← Tenzin Chonyi

Unlocking the Addiction Trap

Tenzin Chonyi · 23 February 2008 · 4 h 54 min · Tse Chen Ling via Internet Archive

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  • 30:07

    And one of the most important things that we need to know is why we're doing something, our motivation. And it's very important to reflect on our motivation for wanting change. I remember Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who's the spiritual director. of this centre and similar centres around the world. When he started doing healing courses down at Tara Institute in Melbourne one of the things he said to people is one thing to want to be healed and there he was talking about cancer and AIDS and things like this one thing to want to be healed but what do you want to be healed for?

  • 43:22

    So what we're going to do through the day is to look at different ways of working with this habit. And there are five different ways in which we can do this. There are five, David. David's helping me with editing the book, you see. I had a list of four and when I looked at it, I said there were five and there's only four on the list, but there are actually five. I left one out.

  • 47:04

    It's just that a phobia is this unconscious reaction and a habitual reaction, which if I started going around, Bashing people up because I'd seen a Huntsman spider, then we might call it an addiction. So we find the trigger and disable it. So if you read any of the works on phobias or self-help books on phobias, you can use these for addictions as well. What is the trigger? How do I identify the trigger? What's the emotion under the trigger? These sorts of things. Then the next key, number three, is about learning to tolerate pain.

  • 1:37:11

    Present in front of you in human form and is radiating the healing energy of wisdom and compassion into your body and into your mind so that you can do this meditation and rejoicing that we can do this meditation together.

  • 2:30:20

    By looking at the pain and by looking at it directly, then we can see what it is and we stop this catastrophizing. And stopping that is also... Was it actually better if we just drop it down there? Sort of tickles my falls off every time I move my head. I'm used to looking around and backwards and forwards. If we stop catastrophizing, we develop the sense of equanimity. So there are some dangers in flying in a pain.

0:16 You're going to be mic'd up. Report an error

0:21 ear yeah there you go that's all that's all that's easy Report an error

0:29 told people to move forward they'd like. Report an error

0:37 -huh, okay. Report an error

0:50 It's very nice to be here in America. I'm discovering a few cultural differences and one of the most embarrassing of them was last night when Venerable Monlam said, do you want to go for a walk? I said, oh yes, but it's cold outside. I'll put my skivvy on. And he looked at me in horror. And I saw the look on his face. Report an error

1:13 I thought, oh, I've said something wrong here. In what we call a skivvy, you call a turtleneck. So then he explained to me what a skivvy was in America. I said, no, no, no. Report an error

1:28 So apart from the fact you drive on the wrong side of the road and you have your lights switches upside down. That's all right. Report an error

1:35 Pretty much Americans seem to be much the same as Australians and I've had a lot of fun being here, having this little tour in California and meeting some Americans and seeing what it's like and seeing the spring flowers come up instead of the autumn fruits dropping down to the ground which they're doing back in Australia at the moment. Report an error

1:57 So I'd like you to welcome all to this workshop. You know what the topic is. I think... Before we start, it might be a good idea to bring everybody a little bit closer. It's going to require some rearranging. So I'm wondering if we have one, two, three, four people on cushions. So if those four people would like to come up and then maybe we could remove some of the cushions and bring some chairs forward. Report an error

2:25 Can we do that? That's a great idea. Yep. Report an error

2:30 That'll do. Report an error

2:47 Sorry to move you all around, but I think it would be a lot friendlier that way. Report an error

3:09 Oh, Report an error

3:26 right. that's my question. Report an error

3:30 All right. Good. Report an error

3:55 No, no, no, it's fine. There's one right there. Oh, okay. Ooh. We got one. Good. Well, this is an extra one, too. I'm going to put something in there. Okay. Okay. Report an error

4:18 Thanks Churgy. Report an error

4:22 Now that way we can actually talk to each other instead of sitting as though you're in a schoolroom somewhere. Report an error

· · ·

5:01 That's a lot easier and I can see everybody and people in comfy chairs, which are very important. I like the comfy chairs. I'm not hiding behind somebody unwittingly. So this way we can talk to each other rather than me sort of lecturing you. And one of the things I'd like to do first is to find out something about why you're here. Report an error

5:24 I know this is the very thing that people don't like doing in a workshop, but it helps me a lot to find out where you're coming from. And therefore to be more skillful in the way I approach the topic. Now I'll ask you to give names. It'll mean that I'll automatically forget them within about 30 seconds because I've got a very poor memory from them. But maybe other people will remember and we can get to know each other during the day. Report an error

5:51 So we'll start with you. Report an error

6:06 the class and we'll Report an error

6:13 Yeah, that's what I was just saying. For this part, I think it's fine not to. Yeah, okay. So we'll start with you. Okay, so I'm Chucky and you're Chonyi. Yeah, this is falling off again. Oh, okay. I'll take this hearing aid out. Oh, okay. If I don't quite hear you, I'll take them both out. If I take one out, I've got to take them both out. Report an error

6:36 Then I adjust my hearing accordingly, but it means that I don't always hear consonants. Is that going to work? Because we could set up a different mic on a stand in front of you. No, this should be fine now, but if I have to ask you twice what you're saying, you'll understand why. Okay. Yep. So, I'm Chucky, and I invited you here because I thought it seemed like an incredibly great... Report an error

7:02 workshop for us as a center, but for me personally the reason I decided to actually attend is because I definitely have addictive behavior. Yes, yes. mean, I'm a workaholic, for one thing. I look at Emily because we've shared this conversation. You know, addictions, food addictions, you know. Yes, yeah. Report an error

7:25 Internet addictions, you know, all that stuff. I'm good on that one. Yeah. So you give up one and you find another one is what I'm discovering because I certainly gave up a lot when I became a nun and then I can just find new ones. That's right. And they aren't so bad, quote, quote. So, yeah, I'd like to learn some ways to work with them. Good. Okay. Report an error

7:46 My name is Janet and I came to the class because I also have addictions. This sounds almost like an AA meeting. An attachment aversion, addictions. And any insights, any conversation about it I think is useful. Just sitting and thinking about it for the day is useful. So here I am. Report an error

8:13 Hi, I'm Mary. And I've struggled with... What most people would consider addiction in this country for almost 30 years. And now that I've been clean for four years, I find that I have lots of other addictions. So that's why I'm here. Good, thanks. Report an error

8:35 Hi, my name is Sonera and I'm here because I get fixated on pleasurable sensations and I want the constant repetition of them, constant. And also in a provost way, I do get fixated on negative situations as well and I do a lot of reruns in my mind, you know, and I notice very obsessive tendencies. Yeah, thank you. Report an error

9:03 Hi, my name is Sandy and this is my first time here. I'm very happy to be here. I have been trying to break free from my addiction for probably 20 or more years. And I just said last, I think it was two weeks ago, I just said out loud, I can't do this on my own. And my boyfriend and I were driving past here on a kind of unusual route. Report an error

9:29 We normally go a different way. And we came this way and I saw this place. And then I checked the website. And sure enough, one week later is this workshop. So I said, okay, it's meant to be. I'm going to go take off work. I'll definitely be there. So I'm eager to. get involved in meditation as well. And I hope that this is going to be helpful. You're welcome. Report an error

9:53 Hi, I'm Saki. I work in the cafe, so I'm kind of here by default, but I've worked with people with addictive personalities and myself also have had addictive personality throughout my 20s. I'm in my 30s now, so I feel like I'm getting a handle on those things, but as I'm getting a handle on it, I feel like I want to... Report an error

10:16 Go further, go deeper, go further, go deeper. Because I feel like I'm able to snap out of the negativity that I feel from analyzing an addictive personality or addictive moments of obsession. But I feel like minimizing the amount of time even in milliseconds is really important for me. Report an error

10:58 Hi, I'm Karen and I'm here. I'm a recovering alcoholic and I've been sober for a little over a year. And what I've realized is since I stopped drinking, I'm addicted to everything else. I mean, everything, TV, peanut butter, work, anything. yeah and so um saw this uh class on the website i was really excited because i i i just get obsessed with all the other addictions so yeah thank Good Report an error

11:40 morning, my name is KT, that's my nickname, and I'm here really for two reasons. I happen to read a book called The Diamond Cutter by Michael Roach, and so that started my inquiry into Buddhism. Report an error

