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Applied Dharma

In this essay about applied dharma, Norman writes about skillful means, mindfulness and his work with conflict mediators, hospice workers, lawyers and employees at Google. The article is published in the March issue of Shambhala Sun magazine.

Applied Dharma

I had my first experience with “applied dharma” – using Buddhist practices to try to help people in need, whether they are Buddhists or not – watching a video. It was a tape of a PBS show called “Healing and the Mind” that featured Jon Kabat-Zinn teaching a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction class at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. As everyone knows by now, Jon had invented this vocabulary and technique, an adaptation of Buddhist mindfulness practice, to help patients at the hospital whose cases had been pronounced hopeless. Since there seemed to be nothing the doctors could do to alleviate their chronic pain and illness, the hospital decided to give Jon, then a medical school faculty member, a shot. His six week course turned out to be wildly successful. Over many years it brought not only relief but also wisdom and happiness to thousands of patients with previously intractable conditions.

As a Zen priest who’d spent my whole adult life in monasteries and temples, I was initially skeptical as I watched that video. For me, Buddhism was a radical religion, whose goals and practices were at odds with what people were normally looking for in life. I had been trained to view enlightenment as the goal of Buddhism – total liberation that went far beyond worldly aspirations like health and well-being. In my Soto Zen tradition, the desire to derive any benefit at all from the practice, “a gaining idea,” as Suzuki Roshi, our founder in America had called it, was really bad. Gaining ideas would blunt your sincerity, and sincere effort was the most important thing.

Yet as a religious person I was sympathetic to the idea of helping people in need. It also thrilled me to think that the esoteric practice I was engaged in might be serve. So it took almost no time for Jon’s compassion, his sheer love for the people he was working with and his passion to try to help them, to win me over. All doctrines and notions about what the practice was supposed to be or not be were swept aside by the immediate sense of honest caring I saw in action in that video. Jon was not trying to sell anybody anything. The claims he made for the practice were honest and encouraging. “Try this – I think it will help – but you have to be patient, you can’t hate your illness and be desperate to make it disappear. Be patient and work with your condition, not against it. Then maybe something will change.” A different way of speaking about Buddhist practice than I was used to, but one that was clearly authentic. Later I went to the clinic at U. Mass to witness classes. I met and spent time with Jon, and we quickly became friends. I learned from him that what I had read in the Buddhist sutras was true: the Path is available to everyone and must be shared – and to guide others effectively you must be willing to use whatever comes to hand (“skillful means”).

Since news of Jon’s work has spread, a host of ways have developed to apply dharma.
Mostly these efforts have used, as Jon has used, the language of mindfulness to describe the method of practice. The Sanskrit words for mindfulness are “sati,” which means basic awareness, and “smirti,” which includes the idea of remembering to come back to awareness when the mind has strayed from it. Although what we call meditation includes many forms and techniques, basically meditation is mindfulness. Sitting quietly, you establish awareness of the body and of the breathing. When your mind wanders, you bring it back. Once basic awareness of body and breath is established, you can also be aware of bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, and so on – whatever arises in the field of awareness can be appreciated as long as you let it arise and pass away without too much identification, judgment, or entanglement. In fact, one definition of mindfulness is “non-judgmental awareness.” Just seeing what’s there.

In the Mindfulness sutra, the primary pan-Buddhist text on mindfulness practice, the Buddha says that mindfulness is “the only way to deliverance.” This is very counter intuitive to our can-do Western mentality. Mindfulness proposes that the more we try to fix or improve things, the more we get stuck in them. But that if we are willing to simply be aware, without entanglement, things will slowly come naturally to wise equilibrium. What we call meditation – sitting quietly without moving – is a particularly focused form of mindfulness. But mindfulness practice goes beyond conventional meditation. Once we have some training in mindfulness meditation, we can extend mindfulness to any other activity, until eventually mindfulness becomes a way of life. We become much more aware of what is going on, within and without. When we’re angry we know we’re angry, When afraid we know we’re afraid. With awareness of our state, we don’t react wildly compelled by unconscious impulses; instead we respond with much more accuracy and kindness. This movement from reactivity to response is the key shift that mindfulness practice aims for. But it comes about organically, with training, but without forcing anything.

