Focus Your Mind

So, from a monk’s perspective, the greatest power is to be self-controlled. To be able to train the mind and energy to focus it exactly where you want it and when you want it to be. You are completely detached and undeterred from external ups and downs. You’re able to navigate anything that seems tough, challenging, fun excitement, with the same amount of being equipoised and balanced in equanimity without being too excited in pleasure or being too depressed in pain of knowing how to navigate every situation, to me that’s great strength and great power.

There’s a beautiful verse that says that “detachment is not that you own nothing, detachment is that nothing owns you”. And I love it – because to me that summarizes detachment in a way that it’s not usually explained. Usually people see detachment as being away from everything, actually the greatest detachment is being close to everything and not let it consume and own you. And that’s real power, that’s real strength. How many people that we know that have had fame and then that fame has ruined them? So for me, that definition of detachment is possible to practice even in the real world. Rather than saying,” oh, I’m just going to have a really simple life, I ‘m just going to have nothing in life”.

Being able to overcome ego, being able to overcome envy, being able to overcome jealousy, being able to overcome the negative of complete state. There’s a positive competitive state, and there’s a negative competitive state. Today, when people are looking at Instagram or Facebook or YouTube, all you’re looking at is “OH. She’s got that many likes”, or “he got that many likes”. Or- “oh my god, look at her body”. And it’s like that stuff is destroying us inside Envy, jealousy, ego, greed to be able to have enough clarity to purify yourself of those things, is going to eliminate the biggest anxieties and the depressions of our time and mental health problems and we know that all the mental health research today suggests that things like isolation, over exposure. We now can have more pain consummation in one day because of what we’re exposed to than the pain we would’ve had in a lifetime. That’s huge. That’s ridiculous to think that in one day because of the media, news and social media we consume more negative than we did in a life time.

For me, being able to have time, energy and clarity to focus on self-purification, that is the most important thing about being a monk because you have that time, reflection and process and an environment that only allows you to become more purified of those things.