Excerpts from:
Buddhist Practice and Community Living - Sravasti Abbey's first Young Adults Program
Conducted by Ven. Thubten Chodron©
Sravasti Abbey, USA
30 May 2006 to 7 Jun 2006

Day 1

Excerpt: Cultivating a long-term motivation

We always create a long-term motivation because that long-term motivation creates an incredible sense of space in our mind.

Usually our minds are so limited and we’re thinking, “How can I get my own pleasure as soon as possible?” That state of mind creates many difficulties. The mind is so narrow and focussed on ‘me, what I want, my problems, what I like and don’t like’, that the mind is not in a very happy state and it’s not in a state that is really of great benefit to anybody, including ourselves.

That’s why we create this long term motivation, remembering our long term spiritual goal of full enlightenment for the benefit of sentient beings. Even if that’s going to take a few countless great eons, it’s okay, because it’s something very valuable and wonderful to do. When we place what we’re doing now within this bigger context, it gives a whole new feeling to the actions we’re doing now.

Placing what we’re doing now within the context of, “How can I feel good today?” is what makes us so stuck so often. But when we place what we’re doing now within this huge context of being of benefit to all the numberless, limitless, uncountable sentient beings, then there’s a sense of space in our mind for what we’re doing, and that enables us to continue doing something beneficial over a long period of time.

That’s why we always start with cultivating our motivation. It’s very important to do that. [Return]

Excerpt: Eating only food that is offered to the abbey.

You make yourself dependent so that you are constantly aware of the kindness of others just in keeping your body alive. Also, when you receive food that’s offered, it really helps counteract your attachment to food, because you can’t go to the store to get what you want to eat. [Return]

Day 2

Excerpt: You may wonder, “Why is she talking so much just about this abbey and how they live, etc; I want to hear something about Buddhism!” [laughter]

It’s because when one starts something like this, there’s the tendency to want to build an institution, and it’s easy for the goal of one’s actions to be to benefit the organization. So then the motivation becomes, “How can I make my institution or my organization bigger and stronger?”

But here at the abbey, great emphasis is placed on the principles by which we live because we’re not trying to create an institution for the sake of an institution – the world already has enough institutions. We’re trying to grow the Dharma principles in our own heart. It is necessary to have an institution to support that, but the actual goal is the living of the Dharma in our own hearts. That’s what’s important and so that’s why there’s so much talk about the kinds of attitudes we want to cultivate living together. [Return]

Excerpts: The emphasis at the abbey is on practice and training – there is no expectation that we are ‘there’ already 

It’s important to remember that what we’re doing here is practicing. We’re training. When you hear the word ‘practice’, practice has the implication of doing something repeatedly. Practice has the implication that you’re not there yet. You’re familiarising yourself with something in order to – not suddenly, but gradually – get to where you’re going.

As for training, the military does a lot of training, don’t they? Well, over here, we’re developing the militia of love and compassion, and our enemy is the self-centred mind and the ego-grasping. We’re training the mind.

Training, again, implies repetition, familiarization, gradually developing one’s skills. That’s very important, and there’s no expectation that we’re all there already. We are where we are. We know where we’re going. We’re practicing and training over a period of time in an attempt to get ourselves there. But of course, it’s not a physical place we’re going to; it’s an internal place.

The fact that it’s a training has several ramifications:

We don’t criticize ourselves for not being there
One is that we don’t criticize ourselves for not being there, because we know that we’re starting from where we’re at and we’re in the process of going there. We don’t beat up on ourselves; we don’t get down on ourselves; we don’t sit there and go, “Everybody else is so far along the path; it’s only me who’s so distracted. Everybody else can get out of bed in the morning; it’s only me… [snoring sound]. Everybody else is so nice to people; it’s only me who slams doors and interrupts.” [laughter]

We don’t guilt-trip ourselves, because we’re taking away the expectation that we’re perfect. And we accept the fact that we’re at where we’re at and we’re training.

