Tag: compassion

Healing Relationships

We have talked about relationships quite a bit over the years. But today, I want to discuss how we heal our fractured relationships. We all have relationships that are not where they need to be and we must repair and heal these relationships.

But that starts with improving our relationship with ourselves. We need to accept ourselves, feel good about ourselves, and not identify with our faults and limitations or delusions.

They did a study and asked people out of 10 thoughts they have, how many of those are uncontrolled or unwanted. To my surprise, people said 9 out of 10 of their thoughts were uncontrolled. These uncontrolled thoughts are what Buddha calls delusions. A delusion is a state of mind that arises from inappropriate attention making our mind uncontrolled.

We need to learn to develop happier relationships with ourselves. We need to learn to control our thoughts. We need to believe in our pure nature, our Buddha nature, that golden nugget we keep talking about every week.

So this is the foundation for our ability to make spiritual progress, or any ability to let go of our faults, limitations, and delusions, and any ability to see others as precious, and important, and cherish them. At the moment, if we keep thinking other people are inherently awful, faulty, nasty, and deluded. And that is their fault. And they’re to blame for everything that goes wrong.

It’s very hard to improve our relationships with others when we really can’t stand them. If we think they’re faulty and horrible and awful, it’s impossible to improve our relationship with them.

Improving our relationships with others comes from understanding that others are at heart just like us and that they suffer from delusions just as we do and they want to be happy just as we do. We need to understand when people harm others, they are controlled by their delusions.

Gesla says delusions are distorted conceptual thoughts that arise within the mind like waves on the ocean, just as it is possible for waves to die down, so it is possible for our delusions to end.

Buddha compared our nature to a golden nugget in the dirt. No matter how disgusting a person’s delusions may be the real nature of them is like pure gold.

In the heart of even the cruelest and most degenerate person exists, the potential for limitless love and compassion and wisdom unlike seeds of our delusions which can be destroyed, this potential is utterly indestructible. That is the pure essential nature of everything.

When we meet other people, rather than focus on the delusions, thinking you’re awful, you’re greedy, selfish, you’re this, you’re that. Rather than doing that, we focus on the goal of evolution, I see you, I see your potential, I see that you have a pure nature. So this will not only enable us to regard them as special and unique but also help us to bring out their good qualities.

Another way to improve our relationships with others is to change our perspective.

Geshe-la says to imagine someone whom we regard as especially precious, such as our child, partner, or mother. This person seems to have unique qualities that make him or her stand out from others. We treasure and want to take special care of this person who has good qualities like from their own side is just precious. And even when they’re acting out, even when they’re being horrible. We see past that because we know that they have these qualities. There was a decision that we made somewhere along the line, to love this person, you may be in any different number of factors including Karma that came into play. But at some point there was, you know, I’m just committed to viewing this person in this way.

And we can choose to see everyone as having special qualities as being worthy of love as being worthy of happiness. Alternatively, we see someone and we think they’re horrible and mean and messing with our plans, and unkind and manipulative and whatever however we’re seeing them, then it can be very helpful to think, Okay, I’m seeing them like that, they seem to be filled with horrible qualities. Right? There definitely in the way of my happiness, they are my problem, not my delusions, them. But we can actually look at them from a completely different angle. We can think, for example, other people are looking at this person. It seems someone really special and lovely. This person may have a husband or a wife or dog, who looks at them or their mom looks at them and thinks they’re just the most special, beautiful person in the world. And when they think that mother, for example, that husband looks at me looking at them thinking they’re awful, they’re like, they don’t get it. This person is not awful. This person is lovely. You’ve got it wrong. Whenever we shift our perspective, broaden our perspective. Then our thoughts change, and our whole attitude towards that person shifts naturally shifts.

If we start looking at people who we find have difficulties with through the eyes of someone who doesn’t have difficulties with them, something shifts in our mind. Something loosens up and space opens up in my mind because there is nothing inherently awful about them. If they’re behaving badly towards us, it’s their delusions making them do that. But they’re not inherently awful if they were inherently awful, everybody who looked at them would see the same awful person. But actually, there’s probably no one who sees them in exactly the same way we see them.

