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Peace and Harmony

The main thing that you need to do in life is to create peace and harmony. To create peace and harmony you have value peace and harmony. You don’t have to feel peaceful and harmonious all the time (that would be nice), but you have to regularly remember that peace and harmony is very important.

When you are feeling at peace and in harmony with life, then you can radiate that feeling to help everybody else. That will help. When you are feeling ill at ease or out of harmony, you can absorb all the peace and harmony that others are radiating. That will help too. Peace is always there.  Harmony is always there.

If things feel like they are disharmonious, then you can gently bring them into harmony. If there is conflict, then you can bring peace. The trick is being patient and remaining focused on peace and harmony. The trick is not giving up when peace and harmony seem lost. The trick is not getting tricked into thinking that other things are more pressing than peace and harmony.

You can accomplish all of your life’s goals in peace and harmony. Without peace and harmony, there are no worthwhile goals. To practice peace and harmony, simply look for peace and harmony wherever you go, whatever you do. That is important. If you forget from time to time, try again.

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Unraveling the Dream

It is easy to recognize the difference between our sleeping dreams and our waking experience. It is not so easy to recognize the dreamlike quality of reality. Dreams seem intensely real while we are in them, then often absurd when we recall them when awake. In dreams, people who have died are alive and people who are alive may die. Although, dreams defy time and physical boundaries, they maintain an internal logic where, no matter how unlikely, impossible, or ridiculous something may be for real, it all seems natural within the dream. When we are awake, our waking life feels natural too. In that way, it is dreamlike.

This natural way of experiencing life involves constantly making sense of the world around us. Because the world is so complex and unfathomable, we have to break it down into little bits that we can pretend make sense to us...read more

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Force of Habit

We are creatures of habit. Whatever we do one day, we’re likely to do something very similar the next. However we feel today, we will probably feel like that again tomorrow. If you’re feeling great, that’s great news. If you’re feeling sad and lonely, that is terrible news. Who would want to feel that way day after day? Nobody. Who would want to fly into a rage 10 to 100 times a day because little things keep going wrong? Nobody. Unfortunately, lots of people habitually feel these ways. Fortunately, there is a simple thing anybody can do to change their habitual feelings. Starting a new compassion habit can break old patterns and change your life.

A compassion habit mostly requires recognizing suffering. People are naturally compassionate. We all want to feel good and not suffer. Compassion is how we create comforts for each other and ourselves. It’s how we respond to the suffering we encounter in a way that makes it hurt less. Hurting less though, always begins with hurting more. So creating a compassion habit starts with seeing where it hurts.

Things hurt all the time so opportunities to practice compassion are plentiful...read more

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The Nature of Consciousness

One thing we all have going for us is consciousness. It is part of our basic nature to be aware of things going on around us. Consciousness is such a part of us, that we can even confuse it with who we are. However, we are not our consciousness any more than we are our foot. Like our feet though, consciousness helps us interact with the world around us. We can be aware of internal signals like when we are hungry and we are aware of external signals like light and sound. All these internal and external signals, those that we are aware of, and those that we ignore, interact with each other and what emerges from it all is our sense of the world.

Although human consciousness is unique, consciousness isn’t unique to humans. It is part of nature. We can see how dogs, cats, birds, bees, and elephants share a similar consciousness to us, where we all respond to light and sound and hunger and thirst and find ourselves food and water...read more

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A New Kind of Mind

The Dalai Lama, the spiritual and secular leader of Tibetan Buddhists, has often claimed that his true religion is kindness. He is a very nice person. Kindness is part of every person’s basic nature, as nobody would survive if people were not generally kind to each other. Despite all that kindness out there, there is also a significant amount of meanness. As it is in the world, so it is in each of us. Most of us are generally kind, and then we have our moments of meanness. The problem is that even a little bit of meanness can wipe out a whole lot of kindness, and it rarely works the other way around. It can take a whole lot of kindness to fix even a little bit of meanness. Kindness does heal though, which is why it is important to practice it, a lot.

Our bodies carry physical scars of our past injuries and our minds carry emotional scars of all the times people have been mean to us or to each other around us. Our minds have built themselves around our experiences of kindness and meanness. We have developed habits and patterns of having kind and mean thoughts. Some of those thoughts are about other people and some of them are about ourselves. Whether we are thinking of ourselves or others, all of the thoughts occur to us and so affect us directly. For example, we can think something mean about somebody, but if we don’t do or say anything about our mean thought, that person will be completely unaffected by it. We however, will always negatively experience that moment of negativity...read more

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Mind Craft

Whether you know it or not, you design your mind. Other people help (and hinder), but you are the master craftsman of your world. You are the one who toils in the trenches, reacting and responding to everything as only you can. The outside world competes for your attention with a constant barrage of sensations, and you, moment by moment, make choices of where to aim your awareness. The choices are made so frequently and so fluently that they seem automatic. That unconscious choice shapes your mind just like the conscious choice, but it designs without designs, which makes you prone to more suffering. Nobody means to design a mind prone to suffering, but everybody does it. Fortunately, figuring out that you are the one in charge and then making a few conscious adjustments gives you the opportunity to create a mind you can live with...read more

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The Magic of Meditation

There is no trick to meditation. It is a simple process that anybody can do anywhere at any time. It can be done in any position, sitting, standing, lying down, or during activities. You can meditate for a few seconds, minutes, or for hours. The process of meditation involves focusing your attention on your attention. Because attention can be so squirrely, it helps to focus your attention on something more steady like your breath. When your attention jumps to the next most interesting thing in your life, notice the jump and let that interesting thought go, bringing your attention back to your breath. The basic mechanics of meditation are so simple and are so similar to the regular workings of the mind that it is surprising that it has any effect at all on your psyche. When practiced regularly though, it can change your whole world...read more

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Meditation to Build Self-Esteem

Here is a guided meditation you can use to help build self-esteem. Sit in a comfortable position, with your back straight, breathe in as you read the breathing in lines and breathe out as you read the breathing out lines.

