Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 3.7-minute teaching, Kathleen McDonald presents two foundational practices for inner transformation: the power of intention and the power of counteracting negativity. She explains how to generate strong, clear positive motivations—reaching enlightenment to benefit all beings, being reborn in circumstances where we can help others, and deliberately cultivating love and compassion while releasing anger, jealousy, and selfishness. She recommends repeating these intentions each morning as a reminder of how we want to live. The second practice involves gaining a clear understanding of how negative mental states like anger, greed, and hatred harm both ourselves and others, then gradually applying antidotes to weaken these patterns and strengthen positive qualities. Accessible to all Buddhist practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 3.13 The Powers of Intention and Counteracting Negativity.mp3
UUID: 861c2fa6-5218-4dbb-b64e-687b8dc3efaf
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 3.7 minutes
Words: ~502
The second is the power of intention. And this involves generating very strong and clear positive intentions, positive motivations. So examples of this would be the intention to reach enlightenment. To think, I want to reach enlightenment. I want to attain a state of enlightenment so that I can help all others in the best way possible.
Or having the intention to be born in a good situation where we can be of benefit to others, where we can bring joy, peace, help to others, and be able to relieve the suffering of others. Having the intention to work on our own mind so that we decrease our negative, disturbing thoughts and emotions such as anger and hatred, selfishness, jealousy, and so forth. And instead, make our minds more and more familiar with the positive qualities of love and compassion. So that’s another very important powerful intention that we can generate and repeat to ourselves again and again. For example, I really want to work on my mind, free my mind from negative thoughts and emotions, and make my mind more and more familiar with positive thoughts and emotions.
I want to make my life as beneficial to others as possible. So repeating those intentions again and again, or at least in the morning. It’s good to do this in the morning when we start our day. To remind ourselves of how we want to be, how we want to live, how we want to relate to others. So doing this as we go through life, repeatedly generating these positive intentions, and also at the time of death, generating the intention that we’ll use the experience of death and dying in a way that’s positive, beneficial, meaningful, and that in the next life and subsequent lives, wherever we go, whatever happens to us, that we want to continue having these positive attitudes, positive intentions, make our life beneficial and meaningful to others as much as we can.
So making ourselves familiar with these positive intentions. And the third power, the power of counteracting negativity. So this mainly involves having a clear and confident understanding of the faults or the disadvantages of negative attitudes such as anger, hatred, greed, jealousy, selfishness, egotism. So seeing very clearly that these states of mind are problematic, they cause problems for ourselves, they also lead to problems for others because when we become overwhelmed by them, the way in which we act, the way in which we behave with others creates problems for them, creates suffering for them. Seeing that very very clearly and having the strong determination to decrease these negative attitudes in our mind, to work on overcoming them.
Of course, can’t do that immediately, that’s not possible. But gradually over time, we can lessen the strength of these disturbing thoughts and emotions and increase the positive counterparts. So this power of counteracting negativity involves having the strong intention to overcome negative thoughts and attitudes and replace them with positive ones. Apply antidotes to them.