So if we understand that we are not our delusions, we can come to understand others are not their delusion. So that’s one way of shifting our perspective and getting on better with other people. Another way is to think that people were inherently awful and deluded everybody would see them that way. But they don’t. And actually, think how this person views them and actually try and maybe put ourselves in the position of their husband or their mother or whatever and look at them through those eyes, actually see what’s happening shift. Start seeing their redeeming qualities. Let the light in.

It Takes A Village

I am sure you have all heard this classic phrase “It Takes A Village” that ended up becoming political about 15 years ago. It’s the messenger stupid! All kidding aside, I think it is important to recognize that there are so many people involved in the smallest of things that we are trying to achieve on a daily basis. In other words, without the kindness of others, a lot of what we are used to will vanish in a heartbeat.

In a sense, post covid we are already seeing the effect of that. Let me explain. Before COVID, we were all used to a certain level of price stability. We expected things to cost a certain amount and if it went up it went up reasonably enough that it did not break people’s budgets. It did not make life difficult for them in general. What happened during COVID-19 is really an eye-opener. People in certain industries started to retire. Let me give you a couple of examples. People in the railroad industry, the hard-working people who held blue-collar jobs made sure that the turn tables were manually turned when necessary for trains to run smoothly. Now, it is a hard-working job that requires one to travel hundreds of miles every day up and down the railroad track. It is not a fancy job and there were no newcomers for these jobs. No one in the management thought about recruiting future generations of these blue-collar workers—they probably figured how hard can it be to find someone to turn these things. Well, during COVID, a lot of these workers retired. As a result, the railroads could not find enough people at any price it seemed. They offered whatever it took to keep the trains running. The oil and gas industry is having a similar crisis. Because of the stigma attached to the industry not enough people were joining the petroleum industry. All of a sudden all these retiring engineers created a real shortage. Now, they are offering upwards of $200K to a recent graduate to make sure there are enough engineers in the field.

Why does that matter to you? Well, it matters because it resulted in the runaway inflation that we are experiencing. The plumbing job that used to cost $85 now costs $300. That changes people’s lifestyle. So I come back to the kindness of others. Without the kindness of others, we would not be able to live a comfortable life that we are used to.

Let’s look at an example. When you woke up this morning, you went to brush your teeth. You opened the faucet and water came out. You did not put any thought into it at all. That’s what is supposed to happen. But think about how many people are involved in getting that water to you. It starts with raw water. Depending upon your water source, it is either coming from a reservoir or a water well. Someone had to design that reservoir or a well and build one. Then someone put together a pipeline to bring that water to a water treatment plant. Someone designed that plant and built one. People operate the treatment plant 24 hours a day to make sure that all the particles that are not supposed to be in your water are taken out and water is safe to drink directly out of the tap. By the way, that itself is a luxury as the majority of the world’s population does not have clean drinking water right out of the tap. So you see, quite possibly thousands of people were involved just to make sure that you get your water first thing in the morning when you turn your faucet on.

And this is just one example. This is true for everything that goes on in our lives on a daily basis. In short, we need others for our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. And without others, we are nothing. And this is not just a figure of speech. It’s the literal truth. Now you can think about well, I am paying for all these things and people who are involved are all getting paid. And you are right. But here is the thing, as we saw in the example of railroad workers and petroleum engineers, what if they start working? They have a choice. What effect that would have on our daily lives? As we speak, there is a strike by auto workers. If the strike lasts long enough, there may not be enough cars for people to buy resulting in price increases. So you see, it’s true you are paying for these products and services but we must remember the kindness of others in bringing these goods and services to us.

So this is telling us something so interesting about who we actually are. Because self-grasping and self-cherishing think that I’m independent of everything. I’m there, I’m findable, I’m solid, I’m real. And I move around in a ocean of other real things and real people, with no connection at all. Occasionally, we notice the connection. But generally, we don’t notice that we only exist in relationship to others. In fact, we’re totally dependently related. That’s how we exist and dependently related is the opposite of being inherently existent or independent. It’s the literal opposite.

Patient Acceptance

Today, let’s talk about patient acceptance. It is a fascinating topic as you will discover. If you think about it acceptance has its root in patience and rejection has its root in anger. So in a way, this is a discussion about anger vs. patience.

