CHILDREN NEED OUR UNDERSTANDING

  When we look deeply into our children, we see all the elements that have produced them. They are the way they are because of our culture, economy, society, and because of the way we ourselves are. We can’t simply blame our children when things go wrong; many causes and conditions have contributed. If parents practice mindfulness and compassion in their daily lives, children will naturally learn from them. Listening deeply and using loving speech, you can water the good seeds in children. When we know how to transform ourselves and our society, our children will transform also.

  DEPRESSION

  Embracing our suffering may seem to be the opposite of what we want to do, especially if the suffering is very large, as with depression. Depression is widespread in our time. It can take away our peace, joy, stability, even our ability to eat, move about, or do simple tasks. It can seem insurmountable, and we may think the only thing we can do is either run away from it or give in to it. But recognizing and embracing this great suffering without judgment, the suffering will naturally calm down, and then you will have the chance to look into it deeply to find out why it has come to you. It’s been trying to get your attention and tell you something, and now you can take the opportunity to listen. You can ask someone to look with you—a teacher, a friend, a psychotherapist. Whether alone or together with friends, you can explore its roots, and see with what nutriments and habits of consumption you have been feeding your sorrow. You can discover how to transform the compost of this suffering into the flowers of understanding, compassion, and joy.

  COMING THROUGH THE STORM

  When you don’t know how to handle the suffering inside you or how to help handle the suffering around you, you may try not to be there anymore, thinking that will make you feel better. To commit suicide is an act of despair. It’s not wise. You think you’ll stop being after you die. But that’s not true. You continue always, in many ways. The suffering will go on, not only for you but for other people who care about you. If you lose hope, they will lose hope. If that habit energy is in the family, it’s one more reason to practice. If we have a good environment, a good sangha, good friends surrounding us, then we have more of a chance to get in touch with the kind of wisdom and practice that can help us. Don’t pretend, perhaps out of pride, that everything is okay. Sit among us and say, “Dear sangha, here is my pain, my sorrow, my despair. Please help me recognize and embrace it. I need the collective energy of the sangha.” If you can end the habit energy, you transform it not only for yourself, but for the whole lineage. With that energy of love and compassion, you won’t do things that make people suffer anymore. Practice breathing, walking, and recognizing this habit energy in you. Say, “Hello, my habit energy. I intend for you not to be there anymore. You have been my friend for a long time. I’m going to help you.” Embrace it, work with it, and transform it. We don’t have to fight. We only have to recognize and smile to it. The insight that death and birth inter-are is very important.

  UPROOTED

  Our society is a difficult place to live. If we’re not careful, we can become uprooted, and then we cannot help change society to make it more livable. Meditation is a way of helping us stay in society, and this is very important. Many young people who come to Buddhist practice come by way of psychology, and they look to the practice of meditation to solve psychological problems. Having lived for quite some time in this society, I’m aware there are many things that make me want to withdraw, to go back to myself. But my practice helps me remain in society. I know that if I leave society, I can’t help to change it. We need to keep our feet on earth and stay in society. This is our hope for peace.

  HEALING FROM CHILDHOOD ABUSE

  As a victim of childhood abuse, you don’t want others to suffer as you have. With a strong aspiration to help and a determination to practice, you transform yourself into a bodhisattva, an activist, an agent of peace, and you begin to heal right away. You transform your suffering into the kind of insight that will help yourself, your friends, and society. Practice looking deeply to see that your parents didn’t have a chance to encounter wise teachings or good friends. If they had lived in a better environment, they might have behaved differently. This is true of everyone.

  For those of us who have been a victim of sexual abuse, there is the teaching that the mud and lotus inter-are; we don’t discriminate, we have to accept both. It is possible to transform the mud into the lotus. Ideas like production and destruction, birth and death, defiled and immaculate, are just creations of our mind. Neither defiled nor immaculate is the teaching and practice that will help us transcend the idea of defilement and impurity. Everything is impermanent, everything changes. You don’t have to bear that kind of suffering forever. You make the great vow to become a bodhisattva and, with that deep aspiration, there’s much you can do to help protect children, young people, and couples from sexual abuse and sexual misconduct, through education and so on. When your energy of aspiration is strong, you begin to heal right away.

