Life doesn’t always work out the way you want it to.

Life doesn’t always go as planned.

We long to do things as we please. When we cannot have things our way, we suffer and remain in agony. When our wishes seem to be beyond our capacity, we turn to others; if this does not work, we even turn to deities in order to get what we want. For our wishes to be fulfilled whomever we pray to should be omnipotent; this way we create all-powerful gods. When faced with extreme hardship we can turn to these gods out of faith, which might be temporarily helpful. However, this is not what a practitioner of Buddhism does. Their practice serves as the means to realize that life does not always go as we want it to.

It is not necessarily good to have your wishes fulfilled. If the world were to grant the wishes of every single person, the world will turn not into heaven but into hell. For instance, if you fell in love with someone that many other women also fancied, what would happen? Many women would fight over him, resulting in complete disorder. What if no one wanted to go to work but still wanted to become rich? What would happen to society? Such a society cannot function, and would become overcrowded with lazy people who put forth no effort yet expect great rewards.

People are prone to arrogance when things go as they wish. However, this does not mean that life should go against one’s wishes. There are both times when our wishes are fulfilled and not fulfilled, but there are more times when life goes against our wishes. The very fact that life generally goes against our desires is what maintains the world as it is now.

If it doesn’t work, try a different approach

If you have goals to fulfill, make the effort to achieve them. If you fail even after putting great effort forth, study the reason for failure. Seek a new method and try again. If you still cannot fulfill it, let it go. If you refuse to give up, you try again. This is life.

You feel joy when you succeed in achieving your goals. But achieving your goals does not imply that you are completely done by any means. You are not free to just fool around; rather, you set another goal and begin the cycle again. Think about this carefully. Taking on a new task after completing one and re-doing a task after a failure is in fact the same thing. It makes no difference whether you do the same thing twice or do two different tasks in succession. Having rice for breakfast, ramen for lunch, and noodles for dinner is the same as having rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the sense that regardless of what you eat, you have eaten three meals for the day. Therefore it is not important whether or not you have achieved your goal after being committed to it. It is more important how fully and diligently you do your job in the process. When successful, you move on to another task; when the results are unsatisfactory, you decide between continuing with the current job or undertaking another. If you know that in the end both are the same, you will not be afraid of anything you do.

People often say, “This can’t be happening to me.” However, can something that is beyond reality actually happen? No. Things happen because they are always within the realm of possibility.

Many unimaginable things happen in this world. For practical reasons, we cannot be aware everything that happens. If we were aware of all the thoughts of our spouse and children then our head would explode. Therefore, in some ways it is better for us to live our life without knowing everything.

Not being shackled by the outcomes of life, a truly liberated being

We should not agonize over outcomes that are unfavorable to us. If we examine our lives in depth, among the many things we wanted to happen we also have one or two things that did not go as we desired but our lives still moved on. Of course we will face some difficulties and obstacles, but in those cases it is not necessary to agonize over them in order to try again. If we want to pursue the same thing then all we have to do is try again. Otherwise just stop. Either way, it is not necessary to stress out. Once we come to the realization that doing the same type of work a hundred times and doing a hundred different tasks is all the same work, then life will be simpler.

If we agonize over things that did not turn out the way we envisioned, we will live in misery for the rest of our lives. Moreover, we will always tremble with fear and cling onto others. Does every business in the world end up successful? No. Also, do all students get accepted to the schools they want to attend? Don’t most students want to go to Ivy League schools? Even so, if a student does not get into an Ivy League school, he is still okay. As parents, if we think that we can do something about our children’s successes or failures then we are acting out of selfishness. Instead, if our children come to us after they experience failure, we as parents should empower ourselves through cultivation of our minds so that we can give emotional support and courage for them to continue on with their life.

If we keep thinking about the past and have negative views of our present, then our lives will be complicated. Acceptance is the most important thing in life. We can perform best when our minds are in calm state and thus able to let go of any attachments. Regardless of success or failure, let it go.

