Tag: mindfulness

How To Access Peace Within Us

We have talked about in the past that within every one of our hearts exists this potential for total freedom from ignorance, complete bliss, and pure happiness, known as our Buddha nature. So today, let’s talk about how to access that peacefulness within us.

We need to learn to experience that nature. We are not able to because we have been habitually caught up with our delusions such as our greed, our anger, and our attachment and we think that’s me. But that’s not us. Those are our delusions.

They are defilements of our minds, our tendencies, our habits, but that is not us. They may be ruining our life but that is not us.

Buddha gives an example of seawater. We can all agree that the sea water is salty. It is salty water. He says no. Water is water. It is the salt that makes it salty. And nowadays, science tells us that we can have a desalination plant and the water is no longer salty! So the water itself is water. It is the salt that made it salty.

In the same way, it’s possible to get rid of the delusions from our mind and leave that clear, pure nature of our mind, which is already there. It’s just that the delusions are making it salty, but it doesn’t mean our mind is salty.   

By nature, we are pure. Our nature is completely peaceful, joyful, and even actually, blissful.

We all have Buddha says our continuously residing minds. Which is the deepest level of awareness. It is completely pure. It is always there. All other minds come and go. So our continuously residing mind is like a clear sky. And delusions and all other conceptions are like clouds that temporarily arise.

We must remember that all the time. That deep down, we are a peaceful person, a joyful person, a blissful person. It’s just that we have all this sand or dirt on top of our golden nugget. But it is a golden nugget and not some dirty rock.

So, therefore, the first step to accessing our pure nature is meditation so that our mind can settle down to its pure nature.

So we are letting the waves die down by focusing on the breath. We’re allowing the waves of our delusions to just die down. This is all we do, to begin with, we just don’t follow our delusions. The way we don’t follow our delusions is by following our breath instead, can only actually our mind can only single-pointedly focus on one thing at a time.

So we like to think we can multitask and stuff. But generally, what’s happening in our mind is just moving all over the place all day exhausting. Trying to do many things at once. Our mind is only actually ever doing one thing at a time. But just moments before it does the next thing in the next thing. Our mind is very much in the nature of the movement. And this is like, go back to the ocean analogy. It’s causing all that disruption. Just the fact that we can’t focus on one thing very well. Sometimes we can. But insofar as we can make lots of things at once, we can’t. But when we focus on breath, then we are focusing single-pointedly as we can one point of focus on the breath. At that point, we’re not projecting any of our other deluded thoughts. You know, what happens to a thought when we stop thinking about it? They go away.

Our delusions are just thoughts. When we stop thinking, those deluded thoughts subside, like the waves sliding into the ocean, that just happens. And we discover that we are actually peaceful, that our mind is actually peaceful, relatively to begin with, right, because it’s quite hard to let our mind completely let go of all the delusions dissolve into this endless deep bliss, okay, that takes some time. But we get a little bit of a taste of the waves dying down, to use the other metaphor, the clouds, clearing a little taste of the blue sky.

And now with meditation, we’re learning to master our mind, control our mind, which is absolutely essential, because if we don’t master our minds, our mind is always going to be in control of us. And when I say our mind, I mean, our delusions are going to control us because they’re what’s running the show at the moment. Right? So if we want to experience peace and happiness, we need to learn to master our minds.

And first step is just making a decision to stay with the breath. We can do a lot based on our decision. If we decide to do something, then there’s every chance we can do that thing. If we don’t decide to do it, then of course, you know, if we just kind of enter our breathing meditation, quiet half-heartedly, and think, Okay, it just seems like something quite peaceful. But we’re not really haven’t made any strong decision to stay with the breath, then we’re going to naturally follow every thought that comes up. Because that’s what we do. That’s what we are used to doing. We’re used to just following every single thought that comes up. But no we’re going to make a decision. I’m going to focus on my breath.

And if a thought comes, we say OK, we are going back to focusing on our breath. If we do this for a while, then what happens is that as the mind starts to settle down, even if it’s just a little bit, turbulence, and delusions, start to die down even a little bit, and we start to sense that depth in that space, that ocean, clarity within our mind, continuously residing, mind our Buddha nature potential, we start to just glimpse it. And that’s why we need a glimpse enough for us to then change the object of meditation from the breath to the peace itself. Again, focus on this peace, I’m going to enjoy this peace the abide by this peace. And focus on that single-pointedly.

