was already under our feet. We just forgot to look down.
Practice prompt for fellow lazy mystics:
Close your eyes. Picture someone—a being, ancestor, saint, or cosmic raccoon—who held you in the wish of love...the wish for you to have deepest well being, happiness and joy.
Let them pour love into you. Like sunshine, hitting every pore of your body, from head to toe. Do this for a few minutes.
Then join your benefactors and mentally say, "May this one have deepest well being, happiness and joy."
Drop the visualization and merge with that radiant field of awareness. Rest there.
View your benefactors behind you, sending you the wish of love, while in front of you are people you hold dear. Now you are sending them the wish of love.
Congratulations. You’re doing the thing.
Virgin Monk Boy approves.
If this practice speaks to you, Makransky has a treasure trove of guided meditations over at sustainablecompassion.org/audio. They’re structured around three core modes:
🧘♂️ Receptive Mode
Field of Care Meditation – Evoke the feeling of being truly cherished and supported.
Deepening Receptivity – Extend that warmth to every part of yourself, even the hard-to-love parts.
Receiving Love from Benefactors – Visualize loving presences sending their compassion directly into your being.
🌊 Deepening Mode
Settling into Awareness – Drop the storylines and rest in pure, spacious clarity.
Resting in the Nature of Mind – Recognize your mind’s luminous, compassionate essence.
🌐 Inclusive Mode
Sending Compassion to Others – Let the love that filled you begin to flow outward.
Embracing All Beings – Expand that love to everyone, everywhere—yes, even them.
You can try these in any order, but there’s a flow to them that opens like a lotus if you start at the center and work your way out.
Check them out, experiment, and tell me what you experience. Did it break you open? Make you cry into your fair-trade tea? Or just give you permission to stop trying so hard? I want to hear it.
Love doesn’t need to be earned. Just remembered.
Before you vanish back into the illusion—smash that LIKE or SHARE button like you're breaking open an alabaster jar. One small click, one bold act of remembrance. That’s how we spread the Gospel they tried to erase and resurrect the voice of the First Apostle.
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What a great article! A "How to" live in the light/love for beginners, those that need a refresh, and average pedestrian! Thank you for your wisdom!
Yes, I breathed a huge sigh of relief just from reading the title. I've spent months, nay years, grappling with anxiety about whether I'm "doing enough." I gratefully set down that burden now and offer a deep bow of gratitude to you, Alek, for writing this piece, and to the guides and ancestors for leading me here.