Tag: yoga

Mindfulness

We have talked on and off about we need to be mindful and how mindfulness helps us maintain peace within our mind. So today, let’s explore mindfulness a little more in-depth. In the simplest terms, mindfulness is being aware of your mind from moment to moment. If you are aware of your mind, your thoughts will not control you.

Let’s think about this real quick. Did you have a problem today? Did it feel like it was a really big deal and potentially could have a huge impact on life? Now think back 30 days. Do you remember what the problem of the day was on this day last month? Chances are you don’t remember. But we are sure that at the time it felt like a really big deal. What does that mean? It means we are paying inappropriate attention to our uncontrolled thoughts.

My teacher Kadam Lucy points to this study that was done a few years. All the study subjects were asked how many of the thoughts they were in control of daily. What do you think the answer is? I have asked a few people myself and in most cases, they do not know. Well, this scientific study found that 9 out of 10 thoughts people have daily, they were not in control of their thoughts. 9 out of 10! There is also a study that we have on average 6,000 thoughts per day. That means we have 5,400 uncontrolled thoughts per day. No wonder most people are not feeling happy 90% of the time.  

According to Buddha, our uncontrolled mind is the main cause of our suffering. Uncontrolled thoughts usually arise from inappropriate attention. That brings delusions including anxiety, anger, attachment, jealousy, pride, and so on. These delusions keep our minds occupied all day long. The only way out is to get control of these delusions is to tame our minds. The famous Indian scholar Atisha once said that Since you cannot tame the minds of others until you have tamed your own, begin by taming your mind.

So mastering our mind is key to getting control of our thoughts and in essence, mastering our life. With meditation practice, we can begin to get control of our uncontrolled thoughts. There are many meditation techniques we can try. The simplest and most common meditation practice is breathing meditation. This is where we focus our attention on the sensation of our breath. One of the more effective meditation techniques we covered in the past known as MAC technic. M-A-C. Mindfulness is what resists temptations to follow our thoughts, when we lose our attention and start thinking of distracting thoughts, Alertness keeps an eye out for our mind wandering off and brings it back to the object of our meditation, and Concentration is when we focus on meditation so we don’t begin to start wandering around.

Concentration is our ability to control our mind, to direct it at will, to focus, and eventually stay there for as long as we want. It allows us to think the thoughts we want to think as opposed to the thoughts that just show up uncontrollably in our minds.

Concentration makes our minds strong, clear, and relaxed, and we become more productive. It always makes us feel better, far more peaceful. It even makes us more physically comfortable.

Buddha said that there is nothing more powerful in this universe than a fully concentrated mind. The reason our mind lacks power is that it is fractured. It is all over the place. We talk to ourselves, apparently, at a rate of a thousand words a minute.

I hear a lot about I am not able to concentrate or I am not able to meditate and thoughts keep coming. I want to assure you that you are making a progress. Every time you notice that your mind wanders off and you try to bring it back, you are getting better at meditation. No matter how many times you have to bring your mind back (initially, it feels like that’s all we are doing), you are making progress. I can assure you it gets easier with practice. If you develop a regular practice say 10 minutes per day, before you know it, you will be able to focus on peace within you.

Cultivating Compassion

During our Q&A session last week, we discussed how difficult it is to cultivate compassion toward others. As I mentioned, it is a learned skill. So today, let’s talk about how we can develop compassion toward all living beings.

Before we develop compassion towards everyone, we first need to have love towards them. If we have a love for someone in our heart, 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 in 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 towards 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.

Cherishing love is to cherish other beings. We touched on this in one of our previous sessions. How so many people are trying to help our day go by smoothly. If we think about how many people were involved in the house we are living in or bringing the water we drink every day or food we eat every day. It is countless number of people. Just imagine how many people are involved in getting this meditation session live to all of us. Someone had to build this microphone, computer, and so on. Once we realize this, we will start cherishing others for all they do. Developing this cherishing love is what helps us develop compassion towards others.

Wishing love is our wish for all living beings to be happy. This is a natural outcome once we develop affectionate love and cherishing love towards others.

A fast-track way to develop compassion towards others is to think about all living beings as our mothers. If we believe that we have had countless lives, then we also must accept that we have had countless mothers. That means any of the living beings could be our mother in our previous lives. One can argue but that does not mean they are our mothers right now. Well, when someone’s mother passes away, she does not stop being their mother. So by that logic, since they were our mothers once, they are still our mothers. If we can begin to bring this point to our hearts, we will naturally develop compassion towards them. If for some reason you are not comfortable thinking about all living beings as your mother, you can think of being a mother to all living beings. The result is the same as you would begin to develop compassion towards them since all mothers have great compassion towards their children.

