1. LIVE WITH COMPASSION
Compassion is one of the most revered qualities in Buddhism
and great compassion is a sign of a highly realized human being.
Compassion doesn’t just help the world at large, and it
isn’t just about the fact that it’s the right thing to do. Compassion, and
seeking to understand those around you, can transform your life for a number of
reasons.
First, self-compassion is altogether critical towards
finding peace within yourself. By learning to forgive yourself and accepting
that you’re human you can heal deep wounds bring yourself back from difficult
challenges.
Next, we can often be tortured because of the fact that we
don’t completely understand why people do certain things.
Compassion is understanding the basic goodness in all people
and then seeking to discover that basic goodness in specific people. Because of
this, it helps you from going through the often mental torture we experience
because we don’t understand the actions of others.
But even more than that, expressing compassion is the very
act of connecting wholeheartedly with others, and simply connecting in this way
can be a great source of joy for us.
The reasons for practicing compassion are numerous and
powerful. Seek to live in a way that you treat everyone you meet as you would
yourself. Once you begin trying to do this, it will seem altogether impossible.
But keep at it, and you’ll realize the full power of living with compassion.
2. CONNECT WITH OTHERS AND NURTURE THOSE CONNECTIONS
In Buddhism, a community of practitioners is called a
“sangha”. A sangha is a community of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen who
practice together in peace towards the united “goal” of realizing greater
awakening, not only for themselves but for all beings.
The sangha is a principle which much of the world can
greatly benefit from. People come together in groups all the time, but it’s
usually for the purpose of creating monetary riches or obtaining substantial
power and rarely towards the united goal o1f attaining peace, happiness, and
realizing greater wisdom.
The principle of the sangha can be expressed in your own
life in many ways. The sangha is ultimately just one way of looking at life, through
the lens of the individual “expressions” of the totality.
By living in a way that you’re fully aware of the power of
connecting with others, whether it’s one person or a group of 100, and seeking
to nurture those relationships in the appropriate way, you can transform your
life in ways that will pay dividends for years to come.
3. WAKE UP
One of the most powerful points on this list, the power of
simply living in a way that you’re fully awake to every moment of your life
pretty much couldn’t be exaggerated even if I tried.
Mindfulness, greater awareness, paying attention, whatever
you want to call it- it changes every facet of your life and in every way. It’s
as simple as that.
Strive to live fully awake to each moment of your daily life
and overcome your greatest personal struggles, find a great sense of peace and
joy, and realize the greatest lessons life can teach you as a result of living
fully awake to the present moment.1
4. LIVE DEEPLY
To live deeply, in a way that you become keenly aware of the
precious nature of life, is to begin down the path of true peace and happiness.
Why? Because to live in this way is to gradually become
aware of the true nature of the world. This will happen essentially in
“sections” of the whole, such as realizing your interconnectedness (you begin
to see how everything is connected to everything else) and impermanence (you
begin to see how everything is ever-changing, constantly dying only to be
reborn in another form).
These realizations are the bread and butter of Buddhism and
all spiritual practice. These “sections of the whole” are fragments of the
ultimate realization, ways for us to understand that which can’t be fully
understood in the traditional sense.
By living in a way that you seek to realize these various “qualities
of the ultimate” you find greater and greater peace in realizing the natural
way of things. This cultivates in us the ability to savor every moment of life,
to find peace in even the most mundane activities, as well as the ability to
transform your typically “negative” experiences into something altogether
nourishing and healing.
5. CHANGE YOURSELF, CHANGE THE WORLD
Buddhists understand that you can hardly help another before
you help yourself. But this isn’t referring to you gaining power or riches
before you can help others, or living in a way that you ignore others.
This is mostly referring to the fact that because we’re all
interconnected, by you helping yourself you create an exponentially positive
effect on the rest of the world.
If you want to make an impact on the world, don’t falsely
convince yourself that it’s “you or them”. You don’t need to drag yourself
through the mud to help those around you. If you do this, you’ll greatly hamper
your ability to create a positive impact.
At the deepest level of understanding, by making it about
you you’re also making it about them because you know there’s no separating
“you” and “them”.
Take care of yourself and seek to be more than just a help,
but an example of how to live for others to follow and you’llcreate waves of
exponential possibility that inspires others to do the same.
6. EMBRACE DEATH
Death is an often taboo topic in Western society. We do
everything we can to not only avoid the subject, but pretend that it doesn’t
even exist.
The reality is, this is really unfortunate and in no way
helps us lead better lives. Becoming keenly aware of your ownimpermanence and
deeply understanding the nature of death with regards to our interconnectedness
are both things which can help us find great peace.
In Buddhism, students in many sects at one point or another
“meditate on the corpse” as it were (a practice which is said to have
originated at least as far back as the Buddha’s lifetime).
This is literally what it sounds like. They meditate on the
image of a corpse slowing decomposing and imagine that process through to its
end, eventually resulting in a deep and profound realization on the true nature
of death.
That might sound a little intense to you, but the truth is,
if you live you’re entire life acting as if you’re never going to die or
ignoring your own impermanence then you won’t ever be able to find true peace
within yourself.