11:57 Investigating Buddhism, but also because prior to 2005 I was always a very disciplined and very focused individual and then I picked up a very destructive personal habit and I am trying to eliminate it for a long time. Report an error

12:16 And so I'm here to try and break free of that. And I wouldn't necessarily call it an addiction, but it is definitely a habit that I cannot stop doing, which I guess is an addiction by default. Report an error

12:26 But I definitely want to, I'm very desirous to cease that type of behavior because of the impact it has upon my ultimate happiness and karma eventually. Report an error

12:38 Hi, I'm Joy. Glad to see you. I'm really happy that addiction is an issue that is being addressed within the scope of Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism. I come from an alcoholic family and consequently I've been working on not being attracted to people with dysfunctional, destructive tendencies that repeat my family patterns. Report an error

13:02 So I was just curious what your take was on how Buddhism can... Intervene on the generational consequences of alcoholism and drug abuse. I also have drug abuse with my siblings. So consequently I've been in Al-Anon for 23 years and I've actually been grateful for Buddhism because I find that it has enhanced the awareness level but I wanted to get an expert advice more, how to deepen that. Report an error

13:35 Thank you. Report an error

13:38 Hi, my name is Trish and I'm here because, well I've been clean and sober for like 20 years but what's coming up for me now is that I am constantly still looking for the feel good and for the comfort and it's more subtle or maybe just because I've been doing some insight meditations for almost a year and I've become really aware of how much I am in. Report an error

14:07 The future and grasping for this next thing that's going to make me feel good. And so that translates to spending money. On a lot of things that I don't necessarily need. It's consumerism. And I think that's what's really up for me. It's also a little bit of unconscious eating. Report an error

14:30 And so it's been kind of subtle but coming to the surface. And so I just want to keep addressing and learn how to stay more in the moment. And I know that's really connected. For me it's really connected. That leaning and grasping. Like over there. And then I have the whole aversion thing, which is also, I guess, part of my addiction, which was part of my addiction, why I drank and used, because I was always running from the things I didn't like. Report an error

15:02 And what I find now is that I'm still running. So it fits in there. It's like running and grasping. And it's like, God, I thought I was well. And I'm not saying I'm not well, but it's just... Report an error

15:17 I'm glad to be here. Report an error

15:23 Hi, I'm Hillary. I Report an error

15:31 was addicted to various drugs for a number of years, but fortunately that's been a while. But now I'm really here because I'm kind of addicted to ideas, I guess, like we all are. Report an error

15:51 So I'm just here kind of to... Maybe get some practical information on dealing with letting go of attachments in day-to-day life. Report an error

16:07 I'm really attached to some idea of myself and to laziness in all its forms right now. Report an error

16:22 I want to somehow get rid of that so that I can make use of it. The other things I've been able to learn here, but, you know, not incorporate into my life as much as I would like to. So that's about it. Report an error

16:40 My name is Emily. And initially I thought to come here because I've heard really good things about you from someone who was at Gilwagiazo last week and said, Emily, you should... You should go to this thing. It's really good. And particularly your meditations. They said, we're really good. And so I thought that would be really helpful. Report an error

17:04 But then also looking at my own personality, I have a lot of grasping. And kind of what Choki was saying, I had grasping toward more worldly things before and now I have huge grasping toward accomplishing something in the Dharma and making concentration and studying more and not wasting this life. And it's just still this kind of speediness that I notice in my body. It's like having a hard time to just... Report an error

17:33 Let go and relax and be in the moment and be okay with whatever's happening. Instead of feeling guilty. Right. The guilt is a big one. That's right. Yeah. So I'm happy to be here. Now, David's just come in. You've probably picked up what's happening, David. So if you'd like to introduce yourself and why you're here, what you're hoping to get out of today. Report an error

17:57 Well, my name's David Kittlestrom. Um, uh, Report an error

18:00 I have mixed motives for being here. On the personal side, though, I've been having a lot of issues lately with, you know, I work from home and I have to, in order for us to just make our basic monthly bills, I have to work full time. But I've been finding myself getting peeled away a lot in a kind of obsessive. Report an error

18:23 Surfing on the internet, especially around this whole presidential campaign and stuff like this and following all the little dramas that are happening. And to an extent where I can, you know, have one part of my mind saying, you know, this is really destructive, you know, if you... Do this now that means you won't be able to spend time with your kids on the weekend or you won't be able to make your mortgage payments or you won't be able to do your Buddhist practice and all these other things. Report an error

18:48 Yet still finding myself continuing to try to hit that lever to get that little gratification pellet and not really being able to stop myself and finding that quite alarming and really having a dramatic effect on my quality of life. Report an error

19:08 And, you know, and it has a lot of the features of how people talk about, you know, more, you know, other kinds of addictions in terms of, you know, I feel like there's some emotional component that's driving it. Report an error

19:21 And there's obviously some self-esteem issues that are, you know, pushing it as well. And, you know, it gets cyclical, you know, so the more I do it, the worse I feel about myself. Report an error

19:35 Did you want to say something more? and so, um, Report an error

19:39 I have a question, but I guess maybe this is more of a fundamental question about Buddhism or sense, but here's the thing that I'm struggling with is, in the end, isn't or aren't we attached to everything? Because, for example, I like to exercise, and obviously exercise is a good thing. And I like the way it makes my body look and feel and I enjoy it. So does that mean that I'm attached to exercising or but then I read the book and it says that attachment is bad or it's not good or what's the difference between attachment and non-attachment and how do you balance? Report an error

20:22 That's what I'm very confused about because then isn't everything an addiction or I'm just confused about that. Can you help me to clear that up? I don't know if this is the appropriate place to do that, but that's just the question I have. Are we not attached to everything? And then if you detach from everything, then how would you do anything that you're supposed to do or not do? Report an error

20:43 Exactly. Very good question. And one of the first things we're going to do is to have a definition of addiction. Because I was brought up in what's called the Galupa tradition in Tibetan Buddhism. Galupas are very good at debating and being very precise. So when I started... The first thing I needed was a definition because you can't debate anything without a definition. So we'll get into that. Report an error

21:07 But before we do that, I'd like to start now with a meditation where we just bring ourselves more precisely into this particular room and thinking about who we are, where we're coming from and where we do receive help and how we receive help. Yep, Report an error

21:32 right. So this is being taped, Cherky? Yep, so you'll be able to listen to it. Okay, so if you'd like to settle into your meditation posture, the most important thing being a straight back. Report an error

21:48 And if you can, if you're sitting on a chair, not leaning back into the chair, but just sitting up so that your spine is above your pelvis. If it's a problem to do that, then don't worry about it. But even on a chair, it's best not to lean back if you can do that. And on the chair, then we have our feet on the ground. Report an error

22:09 Because I've got short legs, I need cushions underneath me on this chair. Then apart from that, just give your shoulders a bit of a wiggle and then settle them around your spine. Report an error

22:19 And in Tibetan Buddhism, the way we hold our hands, we have the left hand underneath, the right hand on top, two thumbs touching. If you're comfortable with that, then you just drop your hands in your lap. If it feels awkward and you want to put your hands on your knee or something like that, then do that. Report an error

22:35 And then tuck your chin in just a little bit so that your eyes would be looking down 6 to 12 feet in front of you and your tongue on your upper palate behind your front teeth, the top teeth and your eyes, if possible, half open and half closed but whatever's comfortable for you because we're not doing serious meditation practice at the moment but just tuning in. Report an error

23:03 So having settled ourselves like that, then we'll take a few minutes to focus in on the breath, being aware of your own breathing, coming in and out without making any changes whatsoever. Report an error

23:16 It might change of its own accord, then you just let it happen, but you're not forcing any changes. You're just watching the breath and Report an error

23:39 notice when you get to the bottom of an out-breath, then your body relaxes. Report an error

23:53 So whatever that relaxation that is for you, allow that to deepen at the bottom of each out-breath. But even though your body relaxes, you keep your mind sharp and clear. Report an error

24:06 So you're relaxing your body as much as you can but keeping that clarity of mind present. That clarity of mind is focused in on your breathing and the relaxation of your body. Report an error

24:39 And then noticing that with that we start to become more aware of the calmness and the clarity of the mind. When it's not being disturbed by a whole lot of things, Report an error

