Through meditation experiences, we gradually build what some have termed “Buddhist Faith.”  As we realize more and more that through our experiences that the teachings help us in our lives and ring true for us, it further develops this faith.  When we start to reach this point, we realize that Buddhism is practical more than it is just a philosophy (though it can be studied as one, as many college courses can attest).  There is a story of a monk who was going to threaten the Buddha with leaving the monkhood if he wouldn’t answer a bunch of philosophical questions.  Well, these questions, if answered, would not really relieve suffering.  The Buddha realized this and informed the monk that these questions and their answers have no relevance in regards to removing suffering.

We have many questions we debate over and over with people, sometimes getting quite heated.  One very big one is “Does God exist?”  Whether God exists or not, does not really free humanity from suffering, much less the knowledge of existence or non-existence.  Similar to what created the universe.  Buddhism does not claim to know answers to these questions, so people can believe what they want to believe.  In Buddhism, we focus on freeing people from suffering, everything else is just additional ideas or beliefs that you have, whether good or bad, it is not a big part of the Buddha’s teaching.  That is why we have Christians, Jews, and people of other faiths who see no conflict with practicing Buddhism and keeping their faith.

A practical Buddhism that follows a middle way between the two extremes of over intellectualism and blind faith is what one should strive for.  Meditation is a key way of moving towards this aim.  Through meditation, we are able to develop a greater insight into who we are as people and how best we can take these teachings and use them in our lives.  I like to use the phrase, “Practice Makes Perfect,” when people ask me how many times do they need to meditate.  Without practice, we are focusing on the words describing the actions and not on the actual actions.  By meditating regularly, we are building a more solid foundation from which we can gather a greater understanding of the texts in which we read or the teachings that we listen to.  Everytime our mind goes off of the breath or other meditation object, it is like when we learn to ride our bike and skin our knees (if we weren’t wearing kneepads).  Did we quit everytime we fell off our bike?  I hope not.  When we face difficulty in our practice, we should endure and also use the Buddha’s teachings to be a rock to stand up on and hold firm to as we navigate the busy streets of our minds.  Let us take back the word “faith” and use it not negatively, but as something that allows us to keep going when the going gets tough.

With Metta,

Venerable Sucāra

At the time of the Buddha, there weren’t things such as Red Bull or no-doze, so he gave different techniques to work in the mind and the physical body to try to remove sleepiness.  First, the Buddha told him do not keep your mind on thoughts of drowsiness when they come to you.  If that did not cure it, he recommended to contemplate some aspect of the Dhamma (body of teachings) to try to inspire him out of his tired body.  When all else fails, the Buddha told him to get physical and try a couple things with his body to try to wake him up.  He was told to rub his ear-lobes, rub his arms with his hands, or splash water on his face.  If he was outside under either night sky or the sun, he was told to look to the stars or the sun and focus on the light as to inspire a mind to be without clouds, so it can shine brightly.  He told this monk to do walking meditation, so when he walked, he would be fully aware of how he is walking and all the sensations associated with it.  The last advice that the Buddha gave him sounds a bit counterintuitive: lie on your right side, placing foot on foot, always keeping your mind on thoughts of being awake and getting up from the lying position.  When he gets up from this lying position, he must maintain the thought “I will not indulge my desire to rest or lie down, for the pleasure of sleeping.”

In my own practice, I have found one technique that really seems to generate mental energy (viriya in Pali) within myself, it is the practice of loving-kindness (metta in Pali).  Even if I focus loving-kindness on myself and possibly a few other people who are near and dear to me in my life, it seems to uplift me and energize myself.  We can also see this apply when we are sick and aren’t really feeling like doing anything.  You can use this metta practice to give you energy to wake up out of a stupor and get things done.  Changing our attitude and mood is what we are trying to do in all these techniques, so if there is something you can do that can bring you into a better mood, like playing a favorite song or reading an inspiring poem, then do it as long as it doesn’t involve taking drugs or alcohol.  If we start each day with a metta practice, we bring the mind towards a positive attitude early on in the day, then you have a lot more energy and a greater ability to fend off things that would otherwise bring you down.

