Learning to Transform It What happiness has come to mean For me, happiness has slowly come to mean something amazingly simple: suffering less. The older I get, the more I realize that happiness is not something we can endlessly add to our lives through achievements, possessions, status, or approval. Happiness becomes possible when we learn how to transform the pain that already exists inside us. If we are not able to take care of the suffering within ourselves, then no amount of external...

How the anger we grow up with quietly shapes the way we speak, react, and love. Growing up around anger I recently had a conversation with a friend about anger, and it stayed with me long after we stopped talking. It made me realize how much anger has shaped not only my family, but also the emotional atmosphere of my childhood. The truth is that anger was never something rare or shocking to me. It was everywhere. I grew up witnessing so many fights and arguments that they became part of life....

Childhood Memories at the Table When I was a child, my dad used to tell a funny story about me. Every time someone brought food to the house, the moment I saw it, I would run away. I was extremely skinny because I simply didn’t enjoy eating very much. While other children looked forward to meals, I treated food almost like something I needed to escape from. But there were a few things I loved deeply. My favorite meal was incredibly simple: rice with cucumber and soy sauce. I loved vegetables...

My Childhood Home I often find myself thinking about how the homes we grow up in quietly shape the dreams we carry into adulthood, even when we do not fully understand it at the time. When I was young, my family of four lived together in a small home in a busy city where land was limited and space was considered a luxury. Owning a home with a large yard was something associated with wealth, and most families learned to live closely together because there simply was not enough space to live...

The Sky Inside Us There are days when the sky is completely clear, without a single cloud. When we look up, it feels calm and vast, like that blue has always been there for us. Sometimes our inner world feels like that too. Clear, open, spacious, like our heart has room to breathe. But there are also days when our inner world is not clear or at ease. It becomes like a sky filled with clouds. We feel worried, sad, and our heart resembles a sky covered with dark clouds. Often this is not anger...

Loving Kindness True love begins with loving kindness. It’s not just the desire to make someone happy, but the ability to do so. Even when your intention is pure, love without understanding can still cause pain. To love well, we must understand deeply. We must take time to truly see the person we love; their joys, their struggles, their silent battles. Understanding is the essence of love. Without understanding, love cannot exist. True love begins when we look deeply enough to understand....

The Many Faces of Physical Touch First off, the more you really think about physical touch, the more you realize there are almost as many variations of it as there are when we think about love. We often say things like “That really touched me” or “That touched my heart.” These expressions reveal something deeper; a strong emotional reaction tied to something that feels physically real. Yet most of the time, we don’t consciously connect those feelings to physical touch. For me, music has...

It is really amazing to think of love and realize that something we all yearn so desperately for is also the one thing that is so difficult for us to understand and define. And it becomes even more difficult to define because every day our understanding of life and the experiences we have change us, so too does our understanding and capability of love also change along with it. In essence some may say that true love is a constantly moving target! What is love? One of my all-time favorite...

The Beginning There is a kind of original fear that lives in all of us. Before we ever knew this world, we lived in a place where everything was done for us. We once lived inside our mother’s womb, held in warm water, protected from noise, hunger, and cold. Two hearts beat in one body. She breathed for us. She ate for us. Oxygen and nourishment came through an invisible lifeline, and for a while, life was effortless. We did not have to try. We did not have to search. We did not have to...