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Tibetan musician finds right key for happiness
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EVERYONE is looking for eternal happiness, but few can achieve it. Yangjin Lamu thinks she has found a very simple formula.
“Many of today’s people are obsessed with an abundance of meaningless tasks. Though they seem to be chasing after happiness, they always get trapped in more pain rather than relief,” says Yangjin, a Tibetan soul musician and the first Chinese to win a Grammy Award. “It is probably because they made a bad choice in the first place. So did I.”
Trying hard to achieve success for years yet finding herself occupied by negative emotions, Yangjin started to question her life goals about 10 years ago. “I asked myself what is real happiness and how can I reach that exactly,” she says.
With those questions in mind, she started her spiritual journey in 2003 and gradually found that only by living in the moment and keeping internal peace can one reach true eternal happiness.
To help more people gain relief from life’s burdens and find real happiness, Yangjin has given lectures and practical lessons for the past year.
She was in Shanghai in late September, giving a week of lessons in Songjiang District. Along with the lectures on how to achieve internal peace, she also presented small concerts with some of her Grammy Award-winning friends, such as bamboo flutist Steve Gorn, percussion player Glen Velez and Sarangi player Dhruba Ghosh. Most audiences consisted largely of women ranging in age from their 20s to 40s.
Born in a poor family in Tibet Autonomous Region, Yangjin found herself wanting to help others, improving the life of her family and even enhancing the economic and educational condition of her homeland.
She initiated the Qizheng Tibetan Medicine Company with her friends in 1996 and worked hard to achieve business success, thinking that she could solve all the problems only with sufficient money.
But things didn’t turn out as planned. She found herself not only failing to solve the social problems but becoming trapped in anxiety and pain by immersing herself in the aggressive business world.
“I wanted to solve problems but found myself obsessed with more,” says Yangjin.
To tackle her own problem first, she went back to practicing what her mother had taught her since childhood.
“My mother is a woman who lives by spiritual cultivation though she cannot lecture much about it,” says Yangjin, “She taught me how to live in the moment, how to think and work through mindfulness.
“She asked me to put my heart in every trifling work, including ordinary floor sweeping and tea making. She knew if I made short shrift of it the moment she sipped the tea, and she always told me that one’s mindfulness determines the result,” she recalls.
Since then, avoiding being hasty and keeping her mind on what she is doing at the moment has been a major practice for Yangjin to realize spiritual cultivation, apart from meditation in mountains and Buddhist temples.
“All the problems are actually problems on my own. When I reached my internal peace, I found the world peaceful too,” says Yangjin.
Another big problem for a lot of working women today is that they feel they must become more like men to compete in the realistic world. They fear a loss of such female virtues as warmness, gentleness and a caring attitude.
“A woman does not have to be a man to succeed. She can use her own advantages to take care of both her company and family, yet many women just forget how to do that,” says Yangjin. “But they will recall all those features with proper Buddhist cultivation.”
Yangjin realizes that many people today are too busy to set aside regular time for meditation. But she says they can try reaching internal peace by keeping themselves mindful in everything they do, even in such routine tasks as cleaning, cooking, watching TV and just walking around.
Yangjin says that one of her students who works as a company vice president tried cleaning at home with mindfulness when she was fidgety about her work. She said she found her problem solved quickly afterward after the cleaning.
“The answer just came to her naturally,” says Yangjin. “It is the answer from her heart rather than her thinking. The methods worked out from intentional thinking are very limited. They cannot solve the problem completely. But as long as you master the way to have your heart answer for you, there is nothing that cannot be solved.”
But many people are accustomed to having their brain working almost every minute, which makes it very difficult to clear their mind and listen to their heart.
Music can help, says Yangjin. “It can help people enter the status of slow thinking. The mercy and peace of the singer or music player can reach the audiences directly, and help them reach internal peace,” says Yangjin.
Gifted with a beautiful voice, Yangjin started to sing for people looking for internal peace. Her cooperation with Paul Winter on the album “Miho: Journey to the Mountain” made her the first Chinese to win a Grammy Award in 2011. However, Yangjin does not perform that song often.
“I live in the moment and I sing in the moment,” she says.
All her inspiration for singing comes from the environment where she is singing and from the audiences.
“I don’t intentionally sing particular songs, but let what occurs to me just happen,” she says. “With no needs or fear, I sing for the people that I care for, and deliver my message of truth and peace to them. I show them how
I do it, and let them participate as well. By doing so, the audiences may realize that they don’t have to search for the meaning of life anywhere, as
it lies right here.”
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