24:54 we have turned our consciousness inwards and Report an error

25:04 from that inner space, think again about your reason for being here and what you hope to achieve from the workshop and Report an error

25:22 think how you will be different if you are able to achieve this. What sort of person will you be when you can achieve your personal aim and Report an error

25:43 how will this affect my relationships with the people around me when I have changed in this way? Report an error

26:06 And then having become aware of that, thinking in order to do this, I need help. If I could have done it from my own side, I would have done it already. Report an error

26:19 And the very best help that I can have is from a mind which is completely wise, profoundly compassionate, which is the mind of the Buddha. Report an error

26:32 Or if you do one of the deity practices, the mind of one of the deities. Report an error

26:42 And feeling how that this room has been blessed by high lamas coming in here. With their wise and compassionate minds, the number of prayers have been said with a heart of sincerity by people doing their practices in here. Report an error

27:03 So tuning into the energy of wisdom and compassion which is around us at this moment, Report an error

27:15 this is what we mean by taking refuge. Report an error

27:28 Now imagining that in the space in front of you is Shakyamuni Buddha himself on his throne and Report an error

27:38 he can see the sincerity of your need. And he's waiting for you to make a request. So request of him whatever that you would like to achieve. Report an error

27:55 And ask him to take away all the obstacles which stop you from achieving this and that he grant you all the realisations which you need. Report an error

28:21 Having done that, thinking that once I have achieved all these, then my mind becomes calm and clear, wise and compassionate. Report an error

28:36 benefit not only myself but every being. Being that I come into contact with, even when they're angry with me, I benefit even all the beings that I've never seen in this lifetime and maybe never will. Report an error

28:58 In this way, my inner peace becomes world peace. Report an error

29:12 So my motivation for being here today is not just my personal motivation, but so that I can become a person which will benefit everybody, all creatures of the mind, which we call sentient beings. Report an error

29:31 So that they may also develop the same wisdom and compassion. Report an error

29:38 And with that thought, finishing your meditation, Report an error

29:50 allowing yourself to open your eyes and Report an error

29:59 relax a little bit. Report an error

30:07 And one of the most important things that we need to know is why we're doing something, our motivation. And it's very important to reflect on our motivation for wanting change. I remember Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who's the spiritual director. of this centre and similar centres around the world. When he started doing healing courses down at Tara Institute in Melbourne one of the things he said to people is one thing to want to be healed and there he was talking about cancer and AIDS and things like this one thing to want to be healed but what do you want to be healed for? Report an error

30:46 Why do you want this to happen in your life? What's the point of it? There's no point in being healed of cancer if you discover yourself Creating the causes for cancer all over again. So when we're looking at addiction also we have to say what were the causes which were behind that and how can I stop those causes from arising all over again. Report an error

31:16 Now in terms of, first of all I'll tell you a little bit more about myself and how I came to be doing these. This is when I was working as the Western teacher at Vajrayana Institute in Sydney and our program coordinator at the time. Kept on saying, I want you to do a workshop on addiction because he's a smoker. He didn't smoke inside the centre but he'd creep outside and have his smoke and then he'd sort of get rid of the smoke and take a menthol of some sort and come back in again. Report an error

31:44 Everybody knew he was doing this. I said, I want you to do this. Lots and lots of people who have this particular problem. I said, no, no, no, I've never worked in the field of addiction because I'm a psychotherapist. Oh, I was a psychotherapist. Never worked in this field, I shouldn't do anything about it. But he pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. Report an error

32:00 And as a teacher you're supposed to say yes after somebody's requested three times and he'd requested about eight times by this stage. So I thought I'd better do something about it. So I said yes. And having said yes then I had to put a workshop together. So I was thinking what am I going to do and how am I going to work with addiction from a Buddhist point of view? Report an error

32:21 And one of the first things that came into my mind was that Buddhism is actually about addiction. But we don't use the word addiction, we use the word attachment. And this is partly what you were asking, isn't it? What is attachment about? So we need to look at that as well. Attachment is about wanting things and wanting things in a way where we're hanging on to it and not wanting to let it go, which is different from, let's say, somebody comes up here now with a box of very nice chocolates, which I enjoy very much. Report an error

33:01 And if I'm saying I want one of those and wanting to grab it and hang on to it and not wanting anybody else to get the one that I've chosen, then I've got attachment to that chocolate. Report an error

33:14 But if they come up and they say to me, would you like a chocolate? And I think, oh, that's fantastic. I really would like a chocolate. And I take one and I enjoy it. That is not attachment. Report an error

33:26 But it has joy in it and it has pleasure in it but it's not attachment because if somebody else came along and took that same chocolate or the box suddenly disappeared and I couldn't have it, then if I have a mind which doesn't have attachment then I wouldn't be worried about that. Alright, there's a box of chocolates here, now they've disappeared. Well, it would have been nice to have had it but it's not there so let's not worry about it. So the word attachment... Report an error

33:53 Buddhism has got a specific meaning which is about hanging on to something and wanting it and being unhappy if we don't get it. Does that make sense to you? Report an error

34:14 I understand that but it brings up another question for me. I'm a very objective minded person. I'm ex-military, I was in the army and I'm used to... setting an objective or being given a mission doing everything you can to achieve that and And I've just never been able to separate that from my thinking. Does that make sense? Yeah. Report an error

34:45 For example, if my objective was to have a piece of chocolate and someone took the box away, I would go after the person who took the box of chocolate to get the chocolate back. Does that make sense? Yep, yep. Does that make sense to me? That's my thinking and maybe because I'm unenlightened but that's my consciousness at this point in my life. Report an error

35:07 Well this is true of most people in most of the situations that we're in. That when we take the chocolate, we take it even when we've thought about it and thought about attachment, we take it with a mixture of attachment and genuine joy. When we... Have a relationship with somebody, a good relationship I mean, then that relationship usually has a mixture of attachment. I want this person to be here and it has in with that a genuine desire for that person to flourish and for their well-being which is not attachment. Report an error

35:48 So distinguishing one from the other is actually quite subtle and when we're looking at this from the Buddhist point of view what we're saying is that As soon as you feel compelled in one way, and particularly if that compulsion has got a negative component in it, you're going to cause harm, then there is something wrong, right? Report an error

36:15 And that something wrong is to do with the way in which we either harm ourselves or harm other people. Now, if I wanted to get, say, the master's degree in... Buddhist studies, which we do in Italy these days, which I'd really like to do, but I'm getting a bit old for things like that. Got lots of other things in my life as well. Report an error

36:39 So if I wanted to get that, that's something which is positive, maybe. I might want to get it just so I'm important, in which case there's attachment in it. So that if I want to do that without attachment, there's something positive there. I want to be able to use my knowledge to benefit other people. Report an error

36:59 in particular and to have more wisdom for myself. So I have those qualities there. I might also work very hard. I might even become stressed. I might even become burnt out in the process. But because I know that what I'm doing is something which is beneficial, then I work through that. Report an error

37:24 And maybe I'll have to take some time out and say, well, look, I can't do all this in the minimum of seven years, so I'll have to take 10 or 20 years to do it, but that's all right. Report an error

37:34 So the difference is not so much in the sense of desire and wanting something to happen, but in the grasping for it to happen too quickly and too soon and without being aware of what other people are thinking. Report an error

37:56 So I should probably at this stage bring up the definition of addiction, which I forgot to put on your handouts. But the definition of addiction is that it is a habit. It comes from the mind. It's a habit, first of all. So I should point out that in talking about addiction, I'm talking about how we can work with the mind. Report an error

38:21 There are certain things which come into addiction from drugs and alcohol which involve the body. but I'm not discussing those except from... A little bit. But principally the problem with addiction is in the mind. So it's a habit over which there appears to be no conscious control. Report an error

38:41 So if in chasing after that box of chocolates you have no control over your original intention, then you've got a problem. But if in chasing after the box of chocolates you know that somebody's creating harm for themselves, let's say instead of chocolates it's $100,000. They've run off with $100,000 which belongs to you or to your organisation. You run off because you know that that money should be within your organisation and this person is going to spend the money, say, on drugs. Report an error

39:16 Then you would go after that person to get the money back because this would be something which is beneficial. But you would have control. Report an error

