Lesson 7 Calmly Facing The Eight Worldly Winds

Each of us must go through the “10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows,” the ups and downs that any life brings. In this session, we learn about the 8 worldly winds: pleasure and pain; gain and loss; praise and blame; and fame and disrepute, and how they are like spokes in a wheel that is constantly turning. But in the center of the wheel is a hole, which is our true nature of emptiness, of not-self, another key characteristic of existence. Not-self helps us see that we are not a separate self, but in fact, we contain everything. We are empty of an independent self and part of something much vaster. When we touch our nature of interdependence, we experience that which does not get blown about, which is not conditioned by fortune and misfortune. And this leads us to touch the freedom of non-fear.

Please note: In this lesson Kaira mistakenly quotes 'I am vast, I contain multitudes' attributing it to Longfellow - the actual quote is 'I am large, I contain multitudes' and the author of this quote is Walt Whitman.