When our delusions are not manifesting strongly, our mind is naturally relaxed, actually peaceful, and naturally happy.

Going With The Flow

Let’s talk about going with the flow today. As we all know, life is a flow. Life keeps changing all the time. It’s like a mountain stream running all the time. Its nature is to flow. Sometimes it feels as if we barely get out footing and all of a sudden the ground is shifting beneath us.

We try so hard to keep things the same. I think human beings like familiarity. We resist change. Our brain is wired for familiarity bias. We would rather accept known pain than unknown pleasure! The reason for this is that the pain of loss is usually a lot greater than the pleasure of gain. Give an example of people staying in toxic job.

Even then, life keeps changing. It changes from moment to moment.

Look outside. Look at the flowers, the trees. A hailstorm comes and all of that is gone in an instant. Example of a 100 year old tree uprooted on University Blvd.

Has anyone heard of the phrase Managed Growth? It’s a term that was in fashion 15 years ago. In reality, there is no such thing. Either you grow or you shrink. There is no other option.

Examples of IBM, Blockbuster

We always try to fix things because we don’t like the flow of life. As soon as we fix something to our liking, something else breaks though or so it seems. That is what Buddha calls impermanence.

One moment gives rise to the next moment and the moment after that and so forth. So if you think about it, there are no things per se. Because things would imply a sort of permeance and everything keeps changing moment by moment. By that thought process, everything is an event.

Someone would say, well our body is a thing. Is it really though? It keeps changing. Your body is not what it was 10 years ago for sure. Sometimes changes are so subtle that it looks like it is not changing. Well, not in my case! My weight scale tells me it is going up every day!

In Buddhism, it is called a functioning thing. As opposed to a thing that may be static.

For example, take a seedling. Its function is to create a sprout. And then it goes out of existence. There is no seed anymore.

And the sprout becomes a sapling and goes out of existence and so on.

This means everything is an event. Everything is always in the nature of change.

We have to learn to accept and go with it, adapt to it.

Why is this important? The Sooner we accept the fact that Change Is the Only Constant, the more adept we will become.

If we accept that change is part of nature, we will not try to force things, we will try and accept things as they come, this, in turn, will reduce our anxieties, and stress because we are no longer fighting against the flow.

If we fight against change in our minds and in our hearts, we are going to lose because impermanence is the reality.

Not one of us wants to be unhappy. If we all want a happy life then our only option is to go with the flow. We can call it patience, resilience, grace under fire, and whatnot.  It is a way to stay peaceful, calm, and accepting no matter what life throws at us.

If good things happen, we are happy; if bad things happen, we accept them happily.

The only way to be happy is to stop being unhappy. Does that make sense?

We are unhappy because we don’t accept what is going on in our lives. We are fighting. We are trying to fix things. We are trying to build these dams in the flow of the river called life.

This is where the practice of patient acceptance is so important. It is the ability to accept wholeheartedly. We accept it as it appears without wishing it to be otherwise.

Let’s look at an example. Say you want to go for a hike. You prepare for your hike, load up the car and start driving. You drive for two hours and all of a sudden there are thunderstorms. If we get unhappy that it is raining, it would ruin our day. Instead, you accept that it is raining. We can pull out an umbrella to protect us from the rain.

And you can use this example for anything else that may be going on in our world. If we don’t like injustice in our society, bring out the umbrella, meaning act to help people and solve problems, but don’t let it disturb your inner peace.

Change Your Mind, Change Your World

Today, let’s explore how a simple way of changing our minds can change our experiences. While researching this topic, I discovered that there is a book with the same name. How cool is that? So last session we talked about how Happiness is an inside job and how pain and pleasure are within us. How we let external conditions dictate our mood.

I am sure we all had some kind of problem today. It bothered us. It disturbed our peace. But if you think back, was that an external problem or an internal problem? I would bet a pretty penny it was an external problem. We let our external problems power to make us suffer. But it is all about perception. Say one day is going great. We feel like everything is going our way. Traffic is flowing smoothly, coworkers are on their best behavior, and so forth. The very next day, we feel like the whole world is against us. Someone cuts us off in the traffic, coworkers sound like they are demanding and whatnot. It is the same set of characters but we despise them! Why? Because our internal compass is off that day.