We can be transparent with others
Since we accept that we’re not there yet, we can be okay being transparent with others. We don’t have to put on a mask and try and be some kind of super-practitioner who’s very together. We know that we’re not and we know everybody else knows that too. [laughter]

You know our usual behavior - how we try and hide our faults, how we make up excuses and blame others and twist things around to make it look like, “Oh yes, I always have totally good intentions; I don’t have any faults.” We drop this kind of behavior for two reasons.

We’re not trying to impress anybody
One is that we know we’re not there yet and we know everybody else knows we’re not there yet. So we’re not trying to impress anybody.

We can trust the other people in the community to be compassionate and understanding
Another reason is that we trust the other people whom we live with to be compassionate and understanding of us when we admit that we’re not there yet.

We’re all working on this ability to be compassionate and tolerant with one another. Sometimes we’re not so good, but basically I think when somebody else is transparent with us and admits their mistakes, our reaction is usually one of understanding.

I think where things get built up and very tense, is when we aren’t willing to admit our mistakes, and yet everybody else around us knows that we make them.

When we’re okay with our stuff and we trust other people and admit our stuff, then it creates a sense of ease within ourselves. It also creates a sense of ease within others and gives them the opportunity to be kind and compassionate to us.

When we’re very defensive, it’s very hard for other people to be compassionate to us.

It’s strange, isn’t it? When we’re defensive, what we want most is other people’s kindness, but our defensiveness actually pushes their kindness away. [laughter] On the other hand, when we are transparent, admit our stuff and brace ourselves for their criticism, their response usually turns out to be one of compassion.

We’re not competing to see who gets enlightened first
We know and accept that we’re all in the process of training, and we try and support each other in that training. We’re not competing to see who gets enlightened first. Whoever gets enlightened first is going to have to come back and lead the rest of us there anyway.

So if others get enlightened before us, that’s even better. [laughter]

We voluntarily chose to come here
The ten destructive actions to abandon, the five lay precepts that you’re keeping while you’re here, the in-house rules and guidelines for living at the abbey – these are all trainings that we voluntarily undertake. They’re not rules coming from the outside. It is not as if there is somebody saying, “You’ve got to do this,” thereby giving us something to rebel against and fight against.

We have to remember that we came here voluntarily. We knew what the guidelines and the rules are. We saw some sense and purpose in them. We knew before we came that the structure here is something beneficial for our own practice, and so we voluntarily chose to come. We voluntarily put ourselves in the situation because we know it’s something good for us. [Return]

Excerpt: Give and receive support

Being able to receive that support and give that support is very important for our own Dharma practice.

We need the support and we need to develop the mind that trusts others enough so that we can receive their support.

We need to give our support so that we come out of ourselves instead of getting locked in our little self-created traumas. We need to give our support so that we can benefit others and see that what we do does actually help. [Return]

Excerpt: Humility and willingness to accept instruction

Another thing that’s quite important, especially in a monastic context, is humility and willingess to accept instruction.

This is totally against our American upbringing.

Our country certainly isn’t humble, “We’re the one super-power and everybody has to do what we want them to do!”

We’re taught to sell ourselves
Even in our own life, we aren’t taught to be humble. What are we taught? We’re taught to sell ourselves.

Those of you who have gone through the process of applying for jobs, what do you do when you apply for jobs? You have to sell yourself and you have to make yourself look good. You have to hide everything you don’t do well and make it look like you’re very capable, “Even if I don’t know these few things here, I’m willing to learn them and I’m intelligent enough to learn them.”

That is what happens, isn’t it? We do that and we’re taught to do that.

If you look, when we start relationships with friends or even romantic relationships, what are we actually doing? We’re selling ourselves, aren’t we? “Here’s me. I am so good at this. I am so good at that. I am so wonderful. You should definitely fall in love with me!” I’m doing it in an exaggerated way, but this is kind of what we’re doing, isn’t it? [laughter]

What is humility?

Humility isn’t putting ourselves down
In monastic practice, what we’re trying to cultivate is a sense of humility instead. Humility is different from low self-esteem. We’re not putting ourselves down. Don’t think that in order to be humble, you have to have low self-esteem and put yourself down, criticize yourself and all that kind of stuff. That’s not humility; that’s just regular old self-loathing that doesn’t have any productive quality at all.