When I was entering the monastic life my teacher once said that I will have a short life. I did not know if it would hold true or not but I continued to live my life to the fullest. To live life frivolously would have been a waste of even a short life so I lived as though every day were my last and put that same energy into each day, and today I continue to live. To think of the rest of my life as a bonus puts my mind more at ease and allows me to live a more liberated life. Before, I worried over things not going the way I wanted, but nowadays I think that I have done the things that needed to be done during my given life span and anything from that point onward are just extra days given to me, and so I worry less. Therefore, for me dying today or tomorrow does not matter because I have no regrets.

So, if you tumble and fail in life do not breakdown; instead find the courage to move on or try again. Be courageous and do things to the fullest. As humans we will mature more effectively when we taste some failure. If you look at plants, those that grow straight upward will eventually fall over, but those that grow up and outward with many divergent branches appear fuller with many leaves. With cultivation of our minds we can become more composed people. “Everything will be okay. Everything is going well. I have no worries.” When you pray, do it with this mind set, and have a positive outlook. Only then, even when things do not go the way we wanted them to, we will not live in agony or constantly worry. In conclusion, I hope that all of you will always live your lives with gratitude.    

Ways to Let Go of Anxiety and Worries

By Ven. Pomnyun

Attachment and Scattered Busy Thoughts

Anxiety and worries are illusory phenomena that occur when we misconstrue the future for the present. Likewise, we sometimes associate suffering with things we recall from past experiences and therefore reawaken those emotions in present situations. Seeing a heroine on TV crying over the death of a hero makes you cry with them. However, upon turning off the TV, you no longer see such characters or sad situations and only a blank TV remains. Then why do we cry over nothing? This is because we are so absorbed into the drama that we take the story for reality. Likewise, we shed tears or laugh while reading a book as we imagine what happens in the book happening in reality.

Similarly, while sleeping, we perceive what happens in a dream as factual. While asleep, a dream becomes reality for us, so we cry or run away out of fear, or sometimes we grab hold of things dear to us and refuse to let go. If we knew all along that it was just a dream, we would not hesitate to give things away or go with strangers in the dream. When we open our eyes we realize we were dreaming, but when we go to sleep again, our dreams once more become reality. In the same way, vividly recalling past memories within the mind makes the past seem like reality. This way, as soon as we expect something in the future to occur, our expectations become reality in our minds, resulting in fear. These feelings are simply attachments that we have.

This does not mean that we should forget about the past but that we should not project past memories onto the present. Those who live in past memories or in future worries are lost in dreams. Neither lives in the present, which is reality. They are alive but not truly living because they roam around in an illusory state of mind. However, most of us, no matter what we do in the present, we succumb to living in past memories or in thoughts about the future. This is just scattered busy thoughts.

Everything is Created by Your Mind

Buddhas are awakened ones, and the worldly human beings are those who are wander around in their own illusory world. Crying and yelling due to suffering or celebrating out of great joy are all dreams. When a sleeping man has a nightmare and screams in his sleep, we just think, “what a sleep talker!” Sleep talking has no meaning and is nonsensical. All emotions like joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure that are triggered in the life of someone in the illusory world are just as nonsensical as sleep talking. For this reason, those who live in agony due to pain from the past are like those that live in dreams.

Let me compare this situation to our body in order to clarify. If you have a shoulder injury, it hurts a lot when a passerby bumps into it. “Hey!” You will yell at him. Then, the passerby thinks that you are overreacting, which angers you more and you yell, “You caused me severe pain without apologizing.” At this time, the passerby has no idea what he did and says, “What did I do? What’s your problem, and why are you yelling at me?” Before you know it, the quarrel has become serious. For another example, let’s say a wife has mental trauma from the past and her husband unknowingly says things which aggravate her old wounds. Over time, she feels greater and greater pain and soon becomes furious and refuses to speak to him. The husband, having no idea why she is mad, says “what a temperamental woman.”

