Mental Health 

Life is full of stress and strain, but we have to live in conditions as they are and make the best of them. Successful adjustment to life in the light of Buddha's teachings will, however, ensure the all-round progress of the lay Buddhist, maximising happiness and minimising pain. 

The Buddha names four kinds of lay happiness: the happiness of possession as health, wealth, longevity, wife and children; the enjoyment of such possessions; freedom, from debt; and a blameless moral and spiritual life. Yet even the happiest person cannot say when and in what form misfortune may strike him. Against suffering, the externals of life will be of little or no avail. Real happiness and security are then to be sought in one's own mind, to be built up by constant effort, mindfulness and concentration. 

So the wise layman while being in the world, will try to be less and less of it. He will train his mind to look at life mindfully with detachment, and soon discover that modern civilisation is, by and large, a commercial one, for the benefit of a powerful minority at the expense of the unthinking majority, based on the intensification and multiplication of artificial wants, often by arousing and stimulating the undesirable and lower elements of human nature, and that the increasing satisfaction of these wants leads not to peace and stillness of mind, but only to chronic discontent, restlessness, dissatisfaction and conflict. 

He therefore decides to practise voluntary simplicity and finds a new freedom; the less he wants, the happier and freer he is. 

Thinking man realises that there are but four essential needs for the body --   pure food, clothing, shelter and medicine. Corresponding to these, there are four for the mind -- right knowledge, virtue, constant guarding of the sense doors and meditation. 

Bhãvãnã, or meditation is the systematic training and culture of the mind with Nibbãna as its goal. The emotions are controlled, the will is disciplined, and the instinctive energies are diverted from their natural ends - led along the Four Great Efforts (the sixth step of the path) - to the sublimated ideal of a perfect Man (the Arahant) or Nibbãna. If there is an urgent felt need, the ideal has the power of drawing out all one's instinctive impulses so that they are sublimated and harmonised, giving satisfaction to the individual, and therefore benefiting the community as well. 
 

Closely connected with our instincts are the emotions. By emotion is meant a feeling which moves us strongly. We get stirred up, as it were. Examples of emotion are fear, anger, and strong sexual passion. When emotion floods the mind, reason retreats, or disappears, and we often do things for which we repent later. So some emotional control is necessary for, without it, character cannot be developed, and moral and spiritual progress is impossible. 
 

Fear is a common emotion that darkens our lives. It is anticipation of deprivations. One tries to live in two periods of time at once -- the present and the future. To know how fear arises enables us to take the right steps for its removal. It results from wrong seeing, not understanding things as they really are. Uncertainty and change are the keynotes of life. To each one of us there is only one thing that is truly "ours" , is "us" -- our character, as shown by our actions. As for the rest, nothing belongs to us. We can visualise everything else being taken away save this. But this, one's character, nobody and nothing else can deprive one of. Why then go to pieces when all other things that are liable to break, do break? Why fret about the fragility of the frail? Besides, are we so careful of not taking other people's things, as we are of preserving ours? Our past actions of depriving others may only end in others now depriving us. It is only fair and just. 
 

This attitude of detachment to life's storms is the only sound philosophy that can bring one a true security and a true serenity. 
 

Or again, there is no such thing as justifiable anger in Buddhism, for if one is in the right, one should not be angry, and if one is in the wrong, one cannot afford to be angry. Therefore, under any circumstances one should not become angry. 
 

A good way to secure emotional control is to practise noticing mindfully and promptly an incipient hindrance (or any other impure state of mind), then, of its own, it tends to fade away. If done as often as possible, it will be very effective. The five hindrances are undue attachment to sensual desire, ill-will, laziness and inertia, agitation and worry, and doubt. The last here refers to indecision or un-steadiness in the particular thing that is being done. One must know exactly one's own mind -- not be a Hamlet. unable to decide, because one is always mistrusting one's own judgement. 
 

Daily practice is the way to progress. Even a little practice every day, brings a person a little nearer his object, day by day.