Tag: peace

Dealing w Teenagers

Last week we received a request to talk about how best to deal with teenagers. So let’s try to tackle this age-old problem for every parent in today’s session.

Someone sent me a perfect WhatsApp message I want to say five or so years ago. It went something like, don’t live your dreams through your kid’s lives. What a perfect sentence. We all are guilty of living our dreams through our kid’s lives sometime or another. The Sooner we realize it is not healthy for either the kid or the parent, the better off we are. This is one of the biggest obstacles when dealing with teenagers. It is an age when kids are just forming their own dreams and aspirations and want to be independent. This is also an age when a parent thinks the kid is at an age where they can mold their dreams onto kids’ life! So the first thing we must recognize is that it is their life. We are here to support them in any way that we can but we must not interfere with their lives.

When we talk about teenagers in the western world, we should also realize the amount of pressure these kids are experiencing. This is the age when bullying usually starts at school. They also are trying to fit into different social dynamics of the end of middle school and beginning of high school. This is a rough time for kids. Let me give you an example. When my son went to high school, the very first week, one of his friends (this was a small skinny dude), was hung in a locker by some older bully and he was stuck in that locker for a few minutes. Imagine the trauma that the kid went through. Not only him but his friends and everyone else who found out. For example, my son started talking roughly after that incident. I told him he did not need to talk that way and he said yeah I do otherwise I would get in the same situation as the other guy! So you can imagine the pressure these kids feel just to stand up for themselves.

On top of all that, the kids have other pressures such as academic pressure, social pressure, pressure to participate in extra-curricular activities, and pressure to perform in athletic events! Growing up, we never had pressure to perform or no one had to tell us to join extracurricular activities or sports. We just did. Today, the kids are talking about college preparation at an early age. Elite colleges have made the lives of a teenager miserable. They are expected to participate in all kinds of activities and excel at them along with their academics. Let’s draw a comparison. You all have high-flying jobs. Let’s say your company expected you to spend 10 hours a week on nonprofit activities and not only that, excel at those activities, improve the impact of those organizations. In addition, they expected you to participate in competition-level athletics that required 10 hours a week of your time to prepare. I am sure you would be exhausted and quit by the end of the week!

So as you can see, the life of a teenager is very difficult in today’s world. So the question is not how to deal with the teenager, the real question is how to help your teenager. The first thing, I would recommend is that show them you understand the problems they are going through. Appreciate the efforts that they are putting into different activities. Once they realize you get the kind of effort they are putting in, they will respond accordingly.

The next thing is to be there for them. As I pointed out, they have so many pressures that sometimes, all they are looking for is an ear. I don’t think they want your advice but they do want someone who listens. Just listen without giving advice (chances are they would not like your advice at this age).

Now you say but what about when they are making wrong decisions. For example, what if they are not doing well in their classes and you know they can do a lot better (say they are getting Cs when you know they are A+ students). The only thing you can do in such situations is to explain to them the importance of the right actions. Why they should be putting effort into their education and so on. Show them the consequences they may face down the road (not consequences from you in terms of punishment but real-life consequences of unable to get into their dream schools etc.). After that, just let it be. The Sooner you realize it is their life better off you will be for your peace of mind. I have this mantra I have been using for the past five years or so, your life your decisions. We all have to face the consequences of our decisions. You cannot change that. Just accept it for what it is.

One last thing I would mention is that our kids come with their own set of Karma. If we accept that fact, we would not try to interfere in their lives as much as we do. We would instead, foster a loving environment and just let the things be.

Discernment

Today we will wrap up our discussion on the six perfections. The last perfection we are looking at is discernment also known as judgment. It is our ability to discern what is real and what is not.

There are three fundamental aspects of discernment: we must accept conventional reality; accept ultimate reality; recognize non-duality. Let’s look at this one at a time.