Viriya can also be translated as perseverance or effort or vigor, which adds a whole other take on this concept.  Not only do we want to reduce sleepiness (or sloth and torpor as some texts describe it), but sometimes we need something that can give us a boost in our practice.  We may get discouraged or loose a bit of faith, so sometimes we need a kick start.  When I was sent to study at a monastery that was a lot more quiet and less busy than the city temple I was studying in, my knowledge, confidence, and faith in the Dhamma increased manyfold.  By a greater amount of time to study books on Buddhism, especially the original teachings and of learning more of the traditional Theravada Buddhist chanting in the language of Pali, it kicked my practice into high gear.  If your practice is slowing down or in a rut, then read a few passages from the Buddha’s teachings and let it inspire you to continue on the path.

Often times, in some meditation groups, the teachings of the Buddha are also talked about in addition to the meditation practice.  Without the inspiration of a person just like you or me who reached his full potential and listening to his teachings, it makes for a difficult struggle for people to continue their meditation practice.  Sometimes when teaching meditation, the challenges that we face in the meditation aren’t always discussed but are very much there.  We often need courage to face our inner demons that will eventually pop up in the meditation practice after a person has practiced for a while.  Without this bedrock, this foundation of teachings and the inspiration of the Buddha’s enlightenment, we can all to easily fall from our practice and become discouraged from pursuing it further, despite the profound changes it may have on our lives.

Another technique that we can use if our practice is stuck, is the practice of metta, even if you practice just a little bit of it, your meditation will have generated a positive change in your mind and give you the space to get back into your normal practice.  In fact, the Buddha actually said that if in a just a finger-snap, you develop a thought of loving-kindness and dwell on it, then your meditation is not in vain and you are practicing his teachings well.

Let us remember the Buddha’s recommendations for getting out of a sleepy meditation session and recall he didn’t advocate for energy drinks, but focusing the mind on aspects of his teachings, abstaining from thoughts of sleepiness, to rubbing your ear lobes and arms, to splashing your face with water, and finally doing walking meditation and using the lying down position to generate a desire to not fall asleep.  Also recall that we can generate energy through the use of loving-kindness in our meditation to give us that extra boost that can keep us from falling over and hitting the person meditating next to us.  Remember that through studying the Buddha’s teachings, we can develop a strong base for our practice, so we can persevere in light of the difficult challenges that we may face in our practice and trying to continue with the practice.  Lastly, make use of metta to bring you into a more awakened mental state and to give you the energy to persevere through difficult times in your practice.

Blessings,

Sucāra

The best prescription to get rid of anger or ill-will that the Buddha recommended to us is to practice metta or loving-kindness. We can take that person who violated our trust, the person who cut us off in traffic, the person who paid for their groceries with pennies when we are in a hurry, or anyone else that causes us to develop ill-will towards them and extend out feelings of loving-kindness towards them. We like to start with ourself first, this is because you cannot give what you do not have. We have to fill the well of compassion before we can allow others to drink from it or take from it. Begin with positive thoughts of yourself such as “may I be well and happy,” “may I be at peace,” “may I have good health,” etc. Sometimes smiling while doing this along with evoking a mental image of something that stirs boundless compassion from within yourself. If it was a really terrible thing, you may have to do a gradual process, moving from those who you love to those who are mere acquaintances, and then onto this person or people in question.

Let us look at another phrase from that Metallica song, “twisting your mind and smashing your dreams.” This is a very apt way of looking at what anger and vengeance can do to a person. It has such an ability to make our mind clouded and prevents us from seeing how the world really is. Feelings like anger give us some satisfaction and may feel good for a little while, otherwise we wouldn’t be so fond of letting this emotion take hold of us. It gives us a sense of power and definitely has the adrenaline component. We have to learn that even though anger feels good at the time, we know that eventually it will get us in the end. We have seen on the local news where they talk about a crime of passion or a murder of passion. This passion, which depending on how severe it is, could wind you up in jail. If you talk with some people in prison, some of them were your typical person who didn’t really break too many laws, but were caught up in a moment that overtook them and then were caught. Don’t let anger or any other toxic emotion smash your dreams and twist your mind.