The accumulation of these kinds of incidents gives rise to conflicts. And yet, we live our lives, feeding our pain with trivial fights and arguing. The past is like a night’s dream, but we live with a firm grip on it, as if it were our reality. Your present problems arise when you hold on to your past memories. Therefore, you should clear all the mental wounds that you obtained in the past and should such wounds appear to reopen, you should become aware, “This is an illusion that my mind created.”

Just Let Go of All The Attachments

The same applies to thoughts about the future. For instance, when waiting at a bus stop, we see our minds changing frequently. When we are late for a Dharma gathering, we get so impatient we complain about the bus driver who seems to be late without reason. However, if we are waiting for a friend at the bus stop and the friend is late, we worry that the bus may come early. Buses just come and go. There is no need to complain about their coming early or late. Depending on what the agenda we have in mind, we feel easy or uneasy. Knowing about the workings of our minds, we can think, ‘Buses do not come early or late according to my wishes. If one comes a little late, I can be a little late. If one comes too early, I can let it go and catch the next one’ and not resort to unwarranted distress.

No matter how trivial a thing it may be, anything can become a matter of grave concern once we develop attachment to it. Inversely, no matter how serious a matter it may be, it becomes nothing when we are free from any attachment to it. All suffering is produced by your mind. When suffering, you can let go of your anxiety and worries by becoming aware that ‘Oh, I am attached to this. By holding on to it, I am messing up this matter’. A rat wouldn’t knowingly eat something if it knew it was rat poison and we likewise would not hold onto attachments if we knew how harmful they are to us.

People often ask me, “How do we let go of our attachments?” The answer is simple: just do it! You might reply, “How? I don’t understand.” Say you were to hold a very hot cup, how would you put it down? You say, “Ouch, its hot!” and put it down. If you were asked how you did that, what would you say? There is nothing else to say except that you simply let it go because it was too hot. Suppose that someone says he cannot put it down because he does not know how and keeps yelling, “Hot, hot!” Does he not know how to let go of it? It might seem so. But when we examine his mind, it is not a matter of not knowing how to let go of the cup, but rather an unconscious urge to possess it. Therefore, you have only two choices; put it down and avoid burning your hand or hold it and consequently burn your hand. Only the foolish would burn their hands whereas the wise would put it down, thinking no matter what it is not necessary to burn their hands for the sake of holding onto it.

Let’s say you nagged your husband because you thought you could change him for the better, but he worsened instead. With this kind of consequence you should stop your nagging, but you keep doing it. This is not your husband’s problem but yours. Therefore, you need not argue with your husband; as you sense the urge to nag, look within and accept it as your problem and only then can you break yourself of such habitual behavior. By accepting your problems as your own you relieve your mind of placing responsibility on others and progress in your practice of dharma in daily life. At this moment you come to feel grateful to the Buddha. ‘If I had not known the Buddha’s teachings, my family might have fallen apart because of this conflict or I could have gotten divorced, but the problems are solved thanks to the Buddha’s teachings. Thank you. I am so proud and glad that I have found the Buddha’s teachings.’ This is the very blessing of the Buddha

Transforming Disaster into Blessing

No matter how disastrous the incidents you encounter in life, those experiences will get you to mature more than ever if you take refuge in Dharma and study your mind. For example, having long suffered from the aftermath of sexual harassment, one who meets Dharma and sees “A-ha, everything is the workings of my mind” can let go of past trauma and as a result that person actually becomes more blessed than those who have not gone through such an ordeal. If others talk with you about their painful experiences of sexual harassment, you will have a distinct (???? Distinct ???) attitude — you will be able to console them with deeper understanding and sympathy, empathizing with their anguish and guiding them to overcome such painful memories.

It is not that Dharma entitles you to avoid disasters and receive only blessings but that Dharma enables you to transform disasters into blessings. When this is the case, what in the world is not a blessing? Therefore, no matter what happens, we can live without fear. This is the greatness of the Buddha’s teachings. If you keep practicing this Dharma properly, how could any gods not bless you with good fortune? In this manner, blessings follow you as an unexpected gift. Nevertheless, even if no one gives you any blessings or luck, you can always make your own. Only by practicing Dharma in this manner can you become a person of great and genuine luck.