Conventional reality is a day-to-day reality. It is completely an internal mental representation. Meaning it is all playing out in our minds. For example, when we see something, actually our eyes see the image and that image is then inverted in the retina and then our mind actually interprets the image. This is true for all of our senses. Our mind interprets our sensations of touch, smell, etc. Human senses are limited. The human eye is capable of seeing only 1% of the light spectrum. So what we see is limited. Similarly, we cannot hear all the frequencies of sound. In addition, we are bound by emotional distortion that limits our ability to perceive. For example, when we are afraid, we see things that are not there and when we are distracted we don’t see things that are there. That is why eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable.  

Conventional reality depends upon cultural agreements if you will. We all agree on a set of rules that allows us to accept certain things as long as perception meets the function.

Part of conventional reality is to recognize that every cause produces similar effects in nature. The second assumption is that all effects have multiple causes and conditions. It is never a one-to-one relationship. There are multiple causes and conditions that have to come into place to manifest a particular effect. For example, when you buy a seed it does not create a plant. You need to plant it, put fertilizer in the soil, it needs rain or watering, sunlight, and so on. All of these causes and conditions must come into play for the seed to become a plant.

Ultimate reality is just like it says, the real truth. We don’t have direct access to ultimate reality but there are principles that we can understand. 1. There are no inherent characteristics. For example, beautiful to one person would be different for someone else. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What one person finds attractive another person finds repulsive. It is always subjective. So the characteristics do not exist from its own side. All characteristics are imputed. Long, short, far, near, strong, weak, good, bad, large, small, all of these are subjective and are imputed. We should also however apply a functionality test on it. For example, killing is bad or good are both imputed but functionally, killing is bad because it is bad for the one who gets killed. 2. Interdependence of all beings and equality of all beings is a fact. Interdependence is the basis of all science. Without pollination, for example, there is no agriculture. So interdependence is a fact. Equality is a fact because each being feels they are important. So this makes us all equal. We all want to be happy. There is no question about it.

Non-duality means that ultimate reality is the basis of conventional reality – meaning they are not separate from each other. These are not separate concepts. We must have a basis for everything. Without basis, we cannot even have distortion. All beings share the same essence. Science tells us this. We all have at core the same basic atomic structure. In the spiritual realm, we say all beings have the same soul or the very subtle mind.

Once we have these three basic components in mind, it becomes easy to discern. We accept what needs to be accepted, assume what needs to be assumed, and respect what needs to be respected. The combination of this wisdom is what gives us true perception. As we discussed in the past, the function of our mind is to perceive. Once we understand these basic principles, our perception becomes clear. Our judgment becomes clear and our decisions are better.

It is good to promote discernment in today’s world because people are susceptible to believe anything and everything without reason. One can choose to believe what they want as long as they understand that it is just a belief and not based on truth.

Perseverance

Today, I want to talk about one of the six perfections. We have already talked about a couple of the perfections in the past including generosity and patience. Let’s discuss today perseverance. This is also known as vigor and enthusiasm. I am sure you have heard this expression that goes half of life is just showing up. I used to tell this to my kids all the time. All that means is to make sure that you are consistently showing up for what needs to be done. Keep giving your efforts without regard to short-term results or lack thereof.

Let me give you an example. When I came to the US, during the first semester, I was paying for all my expenses. As an international student, the fees are really high. So the goal for most international students is to receive a research assistant position where the University waives your tuition and pays you a small stipend on top of that. Within the first month of starting the semester, I started talking to professors for a potential research assistant position. One professor told me, he had a grant application out with the National Science Foundation and if it was approved, he would have two or three positions open. I would go visit the professor every two weeks to see if heard anything from the NSF. About two months later, one day I visited the professor and asked if he heard anything. To my surprise, he said, yes his application was approved and he would need three research assistants on that project. He said there were about ten students who were asking him for a position. Then he said something totally surprising. He said he was going to interview everyone for two of the position and he was offering me one of the positions. I thanked him and he went, do you know why I offered you this position? I had no clue. He explained that I was the only one, who was persistent, meeting him every two weeks, and wanted his lead researcher to be someone with that kind of drive. Who knew?

The point here is that no matter how many times you hear no, or fail, we must get up and move towards our goal. Let me put it another way. Have you ever owned a stock? I am not a stock market guy personally. But I have heard so many stories where people get out of their position because it was going down just to see their stocks turn around and go higher.  If they only held on to that for a few more days or weeks. Again, this is not meant to be stock market advice. I have zero experience in the stock market.

