Find peace

"... if you don't have peace, it isn't because someone took it from you; you gave it away. You cannot always control what happens to you, but you can control what happens in you." John Maxwell

acknowledge you don’t need anything outside of you to make you happy.

What we do not appreciate is that while we cannot control what is going on outside of us, the way we feel inside is our own responsibility. Depression is telling us there is something we have not yet learned—that we create our own reality—when we change our thoughts, we change the way we feel.

The best way to make friends with your mind is to know what your mind loves.

What the conceptual mind loves more than anything is having something to do. It loves being very active all the time.

In fact, if the conceptual mind doesn’t have something to keep it busy, then it can create a lot of trouble.

So in the beginning, you need to start by giving your conceptual mind a job—and that job is meditation.

Most people think of the mind as being thoughts and emotions, but these are actually just the appearance of the mind, not the true nature of the mind itself. We have these two main aspects of the mind:

—the appearance of mind,

—and the nature of mind.

We spend most of our lives lost in the appearance of mind, without any understanding of the nature of mind itself. We are always looking for our true selves outside of ourselves, in our thoughts and emotions.

So, we are constantly looking in the wrong direction—as if we were facing the west and looking for the sunrise. 

It is not the appearances themselves that are the problem—it is how the mind perceives them, grasps at them, and tries to solidify them as if they were real.

Therefore as in the Buddhist teachings, the main advice for this life is to purify our projections of the mind and realize the nature of mind.

Through the practice of meditation, we can tame our mind by becoming more and more familiar with the essence of mind.

When we conquer our own minds, we become master of our perceptions. When we transform our perceptions, then even appearances will begin to change.

Ultimately, through taming our mind, we can arrive at the profound purity of the nature of mind, that great peace which the Buddha spoke of at the moment of his enlightenment over 2,500 years ago in India, beneath the Bodhi tree in what is now known as Bodhgaya.