Once again, we have one more piece of wisdom from Metallica, “blinded by me, you cant see a thing.” Anger has this great ability to blind us from seeing beyond the moment we are in. The best way to counteract this aspect of anger is to practice meditation regularly and be able to bring mindfulness into our daily life. So when you feel the coals of anger heating up and getting ready to take off, we can see anger arise and let it go back down without letting the puppet master take over. We don’t have to put lighter fluid on the coals and make ourselves blinded by anger and controlled by it.

So let us cut the strings of anger and become our own puppet master by transforming this anger into a more positive, mood-changing attitude that doesn’t ruin your day. Also, remember that anger has the power to cause your dreams to go up in flames and cause your mind to loose its clarity or reason. Lastly, recall that anger has the power to blind you, so remember to practice meditation to be able to take the blinders off before anger takes a hold of you.

Blessings,

Sucāra

In Buddhism, we have a sutta, or scripture, that deals with this very issue. It is entitled the Abhaya Sutta, which roughly translates as the Fearless Sutta. It mainly deals with the realistic fact that we are all subject to death and that some of us fear death and some of us do not. He relays the reason why we have this great fear in that when we get a very nasty disease, we realize that we may be taken from all the sensual desires that we have grown attached to in this world. We often end up having a strong passion, thirst, or desire for the things in this life that usually make things difficult when we are thinking that we may become separated from the things we want badly. Another great point made in this sutta is of the person who has lived a life that he or she is not proud of. Committing a lot of bad deeds and doing things are what we often call in Buddhism, unskillful actions. Due to this, the person, upon having a chance encounter with death or a debilitating disease, really gets scared and is worried about going to a place reserved for those who act in this way. To sum up the general idea of this sutta, be less attached to those sensual things in this world and act in a good way, is the more sure way to be more fearless even in the face of the inevitable death.

We also can be so attached to ideas, mainly in regards to self-limiting ideas, that we end up being afraid to try new things. It could be as simple as trying to take a huge water bottle and putting it on top of the water cooler. This just happened to be one of those old types that does not have the part in the middle that pops out, which prevents the water from going all over the place. We can count one, two, three and then put it on there. If we make the area into a retaining pond, then it is okay, that would be the last time that person asked you to do this particular duty and you get to make merit by cleaning everything up, and it may have been the only time it has ever been mopped before. But, if you were able to accomplish this, it would help build up your self-confidence to take on new and other exciting tasks. Okay, maybe this task isn’t the most challenging one or will give you a huge burst of confidence, but it is just one more thing you can now do.

Not only in the face of grave illness and death, but in how we look at anything that challenges us from our comfort zone, we are given the choice to either allow fear to overtake us or we can take the Buddha’s advice and be fearless in the face of all these and more.

Blessings,

Sucāra

Suttas Referenced:
AN 4.184, Anguttara Nikya, Abhaya Sutta

Often times when we get sick, we get the blues. We tend to involve those around us in a pity party and almost reach a point if we feel bad enough, where they wait on us like a little child. Sometimes we get pulled out of this feeling of being in “the dumps” and someone or something brightens our day. We may still be sick, but by totally having our attitude change, we actually improve how we feel at that moment. The next time you are feeling sick and as a result, pretty unhappy, try to make yourself happy. If nothing else than making a very funny face in the mirror. Try it, if nothing else, you will laugh at how ridiculous you are being. Happiness is the best medicine as they say. I am often reminded of the movie, Patch Adams, where the doctor acted like a clown and made his patients laugh in order to brighten their day and help them heal faster.

Sometimes we have to come into contact with individuals that either don’t like us very much, or we don’t like them very much. Our metta practice is a very useful tool when dealing with difficult people. With metta, you try to conjure up a feeling of boundless compassion within yourself and then point that towards someone. Memories or just imagining a certain animal or picture can bring this about. You can think of a baby or kitten or two long lost friends who meet after decades of being separated. We start with ourself first, as you cannot give what you do not have. When we use this feeling, we also want to combine it with a phrase like “may this person be at peace” or “may this person enjoy happiness.” Basically, it is something that you would want to happen to you or someone you love. When we are finished with bringing this feeling and saying the phrase in our mind towards ourself, then you move onto those who you love. It can be helpful for you imagine the person smiling and you can also enhance this loving kindness feeling by smiling while you are directing this positive energy towards the person. You eventually will move onto someone more neutral to you, like someone who you pass everyday on the way to work but don’t really know or the person who bagged your groceries the other day. The last group of people you do are those who you have negative feelings towards or those who would do you harm. By bringing them into the object of your meditation, you are not only wishing them this compassion, but it also changes your attitude towards them. I found that after I did this for a while towards one of the bosses when I worked at a retail headquarters, I actually was able to say good morning to this person I disliked. It may never change the person who you are directing it towards, but it also makes you a much happier person and you can treat everyone in a more equanimious way.