What perseverance means is that we must become independent of internal and external influences when we are moving toward a goal. All of you are here listening to these meditation videos and attending sessions because something in you tells you that you want to become mindful. You want some level of mental peace and joy and bliss within you. if that is the goal then please make sure that you don’t get influenced by outside influences. You will have good meditation days and not-so-good meditation days. Some days you may feel like you met Buddha himself and other days, your mind is so wound up that nothing brings peace it seems. That is perfectly OK. With time, you will be able to get into a situation where no matter the external conditions, you will be able to bring your mind to peace.

So please don’t give up because you think you are not making progress in your meditation practice. You are certainly making a progress. I had this interesting discussion with a young person. This person is in their early twenties and was having some challenges. I was trying to help them walk through the situation and kind of helping them make a plan for long-term success. We would talk weekly. After a couple of weeks, they said it doesn’t seem like they are making any progress and it feels two steps forward and one step backward. I said OK; imagine if you are walking from your house to the nearest pizza place. Let’s say it is 1,000 steps away. Once you start your journey, let’s say you take two steps forward and one step backward. After say about 10 minutes, you are 20 steps away from your house. If you did not take one step backward, you would have been 30 steps away. Even with 20 steps away from your house, you are still closer to the pizza place than you were if you were just sitting in your house. And that is what is important.

The moral of the discussion here is to make sure you keep performing beneficial actions and don’t give up because you are not seeing immediate results.

Instant Happiness

We live in the age of instant gratification. So I thought I would offer you an instant gratification version of meditation today! We have talked about happiness on and off here for the past year. I have talked about how real happiness comes from within and that outer problems should not affect our inner happiness. On one level all of you have told me that it makes sense but difficult to grasp. Today, I want to prove to you that real happiness is within us. We will do a meditation known as transfer of enjoyment meditation to show this.

Before we do that though, let’s talk about how many of us can say we are really happy all the time? Forget all the time, how many of you were truly happy meaning no delusions – no anger, attachment, hatred, upset, hurt feeling, jealousy, and so forth for a full 24 hour period? Hardly any one of us can say we have been truly happy for a straight 24 hour period. It certainly comes and goes. We are happy for a while and all of a sudden, our mind starts to wonder and gets to a negative place, and poof, it destroys our happiness. So why is that? If we are on a vacation, we should be free from all worries. But even on vacation, something disturbs our peace of mind. Geshe Kelsang says in the book How to Transform Your Life, “Inner peace, or mental peace, is the source of all our happiness. Although all living beings have the same basic wish to be happy all the time, very few people understand the real causes of happiness. We usually believe that external conditions such as food, friends, cars, and money are the real causes of happiness, and as a result, we devote nearly all our time and energy to acquiring them. Superficially it seems that these things can make us happy, but if we look more deeply we will see that they also bring us a lot of suffering and problems.”

This is similar to what I mentioned earlier. When we are on vacation and if something sets us off, we are no longer happy. So, it is certainly not our surroundings that make us happy. I think we can say for sure that everyone wants to be happy. No exceptions. Have you met anyone that does not want to be happy all the time? Their definition of happiness may be different but they all want to be happy –  free from suffering. If all of us have the same desire to be happy, happiness should be not as elusive as it has been. The reason for this elusiveness is that we are looking for our happiness in the wrong places. Some people look for happiness in food, money, travel, sex, drugs, big houses, fancy cars, and so on. None of that can give us permanent happiness. We are told early in life that you achieve a certain career goal, get married, have kids and happiness will follow. Well, the divorce rate tells us that is not true! We have turned this whole thing backward. Rather than being happy with the journey, we are teaching kids to look for a destination. This in turn creates unreasonable expectations as kids are growing up and sets up them for a lifetime of unhappiness. Happiness is a state of mind. If we develop a positive state of mind, we will naturally be happy. This is what we need to train ourselves into. Fortunately, there is a shortcut to this process called Transfer of Enjoyment meditation. This meditation is a doorway into this practice of getting our mind to a happy state in an instant. It is however not the be-all and end-all. Initially, it is a good practice to use this meditation until we get to a point where we can get into a happy state of mind on demand. Without needing any external stimulus.

