Present Still

You're lying in bed, replaying something that happened earlier that day, when suddenly a completely unrelated worry slides in and takes over.  Maybe you've caught yourself there before. Maybe you've even blamed yourself for it afterward, wondering why your mind won't just be quiet. Here's the short version. Much of what troubles you isn't something you chose to create.  And in Buddhism, thoughts like these aren't automatically treated as "you" at all. Strange thought, isn't it?  That the thinker and the thought might not be the same thing.  So what does that actually mean? Why We Assume Our Thoughts Are Really Us Most of us treat our thoughts as naturally, obviously ours. We simply take them to be part of who we are. I thought that. I've always been an anxious person. I still haven't forgiven what happened. But thinking doesn't happen in a vacuum. It reacts constantly to past experience, to the environment around us, to whatever se...

Do you ever lie awake worrying about tomorrow, next month, or years down the road? Will the presentation go well tomorrow? Will the deal with that client close next month? Will there be enough saved for retirement in ten years? When these worries take hold, your heart races and your mind spins, yet you can never quite pin down where in your body the anxiety actually lives. Venerable Beopsang offers a simple practice you can try right now.  The next time anxiety rises, close your eyes and search for exactly where it sits, somewhere in your head, somewhere in your chest.  But when you actually go looking, you won't find a solid lump or a fixed thing called anxiety waiting there. Why is that? Photo by the author Why Fear Has No Substance When fear shows up, you feel it in your body, unmistakably. Sometimes your hands and feet go numb. Sometimes your heart pounds so hard you can feel it in your throat. The core of this practice is simple : see the gap between what your body actu...

How was your heart today? Did someone's words send a sudden flash of anger through you? Or did they leave you feeling good instead? This is how it goes for most of us. A single sentence from someone else can shape our entire day, for better or worse. We believe, in that moment, that their words were simply a fact. But whether we end up angry or pleased isn't always purely about what the other person said or did. Our own judgments and interpretations can amplify that emotion, or even change it into something else entirely. So the next time it happens, try pausing for a moment and asking yourself: Is this thought actually true? Is this really a fact? Photo by the author The Illusion That Deepens Our Wounds: Believing Our Feelings Are the Truth We take what we directly see and hear and accept it as fact right away.  " I saw it with my own eyes, " we tell ourselves. But this certainty is often exactly what fuels misunderstanding and suffering. What does that mean, exactl...

You’ve just been promoted from manager to senior manager. Colleagues are gathering around to congratulate you, and you’re smiling.  But somewhere in the back of your mind, a quieter thought is already forming: now I need to work even harder to make it to director .  The joy is real, yet you barely get to sit with it before your mind is racing ahead again.  If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. We achieve something we’ve wanted for a long time, and within days — sometimes hours — that same restless emptiness creeps back in. We chase the next thing to fill it, and the cycle repeats. Buddhism sees this pattern through the idea of dukkha . It’s often translated as “suffering,” but that word misses something crucial.  Dukkha points to a deeper, more persistent kind of dissatisfaction that runs underneath our lives, even when things are going well. There’s a verse in the Dhammapada that says, “Health is the greatest gain, contentment is the greatest wealth.”  At...

Is knowledge a medicine, or a poison?  Sometimes, knowing itself is the problem. A few days ago I watched a dharma talk by Venerable Wonbin , and one line has stayed with me ever since: "Stay at ease like a fool."  Without meaning to, I found myself repeating it under my breath — be at ease, be at ease, like a fool. We replay things constantly. Things that already happened, things that haven't happened yet. And somehow we can't let go of the thoughts they leave behind. But in his talk, Ven. Wonbin says something striking: 99.9 percent of what we think of as "problems" are actually fake — pure fiction we've built in our own minds.  Knowledge, he says, isn't always medicine. Sometimes it's poison, and we need to recognize that. Instead of clutching at what we think we know and picking it apart, what if we simply set it down — pretended, for a moment, not to know?  Just doing that can make the heart feel lighter almost instantly. Photo by the author...