Satisfied Buddhist - Domo Geshe Rinpoche

I have observed many 3-year-old children who have too many clothes; they have too many shoes, too many little sweaters, and too many little coats.  They personally own too many little toys, too many electronics. Some 3 or 5-year-olds even have their own cell phones!  This too much stuff is a culture based upon satisfying personal desires in small beings that actually are not built for that.  They are built for safely exploring their physical world.  They are built for rolling in the snow, or in fields of flowers.  They are not built for the mental task of separation from safety.  Forcing small children pushes the children into their own zone. ”This is the one that I would choose, but which one do you choose?” says that you and I are not like each other anymore.  How can the child trust when they don’t feel a part of mother or father or family?  They feel unsafe.  We can learn to put up walls and barriers between others and ourselves, a natur...

“Many people crave the alive feelings they had as a child. For them, the memory of an effervescent way of looking at life is remembered as feeling happy and vibrantly alive. When daily stress increases, they might begin to feel less and less alive. This is too bad, because their sense of feeling can also become mixed with feeling old. These two should not be connected as they are two completely different issues. The problem is, that without a stabilized energetic system, it is hard to break through to a fresh feeling, that special alive. As we all know, almost all children produce a tremendous quantity of fresh new energy that excites itself. Since they do not usually have a very clogged up energy system, they are able to be light, flexible and open to themselves and the world around them. They act and feel lively because there are not many experiences and discordance there yet to stabilize. As that child gets older, dense and sometimes painful physical energies, originally produced...

"There are many teachings associated with developing Buddhist compassion. We primarily focus on them, not because we want to learn more about compassion, of course. It is because we want our own children to be safe, we want to be a locus of peace in our own home and in our workplace and feel safe walking down the street. As part of that, we wish that all bad people become enlightened, because then our children will not be afflicted by them any longer. In addition, we want these innocent children to be safe and free forever, even after the passing away of the protecting parent. Only the can we no longer think that freedom is the exclusive right of good people. In this way, we are correctly convinced that bad people need it even more than the good people do. True?" ~ Domo Geshe Rinpoche ~~~ excerpt from Buddhism Rocks! my new book coming soon "Hay muchas enseñanzas asociadas con la compasión budista en vías de desarrollo. Principalmente nos concentramos en ellos, no porque...

Part 5 in a series. In the small town of Sebastopol in northern California, there is a little farmer's market each Sunday. Next to the market is a small town square with a beautiful fountain and sometimes music and dancers. One Sunday I was there sitting on a bench observing people and enjoying. Soon, several little girls about three or four years old arrived with their nanny ; each child dressed in a fairy ballerina costume . Their costumes of different colors had little wings and were a bit torn and worn out. Perhaps a couple of them wore their costume every day, just for fun. One of the little girls, in her little tattered fairy costume, decided to get into the fountain. Climbing in, she marched around in a circle in the fountain, laughing and splashing as much water as she could! Soon the other girls joined her in the fountain. It looked like so much fun. My pleasure in seeing children laughing and marching, marching around in the fountain really made me feel happy! Ma...

I have observed something magical, which happens when people are thinking about their children and their safety. They pray, visualize or demand that nothing bad and no unhappiness will ever come to make their precious child suffer. Your mother never, ever intended to bear children so that they would experience the least amount of unhappiness, isn't that so? If your mothers and fathers wishes were obeyed by the universe, you would have never suffered what you have already endured. In that perfect world, where mothers rule, she would tell you, " Oh, my children, you just be happy ," and you would have instantly obeyed your mother's wishes perfectly. In fact, your mother must have been right because happiness is the natural state of the mind. Therefore, unhappiness must be the unnatural state of the mind, unnatural meaning unbalanced, and not poised, out of equilibrium, and bulging with an agenda weighing down the mind. This unbalanced state of the unhappy mind is ...