Mindfulness is easy to explain, but the actual practice is subtle. Since we are always to some extent aware, unless we are asleep, it can be hard to grasp the difference between normal awareness and the more subtle, eyes-wide-open, non-judgmental awareness of mindfulness practice. But with some training you do get the hang of it. In the last decade or two there has been an enormous amount of research corroborating the efficacy of mindfulness in healing and mind-training of all sorts. At this point there is not much doubt that mindfulness practice brings benefit on many fronts – it reduces stress and so promotes basic health; it provides methods to bring healing to difficult illnesses; it improves personal effectiveness in work and personal relationships; it can be a basis for the cultivation of all sorts of positive emotional and attitudinal states, like compassion, loving kindness, equanimity.

Jon had found himself at U. Mass Hospital, had seen a local problem and had the intuitive sense that the basic Buddhist mindfulness practice he knew might help. I have tried to do the same. Whenever someone has appeared asking me to help with an issue that mindfulness practice might address, I have always said yes.

Early on, in the 1980’s, even before I saw the video of Jon’s program, colleagues and I at the San Francisco Zen Center, wanting to help, began the Zen Hospice Project. We had noticed that the simple act of mindfully caring for the dying – simply offering a damp towel, a cup of tea, and a smile, with a spirit of acceptance of rather than resistance to impermanence (a hallmark of mindfulness) – was powerfully healing. Our community had cared for Alan Chadwick ,our gardening teacher, for the Buddhist writer Lama Govinda, for the philosopher and anthropologist Gregory Bateson, for our friend and Native American teacher Harry Roberts, and for our own Zen teacher, Suzuki Roshi, when he died in 1971. So it seemed natural for us to apply dharma in this simple way, especially at the height of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, when so many of our friends and fellow practitioners were in need. Today the Zen Hospice Project continues to do its caregiving work, and has spun off another organization, the Metta Institute, that aspires to have an impact on how end of life care is delivered in America through training health care professionals who work with the dying in the kind of mindful care we have developed over the years.

I am on the faculty of Metta and have found it very interesting to figure out how to teach mindfulness practice in the professional context. Professionals have a lot of knowledge about medical and psychological issues relating to the care of the dying and their families. But what they are not necessarily good at, and where mindfulness practice can help, is in the development of a compassionate presence – the ability to evoke an atmosphere of love, forgiveness, and acceptance, so that whatever healing is possible in those last days or weeks can be encouraged to take place. Any time death is immanent, this atmosphere is potentially present. But where there’s too much fear and denial, or too much pressing for a particular result, things don’t go well. Sometimes professional knowledge and experience not only don’t help with this, but can get in the way. Thinking you know what to do, having experienced past cases, can blind you to what is uniquely present now. With careful attention to what is going on deeply inside, mindfulness practice can bring you to be more aware of your basic confusion about death, your possibly exaggerated need to help heroically, all your unconscious stumbling blocks. If you can learn to be aware of such things with acceptance and forgiveness, if you can also receive some training in becoming comfortable with silence through intensive meditation training, you will have a deeper capacity to be with dying in a healing way.

I have two old friends, Gary Friedman and Jack Himmelstein, who train professionals in conflict resolution and mediation. After years of talking about how mindfulness meditation could be used in their work, we began to include it in the training. Gary and Jack practice what they call “understanding-based” conflict resolution. The goal is to help people in conflict understand one another as a basis for resolution of issues, rather than to simply act as a broker to bring about a compromise solution, which is generally the method used in mediation. One of Gary and Jack’s key concepts is the notion that no conflict is about what it seems to be about. Impasses over money or property are really about deeper concerns that usually do not surface. Any solution that does not address these deeper concerns won’t really hold. For years they have taught a method of dialog that will help mediators guide parties to a discovery of what lurks beneath the surface of conflict, and they have been successful at this. But the introduction of ongoing mindfulness practice has taken the work to a new level. When mediators learn to see more deeply into their own motivations and prejudices with a sense of acceptance and curiosity, rather than with judgment, they are able to make use of their own emotions – and to come to understand others better. The conventional wisdom in mediation work is that the mediator must to keep his or her emotions out of the equation and be a neutral, dispassionate observer. But anyone who has practiced mindfulness knows that there’s no way to keep your emotions out of anything, and that imagining you are doing so only means you are prey to your emotions rather than guided by them with some wisdom. I remember the aha moment in one of our training sessions, when a mediator realized that she didn’t have to pretend she wasn’t angry at one of the parties – that mindfulness practice had given her the capacity to be aware of her anger without expressing it inappropriately, so that she could learn from it and make use of it to help the parties find a solution.