Humility is the ability to be open and receptive
Humility is the ability to be open and receptive, not always having to be right, not always having to tell everybody what we think and what our opinion is, not feeling that we have to be King of the Mountain, so to speak.

Humility exemplified by the Eight Verses of Thought Transformation
Yesterday, after lunch, we chanted the 'Eight Verses of Thought Transformation'. There’re a couple of un-American verses in there.

Seeing ourselves as the lowest of all

The first one is:
‘Whenever I am with others,
I will practice seeing myself as the lowest of all,
And from the very depth of my heart,
I will respectfully hold others as supreme.’

Oh, my goodness! How can an American possibly think like that? [laughter] Again, don’t misinterpret ‘lowest of all’ as ‘I am worth nothing. I’m just crumbs on the carpet.’ This is not what it means.

‘Lowest of all’ means we let go of the mind that says: ‘I have to be right. I have to be the centre of attention, and I have to let everybody know how much I know.”

We do that sometimes. When we go into situations where we feel a little insecure, what do we do? We start telling everybody all the important people we know, what our experiences are, what we’ve studied, how much we know, and so on.

Therefore ‘seeing myself as the lowest of all’ just means ‘I do not have to do that. Just relax.’

Accepting defeat and offering the victory to others

The other un-American verse:
‘When others, out of jealousy,
Mistreat me with abuse, slander and so on,
I will practice accepting defeat,
And offering the victory to them.’

Again, this doesn’t mean that we put ourselves down. What it does is it gets rid of this feeling inside that we have to be the winner of any argument. You know how sometimes we get into a discussion and we feel, “I gotta prove my point. I am not going to let go, even if I’m wrong.” [laughter]

This verse is telling us, “Relax!” [laughter] We don’t need to do this. Just relax. Do you remember the story that someone told yesterday about the bad relationship between a father and his daughter? The dynamics with her dad is such that when she says, “I’m right!” her dad will say, “No, I’m right!” They fought for thirty years like that.

But the moment she said, “I don’t have to win the fight” and told her dad, “Whatever you want, dad,” then the whole relationship changed.

This is what the verse is trying to tell us. We don’t need to have the last word on everything. And sometimes when we’re humble and let go of our view, it diffuses the situation and enables us to start a friendship with somebody instead of having a combative relationship.

Offering instruction and guidance to one another is emphasized in the Sangha system that the Buddha set up
In a monastic setting, humility and the willingness to accept instruction are especially important. The way the Buddha set up the Sangha is very much in this line, where juniors have certain responsibilities to their seniors, and seniors have certain responsibilities to their juniors. And peers have responsibility to each other. Offering instruction and guidance to one another is very important in the Sangha community.

It is especially important that the monastics who are new or junior are able to accept instruction and guidance from people who are more experienced than them.

Sometimes we become the rebellious teenager again
Sometimes our ego doesn’t like this. We become the rebellious teenager again, “Don’t tell me what to do!”

But in a training context, it’s very important to be able to accept instruction and guidance from our seniors, and to lessen the ego.

Ulric was telling us that when he was a temporary novice, the most difficult thing for him was having this monk screaming at him all the time and making him bow to him when he made a mistake. [laughter]

Ways to cultivate humility in our mind
One on hand, that might seem a bit extreme. On the other hand, what it did is to cultivate within you the attitude of, “Okay, I have to learn and I have to accept that I’m not always right. I have to learn to be more careful. Things are done in a certain way for a certain reason. I spaced out and didn’t do that, and he’s reminding me that I need to be more careful.”

So it squashes our pride, which is very good for us. It’s painful, isn’t it? But like I was saying before, we deliberately choose to come into this situation. We know that our pride is going to get squashed. We also know that by and large, it’s coming from a motivation of compassion from the side of the other person.

What good does it do that monk to have you bow to him? He doesn’t benefit. He wants to go do something else but he has to stand still while you bow to him. He’s not doing that for his benefit. If we have that kind of awareness and trust, then it enables us to put our ego aside and accept instruction and admonishment. That’s so important in a community, and the Buddha has set it up for us to do that.