  GETTING UNSTUCK

  When we feel that we are a victim of someone, we suffer and tend to become passive in our lives. Instead, we can behave positively and take the situation into our own hands. Once we feel sorry for ourselves and feel we’re a victim, it’s difficult for us to be fully present and to go ahead and do what we want to do. We think we’re the victim, but in fact the other person is a victim of their own suffering and ignorance. With mindful awareness, we can come to the wisdom of nonself and nondiscrimination. This insight protects us. Once we’re inhabited by this energy and wisdom, we won’t suffer anymore, and we won’t make other people suffer.

  LIVING TOGETHER

  When we live with another person, to protect each other’s happiness we should help each other transform the internal knots that we produce together. By practicing loving speech and deep listening in order to understand, we can help each other a great deal. Happiness is not an individual matter. If the other person is not happy, we will not be happy either.

  If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

  NON-ACTION

  Love and hatred are organic. We can quickly become angry with the one we love, and we can also come to love someone we hated. When we’re angry, we can give ourselves a little space by taking some deep breaths. This will prevent us from saying or doing something that we may regret later. We recognize that this feeling of anger is a momentary reaction. Following our breathing in and out, and not feeding the anger with our perceptions, it will calm down and cease. When someone says something challenging, if we can smile and return to our breathing, this will be a living teaching, and others will be able to touch it. Sometimes, through non-action, we can help more than if we do a lot. Remaining calm, we can change the situation.

  LOVING SPEECH AND DEEP LISTENING

  All of us have pain, anger, frustration, and we need to find someone willing to listen to us who is capable of understanding our suffering. Before we say something, we have to understand what we’re saying and also the person to whom our words are directed. With this understanding, we will not say things to make the other person suffer. Blaming and arguing are forms of violence. If we suffer greatly, our words may be bitter, and that won’t help anyone. We have to learn to calm ourselves and become a flower before we speak. This is the art of loving speech. Listening is also a deep practice. We listen in a way that we understand the suffering of others. We empty ourselves and leave space so we can listen well. If we breathe in and out to refresh ourselves, we will be able to sit still and listen to the person who is suffering. When they are suffering, they need someone to listen attentively without judging or reacting. If they cannot find someone in their family, they may go to a psychotherapist. Just by listening deeply, we already alleviate a great deal of their pain. This is an important practice of peace. We have to listen in our families and in our communities. We have to listen to everyone, especially those we consider to be our enemies. When we show our capacity of listening and understanding, the other person will also listen to us, and we will have a chance to tell them of our pain.

  ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW

  When you are angry with someone you love, breathe mindfully with your eyes closed, and bring your mind to the distant future. Your body and the body of the person with whom you are angry will have dissolved into dust. When we see our lives are so ephemeral, we don’t want to waste our time being angry with each other.

  EQUANIMITY

  Equanimity is an important element of true love. Some people think equanimity means indifference. But equanimity isn’t cold or indifferent. It means you love without discrimination and include everyone in your love. It means seeing the whole situation without taking sides. When you love because living beings need your love, not because someone belongs to your family, your nation, or your religion, then you are loving without discrimination and practicing true love.

  MINDFUL CLASSROOM, MINDFUL SOCIETY

  Many people have enormous suffering and don’t know how to handle it. Often it starts at a very young age. If a student is suffering greatly, they can’t concentrate and learn. Schools should be places where children can learn to be happy, loving, and understanding, where teachers nourish their students with their own insights and happiness. Very few school programs teach young people how to live—how to deal with anger, reconcile conflicts, how to breathe, smile, and transform difficult feelings. We can transform our classroom into a family where a good relationship can be established between teacher and students. For a child who has difficulties at home, such a teacher and classroom are a second chance. Together we have to create the kinds of public institutions we need for our collective awakening.

  BE YOURSELF

  To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don’t try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.

  TWO ASPECTS OF HOPE

  Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us. When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic: since we cling to our hope for the future, we don’t focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that peace will come. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here.

  I don’t mean you shouldn’t have hope, but that hope is not enough. If you dwell in the energy of hope, you won’t bring yourself back entirely into the present moment. If you re-channel that energy into being aware of what is going on in the present moment, you can make a breakthrough and discover joy and peace right in the present moment. The inspirational peace movement leader A.J. Muste said, “There is no way to peace, peace is the way.” We can realize peace right in the present moment with our look, our smile, our words, and our actions. Peace work means that each step we make should be peace, joy, and happiness. We can smile and relax. Everything we want is right here in the present moment.

  BREATHING AND SMILING WHEREVER YOU ARE

  Our senses are our windows to the world, and sometimes the wind blows through them and disturbs everything within us. Some of us leave our windows open all the time, allowing the sights and sounds of the world to invade and penetrate us.

