Meditation Practices to Reduce Suffering

The Dalai Lama is the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan people. He is also probably the most inspiring teacher of meditation practices to reduce suffering.

The 14th Dalai Lama -Tenzin Gyatzo

The Tibetan people have suffered tremendously at the hands of the Chinese and those in exile had to leave everything behind. Yet, they seem to have a positive attitude about life and avoid self-defeating emotions.

When the Dalai Lama first heard about westerners having a lot of self-hatred, he didn’t even understand how this could be possible. Apparently, self-hatred is absent from the Tibetan people, wherever they live.

External circumstances are not what draw us into suffering. Suffering is caused and permitted by an untamed mind. The appearance of self-defeating emotions in our minds leads us to faulty actions. The naturally pure mind is covered over by these emotions and troubling conceptions. The force of their deceit pushes us into faulty actions, which leads inevitably to suffering.

We need, with great awareness and care, to extinguish these problematic attitudes, the way gathering clouds dissolve back into the sphere of the sky. When our self-defeating attitudes, emotions, and conceptions cease, so will the harmful actions arising from them.

As the great Tibetan yogi Milarepa says, “When arising, arising within space itself; when dissolving, dissolving back into space.” We need to become familiar with the state of our own minds to understand how to dissolve ill-founded ideas and impulses back into the deeper sphere of reality. The sky was there before the clouds gathered, and it will be after they have gone. It is also present when the clouds seem to cover every inch of the sky we can see.(p.22)

–from How to Expand Love: Widening the Circle of Loving Relationships by H.H. the Dalai Lama, translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins

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