Let me tell you a story. I was driving through rural Mississippi about 20 years ago. I saw a small vendor on the roadside so I stopped. She was an old lady selling boiled peanuts. I bought a few and started talking with her. I asked her how her day was. She said it was an especially good day. I asked her what made that an especially good day. She said, well, I would make $20 today. Think about it! $20 was an especially good day. Granted I was in rural Mississippi in the early 2000s but still. She just had a particularly bright outlook on life you can tell. I bet she hardly had a bad day.

Everything depends upon our mind, including our sense of self. I think I may have talked about this in the past but let’s just reiterate. We all have this strong sense of self. Who we are. We are certain types of people, we do x and not y, and so forth. But if you think about it, this sense of self is not constant. It is ever-changing. Think about your 10-year-old self. I bet when you were ten, your sense of who you were was totally different from who you are today! Your 10-year-old self may not recognize who you have become. I am sure that’s true in my case. And you can say the same thing about your 20-year-old self and so on. So our sense of self is evolving. It is a good thing. And if we know it is constantly changing why are we hanging on to that sense of self? If we realize that our sense of self depends upon our thoughts, it becomes liberating! We are free to change our thoughts and in turn our sense of self. How cool is that?

Our sense of self is always based on our delusions. Our anger, jealousy, pride, attachment, and so on. But as long as it is an imputed sense of self, why not impute a happier state of mind? Because the universe gives us what we want. If we are always identifying ourselves as a tired, frustrated, and angry person then that is what the universe will give us. We do what we intend to do anyway. So why not create the intention to be happy all the time? If we are feeling completely rattled and overwhelmed, rather than identifying with that rattled and frustrated self, why don’t we tell ourselves, we are peaceful? We identify ourselves with our peaceful nature. We are this inherently peaceful person who happens to get rattled or frustrated every now and then. Now, we have changed the basis of our imputation all of a sudden. We are no longer identifying ourselves with the unhappy or angry but recognize that those are just our delusions that flare up from time to time.

We have talked about this before that we have the unlimited potential for peace. We are like this golden nugget that has some dirt on it. We recognize that we are not this dirty rock but actually a golden nugget with some dirt. As soon as we realize and accept that, we begin the work of removing the dirt from our golden nugget so we can be that peaceful person all the time.

Happiness Is An Inside Job

I am here to reveal a secret today. We are going to talk about how happiness is an inside job! Let me ask you first. Where does happiness come from? Where does suffering come from? Let’s look at the real causes and conditions of real happiness. Inner peace is the real cause of happiness.

Buddha said that we have limitless potential for peace, happiness, and joy within ourselves. It is our Buddha nature. We have the potential to be permanently free from suffering. What gets in the way is our nature of trying to fix everything. If we think about it, every day we wake up and we try to fix problems. We are putting out fires we call them. But are they fires? A lot of times in trying to fix things, we lose our inner peace. We get bogged down in these so-called fires and sometimes the fire consumes us! I am sure all of us have experienced these patterns in our lives.

Even though inner peace is the source of our happiness, we keep wanting external conditions to make us happy. I think we talked about this before but I am going to give this example again to drive the point home. We all derive pleasure from some type of food. It gives us joy and satisfaction. For me, that is pizza. But can pizza really make us happy? When I start eating pizza, the first few slices are like heaven. After the third slice, I can hardly eat. Now if I keep eating, I would become uncomfortable. After maybe the 10th slice, I would start to throw up and all of a sudden, I am suffering. There is no joy in continuing to eat pizza. So what does that tell us? It tells us that happiness is not coming from pizza. If pizza could bring happiness, it would not change to suffering.

And we can use other examples in a similar way, money, cars, and houses. Even relationships cannot make us happy. You fall in love with someone and they can do no wrong. Every little quirk they may have, you find adorable! Some time goes by and now, you find them annoying. The same quirks that you thought were adorable are now disgusting! What happened? Your attachment went away that’s all.

Love, on the other hand, can make you happy. Genuine love has no expectations. It does want anything in return.  

If you think about what makes us unhappy, there is a long list. Traffic makes us unhappy. Someone cuts us off and now our whole day is ruined. Why do we give the power of our happiness to some stranger who does not even know we exist? We seek happiness in social media in all places. We like that we have “friends” and “followers” on social media. How many of these friends genuinely care about our well-being? There are businesses that give you pictures so it looks like you are on vacation in a foreign land! How crazy is that? You put these pictures just to impress some stranger! Where is the happiness in that?

