Wednesday night at KMC Canada, 135 people enjoyed a Public Talk entitled ‘The Power to be Happy’ with Deputy Spiritual Director of NKT-IKBU, Gen-la Jampa.

Reading from How to Transform Your Life by Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche, Gen-la explained clearly how we can correctly identify the real cause of happiness, inner peace. Inner peace depends on mixing our mind with virtue such as patience, loving-kindness, compassion and wisdom.

How do we mix our mind with virtue? Gen-la explained we do this in formal meditation as well as in our daily life. We simply familiarize our mind with positive mental states such as patience and loving kindness, and as a result we become patient, we become loving and we become kind. This is training our mind. Gradually our negative states of mind that destroy our inner peace are replaced by positive states that are the causes of inner peace.

Directing our mind toward virtue and holding this virtuous thought is meditation! Through this spiritual practice we can develop and maintain a happy mind all the time.

As we can see in the brief video excerpt, Gen-la also reminded us that the power to be happy does not come from the ‘power of enjoyments’ or any external conditions, which we spend so much time pursuing. The real power to be happy is learning to control our mind.