Here is some parting advice:
No matter what, don’t be a traitor to yourself.
Do not trade your happiness away; do not sell yourself out in exchange for anxiety, resentment, addiction, and loneliness.
Promise yourself now:
From here on out, to the best of my ability, I will take care of myself, body and mind, emotions, and perceptions.
From here on out, I will make the most of my journey.
Caring
As we study, we may find ourselves wondering how:
How can we bring balance into our life?
How can we find a way not to depend on external conditions and objects?
How much knowledge can we bring to our lives, and how can we unite with this knowledge?
How can we embody it?
How seems to demand action; but paradoxically, the best way to work with these hows may be to practice stillness.
Knowledge of OK Mantra
Regardless of our past, we can now make a choice for our future.
If we are determined to work on ourselves honestly and intelligently much worthwhile growth can take place.
Honesty is required because we have to learn to take care of ourselves in the best possible way; intelligence is required because there are many obstacles to overcome.
Unless we are relentlessly honest, ultimately we will cheat ourselves by trying to cover up our mistakes or trying to escape our difficulties, rather than confronting ourselves and bringing about meaningful change.
If we want to attain inner peace and balance, we must begin with honesty.
Tibetan Meditation
Beauty inseparable from love protects and opens the heart, and stimulates the soul to grow.
Natural goodness reveals itself, witnessed by appreciation that expands and deepens.
Mandala Gardens
For this exercise, set aside 20 minutes or so in a place you do not know.
Go for a walk, or just sit quietly.
Let yourself appreciate the newness, the unknowingness.
Anything could happen—but maybe nothing at all will happen.
Either way, you don’t need to have any expectations.
Just relax and release.
Let go.
Dimensions of Mind
Right here and now, in the middle of fears and worries, surrounded by the complexity of the modern world, you can open to a new way of living.
You can let go of the idea that you can’t, or you don’t know how, or you aren’t good enough.
You can understand that anxious, insecure mind will keep looping round and round identifying problems.
There aren’t enough solutions in the universe to keep pace with a mindlike that!
Without avoiding responsibilities, without running away from everyday life, you can be calm and joyful.
Instead of living in a world of constant conceptualizing, you can bring ease to body and mind, and simply be.
Gesture of Great Love
It is easy to say the word “compassion,” or even to generate feelings of sympathy toward others, but the real meaning of compassion only begins to manifest when we are ready to dedicate body and mind toward positive results for year after year.
Here it is certainly true that actions speak louder than words.
TNMC Annals, Guidance and Teaching
Awareness generally means to be “aware of some thing”— to look at objects, to recognize, identify, and try to understand them.
This is commonsense awareness.
But as a living experience, natural awareness is simple and direct, open and responsive, without concepts, words, images and interpretations.
Awareness takes place within the first moment, not before, and not after.
It is immediate, spontaneous.
There is no other “thing” to obscure the moment—there is no subject or object, no time or space.
All that remains is within this openness, which neither words nor concept can describe.
There is complete freedom from our restless attempts to hold on to something, to be secure in some distraction or some trance-like fixation.
There is no fear and no guilt—no desire to escape or be any other way.
There becomes complete self-acceptance and generates a fresh new outlook all its own.
Tibetan Meditation
We could get more out of our work and life if we had less.
This does not mean that we should giveaway and try to live on nothing, or that we should feel guilty about enjoying what we have.
It means that there is a beauty to living and working with precision and efficiency, to taking only what we need.
This brings inner balance to living and a sense of peaceful attunement with everything around us.
But this immediate connection to values, this clarity about what we really need, can be obscured when we have too much.
Skillful Means
According to the yogic tradition, a healthy mind is one that knows how to inhabit the present moment.
Undisturbed by memories of the past, free of fears in the present, and unconcerned with projections of the future, a healthy mind engages experience freshly and directly. Western psychological and therapeutic thought has come to respect the importance of the present moment for mental health: it is a common idea nowadays that the answer to many of our emotional problems is to “get present” to live in the moment.
The present moment is the moment of embodiment.
This is when the event takes place: this is the right now of our experience. We may assume that the present is where we live—yet are we present in the present?
Are we truly living in the present tense?
Instead of engaging the moment, we often seem to be engaged in reflections of reflections, as if we lived in a recursive mirror-maze, its passages turning endlessly in upon themselves. The whirl of our ordinary thought process—our plans, daydreams, and internal monologues—effectively assures that our awareness remains disassociated from the present moment.
We are just too busy to be present.
We are preoccupied, thinking something about something else; then we are busy thinking about our reflections that though-of-something, inspiring further reflections and analysis until no thing is left – just wheels within wheels and meanings of meanings
A curious effect of asking the question of what is actually happening when we are not present is that we begin to examine our experience openly and honestly.
As we recognize that we are not present, the moment of recognition has power to engage us in the now.
It presents the present.
Kum Nye Dancing