This next part is what I call metta in action. Sometimes we can’t wait to be on the cushion at home to meditate and practice metta towards someone who ticked us off. When a person does something that makes you angry at him or her, or if you really have some negative attitudes towards him or her, just the mere presence of the person turns your skin, we can bring this practice into action right then. Immediately after the event occurs, take some deep breaths and do the loving kindness towards yourself and then move it to the person of your ire. I have tried this many times and its amazing how effective it is. It may not always be a person that really devastates your mood and overtakes you, sometimes it is just an event itself that is beyond your control. When this happens, I have been able to bring myself back to a calm state by doing at least a little loving kindness practice towards myself and towards anyone else involved in the situation at hand.

Please remember to bring humor into your life when you are sick or otherwise get in a moopy mood. Take care to also bring a practice of loving kindness towards people who cause you to be unhappy and then to bring this practice into your everyday activities when it sets you off. I hope you all can be your own clowns and metta practitioners.

Blessings,

Sucāra

We should look at our beliefs and see if there are any filters that are causing us to see things in a tainted way. The best way to be able to do this is through the regular practice of meditation. The aspect of the Dhamma I am talking about here is right view. Without having a clear way of looking out into our world, we may be taking our boat into uncharted territories through a misty fog where we can’t see the rocks right in front of us. By being able to take a look back at our lives and how we are doing things, we can see that holding onto this negative view or having a self-limiting idea that is really harming me in the long run.

So often we seem to limit our selves by our thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. Seeing things through a fractured lens makes what we are working towards a challenge at best to get the right results. From having a wrong view of things, everything else is affected. From our actions, speech, effort, mindfulness, livelihood, etc; everything is affected and brings about less than ideal results. In English, we sometimes use a different translation of right, like skillful or wholesome. We are now going to explore three simple things that affect right view, which are called the roots of the unskillful: greed, hatred, and delusion.

First, we will look at delusion. It is becoming increasingly common for many in the west to not have the best attitude towards one’s self. I remember one of the first times I heard the Dalai Lama talk, he was so baffled by how many westerners just don’t love themselves. We have this self-defeating mindset that we aren’t worthy of this or that and turn many of our thoughts against ourselves. Sometimes we take these thoughts to discourage ourselves from presenting the topics we know so well. This incorrect view completely disables us from reaching our full potential as people and will affect everything from this point on.

With hatred, it can completely blind us from seeing things and it permanently affects things when it is expressed as anger. There is a great story that illustrates this. Once there was a child who had a bad anger problem. His father gave him a box of nails and told him every time he got angry, he should hammer a nail in the fence. Upon the first day, he had nailed over 30 nails in the fence. After a while, the child got tired of nailing the nails, so he learned it was easier to not loose his temper than to keep nailing nails. Several days passed and he hadn’t nailed any nails, he told his father and he told him for each day that he didn’t get angry, he should pull a nail out. Eventually all the nails were pulled out and the father told the child to look at the fence. He looked at the fence and realized what his dad was trying to teach him. There were many holes with light coming through in the fence, as with nails, anger leaves scars with all that it touches. From hatred, it stops us from acting in a right way, performing our job in a right way, saying things in a right manner, etc. It burns all that it touches and affects our ability to do good.

Greed can consume us and we are always seeking more and more, without seeing what is in front of us. An intense drive to obtain as many material objects as possible is one of the main causes of our suffering. Keeping up with the Jonses is a great problem in our society. On the other hand, the Buddha did not advocate poverty, in fact he talked about how bad it was because it can lead us to borrowing and thus getting ourselves in more debt and creating more suffering four ourselves. He also did not talk about whether we have to be rich either, but rather knowing how to be content with what we have is the greatest wealth to be attained. This comes from developing a non-attachment to the things we have and just use it, so they do not possess or use us. It is more of a psychological renunciation than that of a full giving up of possession. By developing this, we can let go of the greed that causes us to have a wrong view.

