21/01/2022
Wishing you gentle beginnings to the New Year 🙏
"To begin this year anew, we can reflect on these simple questions:
· What have I done during the year?
· Have I been able to produce feelings of joy and happiness during my days?
· Have I been able to take care of the painful feelings during the year?
· Have I been able to handle them, to calm them down, so that I will not be a source of suffering for myself and for other people?
With mindfulness, we can produce a feeling of joy whenever we want, because we are a practitioner. We can produce these feelings for ourselves, and everyone we love. Have we done that this year?
We can learn how to calm down painful feelings, and even transform them into compassion, friendship and forgiveness. Pain and pleasure are all organic, like love and hate. If we do not know how to handle love, it can turn into hate or anger. If we know how to handle hate and anger, we can turn it back into understanding and love. If we do not know how to handle painful emotions, we are going to repeat that in the new year, and the new year will not be very new.
The value of the year depends on the value of acting, of our way of life. With mindfulness, we can improve the quality of our life, of our days, our months, our years."
Excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh’s talk