The Secret to Being Liz

I have this friend who is an accupuncturist. She's always going to India, does triathlons, spends every weekend at her boyfriend's house in the country, which is a remodeled barn with solar panels, is doing a Buddhist chaplaincy program, and does lots of volunteer work. She has the freedom and flexibility to follow her dreams. It seems like she's always having fun and knows everyone and she has a big heart. I've always said, "I want to be Liz in my next life."

I was trapped in my high stress, endless work lifestyle and death was the only way out.

There are millions of impoverished people around the world who are, indeed, trapped in poverty and misery. They work all day and still it's not enough so they need to have children and send them to work too so collectively they can earn enough money to house and feed themselves.

Generally, though, as Americans, we're not one of those millions. We have choices.

We choose a lifestyle of overconsumption which traps us in the golden cage of our jobs.

We choose to occupy ourselves with projects in the hope that it will improve our situation but just robs us of time and money.

We choose complexity over simplicity to keep ourselves busy so that we don't have to look at our inner selves and follow our secret dreams.

Now, I'm Liz too. I just had to choose to be Liz. It was as simple as that. Everything I needed to be Liz was there all my life.

The Buddha said, "He who loves himself would never harm another."

So forget about your goals and follow your dreams, be the real you, and be happy.

Don't be afraid to dream big, as in helping half a billion people out of poverty in one fell swoop and making a profit while doing it. Here's an inspiring (long) video of Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems and now a venture capitalist, talking about microfinance.

Renouncing Stress

I used to be a stress junkie. I used to work in corporate IT. I helped to deploy and maintain mission critical business systems. If the computer system went down, business ground to a halt and all kinds of very bad things happened and lots of blame and anger ensued. I loved being so important.

Now I have completely renounced stress and coffee and I have embraced slacking and sleeping.

Our lives are rife with hope and fear. EVERY little thing in our lives is a source of stress. Can you name anything that is not a source of stress? Even fun things, like these Charles David sandals on bluefly.com, are a source of stress. Can I afford them? While wearing them, I'll have to be constantly careful so I don't scuff them up.

We say and do all sorts of things in frustration, blame, and anger because we are stressed. But you can have the right answers and still be wrong. Right answers and wrong answers are really just ideas on the relative level. So aren't they really part of this grand delusion that is samsara? What's really important are your fellow human beings. Those people standing right in front of you. Besides, getting upset is, well, so stressful :-)

We can sometimes have so many grandiose ideas about our work, our goals, our mission in life. My last job was working for the Buddhist group to which I belong. I completely missed the irony of my having so much hope and fear about contributing to the work of my Buddhist teacher, whose life's work is to free our minds of hope and fear.

The end doesn't justify the means. In Buddhism, I think the means are the end.