  When you need to slow down and come back to yourself, you don’t need to find a special place. Wherever you are, come back and practice conscious breathing. Whether sitting in your office or your car, standing in a busy market, or waiting in line at the bank, if you begin to feel depleted and need to return to yourself, you can practice breathing and smiling.

  A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

  If you throw a rock into the river, no matter how small it is, it will sink to the bottom. But with a boat, you can keep many rocks afloat. If you are alone, you may sink into the river of suffering, but if you have a community of practice and you allow it to embrace your pain and sorrow, you will float. Many of us have profited from the strong collective energy of the sangha.

  Imagine you’re a drop of water on its way to the ocean. Alone, you might evaporate on the way. But if you allow yourself to be held and transported by the sangha, you go as a river, and you will surely arrive at the ocean. In a sangha, we’re like a drop of water in the river. Our pain, sorrow, and suffering are recognized and embraced.

  BUILDING BELOVED COMMUNITY

  I met the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in person for the first time in Chicago in 1966. I could tell I was in the presence of a holy person. We were both young, both belonged to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, working to help groups in conflict find a peaceful resolution. We had tea together and then went down to a press conference. This is when Dr. King spoke out for the first time against the Vietnam War. We combined our efforts to work for peace in Vietnam and fight for civil rights in the US. We agreed that the true enemy of man is not man, but is the anger, hatred, and discrimination found in the hearts and minds of human beings. We met again in 1967 in Geneva at the Pacem in Terris conference organized by the World Council of Churches. There we continued our discussion on peace, freedom, and community. We agreed that without a community, we cannot go very far. Without a happy, harmonious community, we will not be able to realize our dream. I told him, “Martin, in Vietnam they call you a bodhisattva, an enlightened being trying to awaken other living beings.” I’m glad I had the chance to tell him, because a few months later he was assassinated. I was in New York when I heard the news. I was devastated. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I made a deep vow to continue building the beloved community, not only for myself but for him also. I have done what I promised, and I think that I have always felt his support.

  THE COLLECTIVE ENERGY OF PRACTICE

  When we practice together as a group, we generate a collective energy of mindfulness and peace that can help heal and nourish us and our children. Practicing together, we have the opportunity to produce the powerful, collective energy of mindfulness, compassion, concentration, insight, and joy that can help change the world. We don’t need more money, fame, or wealth in order to be happy. Just by generating these energies, we can create freedom and happiness for ourselves and for many people around us. We have a chance to be together. Walking from one place to another, why don’t we enjoy every step? We are here for that. Give yourself pleasure, joy, and freedom with every step.

  EMPTINESS

  Emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness are keys to unlocking the door of reality. They are three essential contemplations that liberate us from our wrong views so we can live deeply and fully and face dying and death without fear, anger, or despair. To say that something is empty does not mean it doesn’t exist. Emptiness doesn’t mean nothingness. It means that something is full of everything except for one thing: a separate self. The verb “to be” can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves alone. “To be” is always “to inter-be.” A flower is full of everything in the cosmos. It is empty of only one thing: a separate existence. We inter-are with one another and with all of life.

  SIGNLESSNESS

  To see a flower only as a flower, and not to see the sunshine, clouds, earth, time, and space in it, is to be caught in the sign “flower.” When you touch the interbeing nature of the flower, you truly see the flower. If you see a person and don’t also see their society, education, ancestors, culture, and environment, you haven’t really seen that person. Instead, you have been taken in by the sign of that person, their outward appearance, the appearance of being a separate self. When you can see that person deeply, you touch the whole cosmos and you will not be fooled by appearances.

  AIMLESSNESS

  When we put an aim in front of us, we can run for our whole life, and happiness will never be possible. Happiness is possible only when you stop running and cherish the present moment and who you are. You don’t need to be someone else; you’re already a wonder of life. In the West, we’re very goal oriented and often we forget to enjoy ourselves along the route. Aimlessness means you don’t put something in front of you and run after it, because everything is already here, in yourself. While we practice walking meditation, we don’t try to arrive anywhere. We only make peaceful, happy steps. If we keep thinking of the future, of what we want to realize, we will lose our steps. The same is true with sitting meditation. We sit just to enjoy our sitting; we don’t sit in order to attain any goal. Each moment of sitting meditation brings us back to life, and we sit in a way that we enjoy our sitting for the entire time we do it. Whether we’re eating a tangerine, drinking a cup of tea, or walking in meditation, we should do it in a way that is “aimless.”

 

1 2 3 4