I have also for some years worked with lawyers under the auspices of Contemplative Mind in Society, a non-profit with a mission well described by its name. Here the issue is, “How can mindfulness practice help to humanize what has become a very stressful and difficult profession?” Contemplative Mind’s Law Project sponsors a group of lawyers who meet with me regularly to meditate and engage in dialog and experimentation about this. Each year we offer national mindfulness retreats for lawyers on both Coasts to share our explorations with others. Over a number of years these lawyers have revolutionized the way they view and carry out their work, moving from what some of them have called “the gladiator” model of zealous advocacy, to one in which they see themselves as wise counsel and ally to their clients, trying to bring healing to very difficult human situations, rather than simply to win cases. The lawyers have often noted that sometimes winning the case with maximum aggression does not actually serve the needs of the client.

Probably the clearest way to understand mindfulness work with lawyers, mediators, and end of life care professionals is as training in Emotional Intelligence. EI is a concept popularized by journalist Daniel Goleman, another Buddhist practitioner motivated by a desire to usefully apply dharma. While it is clear from many studies that Emotional Intelligence is a key factor in effectiveness in all sorts of spheres, it is not so clear how or if one can develop it. It turns out that – as I have found – mindfulness practice is the most effective way to improve Emotional Intelligence. At Google, the enthusiastic and idealistic young engineers are not looking for calmness or healing, but they are interested in developing Emotional Intelligence, for work and for their personal lives. Our six-week course there is called “Search Inside Yourself,” and uses meditation, journaling, mindful dialog and a host of other techniques to improve EI.

Many of the practices I use there, and in the other trainings I do, are simple extensions of mindfulness practice. They are readily adaptable by anyone who would like to use them to develop more mindfulness in everyday life. The emailing practice for instance: instead of shooting off a hurried email, and dealing with the consequences later, take an extra moment. Write the email. Then close your eyes and visualize the person who is to receive it. Remember that he or she is alive, a feeling human being. Now go back and re-read the email, changing anything you now feel you want to change before sending. Or the communication practice we call “looping:” when listening to someone, intentionally try to pay close attention close to what is being said, rather than entertaining your own similar or dissimilar thoughts. When the person is finished talking say, “Let me make sure I understand what you are saying. I think you said….” and then feed back what you heard. This way the person feels truly heard and respected, and has a chance to correct whatever distortions in your hearing there may have been. “Looping” saves a lot of trouble and misunderstanding, especially when the communication is sensitive or difficult. There are many more practices like this, simple but powerful techniques to maintain mindfulness throughout the day: Taking three conscious breaths – just three! – from time to time to interrupt your busy activity with a moment or two of calm awareness. Keeping mindfulness slogan cards around your office or home to remind you to “Breathe” or “Pay Attention” or “Think Again.” Training yourself through repetition to apply a phrase like “Is that really true?” to develop the habit of questioning your assumptions before you run with them. Practicing mindful walking whenever you walk during the day. Instituting the habit of starting your day by returning to your best intention. My mediation training partner Gary Friedman does this by pausing before he sits down to meet his first clients of the day. He silently reminds himself as he places his hands on the back of his chair that he is about to participate in a sacred act – the effort to bring peace to conflict. In these and many others ways you can invent, mindfulness can be extended to practically any situation in daily life. And it will make a difference.

I believe the Buddha never intended to create a specialized sphere of life called “religion.” In his time there was no question of secular or sacred, church on Sunday and work during the week. There was only life and life’s difficulties and the possibility that with cultivation one could live with less trouble and strife. Although many of his teachings were given in the context of the monastic community in which he lived, many more were given to lay people for the purpose of making their lives more peaceful and successful. The contemporary application of dharma to so many spheres of contemporary life would not, I think, seem strange to the Buddha. Philip Snyder, Executive Director of Contemplative Mind in Society, and an anthropologist, is fond of saying that a thousand years ago our civilization was profoundly altered by the spreading of literacy to the general public from the monasteries where it had been exclusively practiced. Could it now be the case, he wonders, that the practice of mindfulness developed for millennia in monasteries and temples will similarly be released and spread throughout the world, with just as large an impact?