You don’t necessarily have to meditate on the image of a
corpse, but simply opening up to yourself about death so that you’re no longer
shielding it from your mind (which you’re likely doing unconsciously, as that’s
how most of us were brought up in the West) can begin to be a great source of
peace and help you appreciate the many joys in your everyday life.
A true appreciation for life can never be fully realized
until you come face-to-face with your own impermanence. But once you do this,
the world opens up in a new and profound way.
7. YOUR FOOD IS (VERY) SPECIAL
Buddhist meditative practice, particularly mindfulness and
contemplation, helps you realize the precious nature of the food in front of
you. Indeed, with how integral a part food plays in our lives, to transform our
relationship with food is to transform a key aspect of our entire lives, both
now and in the future.
By contemplating on the food in front of us, for example, we
can come to realize the vast system of interconnectedness that is our life, and
how our food coming to be on our dinner plate as it is depended on numerous
elements coming to be.
This helps us to deepen our relationship with food,
cultivate a deep sense of gratitude before each meal, and learn to respect the
delicate but ever-pressing balance that is life.
8. UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF GIVING
Giving is more than the act of giving Christmas and Birthday
gifts, it’s also about those gifts which we give each and every day which we
don’t typically see as gifts at all.
Buddhists hold a very deep understanding of the nature of
giving, particularly in that life is a constant play between the act of giving
and receiving. This doesn’t just help us find peace in understanding the way of
the world around us, but helps us realize the amazing gifts we all have within
us that we can give others in every moment, such as our love, compassion, and
presence.
9. WORK TO DISARM THE EGO
The easiest way to sum up all “spiritual” practice is this:
spirituality is the act of coming in touch with the ultimate reality or the
ground of being, and as a result spiritual practice is the act of overcoming
those obstacles which keep us from realizing that.
The primary obstacle in our way? The ego.
To put it short and sweet, the reason the ego is the major
obstacle in spiritual practice, or simply the practice of finding true peace
and happiness (whatever you choose to call it, it’s all the same), is because
it’s very function is to pull you away from the ground of your being by
convincing you that you’re this separate self.
The process of unraveling the ego can take time, as it’s
something which has been with us, intertwined with us, for years. But it’s
infinitely rewarding and altogether necessary if we want to realize our best
life.
10. REMOVE THE 3 POISONS
Life is filled with vices, things which attempt to bind us
to unwholesome ways of living and therefore do the very opposite of cultivate
peace, joy, and greater realization in our lives. Among these, the 3 poisons
are some of the most powerful. The 3 poisons are:
1. Greed
2. Hatred
3. Delusion
Together, these 3 poisons are responsible for the majority
of the pain and suffering we experience as a collective species. It’s perfectly
normal to be affected by each of these poisons throughout your life, so don’t
knock yourself for falling for them.
Instead, simply accept that they’re something you’re
experiencing and begin working to remove them from your life. This can take
time, but it’s a key aspect on the path towards realizing true peace and
happiness.
11. RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
We should all strive to work and make our living in a way
that’s more “conscious” or aware. This generally means not selling harmful
items such as guns, drugs, and services that harm other people, but it goes
deeper than that.
There’s ultimately two aspects to this: making a living by
doing something which doesn’t inhibit your own ability to realize peace and
making a living doing something which doesn’t inhibit others ability to realize
peace.
Facing this can lead to some interesting situations for some
people, and as Thich Nhat Hanh has mentioned this is a collective effort as
opposed to a solely personal one (the butcher isn’t a butcher only because he
decided to be, but because there is a demand from people for meat to be neatly
packaged and made available for them to be purchased from supermarkets), but
you should strive to do your best.
Following the teaching on right livelihood can help you
realize the harmful effect that your own work is having on you and therefore
coming up with a solution can result in a largely positive shift in your life
as a whole. Only you can decide if a change needs to happen though.
Whatever the case, seek to make a living doing something
that promotes the peace and happiness of yourself and those around you as much
as possible.
12. REALIZE NON-ATTACHMENT
This is a difficult point to put into so few words, but a
profound one I felt would be greatly beneficial to mention nonetheless.
To realize non-attachment in a Buddhist sense doesn’t mean
to abandon your friends and family and live alone for the rest of your life,
never truly living again just so that you don’t become attached to these
desires.
Non-attachment refers to living in a way that you exist in
the natural flow of life and generally living a typical modern life, building a
family, working, etc., while simultaneously not being attached to any of these
things. It simply means to live in a way that you’ve become aware of and
accepted the impermanence of all things in this life and live in a way that
you’re ever-aware of this fact.
It’s perfectly normal for a Zen student in Japan, once
having completed his training, to actually de-robe and go “back into the world”
so to speak. This is because, once they’ve reached this level of realization,
they see the beauty in all things and are compelled to live fully absorbed in
all the beauty and wonders of this life. From this point on, they can truly
“live life to the fullest”, while not clinging to any of these things.
Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean that you stop feeling
emotions. On the contrary, these emotions are welcomed and expected, and fully
experienced with mindfulness in the moment of their impact. But this is simply
the natural course of things.
Once these emotions subside though, and when we have no
mental formations or obstructions to block our path, a natural healing process
takes place that heals the wound and allows us to continue on living in peace
and joy instead of dragging us down into darkness.
Source:
Buddhaimonia.com