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“We suffer pain because we organize our life around the concept of an enduring self in a solid world, even though all of it is simply ideas and forms coming in and out of existence… The quietness of meditation offers an opportunity to witness how the entity of ‘me’ comes into being.”

- Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Just came across this late at night shortly before bed, and thought it was worth sharing.  Sakyong Mipham is the son of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the first high Tibetan lamas to teach in the United States in the late 60’s.  He passed away in 1987.  I have been reading “The Essential Chogyam Trungpa” on and off for a couple years- it’s great, though I think a basic understanding of some Buddhist fundamentals make it much more accessible.

I’ve had the very good fortune of recently coming into contact with the most coherent and succinct description of Buddhist fundamentals I’ve ever seen in the 20 years of paying attention to it.

I plan on doing some posts in the not so distant future about the basics of Buddhism- particularly from the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism as I have been learning it from my dear friend and Buddhist monk Erik Jung and his teacher who I’ve met on just one occasion His Eminence Dzogchen Khenpo Chogya Rinpoche.

This explanation of positive and negative thinking, how it works, and how it creates the moment to moment sense of happiness or unhappiness that we experience is both profound and entirely practical.

More coming on this soon.

Warning: I’m going to begin this post by being presumptuous and saying that above all else:

We all want happiness in life.

It really doesn’t matter where you come from…

It really doesn’t matter  how much money you have…

It really doesn’t matter what neighborhood you live in…

What you ultimately want in life is happiness.

You want to feel good about yourself, the people around you and you want to feel positive and optimistic about what life has to offer.

If you’re reading this, then it’s also likely that at some level you believe that losing weight will help you get closer to your happiness.

Happiness can be a bit of a tricky topic, though, for 2 reasons:

1.  It’s such an individual thing, and means something different to everybody.

2. Because very often the things that we think will bring up happiness in reality will not.  They might even bring us greater frustration and unhappiness.

When it comes to understanding and mastering the connection between weight loss and happiness, I have found that there are three different things you need to look at that can really make the difference.

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