“We can transform our life from a state of misery into one of pure and everlasting happiness.” -Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, How to Transform Your Life

What if someone told you that your road to being authentically happy happens to involve feeling happy along the way? This is precisely what the Buddha taught. All living beings share the same common wish to be happy and avoid suffering and most of us spend our entire lives striving to fulfill this wish.

But rather than just seeing happiness as an end goal to our spiritual aims – something that we need to work hard at to hopefully someday achieve – the Buddha taught us that generating joy on a day-to-day and moment-to-moment basis is, in fact, possible and what will bring us closer to this aim. This is called bringing the results into the path. This special Tantric practice offers us the opportunity to generate joy and happiness for ourselves and others on our path to pure and everlasting happiness.

This joyful practice also serves to strengthen our faith. In his book, How to Transform Your Life, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso writes, “Since faith is the root of all pure spiritual attainments, it should be our main practice.” But Geshe-la doesn’t want us to have faith through blind belief. He shares with us ways to help build a strong foundation from which faith naturally arises. Through admiring faith, we can develop delight in the special qualities of our teachers, in the profound wisdom of the teachings, and in our own spiritual experience. In this way, we can build a spiritual confidence in both our teachers and in ourselves.

Check out this video where Kadam Morten shares Venerable Geshe Kelsang’s inspiring take on admiring faith and how it can be a source of joy for our teachers, the teachings and our own spiritual practice.