In addition to the roots of wrong view, we can also look at three different types of unwholesome actions that help bring us unhappiness in our lives. First, we will look at the physical actions: killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct. Second, we have verbal actions: lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, and idle chatter. Third, we have mental actions: covetousness, ill will, and wrong view. I think we can agree that the physical actions are pretty self-explanatory that they are things we should lend ourselves to not do. In the range of verbal actions, the thing that may have perked your interest is idle chatter.

Idle chatter is looked at as something without any real point or meaning and goes well beyond providing a useful function. It often clouds the mind and wastes one’s time that could be best used doing something that helps grow us on our spiritual path. I am often reminded of the cartoon series Charlie Brown when the teachers or some other adult talked, you couldn’t really understand a word they were saying. You can use that auditory or mental image to remind yourself of what you are doing when you catch yourself engaging in idle chatter again. The other aspects of verbal actions are pretty self explanatory and we should already know not to practice those.

In Buddhism, we also focus on mental actions, as they are the forerunner to bringing about physical actions as well. By participating in any of the mental actions like ill will or covetousness, we are actually watering the seeds that may grow into physical actions or even more of these mental actions to continue to grow and propagate into more of our mental states.

Remember to guard against leading our views delude us from reaching our full potential as well as letting anger make the fences in our lives full of nails that don’t need to be there. Also, take care to work on a psychological renunciation of our possessions, so we can live a much more content life with or without the things we have. Lastly, be mindful of the various actions that you take throughout your life and recognize whether they are wholesome or not, especially the more subtle ones of idle chatter and mental actions.

Blessings,

Sucāra

We are like fish living every day breathing our air through water. Sometimes we get pulled out of the ocean of our life and get thrown onto the deck of a boat. At this point, we are forced to evolve lungs to breathe the air. Many difficulties that we face in life are very distressing and forces us to grow and adapt to the new situation. Wanting things to be the same all the time, when everything is always changing around us, is no way to live. Yet, so many of us live this way day in, day out. I am reminded of the phrase “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Through these challenges that we face in life, we grow and change with them. We run into the problem of suffering when we don’t want to allow these changes to occur. Mark Twain has some very apt words for how suffering affects us: “Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.” No matter how big the problems we have are, they can take hold of us and make it the only thing that matters.

We have to learn to practice renunciation of thoughts, ideas, beliefs, or anything else that has become a hindrance to your practice and happiness in your life. Even if it is something that you have thought or done your entire life, if it does not work for you anymore, then throw it out the window. The Buddha talked about not following something just because it was tradition, said by a wise person, or always was so. He wanted people to test and see if the teachings or ideas were true and made sense. If you are being paralyzed by an idea or belief, renounce it or let go of it. Sometimes we need a ritual to formalize the letting go, write it on a piece of paper and then shred it or burn it. By putting it into an action, we are making it even more of a conscious choice to put it behind us and move on.

Sometimes it isn’t just an idea or thought, but more of a feeling that comes up in our lives. Whether it be anger, sadness, greed, or any other negative emotion or feeling. With any of these, the best antidote is to practice compassion and love. There is a great story that illustrates this perfectly. There was once a kingdom where the king had gone off and left his palace for a short period of time, while he was gone, this foul looking creature entered the palace and sat on the king’s thrown. This made the king’s men very angry so they started yelling at the creature and telling him he needs to leave the thrown at once. With every shout of anger, the creature grew much larger. It was not long before the creature was almost as tall as the ceiling. They called for the king and got him to come back and explained to him how the monster keeps growing and growing. The king was a wise man and saw that with every bit of anger the people directed towards it, it grew much larger. He baffled everyone and asked the monster if he would like to stay for dinner and if he wanted to have tea. The monster shrank little by little, the king told everyone to start treating the monster with kindness. Before long, the monster was at the point where it was about to vanish with one more act of kindness. It vanished with one last act of love. I find it very beneficial to visualize the feeling as a big monster and then embrace it with love and even try to put your arms around it. When I first had heard about this technique, I laughed and thought it really wouldn’t work. I gave it a try and its amazing how fast the emotion that overwhelmed me, vanished.

