To Tame This Mind of Ours

A single phrase captures the essence of all the Buddha’s teachings: “To tame this mind of ours.”

Why is taming or transforming our mind so important? Because the mind is the root of everything, the creator of happiness and the creator of suffering, the creator of what is called samsara and the creator of what is called nirvana. As Buddha said:

'We are what we think,
All that we are arises with our thoughts
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you.'

Quite often we do things, say things and think all kinds of thoughts, without any awareness of the thinker, the speaker or the doer. Caught up in distraction, we’ve lost the sense of our true being–who we really are. So we need to bring our mind home and begin to get to know our own mind. This is the spirit of the practice of meditation, through which we can tame this mind of ours.