Peace Is Every Breath

I will practice coming back to the present moment to be in touch with the refreshing, healing, and nourishing elements in me and around me, not letting regrets and sorrow drag me back into the past nor letting anxieties, fear, or craving pull me out of the present moment. I am determined not to try to cover up loneliness, anxiety, or other suffering by losing myself in consumption. I will contemplate interbeing and consume in a way that preserves peace, joy, and well-being in my body and consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family, my society, and the Earth.

I will practice looking deeply into how I consume the four kinds of nutriments, namely, edible foods, sense impressions, volition, and consciousness.

We invoke your name, Avalokiteshvara. We aspire to learn your way of listening in order to help relieve the suffering in the world. You know how to listen in order to understand. We will sit and listen without any prejudice. We will sit and listen without judging or reacting. We will sit and listen in order to understand. We will sit and listen so attentively that we will be able to hear what’s being said and also what’s being left unsaid. We know that just by listening deeply, we already alleviate much pain and suffering in the other person.

Listening deeply with all of our heart, with all our loving-kindness and compassion, we don’t get irritated by anything the other person says. We say to ourselves: “Poor him, he has a lot of wrong perceptions, he’s burning up with rage and hurt.” We keep listening; and then later on, when a good opportunity presents itself, we can provide the other person with more accurate information to help him see the reality more clearly. Anger and suffering are born from wrong perceptions; when we can get a more accurate picture of reality, the black cloud of anger and suffering dissolves. Knowing this, we can sit calmly and continue listening attentively.

Buddhism, we learn that if we can understand our own suffering, we easily will be able to understand the suffering of others. So we should come back to ourselves first and get in touch with the suffering inside of us, and not give in to the urge to run away from it or numb ourselves into forgetting about it. In the Buddha’s most fundamental teaching on the Four Noble Truths, the first truth is about recognizing the suffering that is there, and the second truth is looking into the nature and the root sources of that suffering.
Once we’ve been able to see into the roots of the suffering, we can see the way to transform it, that is, the path leading to transformation and ending of the suffering. That is the fourth truth. The third truth refers to the result, the actual cessation of the suffering—or, in other words, the presence of happiness. The absence of suffering is happiness, just as the absence of darkness is the presence of light. The teaching on the Four Noble Truths is a core teaching in Buddhism and a wonderful, highly practical one. It’s the Buddhist method for diagnosing and healing what ails us.

The desire to practice to transform afflictions in us such as violence, hatred, and despair, and generate more love, understanding, and reconciliation, is a good desire to have. When we are able to realize such aspirations in our own life, we can help other people in society to do the same. This is a wholesome kind of volition.

Certain kinds of music, newspaper articles, films, websites, electronic games, and even conversations can contain a lot of toxins like craving, violence, hatred, insecurity, fear, and so on. Consuming these kinds of poisons harms our mind and also our body.

Things you really do see or hear in the present may be the initial trigger, but once those old stories have been accessed, have risen up and taken center stage in your mind, you lose touch with the things you actually are seeing and hearing. Eventually you end up living most or all of your life inside the virtual world of your own memory instead of in the real world. The world inside your head is far removed from the world as it really is; yet you are quite convinced that your illusory world is the real one.

If you can embrace the five-year-old child inside one of you, you can embrace the child inside the other as well, and then the transformation of your relationship can happen very quickly. If only your father had had the chance to learn this when he was young, he would not have caused himself and you to suffer. But he was not so fortunate; so you have to practice, for yourself and also for your father in you. When you can transform your father inside of you, you will be able to help your father outside of you to transform much more easily.

Breathing in, I see my father, five years old, fragile, vulnerable, wounded.
Breathing out, I look at this wounded child with all my understanding and love.