Right understanding starts by acknowledging the suffering and difficulties in the world around us as well as in our own lives. There it asks us to touch what we really value inside, to find that we really care about, and to use that as the basis of our spiritual practise.
 

Human suffering and hardship cannot be alleviated just by a simple change of government or a new monetary policy, although these things may help. On the deepest level, problems such as war and starvation are not solved by economics and politics alone. Their source is prejudice and fear in the human heart – and their solution also lies in the heart. What the world needs most is people who are less bound by prejudice. It needs more love, more generosity, more mercy, more openness. The root of human problems is not a lack of resources but comes from the misunderstanding, fear, and separateness that can be found in the hearts of people.
 

Whatever we do, however we act, creates how we become, how we will be, and how the world will be around us. To understand karma is wonderful because within this law there are possibilities to change the direction of our lives. We can actually train ourselves and transform the climate in which we live.
 

Spiritual practice is not a mindless repetition of ritual or prayer. It works through consciously realizing the law of cause and effect and aligning our lives to it. Perhaps, we can sense the potential of awakening in ourselves, but we must also see that it doesn’t happen by itself. There are laws that we can follow to actualize this potential. How we act, how we relate to ourselves, to our bodies, to the people around us, to our work, creates the kind of world we live in, creates our very freedom or suffering.
 

It is to untangle the tangle that we begin meditation practice. To disentangle ourselves, to be free, requires that we train our attention. We must begin to see how we get caught by fear, by attachment, by aversion – caught by suffering. This means directing attention to our everyday experience and learning to listen to our bodies, hearts, and minds. We attain wisdom not by creating ideals but by learning to see things clearly, as they are.
 

For spiritual practice to develop, it is absolutely essential that we establish a basis of moral conduct in our lives. If we are engaged in actions that cause pain and conflict to ourselves and others, it is impossible for the mind to become settled, collected, and focused in meditation; it is impossible for the heart to open. To a mind grounded in unselfishness and truth, concentration and wisdom develop easily.
 

Establishing a virtuous and harmonious relationship to the world brings ease and lightedness of the heart and steadfast clarity to the mind. A foundation of virtue brings great happiness and liberation in itself and is the precondition for wise meditation. With it we can be conscious and not waste the extraordinary opportunity of a human birth, the opportunity to grow in compassion and true understanding in our life.
 

Wisdom grows out of our clear seeing in each moment. Seeing the arising and passing of our experience and how we relate to it. it arises through our gentle and careful inquiry into the workings of the body and mind and through an open inquiry into how this body and mind relate to the whole world around us. For insight to develop, this spirit of observation and deep questioning must be keep in the forefront. We can collect and quiet the mind, but then we must observe, examine, see its way and its laws.
 

Wisdom is not one particular experience, nor a series of ideas or knowledge to be collected. It is an ongoing process of discovery that unfolds when we live with balance and full awareness in each moment. It grows out of our sincerity and genuine openness, and it can lead us to a whole new world of freedom.
 

To understand the nature of happiness and sorrow, to find freedom in our life, we have to be willing to face all the demons in our mind. Our journey – our practice through all the realms of our mind – is to learn a kind of mind control, a traveler’s equilibrium. It is not the control of making something happen, but rather the ability to stay present, open, and balanced through all the experiences and realms of life.
 

We start to see that the worst and most difficult things also change, that they too are empty experiences, light and shadows that we all share and that arise and pass in the clear space of mind.
 

There is a practical path we can follow to experience whole new levels of happiness in our lives, to learn a new relationship with ourselves and our experience. Depending on our relationship to these hindrances, they can be the cause of tremendous struggle or valuable fuel for the growth of insight.
 

There is no problem with enjoying pleasant experiences, and to practice does not mean to dismiss them. But they don’t really satisfy the heart, do they? For a moment we experience a pleasant thought or taste or sensation, and then it’s gone, and with it the sense of happiness it brought. Then it’s on to the next thing. The whole process can become very tiring and empty.
 

In a situation like a retreat – or a prison, for that matter – where the possibilities for fulfilling desires are limited, it becomes clear that the strength or a desire is determined not by the particular object, but by the degree of attachment in the mind, and the desire for a piece of candy can be as powerful as the desire for a Mercedes Benz.
 

People can get so lost in the imagination that meditators on retreat have often glimpsed a potential partner and gone through a whole romance (meeting, courtship, marriage, children, even divorce) without ever saying a word to that person. We call this the vipassana romance.
 

We can directly observe the nature of desire, anger, doubt, and fear and really understand how these forces operate in the mind. We can use their power to enliven and strengthen our investigation. And these very forces can teach us the truth of the dharma, for we can see in their operation the laws of karma, or impermanence and impersonality.
 

We need to let ourselves feel fully, even it if means touching the deepest wells of grief, sorrow, and rage within us. These are the forces that move our lives, and these are what we must feel and come to terms with. It’s not a process of getting rid of something, but one of opening and understanding.
 

Still, many times as we look carefully we can also see that beneath desire there is a more neutral, universal energy with which we live, an energy called the will to do. While sometimes it is associated with greed and gasping, it can also be directed by love, by compassion, and by wisdom. With the development of awareness we can get a taste of living states free from so much desire, of a more spontaneous and natural way of being without as much struggle or ambition.
 

It we observe, we can see that judgment is actually just a thought, a series of words in the mind. When we don’t get caught up in the story line, we can learn a great deal about the nature of thought by watching the judging mind. We can learn a great deal about the nature of suffering in life as well.
 

The path of is our great and wondrous legacy as human beings. It will often be difficult and at times seem almost impossible.
 

So the purpose of practice is not to create a special state of mind. That is always temporary. It is to work directly with the most primary elements of our experience, all the aspects of our body, our mind, to see the way we get trapped by our fears and desires and anger and to learn directly our capacity for freedom. If we work with them, the hindrances will enrich our lives.
 

Meditation is a dynamic, living process out of which new perspectives, new ways of understanding and appreciating our lives, continually emerge. As we follow the path of meditation, we discover a process of deepening through observing, opening, and being.
 

In meditation we learn to care with a full-hearted attention, a true caring for each moment. Yet we also learn to let go.