One of the many concepts or tools that the Buddha provided to help us achieve some lasting peace,

and calmness in life as a tool called Staki, which is often poorly translated, invariably translated as mindfulness, which is a word that we rarely

use in any other context and most key Buddhist words cannot be translated

directly into an English equivalence in one word because there were very, very few

poly words that it was a language that was a fraction of the size of English and each word

tended to have a lot of different meanings and a lot of different purposes and was packed with much larger concepts than any than most English words.

So, um, Saati really means keeping something in your mind, keeping yourself aware of something to help you get a new perspective on life, to help you achieve

a different way of viewing and experience. I can give you numerous examples. The one I've been, I

used this week was the Louis C. K. example, he was talking about how he was on a plane shortly after they started having

Wi-Fi and planes and they made an announcement that the

Wi-Fi had gone out and he found himself getting really irritated.

And then he realized that at that very moment that he was irritated,

he was irritated he was 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal container that was hurtling 550 miles per hour across the country.

And when you bear that in mind, suddenly the fact that you have to do without Wi-Fi for a little while becomes less traumatizing certainly. uncertain.

My mom used to have her own version of mindfulness or souti with me, my mom used to have her own version of mindfulness or souti with me was whenever she was a terrible cook a wonderful

writer very brilliant woman but but a terrible, terrible cook.

And so whenever she made something and we would start to complain,

she would remind us of all the starving children across the globe and inform us that we could easily be one of them too.

Now using Sati is a form of instilling guilt like that is not the highest form of the practice.

But really it's a way to pull our minds away from the fixation on whatever bothering us or causing us suffering, not utterly replacing.

There is another Buddhist practice of replacing an unskilled whole thought with a skillful

thought, but Sati is not about replacing

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