Birds Can Help You Meditate

Some might think that meditation is so simple, you just sit there closing your eyes and do nothing. If it is so easy, then we won't have so many stressful people around, don't we? 

Much to the contrary, meditation is indeed very challenging especially to beginners. I remember that when I first tried to meditate, I couldn't achieve any peace of mind throughout the duration at all. My mind would kept wandering off and focus all the plans, problems and worries I had at the time. I found myself even more stressful after the meditation. Fortunately through persistence practice and a lot of patience, I'm glad that I'm now able to meditate for an hour without any problem. 

It is like when you first try to ride a bicycle, you kept falling but you stood up and try again. Eventually you can now ride a bicycle without having to worry about whether you should put your leg on the peddle first or balancing yourself by steering the handle and so on. The same goes for meditation, you need to continuously practice it to do it better and better by gradually letting go of everything that is troubling your mind. Remember that you are gaining back your personal space 100% back to yourself when you meditate. Ideally no one should disturb you during the process so that you could fully be absorbed into the moment.

If you still can't get into deep meditation, then there is still one more technique you can use which I just discovered this morning. I woke up at 6.30am and meditated on my bed. I got into the meditative state quite fast today probably because of the quiet environment in the morning. Then I noticed that the birds outside my apartment were chirping. It was probably their version of morning rush hour going to work. However, their chirping frenzies produced such beautiful sounds to my ear that I found myself completely surrounded by this fresh and harmonious melody. In fact they are still doing it now while I am writing this post although in lesser amount as most of them must have taken off somewhere hunting for breakfast. It was indeed music to my ears. I didn't think of anything at that time when I meditated, I just totally focus on those beautiful sounds and enjoy the moment. 

Thank you birds for making my meditation went so smoothly today!

It's Friday!

All of us are excited about Friday. It means we have survive one more week and weekends are just around the corner for us to spend time with our family or simply doing what you love most. Hopefully it also means that you have had a productive week that you could be proud of.

Here in Australia, everybody is more relax even in the workplace and sometimes towards the end of the day, we would gather around together with our boss drinking wine or beer and just simply unwind for the week. Another reason I'm particularly excited about Friday is that I get to attend the public talk given by Ajahn Brahm in the evening. It starts with half an hour guided meditation and follow by his talks on various topics of life. Unfortunately it is the rains season right now and he has gone for the Rains Retreat in his monastery until October.

Anyway, Friday is a good day for us to reflect upon what we have achieved throughout the week. Is there something that we have learnt or do we feel that we have grow intellectually and emotionally? If something bad happened this week, instead of complaining about why it happened to you, why not think about what you could learn from the experience.

No man is an island and we are all surrounded by other people in our workplaces and lives. You would be a very lucky person indeed if you are surrounded by positive people. But we don't usually have the choice especially when it comes to working for people. You will be assigned by your boss or superior to work on certain project with other people. It is great if that person has the positive spirit to work as a team. But it is always not the case, isn't it? It is always someone who doesn't want to do the work but simply manipulating others to complete the tasks and she would then end up getting all the credit. So what should you do when you have someone like that in your team? Should you complain it to your boss? No, it will never work and your boss would think that you are behaving unprofessionally by taking things to personal. The only thing you could do is to focus on the project at hand and do not let your manipulative partner sways you from your attention. She would even push all her tasks for you to finish it. That's wonderful! Now you have the chance to learn more things by doing all these extra works. You will gradually find yourself growing professionally and soon you will become more valuable to your boss because of your increased capability. It is good to go the extra mile and overachieve what you promised to do. I hear you screaming now: "What about my lazy partner who didn't do anything and end up sharing my credit?" Ajahn Brahm has spoken about this on many occasions that we should not seek revenge. He said Karma will eventually sort it out. You see by pushing all the work to you, she end up learning nothing. And if she continues to do that over a long period of time, she will soon realize that she have nothing else to do in the office and that will make her redundant. There is a big possibility that she maybe sacked by the boss. So always have the bigger picture in your mind and not be too calculative about who should do what because your boss will eventually find out.

Like what Ajahn Brahm said, be kind to every situation that you are in. By being kind, you are generating positive energies from you that might eventually influence other people around you. Look for positive things around you when you go to work today. You may bump into someone you don't know on the street, simply smile or greet them, they would usually greet back. When you make them feel good, they then go on to treat other people better and these other people then producing further positive energies around them. This is what I call positivity goes viral.

Be kind to everyone and beings. If you can't do it everyday, at least just do it on a Friday and see what it makes you feel. Weekend is coming, so cheer up and enjoy life!

