01/01/2021
Here are some highlights from last night's public talk. Thank you for the inspiration and hope, Gen Tenzin, and thank you to everyone who participated!
Here are some highlights from last night’s public talk with Gen Tenzin: Restoring Hope in the New Year: Inspiring Solutions for Healing & Finding Peace in 2021. Thank you, Gen Tenzin, for the practical wisdom you shared with us!
"Buddha's teachings help us learn how to become calm, clear, and positive all the time."
“What generally happens to me in my heart when my mind is calm? Maybe you’ve noticed when you’re in a really good mood … and something goes wrong, maybe you break your favorite coffee cup, you think, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ It doesn’t matter, because inside we feel good. So this experience is very important to identify–that when we’re feeling good inside, when our mind is positive, bad things can happen outside and we stay happy. This is something that is very important to recognize in our own life, and you can use your own examples of times in your life when you’ve been in a good mood and things have gone wrong.”
“If we’re able to generate a positive mind, a happy mind, through meditation and through relying on Buddha’s teachings, then we’ll be like that person who is in a really good mood and breaks their coffee cup, or they get in a fender bender. We’ll actually experience peace of mind anyway, and that is very important to recognize–that that’s possible. Sometimes we just assume, ‘something goes bad, I feel bad.’ We think, ‘It’s definitely a cause of feeling bad when something goes wrong.' … This idea that when something goes wrong, I definitely feel bad, that’s what Buddha is trying to get us to look at. That’s what he’s trying to say is not correct. It is not correct that just because something goes wrong, I have to feel bad. This insight is really at the core of why we need to do meditation.”
“The reason why we log onto our meditation stream, the reason why we study spiritual things, is because we want to be happy. And to be happy, we need to know how to create happiness.”
“If we listen carefully to what happiness is and where we can find it, then we can have insight. And then, instead of being confused or worried, we can know where we’re going and feel good, like ‘I’m on a path.’”