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Emptiness and Love

Talk on Emptiness and Love given at Mountain Rain Zendo in Vancouver.

Emptiness and Love

By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | January 24, 2009

Abridged and edited by Ryusen Barbara Byrum

Good morning everybody. It's so nice to see so many of you here. Very exciting. Lots of new faces. This is a good thing, because I think practicing dharma makes you happier and clearer about your living. And if it's good for you, it's good for your family. They're going to feel better and be happy to have a wise person in their midst, and then they're going to spread that goodness to their associates and friends. The world really needs this little extra measure of light right now. So I feel very encouraged to see all of you here.

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva when practicing deeply the Prajna Paramita perceived thatall five skandas in their own being are empty and was saved from all suffering.

Doesn't that sound like good news, that we are saved from all suffering? In the fall of last year we chanted the Heart Sutra at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. All the Zen and dharma centers have different translations of the Heart Sutra, and there they were using the translation of Kaz Tanahashi. In Kaz's translation the word shunyata, which is almost always translated as "emptiness," is translated as "boundlessness." Boundlessness. Avalokiteshvara perceived that all five skandhas are boundless and was saved from all suffering.

The Diamond Sutra, which also speaks about emptiness, refers to phenomena as being empty; and therefore, because empty, they are dreamlike, phantom-like, like a bubble, like dew, like a flash of lightning, like a wave on the ocean. And according to the Diamond Sutra, that's how you should view conditioned things.

The Heart Sutra is telling us that Avalokiteshvara has both a faith and an unshakable confidence in this experience of emptiness. The faith is that this dream-like quality is not a hallucinatory trick of the mind or an illusion. This really is the way things are; only we don't see them that way. We seem to persist in thinking of ourselves, of our problems, of our world, of everything, as being fixed and substantial – each thing separate from one another.

I think if we were honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that this is the way we see the world. We do see it that way – separate, out there, problematic, difficult. And also, we see ourselves on the inside in the same way. It seems as if we are not alone in this. At least as far back as the Buddha's time, and probably further back than that, this is how human beings have seen themselves and the world. So we come by it honestly. We should not blame ourselves for our confusion and our problems, because this is the human birthright. We're made to have these problems.

Even though we see and feel the world this way, and our ancestors have seen and felt it this way, the Heart Sutra tells us that it is not that way. It never has been that way. Things are not really as painful in the way that we are convinced that they are. Things are actually like a dream – like a phantom, boundless and empty. They are not fixed, substantial, and separate. Instead, they are mixed up all together – flowing in and out of each other. Things shift and melt and merge, as in a dream. Now something seems to be one way, but in the next moment it can be completely different. That's actually how things are in this world. That's why we all understand that compassion and love make so much sense.

How do you not love the world that is yourself and that you are? How do you not love others that are yourself – that are what you are? And how not love yourself for being all of this? To practice as Avalokiteshvara practices the Prajna Paramita – the Perfection of Wisdom, the wisdom that sees emptiness – is to see deeply in our hearts that things are this way. And then love arises, and we have compassion and concern for others. We have a sense of ease in our living, even when things are tough. That's why, even though the Heart Sutra teaches emptiness, the speaker of the text is not the one that we would imagine – Manjushri Bodhisattva, the bodhisattva of emptiness and Prajna wisdom. The speaker of the text is Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of love and compassion – the one who hears the cries of the world and loves all beings. She's the one who is speaking the truth of emptiness, because the consequence of understanding the empty, boundless nature of emptiness is always love.

The Buddha, as his life story shows, and as his teachings illustrate, had a passion and a concern for one thing, and one thing only: human suffering. He felt suffering himself, and he felt our suffering. He wanted to address, in a fundamental way, this most pressing of all human concerns. He asked, "What is the cause of suffering?" He saw, more or less, that the cause of suffering is ourselves – our sense of being separate, atomized, distanced individuals, standing over and against the powerful world. That's actually the cause of suffering, because without that feeling that we have, there isn't any suffering; there are just things that happen. When we hate the things that happen or feel that they impact us in a bad way, we suffer. If I don't feel that way, then when something happens, it just happens. It's not suffering. And further, he realized that this viewpoint that we have about ourselves is not something that can be easily overcome, because it is so embedded in the way we think and the way we perceive. It's even embedded in the whole operation of our sense organs and the way we put together a world. To overcome it takes some serious doing.