So as you can see there are a couple of ways we can train our minds to develop compassion. This is a very profound practice. It is certainly not easy but it is a fast-track way to get towards enlightenment. I hope all of us can begin to practice this in small ways in our daily life.

Equalizing Self with Others

Let’s talk about an extension of a topic we have covered earlier. We talked about how one can equalize self with other meaning how we should consider that the happiness of others is as important as our happiness. Today, let’s go one step further. That is called exchanging self with others. To look at this I am going to give you an example of a mountain.

Let’s imagine we are on a mountain top. We can see another mountain top from our vantage point. For us, the mountain top we are standing on is this mountain and the other mountain top is that mountain. Now let’s say we get off the mountain top and climb to the other mountain top that we were seeing. At this time, the mountain top we are on is this mountain, and the original mountain top that we were on previously becomes that mountain top. Everyone with me? So the words “this mountain top” and “that mountain top” are just imputations based on our vantage points at the time. It is not attached to a specific mountain top.

Our attachment to ourselves and our happiness is very similar. We all are on this mountain top where our happiness is more important than everyone else. We see everyone else as that mountain. Meaning their happiness is less important than our happiness. If we think about it, that is how most of us are living our lives. All of our problems come from this basic belief that our happiness is more important than everyone else. Think about it. We get upset when something does not go our way. When someone charges us more than what we think we should be paying. Or when someone says something that offends our ego. Or when someone does something different from what we think is right. All of these scenarios bring up delusions in our minds. Anger, hatred, jealousy, frustration, and so on. All of our delusions have their root in this belief that somehow our happiness is more important than others.

Now, if we get down this “me mountain” and start climbing the “they mountain”; we would cherish their happiness more than our happiness.  Think about this, if we value their happiness more than our happiness, delusions will not arise in our minds. A classic example is a mother’s love for her children. A mother would save her baby over her life. Obviously, she cherishes the happiness of the baby more than herself. So when an infant is hungry in the middle of the night, she is happy to get up and feed the baby. The same mom would get upset when someone else wakes her up in the middle of the night. What does that tell us? It is clear that in both cases the inconvenience is the same. She is up from her sleep. In one case she is happy to do it and in another case her delusions flare-up. In the scenario of feeding the baby, our mom is on “they mountain” – the baby’s happiness is more important than my happiness. In the other scenario, she is on the “me mountain”.

So as you can see, if we try to get off the “me mountain” and get on the “they mountain” a lot of delusions go away. Not only that, there is no friction in our life. Life just becomes smooth. The more formal name for this exchanging self with others.

Another way to look at this is to accept defeat and give them victory. A friend of mine recently said something that caught my eyes. She lives in a small town with her family. On the main street, she was going to a neighborhood shop. After she entered the shop, someone came behind her and was visibly upset. He said thanks a lot for cutting me off back there. She did not realize that she cut this person off. So she apologized to him and said she was sorry that she cut him off. He continued, you should be sorry for driving like a maniac. At this point, most people would have lost their patience and got into an argument. Not my friend. She said I am truly sorry that I did that to you. I could see you are upset and please tell me what I can do to improve your day. At that point, the person calmed down. My friend to her credit did not let the person upset her mental equilibrium. She also turned around the mood of the other person. Accepting defeat and giving them victory. I know it is very difficult if not impossible to practice but please try to do this next time you find yourself in a tough situation. It will brighten everyone’s day.

Renunciation

When someone says renunciation, people have all kinds of ideas. They think it is about leaving your family or getting away from it all and going to some cave to meditate. That cannot be further from the truth. So let’s demystify renunciation today.

Renunciation means a spontaneous wish to attain liberation (Mukti, Mox) from Samsara. This requires a careful look at the definition of Samsara. For a lot of people who are of Indian origin, Samsara typically means day-to-day life. That is not Samsara at all. Samsara is this endless cycle of birth and death. If you think about it, we have been going through this cyclical process of birth, death, birth for eons. Idea is to get out of that wheel.

Why would we want to get out of this circle you may ask? If you look at it, Samsara is full of suffering. We go through the suffering of birth, aging, sickness, delusions, death, and then rinse and repeat! Let’s look at each of these individually.

Any woman who has given birth will tell you it is no joke. If the full-grown adult is having so much pain, can you imagine what a baby goes through during the birthing process? Even before the birth, in the mother’s womb, the baby goes through suffering. When a mom drinks something cold, the baby feels like she is taking a cold shower, and exactly the opposite when mom drinks something hot.

