My favorite sayings by a Buddhist nun called Ayyat Kamah. She was an early Buddhist

feminist who started a lot of monasteries for nuns and she used to say that one should practice as if one had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to become.

Now the first two sound very common sense. We all know what it's like to feel like we have nowhere to go and nothing to do. It's bad feeling you get when perhaps you're on vacation or you're on the beach or you reach a weekend after a lot of work,

that feeling where all the sense of obligations and required busyness in life we can put aside and just

relax into the moment and there's that great feeling of relief but the sense of no one to

become what does that mean one of my favorite teachings by the Buddha is called

the loca which means world, or reflections on the world teaching.

And the Buddha simply said, essentially, the world is on fire and what is it a flame with nothing but people who are

burning up with self-centeredness. He said when we fixate on self, what happens is we become

delighted with the idea of becoming and when we delight with the idea of becoming when we

fixate on becoming to suffer more in life. We experience more stress. So what in the world does

becoming mean? What is this all about? Well, becoming is simply a very awkward translation for what is the word

Bawa and Polly. And Bawa simply can be understood in today's lingo simply with the idea of self-improvement or

accomplishment schemes. The idea that I've got to accomplish better myself get all this stuff done to be worthy of

happiness and peace. Now I need to say that there's nothing wrong with achieving things in life.

Keep up with your great American novel, your Whitney ready works the movies, the, desires to learn,

your, the plays, the movies, or the,

the desires to learn new skills to develop new tools in your life.

There's a purpose for self-improvement. But self-improvement often doesn't meet the underlying drives or the real needs that we assign to it when we undergo our self-improvement regimes.

I'll try to explain this a little bit more elegantly so that it's understandable

But let's start out with one very basic observation which is in life as as the Buddha noted, there are lots of universal, inevitable, disappointing events that happen to every single human being.

We will all not only grow old and experience illness,

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