Student and Teacher

Together on the Path

Student: Could you speak about self-reflection and how one can extend this more into one's everyday life? I am able to reflect during my sitting practice and realize, for example, not to do something, but then it is so easy to forget in daily life and react with negative emotions like anger. How can we be more conscious during the day?

Rinpoche: First of all, the ability to self-reflect, to have self-awareness, is a very valuable thing. Sometimes people have it; sometimes people learn it; sometimes people don't have it; and sometimes people don't realize that it is lacking, and then don't learn it.

Most important is to see the richness and the value of it, because if you like it, then you will come to exercise that awareness more. For example, generally in our life, if we pay attention we see that we always are looking out. Our eyes are looking out; our ears are listening for sounds outside us. And constantly we are judging. We are perceiving something, and very often we are then engaging with our weakness. We say something like, oh, I don't like that, instead of saying what we do like.

We talk more about what the problems are in the world, don't we? Every day in our life, we engage our attention with the things we can't do, with the things we are not able to do, with our limitations, our problems; we engage with that. Sometimes, though, you can realize, Well, I don't have to think about this all the time. I can think about what I can do. It's simple logic like that. What wonderful things can I do today? It gives the brain something to work on differently. Immediately the mind says, what can I do? And immediately it looks into and exercises different possibilities. Or you see that you are feeling so depressed or down this morning, because you are not able to do what you are supposed to do. Maybe your flight got canceled; your appointment got canceled; traffic is heavy. So the ability to self-reflect in cases like these is very, very valuable. Try to notice yourself all the time. And value that more.

It's as if you now have a toolbox, a good toolbox. Now if you saw that something was broken, would you simply be thinking, it's broken and I'm depressed that it's broken. Would you do that? Or instead would you know that you have a toolbox, and open the toolbox and then fix what is broken? See, you are now aware that you have so many different ways that you can fix it, and you will fix it.

But most of the time people don't know that they have such a toolbox; they don't remember that they have a toolbox and can work with the help of their toolbox. Instead they sit with this pain and then complain about life, and then exhaust themselves. It is almost as if they assume that exhaustion will help them figure out a solution. No. Exhaustion does not fix the problem. Resting does.

So I think it's so good, this sense of deep respect for that mirrorlike wisdom, that ability to self-reflect. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. And so is keeping the intention: may I have the ability in every moment, all moments, to self-reflect.