The Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity 

to accept the things I cannot change; 

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference. 

--Reinhold Niebuhr

In an experiment, monkeys were implanted a signal directly into their neural pleasure center. They could activate their bliss zone simply by hitting a button. What do you think happened? They pushed the button over and over. They forgot about mating, forgot about attending to their young. They even stopped eating and hammered that button until they died.

The world is here to lead us Home. Pleasure is part of the Way, and so is pain. If you push your pleasure button at the neglect of what needs to be done you have deviated from the Way. If you hit it because you want to escape from what doesn't feel so good, you also have missed the Way. Life is really not that hard to figure out. There is always a golden middle along the Way. We are not helpless monkeys being tortured by scientists, we are part of God and we claim our right to be Home. This is my spin on the Serenity Prayer:

I do not accept what 'appears to be' but always welcome 'what is'.

I won't do the stuff that is spiritually wrong just because it somehow feels right.

I am happy to endure what may not feel so good if it is something my soul needs.

Every step of the Way, in pleasure and pain, I am already Home.

A New Take on Pleasure and Pain

Pleasure begets suffering, that's an old-established spiritual claim. Our likes and dislikes naturally set us up for disappointment. If we like what we consider pleasurable we obviously must mind when it is taken away from us. When you say, “I like sunny days”, you certainly imply that you are bothered by rain. When you say, “I like living in the country-side”, you must imply that you are miserable when you have to move into a big city.  We identify ourselves with our preferences. We say,  "I am a Cowboy"' or "I am a California girl". Yet are we really? Wouldn't the Cowboy be happy to move to grey and rainy London if the love of his life lived there?

We are not saying that you shouldn’t have any preference. This would be pretentious and fake. But you can very much observe who you think you are and how this "someone" tends to interact with life. Just try to observe all the thoughts, feelings, preferences and activities that you think define you. Whenever you identify with these preferences you cannot be completely open to life. Why don't you give the opposite approach a shot: experience how your notions of pleasure and pain, good and bad change as you welcome life with open arms.

Let life shape you - let pleasure and pain melt in the holy Now. When you open up to life you will conclude with us, "it is as it is, and as is, is kind of meaningful and good.

By Christian and Su Zhen

On Figuring Out What You Really Want

Do you know what you really want to accomplish in your life?  And are you willing to pay the price for it? I remember when both my kids were still young, and we lived in a big and fancy house which required lots of work to maintain, I also wanted to take good care of my kids. So in order to send them to all the different after-school activities while taking care of the house at the same time, I ended up needing a couple of helpers.  However, at that time I was very hesitant to invite other people into my private life. I had also had bad experiences of managing people, so it turned out I wasn't ready to make that step.

What now seems to be such an easy explanation took me actually quite a while to figure out. The struggle was all in my subconsciousness. So I ended up spending quite a long time looking for help and was not able to find anyone.  As you might imagine, the right people magically showed up once I was ready to welcome them into our family's life. Does this theme sound familiar to you?  Have you been working on some goals  for some time only to find that you are going nowhere?  Observe your struggle inside. Only you can prevent yourself from going where you want to; and no one can stop you from getting what you want once you have become determined to get it.

 You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Every choice comes with a trade-off attached. The lesson plan of the Tao is to show that pleasure and pain are different sides of the same coin. So make up your mind, identify what you want and go for it tiger! The pleasure will give you happiness, while the pain will help you grow as a person if you open up to it.   Experience how fast your dream can come true when you acknowledge your inner struggles and are willing to pay the price for your success.

 By Su Zhen and Christian

Highway to Heaven and Hell

A Buddhist monk was once asked how he can live without sex. He thought about it briefly and then said, ' Well, when you experience an orgasm all day long in whatever you do, you don't miss it that much at night!' There is a lot of wisdom in this statement. Sex gives you a taste for the orgasmic heights we can achieve. All addictions are the attempt to get this state of well-being with artificial means instead. A spiritual path is the journey in the opposite direction, that will teach you how to experience bliss all the time.

Addiction is an escape from freedom. Once you think of whatever it is that makes you high, you already feel the blood rushing through your brain. As you get access to your substance, a strange trance takes over and you give in and let that force run its course. The longer you stay on this highway to hell, the harder it gets to turn your car around. It is a joy ride, no doubt, as handing over the reigns to this force lightens up your pleasure center in your brain. But alas, life becomes unbearable without your fix afterwards and the fix needs to get ever more intensive if you want to experience a similar high next time around.

Walking the Tao is the opposite experience. You interact with life in ever more subtle ways as you understand that life communicates with you always. The joys you experience  day in, day out, become more frequent until you experience bliss wherever you are. The Tao sets you free in the way that life dances with you constantly and you have to stay way too alert for the 'robot' inside of you ever having a chance to take over. The Tao gives you increasing freedom from the  subconscious thought processes. Along this journey, there is mental clarity, a feeling of joy, peace and bliss that you have never experienced before.