Clearing Out Your Mind

I once read from a book that there are an average of 50,000 thoughts produced in our brain every day! 50,000 thoughts, no joke indeed! The thoughts may arise when we see or hear something and communicate with others. In fact, whatever we sense could produce a certain thought. Some thoughts are beneficial to us such as ideas to achieve certain things but unfortunately majority of the 50,000 thoughts are useless and even negative.

We may think about a project that we are going to do later today or tomorrow. And when we think about it, sometimes we get worries, stress and confusion. At the same time we miss out on what is happening around us right now. This is simply because we can't predict the future, no one ever could. The best way to remove the worries we have on certain things is to go ahead and do it. For example, you may be thinking about building a timber gate from scratch. You then think about how to join the timber pieces together and so on. You won't erect a gate by just thinking about it. And when you think without doing anything, tension is created deep in your mind because you haven't achieve anything that you are 'thinking' of doing yet. You are giving pressure to yourself. It is fine to sketch out a drawing of the gate to see how many piece of wood you need and their individual lengths required. You then put it aside if you have no intention to do it today. You only think about it again when you are about to commence on the project, that is when you go out to purchase the material, bring them to site and start working hard on it.

There are basically 2 ways to keep the mind fit and in healthy shape. First of all is through meditation so that the mind can rest. Secondly is to clear our mental clog regularly so that there is no negative deposits from the past still clinging on to our minds. Our mind is like everything else, it needs constant maintenance. Without continuously taking care of it, our  mind will get tired and produce all sorts of negative emotions within us which in turn affect our behaviour towards others.

We can't solve all the problems in life by just thinking about them, we have to gets our hand dirty to actually do it. When you start doing it, you would find that most of the worries you have previously would be solved by themselves and your mind becomes clearer and clearer. Remember that Rome was not built in a single day. We must acknowledge that everything takes time. Don't put emphasis to much on the end result as the process is equally important. Enjoy every single moment of the journey towards your destination. 

Mindfulness

Have you ever done something you enjoy so much that you are completely absorbed into the activity and lost track of time? Before you know it you could have spent the whole day doing that activity and even skipped your lunch. This is what happen when you focus on the 'now' and practice the Buddhist approach of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is in fact a very simple thing to do and yet most of us fail to practice it because of our unsettling mind which always deviate to negative thoughts and trivial daily concerns. To practice mindfulness, we just need to be aware of the present moment without judging any of our actions. 

I was paving my house crossover last weekend and learned a few valuable lessons along the way. The task looked daunting initially because it is quite a substantial area to be paved. I had to level the ground with rake, shoveled away excess earth and created a gentle slope at the same time. It is a challenging site as the land slopes in two directions. After finished the preliminary earthworks in about 2 hours, then only I could start lay the first pave. And laying the first few paves was like taking eternity. It was slow and I had a large area to fill. Anyway, I continued to focus on hammering down every single pave with my rubber mallet and this action somehow managed to put me into a Zen like situation that before long I found myself totally absorbed into the activity. I hammered down each pave with a peaceful mind. I did not think about anything and certainly did not allow any worries to trouble me. You see when you are totally preoccupied with a task, negative thoughts are unable to invade your mind. It was indeed a wonderful experience and I managed to get much more than expected done that day.

If we ever want success in any area of our lives, it is important that we must do everything wholeheartedly. Focus on productivity, outcome, positivity and stay away from negative thinking pattern or worries. There may be some people around us who wish to see us fail for their own benefits. For example, your colleague does not want to see you excel in your career because that may diminish her role in the office. People do all sorts of things to protect themselves and for their own interests. This is so true especially in the workplace. Very seldom you would find genuine people who are willing to help you without thinking of getting anything back in return. Knowing that these people do exist and we can't do anything about it, why don't we just make peace with it and put 100% of our energy onto the task at hand. That way, we can enjoy our work without being interrupted by hostile acts towards us. And since we are so focus in whatever that is being assigned to us, our work will turn out to be so good that it speaks for itself in negating any criticism that may have arisen.    

Why I started This Blog

I have said that I hope that what I share in this blog may help whoever read it but it actually also help me at the same time. That is because by writing down my experiences in life helps me to have a clearer view of the bigger picture. We all have worries in our life, some trivial while some are more serious than others. If we just keep all these in our head, we could potentially be crazy one day considering the amount of matters that we have to take care of these days.

Also by writing down my experiences with Buddhism helps me to know the religion better. Religion is a lifelong faith as it is always not easy to follow the right path. We have witnessed in our world today that so many so called religious fanatics carried out terrorism that harms innocent lives in the name of their religion. These people have deviated from the true teaching of their religion and they are delusional, they don't know what they are doing. I believe all religions are originally good, it is the small amount of people that ruined its reputation.

