Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo Day 1 - Change the Mind, Change the World

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, the first female, western ordained buddhist nun, is in Dharamkot doing a 2 day teaching and I put a pause on this weeks Iyengar course so I could attend each of the 4, 2 hour long teaching/meditations.  I told a few people I would take notes so here are the highlights that stuck with me as she was speaking.  Tushita will be posting the audio files online and I'll link to those as soon as they have them on the site.  Day 1 and I LOVED it and her!  She's quite the character and really lovely. Here is some more information on her, if you're curious.

Morning session

• Where we really live 24/7 is in our minds and we give so little attention to creating well-being where we truly reside and spend too much time focusing on the outside
• Who we are is in the mind not in the body
• We are slaves to our mind, we are not the masters, which is why we say and do what we don’t necessarily want
• The good news - the nature of our mind is completely pure, illumines and clear
• **Change the mind, change the world**
• There are 2 levels of meditation in Buddhism:
• 1^st – to remain calm and peaceful (single pointed)
• 2^nd- Vipasana – look into the deeper depths of oneself
• To gradually quiet the inner chatter, focus on the breath
• Issues that may arise are getting fascinated with the psychic events/feelings that occur and gets unfocused on everyone and just oneself
• 4 feels that are ok and positive to dwell and cultivate with others:
• Love and kindness
• Compassion
• Empathetic Joy
• Impartiality

Love and Kindness

• Love = Goodwill towards others, the wish others are happy and delight in their happiness
• The first object of wishing is oneself, not to be contradictory with always putting others as more important than oneself and always giving victory to others.  When that was originally talked of, it was not with the knowledge that people suffer inside and think negative thoughts and have low self esteem so we must be happy within ourselves first
• Give yourself love, compassion, rejoicing in the goodness of ourselves
• If we do not feel genuine love in our heart for ourselves we cannot give it to anyone else
• If you don’t believe in ourselves, who will?

Afternoon Session

• It is important to enjoy doing whatever it is you’re doing because you’ll do it well
• Dhamma should be fun and making our life light, not heavier
• Mostly, we just live on the surface of our minds and we have no idea what’s in the deeper depths of our mind
• Meditation = path of discovery
• The beauty of a journey is not in the destination but in the journey itself
• Do everything with no expectations.  The moment we try to super impose hopes and expectations, the doors close down because our ego takes over
• The thinking mind cannot meditate and cannot be present in the moment… there is no “now” because as soon as you look for the “now” it’s gone.
• Mindfulness is being present and aware of the present moment without comment
• Our breath is our gateway into the “now” because we cannot break in the past and we cannot breath in the future.
• Thoughts are not the enemy.  Our goal is not to be thoughtless, our identification with the thoughts is the problem

Compassion

• Understand the underlining dissatisfaction which is always prevalent as long as we are delusional
• As long as we remain in a state of unknowing we cannot go beyond dissatisfaction