View suffering not just as a negative experience, but as a potential messenger that can deepen your capacity to be with life’s difficulties. Approaching suffering with awareness can lead to illumination and understanding.
When facing struggles, allow your awareness to touch and breathe with the difficulty, honoring these moments. This can illuminate how you perpetuate distress and help soften grasping and rejecting, connecting you with a deeper core.
Recognize that your approach to conflict is shaped by family conditioning, and your partner’s is too. Understanding these different patterns in yourself and your partner can help you navigate disputes more effectively.
In moments of conflict, learn to identify when you’re caught in a conditioned pattern, then consciously pause to create space for understanding and resolution. This helps break reactive cycles and allows for clearer communication.
Clearly articulate what is happening for you and what you need in moments of conflict (e.g., ‘I need some space right now’). This helps your partner understand your internal experience and avoids misinterpretations.
In moments of deep distress or conflict, sometimes an explanation isn’t needed; a simple gesture of solidarity, like holding a hand, can be a powerful way to offer support. This helps someone emerge from a difficult emotional state by feeling connected.
Instead of trying to understand everything superficially, choose one fundamental practice (like being with your breathing) and understand it thoroughly. This deep understanding can lead to insight into everything, as all phenomena are interconnected.
Focus on cultivating inner wisdom and understanding the nature of the heart or spirit. This path, as taught by Ajahn Chah, can lead to discovering that which is timeless and transcends birth and death.
Use bowing as a symbolic act to momentarily set aside your opinions and return to the fundamental ground of being. This practice honors your own deepest nature and the timeless awareness within, rather than just an external image.
Beyond constant striving and willpower, learn to soften your volition and effort. This allows you to notice the unmoving, timeless ground of being within which all experiences of pleasure and pain arise.
Use contemplative and meditation practices to move your sense of safety and security away from an over-reliance on external circumstances. External things are inherently uncertain, so cultivating inner stability provides a more reliable refuge.
Cultivate the ability to recognize and abide peacefully with things exactly as they are, whether pleasant, neutral, or painful. This practice helps you find stability rather than seeking certainty in an uncertain world.
Use meditation to develop skill in relating to the essential elements of experience – sensations, feelings, and the fundamental aspects of being. This enhances your ability to connect with others and the world around you.
Grant yourself permission to withdraw attention from external responsibilities for periods to compose, calm, and center yourself. This refreshment and grounding allows you to skillfully re-engage with the external world.
Recognize that you are already devoted to things like your views and opinions, often believing you are right. Consciously shift this devotion away from self-righteousness and blind obedience to your biases towards a more open truth.
Dedicate yourself to understanding ’the way things are’ (Dharma) through practices of training attention and inquiry. This helps you recognize your core source of reflectiveness, inner awareness, and inner listening.
When overwhelmed by complexity, return to the simplicity of being present with your immediate experience, such as sitting or standing. This practice helps you find grounding and clarity in the moment.
Challenge the purely objective, extractive scientific worldview by considering the subjectivity of consciousness and the interconnectedness of all things. This expands understanding beyond seeing reality as mere objects to be exploited.
Cultivate a worldview that recognizes the conscious beingness and subjectivity in all things, infusing life with a sense of awe, mystery, and deep respect. This perspective acknowledges that not everything is an object, but part of a living web.
Acknowledge humanity’s role in the planetary crisis with humility, recognizing that current approaches are out of harmony and require a fundamental shift. This mindset is crucial for addressing global challenges effectively.
Develop a deep sense of reverence for nature, your own body, and all relationships, integrating this sacredness into your daily actions and interactions. This fosters a respectful and sustainable way of living.
Practice dropping back from thoughts, stories, and emotions to perceive them playing out against the mysterious backdrop of consciousness or awareness. This creates distance from mental content and reveals a deeper ground of being.
Cultivate experiences that allow you to feel part of a vast, mysterious totality, recognizing the interflowing nature of all existence. This can be achieved by observing natural processes, like the breath exchange with trees.
Approach religious structures, ceremonies, or rituals as tools for spiritual exploration and transformation, rather than as ultimate truths to be blindly believed. This allows for personal engagement without dogmatism.
Engage in physical practices like bowing to shift your focus away from overthinking and into a more grounded, present state. This helps to ‘get out of your head’ and connect with your body and the present moment.
Apply Dharma teachings to cultivate the capacity to realistically face and engage with the multifaceted crises of the world. This means not spiritually bypassing challenges, but meeting them with clarity and resilience.
Focus on resourcing yourself and building internal capacity and reliance to meet challenging circumstances, such as climate catastrophe, with greater strength and stability. This prepares you to navigate unprecedented difficulties.
While building resilience, do not avoid or pretend that difficult realities, like the climate crisis, are not happening. Acknowledge them directly to foster a truthful and engaged response.
Clearly and consciously identify situations as emergencies (e.g., climate crisis) to recognize that ‘business as usual’ is no longer viable. This realization prompts the need for radical changes and urgent action.
Foster and participate in collective conversations within communities to share and discuss unprecedented, multifaceted crises. Individual approaches are insufficient; collective dialogue is essential for understanding and response.
Consciously prepare for future challenges by collaboratively developing practical skills and strengths within communities. This involves determining collective needs and strategies to enhance group resilience.
Learn to touch the world lightly, finding joy and appreciation in simple things like your breath, presence, sharing, and others’ good fortune. This fosters a non-exploitative way of living that values intrinsic worth over consumption.
Investigate and loosen your attachment to a consciousness that defines security solely by what you own, have, or control. Realize instead your interconnectedness with a vast, mysterious totality, fostering a sense of belonging beyond possession.
Cultivate a soft surrendering that allows you to hold the world more lightly. This fosters appreciation for your deep kinship with other beings and Mother Earth, promoting harmony and interconnectedness.
By composing yourself and consciously changing your attitude, you can positively impact and ‘bless’ Mother Earth and your environment. Your internal state has a ripple effect on the world around you.
Deeply question the path society expects you to be on (e.g., career, marriage, settling down) to explore alternative ways of being and understanding. This critical inquiry can lead to a more authentic life path.
When exploring inner landscapes or spiritual paths, recognize the value of finding teachers who can share what they know, bless, encourage, and guide you. A good teacher provides invaluable support and direction.
Find quiet places to sit silently and pause, allowing yourself to connect with the resonance of presence. This practice helps you discover what you might be overlooking in your life and fosters inner calm.
If seeking alternative ways of being and understanding, consider meditation as a crucial next step to learn how to shift and open your consciousness. This foundational practice enables deeper self-exploration.