39:26 It wouldn't just be, I've decided this, therefore I've got to follow it through. But I have control over how I follow this through and what I do. So addiction is a habit over which there appears to be no conscious control. Next part is that it's something which gives a short-term pleasure and long-term harm. Report an error

40:01 Yep. It's a habit over which there seems to be no conscious control and in which short-term pleasure takes priority over long-term harm. And the next part, and in which the concerns of myself take priority over the concerns of others. Report an error

40:27 So part of, the important part of this definition is that there is harm involved. I'm Report an error

40:51 just waiting for everybody to finish writing it down. So obviously I'm talking about the mind. And almost any bad habit can come into this definition of addiction. It's a very broad definition of addiction and it's meant to be a broad definition of addiction. Report an error

41:15 The habit side of addiction, now let me be more precise. When we're talking about habits, we're talking about something useful. Report an error

41:25 We have a habit about getting up in the morning. So you wake up in the morning, you might lie in bed, I like lying in bed for about half an hour before I actually get out of bed. And then you get up and you go to the bathroom and whatever you do. You've got a habit, which we do. And because I live by the beach... Report an error

41:46 I often have visitors down at my house and what I find fascinating is the habits people have over their breakfast. And my daughter likes one form of, you know those biscuit cereals, we have Weet-Bix and Vita-Britz, do you have that here? Well I like Weet-Bix and she likes Vita-Britz. So she says, oh what have you got for breakfast mum? And I say, well here it is. She said, but that's not Vita-Britz. Report an error

42:08 Even though it's virtually the same. So we have these different habits and mostly they're not a problem and we need habits in order to function. So when we're talking about addiction as a habit we need to recognise that it's a bad habit and not a good habit. Report an error

42:24 But a habit is something which we do without being consciously aware. So my habit of driving the car for example is driving on the left hand side of the road and a driver sits on the right hand side of the car. And when I'm trying to cross the roads here, I have great difficulty in trying to work out which way to look. Because in Australia we teach the kids look to the left, look to the right and look to the left again. Report an error

42:52 So you presumably say it the opposite way around. And then I get totally confused and think I'm doing the wrong thing when I try to do it back to front. So this is just a habit. And I would never drive the car here because my habit of driving on the left hand side of the road is so strong. Report an error

43:11 So it would be a harmful habit here, but it's a very good habit in Australia because it means I conform to everybody else. You see the difference now between a good habit and a bad habit. So what we're going to do through the day is to look at different ways of working with this habit. And there are five different ways in which we can do this. Report an error

43:40 There are five, David. David's helping me with editing the book, you see. I had a list of four and when I looked at it, I said there were five and there's only four on the list, but there are actually five. I left one out. Report an error

43:54 The first is knowing the difference between happiness and pleasure. You won't find this in your notes either. You'll have to write this one down. Report an error

44:08 So if we know the difference between happiness and pleasure, then we know what it is that we're trying to look for and why the addiction does not give us the happiness that we want. Report an error

44:23 The second point. Which is about looking at the habit and ways in which we disable the habit, which comes from my understanding of Western psychology and the way we work with phobias in particular, is finding the trigger to the addiction and how to disable that trigger. Report an error

44:47 So just to give you an example of that while you're writing down, my phobia happens to be of huntsman spiders, which are big hairy ones, do you call them that here? Big hairy spiders, we call them huntsman spiders. So if there was one up there in the corner of the room I wouldn't be too fussed by it, but if one suddenly appeared on the arm of the chair you'd see me move very, very quickly. So anything which looks like a huntsman spider to me is likely to trigger a reaction of run away as fast as you can. Report an error

45:16 And I was staying with some people, I was teaching down in Hobart actually, and the... The person I was staying with had children and the children had been playing with a soft toy in the bath which had left some black stuff in the bottom of the bath. So I went in to have my shower and here's this black stuff at the bottom and I squealed because this had triggered off this reaction, here's a huntsman spider. Report an error

45:39 So of course they all came running in and everybody laughed at me. It's not the first time people have laughed at me. So this look of hairy black. triggered off a certain reaction without me having any sense of I have a question Report an error

46:18 about that. Fear of spiders. have a question. Report an error

46:21 I don't know how that would necessarily be a bad habit. So I'm needing some definition between, because you had stated that a bad habit which causes harm and meets those conditions, the four, loss of conscious mind, short-term pleasure, over-long-term harm, etc. Report an error

46:43 Those are the conditions. Yeah, I wasn't saying that the fear of spiders was an addiction. I'm saying it's a phobia and the way in which we work with phobias is similar to the way we can work with addiction. Okay. Right? Okay. So if the black hairy, oh, I can't think of an example that relates to spiders, but it's not to confuse those two. Report an error

47:04 It's just that a phobia is this unconscious reaction and a habitual reaction, which if I started going around, Bashing people up because I'd seen a Huntsman spider, then we might call it an addiction. So we find the trigger and disable it. So if you read any of the works on phobias or self-help books on phobias, you can use these for addictions as well. Report an error

47:32 What is the trigger? How do I identify the trigger? What's the emotion under the trigger? These sorts of things. Then the next key, number three, is about learning to tolerate pain. Report an error

47:51 The reason for this particular one is because addiction very often is a way of masking something which is uncomfortable, something we don't like or which might be quite painful. So if you think of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, and very often addiction has a correlation between something like post-traumatic stress disorder Post-traumatic stress disorder or depression or anxiety or social problems, these sorts of things. They go together because the addiction is a self-medication for something which is not wanted, right? Report an error

48:37 So there's the pain. Learning to tolerate pain might be learning to tolerate physical pain. So you might build up, say, an... This is the Report an error

48:49 An addiction to painkillers because you've got severe back pain and you've had a lot of painkillers and then you end up being addicted to it. There's also what I call masked pain and that very often is an emotional thing, the masked pain. The masked pain is the underlying psychological issue which might be there. So the masked pain might be I've got a bad back because I've got... Report an error

49:19 A lot of tension in my back and I've got a lot of tension in my back because I feel that I've got to keep on coping and if I don't cope then I'm no good. So the mask pain would be something if I don't cope I'm no good. And then the third sort of pain we have to look at is the pain of withdrawing. So if you try to stop an addiction then you start to suffer because you're withdrawing and then you start to substitute something else. Report an error

49:50 Aha! A note of recognition here. So this is a key thing. What am I going to experience when I withdraw from this? So if you've got a drug or alcohol addiction or you know people who have it, then there might be specific physical withdrawal symptoms and they need medication in order to help cope with them. Report an error

50:14 But we can also learn better ways of tolerating pain. So that's number three. -ha! Report an error

50:20 Number four helps us to deal with the underlying emotional pain, the masked pain. So point number four is about replacing what I call catastrophizing with equanimity. Report an error

50:38 Catastrophizing. By catastrophizing, I mean building a big drama about something. So that if I have an addiction to chocolate... And somebody comes in with the chocolates and they're suddenly snatched away from them or everybody has theirs and there's none left for me or something like that. Then I might start catastrophising around this. I might start thinking, nobody cares about me because nobody shared their chocolate with me. Or therefore I'm no good and I'm not being noticed and this means I'm a bad person and I don't like these other people. Report an error

51:13 And so you build this big drama around the fact that we haven't got the chocolate. That's the catastrophising. And the opposite to catastrophising we call equanimity. Equanimity is about being even-minded, having a balance. So coming from a military background, equanimity should be a nice easy thing to understand because equanimity means seeing things for what they are. Report an error

51:43 This is what a scientist does when they're, or what a scientist is supposed to do, when they're... at their data. They collect their data, they look at their data without into a big tis as to whether it's data or So instead of getting upset by it, this scientist looks at it objectively. So equanimity... Report an error

52:19 It's about the subjective looking at things and not judging whether they're good or bad. Have any of you had worked with the mindfulness-based cognitive therapies, John Kabat-Zinn and so on? Well Kabat-Zinn, when he's talking about mindfulness, he actually uses mindfulness as a synonym for meditation in his definition of mindfulness. Report an error

52:44 But equanimity he calls non-judgmentalism. So when he's talking about being non-judgmental, then I would rather bring in the Buddhist word equanimity at this particular point because I feel it gives a better sense of what is meant. Report an error

53:00 So that's number four. Number five, which is about knowing what to replace the addiction with. Report an error