Please take a moment to breathe deeply the air and realize that we can be transformed by changes in our lives and let go of how we used to be. Do not let the anger eating monster take over your life, so practice love and compassion to those things inside us that we want to overcome.

Blessings,

Sucāra

We can look at our practice like that of making a hill of dirt with one shovel at a time. Eventually we will have a mighty hill to over look and see the world. From this vantage point, we can see our defilements and attachments. Since we are high above things, we can also see that they are smaller than before. Nature, though, has a natural process called erosion, so we need to continue to build upon the hill. Also, we can take a look at the time and effort that we spend on our practice building this hill, as time away from feeding these impediments to our practice. Just like erosion occurring, we can liken this to when we are sick with a cold and need to take medicine. The doctor advises us to not quit taking the medicine even if you start feeling better. So when the going is good in our minds and not having too much drama in our life, we have a tendency to stop doing our practice. We sometimes even joke at the temple “why haven’t we seen so and so?” and we usually respond by saying they must have got married or got a boyfriend or girlfriend.

When your life changes in an instant and you really need some inner help to deal with these things, without a consistent practice, it makes it more difficult to deal with things as they arise. A not oft used phrase in meditation talks is that we need to make our mindfulness and discernment practice brave enough to able to burn defilements and attachments because otherwise, these things will end up burning us. We have to develop this strength within us, so we can make the power that these things have over us be further dissipated.

We all have pain at some point in our lives, the trick in dealing with it is to come to an understanding that it is a natural occurrence and it is not our pain. It is something that comes from the things that make us human: form, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. By looking at this pain as coming from one of these aggregates, it helps us to see how they interact with one another. In watching how it arises and interacts with each one, we can develop a stronger practice of mindfulness and discernment. Otherwise, we continue to allow our mind to magnify and expand what was just pain into something that becomes the entire focus of our consciousness.

In regards to our daily lives, let us now take a look at what really arises and what really falls away. You may experience an event and react based on if it is was a good or a bad event. Think of everything that occurs in your life as a form of stress. Whether good or bad, stress will arrive, stay for a while, and then fall away. In fact, it is the only thing that actually happens. When we look at it in that way, we can then use the skills of discernment from our practice, to be less affected in situations that are either positive or negative. By working on this ideal, it allows us to be more clear headed in the world, less swayed by events and being more content and happy with what is going on around you.

I hope some day to see many tall hills here and afar, so that we can make our lives and the lives of those we meet that much better.

Blessings,

Sucāra

I find that when I meditate, I see profound changes in my life. Off and on, I have stopped meditating for a period of time. Let’s say a week, then I see how I react to things and people and events. Its quite amazing seeing the changes just one week without the meditation did to me. The problem we have is that if this continues to happen, before long, you really see these weeds that you pulled earlier coming back. I relate meditation in this respect to that of a weed killer. When we are meditating and learning to live our life more mindfully, we are promoting the growth of certain things in our lives. By meditating, we are able to continue to water these good seeds within ourselves. Weeds will grow here and there just like a garden in our mind, but when we are more mindful of what is going on inside us, it makes it a lot easier to pull this weed or that weed. When we get out of practice for a while or just starting up, it sometimes seems like we have nothing but a weed garden. Everything is coming at us all the time and it makes our practice difficult, but just like in the garden, we pull one weed out at a time and before long we have great soil to plant things that bear great fruit.

When things just aren’t going our way, we tend to get all bent out of shape about it. We complain to our spouse, friends, co-workers, or anybody else within an earshot. One of the teachings that I find very useful in Buddhism and always have to keep reminding myself of is a very simple idea: wanting something to be different than it actually is, is a source of great suffering. A related teaching that explains why this is so, is the simple truth that the only thing that remains the same is that everything changes. This applies not only to those things that bring us a lot of sadness, but also things that make us happy. For example, when we washed our car and luck would have it, a bird had a really bad lunch that day and graced your clean car with a gift from above. We can get really mad and complain to our buddies at work about it and ruin our entire day, or we can realize that clean cars are subject to getting dirty. This is a silly example, but shows this concept very simply. Often times the teaching of grasping or pushing away gives Buddhists a bad name as we are sometimes seen as being very pessimistic about life and the world. We acknowledge that even if you are having a great time and are very happy with something, it too will go away. On the other side of that coin, we also see that when you are sad and having an all around bad time, it too will pass. It isn’t that we are always looking for the downside of everything, but we are being realistic about the way things are. Enjoy life while you can, but acknowledge that what you have is subject to change.