The vows require Sangha members to admonish and to accept admonishment
In my case, I create an infraction of my vows if I don’t talk about a wrong-doing of somebody else in certain situations. That doesn’t mean that you go around talking about everybody else’ mistakes all the time. But it does mean that if there is a situation where you can help somebody who is going through a difficult time by pointing out to them what they’re doing wrongly, then you need to do that.

Also, in many of the vows, if we do not accept our mistake after one or three admonishments, depending on which vow we’re referring to, then we have an infraction. These vows are not the root vows, but some of them belong to the next most important section of vows.

So it’s very much this attitude of being open and saying, “Okay, other people are trying to teach me something here.”

Sometimes we might get an admonishment from somebody who doesn’t know the whole situation and who gives us advice that doesn’t really fit the situation. We don’t need to get angry at that. We just need to realize, “Okay, this person only saw what I’m doing now. They don’t know everything that happened before, so they don’t understand why I’m doing what I’m doing right now.” You don’t have to get angry or bent out of shape; you can just explain to them. Hopefully they’re reasonable people and they’ll say, “Oh, okay, I understand now why you’re doing that.”

Depending on our attitude, living in a community can be bliss or hell
This willingness to accept instruction is very important, because if we go to some place with that attitude, then living in that place is bliss. When somebody points out our faults, our attitude is one of, “I really want to learn. This person is helping me and I’m happy about it.”

If we don’t have the mind that wants to learn, if we are so entrenched in our own ego and in getting our way, then living with others will be hell.

The basic thing about Dharma practice
So it all just depends on our attitude. That’s the basic thing about Dharma practice – to see that what we experience depends on our attitude towards it. That is why practicing the Dharma means to transform our own mind. It doesn’t mean to recite a lot of prayers and do all these things that look holy. It means working with what’s inside our own heart and transforming it. [Return]

Day 3

Excerpt: Having to experience the dukka alone

We’re born alone – we go through the whole birth experience all by ourselves.

We die alone. Even if there’re many people around us, we’re the only one dying. Even if we die in a car crash with somebody else, we’re each having our own experience as we die. All throughout our life, we experience things by ourselves; nobody else can crawl inside of us and change it, or take it away.

This was really shocking for me when I first heard it. For a long time, I was always looking for somebody who’d deeply understand me and always be there to take my suffering away. But I could never find that person. [laughter] So when I heard this teaching, it was like, “Oh! No wonder I couldn’t find that person, because that person doesn’t exist.” Why? Because we all have our own experiences. We’re all in our own samsara, our own cyclic existence.

In one way, thinking about all of these was a tremendous sense of relief because it was like bringing it all out in the open. In another sense, it was very shocking to me because I saw very clearly how deeply entrenched we are in cyclic existence. I saw what it meant to be under the control of afflictions and karma. It was much more horrific than I had thought. [Return]

Excerpt: What’s the purpose of thinking about the different types of dukka?

The purpose of thinking about these different types of dukka is not to get fearful or depressed. There is no need for the Buddha to teach us how to get fearful and depressed; we are well able to do that all by ourselves. If we become depressed, anxious or fearful after this kind of contemplation, it means we’ve got to the wrong conclusion.

What the Buddha is really trying to do, is to get us to see the situation clearly, with wisdom, and say, “I don’t want to continue doing this. There is an alternative to this. I can stop the causes for this. Because I cherish myself in a healthy way, because I have love and compassion for myself in a healthy way, I’m going to get myself out of this situation.” This is the determination to be free, or renunciation. [Return]

Excerpt: ‘I should practice the Dharma’ vs. ‘I want to practice the Dharma’

When you have that kind of ascertainment [deep conviction in the teachings], you stop seeing the teachings as a bunch of things that are being forced on you. You stop seeing the Buddha’s advice, precepts or recommendations on how to think and behave as a bunch of “should’s”, “ought to’s” and “supposed to’s”, but we actually go, “Oh wow! Yeah, if I follow these, they will get me out of the predicament I’m in.”

