Please accept our apologies for the recent message from Satvinder Kaur. She has been helping us with our e-mail list and we sent out one of her test messages by mistake.
Unless we are perfect, we are all going to make mistakes from time to time. However, the extent of their impact on us depends on how we respond to them. If we allow the mind to fixate on and lament the past, the impact of that habit will be far more damaging than any one individual misstep.
If we are given to living in the past, it would be counterproductive to compound the problem by adding that tendency to the list of judgement and blame that we assign to ourselves. Instead we should seek to understand how the mind works and determine the underlying causes for our suffering. We can then see that habit is simply the nature of the mind. If we indulge in certain thought patterns like worry and lamentation, we will only fuel those tendencies.
Thankfully, if we suffer from an excess of regret or worry, we are not necessarily consigned to live this way for ever. It is possible to learn how to convert that kind of unproductive energy into the wholesome energy of mindfulness. Surely there are those who doubt that this is possible. To those, the Buddha said this: “An end to suffering exists. The path to the end of suffering exists. The One who points out the Path exists. If you do not walk along this Path, how will you ever reach an end to suffering?
What is this Path referred to by the Buddha that will lead us to an end of suffering? The path is the training that is available to us through insight meditation. When we practice the act of becoming aware of what is happening right now, we are training the mind in present moment awareness and we are walking the path to the end of suffering. Why is this so? Because when the mind is observing carefully in the present moment, it is not grasping for the future or the past so suffering has no opportunity to come in and take hold. That is why when we train in mindfulness, happiness becomes a foregone conclusion.