Spiritual practice can be enormously bene?cial. The fact is, it is possible to undergo genuine spiritual training by devoting some time every day to meditation. More people than you might think do so, while leading regular family lives and doing absorbing work. The positive bene?ts of such a life far outweigh the few problems of schedule arra...

Usually, we all experience thoughts of loving kindness, generosity, inner peace and freedom from conflicts. But these thoughts are fleeting and will soon be replaced by other thoughts, including afflictive ones such as anger and jealousy. To fully integrate altruism and compassion in our midstream, we need to do more than that. We need to cul...

Happiness is, to begin with, a love of life. To have lost all reason for living is to open up an abyss of suffering. As important as external conditions may be, suffering, like well-being, is essentially an state of mind. Understanding that is the key prerequisite to a life worth living. What mental conditions will sap our joie de vivre, and ...

True patience isn't a sign of weakness, but of courage. It certainly doesn't mean to let everything happen passively. Patience gives you the capacity to act correctly without being blinded by hatred and a thirst for revenge, which deprive you of any capacity for judgment. As the Dalai Lama often says, true tolerance isn't a question of saying...

For Buddhism, paradoxically, genuine self-confidence is a natural quality of egolessness. To dispel the illusion of the ego is to free oneself from a fundamental vulnerability. Genuine con?dence comes from an awareness of a basic quality of our mind and of our potential for transformation and ?ourishing, what Buddhism calls ‟buddha nature”, w...

At every moment between birth and death, the body undergoes ceaseless transformations and the mind becomes the theater of countless emotional and conceptual experiences. And yet we assign qualities of permanence, uniqueness, and autonomy to the self. Furthermore, as we begin to feel that this self is highly vulnerable and must be protected an...

According to Buddhism, our view of the self as a singular, distinct, autonomous and lasting entity is at odds with reality and, therefore becomes a source of frustration and suffering. An exacerbated feeling of self-importance, self-cherishing, and self-centeredness are the basis for impulses of attraction and aversion, which quickly develop ...

"Simplify, simplify, simplify�" These refreshing words written by Henry Thoreau remind us that much of our suffering comes from adding unnecessary and disturbing complications in our lives. We seem to be continually weaving elaborate conceptual webs around even straightforward events. We distort reality and shroud it with complications by sup...

From March 16-20 in the beautiful Himalayan foothills of Himachal Pradesh, at the Deer Park in Bir, India, over fifty translators and scholars of Tibetan Buddhism gathered for 5 days of intense and constructive discussions, to which I was fortunate to participate. This wonderful conference was organized by the Khyentse Foundation. The gro...

Interdependence is a central Buddhist idea that leads to a profound understanding of the nature of reality and to an awareness of universal responsibility, as often pointed out by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Since all beings are interrelated and all, without exception, want to avoid suffering and achieve happiness, this understanding becomes...