Skip to content

Sakyong Mipham Quote on Living Our Days At The Mercy Of Our Moods

    “With an untrained mind, we’ll live most days of our lives at the mercy of our moods.  Waking up in the morning is like gambling: ‘What mind did I end up with today?  Is it the irritated mind, the happy mind, the anxious mind, the angry mind, the compassionate mind, or the loving mind?’  Most of the time we believe that the mind-set we have is who we are and we live our day from it.”

    Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 20)

    Beyond the Quote (29/365)

    Gambling is not a good strategy for long-term success.  Heck, it’s not even a good strategy for short-term success.  It’s not a good strategy for success at all.  The odds are against you and the factor that holds most of the control over your destiny is blind-luck.  What’s better than blind-luck?  Well, just about any other strategy, to be honest.

    Read More »Sakyong Mipham Quote on Living Our Days At The Mercy Of Our Moods

      “Beginning meditation practice is an excellent opportunity to contemplate how we spend our time.  How much of what we do is important and truly necessary?  One of the obstacles to meditation is being pulled in too many directions.  What drains us; what nourishes us?  Are there activities we can postpone or eliminate?  It will be helpful to ask questions like these at the outset.  Awareness lays the ground for a strong commitment to practice.  Taming our mind isn’t a hobby or an extracurricular activity—it’s the most important thing we could be doing.  It can even help streamline a pressured situation because it gives us clarity, peace, and fortitude.  So while we may need to simplify our life in order to meditate, a benefit of meditation is that it will make our life simpler.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 216)

        “The journey of the bodhisattva warrior starts with the basic attitude of enlarging our motivation to include the welfare of others.  This is a simple response to this dark age.  Let’s begin right now by engaging love and compassion however we can—not tomorrow, but today.  By cultivating courage and confidence in ourselves and maintaining our seat, we can enjoy creating a sane environment; we can enjoy creating an enlightened society.  This doesn’t have to be overwhelming.  Start by looking at your own life and see what you can do, one step at a time.  Love is the saving grace.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 212)

          “Generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, meditation, and wisdom keep turning our mind to enlightenment like a flower seeking sunlight.  This brings genuine delight.  The more awake we are, the more connected we feel with other sentient beings.  The more awake we are, the more we want to help others achieve the same freedom.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 210)

            “We use discipline to clear the road for the future by deciding what to do and not to do now.  It’s learning what to accept and what to reject.  We’re able to see more and more clearly the difference between virtue and nonvirtue—gewa and migewa.  Our minds are strong through practice, so we’re not seduced into acting on negative emotions, even in our mind.  We know such actions will create more pain for us.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 204)

              “To meet our basic goodness, we meditate.  Through peaceful abiding, we learn to rest fearlessly in our natural state.  We see what an enlightened being sees: basic goodness is the ground of being, the nature of everything; it’s an indestructible continuum, a diamond hologram with infinite facets.  Through contemplation we discover that, like the reflection of a jewel in the sunlight, it is empty.  In continuing to contemplate, we see that this emptiness is vibrant and dynamic—a playful display of thoughts, emotions, and perceptions.  This is luminosity.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 198)

                “We often conduct our life as though it’s going to last forever.  With this attitude, we want everything.  The fact of death puts a limit on what we can have, what we can do.  We don’t need to think about death all the time, but to ponder it, to contemplate it, gives us perspective and inspiration about living our life.  It also makes us less spoiled.  It makes us look at the balance of our life and determine what needs to come first.  What is important to me?  How shall I use my life?  We’re able to enter situations more openly once we’ve related with death.  It makes our love more powerful.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 156)

                  “In Tibet people don’t seem to worry as much about aging.  When I hear my mother and her generation of Tibetans talk about getting old, the tone in their voice is proud.  They’re proud to have lived so long.  They’re cheerful.  They have young minds.  They’re continuously curious, always learning.  One of my favorite Tibetan saying is ‘Even if you’re going to die tomorrow, you can learn something tonight.’  With this attitude we don’t feel so old.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 152)

                    “Understanding the meaning of impermanence makes us less desperate people.  It gives us dignity.  We no longer grasp at pleasure, trying to squeeze out every last drop.  We no longer consider pain something we should fear, deny, and avoid.  We know that it will change.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 150)

                      “Contemplating impermanence can be a liberating experience, one that brings both sobriety and joy.  In essence, we become less attached.  We realize we can’t really have anything.  We have money and then it’s gone; we have sadness and then it’s gone. No matter how we want to cling to our loved ones, by nature every relationship is a meeting and parting.  This doesn’t mean we have less love.  It means we have less fixation, less pain.  It means we have more freedom and appreciation, because we can relax into the ebb and flow of life.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 150)

                        “Impermanence is always pounding at the door.  Of course, acknowledging impermanence doesn’t mean we get permanence.  It means we’re more in tune with reality; we can relax.  As we relinquish our attachment to permanence, pain begins to diminish because we’re no longer fooled.  Accepting impermanence means that we spend less energy resisting reality.  Our suffering has a more direct quality.  We’re no longer trying to avoid it.  We see that impermanence is a river that runs through life, not a rock that stands in the way.  We see that because we resist impermanence, pain and suffering are constants.  We realize that pain comes from our desire for permanence.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 147)