Do you see that shift in the mind? We can often understand teachings on an intellectual level without too much difficulty. But we have to bring the understanding from up here [our head] into here [our heart] – we have to see it through our own experience. That’s when an impact is made and a stable kind of confidence in the teachings arises. That’s when we really want to start practicing the Dharma instead of always telling ourselves, “Oh, I should practice and I should change. I shouldn’t act this way. I know it’s not good for me, but it’s so much fun. Well, I’ll still do it now but I’ll stop doing it tomorrow.” You know that mind? [laughter] [Return]

Day 4

Excerpt: Ensure our views are coherent.

You know, we can talk a lot and come up with many theories, but when it comes down to actually looking at how our own minds work, we may find that it actually contradicts our own theories. Unless we work this out, our view on life is going to be kind of a mush.

It’s important to have a view of life that is coherent and that applies not only in our intellectual life, but also in our emotional life, that applies not only in our professional life, but also in our personal life.

I remember at one of the science conferences, I was having a discussion with one of the scientists. He was doing all this research about how our brain chemicals are our moods. He has this view that the mind was just an emergent property of the body, that the mind is dependent on the brain chemicals and the electrical processes going on at the brain synapses.

And so I asked him, “When you’re angry and you’re upset, do you just think, ‘Oh it’s my brain synspses. It’s the chemicals in my brain, so there’s no reason to be upset?’” [laughter]

What do you think? Do you think that’s what a scientist thinks when he’s angry and upset? No way!

Intellectually, he’s holding on to the view of, “The emotions are just the chemicals and the electrical processes in the brain.” But that’s completely unrelated to how he sees his own experience. So you can see that this kind of world view is mush! It’s not something coherent.

… The mind is formless in nature. It’s clear and aware in nature, while the body is form. It’s molecular in nature. Body, unlike the mind, can be measured by scientific instruments. You can measure the serotonin, you can measure the behavior of a person, you can measure the electrical impulses, but none of those things are experience.

If those things were experience, then in a petri dish, if you had certain chemicals, you could say there’s anger. Would you ever look at the chemicals in a petri dish and say there’s anger? [laughter] You never would, would you?

As I was saying, one time His Holiness asked a scientist, “If there’s a brain on the table, would you look at it and say, ‘I love you’?” If there’s a brain on the table, would you say, "There’s the seeing of color?" No. All these functions of the consciousness or mind can only be done by the mind. The fact of the body or the brain being there doesn’t mean that that’s the experience.

So what’s going on in the brain or the body may correlate with what’s going on in the mind, but that doesn’t mean it is what is going on in the mind. [Return]

Excerpts: The power of our conception

When we start to investigate things, we’ll see that they exist in dependence upon parts, in dependence upon the causes and conditions, in dependence upon our concept and our label that put these parts together. Our mind is what puts something together and makes it what it is.

Does a baby see a flower?
If a baby were in this room, it wouldn’t necessarily pick out the flowers, statues, water bowls and altar. To the baby, there’re just all these colors. They haven’t learnt depth perception. Does a baby see a flower? Well, I don’t know.

When does that moosh become a flower? That happens when our mind picks out, “Oh, those colors belong together. That shape belongs together.” It becomes a flower.

Like the blind men describing what an elephant looks like
When we’re describing a situation, we will talk about similar yet different things, because we will each pick out different details. A good example of this is the famous story of the blind men describing what an elephant looks like.

All these things happen through the power of conception and labeling – we pull out certain things and give them a label.

Labeling in the school
Most of our education in school is learning labels – how do you label something? How do you conceive of something?

Labeling in the law courts
What is going on at law-courts all day? Trying to decide what label to give to something. In a civil court, when one party sues another over a piece of land, they’re actually arguing about the label – is this land mine or yours? In a criminal court, they’re also arguing about what label to give – is this first-degree murder or is it innocence? And it all depends on how you conceptualize it. That’s why different jurors may have different opinions about what’s going on in a criminal case.

Countries quarreling over concepts and labels that they have created
So much of what’s going on in our world and what we have tension and conflict about is quarelling over concepts and labels that we’ve created. It’s kind of amazing when you think about it.