A patient mind is an immensely creative and flexible mind. But before we can be creative and flexible with any situation, we find ourselves in, we have to accept it first. We can’t come out fighting. Because effectively what we’re doing is fighting reality.

Because things are happening the way they are whether we accept them or not. Say your car broke down. No point getting angry about it. We have to accept the fact that the car broke down. Then we can do something about it.  So I need to accept that without getting freaked out. Happily, peacefully, then I can do something about it. So patience is not about doing nothing.

Being patient means welcoming wholeheartedly, whatever arises and not giving up the idea that things should be other than what they are. Because the point is, that things are not other than what they are. If they were other than what they are then fine, but they’re not whatever is appearing to our mind is just the way it is at the moment. So we have to accept happily.

The flip side of this is that we don’t accept what is happening. Usually, when we don’t accept what is happening, anger comes into play.

The thing with anger is that it exaggerates. Anger has a tendency to make the mountain out of molehill. If we get angry with our partner, for example, or our friend or anyone, we basically build up an image of an intrinsically faulty person, we basically focus on everything that’s wrong with them. And we forget about anything that is good about them, including any kindnesses they may have performed towards us or others.

Geshe-la says every opportunity to get angry is also an opportunity to develop patience. Think about it. Last time you were mindful and watching your thoughts and when the anger was about to raise its ugly head, you tame it right in its tracks. You thought things through, you forgave, you let it go, and so forth. You were able to patiently accept what was instead of what could have been! When that happened you were at peace. Now the trick is to do this every time! I know it’s difficult but you know it is possible.

Now let’s be clear, this is not about suppressing anger because that just becomes passive aggression at some point. And we won’t be able to catch the anger train coming up every time. And if that happens, once the anger has arisen and taken over our mind, you kind of just have to let it pass. There’s not much you can do. Maybe hiding your room or something. I find that exercise tends to help in that case at least for me.

But the real remedy is to stop the anger train before it leaves the station if you will.

And what they say about habits is that if you do something 40 times, it becomes a habit. So you can think okay, next 40 difficult situations and annoying people that come up in my life over the next weeks. So I’m going to try and practice patience 40 times, it’s just an idea. I’m just going to try and practice patience with this person in the situation 40 times and see if my habits change. See if my go-to mind becomes that of patience instead of that of anger. How wonderful!

So that we start to feel like a happier person. When we’re happy, we don’t get angry. Or if we do, then the happiness goes. So generally, if we are able to make ourselves happy, and we’re able to stay calm, contented and peaceful, and basically happy, then, dealing with anger is going to be far easier, it’s not going to rise nearly as often. When it starts in our minds, we’re able to deal with them a lot more easily. Because we’re basically happy. We see actually, I like being happy. I like being happy, and I don’t want to get angry and upset right now. Because I actually prefer to be happy. So we need to know methods to make ourselves happy. And to be able to stay peaceful. Whenever we have love for others when we’re enjoying others when we have compassion.

So one way to be happier within ourselves is to just allow our mind to settle into its own peaceful nature as often as we can even through simple breathing meditation, our mind starts to feel more peaceful. In our hearts, we start to feel more balanced, more peaceful, more contented, and happier. And as I’ve said many times, at that point, it’s very very helpful to think, Okay, I’m actually naturally peaceful, not naturally angry. Even if you have a very strong habit of irritation, annoyance, passive aggression, aggression, anger doesn’t matter. That’s not who you are, that’s still just the delusion of anger. It’s the dirt on your golden nugget if you will. We have talked about this before. Deep down all of us are like this golden nugget, naturally peaceful. But because that nugget is surrounded by the dirt of delusion, we are not able to see the real nature of ourselves. We find ourselves as anything but a naturally peaceful person.

We think actually who I am is a peaceful, happy person. And try and identify with that sense of self because that helps. Well, that allows you really to keep that peaceful feeling going.

