The Workshop is in the Mind

Women of Wisdom series.

According to Buddha, attachment – clinging, grasping, craving – is effectively the main source of our suffering in day-to-day life. Big surprise! We usually confuse it with love, which is necessarily altruistic, and is the source of our own happiness and the capacity to help others.

Buddha's view of the mind describes two distinct categories of states of mind: the deluded, disturbing ones – such as attachment, anger, low self-esteem and the rest – and the virtuous, spacious ones – such as love, compassion, patience, and so on. ​

A key function of attachment and the other delusions, and the main reason they cause suffering, is that not only do they cause us pain but they actually cause the things, the events, the people out there to appear back to us, as Lama Zopa puts it, in a distorted way. Attachment causes things to look more delicious than they really are, anger causes things to appear more ugly than they really are.

And the problem is we totally believe these appearances. This is what keeps us stuck in our misery.

As we learn to doubt the way things appear to us, we are beginning to loosen the grip of ego-grasping, the root delusion, which misrepresents the very nature of self and everything else.

Tse Chen Ling, San Francisco, Thursday 27th March 2025.

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We spend our lives being seduced by the outside world, believing completely that happiness and suffering come from "out there." But "everything we experience is our own karmic appearance," says Lama Zopa Rinpoche. "Everything is made up by our own minds." By understanding emptiness — that everything occurs in dependence upon causes and conditions (in other words, karma) and that, crucially, there's nothing intrinsic in anything that makes it what it is — we can slowly loosen the grip of ego-grasping and begin to develop our marvelous potential for clarity, contentment, love, and the other qualities that Lord Buddha says are innate within us.

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