New cryptoculture.info Discord Mindful Message! 01.25.24

Rise & Grind 👑 🙌🏾

Today’s tale is called “Where Is Happiness?”

This tale is about two homeless dogs who had only each other. “Sport” the younger dog often complained about being poor. He wondered when they would finally be rid off the shame of being deprived and homeless. He dreamed of someone providing them with food and shelter. “Doc” the older dog wanted to comfort Sport, so he said being homeless means that our home is everywhere and anywhere, we should be content with what we have. But Sport refused to listen to Doc’s advice. He continued to have grand dreams about being a cherished pedigree dog.

One day Sport decided to visit a fortune teller. He asked “Where Is Happiness?”. The fortune teller pointed and replied “Happiness is own your tail.” Upon hearing this Sport began to chase his own tail in circles and circles. Feeling dejected and covered in sweat, he gave up when he realized it was impossible to catch his tail. Feeling miserable he found Doc and told him the fortune teller said happiness was on his tail. But try as he might he couldn’t catch it. He asked Doc for his advice.

Doc laughed and replied, happiness was found by never regretting the past, never fearing the present, and never worrying about the future. This way the happiness on his tail follows him wherever he goes.

The moral of the story is happiness follows when we are content with what we have. Happiness follows when we show appreciation to those who have helped and supported us in times of
need. Happiness follows when we trust that there is hope for the future, so long as we choose to never look back and keep marching forward. So there’s no need to chase happiness. So long as we have the causes for happiness it will follow us everywhere we go.

I remember struggling initially with this tale when I first heard it in detail. I felt like Spot deserved to have his dreams of being cherished, and like Doc and the teller wasn’t taking his dream serious. However, I realized Spot was defining happiness with achieving his dreams. By doing so he would never be happy until his dreams were fulfilled. And the truth is there is happiness in working towards the dream, reconfiguring the dream, even failing to achieve the dream (in those moments we just have to dig deep sometimes, depending on how far we’ve fallen, but light is there.) But when your content with the life you’ve been given, happiness on our journey can be found from beginning to end. Just like a tail, it follows everywhere.

Sport can still achieve his dreams, Doc and the teller were only assisting him with redirecting his perspective on how happiness is defined. With a positive mindset shift Spot will be on a more positive path to assist him in achieving his personal legend.

We’ve talked about defining happiness in the past, and the overall lesson was “Happiness has nothing to do with our life’s circumstances, its based on our ability to accept the things we are experiencing”

{Bodhi Light Tales is a podcast series that features short stories about mindfulness and wisdom. The stories are based on the work of Master Hsing Yun and are hosted by Venerable Miao Guang. }

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