Breathing in, I am aware of my breath going in

Breathing out, I am aware of my breath going out

Breathing in, I am present in my body

Breathing out, I am present in time and space

Breathing in, I invite a new perspective on myself

Breathing out, I empty my mind

Breathing in, I give myself the gift of fresh air

Breathing out, I give back to the world

Breathing in, I recognize that I suffer from my self-esteem

Breathing out, I wish to change that habit

Breathing in, I recognize that I am human

Breathing out, I know that being human hurts

Breathing In, I feel the pain and sadness

Breathing out, I give that to the world

Breathing in, I feel the world’s suffering

Breathing out, I send the world peace

Breathing in, I am connected to all people

Breathing out, I wish people to be free of suffering

Breathing in, I am connected to myself

Breathing out, I wish to be free of suffering

Breathing in, I invite peace into my life

Breathing out, I share peace with the world

Breathing in, I see all people are equal

Breathing out, I join the sea of equality

Breathing in, I am no better than anybody

Breathing out, nobody is better than me

Breathing in, I am only what I am

Breathing out, I am enough

Breathing in, I connect with my essential goodness

Breathing out, I share my goodness with the world

Breathing in, I know new thoughts may unsettle me

Breathing out, I let my thoughts go.

Breathing in, I am present in my body

Breathing out, I am present in time and space

Breathing in, I am aware of my breath going in

Breathing out, I am aware of my breath going out

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Force of Habit

We are creatures of habit. Whatever we do one day, we’re likely to do something very similar the next. However we feel today, we will probably feel like that again tomorrow. If you’re feeling great, that’s great news. If you’re feeling sad and lonely, that is terrible news. Who would want to feel that way day after day? Nobody. Who would want to fly into a rage 10 to 100 times a day because little things keep going wrong? Nobody. Unfortunately, lots of people habitually feel these ways. Fortunately, there is a simple thing anybody can do to change their habitual feelings. Starting a new compassion habit can break old patterns and change your life.

A compassion habit mostly requires recognizing suffering. People are naturally compassionate. We all want to feel good and not suffer. Compassion is how we create comforts for each other and ourselves. It’s how we respond to the suffering we encounter in a way that makes it hurt less. Hurting less though, always begins with hurting more. So creating a compassion habit starts with seeing where it hurts.

Things hurt all the time so opportunities to practice compassion are plentiful...read more

Audio version

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Only Inner Peace

The world is currently at war with itself. People are killing people. The suffering that all this killing creates touches us all. We all find ourselves taking sides with the killers and the killed, and we stew in hate, anger, fear, and grief. You would think that with our big brains, meta awareness, and basic morality, we would come up with a way to stop all the killing, but we’re not there yet. Even in these violent circumstances, each of us has the ability to create inner peace. By working on our inner peace, we can help our big brains deal with those violent and painful feelings that leave them so confused.

Our complex brains operate in a state of general confusion, which makes it possible to trick them into being at peace...read more

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20 Breaths

Meditation is simple. It is so simple that we invent all kinds of complications to make it more interesting. In zen, we like to get dressed up in robes, chant, bow, drink tea, and then sit in rows, on cushions, on mats, facing a wall. To meditate though, all you need is a mind and a few minutes to check it out.

A simple meditation technique involves counting breaths. The breath is a great focus for meditation, because it is always there. Whether we are meditating or not, we are breathing. In breath counting meditation, we notice our breath going in and going out and at the end of each exhale, we count. It takes about two minutes to breathe in and out twenty times. So, for a two minute meditation, simply count twenty breaths. Breathe in, breathe out, one. Breathe in, breathe out, two, and so on up to twenty...read more

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Emotional Forecasting

How we feel determines our quality of life. No matter how comfortable our circumstances are, if we worry too much or get angry too often, our quality of life suffers. However, worrying and getting angry are what we do. How we worry, and the specific things that make us angry also make us who we are. Unfortunately, being who we are and how we are can be detrimental to our quality of life. Fortunately, being who and how we are is a work in progress, so when we work at feeling better and improving our quality of life, we progress.

Each day, we experience our own emotional weather. When we wake up in the morning, we make an immediate, unconscious forecast. We know what to expect from our day and that expectation, although completely biased by our current mood, sets the tone for the day...read more

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Ego Tripping

The difference between who you think you are and your ego is not much at all. Ego in the Buddhist sense of the word is a false idea of self. The reason it is a false idea and not an accurate idea, is that there is no such thing as a self. We have all kinds of ideas about things that aren’t real. Wonder Woman and Superman are not real, but there are lots of ideas about them floating around in movies and comic books. The idea that the self is fictional was the Buddha’s big insight. However, we all still have strong senses of self, so that sense of self is called ego. Believing that the ego is real, like believing that Wonder Woman and Superman are real is called ignorance. However, a Buddhist who believes in superheroes, but not in a separate self, would not be considered ignorant...read more

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Managing Moods

As we cycle through our many daily moods, it is important to remember that each mood involves a choice. We have the choice to assume responsibility for our moods or assign blame. The difference between the two options is the difference between having a say in our emotional life or being at the mercy of the elements. When we blame our moods on the world, all we can ever do is react. When it gets too hot, we get too miserable. Whenever we get hungry or tired, more misery. If somebody around us is miserable, we catch their misery. When we take responsibility for our moods, we respond instead of reacting. When it gets too hot, we feel the heat, it may be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to make us miserable.

Taking responsibility for our moods gives us a degree of control over our lives...read more