53:13 And basically, when we look at underneath that, it's about reconnecting. And addiction separates us out. Report an error

53:25 It's designed to blind us from something, to make us less aware, so that when we're trying to stop ourselves from getting addicted again, one aspect of that is about learning how to reconnect. Learning how to reconnect with ourselves, learning how to reconnect with other people, learning how to reconnect with the environment and learning how to reconnect at a spiritual level. Report an error

54:00 So that's the bulk of the theory. So I'll stop here and see if you've got any questions. Report an error

54:08 Yep. You need the mic. Because also I've taken my hearing aids out. What was number one again? Knowing the difference between happiness and pleasure. I'll run through them again. Second one is to find the trigger and disable it. Third one is learning to tolerate pain. Report an error

54:29 Fourth one is replacing catastrophizing with equanimity. And the fifth one is about knowing how to reconnect. Report an error

54:41 So these five points have arisen out of doing the workshops over a period of time and seeing what worked with people and what didn't work with people. Yep. You said something that really interested me in the beginning before you went through these steps, which is that you said that the difference between addiction and a good habit is really subtle and I think is something that is subtle. Report an error

55:11 There's a difference between addiction, which is self-destructive or other destructive. And I don't remember what you said, but you said something like if it's a good habit. I'm translating it to the way I understand, but I'm not really sure. That's fine. If I'm going through a situation where I'm stressed out or burnout, but if the ultimate goal is to benefit others, Report an error

55:40 Then that's not necessarily a bad habit or an addiction. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. It might be, but not necessarily. It might be. So being that it's subtle, where do you draw the fine line between where one is overdoing to the point of self-destruction? Okay. Or it could be over whatever it is, over forgiving, over patient, over, you know, you could replace that. Report an error

56:11 The action with any verb. So I'm looking for that place where I can draw the line. Because I can do something altruistic and be volunteering, you know, but then there's a line that I have to draw to sort of go, okay, I need to take a break and need to delegate or resign from this position. Report an error

56:42 Could you say a little more about that? Yeah, because this is also an important point. I asked a Geshe about this. Geshe's like PhDs in Buddhist philosophy and so on. This is Geshe Tashi Seri up at Chenrezig Institute. And his response was you get the big people to shift big stones and little people to shift little stones. Report an error

57:03 And what he meant by that is we need to know what our limitations are. And to work within our limitations and to recognise at this point this is too much for me. So we take responsibility for that. Report an error

57:20 And there's another point also which I'd like to make here and that is how we feel about being burnt out. I've had a fair share of being burnt out. Report an error

57:31 And I can't say that I always do this. But if... If what we've been doing has been something which is beneficial, even though we're burnt out, then there's a sense of joy which is there. I've worked hard and now I'm having a good rest. I need a good rest. If there is some attachment there, and this is my most common response I have to admit, if there is attachment there then there is resentment which goes either towards myself for not being good enough or towards the external conditions for being so onerous that I can't cope with it. Report an error

58:08 Or the volunteers aren't doing enough work or there's not enough money to employ people to do it. Things like that. So if I had my own act together, then at the point where I say, that's enough, I can't do any more, then there's no sense of guilt. It's just saying, well, I've done what I was able to do. And then there's also a sense of joy and satisfaction in that. Report an error

58:40 But unlike you, I find a great difficulty. I'm going to be very practical here. I have a friend who volunteered at a bookstore at another center. And she got to the point, and she had cancer issues, and she got to the point where she felt so pressured because there was very limited funding, very low staff, and quite frankly, you know, I don't really think that it was an attractive center because there was a lot of negative. Report an error

59:12 Emotions running around, even among the staff, even though it was a center for spiritual practice. And she felt burned out and pressured to do more work under guise of doing bodhicitta. Report an error

59:27 And she didn't know how to say no without feeling like she was going to be guilted into doing more. And I feel very sad sharing this story, but this is actually a true story. And she finally left the center, but she felt really... It wasn't without feeling really hurt and confused because she went there with all the best intentions and she just got pressured into doing more and more and more and more even though she stated that she had cancer. Report an error

1:00:03 I just knew the details of it. It was just difficult. So in a situation like this, clearly, And, you know, I know her, you know, she. Report an error

1:00:12 When you're overextended, and again I'm using this example and everybody could substitute any kind of patience or underguise of doing good for others. There's a point at which it starts to, I guess I'm curious because I don't see that anybody can pull this balanced sense of commitment off without the support of the surrounding, the context. Report an error

1:00:41 within what went with It can't happen without the support of the social or professional context within which one is functioning. Well, if you have that support, then of course there's no problem. If you don't have that support, then we need to be very self-aware and to know, okay, I have reached my limitations. I can't do everything this organisation wants. Report an error

1:01:06 They're going to have to take over some of this responsibility themselves. Or it has to be left for a little while until things build up again. But I can't do this. And we recognise that. And that's part of being self-aware. It's part of knowing that I'm just a little person who can only pick up little stones. I mean, Shakyamuni Buddha talks about the time when... Report an error

1:01:32 No, he wasn't a tiger. He lies down in front of the tiger. That's right. And he allows the mother tiger to eat. his flesh and drink his blood because the tiger is starving and her cubs are starving. Now if you or I tried to do that, I think our resentment would build up pretty quickly and our self-protection would come in fairly strongly. Report an error

1:01:56 So we don't have that sense of compassion built up to that extent, so we can't do that. That's a big person picking up the big stones. Report an error

1:02:07 So then we acknowledge my compassion. My wisdom is still baby compassion, still baby wisdom and I simply cannot do this. And maybe I need to develop more compassion and wisdom but I can't while I'm running around feeling guilty and while I'm being worn out. So therefore I have to pull back. So does pulling back include exiting from the social context? Report an error

1:02:35 It can be. Okay. Because I find that in my own personal experience, it's easier for me to exercise compassion when I'm not like in it, in the situation that's challenging. So I kind of liken this to, you know, being in a cave. Yes. Right. One teacher told me that, you know, in order to develop. A strength in one's spiritual practice, it's necessary to be in auspicious conditions. So it could be in retreat or in a cave or whatever. And so the challenge for me is like when I come out of hermitage and function among people, I'm a lot more aware. Report an error

1:03:18 And then there's a point at which I have to decide whether to stay in a particular social context or excuse myself and just kind of... From a distance sort of work my spiritual practice onto what it is that's difficult. Is that correct? Yes. Is there something else that I could do? Well, if you're perfect, of course there's something else you could do, but the reality is that you're not. Report an error

1:03:47 And everybody's different. I think I'm probably a bit like you. I enjoy being amongst people and doing things like this, but I need to go away and to be very, very quiet. And I like doing my writing because that's the way I can benefit people in that particular context. But the writing's of no benefit unless it's tied in with people. Report an error

1:04:08 So there's this coming and going. And the balance that I have for my life wouldn't suit some people. It probably suits only a few people. We have Tibetan lamas who will go and do 12 years retreat. Report an error

1:04:21 And when I first heard about this, I thought, oh, they're running away from real life. Report an error

1:04:28 But then I realised that this is the way to build up a very powerful sense of the mind and how the mind works and what is happening in the mind to develop a very close and intimate relationship with this energy of wisdom and compassion which we call the Buddha. And then with that power then coming back and serving people may not even be in this lifetime but in the next lifetime. So there's always this balance. Report an error

1:04:58 Always this balance between being involved and then pulling back to refresh yourself and renew your energy and to develop your own practice. Report an error

1:05:08 So may I repeat? So you're talking about distancing yourself. I was a little distracted but I just really want to get this because this is really important for me. So to be aware of your situation. To be aware of yourself, your own personality, what works for you and therefore what is most beneficial to other people. Report an error

1:05:29 So I love what you used about your writing and what works for you because you navigate the being with other people versus distancing and you found the bridge on how to be of service without getting wigged out, if you will, but to use California terms. So it's just a question of knowing. It's a question of knowing that. Thank you. And if it's not writing, then the other thing I could be doing at that particular time is retreat. Report an error

1:05:53 I mean, I like putting things down on paper, so I write. But I could as well be in retreat and simply meditating during that period of time and rebuilding and renewing and developing my own spiritual energy. So next time I come out. Yeah? I Report an error

