Essay by Luke Foster
“When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, ‘Oh yes – I already have everything that I really need.”
Dalai Lama
I love this quote by the Dalai Lama and I feel I need to heed this important advice. I quite often over shop particularly on the Internet and mum always said to me for the five years, before her passing: Luke money is nothing to you and you are living beyond your means and it only sunk in this last month as I have tight end my belt financially. She also said I had to much stuff and needed to reduce it as it would never fit in an apartment when I got my own place.
My mum used to be the rock to lean on. When she died, I was lost. But now I am finding my way slowly as the Dalai Lama has become my rock to lean on from a distance. I learnt this from the Dalai Lama from one of his talks when he said that when his main teacher passed, he felt very sad and the rock he used to lean on had gone.
I think the Dalai Lamas advice is sage advice and like most people in the world would love to meet him in person and praise him.
I was talking with Yannick my support worker yesterday and joked that when I was in kindergarten, I used to love to go to the dress up box and dress up but then I remembered it was actually preschool when I did this and I haven’t changed much and literally dress up in different costumes for my art.
“It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.”
Dalai Lama
Once again this is sage advice from the Dalai Lama as I really need to pursue my dream of much deeper happiness in my life so I can enjoy it and be productive.
I agree with the Dalai Lama that having peace of mind is very important.
“When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways – either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.”
Dalai Lama
I was lucky that when my mum passed which was a great tragedy, I had my friends to support me and my support workers Yannick and Ava supported me too. Without them I would have suffered much more.
In conclusion if I keep up the three actions and studies that I talked about in the heading then I shall put myself in a better position to suffer much less and not leave a bad taste in peoples, mouth.
One of the main reasons I want to beach walk every day is to lose ten kilos as I put on weight when I had a sore foot for a month.