stop pimping your ride

One of my teachers, Kelly Morris, has meditation and yoga classes online that you can download for free. I was listening to one of them the other day, where she asked you to consider where you go when life is difficult. What do you turn to when you're upset, stressed, angry, depressed, lonely, sad. Where do you go for refuge? You turn to the police or the fire department if you've been robbed or your house is burning down. What do you turn to when you're having a mental or emotional emergency?

For some reason, I thought about the MTV show, "Pimp My Ride." If you haven't had the pleasure, someone with a run down car in poor condition gets picked to have his or her car "pimped," which means that the car gets spiffed up with a fancy paint job, hub caps, seat covers, maybe a new engine, flat screen t.v., the works. At the end of the show, the car is revealed to its owner, as well as all the details of the renovation and the custom features. I thought - this is what we're doing to ourselves all the time -- glamming up our exteriors with fancy cosmetics, clothes, obsessive exercise, jewelry. We're pimping our ride. But the problem is, the driver is the same. None of the "stuff" affects the inner person, even if it seems to temporarily. Just like the same person is going to step into the pimped up automobile and drive back into his or her same life.

Consider instead, the words of the 8th Century Indian-Buddhist scholar, Master Shantideva:
All the happiness there is in this world
Arises from wishing others to be happy,
And all the suffering there is in this world
Arises from wishing only oneself to be happy.

Or from the musical, No No Nanette:
I want to be happy
But I won't be happy
Till I make you happy too.

Or heed the great Jimmy Durante:
Make someone happy,
Make just one someone happy,
And you will be happy, too.

Wisdom is everywhere!