1:06:15 have a question with regards to retreat because, okay, let's say one identifies addictive behavior and one nips the behavior. But the thoughts, you know, I could put myself in a room or go on a vipassanā retreat, but the thoughts keep circulating again and again in the mind and that's what really plagues me because on one level I can get some degree of control over the physical action, but it's more the emotional, psychological content which is more bothersome. Report an error

1:06:47 So then again we have to be gentle with ourselves. Say, okay, I haven't trained my mind in this. Therefore, I'm not as skilful as somebody who's trained their mind maybe over 15 years in this lifetime and maybe over 30 lifetimes before, who just sits down and meditates and immediately in this lifetime they're into it. Report an error

1:07:08 I'm not like that, therefore I have to learn, therefore I just get on with the slow process of learning. Change is always slow. Do you feel that constant perseverance of staying away from the... addiction or the addictive tendency. Well, Report an error

1:07:34 it will loosen its grip. It will loosen its grip, particularly over that particular addiction. But unless we address the things which are underneath, then we're not going to lose that addictive personality. Report an error

1:07:48 And basically, Buddha said, we've all got addictive personalities, unless we've become enlightened, in which case you don't need to be here. over time and perseverance lose in this group well it Report an error

1:07:57 But that's what he said when he said that we're all suffering, which is the first noble truth. Then he was saying we're suffering because basically we don't see the world in the way it really is. We're addicted to a certain way of seeing the world and that's the source of it all. That's where we cut the root of it. But meanwhile, because we haven't yet got the wisdom to do that, we start working at these other levels. Report an error

1:08:26 And cutting the causative effects of deeper and deeper layers of our own psyche, our own consciousness and unconsciousness. Report an error

1:08:38 So how's the time going? I think quarter to twelve. How about we take a five minute break and then we'll come back and do some meditation. Very Report an error

1:09:02 dry do that. Report an error

1:09:07 Yeah. Report an error

1:09:21 So we can sit and chat while the others are coming and going. Informally with everything switched off. And Report an error

1:09:35 for me a lot of it, the Report an error

1:09:41 first step being satisfying being Report an error

1:09:49 yourself. Yeah. Report an error

1:09:55 It's a hard one. Well, you've got a meditation to do on all that. Acceptance, forgiveness, all of those things. All those things come to you. Report an error

1:10:12 very addicted, so I haven't mastered either. To what? I said I'm very addicted, so I haven't mastered either. I'll try putting this on. At least I know the words. Yeah. Report an error

1:10:25 It's Report an error

1:10:45 just so easy to deceive yourself. Because obviously you're not addicted to every moment of every day. You have long stretches where it's not And so you can to think that history and not Report an error

1:11:07 the adjectives keep going through the the same lesson over and over Report an error

1:11:23 Where did Buddhist go to church? Here. Oh, here. This is the equivalent to a church. So we have our equivalent to a church service, which is called a puja. Is that an Indian word? Pujas? Pujas, yeah. Report an error

1:11:42 And when do those, are those on Sundays or what? Saturdays or what? So you don't go to church once a week, it's like, is it scheduled to publish it? Well there's a program which is on the website here. Report an error

1:12:03 At times when people do meditation. I don't know the program here because I'm a visitor, but I think they have regular meditation days. Saturday mornings. Saturday mornings are meditation. Report an error

1:12:15 And then the pooches are like special services, which are not every Sunday the way it is in a Christian church, but they're happening on a regular basis. Report an error

1:12:26 And then there are teachings. So in a Christian church you'd have a... a priest or the minister getting up and giving a sermon during the service so instead of that we usually have a teacher a llama or somebody like myself sitting down and talking about things and receiving questions in this sort of context rather than the minister There are lots of different kinds of buddhists though. Report an error

1:12:56 So it's a good one of these ethnic Asians. temples around here services that services, you know, a special liturgy Report an error

1:13:16 together Dharma at Report an error

1:13:21 Ask the questions. Report an error

1:13:38 One of the things I like about Buddhism is that the Buddha said, don't accept things, ask questions. So if you have a doubt about anything. Report an error

1:13:50 And the Dalai Lama says, if something can be proved to be wrong in Buddhism, then it should not be accepted. Very simple. But it's got to be proven. Report an error

1:14:06 That's because you can't prove it's correct. That's right. Report an error

1:14:15 You have evidence for and against, but some things you can't. Report an error

1:14:31 Is there another handout? I'm sure there's pins around. Report an error

1:14:46 No, I'm not. I hide down in my little house down in South Gibson, which is where Australia points down towards Tasmanian. Oh, okay. And that's where I do my writing. And then I come out and... You can't start a thing where Report an error

· · ·

1:15:00 I'm currently one of the travelling teachers for FPMT. Please read about me on the FPMT website. Yeah, because a friend of mine liked him. Oh yes, he's a lovely person. Isn't he wonderful? Yeah, he took over my role. Oh, I see. Lama Zopa wouldn't let me leave until he arrived. Ah, okay, so you were grateful for coming. I actually left about three weeks before he arrived, but that was with the agreement of the director. Report an error

1:15:30 What happened was that our dog was done. The dog was 16 years old and had been in the family obviously all this time. And I thought, what other organisation would allow you to leave a few weeks early because your dog was done? I was very grateful to the dog because it was extremely tired. Report an error

1:15:53 So I got to leave a few weeks early and I was with the dog when she died. right. Report an error

1:16:15 The handout is not necessarily in any particular order. I want to go to page four, because this is where we start looking at the applications themselves. Report an error

1:16:41 Does anyone else need a handout? Everybody else has one. Report an error

1:16:54 Oops, sorry folks. Report an error

1:17:00 Trying to keep that there without it falling off this time. Oh, the clip needs to be on your collar. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right, okay. Report an error

1:17:12 So this quote up the top is from Lamyeshi. Lamyeshi. Was the, one of the Tibetan lamas who, Report an error

1:17:24 that way? Oh, over my shoulder. That's Lama Yeshi, thank you. Actually, whenever I'm writing, I often feel that Lama Yeshi is sitting over my shoulders. Report an error

1:17:41 And he sits there and he says, Chonyi, that paragraph is a lot of rubbish. Just get rid of it and start again. So I'm very, I met Lama Yeshi once. I was very fortunate to do that. Lama Yeshi was one of the first of the Lamas to teach Westerners, which was back in the 1970s. At that stage I was a mum with young kids, so I wasn't involved in that. But his books, which are put out by the Lama Yeshi Wisdom Archives, contain a lot of his teachings. Report an error

1:18:11 You can download them on the internet. And the quotes on this one are taken from his book called Ego Attachment and Liberation, I think it is. And it's got a different title on the internet, a slightly different title, but it's actually the same book. But there are copies around, aren't there? Not even down in the deliberation? Report an error

1:18:32 I can check on the lunch. Yeah, yeah. Because if you just, where the book talks about attachment, if you substitute addiction where he says attachment, then it's a very good book for working with addiction. Report an error

1:18:52 So his quote here, to realise that only your own mind and effort can release you from your ego is most worthwhile. For years and years all you have done is build up your ego and under the hallucinated projection of the sense world you've run, run, run from one thing to another as if you've lost your mind. Report an error

1:19:10 To even have a flash of recognition of this reality is most worthwhile and well worth the effort. So here he's talking about the sense world and just very quickly. I want to go back to my first point about knowing the difference between happiness and pleasure and then we'll try and get into this, changing the addictive behaviour. Report an error

1:19:33 When we're talking about pleasure from a Buddhist point of view, we're talking about the pleasures which we feel from our senses, which is sight, sound, touch. And also there's a sixth one which we talk about in Buddhism, which is mental sense, perception. And that mental sense perception includes things like clairvoyance, but that also has similar qualities to the other sense perceptions. Report an error

1:19:58 And the ones which concern us most are the feelings that go with it. And there are three of those feelings. There's pleasure and there's displeasure and there's the intermediate one which is not caring one way or the other, indifference. Report an error

1:20:14 So that when we have something which, say, pleases our ears, Then our hearing has a feeling of sense pleasure and when we hear something which our ears don't like then our hearing has a sense of displeasure. It's not quite the same as the sort of music that you like or dislike because me and my son have very different tastes in music. What I call pleasure he calls noise and what I call pleasure he calls the other way around. Report an error