I remember being in Israel one time leading a retreat. The kibbutz was right on the border with Jordan. There’s desert, and in the middle of the desert sand was a fence… I stood by that fence one day and I thought, “People kill each other arguing where that fence should be.” Arguing whether that grain of sand is called ‘my sand’ or ‘your sand’; ‘my dirt’ or ‘your dirt’. That’s all they’re doing when they’re fighting those kinds of wars.

So you can see how we human beings create so many problems for ourselves by the power of our wrong conceptions. [Return]

Excerpt: Thought training using the concept of dependent arising.

"Somebody hurts my feelings!" – this has happened to all of us before. Somebody says something harsh to me, and we give it the label, “They criticize me; they hurt my feelings.” We feel miserable about it.

But when you’re practicing thought training and the same thing happens, you give it the label, “That’s my negative karma ripening. My negative karma created in the past – it’s ripening, it’s finishing, it’s over now!” When you give it that label, do you get all depressed? No. You feel good. You rejoice. You’ve gotten rid of that karma.

The situation or the basis of the label is the same – the harsh words that the other person said. But depending upon what we call it – “They criticize me!” or  “That’s karma ripening” – we either feel depressed and miserable, or we feel okay and even happy.

Why is it possible to change how we’re looking at situations? Because there’s no actual reality in that situation; it’s empty of its own inherent reality. Depending on how we conceptualize it, we could feel miserable and carry around that hurt and pain our whole life, or we can make it into something that becomes the path to enlightenment for us. It’s all up to us. [Return]

Day 5

Excerpt: Handling bad times

When karma ripens in a situation, we create new karma by our response to that situation. That’s why when we go through rough times in our life due to the ripening of some negative karma, it’s very important to work with our mind and stop it right there and don’t create the causes for more suffering. We transform our mind instead and start creating the causes for happiness. [Return]

Excerpts: Be very careful about what kind of groups we join

When we join a group and we condone the purpose for which the group came together, then we will accumulate the karma for all the actions that the group does that correspond with the reason for which the group was formed.

For example, our group was formed for the purpose of learning the Dharma, transforming our minds, benefiting sentient beings. We all came together with that motivation, condoning that motivation for the formation of the group. That means for every virtuous action that anybody in the group does, we create that collective karma with them.

…We have to watch what groups we take part in, and if sometimes we find ourselves part of a group but we don’t agree with the purpose for which that group was formed, we have to be very clear in our mind that we don’t agree with the purpose of this group, e.g. when our country sent out the army to kill the people of other countries. [Return]

Excerpt: Be careful about what we rejoice at

We train our mind to look at people’s virtues, people’s talents, people’s abilities, people’s good qualities, people’s good deeds, and rejoice at them. We train our mind like that, because that’s a way for us to create a lot of positive karma individually. It also counteracts the tendency to rejoice at other people’s misfortune or negative karma. We have to guard our mind very carefully that way. [Return]

Excerpt: Be content with the decision we have made

When you make a decision, be content. Don’t have this mind that says, “If only I had done x, y, z,” because that’s just self-torture.

Transform mistakes and grow from the experience
If you figure out later that you made the wrong decision, then learn from your mistake and just say, “Ok, what was going on in my mind that resulted in me making this decision? How did I get into this situation? How can I learn from it so that in the future, I don’t do the same thing again?”

In that way, you learn from your life experiences. Rather than looking back on the past and having all this guilt, remorse and regret, feeling awful and carrying around this bag of bitterness your whole life, you transform them into something conducive for your growth.

Purify if we need to
And if you need to do some purification, purify. But really try not to collect a lot of resentment and grudges and bitterness. I call it ‘staying on top of your life’.

Get on with our life with freshness and buoyancy
If you’re always able to look at your life and learn from your experience, then there’s always some kind of buoyancy in your life… You’re able to go on with your life with some kind of freshness and feeling of joy. [Return]

Excerpt: We don’t make ourselves suffer in order to purify

We never wish nor deliberately cause suffering upon ourselves or anybody else. But when suffering comes our way, we see it as the ripening of a negative karma that would have otherwise ripened in a much more horrible result.

