Take a look at how your relationship is to any important person in your life. For instance, how is your relationship to your child, say, or your brother or your sister. How is your relationship to your boss, or to a sangha member? The point is to look at your relationship to anyone who matters a lot in your life, and who means something to you. And my question to you is, how is that relationship?

If it’s very open, if it’s very connected, if it’s caring, and if your experience of that relationship is very dynamic, then that means that no matter what kinds of challenges you face in that relationship, it’s never a problem. Because of the fact that it’s dynamic and flexible. And if that’s the case, then your experiences are ones of fullness, and of wholeness, and of oneness. Otherwise, you experience your sense of self as many selves of pain identity. And that experience appears clearly in your relationship with a person who means a lot to you, manifesting as multiple dimensions of conflict. But you see, all of those dimensions of conflict point us back to just a single dimension of conflict, and that is, how is your relationship to yourself?

It goes back to the question that I have raised quite frequently throughout my teachings: how much time have you spent engaging in the sense of self which is not you? Thousands of hours, right? And then how much time are you engaging your authentic self? Very little, right? And why? Because you have more of a relationship with who you are not, than with who you are. And all of these roles which you have played in the past were felt at the time as if they were not just roles, but rather they were experienced as you! And they are still experienced as you. However, they should not still be you, not as much as they used to be. Because, you should be free from all of those things – all that you have done, and all that you have identified with – you are not any of them.

And most importantly, no single one of those things should be the basis for your compassionate, creative, dynamic manifestation in any moment in the future where anybody needs something from you. You can be just the right person, as you are, to anyone you’re with in any given moment. And that’s the most beautiful thing – the ability to manifest as just the right person at the right moment to any particular person that you happen to be with. You can do that!

Think about this: every morning when you wake up, how much are you connected to your authentic self? And how much are you being someone? How much are you trying to do something? And how much are you trying to prove something to someone, or trying to disprove something to someone?

And on the contrary, how many days do you wake up with this sense of yourself as free? And with this sense of yourself as free, you wake up with so much energy, so much joy, so much creativity, and always questioning and exploring who you are. And as a result, every little thing that comes out of you is coming out of that source, it is not coming from your pain identity; it’s not coming from who you are not. There is always someone within you who is able to witness that, who is aware of that. And as a result, the duration of the moments in which you are identified with who you are not, becomes very short. Because awareness is always there. And it recognizes those delusions right away. Then as you get used to experiencing that every day, every moment, it becomes so frequent that slowly you begin to live life as who you are. And when I say, to live life as who you are, you can imagine that for Yongdzin Rinpoche, he is a great example of that.

But normally in the samsaric world when people say, now I want to do something for exploring the connection to myself, that can very often be a way of your disconnecting with the world and disconnecting with others. And that’s a sign that it is the wrong connection to yourself. It means that you are still trying to connect with a deep-rooted pain that has difficulty connecting to the outer world and to other people. The effect is a kind of dis-identifying and disconnecting with the world, all in the name of connecting with yourself. That’s wrong. You never disconnect with the world – you never disconnect with anybody – when you connect with yourself. However, it may be that you might not engage in the same way, because many times our engagements are related with a pain.

The question was asked earlier, how should one engage and act in the face of another person’s manifestation of a pain identity which arose without our instigating it? First of all, one has to be open; one has to aware and connected; one has to be caring and compassionate to every aspect of oneself and be the same way toward other people as well. Although somebody else may have initiated some action, or might have done something and said something, the truth is that you do have total choice in how to respond to that. And if you think that you don’t have a choice in how to respond, then that’s not correct – we do have a choice. You have to understand that if somebody said something, or did something that is difficult for you, then it’s the case that not only is someone doing something wrong from your point of view, but also that someone inside you is simply not able to easily respond in the right way and does not have enough space for it to simply dissolve by itself.

For example, no matter what thunderstorm occurs, no matter what tsunami occurs, no matter what earthquake happens, or no matter what volcanic eruption occurs, the sky will never have a problem with any of it. But you can’t say that’s the case for the buildings nearby; they will have a problem with any occurrence like that. And, the trees nearby will have a problem with it, and the animals will too. And the humans will have a problem with it as well, because we are conditioned, and our relation to an occurrence like that is not strong enough and open enough. And yet it will not bother the sky. But can we become that sky?

We are that sky. And when we realize that we are that sky, then no matter what happens, they are all ornaments.

If you look at everything in your life, you can see that what initially appears as a problem often has so much opportunity for growth, for resources, for strength, for power, for clarity, for flexibility, for compassion, for opening the heart- so many things can be coming from that one arising. Or that same arising can destroy you. Every possibility is in there. And we stand somewhere in between. Whenever you feel challenged, the question always to ask yourself is, what is this trying to teach me? Which of my pain identities is it trying to introduce me to? Or, which pain identity is it trying to help?

And an amazing thing is that you will always get some surprise; I feel that way so many times in my life. And especially recently whenever something that I expect will happen does not happen, I always know that something better is waiting. Therefore, now my disappointment about what is not happening is so short lived. And my excitement and curiosity about what other thing might be coming, because of what did not happen, is enormous – the magic of it! So not only do you kind of get excited about something that did not happen, which you had wished would happen, but you are more curious and excited about what magic is going to happen as a result. Because you are living in that space. Because you feel that space. There’s clearly something more than what the pain identity was wanting to have happen.

So, believe in that way. And no matter how difficult something is that somebody else initiated, it’s trying to give you something so much more than what you think you are losing. Okay?