It Is My Conviction That There Is

There Are So Many Things That Can Provide Us With Peace. Next Time You Take A Shower Or A Bath, I Suggest You Hold Your Big Toes In Mindfulness. We Pay Attention To Everything Except Our Toes. When We Hold Our Toes In Mindfulness And Smile At Them, We Will Find That Our Bodies Have Been Very Kind To Us. We Know That Any Cell In Our Toes Can Turn Cancerous, But Our Toes Have Been Behaving Very Well, Avoiding That Kind Of Problem. Yet, We Have Not Been Nice To Them At All. These Kinds Of Practices Can Bring Us Happiness.

I Am Determined Not To Kill, Not To Let Others Kill, And Not To Condone Any Act Of Killing In The World, In My Thinking, And In My Way Of Life. We Cannot Support Any Act Of Killing; No Killing Can Be Justified. But Not To Kill Is Not Enough ... If In Your Thinking You Allow The Killing To Go On, You Also Break This Precept. We Must Be Determined Not To Condone Killing, Even In Our Minds.

If We Are At War With Our Parents, Our Family, Our Society, Or Our Church, There Is Probably A War Going On Inside Us Also, So The Most Basic Work For Peace Is To Return To Ourselves And Create Harmony Among The Elements Within Us - Our Feelings, Our Perceptions, And Our Mental States. That Is Why The Practice Of Meditation, Looking Deeply, Is So Important.

When We Are Angry, Our Anger Is Our Very Self. To Suppress Or Chase Away Our Anger Is To Suppress Or Chase Away Ourselves. When Anger Is Born, We Can Be Aware That Anger Is An Energy In Us, And We Can Change That Energy Into Another Kind Of Energy. If We Want To Transform It, First We Have To Know How To Accept It.

To Reconcile Conflicting Parties, We Must Have The Ability To Understand The Suffering Of Both Sides.