How to Train a Wild Elephant

in inner silence. This is a life lived in faith, faith in the One Mind, a life of continuous prayer.

The capacity of the human mind to

We walk with the hands held folded together at the waist, maintaining what Catholic nuns call “custody of the hands.”

Pay full attention to the bottoms of your feet, feeling every sensation of warmth, tingling, pressure. Notice where the sensations are the

Don’t formulate any response in the mind until a response is requested or obviously needed.

negativity begins to color our awareness, often without our even knowing it.

knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality.

“the universal mind” has been given many names. It has no boundaries. It reaches everywhere, throughout space and time. And yet, it does not manifest as anything other than each small thing, each breath, each sound, each falling flower petal floating on the wind.

The Buddha called it the First Truth: the fact that every person will at some time experience this kind of distress.