You still use medicine
You still use medicine when you are sick; you don’t go on some big trip of, “Oh, I’m purifying negative karma, so I’m not going to use any medicine.” No, that’s not too smart. Rather, it has to do more with our way of viewing things. [Return]

Day 6

Excerpts: ‘I have to’ vs ‘I choose to’

Let’s take an extreme situation. Your baby is crying and you say, “I have to feed the baby.” If I say, “No, you don’t have to feed the baby,” you’re going to reply, “I have to feed the baby, otherwise the baby will die from starvation.” Well, it’s true that if you don’t feed the baby for a long time, the baby will die from starvation. But you don’t have to feed it. You’re choosing to feed it.

Do you get what I’m saying? Do you see the difference between “I have to do this” and “I’m choosing to do this”? We often say ‘I have to’, but in actual fact we’re choosing to.

…In reality, the only thing that is certain in our life is that we will die. That’s the only thing we have to do. Everything else is a choice.

An example of a person who promised to help her friend move but decided at the last minute to attend her nephew’s basketball game instead.
If you feel that going to the basketball game is the most important thing for you to do, then don’t feel guilty and don’t make up an excuse about not helping your friend. It's better to just be honest about the situation.

What happens very often is that when we see that our motivation is less than magnanimous, we feel guilty. We want to do what our attachment is telling us to do, but we don’t want to feel guilty over it.

So in this example, I really love basketball, I really love my nephew, I really want to be there. But I’ve told my friend that I was going to help her move. I want to be at the basketball game, but I also want to be guilt-free, so what do I do? I say I have to go, as if I don’t have a choice. In this way we avoid the guilt.

But sometimes we will still feel rotten inside, because at a deeper level, we know that it’s really our attachment at work.

Admit our attachment and practice within that
So I think it’s important to face things honestly in our life. If we have a very strong attachment for something that we’re not ready to give up yet – even though intellectually we know attachment is not desirable – then it’s better to say, “I recognize that I have a strong attachment. I’m not able to let go of it yet, but I will still try and practice the Dharma within that. And I’m not going to feel guilty. I’m not going to beat myself up. I’m not going to make myself miserable about it. But I’m also not going to sit on the fence and not admit that I have this attachment.”

We don’t want to die with regret
I think it’s important, before we make a decision, to be very honest with ourselves about why we’re making the decision that we’re making instead of just saying “I have to” or doing it because we feel obliged.” If we live our whole life trying to do what we think other people think we should do because we need their approval, our motivation becomes foggy and clouded and we may wind up feeling trapped, but we’re not able to leave the situation because we’ve gotten so attached to being it.

Acknowledge where we’re at, make wise decisions, and be content. If we try and live our life the way we think other people want us to, then at the end of our life, we will die with a lot of regret. We die with regret because our motivations were not sincere Dharma motivations. Our motivation was just to please other people, and we please them not because we really care about them, but because we need their approval or because we don’t want them to disapprove of us.

That’s the bottom line actually – it took me a long time to say that. [Return]

Excerpt: Living our lives in an authentic way

I was at a conference recently and somebody in the group that I was in said, “You have to be really sure that when the Lord of Death comes, you’re truly alive.”

A lot of people aren’t truly alive; they’re just living their lives ‘on automatic’, completely on automatic.

“Everybody else is doing this; I’ll do it.”

“My parents and society want me to do this; I’ll do it.”

Or you want to directly rebel against the authority, “My parents and society want me to do this; no way I’m going to do it!”

That is being just as controlled by attachment as doing what you think other people want you to do, because in neither situation are we making our decisions based on our own clarity of mind and our wisdom. …We’re not living in an authentic way. We’re not living what we think is the best, most meaningful way to live our own life.

Isn’t it selfish?
You might say, “Isn’t that a licence to be selfish – doing what you want to do in life without caring about what other people think?”

Well, some people might have that idea and they might think like that, “Who cares what everybody else thinks; I’ll live my life the way I want to!”

