What Is Real Peace?

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about real peace. I'd like to read a passage by the great teacher Ajahn Chah. He says, "Within itself, the mind is already peaceful that the mind is not peaceful these days is because it follows moods. It becomes agitated because moods deceive it.

Sense impressions come and trick the mind into happiness, suffering, gladness, sorrow. But the mind's nature is none of these things. Gladness or sadness is not the mind, but only a mood coming to deceive us. The untrained mind gets lost and follows them. It forgets itself.

And we think it is we who are upset at ease or whatever, but really this mind of ours is already unmoving and peaceful, really peaceful. So we must train the mind to know these sense impressions and not get lost in them. Just, this is the aim of all of this difficult practice that we put ourselves through." And of course, that last line of difficult practice is referring to meditation. So notice how that passage lands for you. Does it resonate? Do you feel resistance? Or maybe even some confusion? The idea of the mind already being peaceful requires that we go beyond our usual conceptualization of the mind, which tends to just be thoughts, beliefs, or emotions.

In the meditation traditions. Mind is used to describe the part of you that is aware of all of these things. The Zen folks call it big mind,. Big mind cannot be touched by what is arising in our experience. It's not caught in what is happening and it's the part of us that we're connecting to in our meditation practice.

Most of our pursuits of happiness come from the arrangement of moods asAjahn Chah talks about. But there's a different kind of peace we experience, a different kind of happiness when we identify more with our big mind. We'll explore this more in our meditation practice today. But as you go about your day, see if you can feel the difference between big mind and small mind. The real peace comes from more and more moments connected to big mind.

Thank you for your practice and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.