We rearrange our lives just to make sure we remove things that make us unhappy and bring in things that make us happy. But that is just a temporary solution because new things pop up that make us unhappy. If we think our problems come from sorting out external events, we will never be happy.

Let me ask you a question. How many of you have been truly happy for a straight 24-hour period? No sad thoughts, no anger, no jealousy, no uneasiness, just pure happiness. Very few of us can say we have been truly happy for a straight 24 hours. And those of us who had a few of those, how many times? Very few times I am sure.

Because we are so bogged down on external conditions, we are not even able to be truly happy for a straight 24-hour period.

When we go on vacation in paradise, our whole goal is to be happy. We land and the rental car counter has an issue with our reservation. All of a sudden the paradise does not feel like paradise anymore. This story plays out every day at a tourist destination. I had an interesting tour guide last year in Egypt. A young man took us on this old-fashioned boat tour in the river Nile. We were talking about his client base and he said sometimes people come and they get upset about some view or something where he takes them. He said he usually tells them, you paid so much money to come here, just be happy. I thought he had this figured out. He is right. We have the choice to be happy no matter the external conditions.

The true source of our happiness is inner peace. So regardless of what happens out there, let’s try to keep our inner peace.

Developing Compassion – Affectionate Love

We have talked about how it is best to try and develop compassion towards all living beings. It is easy to develop compassion towards people in our immediate circle (our family, our friends, etc.). But it is much harder to develop compassion towards someone we do not know. Ans harder still for someone in a faraway place. It’s like this when we hear about a natural disaster half a world away, we feel bad for sure but not enough to do something about it and help them. It happens in our region, we actually want to do something about it—maybe we send some money or consumables, etc. If that happens in our neighborhood, we roll up our sleeves and help as many people as we can. So how do we develop the same high level of compassion for all living beings?

Well, before we develop compassion toward everyone, we first need to have a love for them. If we have a love for someone in our hearts, developing compassion towards them becomes easy. So how do we develop love towards other random people and even people who do not care for us? Well, let’s start with types of love. There are three types of love. Affectionate love, cherishing love, and wishing love.

Here is from the book Universal Compassion: We can understand these by considering the following example. If a mother is reunited with one of her children after a long separation, she is very happy and feels great affection for her. This special feeling of affection is affectionate love. Out of affection, the mother considers her child to be very precious and wants to take special care of her. This special feeling of caring is cherishing love. Because she has affectionate love and cherishing love for her child, if she sees that she is unhappy she immediately wishes to restore her happiness. This wish for others to be happy and to help them to achieve happiness is wishing love.

So let’s break this down. In simplest terms, affectionate love is to like someone. If we are in a family and we have affection towards each other, life would be much smoother. Similarly, if we have affection towards our community, we will try to make sure that everyone in our community is free from suffering. This affectionate love brings harmony and peace to the community. The easiest way to develop affectionate love is to think about how no one wants to suffer. We know that we don’t want to have any suffering in life. Similarly, no one wishes to suffer for themselves. Once we understand that all beings want to be free from suffering, we will develop affectionate love toward them. A warm feeling in our hearts towards them. It is difficult to practice this by trying to show affectionate love towards everyone at once. So one should start by showing affectionate love towards a select few that would be easier – members of your family or close friends. Then expand the circle once you are comfortable.

Now, we need to be careful because a lot of times what people call love is more like attachment. For these people more the “love” increases, the more desirous attachment they develop. If the object of their “love” even talks to someone else, they get jealous or angry. This is not love. This is the attachment. Real love does not make one angry. So what is affectionate love? In the book How To Transform Your Life, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso outlines: when from the depths of our heart, without attachment, we feel very close, warm, and happy towards someone, this is affectionate love. It makes our mind peaceful and balanced, free from anger and attachment. Thus it is called “equanimity”.

Developing equanimity is like plowing a field—clearing our minds of the rocks and weeds of anger and attachment. That will make it possible for true love to grow. So how do learn to develop affectionate love? One way to develop this is to make an effort to be happy to see everyone. Whenever we see someone, we should be happy to meet them and try to generate a warm feeling towards them. If we are starting a meeting just before we get into the meeting room, we imagine all the people who are going to be in the meeting and try and generate a smile on our faces.

There are many benefits of meditating on affectionate love. Nagarjuna a great Indian scholar said that the biggest benefit of meditating on affectionate love for just one moment is that we accumulate greater merit than giving food three times to all the hungry people in this world! How wonderful!