1:20:48 So I'm not talking about the mental projection on top of something. But within our eyes themselves or within the hearing, there are things which are pleasant and things which are unpleasant. So if we heard a very loud sound right now, then we'd all cringe and jump. Let's say there's a huge thunderclap outside. Then we'd jump because our ears have not had the chance to adjust to that sound level and it's unpleasant. Report an error

1:21:16 So that's not a mental... super imposition on top of what we're hearing but something which comes from the ear itself and other sounds it likes and maybe the sound of running water something soft and very gentle soft sounds are So when we're talking about pleasure, we're talking about our senses and when we're talking about pleasure in terms of addiction, Report an error

1:21:49 The addiction is something which pleases one of the senses or it dulls the negative senses so that we don't have to feel them. Report an error

1:22:03 So that if the negative feeling is that of a really agitated mind, then taking something which stops that agitation, dulls the agitated mind and often actively brings a sense of pleasure as well. Report an error

1:22:21 And the stronger the sense of pleasure, the more likely you are to get addicted to it. Which is interesting, isn't it? So pleasure is different from happiness. Happiness is something which lasts a lot longer. Report an error

1:22:38 So what Lama Yeshu is saying here, for years and years and years all you have done is build up your ego and under the hallucinated projection of the sense world you've run, run, run from one thing to another as if you've lost your mind. Report an error

1:22:52 So this is, addiction is about running towards the addiction when we haven't got it. And hanging on to it when we have because we know we're going to have to run to get it later on. So there's that constant turmoil which is there in the mind. Report an error

1:23:11 The other part of the addiction which comes into this particular meditation is the triggers which set us off. So we might be quite happily doing something and let's say I'm sitting in my room typing away. I'm in the centre because I'm teaching. Report an error

1:23:34 I smell coffee wafting down the corridors into my room. I think, oh, I'd love a cup of coffee. So the smell of the coffee has triggered off this thing. And if I'm addicted to coffee, it will not be, oh, I'd like a cup of coffee, but I've got to have a cup of coffee and I've got to have it now. So there are things which trigger off an addiction. Report an error

1:24:01 And when there's trauma behind it, those triggers can be... Outside things, they can be inside, meaning inside our bodies or minds. But an outside thing, one example of that might be, and this is just a theoretical example. So if we take a woman, say, who's been raped and she was raped on a floral carpet so that she remembers the trauma of the rape, but what she can see and what stands out for her is this floral carpet. Report an error

1:24:33 So if she comes into a room like this and sees a floral carpet, Then that could trigger the trauma, the memory of the trauma and therefore trigger the need to find the addiction which masks that. Report an error

1:24:51 So this is what I mean by the triggers. Another example is a friend of mine who was a reporter in Vietnam during the war and she and I worked together at Monash University in Melbourne. And it was orientation week, which is where all the students come and they find out about the university. And somebody let off a firecracker and I saw my friend's face go white and she jumped as though to go under her desk. Report an error

1:25:21 She had heard many, many bombs and some of her best friends were killed by bombs in Vietnam. So although this was a firecracker... Although she was in Australia and from her logic she knew all this, the automatic reaction was this intense fear and jumping under the table. So we can understand that. And if she was going to, if she had an addiction as well, then this would be the time when she would want the addiction mostly. Report an error

1:25:54 This is one reason why post-traumatic stress disorder is often related to addiction. Because things trigger off. That these memories, these external memories, but it happens so quickly that we don't know how or why this is happening. So Rosemary jumped under the desk and went white before she even knew what had happened. But it was quite clear. Another part of her mind actually knew, well, this is a firecracker and I don't really have to worry. Report an error

1:26:25 So this is about the habitual side of the addiction, the feeling that there's no control there. That we're triggered into this very, very quickly. So in terms of my spider phobia, there's photos of me at the age of two and I've got a very swollen arm. This is sent to my father. He was a soldier in the Second World War. I was born during the Second World War. So I've got this big swollen arm. Nobody knew why, but presumably I'd been bitten by something. Report an error

1:26:57 So we can hypothesise that maybe it was a huntsman spider that bit me. Because Huntsman spider bites do swell up but they're not really bad. So if that had happened, then things which triggered off that memory would trigger off that same sort of behaviour. I've got to get away from this but at the age of two your ability to get away is limited and so therefore you go into a panic. Now whether that actually happened or not I don't know. Report an error

1:27:26 So what we're doing here is trying to think about what... Might be triggering the addiction. So it can be something outside. It can be an internal feeling. So let's say the feeling is having a dry throat, which I've got at the moment. Report an error

1:27:47 And the dry throat means I've got to have a drink. And if I'm going to have a drink, I'm going to have alcohol. There's no alcohol in there. It's only hot water. We're safe. But if that was so, then the dry throat, which is something internal to me, not external, then becomes a trigger for taking a drink. Report an error

1:28:05 So maybe I've been doing some training outside and I've got hot, throat is dry, I come in, I've got a dry throat, I need a drink, let me have a beer. And so the person then goes and uses that without even realising that the dry throat has triggered it off. Report an error

1:28:25 Or it might be stress. Now here's another hypothesis. Somebody's had a really hard day at work, they haven't had the sort of support they wanted, nobody's doing what they want them to do. Report an error

1:28:40 Nobody's appreciating them. They come home. They feel tired. They feel lonely. Maybe they live by themselves. Report an error

1:28:54 And I think, I deserve something for myself. Now that thought is not a bad thought. It's a good thought. But it's what goes with that thought that can cause the trouble. I deserve something for myself. I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine. Female in this case. The guys usually go for the stubbies. Stubby's the right word in... Report an error

1:29:21 So what do you call them here? How boring. Actually, the stubbies are the small six-pack. Stubbies go with the little bottles. Do you have the little bottles? Yeah, and tinnies are the ones. Report an error

1:29:45 Australians are especially good Stubbies also mean short shorts. If somebody wants a stubby, usually they mean a beer. So, yes, we have to be careful about some of these cultural things. Report an error

1:30:02 So, okay, this is a woman, so she's not into drinking beer, she's into drinking wine. I want to do something for myself, so she has a glass of wine, and with a glass of wine, then she has a cigarette as well. So here's the addiction. And because her work is stressful, then every night she comes in, I need to relax. And so it's into this pattern of behaviour. Just as when you get up in the morning you have a certain pattern of behaviour, for this particular person there's a certain pattern of behaviour that goes with coming home. Report an error

1:30:34 Or one woman the other day said the trigger for her was driving past one of these drive-in places where they sell alcohol. Report an error

1:30:47 She said before she leaves work she's determined not to and she's determined not to for about two days but on the third day because it's such an effort not to she gives up and then she goes in and gets the alcohol that she needs. So the trigger is actually seeing this sign but for her also there'd be another trigger too which would be related to the alcohol, to needing the alcohol. Report an error

1:31:12 So when we're talking about triggers there's usually more than one and The external trigger is out there but the external trigger is triggering off an emotional feeling or physical pain, a sense of pain, something that we don't like and therefore we want something to calm down that sense of pain. Report an error

1:31:41 Yep. Report an error

1:31:44 Maybe this is too soon but I'll ask now. People pleasing is an addiction so it can also... Would you do the same strategy if you're continuing a behavior for a benefit? So it doesn't necessarily have to be trauma, but rather like if you get attention for getting good grades or more money for increasing the bottom line or praise for doing excellently in a project, you can be addicted to that. Report an error

1:32:25 Dangling carrot. Yes. You know, whether you get the recognition or not. Exactly those sorts of things. So we were talking about trauma. I'm just curious if the meditation works for both. It does definitely work for both. Positive and negative triggers. Report an error

1:32:46 Well, if the trigger is wanting praise, for example. And we want the praise because basically we feel uncertain about ourselves. So we have to have the praise. Then there is an addiction to that. And then there is the pain of not getting the praise when we feel we deserve it. So that pain of not getting the praise is what we need to focus in on. Okay. That's the attachment. And what we do when we don't get that. Report an error

1:33:17 What am I going to do? I haven't got the praise. I feel bad about myself. What am I going to do? I'm going to have a cigarette. Okay, so the meditation that we're going to do works for both positive or negative triggers. Yep. And the goal would then be to reach the state of equanimity so that we're not going into automatic response. Report an error