I’m not talking about that kind of attitude, because that motivation is completely selfish and completely fueled by attachment. What I’m talking about is what we know, in our heart of hearts, is right for us to do in our life.

We all have our unique talents, so what is a good way for one person to use their talents may not be the right way for somebody else.

Take time to figure out what’s valuable to do
We all have our own unique talents; we have our own unique ability to give and to help, and that’s for us to figure out. And it’s not always immediately apparent. And so for a period of time, you might live in a state of confusion.

Ven Chodron’s experiences during her late teens
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was tremendously confused. Unbelieveably confused! [laughter] “What do I want to do with my life? Do I want to study this? Do I want to study that? Do I want to major in this? Do I want to major in that? Do I want to live here? Do I want to live there?” Changing my mind every five minutes [laughter] – just tremendous confusion!

I think it’s quite natural to have to go through that; there’s nothing wrong with it. Sometimes it takes us a while to figure out what in our hearts we think is a valuable thing to do, or many valuable things to do.

This is my theory – you can check it up and see if it holds true for you or not – but I think living a meaningful life has something to do with being of service to others. I came to that conclusion even before I met the Dharma, when I was totally confused about what career to choose.

Ethical values
When we die and we look back at our life, what are we going to rejoice at having done and what are we going to have regret over?

If you look in your own life, you’ll see that when you’ve done things that went against your own ethical values, there’s a sense of regret, isn’t there? Everybody else might tell us, “Oh it’s fine, you did the right thing,” but unless we have really made peace with what we did, there’s that sense of emotional and spiritual heaviness. So if you find yourself on the verge of making a bad decision, stop yourself and try and make good decisions.

Purify and let go
If you’ve done something that you regret, do purification practice, lay it to rest and let it go so that it doesn’t hang over you. Then you will be able to go forward in your life and do things with an honest and kind motivation, without having so much guilt, regret, self-hatred and all those other emotions that are not beneficial, that our ego torments ourselves with.

No dying person will regret not having worked more overtime
Can you imagine somebody dying and their regret on their deathbed is, “I should have worked more overtime?”

Nobody thinks like that.

But how many people, by the force of their attachment and lack of clarity, get themselves into living lives where they work so much overtime because they have to?

In actual fact, they don’t have to; they’re choosing to. They will say, “If I don’t do all that overtime work, I will not be able to support the lifestyle that I’m living.”

Be honest about our attachment if we cannot give it up
Okay, if that lifestyle is so important to you and you don’t want to give it up, then be honest about it and say, “I’m choosing to work overtime so that I can have that lifestyle.”

Don’t say, “I have to work overtime.” Say, “I’m choosing to work overtime because I like that lifestyle.”

On the other hand, if you really don’t want to be working overtime and you really want to be doing something else, then give up your attachment to living that lifestyle.

A lot of times, to do what in your heart you know you want to do involves giving up things that we’re attached to.

Do not ‘should’ yourself
But you’ve got to feel it in your own heart what is best for you to do. You can’t use a bunch of should’s and ought to’s.

And don’t use the Dharma as a 'should' and an 'ought-to'. Because if you use the Dharma in that way, you’re also going to be miserable, “I should practice the Dharma.” “I should ordain.” “I should do this.” “I should do that.” “I should…” “I should…” “I should…”

No! You can’t make an honest decision when you’re should-ing yourself. [laughter] We have to let go of the “should’s” and the “ought-to’s” and the “supposed to’s” and the “I’m-going-to-disappoint-somebody-if-I-don’t-do’s”, and really figure out in your own heart, what contribution you want to make to the world. And take the time that you need to do that. 

Ven. Chodron in response to a participant who expressed appreciation for these teachings:
I was really talking from my heart. You can’t always talk this directly. For example, the man whom I was telling you about, it would be hard to talk this directly to him, because it would be too threatening. So I have to talk to him in a different way. But you’re young and you haven’t made a lot of mistakes in your life, so you can really get it, I think. You’re not so involved in defending things that you’ve done in the past. You’re open and receptive to looking at your life and making changes and things like that, so therefore I can talk like that. [Return]