If the answer is yes, it would not be surprising. This is because we have problems every day! Maybe every hour.
Another question: can you remember what your problem was this time yesterday? The one that filled your mind?! Or this time last week? Or this time last year? Or when you were ten?
All these problems that felt like a very big deal at the time, now we can’t even remember what they were! Might that be telling us something?
Such as, nothing in life is as important as we think it is while we are thinking about it.
Some days, or weeks, it just seems like our mind has nothing better to do than sit around creating anxiety and misery – we want this, we’re annoyed about that, we’re worried about that – the list never ends. We are moody, we take everything so seriously, we find it hard to happy. Everything is The Biggest Problem Ever.
As a friend of mine just wrote on Facebook:
So… for the past few weeks I have been feeling very sad – oh for many reasons, mostly private ones. And I have been working on being very still and quiet – not running away, just watching as these feelings wash over me, coming and going, intense and then fading, sad and then sort of dull. And last night I just said to myself – this is my self-grasping, my self-cherishing at work. I am holding onto these feelings as if they are real… and they are not! They are just thoughts, wind in my mind, figments of my imagination. Let them go… drop the story line… just drop it!
This morning, the sun started to filter in … and a soft breeze fills the space of my mind, my heart.
Patience accepting suffering
I want to share some thoughts in this and future articles on how we can practice the patience of accepting suffering, so here is a working definition of patience for starters:
Patience is a mind that is able to accept, fully and happily, whatever occurs. It is much more than just gritting our teeth and putting up with things. Being patient means to welcome wholeheartedly whatever arises, having given up the idea that things should be other than what they are. ~ How to Solve our Human Problems
This doesn’t just mean accepting bad circumstances such as unexpected bills and broken relationships, but also welcoming the actual suffering arising in our minds, ie, our unpleasant feelings, indeed our delusions themselves! We need to accept fully that they are there without panicking, because only then can we let them go and transform our way of looking at ourselves and the world.
Of course it feels good to get fit if we can, which is why I went back; and a lot of New Year’s resolutions are about our bodies – we want to eat better, exercise more, have more massages, ideally look better if we can. We pay a huge amount of attention to our bodies. It is good to be physically healthy, I’m a great believer in that, but it is even more important to pay attention to the state of our mind. What thoughts are we exercising or failing to exercise? Are we exercising our love, our insight, our patience regularly, or even at all?
It takes ages to get our body ready to go out in the morning, all washed and clothed and beautified, as we may not dream of inflicting a smelly unwashed body on others; but we seem perfectly prepared to go out and inflict our hideous mood on them. Then we expect to have a good day.
We love feeding our body – we’d spend all day feeding it if we could get away with it – but how much time do we spend nourishing our mind? Again, we may not dream of leaving the house without breakfast, but we might well leave the house without nourishing our mind with good energy and kind thoughts that enrich our own minds and help us enrich the lives of those around us.
Our exercise, eating, and self-beatification often seem to positively reinforce one another — if we exercise properly we are often more mindful of what we eat, for example. One evening I offered a big slice of yummy chocolate cake to Ken, a friend, when he got back from a heavy workout, and he was able to resist, “That kind of defeats the point.” It is the same with our minds — once we get going on a good mental workout routine we tend to become naturally more mindful to avoid bad hab
I know for a fact that I can only train this body so much … I’ll never be as pumped as Julian’s personal trainer, I just don’t have those muscles, and I’ll probably never compete in the Olympics either. But the same is not the true for our minds, which have infinite potential for improvement – we can all become Olympic athletes of the mind.
So I did enjoy my workouts, very much considering the agony; but could not help thinking that if we could put even a fraction of the time we put into our bodies, even ten percent, into meditating — purifying, feeding, and exercising our mind — we’d be incredibly happy by now, maybe even Buddhas.
Learning to meditate
So if, perchance, you made a new year’s resolution last month to meditate more, I hope, unlike the average gym membership, this has lasted longer than January. For if our mind is peaceful, our mind is happy, and our life is good.
Click here for a starter meditation on feeling peaceful and relaxed, if you’re new to this site.
Up next, exploring our potential for peace (and omniscience).
22 Comments
Wow this is so awesome and helpful. This was exactly how I was feeling this morning. ❤️
Wow this is so awesome and helpful. This was exactly how I was feeling this morning. ❤️
hi thanks for these posts and my dharma friend who keeps forwarding them to me. I agree with them and the Buddhist path is my path. mind you, yes I can remember what problem filled my mind yesterday, last week, last year and when I was 10 years old.
its the same problem. d
Was my post to long on Friday lol 😄
Yes, it was really long! I enjoyed reading it though.
Tashi Delek 💙
Thank you for this post – it just makes me think ‘catch yourself on’
I had to look that up! Saw that it means something like “wake up”, or “come to your sense”, in Northern Island?
Don’t know if it happens in other countries but in Ireland when I was a child we used to give up things for lent (lent is a Catholic thing and lasts 40 days and Easter marks the end of it). The idea was give up something you liked, so that usually meant sweets. But to give up the idea “that things should be other than what they are” never occurred to me! 😉
HA! good one!
Thanks for all wisdom that comes through Kadampalife. And thanks again!! Hugs
my great pleasure x
Thank you for your inspiring thoughts. I needed to hear that today 🙂 Just look at my thoughts as they arise in my mind without judgments and keep my spiritual guide at my heart… keep this inner space and peace.
nice 🙂 that’ll work.
Thank you. Another inspiring article. I have shared to all my ‘extra’ busy friends to explain, much more eloquently than I could.
thank you for sharing it Kay.
As always, a wonderful post. I get so much out of your writings.
nice to hear it.
Love it! thank you! Wonderful humor too.
With love, mila
pleasure 🙂
I am going to try the “accept they are there without panicking” on my kids
the kids are that scary, eh?!