Discover Greater Well-Being

 

09.30.2022 DISCOVER GREATER WELL-BEING Does your sense of well-being ever feel out of your control? It doesn’t have to be that way. You have the capacity for clarity and calm, and with the right tools and a little guidance, you can find your natural balance. Lion’s Roar Online Learning’s newest online offering, Wisdom for Well-Being: A Buddhist Guide to Personal Transformation, is a curated collection of teachings and practices from our library of virtual summits and online courses, carefully selected to help you foster peace, clarity, loving-kindness, and overall greater well-being. The “Wisdom for Well-Being” teachings in this Weekend Reader and in our online event can help you learn powerful ways to make positive changes in your daily life. May they all be sources of wisdom in your well-being journey! —Chris Pacheco, Associate Editor, Lion’s Roar Digital

How to Work With Anxiety: 3 Techniques For Lasting Change Anxiety is a natural response to being human, says Lion’s Roar’s Chris Pacheco. When we try to control our anxious feelings instead of accepting them, we might end up exacerbating fear and worry. Here, he outlines three main strategies for moving through anxiety. “I have always been fascinated,” wrote the 20th-century philosopher Alan Watts, “by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the ‘backwards law.’ When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it.” Watts’ notion, recorded over 70 years ago, still holds true today, describing something we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives: the more we force something, the more we receive the opposite of what we actually want. Buddhists refer to this very human dilemma as grasping or attachment and advocate for the opposite, a life of non-attachment.

No Self, No Suffering The Buddha made a big promise — that if we know the cause of suffering we can end it. Melvin McLeod breaks down the Buddha’s four noble truths — including his unique insight into the real cause of our suffering — and argues it’s not only the ultimate self-help formula, but the best guide to helping others and benefiting the world. Buddhism famously says that everything we are looking for—happiness, the end of suffering, even enlightenment—is found right here in this life. Chop wood, carry water, and all that. But what is this life? It may be much vaster and deeper than we think, both less real and more real. And perhaps more importantly, what is it not? Because according to Buddhism, the whole problem is that we misunderstand the true nature of this life. The Buddha said we make some fundamental cognitive errors about who we are and what we experience, and these cause our suffering. Looking at it that way, the whole Buddhist path is nothing but a way to get from who and where we think we are to who and where we really are.

Compassion and Wisdom A society based upon peace, harmony, wisdom and compassion is possible, says Venerable Khandro Rinpoche—but we must all begin with ourselves. ARealizing the innate wisdom in every human being must begin with training the self. To break through ignorance requires breaking through ignorance in all of its forms. Ignorance is not something that comes from others. Ignorance is something that comes from the projection of the self. In Buddhist philosophy, we speak a lot about illusion, which refers to how human ignorance, or the human mind, creates a lot of external phenomena, and how once that illusion is created, we see it as very solid and permanent. In meditation, we break through that illusion of external phenomena by analyzing its dream-like nature. The first step is to understand how we create our own illusion—to see how this human mind works to create and solidify the world. If then we can let go of our attachment to that illusion, we will be free from pain, free from our own expectations, and free from our own hope and fear.

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