Once we are born, for initial weeks and months, we don’t know how to convey our wants and needs. The only thing we know is to cry and to move our limbs around to get attention. That has to be a frustrating experience. Not being able to communicate you are hungry or you are in pain.

As we grow, the suffering of sickness is one of those things that can sneak up on you at any time.  When sickness strikes even the most healthy amongst us can get knocked out. It can take away our daily joys and make us feel unpleasant. When we feel ill, it is like a soaring bird that gets shot and comes straight down to the earth. We have no strength. We get frustrated and sometimes are dependent on others for our day-to-day activities. Our medical team may or may not be able to help us. If our sickness is incurable and if we are not exposed to spirituality, we may feel anxious, fear and regret.

No one can escape from this next suffering called aging. All of us age and with age comes age-related issues. The simple task of getting up and down becomes a chore and is painful. When we are young, we can travel around the world, however in old age, just getting out of the house is very difficult sometimes. We lose our eyesight and ability to hear as we age. Our memory fades and we tend to repeat ourselves – I feel like I am already experiencing this one😊Things we used to enjoy when we were young, no longer appeals to us and we are not able to enjoy those same things anymore.

At the time of our death, we don’t want to let go of the possessions we have accumulated throughout this lifetime We feel sorry about leaving our loved ones behind. We have to leave everything and everyone we are attached to and that creates sadness for many people.

There are other sufferings beyond the four basic sufferings of birth, sickness, aging, and death that we discussed here. We all suffer from our delusions. These delusions bring us anger, attachment, hatred, confusion, jealousy, and so on. When we get angry for example, sometimes, we can feel physical pain. It also creates tremendous mental suffering. It affects our health. These sufferings prevent us from enjoying life. We suffer from environmental factors such as recent weather extremities in Texas. That causes people to lose their shelter, temporary displacements, and so on. We suffer from not having our desires fulfilled. Even when our desires are fulfilled, they may not get fulfilled in the way we want them to be fulfilled. With wealth comes its issues and that could be temporary as well.

So as you can see the cycle of birth and death tends to bring suffering. The only way out of this is to strive for liberation. We should make a spontaneous wish to get out of this endless cycle and make a determination to attain supreme inner peace of liberation.

Generosity

Have you ever seen when you do a good deed something good happens to you? That is the benefit of generosity. Today I want to focus on this unique quality of generosity. There are actually three kinds of generosities. The beggarly kind, the friendly kind, and the princely kind. Let’s look at each one of them individually. The beggarly kind generosity is when one gives away the things that they do not need anyway. This is similar to when we give away old clothes to Goodwill. Nothing wrong with it but not really generous per se.

The friendly kind generosity is when we share the bounty that is given to us. We share it with people who we come across we share it with people who we see are in need. We keep some and give some away. This is what most people practice.

The princely kind is a rare breed. It is when we give away more than we keep. We keep less than what we need.

There are many benefits of generosity. When we give away material things, it reduces our attachment to the material world. According to a Canadian research study, generosity can reduce blood pressure, reduce depression, reduces stress, decreases anxiety, and more. Generosity also improves our relationship with the people around us. When we give, we are creating positive momentum and hope it catches on and other people carry on with that torch.

I saw an interesting research piece from the John Templeton Foundation on generosity. They found that people who give on their own accord, tend to be happier. Happy people tend to be more generous so it creates its own ecosystem. They also found that donating money releases the same neural pathways in our brain that are activated by other pleasure activities such as food, sex, etc. People tend to be more generous when they see other people giving. As Americans we are the most generous nation on earth. We donate more than $500 billion per year. That is a staggering amount.

Giving also needs to have the right motivation. For example, if we give something expecting something in return it is not really giving. It is just bartering. Giving also should be without pride. If we give with pride that washes away the benefits of giving. Buddha said that having pride for our giving is like eating a feast of a meal with poison sprinkled on it. It does you no good.

Giving for the sake of giving is what we need to learn to practice. When we begin to that, we do it out of contentment, and as a result, happiness follows.

And we have touched on this before but giving does not mean giving material things only. One can give our time, our skillsets, our compassion and care, our attention, and so forth. Giving away one’s skill and abilities without any thought of return is giving out of compassion. That is what true generosity looks like.

There is a lot of aid by governmental and quasi-governmental agencies nowadays. That is not really giving because people who are doling out the aid are not doing it out of compassion for the most part but they are just doing a job they are getting paid to do.

Why is generosity important you might ponder? Generosity by definition diminishes one’s ego. If we cultivate generosity, we will slowly take a stab at reducing our ego. Reducing ego is the first step towards experiencing emptiness – it is a very deep topic we will cover in a few months.