Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day

by Jay Shetty

Detaching inspires gratitude. When we let go of ownership, we realize that all we have done has been with the help of others: parents, teachers, coaches, bosses, books—even the knowledge and skills of someone who is “self-made” have their origins in the work of others.

Receiving an insult. Observe your ego, take a broader view of the person’s negativity, and respond to the situation, not the insult.

In Care of the Soul, psychotherapist and former monk Thomas Moore writes, “Being literally undone by failure is akin to ‘negative narcissism.’ … By appreciating failure with imagination, we reconnect it to success. Without the connection, work falls into grand narcissistic fantasies of success and dismal feelings of failure.”

Humility allows you to see your own strengths and weaknesses clearly, so you can work, learn, and grow.

The ego wants everyone to like you. High self-esteem is just fine if they don’t.

The ego thinks it knows everything. Self-esteem thinks it can learn from anyone.

The ego wants to prove itself. Self-esteem wants t...

Olympic swimming gold medalist Jessica Hardy says, “My long-term goals are what I would consider to be my ‘dreams,’ and my short-term goals are obtainable on a daily or monthly basis.

Confidence means deciding who you want to be without the reflection of what other people think, but it also means being inspired and led by others to become your best self.

These three steps—soliciting, evaluating, and responding to feedback—will increase your confidence and self-awareness.

You are not your success or your failure.

The measure of success isn’t numbers,

Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

André Gide said, “Believe those who search for the truth; doubt those who have found it.”

Rather than seeing achievement as status, think of the role you play in other people’s lives as the most valuable currency.

Scientists at the Cleveland Clinic showed that people who imagined contracting a muscle in their little finger over twelve weeks increased its strength by almost as much as people who did actual finger exercises over the same period of time.

Meditation is not broken when you’re distracted. It is broken when you let yourself pursue the distracting thought or lose your concentration and think, Oh, I’m so bad at this. Part of the practice of meditation is to observe the thought, let it be, then come back to what you were focusing on. If it isn’t hard, you’re not doing it right.

I use an anti-anxiety technique called 5-4-3-2-1. We are going to find five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.

Appreciate everything, even the ordinary. Especially the ordinary.

Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast defines gratitude as the feeling of appreciation that comes when “you recognize that something is valuable to you, which has nothing to do with its monetary worth.”

Gratitude has been linked to better mental health, self-awareness, better relationships, and a sense of fulfillment.

When you’re present in gratitude, you can’t be anywhere else.

According to UCLA neuroscientist Alex Korb, we truly can’t focus on positive and negative feelings at the same time.

A study published in 2006 found that Vietnam War veterans with high levels of gratitude experienced lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, head of the Division of Biologic Psychology at Duke University Medical Center, told ABC News, “If [thankfulness] were a drug, it would be the world’s best-selling product with a health maintenance indication for every major organ system.”

As the Sutta Pitaka, part of the Buddhist canon, advises, “Monks. You should train yourselves thus: ‘We will be grateful and thankful and we will not overlook even the least favor done to us.’”

Gratitude is how we transform what Zen master Roshi Joan Halifax calls “the mind of poverty.” She explains that this mindset “has nothing to do with material poverty. When we are caught in the mind of poverty, we focus on what we are lacking; we feel we don’t deserve love; and we ignore all that we have been given. The conscious practice of gratitude is the way out of the poverty mentality that erodes our gratitude and with it, our integrity.”

Helen Keller, who became deaf and blind as a toddler after an unidentified illness, wrote, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

Brother David Steindl-Rast says, “People usually think that gratitude is saying thank you, as if this were the most important aspect of it. The most important aspect of the practice of grateful living is trust in life. … To live that way is what I call ‘grateful living’ because then you receive every moment as a gift. … This is when you stop long enough to ask yourself, ‘What’s the opportunity in this moment?’ You look for it and then take advantage of that opportunity. It’s as simple as that.”

