Hi Everybody,
Really wintry run in the park this morning with Gatsby. The wind tossing the trees around and the clouds scudding across the sky. But one more day closer to spring! Last time I was talking about getting over my cancer and being surprised that somehow getting to grips with the challenge rather than being frightened of it, helped to increase my optimism, and my conviction that I could beat it. And optimism has been shown to be a very powerful factor in boosting our immune system ( see the new book I'm writing!)
But that is a theme that has been taken up by, among others, psychology professor Tal Ben Shahar from Harvard who talks about trying to find ' the seeds of the positive ' in the negative events that occur in all our lives. Being optimistic, he argues, certainly isn't about being eternally, smilingly cheerful. That would be totally unreal, and optimism is essentially about getting real; it's about turning towards and embracing our pains and our problems as a normal part of our life, rather than running away from them.
What is remarkable I think is just how closely that advice from a modern psychologist mirrors the sentiment expressed by Nichiren Daishonin in one of his down-to-earth letters to his followers, so long ago;
' Suffer what there is to suffer,' he writes, ' enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life, and continue chanting Nam Myoho renge kyo, no matter what happens.'
So we learn, it's only by getting up close to our problems that we can truly understand them. And only by trying to look for the seeds of the positive, even in things that go badly wrong, rather than being eaten up by the negative effects, that we can transform them. As I've mentioned on several,occasions, because it made such a strong impression on me, one of the things that struck me when I first began to go to Buddhist seminars and meetings, was the powerful sense of optimism, even when people were talking about all kinds of everyday hassles and problems. Life for these people was clearly about getting real. About seeing the problems for what they were, and challenging them, rather than being cast down by them. Ordinary people that is, with ordinary everyday problems, learning to see life differently, through the focusing lens of a Buddhist practice. And you can see how that approach makes it possible to establish a sort of self-reinforcing win-win process in our lives; the more we recognise and overcome the negativity, the weaker it becomes, and the stronger becomes our optimism and hope.
And the greatness of a Buddhist practice, in my experience, is precisely that, it's immense practicality. It delivers into our hands a method that has enabled all sorts of ordinary people, from every possible walk of life, and personality type, and background, to achieve just a slight shift in perspective...from negative to positive. Not a revolution, just that slight shift in perspective, and strange as it may seem, that is all that is needed. It may only be a slight change, but time and time again, it proves to be enough to help us embrace the problem, or handle the anxiety, with an optimistic outlook, that then leads on to positive outcomes.
But what does Buddhism have to say about that extreme form of negativity that breaks into all our lives, all too frequently...that we know as anger?
That's where we go next.
See you then.
William
Buy the book! It can only help to be able to go back and refer to it. Amazon about £950 I think or Kindle about £5.
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