How To Uproot Disharmony

I attended a wedding over the long weekend. It was a joyous occasion, full of love. That got me thinking. How can we keep all of our relationship joyous and full of love like it was the first day of a union? If we think about any relationship, it seems that if you remove whatever disharmony there may be, once you remove that, the relationship becomes smooth. You can feel the love in that relationship. So today, I want to talk about how to uproot disharmony in our relationships.

In one of the books, I read a verse that goes when I associate with others, I will consider myself lower and hold everyone supreme.

Just to be clear, we are not talking about being like a doormat when we consider ourselves lower. What we are talking about is not putting ourselves as a center of attention. We usually are me centric if you will. Our needs, wants, and happiness must come ahead of everyone else’s. I love you as long as it does not disturb my comfort is our typical attitude. And we’re now shifting that attitude so that we get over our egocentric self-importance or self-cherishing. Our self-cherishing is where all our delusions come from, all our anger, our attachment, fear, or anxiety, all our selfishness, all our negative actions, all our suffering. So this self-cherishing is the source of our disharmony. That is the reason we are cycling around in what’s called the samsara cycle of impure life, because of this ego mind, grasping at a self or me, that doesn’t exist.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso says that our self-cherishing, our obsessive self-concern is like a mountain in front of the valley of cherishing others loving others. If you have ever been to Vail Valley from Denver, you know what he is talking about. There is this beautiful valley that you cannot see until you cross the mountain in front of it. Just like that, we cannot see the vast valley of cherishing others because of this mountain of self-cherishing.

Everywhere we look, our mind is polluted by this surface of self-concern. It just alters everything we see. You know, we can’t actually see what’s going on because we’re so obsessed with ourselves. And that’s just reflected in our minds. So why is it? Why is it that we regard ourselves as so precious, but not others? I am just one person others are countless. Why are we so obsessed about me?

One major reason is we’re so familiar with thinking about ourselves, it’s a familiarity of habit. We have been doing it since beginningless time in every life, which is why we’re still circling in suffering. Since beginningless time, we have grasped a truly existent I this is the root of it. So a truly existent I is an I that exists from its own side. But basically, we have two ego minds that are the very kind of root of all our problems. And one is called self-grasping, meaning we’re grasping at a self that exists from its own side.

We think there’s a real me or real I and we think everyone else is not me or either other or self or there are also others or them or you know, him or her or something like that. We have done this experiment before. Show of hand where is the me in this room? Every one of us thinks we are that me and everyone else is something other than me right? Now if the I was inherently existent, it would be the same for all of us. But it’s not.

So it’s only our ignorance that thinks I’m really me, and everyone else is really other. Because I have this sense of real me, I then think that this me is more important than all the other me’s. So I’m more important than you just as simple as that.

So since we regard ourselves or I as so very precious and important, we exaggerate our own good qualities and develop an inflated view of ourselves.

We spend so much time contemplating our real or imagined good qualities that we become oblivious to our faults. It is often so painful to admit that we have faults that we make all types of excuses rather than alter our results view of ourselves, and one of the most common ways of not facing up to our own faults is to blame others. For instance, we have a difficult relationship with someone. We naturally include that it’s entirely their fault. That’s true, isn’t it? They should really change, you know. And then we’ll be so happy. Because you know, it’s hard to change even one person, it’s impossible to change anyone other than ourselves, to be honest, and it’s definitely hard to change everybody.

So we naturally conclude it’s their fault, we’re unable to accept that it is at least partly our fault when we have difficult relationships. So instead of taking responsibility for our actions, or making an effort to change our views or our behavior, get rid of our faults. We argue with them and insist that they must change an exaggerated sense of our own importance thus leading to a critical attitude towards other people making it almost impossible to avoid conflict. So the fact that we’re oblivious to our faults does not prevent other people from noticing them and pointing them out. But when they do we feel that they’re being unfair. So unfair.

This is self cherishing. That arises from self-grasping ignorance. Our inherently existing self. This is the source of all our disharmony. If we learn to remove that, our relationships become easier. Life becomes frictionless. It just flows.

How To Feel Less Frustrated

We have been talking about inner peace and happiness lately. I received a call from my second cousin over the weekend. He said I get all this but life is frustrating. That got me thinking. How about we find a way to feel less frustrated? So today, we are going to talk about how to feel less frustrated.

