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In this issue we bring you an exclusive article, as well as news of two
events running in June. We hope you can join us on one of them!
1. A Love
as Deep as Life Itself!
The highest form of love
in the Buddhist tradition is called upekkha — a word that literally
means "intimately seeing." Upekkha is often translated as
equanimity, or balance, but this does not even begin to capture the
reverential, cherishing and other-regarding nature of this spiritual
quality. It recognizes that if we truly want beings to be happy we
should rejoice in and encourage the cultivation of insight in ourselves
and others.
Upekkha, the quality
we'll be exploring on this 28-day online meditation course, represents
the unity of wisdom and compassion — our whole being integrated in the
desire to liberate oneself and others from suffering. In helping us to
relate to beings in terms of their deepest desire for wellbeing and to
recognize their innate potential for awakening, upekkha is a love as
deep as life itself.
This event is suitable
for people of all levels of experience, including complete beginners.
2. Living
With Awareness!
Mindfulness has been
clinically proven to reduce stress, promote feelings of wellbeing, and
improve mental and physical health. It's a powerfully transformative
quality that helps us develop greater presence and calmness, reduced
emotional reactivity, and greater emotional stability. In short, mindfulness
puts us back in change of our own lives.
This 28-day online
meditation event offers guided meditations, exercises, and tips to help
you bring more mindfulness into your life and experience the powerful
benefits of this practice.
This event is suitable
for people of all levels of experience, including complete beginners.
The most
important thing you need to know about life, according to Buddhism
 Arguably
the central teaching of Buddhism, without which the others make no
sense, is that things change.
While “things change” may
seem like a commonplace observation, made by dozens (at least) of
philosophers and religious teachers over the last few millennia, the
Buddha wasn’t content simply to pay lip-service to the concept of impermanence,
but followed through the implications of this fact as far as he
possibly could.
He saw our resistance to
change as the source of our suffering. He talked about this resistance
in terms of clinging — a desperate attempt to hold onto stability in the
flowing river of time.
Clinging sometimes
manifests as expectation —
we want something to happen in a particular way, and we suffer when it
doesn’t. This can result in huge amounts of suffering, when for example
we have unrequited love (expecting the other person to reciprocate our
feelings when they don’t), or when we get depressed when life doesn’t
turn out the way we’d expected it to. Expectation can also work in much
smaller ways, though, as when we get frustrated when we want the
traffic or supermarket checkout line to move faster than it does.
One of the implications
of impermanence is that things are changing in dependence on things
that are also changing. The movements of traffic depend on the weather,
on road conditions, on the number of people on the road, the individual
mental states of drivers, and so on. Life is complex, and largely out
of our control.
And so one way we can
become happier is to recognize when we have expectations, and to let go
of them. To give you an example from my own life, I’d often feel
frustrated when my kids (who are still fairly young) take longer than I
expect to do things I want them to do, like get ready to go out. I used
to end up getting annoyed with them, and sometimes yelling. Now I’m
more likely to see that I have an expectation that’s going to make me
suffer, and to let go of it. Taking a deep breath, letting go, and
accepting that I can’t control my children helps me to be more at ease
when we’re getting ready to go someplace.
We can also let go of
expectations that we won’t age or get sick, that the weather will
cooperate with our plans, that our possessions will last forever
without breaking, and so on.
While the fact of things
changing can seem like a problem that we have to manage, it’s also a
blessing. We’re capable of change. We may have habits that cause
suffering for us and others around us, but we can unlearn those habits.
And we can learn new ways of being. We can learn to be wiser, kinder,
more patient, and so on. There’s nothing about us that is so fixed that
it can’t change.
The Buddha’s teachings
emphasized how the mind can progressively change in ways that allow us
greater happiness and freedom. Without getting too technical, he
outlined several lists of progressive mental states leading to the complete
freedom from suffering that’s called Awakening or nirvana.
When we resist change,
it’s a curse. When we accept change, it’s simply a fact. When we use
change as a tool, it’s a blessing.
With love,
Bodhipaksa
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