Every morning we come here and sit around this table to have breakfast. The external situation is pretty much the same. Sitting in the room with pretty much the same people at the same time of the day. Yet we notice from day to day how much our mental states and moods fluctuate. One day we come to the table and we are happy. The next day we are falling asleep and grumpy. The next day we are looking forward to something. The next day we are bummed out because somebody said something we did not like.

From one day to the next, the external situation is pretty much the same. The internal one goes up and down, up and down, back and forth, what Lama Yeshe used to call a yoyo mind. When we watch this from day to day, it becomes clear that what we experience in our lives comes from the thoughts that we have. The thoughts, and the emotions, come from inside of us. It is not from outside.

Lama Zopa often uses the expression, “Reality is at the tip of a thought”. I think what he means is that what we think, how we interpret something, and how we explain it to ourselves generate various emotions in our reactions to things. Our moods are our responsibility, along with what we think and how we look at something — whether we look at it in terms of what benefits us right now, what we like, and what we want, or whether we look at it in a long-term view of Dharma practice and heading towards awakening. Also, whether we look at it in the sense of benefiting others right now. There are so many different perspectives, and depending on which one we have, it is how we experience things. It can be kind of amusing to watch how the mind changes day to day, even though every morning we are just sitting here around the kitchen table with the same people.

“365 Gems of Wisdom” e-book is out now!