Question

Can you talk more about how to work with the tendency to corner ourselves, the mind, and try to force it to change, holding up ideals of what we think it should be versus working with mind and its current and past conditioning.

Answer

In general this is covering idealism in mass, that we think we should be able to do something, be able to force somebody to do something. How many parents try to force their kids to do something, how many teachers try to force their students to do something. It is important to have more equanimity here, encouraging the mind, trying to teach it with wisdom, with compassion, so that it'll then bend by itself. By trying to force it and putting a big idealistic title up there and expecting it to follow it, the mind part that doesn't want to do it, which we can say is the ignorant part of the mind, or in Buddhism they use the term "Mara," it'll just fight harder when it's being forced to do something. A kid rebels even more when the parents want to force them to do something. But can we get the wisdom side of the mind to encourage the ignorant side of the mind to get on with doing something, out of compassion for itself, rather than trying to force it?

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.