The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to be Calm in a Busy World

by Haemin Sunim

When your mind is filled with negative thoughts, the world appears negative, too. When you feel overwhelmed and busy, remember that you are not powerless. When your mind rests, the world also rests.

Knowing our minds is just as important as trying to change the world.

When you have an unpleasant feeling, don’t grab hold of it and turn it over and over. Instead, leave it alone so it can flow. The wave of emotion will naturally recede on its own as long as you don’t feed it by dwelling on it.

Don’t struggle to heal your wounds. Just pour time into your heart and wait. When your wounds are ready, they will heal on their own.

Good or bad is always relative.

The road to happiness lies not just in finding a good job, but also in learning to enjoy what you are asked to do.

From time to time we should take a breath and notice the silence between sounds.

We change without realizing it. We are in the midst of change even now.

Open up to people around you and feel connected. This is the true challenge of spiritual practice.

Remember that you are neither your feelings nor the story your mind tells about you to make sense of them. You are the vast silence that knows of their emergence and their disappearance.

Just because our eyes are open does not mean we are awake.

Life is like theater. You are assigned a role. If you don’t like the role, keep in mind that you have the power to re-create the role you want.

If you want to predict how a politician will act after winning an election, look at how he currently lives and how he has behaved in the past. A person does not live the way he says he would. He lives the way he has been living.

When you are making a decision, try to assess how many people it will benefit. If it satisfies only your ego and unnecessarily hurts many, then it is the wrong decision.

Be the kind of person who can put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand something not just from your own perspective but from theirs as well.

When those closest to you feel ignored and betrayed, everything you have built can collapse in an instant.

Your criticism reveals more about yourself than you realize.

When you bottle up your feelings, the river of emotion swells, making it difficult to cross over and speak calmly.

When you speak ill of others, it hurts you more than anyone— because your negativity is loudest within you.

The best revenge is love.

There is a saying in an early Buddhist scripture: “Paper wrapped around incense smells of incense, and string binding fish smells of fish.” Whether we like it or not, we naturally become influenced by our surroundings. Ask yourself, “Who do I want to emulate? Is that person physically or mentally nearby?”

According to the wise Confucian scholar Jeong Yak-yong (1762–1836): “The best way to hide your wealth is to give it away. If you are generous with your wealth, the money that would have disappeared sooner or later becomes an everlasting jewel, deeply engraved in the heart of the recipient.”

If you carry around with you people you hate, it causes only angst and depression.

Humans are like mirrors: We reflect each other.

When you don’t like someone, try to figure out what it is you don’t like; see whether you have a similar flaw within yourself.

Let people have their own opinions— they are entitled to them.