To experience true health and well being we need to learn to lead a more satisfying, sustainable, and therefore meaningful life.
To achieve this we need to balance both outer and inner (mental) development.
Most of us who are reading these words have more than enough outer resources - money, cars, holidays, family, friends, access to fine healthy food. This is a great deal of resources at our finger tips compared to the many billions of people on this planet.
We work very hard and endure incredibly challenging conditions to acquire these outer resources. If we check the rewards of such hard work is merely a few moments of respite from our problems.
If we think carefully we shall see that the amount of time and effort that we invest in acquiring outer resources is vastly disproportionate to the actual pleasure that we derive from them, which is relatively momentary. So not surprisingly, it's not too long before, we seek to acquire further outer resources.
Observe how we work so hard to get a promotion, and no sooner than we get it than we are working towards another one; and so it is for all the worldly things which we chase - the only return we ever get is a temporary respite from our previous moment of dissatisfaction, an unpleasant feeling.
This cycle of searching yet never finding makes our life thoroughly complex and utterly exhausting both emotionally and physically. Eventually we erode away our life force, the very fabric of our health.
We could go on like this for a very long time and may reach the end of our lives with little to show for the immense amount of effort that we have invested. Somehow these worldly things never realize the return in terms of inner wealth that is true happiness that we had hoped for. Regret will be the only enduring thing at this point if we only spent our life chasing outer development, believing them to be the true source of happiness.
We may even fall ill through working our bodies and minds beyond their limits in trying to achieve these worldly attainments - we may never actually achieve what we seek when severe illnesses such cancer strikes us down. Just fear will pervade our minds at this time since we have no inner resources to draw from if we have spent all our energy and time in seeking happiness from external sources.
So we must conclude from our experience that outer development alone is not good enough to fulfill our wishes.
Many of us are not very content, peaceful, or happy. Most of us experience a great deal of painful problems which prevent us from enjoying all the external resources that we have. If we continue to only develop ourselves externally then we will only ever end up with more external wealth and not the true happiness that we seek.
We can say that we are not truly healthy. Why ?
It is because outer development alone can never fulfill all of our wishes since our wishes are internal, states of mind. These wishes are to be free from problems, to experience enduring peace of mind and therefore true happiness, and to be truly helpful to others.
In order to fulfill all our deepest wishes, we need to also engage in inner development in order to attain inner resources which alone can lead to pure, uncontaminated, and enduring happiness.
This simply means to evolve our mind so that we experience deep and stable inner peace. Inner peace is the real source of a happy mind.
Inner peace arises from inner development through following inner paths. These inner paths are development of peacful and positive states of minds.
At the moment inner peace feels intangiable and probably sounds a good idea, yet some how does not feel substantial enough to sustain us. Due to our conditioned familiarity with seeing the results from material development - such as fixing something, or getting rewarded for our work, or praised etc... we cannot 'see' inner peace...so this feeling is like almost an insubstantial dot in the midst of the ocean of tangiable things.
However anyone who has experienced directly a little bit of inner peace notices a profound effect on their whole mental and physical health. As we then refine this experience it actually becomes completely able to grant us all everything that we are searching for...making our life immensely meaningful.
The only way to develop this peace of mind is to engage sincerely and purely in inner development or spiritual practice. Spiritual development redresses the balance between outer and inner development.
What is spiritual practice?
People often misunderstand the real meaning of spiritual practice.
A spiritual practitioner is a cultivator of their mind. They seek to evolve their mind, transforming their experiences gently, over a long period of time.
An authentic spiritual path is very precise with very exact outcomes. Outcomes which result in an experience of inner peace.
First we need to recognise that our real problems are our negative views.
We may hold onto these views for years, long after the event is over and nothing remains of it other than our memory of it.
Holding so tightly to this view begins to erode our mental health, causing all manner of problems to arise and manifest themselves in our energetic system, making us feel not 'right' or 'out of balance'. Eventually our physical health begins to fail, causing sickness to manifest in our body....causing further distress and ill health...
Therefore the way in which to realistically solve our problems is to learn to relate to ourself and others in a more realistic way.
In reality everything is impermanent, continually changing, moment on moment. We ourselves are subject to this impermanence. This is reality.
We understand this intellectually but do not feel it in our heart, consequently our lives and our views do not accord with reality - creating all manner of problems for us such as anger and desirous attachment...
The only thing that makes us believe that we are permanent in the midst of all of this change is just our mistaken view based upon our mistaken awareness of the way things truly exist.
A spiritual life is a simple and joyful one. A spiritual practitioner understands a few very simple principles and then frames their life around these principles.
For all of us, every moment of our life is spent in seeking pleasant feelings and avoiding unpleasant ones.
Pleasant feelings are in the nature of happiness, the real cause is inner peace.
Unpleasant feelings are in the nature of suffering, the real cause of which is attachment to our view, and wishing to fulfill our agenda.
What we normally do with negative emotions (negative energy winds attached to negative minds) is to either express them, suppress them, or repress them... Thus these powerful energies remain, unchanged, and suspended at these three levels in our mind.
They can manifest as all types of sickness in mind and body.
So inflammatory emotions need to be transformed - we cannot afford to store them!
A spiritual practitioner understands that happiness and suffering are states of mind and so actually TRANSFORMS their unhappy, unpeaceful states of mind to happy, peaceful ones. For instance transforming anger into patience.
So a healthy person is a person who is able to TRANSFORM their adversities sincerely and happily.
My job as a doctor is to help guide you to your own healing. Your job as the patient is to seek and engage in a method to heal your own mind.
We all suffer from the inner sickness of negative views that function to destroy the very happiness which we desperately seek. Therefore we need to seek the supreme medicine of inner peace, the true source of happiness.
For this we need to do three salient things :
1. Listen to or read authentic and pure spiritual teachings from a pure spiritual teacher. We need to do so without mixing our own opinions, to keep an open mind and heart.
2. Contemplate the meaning of these teachings.
3. Meditate on the meaning to become deeply familiar with them.
We can then apply the experience gained from engaging in these three spiritual activities into our daily life.
Gradually, pleasantly, and gently, over a period of time our experience of inner peace will become more refined becoming more stable, deep, and enduring.
Then we shall be able to live your life more simply and purely in accordance with the mind that we have developed through these three activities. We shall, in a relatively short space of time, accumulate immense inner resources which we can rely upon and draw from to help us overcome all out inner and outer sicknesses...this is true wealth which no external or internal thieves (aging, sickness, death) will ever be able to take away from us!
There is no need to change anything external, only change our views. From incorrect,therefore unpeaceful ones, to correct and therefore peaceful ones...
This way is free from extremes, this medicine is applicable to anyone who is seeking happiness and wishes to avoid any kind of suffering...
For resources to begin this transformation please go to my Resources page
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