Life can throw us curve balls any minute. Like the milk rice burning on the stove or a stressful moment in a relationship or a neighbor giving us trouble for no apparent reason. Understanding karma helps us understand and deal with such situations in unconventional, yet surprisingly effective ways.

Visual Journeys are a type of meditation that helps focus a distracted mind to a single story line. Especially to be used as a stepping stone before going into deeper, even more tranquil meditations, such guided visualizations serve to contact one’s own subconscious and higher self.

In our series of sessions so far, we have talked about the inevitable, impending death (sooner or later) that we all face as beings who have taken birth. From the Buddhist point of view, a human life is rare. And a human life is also one of the best if not the best form of life that is suitable for “taming” the mind which leads to deep inner-peace, joy, and freedom from suffering. We can make great progress in this life if we make the efforts to meditate and to think good thoughts and take good actions to be helpful to others.

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.

A few days ago, basketball legend Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash at age 41. Someone else unexpectedly passed away recently. Sophia’s grandmother passed away a month ago after years of being bed-ridden. Just about five months ago, Cristof’s godfather’s fight with cancer ended in his mid-seventies.