At the end of the day, what we want to achieve through religion is to have peace of mind. Once we have peace of mind, we are able to treat ourselves and others better. If everyone of us have peace of mind, the world is going to be a much peaceful place indeed.

Meditation Is Good For You

We rush to work each morning, sitting in the office for 8 hours with a quick lunch in between, we then rush again to catch the public transport in peak hours going home. By the time we finish dinner and washing the dishes, we have hardly any energy left in our bodies. 

During winter season like now in Australia, we have the tendencies of going straight to bed after dinner. We thought that we are getting rest by sleeping early but the next morning when we wake up we feel even more tired and sometimes headache as well. Does this ever happen to you before?

That is because even though in our sleep our mind actually does not get it's deserved rest as we may still have worries from our workplace, relationships and financial matters etc. If we bring with us worries to our beds, our minds actually cannot rest at all. 

This is exactly why meditation is so helpful today in helping people cope with stress in their life. The ultimate objective of meditation is to keep your mind still. Ajahn Brahm has said that if you want to strengthen your body, you exercise it and if you want to make your mind stronger, keep in still. It is really the opposite that you do with the mind as compare to the body. I used to think that thinking will make me wiser and strengthen my mind but it is not the case because we tend to have lots of unskillful thinking pattern most of the time. These unskillful and sometimes unhealthy thoughts do not make our mind stronger, they give us worries instead. Most of us focus on negative thoughts and prolong thinking pattern like this will lead us into depression. It is in fact a very dangerous thing to do.

During meditation, your aim is to calm down your mind. Sitting in an upright position, you adjust your body to a comfortable position for you. Closing your eyes will cut off all the distraction around you and you will be able to enter into meditative state more easily. Use the Buddhist approach of mindfulness to notice any discomfort in your body. If there is any pain in the body, acknowledge it instead of trying to ignore it. Acknowledge the pain and just let it be without ever trying to fight it. That is because the more you fight it the worse it is going to get. 

Once your body is comfortable, you may want to focus on your breathing. Simply notice it as the air enter into your body through your nose as well as the air coming out of your body. Imagine breathing like the wave in the ocean. Ajahn Brahm teaches us to think about breathing in peace (or any other positive thing such as happiness) and exhaling out letting go (or stress, worries etc). Concentrate on this for at least 15 minutes and you will enter into a deeper state of meditation. 30 minutes meditation is a good start for beginners as it is not too long and enough to relax the tension in the mind. It is indeed a very relaxing experience and there was once I felt the tingling sensation in my brain as if it has been massaged for 30 minutes. 

We have to practice it everyday if we want to reap the maximum benefit out of it. Just like your body, we don't get fit by just going to the gym once a week for an hour, you have to at least work out 3 times a week and 2 hours each time in the gym to see any apparent result. So meditate regularly and may we all enjoy a life free of worries and good health.

Backstabbing At Workplace

Backstabbing is a common practice in the workplace regardless of the office's sizes. You just need one troublemaker to start office politicking. I've worked in many companies big and small to be used to this kind of behaviour. But still as a normal human being, I'm sure we all won't feel good about it if it ever happen to us.

It was one typical Friday morning which I was very excited about as it is the end of the week and weekend is just around the corner. My mood was good and I was full of energy. Then the company's associate asked me to retrieve an email from the inbox of my colleague who was on leave. Her Outlook inbox was so messy as she didn't categorize her emails into separate folders. So I have to search through laboriously for that one email which I didn't know who the sender was and what he might have written in the subject heading. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But this wasn't the problem to me as I'm a relatively patient guy. 

It was when I accidentally found out the emails that she sent to other two colleagues complaining about me behind my back that gave me the shock. Our office is a very quiet place as the boss doesn't like any background noise and therefore every single sound is usually audible. She was complaining about me chewing gum in the office that caused her to lose concentration. Her complaints were apparently so serious that my boss decided to switch my place to another location. This was just the tip of the iceberg, I could traced back as far as January this year on what she complained about me. Nobody ever said anything to me on this matter, I couldn't read mind and how am I supposed to know I'm making people uncomfortable?

So it could be as trivial thing as chewing gum that would cost you a bad reputation in the workplace if so happen that someone doesn't like you. So what can I do about it? Am I going to clarify this matter to my boss? No - because I'm not suppose to know this and no one has said anything to me on this. So what can I actually do? Nothing much really. When someone doesn't like you, they will try to pick up every little thing that you do wrong and amplify it to the management and there is nothing you could do to stop them because this is their nature. 

