Peace from Within

Focus on your breath. Watch it all the way in, all the way out. Try to breathe with a sense of ease, well-being. Think of the body being full of good breath energy. We need to find a place inside where we can establish our happiness, because if you try to establish your happiness outside, it’s not safe and it can lead to conflict.

Most people look for happiness in terms of material gain, status, praise, sensual pleasures. But the world has only so much of these things. Its resources are limited. When you get something, somebody else has to lose. And when you gain something, it’s not the case that you gain and it’s yours forever. Wherever there’s material gain, there’s also loss. Where there’s status, there’s loss of status. Where there’s praise, there’s criticism. Where there’s pleasure, there’s pain. So you’re looking for happiness in the wrong places if you’re looking there. Look inside.

The Buddha said that even though our minds may seem to have lots of limitations, we can make, at the very least, our goodwill unlimited. The same with our compassion, our empathetic joy, our equanimity: Those can be without limit. We can find happiness inside through being generous, through being virtuous, and especially through meditating. That way, we’re not taking anything away from anyone else. We’re finding our happiness in giving, building from within, taking as our own resources things that really do belong to us—our experience of the breath right here, our experience of the mind right here—and developing those things so they do become a source of happiness inside.

That happiness doesn’t create divisions. If you gain and someone else loses, there’s a division right there. But if you’re gaining and other people benefit from your gain, there’s no division. This is how we create peace in the world, through building up our skills and resources inside.

So make the most of them. Even something as simple as the breath has lots of potential—if you give it time, if you give it your attention. As you do this, the fact that you’re getting happiness inside is not only a benefit to you; it’s a benefit to other people as well.

Think of the vision the Buddha had before he went off into the woods. The world was like a river drying up, drying up, and the fish were fighting one another over the water. Of course, eventually the river was going to dry up totally, and they were all going to die. But in the meantime, they’d made each other miserable. So he wanted to find a happiness that didn’t involve that kind of struggle. And he found that there’s plenty of room inside for developing inner resources for happiness. There are limitations outside, but you can make your inside unlimited. That’s what we’re working on here.