Mindfulness & You – Self Empowerment

Sacred Lives, Sacred Homes, Sacred Service

I hope that what I can provide you is just the right set of tools and the right amount of discipline to help you get on with the most important aspect of your life. This Kit will gently alert you to the fact of your own mortality, and provide you with several tools designed to greatly increase your chances of an advantageous poised-for-Enlightenment rebirth. Contemplating death is not a morbid preoccupation. Rather, to recognize the inevitability of death puts our life into a better perspective.

Being reborn as a human in a favorable environment should be high on our agenda.

Although life in the human realm is difficult and dangerous, this Is the place to be. Actually, the human birth is meant to be challenging. Life provides the opportunity to learn and grow psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. I absolutely believe that the central reason we were all born is to enrich and uplift ourselves.

You are obliged to live your own life, and you should be free to do what your desires dictate. When the mistake alarm bell rings there is obviously an opportunity to learn a life lesson. That’s how the system works. No doubt you have made plenty of mistakes this time around. Actually, most people live a whole lifetime engaged only in mistake making! It is particularly important to function intelligently within your family because these are people to whom you deeply connect. It is all too simple to accumulate further negative karma with family members. For example, during times of stress it is easy to speak insensitively, thereby, creating a considerable amount of negative karma. In particular, “media saturated” people quickly lose what little balance they have and become overwhelmed by dramatic family situations. Viewing TV, reading newspapers, and staying on top of the dramas happening in the world causes a lot of anxiety and frustration to short circuit are ability to respond appropriately to events in our personal lives. In our intimate relationships, more so than any other, there is a need to function with spontaneous penetrating wisdom, with humanity, with love and with compassion. Penetrating wisdom is a critical aspect because it can see through circumstance. Wisdom recognizes the need for compassion beginning with compassion for ourselves. I regard family and intimate relationships as academies for training ourselves to act and live as whole, kind-hearted human beings. In the family, in marriages and partnerships, we soak up massive amounts of pain from disappointment, frustration, jealousy, misunderstanding, etc. As painful as this is , all of this is needed to cultivate wisdom. I want to support and encourage you to not waste these occasions.

Actually, when we observe our psychological states carefully, we can see that much of our life plods along without too much emotional impact. Still, we are wired in such a sensitive way that even small slights or moments of uneasiness can bring on distressing mental states. We are vulnerable to being thrown into states of utter misery. Suffering in all its forms all dominates our emotional experience. Its ranges from slight discomfort to complete anguish. Why do we have to suffer so much? The answer is simple: “dysfunctional” karma brought us here. We are heirs of our own home made karma. More on that in a moment.

We all experience a great deal of psychological suffering because we are so vulnerable to emotional pain and anxiety. Anxiety breeds fear, and fear is a deep and primordial condition. The irony of it all is that mental suffering, though it appears to be something that we are condemned to endure, is totally unnecessary. It only arises when we get involved with the past or begin projecting into the future (for the future is really just the echo of the past). When we proliferate in this manner it gives birth to conflict, hesitation, confusion, etc. The reason the mind wanders around in the past and future is that it is weak and undisciplined. Strong minds aren’t caught in lethargy. Occasionally there are fleeting moments when we feel pleasant and light. For most of us, these are fleeting moments when we experience relief from a sense of having to bear the weight of our identity.
In fact, both pleasant and unpleasant are equal; they are both conditions ripe for learning. However, gaining a foothold on insight while we are drunk on a happiness high is much more difficult than learning from physical or psychological pain. From this perspective it’s a good thing that suffering is pervasive in our lives. Everyone’s life is dominated by suffering—regardless of whether they see it or not. When suffering occurs we tend to want to escape. But the pain, the trauma, the broken heart, the disappointment, the unfulfilled expectations that feature prominently in our personal biography are the very experiences from which we grow wise and compassionate. If we are wise, we will contemplate all these events and make good use of them. Without wisdom the melodrama of our lives would go to waste. If we are to escape from chronic suffering we need to make good use of the suffering we experience. Not try do everything to run away (or drink ourselves away) from it. There is something lodged in the habits of foolish or lazy people, which call them to flee from discomfort. Many of us develop a hair-trigger aversion to pain simply because we really looked inside the experience. Suffering has gotten a bad reputation. The wise recognize suffering as the compost for development.

A Life Transforming Program

My program for generating a spiritual transformation requires only a few practices everyday. These practices will definitely pull your life toward Spirit. And not in a manner that requires you to take any religion on board. The simple core practices offered here will take you beyond any conventional religion, as they in-form not only your mind, but also go straight to your Heart. They will lead you to understand several universal laws. The first such law is that we derive more satisfaction by letting-go, giving, and helping others, than from shrewdly grabbing things for ourselves. Another universal law is that the whole of the future emanates out of this present moment. And that principle is best understood through contemplating “Karma”. The Law of Karma is our eternal teacher. It teaches us the value of goodness, of harmlessness, and of appropriate behavior. The law is concerned and applies only to intentional actions. Recognizing that our intentional actions have spiritual consequences is a fact that brings meaning to our life. In a moment you will see how this applies to “Soul Mates”.

Returning to the need to let-go, we can come to see that everything in the world is in a state of flux and flow — we can’t control any of it, and the whole show belongs to Nature. Learning to let-go is the key to moving along in life. This is often easier said than done but it is invariably necessary because this world is a world of change. We really can’t keep anything for long. In the end, we leave without even our name. Letting go initiates forgiveness. Wisdom and life experience recognizes that we get more by forgiving than by fomenting fantasies of revenge. And we get more by preparing for death than by struggling for the impossible eternal life where we get to keep all our stuff, all our toys. By relinquishing greed and selfishness we find ourselves content and selfless. At the very least, we are better able to deal with all the various personal and social problems that come with being alive on this planet. Modern life is a beehive of bewildering complexity often fueled by struggling to hold on to this and that while struggling to get rid of something (or somebody) else. That struggle is a kind of insanity. Learn to let go and the chronic problem with confusion (too much fusion) will abate, and clarity and charity will permeate the mind.

Monk Sumano

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