So he thought, "How can I help people to overcome this deeply ingrained viewpoint that causes so much pain and suffering?" One of the strategies he devised, among an incredible array of brilliant strategies, was a way of looking at our experience – a kind of organized way of analyzing and viewing our experience, so that we could see through this deeply ingrained habit of self and separation. In other words, to investigate not what we think is going on, but what is actually going on. Cutting through our concepts and our conceptualizations. What is really going on? And he found, through this practice of investigation, that the five skandhas are a very useful framework for viewing our experience – five categories of experience that would pretty much contain all that goes on in a human lifetime.

So what are these five skandhas? The first one is called rupa – matter or physicality. Matter is important to us, because we all depend on it. We have bodies. No body – no you and no me. There is some stuff here on which everything is based, but we don't actually know or experience this stuff directly. Our mind, that interprets this data of the senses, is the only access we have to whatever rupa really is.

The second skandha is vedanā – or feeling. This is our somatic, deeply conditioned reactivity to anything that we perceive. We always have some reactivity. Before we know what we are experiencing, we have a gut reaction to it – a primitive reaction to it. Even a paramecium is reacting to stimulation, one way or the other. We either have a positive reaction – wanting to incorporate it, or have it, or make it stay. Or we have a negative reaction – wanting to escape from it, get away from it, or make it disappear. Maybe we have a mixture of both. Or maybe we are out to lunch and don't even notice what our reaction is. So it's a very primitive, basic reactivity.

It is based on that reactivity that we have the third skandha, saññā, which is perception. The whole bundle of experiences that constitute our lives – the things that we see, and notice, and think about – are based in perception. We identify things of the world. They may or may not be there in some way, but we really don't know. We think that they're there in a particular way, because of vedanā, and saññā. This, of course, involves the sense organs and the mind, and also, probably, some kind of language, or proto-language that allows us to separate and identify.

So, the Buddha understood that perception is not a primary experience. It is a concoction, a conceptual process. In other words, the Buddha recognized that we are actively making the world we live in, and that the world that we take for granted is not necessarily the world that is there. It's a world that we are creating. Our life is a life that we are creating through our reactivity and our perception.

The fourth skandha, samskara, is based on the world that we have created. This is a very important one. This is the field of practice. This is where we work in our practice. Just as saññā is based on vedana, so samskara is based on saññā. The word "samskara" is usually translated as "impulses" or "formations" or "confections." It refers to the whole set of volitions and volitional impulses that arise in us whenever we have any experience – the impulses that lead to choice and action and all sorts of directed thinking. They are also the emotions that arise based on those actions and volitions. This whole realm of experience can either lead us into a lot of suffering, or the opposite. If we take volitional actions that are wise, they can lead to a reduction in suffering. This is why the samskara field of the fourth skandha is so important for our practice.

And finally, the last skandha, the fifth, is called vijnana, which is consciousness. In Buddhist psychology there are six distinct kinds of consciousness: five that go with the sense organs and the sixth that goes with what is considered to be the sixth sense organ – the mind. The mind cognizes thought and emotion as an object, and cognizes in the same way as an eye cognizes a visible object. There are six kinds of consciousnesses that go with those six organs.

I described the five skandhas as if they were psychological categories to be thought about and analyzed, but I think they were designed to be a distinct spiritual practice. We would begin to pay attention to our experience, not only in terms of me – "Do I like this? Is this good for me?" – but to see how we make our lives up as we go. Through mindfulness techniques we could see how we create our lives. We could develop these techniques in the context of monastic living, which is a very simplified living, like this retreat. In this way of living, we can observe what goes on in the mind and the heart a lot more easily than when we have complicated tasks to do. Through looking at our lives in terms of the five skandhas, we see, "Oh, that's an impulse, that's perception, that's vedanā, that's feeling, that's rupa." Through that way of looking at our lives, moment by moment, we would eventually get over ourselves, and being so stuck on ourselves, and so concerned about ourselves. We would begin to enter the flow of our actual experience.

