Kalu Rinpoche | You are responsible for your own happiness (Part 1)

Q: Can you pray for me too Rinpoche, I can feel anxiety and mentally ill ?

A: … yeah, I think the anxiety and mentally ill, we have so many different names, we call it a depression, we call it a anxiety, we call it a panic attack, we call it loneliness, we have so many names for it. Discovering so many names by itself doesn’t really solve the problem.

What really solve the problem is that acceptance of everything, you know, there, you know, in this world everything is impermanent, everything is bound to change. Those you love, those you don’t. Those that existed, those no longer existed. Whether it’s a material, whether you, whether it’s a human being, whether it’s a climate, whether it’s a beautiful tree, whether it’s a beautiful rose. There’s a beautiful people that you met throughout your lifetime.

Things come and goes. And just like that your emotions is like a wave, like a never ending wave. The only way to see the depth of the ocean is a calm ocean or the calm water, and you can see the depth. In order to see the depth, you did not find the depth by saying “that is the east side of the wave, that is the west side of the wave, that is the top side of the wave, that is the bottom of the wave”. Whatever the analytical you find about the wave, it is still the wave. Doesn’t really solve the problem.

The only way to go into the depth of the wave is a calm and be patient. How do you be patient? You be patient by seeing the universal truth. You do not become patient by forcing yourself, you do not become a wise by forcing other people your judgment and your ideas and your agenda.

You become clear and calm, based on the patience, and the patience comes with the action. It is not doing nothing and being patient, it’s doing something righteous, doing something good and meaningful or maybe meaningless. If you just look day to day in terms of the small focus, it looks meaningless for some people.

Especially when you’re going through a depression. I mean, I went through a little bit of depression. You go to a depression sometime because you see too much, you know and understand, there is a few things that are within your grasp, it’s all about whether you decide or not. And all the alternative you see are not so happy about the result that is going to be, not because you can’t achieve the result, you can, and you know about it. And it’s just sometime just by thinking all this is quite exhausting. All the things that you have to go through. All the suffering that you have to go through, you know?

So the only way to do it, is to be patient. Patient doesn’t mean doing nothing, patience means having clarity in mind and doing it. The right noble action, noble speech, noble thought. And when you have that, and you have a sense of calmness and clarity and it can be added with the meditation, it can be added with analytical meditation little bit.