1
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Meditation has helped me tremendously in my life journey.

2
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What would you say is the best way to work through personal family issues so that they do not lead to excessive thoughts of stress or worry based on a sense of instability and change?

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How do I solve my life?

4
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How do I fix everything?

5
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That's all you're asking, no?

6
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Talk about making my head hurt.

7
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Why are we born to the people we're born to?

8
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Why do we have the parents we have, the siblings we have, children we have, friends we have?

9
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There's a lot involved here, there's a backstory.

10
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So, the idea that there would be some answer that I could give over YouTube that would fix all of that,

11
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this incredibly complex, spanning countless lifetimes, the backstory behind your family problems, what seemed like just family problems, the backstory behind them.

12
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Make that question a little bit difficult to answer, to say the least.

13
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But I think that is an answer, is that you have to realize that this isn't something that can be easily answered, easily fixed.

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This is a very important part of your practice, your family, your friends, the people around you, the relationships you have.

15
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That's a very important factor in your practice.

16
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Usually, well often,

17
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in many cases, a negative factor, an inhibiting factor, something that gets in the way of your meditation.

18
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The reason we're born to our families is not usually because we're all meditators.

19
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Could be.

20
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But for most of us, it's because of attachments, because we're attached to these people either in positive or negative ways.

21
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So there's positive in the sense of attachment.

22
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It's not positive in a good way, it's positive in the sense of wanting, desiring.

23
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It could be negative in the sense of aversion, disliking, and we have

24
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vengeance and revenge and so on and all this so you're dealing you know trying to fix that it's not really the place to start the place to start is your reactions to these things and so take the personal family issues the stress that comes from them as your practice instead of what many people do is try to escape so people will run off into the jungle

25
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thinking that their family is getting in their way and the simplest answer is just to escape them.

26
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Doesn't always work, doesn't often work.

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If you have strong bad karma or bad feelings with your parents especially, going often to forest rarely solves that.

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So I would say be careful about how you try to approach these things, about how you try to fix or try to find a quick fix for your family problems.

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They should be approached with incredible delicacy and shouldn't be seen as having a fix, an immediate fix.

30
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One of the best things is to

31
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I suppose have a little faith.

32
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You know and you see the benefit of the meditation, right?

33
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You say it's helped you tremendously.

34
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So, make that leap

35
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It's not really a faith, but it's kind of like a leap of faith, but your mind is missing something here.

36
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So you have to make the connection where you say, this is also helping my family.

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This is also improving my family situation, even though it often doesn't look like it.

38
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Have some sort of faith, not exactly faith, but

39
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But really, logic, I would say, that tells you that, well, if it's affecting me, it must be affecting all the people around me.

40
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We're not islands.

41
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So they must be, if I'm being positively influenced, they must be positively influenced by this as well.

42
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And be patient with that.

43
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Be dedicated to that, to the practice again, right?

44
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Difference between practice and realizations.

45
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Be dedicated to the practice, the cultivation of goodness.

46
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Not so worried about, are we there yet?

47
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Is everything fixed?

48
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So, not expecting for yourself to have a stress-free family life, but...

49
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As your stress decreases, be happy with that.

50
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Be confident that you're on the right path.

51
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That's about all I have to say.

52
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And just that such a general question can't be really answered.

53
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You have to give me more specifics.

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You have specific problems.

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Often we can try to muddle through them and offer strategies.

56
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But how do I fix my life?

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I don't have... Meditate.

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General answer, general question, general answer.

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Meditate.