I have been working on practicing mind-management for a couple years now. I love it when God confirms what I am learning/practicing with a book or sermon or podcast.

Today I finished re-listening to The Book of JOY. I found it to be so insightful and full of wisdom for living a joy-filled life.

It is so hard to just grab a piece of this book and share it, it’s all so good and in-depth, but I am going to try. I really liked the section called You Are A Masterpiece In The Making.

According to the Dalai Lama, “One must develop the mind over time and cultivate mental immunity.” The Archbishop said, “I think we’ve got to accept ourselves as we are. And then hope to grow in much of the way the Dalai Lama described. I mean getting to know what the things are that trigger us. These are things that you can train, you can change, but we ought not to be ashamed of ourselves. We are human, and sometimes it is a good thing that we recognize that we have human emotions. Now the thing is being able to say, when is it appropriate?”

Later in the section it continues…  

“Through self-inquiry and meditation, we can discover the nature of our mind and learn to soothe our emotional reactivity. This will leave us less vulnerable to the destructive emotions and thought patterns that cause us so much suffering. This is the process of developing mental immunity.

The Archbishop was simply reminding us that even with this immunity, there will be times when we will have negative or destructive emotions, and when this does happen, the last thing we want to do is judge ourselves harshly.

In other words, the Dalai Lama was saying that if we eat healthy, take our vitamins, and get enough rest, we can stay healthy and the Archbishop was saying, “Yes, even so, there will be times when we will catch a cold, and we should not make it morse by beating up on ourselves.”

So how do we deal with these obstacles to joy – the inevitable sources of suffering, both internal and external – that cause so much pain and anguish in our live, when they do arise? These range from the everyday troubles of stress, frustration, and worry to the life-defining experiences of adversity, illness and ultimately facing death. We cannot control the inevitability of these occurrences, but both men agreed that we could influence their effect in our life by adjusting the attitude we take toward them.

The first step is to accept the reality of suffering. The Buddha is supposed to have said, ‘I have taught one thing and one thing only: suffering and the cessation of suffering.’ The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that lie is filled with suffering. The Sanskrit word for suffering is dukkha.

        Dukkha can be translated as “stress,” “anxiety,” “suffering,” or “dissatisfaction.” It is often described as the mental and physical suffering that occurs in life, illness, and aging. It is also described as the stress and anxiety that arise from the attempt to control what is fundamentally impermanent and unable to be controlled. We try to control the moment, which results in our feeling that what is happening should not be happening. So much of what causes heartache is our wanting things to be different than they are. ‘I think in any cases,’ the Dalai Lama explained, ‘you develop some sort of unhappiness, some discontent, which leads to frustration and anger.’

        While stress and frustration may sound like superficial problems or complaints, the Buddha identified them as core of so much unnecessary, or created, suffering. I was reminder of what the Dalai Lama had said on our first day: We cannot end natural disasters or the suffering they cause, but so much of the rest of our suffering we can.

Dukkha, or suffering, is the opposite of sukha, which means happiness, ease, or comfort. Both words are said to have originated from the ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India. These Aryans were a nomadic people who traveled by horse- or ox-drawn carts, and the words literally mean ‘having a bad (or good) axle.’ Was it a bumpy ride (dukkha), or a smooth ride (sukha)? Not a bad metaphor for life. What is suffering but a bumpy ride? Every life is rutted, and no one can avoid some inevitable bumps, but so much is determined by our own perception of the ride. Our mind is the axle that often determines whether we experience the ride as bumpy or smooth.”

From The Book of JOY, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams, excerpt from pages 86-88

We have more power than we think! We have the power to choose how we think!! We have the power of the Holy Spirit in us helping us to choose our thoughts well! We can retrain/renew our minds!

Keep seeking and discovering!