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January 2016

Feeling desperate, I said a spiritual mind treatment (with my father’s help), to find a sense of direction in my contemplative path.  Synchronously, a man named Dhammarato (or Richard) contacted me via e-mail after I posted a meditation question on a Yahoo group.  In our first skype session, he explained to me that I could learn to work with the breath in specific ways to generate joy and mindfulness, while eliminating the hindrances that I was still struggling with (despite huge improvements).  

I started gladdening the mind all day long, and by the middle of the month, I was doing short meditation sits which were previously prevented by impatience.  In the third week of the month, I began to act with discipline to do household chores and the early stages of life projects.  Richard had convinced me that no amount of magical, wishful, or karmically-based thinking would ‘save the day’, and that I would need to learn to gradually build up habits the old fashioned way: one task at a time.  Although I had heard this message before, I needed to receive it within a Buddhist framework to actually get me off my ass.  By the end of the month I was sitting for an hour, which would mostly be constant gladdening-the-mind.  

I also finally started applying for HR jobs. Gladdening the mind gave me the strength to overcome my phobia of this.

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