As His Holiness the Dalai Lama explains: ‟Compassion and generosity must be coupled with detachment. Expecting something in return is like doing business. If the owner of a restaurant is all smiles with his customers, generally it's not because he loves them but because he wants to increase his turnover. In the same way, we should not love an...

Father Pierre Ceyrac passed away in India on May 30th 2012 at 98 years old. He died peacefully on a tranquil Indian morning, ‟without pain, relaxed, and serene” according to those who were with him. He lived the greater part of his life in the Tamil Nadu countryside, in southern India, and used to go around on a motorbike, even at an advanced...

61-year-old Joynal Abedin drives a rickshaw in Bangladesh. A rickshaw is a large tricycle with seats attached in the back that carry two or more passengers. He earns the equivalent of $6 a day.  ‟ My father died because we could not afford to take him to the hospital, which was a two-day walk from our home. I was so angry. People here th...

In 1996, Elissa Montanti visited Bosnia. At the time, she lived in Staten Island and suffered from a debilitating anxiety disorder. ‟I was shown a letter from a boy who had lost two arms and a leg when a land mine blew up,” she recalls. ‟The letter this boy had written said, ‘Somebody help me, please get me new arms and a leg.'” Moved and ins...

1-To become rich, powerful and famous 2-To treat the universe as if it was a mail order catalogue for our desires and fancies 3-To yearn for the ‟freedom” to do everything that comes into your mind. (This is not freedom, but being the slave of your own thoughts). 4-To constantly seek pleasant sensations, one after the other (Pleasura...

Recently, during his visit to Yeunten Ling, a well-known Buddhist center in Huy, Belgium. His Holiness spoke about the role of women : ‟Ancient nomadic tribes were egalitarian and not governed by chiefs. Then came the age of sedentary agriculture and the beginning of the accumulation of wealth. Some troublemakers emerged and it became nec...

1.  An exacerbated sense of self-importance 2.  To keep ruminating on the past 3.  To be full of anxiety about the future 4.  Not to be able to rest in the awareness of the present moment 5.  To put all our hopes and fears on the outer conditions of happiness 6.  To neglect cultivating inner conditions of genuine hap...

In the 18th century, a Milanese judge, who did not believe that torture had any value in obtaining reliable confessions from suspected criminal, killed his mule, accused his servant of committing the misdeed, and had him subjected to torture, whereupon the man confessed to the crime; he even refused to recant on the gallows for fear of being ...

In his inspiring book ‟La bonté humaine” (The human goodness), recently published in France, Jacques Lecomte quotes a text by Mordecai Paldiel, who was Chair of the Righteous Among the Nations, Israel. Paldiel argues that it is the basic goodness, present in all of us, which is the key that opens our understanding of the behavior of those who...

April 2, 2012, United Nations, New York City High Level Meeting at the initiative of Bhutan : Happiness & Well-being Panel-1 Participants: • Helen Clark, Former Prime Minister of New Zealand, moderator • Ven. Matthieu Ricard, Shechen Monastery, Nepal • Pr. Martin Seligman, Founder of Positive Psychology • Dasho Karma Ura, Pre...