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February 7 - April 15, 2020
Our ancestors are still alive in us, and we can call upon them anytime we like.
If you behaved badly in the past, if you have been destructive, you can do something about it. By touching the present deeply, you can transform the past. The wounds and injuries of the past are still there—they are within your reach.
“Beginning anew” means being determined not to repeat the negative things we have done in the past.
Only if you are anchored in the present can you prepare well for the future.
This is because time has the nature of interbeing.
Even the Buddha needed a Sangha.
You must begin at the beginning, and give yourself some time to care for yourself, to cradle and care for your pain. Then you will begin to generate the energy of compassion and understanding.
Developing true presence has two purposes. The first is to make contact with everything that is beautiful, refreshing, and healing. We need that—we need the nourishment of
“I am here for you” means that I bring myself back to the present moment so that I can reestablish order, harmony, peace, and joy in myself. After that, I am here to soothe suffering and to offer joy and happiness to someone else.
“shining light” in which we shine the light of our mindfulness on a situation. We shine light on the situation of our body, our feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.
If you live in a community, you can ask for the help of the Sangha.
kneels down before his brothers and asks them to shine light on him, meaning to tell him how they see him, to express themselves concerning his body, his feelings, his perceptions, his strengths and weaknesses. His brothers come together to provide him with the advice he needs. After having received the recommendations of his brothers, the monk prostrates deeply before them three times in thanks, and in the days that follow he tries to practice in the light of their recommendations.
love letter from your Sangha
In Buddhism, it is said that love and compassion are made out of one substance, which is called understanding. If you understand, you can love. But if understanding is not there, it is impossible for you to accept and love someone.
Your compassion is born of your understanding of the situation.
There are people who have suffered so much that they are not capable of expressing themselves, so we need to practice compassionate listening to give them the opportunity to do so.
Let us begin immediately. What I recommend for all of us is to come back to ourselves and take care of the little boy or the little girl who inhabits the depths of our wounded souls.
Mindfulness is something that embraces and includes things like desire, that recognizes them with great tenderness. Meditation is not about turning yourself into a battlefield where one side fights the other, because the basis of Buddhist meditation is nonduality.
just as you do not do violence to your breathing, do not do violence to your body, nor to your anger or depression. We need to treat them with a great deal of tenderness, because the essential thing in Buddhist meditation is not to create tension, conflict, or rift within yourself. The positive elements within you are you, and the negative elements within you are you also. It is necessary for the positive elements to acknowledge and cradle the negative elements, and if you do that, a transformation will take place. There is no need for the two to do battle.
A strong emotion is like a storm. If you look at a tree in a storm, the top of the tree seems fragile, like it might break at any moment. You are afraid the storm might uproot the tree. But if you turn your attention to the trunk of the tree, you realize that its roots are deeply anchored in the ground, and you see that the tree will be able to hold. You too are a tree. During a storm of emotion, you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart, which are like the top of the tree. You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm, and come back to the trunk of the tree. Your trunk is
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My friends, if you have some cows, you have to identify them. You think they are essential to your happiness, but if you practice looking deeply, you will understand that it is these very cows that have brought about your unhappiness. The secret of happiness is being able to let go of your cows. You should call your cows by their true names.
We should be free to experience the happiness that just comes to us without our having to seek it.
That is why you should cultivate freedom, including freedom from your own concepts and ideas. Let go of your ideas, even if abandoning them is not easy.
I am becoming calm, I am letting go. Having let go, victory is mine. I smile.
You have to invest 100 percent of your body and mind in the act of walking. Then you will experience that being alive and taking steps on this planet are miraculous things.
It must always be done with mindfulness—not for the sake of the Buddha, not for the teacher, but for myself. This is the way you create peace; this is the way you bring about freedom. You do it for your own happiness, and when you are happy, the people you relate with benefit from your presence and are happy too.
Little by little you must train yourself for life, for happiness. You probably received a college degree that you spent years working for, and you thought that happiness would be possible after you got it. But that was not true, because after getting the degree and finding a job, you continued to suffer. You have to realize that happiness is not something you find at the end of the road. You have to understand that it is here, now.
Buddhism helps us to see that neither the concept of permanence nor the concept of annihilation are applicable to reality.
The Buddha said, “When conditions are sufficient, the thing manifests, and when they are not sufficient, the thing remains hidden.
The wave on the water is free from birth and death. It is free from being and nonbeing. The wave is the wave.
Most of our suffering arises from our ideas and concepts. If you are able to free yourself from these concepts, anxiety and fear will disappear.
you cannot say that there are no sunflowers. The sunflowers are hidden in the earth; they are just lacking one of the conditions for their manifestation, sunshine. It is false to say that the sunflowers do not exist.
That which is currently not perceivable is not nonexistent.
Existence and nonexistence are just concepts. There is only manifestation and non-manifestation, which depend on our perception.
a flower cannot “be” by itself alone. The flower cannot be. It can only inter-be. We must go back to what the Buddha said—“This is, because that is”—and train ourselves to look at things in the light of interdependence. We can see the entire universe in a flower. We can see not only the entire universe, but also all our ancestors and our children in every cell of our own body.
This is a daily practice to put us in touch with our roots. In the West, too, we should live in such a way that we are connected to our ancestors. This is very important. Feelings of isolation and alienation come from a way of life that is too individualistic. We lose sight of the connection between others and ourselves, and between our ancestors and ourselves.
My friends, I wish with all my heart that you do not make the same mistake. The next time you are suffering, if this suffering was caused by the person you love most in the world, have recourse to right action and say the fourth mantra: “Dear one, I am suffering deeply. I need you to help me to get out of this suffering. I need you to explain this to me.” This is the language of true love.
Nothing has a permanent identity. This impermanence is not a negative thing. If things were not impermanent, growth would be impossible, and manifestation would be impossible.
Our hope lies in impermanence.
Impermanence is what puts an end to dictatorship. It’s what puts an end to hatred and suffering, as well. We need impermanence to transform them. So do not be afraid of impermanence.
But if the seed did not die, the plant could not grow.
In fact, nothing can exist by itself. We must inter-be with all things. Look at a flower. It cannot exist by itself. It can only inter-be with the whole cosmos. And that is true for you, too.
We are like the flower. Every one of us is a miraculous flower in the garden of humanity. If you look deeply into yourself, you will see that you possess everything. As the poet Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” The one contains all—that is the insight of Buddhism.
the mystery of interbeing: the one contains all.
You already are everything you are seeking. Do not try to become something else. The flower does not try to become the sun; it already is the sun.
Aimlessness means not setting an object or goal in front of you and running after it.
We want this, we want that, and as long as we haven’t got it, we think happiness will be impossible. We must bring about a revolution in our thinking: we must stop.
You have God within you, so you do not have to look for God.
We manifest, then disappear. It is a game of hide and seek.
Deep looking helps you to stop, and stopping helps you to look deeply. Those two help each other. In order to look, you have to stop, and when you are looking deeply, you are stoping.
