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Posts tagged ‘Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’

Making Decisions

August 15, 2012

Make more decisions in every day. Because a decision is a summoning of life. That’s why a little chaos is good for you, because often you don’t make a decision until you get yourself in a jam. And then, in the middle of the jam, you make a decision, but that decision summons Life Force. Have you ever been in a place where you couldn’t quite make up your mind and you just felt sort of limp? “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then you decided, and you felt alive again. We want you to know that you’ll never get it done. So don’t approach this from, “I gotta get on this,” because you’re not ever going to get it done, anyway. And the other thing we want you to know is, you cannot get it wrong. So, make a decision. Let it flow. – Abraham Hicks

Only Feelings?

August 8, 2012

From Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s How to Solve Our Human Problems (p. 42)

Normally our need to escape from unpleasant feelings is so urgent that we do not give ourselves the time to discover where these feelings actually come from. Suppose that someone we have helped responds with ingratitude, or that our partner fails to return our affection, or that a colleague or boss continuously tries to belittle us and undermine our confidence. These things hurt, and our instinctive reaction is to try immediately to escape the painful feelings in our mind by becoming defensive, blaming the other person, retaliating, or simply hardening our heart. Unfortunately, by reacting so quickly we do not give ourselves the time to see what is actually going on in our mind. In reality, the painful feelings that arise on such occasions are not intolerable. They are only feelings, a few moments of bad weather in the mind, with no power to cause us any lasting harm. There is no need to take them so seriously. We are just one person among countless living beings, and a few moments of unpleasant feeling arising in the mind of just one person is no great catastrophe.

Just as there is room in the sky for a thunderstorm, so there is room in the vast space of our mind for a few painful feelings; and just as a storm has no power to destroy the sky, so unpleasant feelings have no power to destroy our mind. When painful feelings arise in our mind, there is no need to panic; we can patiently accept them, experience them, and investigate their nature and where they come from.