                          “When we’re in any kind of pain, we can use it to open our hearts to the reality that people are always suffering.  Pain is something everyone experiences.  We can use it to ground us in the fundamental truth of our being.  Pain gives us firsthand experience by which to be kind and generous to others.  It gives us direct access through our empathy to helping others.  We can use pain to activate compassion.  We’d like others not to experience pain, and we can extend ourselves to them.  We can contemplate the words, ‘May all beings be free of pain.’  Our direct experience of pain only makes our wish more potent.  It may even decrease our pain, because it increases our joy.  This becomes a wonderful meditation, to sit there and contemplate the relief of pain and suffering of everyone, of the whole world—not only because it changes our attitude toward our own pain, but also because it’s opening our mind of enlightenment.  This kind of prayer is always healing.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 144)

                            “We’ve been born in a time and place where we have the luxury of hearing, contemplating, and putting into action teachings that awaken us to our enlightened mind.  We’re relatively healthy, we have a roof over our head and food in our mouths.  We have family and friends.  We’ve encountered someone who can teach us how to train our mind and open our heart.  Being threatened by nuclear war, terrorism, and global warming is a reminder that we can’t take such conditions for granted.  We’re just these tiny vulnerable beings riding on a blue dot in space.  Yet sometimes we act as if we’re the center of the universe.  The enlightened alternative is to appreciate how incredibly rare and precious human life is.  The enlightened alternative is to appreciate everything.  By appreciating whatever we encounter, we can use it to further our journey of warriorship.  We are good as we are, and it is good as it is.  Once we have this understanding, we’ll see that we are living in a sacred world.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 143)

                              “We can say ‘blue,’ but until we see the color blue, we don’t really know what the meaning is.  We can say that something is hot, but until we touch it, we don’t know what ‘hot’ means.  We can talk about bringing our mind to compassion by saying ‘May all sentient beings be free from suffering and the root of suffering,’ but until we feel the pain of others, ‘pain’ is only a word.  We have to crack its shell to let its meaning infuse us, seep into our lives.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 133)

                                “I’ve said before that our bewildered mind is like a wild horse.  I have a very high regard for horses.  When I was in high school, I spent some time working on a ranch in West Texas.  A stallion in the distance on the high plains is a powerful sight to behold.  We don’t tame such a strong majestic creature by beating the spirit out of it.  Instead, we work with its raw power and turn that energy in a certain direction.  Where do we want to take that horse?  Where do we want to go riding?  We want to make a real journey.  We want to ride in the meadows of compassion, the gardens of awakened heart, the fields of wisdom.  This is the essence of the practice of contemplation: we learn to direct the energy of our mind toward enlightenment.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 132)

                                  “The point of awareness—and the point of meditation, for that matter—is to know what’s happening.  We have to be awake.  Otherwise we fall into lethargy, which is one step away from sleep.  Without awareness, meditation will lead nowhere.  In the first stages of peaceful abiding, awareness acts as a spy who watches us meditate, alerting mindfulness to bring us back to the breath when we stray.  For a while it might be clumsy and intrusive, because as beginners we need to be watching constantly.  But as we practice, awareness continues to develop.  The mind becomes more stable, and our ability to know what’s happening becomes stronger.  Awareness becomes the sheriff who can sense that our mind is about to become distracted and remedy the situation before it even occurs.  We don’t see the sheriff running around everywhere; we just know he’s there.  Because we have more confidence, awareness no longer feels intrusive.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 107)

                                    “We have to accept responsibility for the state of our own mind; it doesn’t work to blame others for our confusion or expect them to encourage or confirm us in our practice.  We have to look to ourselves as the source of our own confusion—and our own enlightenment.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 98)

                                      “Obviously, meditation can sometimes be difficult.  We may want to run away from practice, run from the cushion, even run from the word ‘meditation.’  We can run as far as we like, but what we’ll discover is that there is no better environment than meditation in which to build the stability, clarity, and strength of our mind.  At the same time, the difficulty of making it to the cushion, the difficulty of staying with the technique, the difficulty of abandoning discursiveness, isn’t going to disappear.  In procrastinating, we’re avoiding the one thing that really is going to make a difference in our lives.  Meditation stabilizes us in our inherent power as humans.  It introduces the possibility of living our lives in a continually conscious, confident, and balanced state of mind.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 91)

                                        “Like weeding a garden, dealing with obstacles is an ongoing aspect of meditation.  Working with these challenges on the cushion is another way we build confidence and courage to go further.  We can be grateful for obstacles, because they push us forward in our practice.  After a while it is even possible to feel a spark of delight when we see an obstacle coming up, because we know it’s an opportunity to keep sharpening our minds.  The more obstacles we face, the more confidence we feel to deal with them.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 86)