Confucius says: “What greater joy can there be than putting into practice what you have learned?” To free ourselves from suffering, the Buddha teaches us 3 questions we can ask ourselves to step out of suffering.

The sixth of the six paramitas is Understanding - Right View. It enhances the other five and, at the same time, is enhanced by them. It is another important tool we can apply to develop peace of mind in any situation.

Diligence and meditation go hand in hand. They are the fourth and the fifth of the six Paramitas - techniques and mental actions that we can use to help ourselves cross over from the shore of negative mind states to the shore of happiness and peace.

Allowing what happens in life to be and becoming open to accepting any and all events as our true experience, that’s what it means to practice inclusiveness. It’s the third of the six Paramitas - boats that we can use to row ourselves from the shore of negative mind states to the shore of happiness.

Mens sana in corpore sano - goes the often quoted Latin saying: which is best translated in meaning as a healthy mind can only live in a healthy body. Do you want to know who came up with that?

Last week, we started learning about the “Four Divine Abodes” for the mind. The first one is unconditional love, which doesn’t expect anything in return. This week, we look at the other three: compassion, joy, and equanimity.

I would like to let a master explain what metta is and how it fits in with Buddha’s teaching and meditation practice. So, I am reading you today from the book “The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

While mindfulness in meditation is quite straightforward - we watch the breath, focus on a mantra, scan the body or send well-wishes to all beings - mindfulness in daily life may be a bit more obscure. So let’s look at it in more detail.

Picking up from last week's class where we talked about the importance of finding out what's truly important to us, today we discussed the process of making that what's important to us happen, the process of realizing it in our daily lives.

Using the metaphor of making a fire, we presented how to create the right conditions of our goals and outlined the three pillars that support the experiencing of these goals.