We have talked about how it is possible to feel happy all the time. That we have this Buddha nature our golden nugget if you will. That our root mind is naturally peaceful. But even then, we get this unhealthy thoughts, the thoughts that make us unhappy, thoughts that get us into negative states of mind. What we are calling delusions. Anger, jealousy, frustration, and so forth. Usually, these delusions arise from inappropriate attention. What does that mean you ask? Well, it means focusing our attention on a faulty situation or in a faulty way. And when our mind is not thinking these negative thoughts, our mind is peaceful.

So key it seems to me is to find a way to identify our delusions and figure out a way to get rid of them. Sounds simple right? The book How To Transform Your Life actually deals with the delusion of aversion that includes frustration including the feeling of being overwhelmed and feeling of not being able to accept what is going on. Have you ever had a day where you feel like you were fighting all day? Actually, reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my tenants. I had a dentist as a tenant in our office building 20 years or so ago. Before he left for the day, usually he would stop by my office just to chat. I would ask how his day was and at least once a week, he would say they won today Nirav. You see, for him, it was always a battle between him and his patients. He was always in a reactive mode. If they said X, he would say Y, and so on.

So when we react in this reactive mode, with the aversion, oh, no, no, I hate this. I don’t like this. We’re fighting it. At that point, we have already lost because we’re fighting, right? So we go around, not liking things a lot and not liking people a lot. And actually, it just makes us unhappy. And it’s not in accordance with reality. It’s a distorted way of thinking about ourselves and the world and the people in the world, what’s going on.

So in general, we can understand that frustration, dislike, hatred, aversion, all of them just different names for anger by the way; is one of the most common and destructive of our delusions and afflicts us almost every day. The reason why there are so many problems in our world. Imagine if the world if no one ever got upset, angry, or hated each other, then many of the world’s problems would disappear, like immediately right? There wouldn’t be a war in Europe, there would be wouldn’t any fighting, and there wouldn’t be any people killing each other harming each other, yelling at each other. All, that would go away if people liked each other.

To solve the problem of anger, we need to first recognize it, within our own mind, and acknowledge how it’s harmful. Anger is really when we just don’t accept something we don’t like. That’s it. Now there are degrees of it from mild irritation to grumpy to full-throttle rage. It’s all on the same spectrum. In the simplest terms, anger is a deluded mind that focuses on an animate or inanimate object. It then exaggerates its bad qualities. And as a result, it wishes to harm it. Take our partner for example. They have a lot of good qualities otherwise we would not be together. But they did not take the trash out and all of a sudden, we just see all the faults they have and exaggerate and get angry at them. We forget about all the good qualities of why we are together. We don’t think that maybe they were busy with other things or they may have something going on that occupied their mind and so on. Nope, we feel wronged and get angry. This is an unpeaceful state of mind.

At that point, the idea is not to accept what is going on in our minds but practice patience. We need to practice patient acceptance of the situation. If we feel bad, we accept that it is there and realize that whatever is arising in our mind is our delusion and that it’s not us. Remember the golden nugget we keep talking about? We need to realize that this is just the dirt on that golden nugget and that we are that peaceful person. Now once the delusion arises it is difficult to push back. So the idea is to get in just when is arising before it develops and starts exaggeration and distortion. Because once the anger is here full-blown, there is nothing we can do about it. So that is why we have to get in early and put our minds somewhere else. So we don’t put exaggeration into it. So for example, in the case of taking out trash, instead of thinking, okay, they never do this. We get in there we think okay, let me just think five good things about this person. This is an incredibly practical way to stop full-blown irritation and anger arising, we think five good things about that person. Know that I can’t think of five good things right now. Okay, try three. Okay, three. No, can’t even think of three good things right now. Okay. Well, in that case, try one, and well, I can’t even think of one well make one up. You know, the dog loves him. That’s enough. Anything to like to derail the anger train, you know, just not let it get full steam ahead. Because it’s based on that exaggeration, or we call it inappropriate attention. We could think I don’t have to exaggerate, distort, or make this person intrinsically evil. And if we learn to do that, then there’s no repression required. The anger just doesn’t arise in the first place.