Pema Chödrön advises, “Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.”

Studies have long shown that attitudes, behavior, and even health are contagious within our social networks, but what hadn’t been clear was whether this is true simply because we tend to be friends with people who are like us. So two researchers from Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, set out to find out whether kindness is contagious among people who don’t know each other. They set up a game where they arranged strangers into groups of four and gave each person twenty credits. Each player was instructed to decide, in private, how many credits to keep for themselves and how many to contribute to a common pot that at the end of the round would be divided evenly among the players. At the end of each round, the players were shuffled, so they never knew from game to game who was generous, but they knew how generous others had been to the group. As the game went on, players who had been the recipients of generosity from teammates tended to give more of their own credits in future rounds. Kindness begets kindness.

A study encouraging some people on the Chicago commuter trains to start conversations with strangers on any subject, for any amount of time, found that those who got up the courage to chat reported a more positive commuting experience. Most of these commuters had anticipated the opposite outcome, and on further investigation, researchers found it wasn’t that people thought strangers would be unpleasant, but they feared the awkwardness of starting a conversation and worried they might be rebuffed. That wasn’t the case, and most of the strangers were happy to engage. When we make the effort to connect with those around us, we create opportunities for gratitude instead of languishing in anonymity.

“The salt is the pain of life. It is constant, but if you put it in a small glass, it tastes bitter. If you put it in a lake, you can’t taste it. Expand your senses, expand your world, and the pain will diminish. Don’t be the glass. Become the lake.”

Research published in BMC Public Health points out that volunteering can result in lower feelings of depression and increased feelings of overall well-being.

Every person is a world to explore.

In addition to diet and lifestyle practices, Buettner found that longevity was tied to several aspects of community: close relationships with family (they’ll take care of you when you need help), and a tribe with shared beliefs and healthy social behaviors. Essentially, it takes a village.

Too often we love people who don’t love us, but we fail to return the love of others who do.

Interestingly, a Psychology Today article describes a field study of military leadership in Iraq done by Colonel J. Patrick Sweeney, a psychologist. Sweeney similarly found “3 Cs” of trust: competence, caring, and character.

As Gandhi said, “The golden way is to be friends with the world and to regard the whole human family as one.”

A well-known poem by Jean Dominique Martin says, “People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.”

We also tend to trust people we find attractive. Rick Wilson, coauthor of Judging a Book by Its Cover: Beauty and Expectations in the Trust Game, says, “We found that attractive subjects gain a ‘beauty premium’ in that they are trusted at higher rates, but we also found a ‘beauty penalty’ when attractive people do not live up to expectations.”

Minister and philosopher Paul Tillich said, “Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”

The Harvard Grant Study followed 268 Harvard undergraduates for seventy-five years, collecting piles of data about them along the way. When researchers combed through the data, they found a single factor that reliably predicted the quality of participants’ lives: love. Participants could have every other external marker for success—money, a thriving career, good physical health—but if they didn’t have loving relationships, they weren’t happy.

In How to Love, Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “Often, we get crushes on others not because we truly love and understand them, but to distract ourselves from our suffering. When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person.”

As Iyanla Vanzant said to Oprah, “… until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex; but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.”

Tibetan Buddhist nun Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo points out that we often mistake attachment for love. She says, “We imagine that the grasping and clinging that we have in our relationships shows that we love. Whereas actually, it is just attachment, which causes pain. Because the more we grasp, the more we are afraid to lose, then if we do lose, then of course we are going to suffer.”

Researchers followed incoming college freshmen to see how well they adapted to their transition and found that those with a tendency to suppress their emotions had fewer close relationships and felt less social support.

If you’ve lost yourself in the relationship, find yourself in the heartbreak.

The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “We are all connected; to each other, biologically. To the Earth, chemically. And to the rest of the universe, atomically.”

The ignorant work for their own profit … the wise work for the welfare of the world …