Before I embrace Buddhism, I would have ruminated about how to get back at her and make sure that justice is done at the end of the day. Instead I just accepted it that these things happens and people like her do exist around us. I can't deny that it sure upset me but I managed to make peace with it eventually. Yes, it may cost me my job eventually if she keep on backstabbing me without me aware of it. However, if I focus on this thinking, I will just worsen the situation. I should instead focus on the positive knowing that now I'm equipped with this knowledge of such thing is happening behind my back. So I should be more careful next time when I chew gum in the office; I should concentrate more on my work; I should take this as a wake up call that someone is watching me; I should take this as an opportunity to improve on my work and prove otherwise. 

Patience is a very important quality to have in our lives no matter what we do. The ride will be bumpy all the time but if we are patient enough and genuinely honest in what we are doing, we will see the sun rises in the horizon. The sun always rises after a long dark and cold night. The sun never gives up on us so what should we give up ourselves?  

Buddhism Saves My Life

I was a typical Malaysian Chinese raised up in the tradition of Taoist and Buddhist culture. I have always thought that older people blindly follow tradition without questioning. Practice such as burning paper offerings in the form of clothes, shoes, cars, mobile phones and iPad (lately) never appeal to me. I always thought them to be superstitious and doesn't make sense. I mean if you burn an iPad for the dead, don't you also have to burn the charger for them?

I have never consider myself to be religious simply because I couldn't comprehend its relevancy at the time. It was not until I suffered from a life threatening illness that I begin to comprehend the importance of having faith in our life. I still don't believe in superstition. Instead I've found a religion that finally makes sense to me - it is Buddhism.

I was a completely healthy man that exercised regularly. I worked out in gym for the most part of my 30s and I still carried dumbbell on a regularly up until last year. I didn't have any major sickness except for the common cold that is quite usual in the tropics. Then suddenly on the year that I turned 40, I suffered from panic attack out of the blue. Doctor in Raffles Hospital has diagnosed me as having cumulative stress in life and gave me medication which were more like tranquilizer to calm me down because I would get stressed out for no obvious reason. Then my relatives would bring me to see a Taoist medium who diagnosed me in his own way as having being cursed by someone who apparently wanted me to suffer.

Both the modern and traditional diagnosis gave me their own kind of remedy - doctor would give me medication while the Taoist master gave 'holy water' which has been chanted upon. I must admit that both did help me initially but just for a short while. 

Every now and then I would get agitated and my mind started 'roaming' freely. And when there were too much thinking I might get panic attack which would then required me to take medication given by the doctor. I said to myself that this couldn't go on like this forever, I need help. I asked the local GP to refer me to a psychiatrist. 

I know that I wasn't crazy but I had no choice at that time as I still need to go to work everyday and my condition was affecting my performance at the office. So went to see the psychiatrist but the receptionist treated me as if I am a crazy person. The psychiatrist gave me anti-depressant which not only didn't help but worsen my condition.

It was then that my previous employer in Malaysia sent me messages through Whatsapp and told me that there is this monk called Ajahn Brahm whose retreat is in Perth. I have migrated to Perth at that time and started to look up for this person. Many of his talks have been uploaded onto Youtube, I downloaded a few and started listening to them. My mood was calming down as I listen to the talk and I could sense that it has the healing effect on me. I researched further and found out that he is giving talks every Friday evening at a monastery north of Perth. I went there one Friday without hesitation.

It was already 7.30pm when I got to the place and there were just so many people packed inside the main hall. I found a spot to sit on and observed my surroundings. There is a big golden statue of Buddha sitting in front of me. Although there were many people in the hall, the atmosphere was quiet and peaceful. Then came in Ajahn Brahm and he conducted a 30 minutes guided meditation. This was the very first time I ever attended a guided meditation session. I followed his verbal instructions with my eyes closed. It was difficult to settle my mind initially but I was able to do that quite smoothly after about 10 minutes. I felt peace, compassion and Buddha's love for the first time in my life. I felt like crying not because of sadness but to shed tears of joy. The feeling that the world is indeed a wonderful place and our own problems are so trivial compare to the compassion of the Buddha.

Buddhism taught me that we are in charge of our life. Most of our sufferings come from our mind. And if we could keep the mind still through meditation, then we could live a relatively happy life.

I haven't recovered 100% from my anxiety disorder but I am progressing well. Now, if I ever get upset on something I would just meditate for 30 minutes and it is the best medication one can ever have. I am happy that I found Buddhism before it was too late for me. In fact I'm so grateful that I started this blog today to record my experiences with the religion. I hope that others could find it useful to help them with their lives.