This book is full of treasure nuggets on how to live a better life – a handbook for living truly sums it up. You might want to take your time to digest everything in here and reflect.
I always thought the Dalai Lama was invincible and so zen that he was spared the sufferings of human emotions. And his recollection of the death of his brother or how a completely objective and innocent comment that was taken in the wrong context by an older monk who took his own life to be reborn as a younger monk to attain a different level of practice.
But mostly, he expounds self love. Self worthiness and how he couldn’t completely understand how anyone couldn’t begin by loving oneself.
It was interesting to get the Western psychotheraputic way of looking at theories of inflated self confidence and disturbances in people’s self image. They link it back to upbringing – the idea of nurture vs nature. “They describe how people develop their concepts of who they are by incorporating explicit and implicit messages about themselves from their parents and how distortions can occur when early interactions with their caregivers are neither healthy nor nurturing.”
“The Dalai Lama focuses on pulling out the arrow, rather than spending time wondering who shot it. instead of wondering why people have low self-esteem or inflated self-confidence, he presents a method of directly combating these negative states of mind.”
What a positive way to deal with things – not the blame game, or (I am so guilty of this) so busy caught up in investigating the why and how instead of addressing the immediate feelings/problems at hand.
Life is a work in progress. I hope to get better at living a more meaningful and purposeful life.
I highly recommend reading The Art of Happiness by His Holiness. Another book I really enjoyed about access joy is by Google’s former Jolly Good Fellow “Search Inside Yourself” By Chade Meng Tan. He also wrote “Joy On Demand” which was an enjoyable read.
