Dec 31, 2024
Tashi Delek and Happy New Year to all of my students and friends around the world.
I wish you much happiness and a very healthy and successful life. I’m praying for universal and world peace for the new year and ask that you yourself also pray for world peace. Especially for yourself and anything that happened this past year. Whatever difficult times with health or financial or relationship issues, everything will be okay, just forget. All those are now the past and now you have to start a new life, a new year. You have to stay healthy and keep happiness. All happiness depends on yourself.
Everybody has happiness. Also suffering. Sometimes we don’t realize happiness is in your heart. So if we see everything as a good thing or a bad thing, it depends on your mind – your mind creates all these things. Samsara, nirvana, happiness, is created from your mind mostly, but it depends on the conditions.
I really encourage you to see small problems – don’t make them into big issues. Don’t keep small problems in your mind. For example, if you have a headache, don’t continually think about it, it will become worse. Forget and do something else, working, joking, something else and the headache will disappear. All small problems – don’t make them bigger. If you see something you this is not nice or not auspicious, don’t think it is a bad sign. If you keep thinking of it, it will become bigger problem.
If you have a nightmare and keeping thinking of it in the morning, and worry about it, it becomes a negative. It makes you not want to eat or talk to others. If you continue to think about it as a negative, it creates more negativity. But in the morning if you realize the nightmare was only a dream, and not truth, not reality, it was just a dream, everything is an illusion, delusion. If in the morning the nightmare really upsets you, you can pray to Buddha or do something to stop feeling like it is a bad sign. This is important.
In life, there are so many issues, so many changes, good and bad. It is all impermanent, constantly changing like the new year. Similar, if something changes in your life, between friends and family, or within yourself, you don’t feel well, don’t keep it in your mind, just forget and start new. This is really helpful for your life. Not only for you but for your friends – if you are happy your friends can become happy. If you are not happy your friends can also become unhappy.
So I hope you all have health, happiness and feel satisfied for this coming New Year.
Menri Ponlob