By having this realization of impermanence, it reduces the level of suffering in your life. It can also make those hard times a lot more bearable. The ideal way of going through your life is to be what is called “stainless.” With this, I am referring to being able to go out into the world and be unchanged by either the good or bad things that happen. We aren’t trying to be cold and distant in the situations we are facing, but we work on what we would like to see, but don’t get too attached to the outcome. Just be with the experience that is happening in the here and now. Stories upon stories are often made up in our minds when planning something and when it doesn’t come out the way we thought it would, we tend to feel sad.

I have always been one to live and die by the schedule. You could say my strongest attachment has been the attachment to schedules and order. In my life at the temple, there is anything but schedules that remain the same. You plan to do one thing, something happens, and its all thrown up in the air and you end up not even doing it. It is a great challenge putting this teaching into practice in this “live in the moment” environment. This environment challenges me to be more accepting and able to give up this grasping at schedules and the order that comes from following them. One big thing that I have done is retire my watch, it was just an object that encouraged attachment to time and schedule. I still can look at the time here and there, but it helped me to be less focused on it. In my own experience, it appears that sometimes we may have to change something outside us to help our reduce grasping at or pushing away things.

Don’t forget to practice weeding your garden on a daily basis, its amazing how fertile the soil can become when we make it a continued practice. Even if we do it for a few minutes a day, it is just one less weed that we have to pull out. Look at the daily things that affect you as you go off into the world, see if you can find the roots of attachment in your activities or thoughts. When we take a look at these things, maybe we can make an effort to be more stainless and untouched by the crazy things that happen in life. May your minds be free of weeds and bear plentiful fruits.

Blessings,

Sucāra

I tried an experiment starting yesterday, it was an interesting attempt to see how I react. I usually drink a soda or two a day, usually with meals. I found that I was always desiring that soda or maybe even more soda after I had my last one at the last meal of the day. As a little test, during one of my meditations I decided to not drink soda for a day or two. The results actually taught me something about craving and desire, also allowed me to bring some of the teachings on attachment and craving into my everyday life. The desire to want a soda was strong and I would have to mindfully tell myself, this too will pass. I would get caught up in other things and amazingly enough, I did not need that soda after all. I am not saying that we should all give up sodas, but I am saying that sometimes we don’t realize how much our lives revolve around an attachment to the world. When we are not able to get to satisfy this attachment, that is where we start to bring about what the Buddha called “dukkha”, usually translated as anguish or suffering. The simplest way I have seen this described in one context is suffering is what you have when you don’t want to have pain.

When someone is in a great deal of pain, there tends to be an attachment to this pain, which amplifies it. We can either accept the pain and move on, or we can complain and exaggerate it and make it a focus of our entire being. Some of us have known people like this, they are grouchy and always seem to have something in the world that is bringing them more suffering. Rather than transforming our mind through mindfulness in meditation or bringing it into our daily life through the recognizing of sensations, these people often are unaware that this is even occurring.

Let me give you a well known Buddhist story about loss and attachment. There was a father and a son, one day the father went off to market and left his son home. While the father was gone, someone kidnapped his child and burned his house down. When the father got home, he found a burnt corpse, thinking that this body was that of his child, he grieved and grieved and would not accept his child’s death. A great deal of time passed away and the son managed to escape his captors and went to find his father. The father told the child that you are not my son, my son died in a house fire. No matter what the child did, his father could not see that he was his son. I am not saying that we shouldn’t grieve when someone close to us dies, but we should not be caught up so much into attachment and desire for someone to live forever.

One thing that always remains the same is the fact that everything changes. By us not being aware and accepting this, we grasp and try to hold onto things with the illusion that everything has a permanent and unchanging nature. I recommend just for a short period of time, maybe a day or two, give up one thing that you use on a daily basis and practice mindful of craving and see if it changes how you act on a daily basis. You could try soda, the internet, television, computers, video games, or anything. Just give it a shot and see how you do.

Blessings,

Sucāra