So all of that is what Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva is referring to when she is deeply practicing the Prajna Paramita and seeing that this whole way of practice is empty. Maybe the early monks who were practicing this way were beginning to get a little stuck on the five skandhas. Maybe they were beginning to make them a little too substantial and take pride in their capacity to discern their experience in terms of the skandhas. Maybe Avalokiteshvara was trying to point that out when she said, in effect, "Don't get so excited about the five skandhas. They're actually empty. You don't really need to be so obsessed with categorizing and analyzing all of your experience. After all, the Buddha intended that in the beginning they be used as a device, as a convenience. The whole point was never to be an expert on the five skandhas and the analysis of your experience. The point was to let go – to recognize that self has always been empty, groundless, and boundless. So the skandhas are empty too." So says the Heart Sutra.

So how do we suffer? Isn't suffering exactly losing what we want and love, fearing the loss of it, or possessing it with such fear and anxiety? Wishing for something we don't have, or wishing for the absence of something in our lives that we don't like? So when we see the emptiness of everything, when we see that we never really had the things we thought we had, or lacked the things we thought we lacked, things get very simple and much easier. We are free. We can be happy. And then the practice of love and compassion become foremost in our minds, because we don't have to worry about ourselves anymore.

I have always been a great fan of the emptiness teachings. I always loved them a lot and studied them over many, many years, over and over, going back to them. I'm especially grateful to them now because they helped me cope with my great loss. You know that I lost my friend, Rabbi Alan Lew, just a little while ago. On Monday, January 12th he got up in the morning and meditated and went to the prayer service and had breakfast. It was beautiful weather out – crisp, cool, but sunny. He was walking on a country road, and I guess he fell down and died instantly.

His passing is a great and terrible thing for his family, who really, really loved him. It was a great tragedy for the many people in the Jewish world and beyond, who depended on him. And it is also very sad for me, possibly the worst loss for me, even though I lost both my parents. It might be that losing my friend of more than forty years has been more difficult than that.

So I have devoted myself to grieving. I stayed with the family. I was surprised that I had as many tears as I did have. I didn't think I would, and it was good to have tears. It is still difficult to believe that I won't see my friend again. Forty years of sharing spiritual practice and friendship and going through every conceivable life change that can happen in forty years. Gone in a flash. In one phone call on a Monday morning.

You all know the famous poem of Issa, that I am fond of quoting. It's a haiku that he wrote at the burial of his two year old daughter, which was the fourth or fifth child that he lost. He wrote:

The world of dew

is the world of dew,

and yet.

All things really are empty of own-being. All things are really like a dream, like a phantom. This is actually the truth. Even if most of the time we do not experience things directly in this way, it's a feeling that we have about life that comes through our practice over many years. We know it's true. And it makes us appreciate the gifts and the beauty. But we really understand that it is evanescent, not only because later it's gone, but because even now it's not really here. Still, due to love, due to our humanity, due to our compassion, we feel grief, and we shed tears. At the same time, we know better than this. We are not regretful or bereft, because we know better; but there are tears, and there ought to be tears. And we don't wish for it to be any other way. These are beautiful tears.

I often worry that maybe our practice is too easy. It's too peaceful. Maybe we have too much dew and not enough tears. Maybe there should be more tears and more desperation in our efforts to help one another. And I guess I am not talking about our practice, I am just talking about my practice and myself. Maybe it hasn't been such a great idea that I have studied the emptiness teachings so much, and maybe even though I had more tears than I thought I would have, these last ten days or so, maybe it wasn't enough.

Anyway, I really appreciate the emptiness teachings. These teachings really do help in the times of suffering and loss. I know that many of you here have also suffered losses recently. Many of you here also have a lot of suffering, because the world is hard right now, and a lot of people are having a hard time, if not you yourself, no doubt friends of yours – people you know and love. And it seems to be a moment like that in our world. I guess that happens sometimes, when we are so much aware.

When someone takes away our toys and our distractions, we look around, and we become aware of how much suffering there is. When there's suffering, we have to be able to feel it, and feel the discomfort of it and shed tears. But we also have to be able to have some confidence and some joy and ease within it, even though we know that the suffering will end, and it will begin again. I really think that our practice and these teachings make a big difference. A big difference. Hard to imagine how people bear these things without some practice to keep them going.

So I suppose these things won't stop happening, but they do have a way of reminding us of how important love is. And I know that I'm going to try to do better with my concern for others. And I think that is going to make me happier. Still, unlike money or material goods, which are limited, love is unlimited. No matter how loving you already are, and I know you are, you can be more loving. So I recommend that as a path.