Emptiness of I

We have been discussing emptiness for the past few weeks. We looked at the emptiness of phenomenon, the emptiness of body as well as the emptiness of mind. So let’s continue with this deep subject and look at the emptiness of I today.

To explore the emptiness of I, we will go looking for that inherently existing I. Before we look for anything, we must know what it is that we are looking for. If you want to find your car keys, you need to know what they look like before you can find them. Similarly, we must first know what does inherently existing I looks like before we go searching for it.

The easiest way to see what our inherently existing I, is to go back and think about a time when we were grasping for that I. Think about a time when you were proud of yourself. May be achieved something big or you were proud of your children or whatever the case may be. Think about your state of mind and your physical expressions at the time. You were really into yourself. If you visualize yourself at your proudest moment, you have found your inherently existing I. Another place to look is to think about a time you were really frightened. Let’s a wild animal was chasing you or you were scared about losing a relationship or money or whatever that may be. Again, if you can think about your state of mind at that time or your physical state (maybe you were shaking). That is your inherently existing I. You can also look at a couple of other examples such as a time when you were in a really sad state of mind. That will also have the same effect.

So once you identify what the inherently existing I looks like, now we start searching for it. Before we go on searching though, let’s agree on what possibilities are there. We can either find our inherently existing I in our body, or our mind, or a combination of body and mind, or outside of our body and mind. That’s it there is no fifth possibility. Let’s begin.

First, we need to see if we can find our inherently existing I in our body. Similar to our contemplation of the emptiness of the body, we start searching for it. Can we find our I in our limbs? The easiest way to find out is to say what if I lose my limbs? Will your inherently existing I still be there? In other words, will you still be proud or afraid or sad at the moment you were thinking of? Of course. It would not change that at all. So we know our I is not in our limbs. Now look for it in our organs. As we discussed previously, every one of our organs is transplantable. So we can have someone else’s kidney or heart or whatever and we will still be here and our I will still be proud, afraid, sad at the moment you were thinking of. So our organs are not our I. Same applies to our skin. So now that we have established that we cannot find our inherently existing I in our body; let’s look for it in our mind.

As we discussed last week, our mind is this vast awareness that is continuing from the beginningless time. It changes from moment to moment. If it was inherently existing, it would be solid as a rock if you will. It would not be changing on a moment-to-moment basis. If it was inherently existing, we would be able to find it at any given moment. But the mind changes every moment and we cannot find this unhappy mind or happy mind because it constantly changes. The same logic applies when we look at our feelings. Our feelings are as fleeting as the wind blowing on a stormy day. They keep changing from moment to moment and we cannot find the mind that contains that feeling when we go look for it. Another way to look at this is that our mind is the possessed and we are the possessor. It is our mind. For example, I am speaking into my microphone but that does not make me the microphone. So the possessor and possessed cannot be the same. So, our mind cannot be the inherently existing I.

How about body and mind combined? Well, two things that are not me cannot be me. If we go on a drive looking for a horse. We see a goat and we say that’s not a horse. We see a cow and we say that’s not a horse. We cannot put the goat and the cow together and say that’s a horse!

So now, only one possibility is left. Maybe we find our inherently existing I somewhere outside our body and mind. How absurd does that sound? Let’s go through the exercise anyway. You are seating in one place. Where would you look for your I? Is it in the other corner of the same room? Is it outside the room? Outside the house maybe? What about in some other City? Just not possible right?

As you can see, we cannot find the inherently existing I that we so strongly grasp. This grasping is what our ego is. It is the root of almost all of our delusions. We are grasping at the thing that does not exist to create problems in our lives. If we begin to let go of that grasping just little by little, life will begin to change for the better for humanity.

In today’s meditation, as always, we will start by first settling in our hearts. Once settled we will begin to contemplate the inherent existence of our I. We will first identify the object (our I that we strongly grasp). Then we will go look for it as we just talked about. Once we realize there is no inherent existing I, we will meditate on that.