1:33:38 That's the end goal. In this meditation, we're just trying to identify the triggers. And this meditation really needs to be done over and over again because as we identify one, then that will uncover something a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper and so we continue on with that. Report an error

1:33:57 So if you'd like to set yourself into your meditation posture and Report an error

1:34:25 be very clear about what it is that you want to work on. Most of us have various things which we can call addictions. I want you to choose just one of those. Try and work with that through the rest of the day. Report an error

1:34:41 So be very clear in your mind as to what that is going to be. Report an error

1:34:49 And then focusing in on your breath, Report an error

1:34:57 allowing your body to relax, but your mind to be clear. Report an error

1:35:08 And in particular, being clear about the particular addiction that you want to work on, if there's more than one. Report an error

1:35:29 So having prepared our mind in that way, we then prepare the mind by checking our motivation. Why are we doing this? So think about how your addiction has harmed yourself and perhaps harmed others as well. Report an error

1:35:48 And thinking strongly that you would like to stop creating harm in this way. Report an error

1:36:02 To do that we need help. So feel that you are being surrounded by wisdom and compassion. It Report an error

1:36:16 can be in the form of Buddha. It can be the Christian God whose mind is also omniscient wisdom and profound compassion. So Report an error

1:36:31 that when we visualize this wisdom and compassion in front of us, we choose... A human figure but one which represents wisdom and compassion to us. So here mostly I talk about Shakyamuni Buddha but for many people the figure of Jesus Christ or Virgin Mary can also be used with the same power and the same strength. Report an error

1:36:57 Similarly for people coming from Judaism or Muslim religions can bring their own awareness into doing a meditation like this. So I feel that this wisdom and compassion is present. Present in front of you in human form and Report an error

1:37:17 is radiating the healing energy of wisdom and compassion into your body and into your mind so that you can do this meditation and Report an error

1:37:36 rejoicing that we can do this meditation together. Report an error

1:37:47 Now bring your mind to a recent time when you indulged in your addiction. Report an error

1:37:57 See the details as clearly as you can, where you are and what you're wearing, what room are you in, what is it around you. What sort of smells, what colours, what sounds. Report an error

1:38:21 And seeing yourself moving towards that addiction, either physically, in terms of your body, reaching out your hand, or in terms of your mind, I'm going to do this. Report an error

1:38:43 And if that is hard, then see yourself already indulged in the addictive behaviour. It has come about without you being consciously aware. Report an error

1:39:06 Try and bring your mind back to that moment just before. You start the addiction. Report an error

1:39:14 Maybe a fraction of a second before, maybe ten minutes before. Try and bring your mind back to that moment where you're thinking, this is what I'm going to do. Report an error

1:39:39 And as you sit and think about this particular moment, think about what emotions may have been there just before you got to that point, or in the ten minutes or in the hour before you got to that point. Report an error

1:39:59 Bring it as close to that point as you can. Report an error

1:40:07 What was in my mind? What was my thought just before I did that? And Report an error

1:40:34 now taking yourself back a little bit. You're aware of your emotions. You're aware of your desire for the addiction. But this time you say to yourself, I'm not going to do that. What is going to happen? Report an error

1:40:55 Do you become more tense, more anxious? Do you become relaxed? This is going to be different for different people. There's no right or wrong. You're going to become panicky. You're going to feel a sense of relief. Report an error

1:41:15 This time I'm not going to do that. Report an error

1:41:25 This time I'm going to find something which is wise that I can do instead of the addiction. Report an error

1:41:39 What can I do at that moment of just reaching out or that thought, I must do this, which can be a substitute? For the addiction, but which is beneficial. That's what we mean by wise. Report an error

1:42:10 If you're finding this hard, you just go back, bring yourself up to that point again. Try and find something which is wise. Report an error

1:42:21 Remember that this figure of wisdom and compassion is in the space in front of you, giving you as much help as you need. You're not doing this alone. Report an error

1:42:37 What can I do? Report an error

1:42:48 Once you've decided what that can be, Then imagine yourself actually doing that as vividly as you can. So over and over again, tracing back to the moment before, as vividly as you can, that moment where you can make a choice, there's still a choice available to you, and you take an alternative path. Report an error

1:43:16 What is that like? Report an error

1:43:23 What is the alternative path? Over and over again, back to the moment before, visualising the alternative path. Report an error

1:43:47 Maybe something very little, maybe just sitting down, picking up a glass of water, Report an error

1:43:58 reading a book, Report an error

1:44:06 just having a rest. Report an error

1:44:15 Something which can have as much power as the addiction itself and yet not be harmful. Report an error

· · ·

1:45:00 Then becoming aware of the figure of wisdom and compassion in front of you, Report an error

1:45:07 who's there to help you any time that you request. Report an error

1:45:18 Acknowledging any benefits that you've gained from this meditation. Report an error

1:45:30 We have to be in touch with this wisdom and compassion all the time and Report an error

1:45:39 reminding ourselves to do just that, to keep in touch. Report an error

1:45:46 With that thought, finishing your meditation. Report an error

1:45:57 Open your eyes. Report an error

1:46:16 That's a lifeline. You said something that has as much power as the addictive behavior. I wasn't clear on what you were getting at by that. I mean, something that gives you as much pleasure and is as potentially addicting as the addictive behaviour? Well, it could be, couldn't it? I actually meant power to heal. Report an error

1:46:36 I mean, we assume the addiction is going to heal or mask something, but we want something which has that power to heal without it masking. So we can replace it with something which becomes an addiction in itself. That's quite true. Report an error

1:46:56 So what we're looking for is something which doesn't do that. But to find something which doesn't replace the addiction also means looking further and further down because as we're trying to remove the addiction, we're trying to cut its roots further and further down. So we have to keep on doing this. And from the Buddhist point of view, it comes right down to that moment where we understand the way the world exists and that how our The view of reality is behind all these addictions. Until we get to that point of view, we're not going to cut it entirely. But we can at least replace it with something which is a bit more beneficial and something which undoes the compulsion of the addictive behaviour as it is at the moment. Report an error

1:47:47 So if the alternative becomes addictive, then you... Go through the meditation but you find a second alternative or a third or a fourth or a fifth. But always with that figure of wisdom and compassion in front of you. Report an error

1:48:01 So for now I'm going to call that Buddha but if you want to use your own figure for that then please just substitute your own words. Report an error

1:48:12 So did anybody have difficulty with that meditation? I Report an error

1:48:21 didn't have a difficulty but I got an epiphany. Report an error

1:48:27 That sounds pretty amazing. Just no word like that. I noticed that it just came to me that generally we like to dig things that make us feel happy. Yep. But it goes back to my earlier point that one also gets addicted to situations in a very almost masochistic way that give you pain. And I find that a bit... Report an error

1:48:52 I mean, want of another word, a bit of a perversion in the psyche that you'd still want to, like masochism in general. Yeah, that's a very good example. And again, this meditation can work towards that as well. But I'm just wondering, what are the root causes of getting habituated to certain states of mind? Report an error

1:49:16 You mean to masochism or the mind? Masochism. Masochism. I mean, masochism is just another way of masking pain. So you do something which is more painful than the pain that you're experiencing. So I remember a young girl who was addicted to pulling out her hair to the point where she had to wear a hat because she had all these bald patches. Report an error

1:49:40 And what was happening to her was there was a man who was trying to set her up for sexual exploitation. And on the one hand he appeared kind and everybody thought he was kind but he had this other agenda which she knew about but other people didn't. So he was caught in a trap. So pulling out the hair was more painful to her than the pain that she was experiencing. And another one is a teenager that I know who has had this habit of cutting himself. Report an error

1:50:14 And he said to me, if I feel that pain I forget about the other pain. So we have that involved in masochism. Report an error

1:50:27 The challenge that I have is that whenever my, or I guess it's a good thing, I don't know, but as long as my mind is actively engaged or focused on something, I'm fine. But it's the moment when I'm just sitting there and my mind is wandering, the thoughts come into my head. And so I have to keep going and going and going and pushing myself. Report an error

1:50:49 That's why I'm always doing something. So it's always when I'm falling asleep or I'm just driving or nodding off in the car and the thoughts just plunge into my head and you just can't get rid of them. How do you stop the thought? So my question is, how do I stop the thoughts to begin with? Because if I could do that, the problem would be solved. Report an error

1:51:09 That's what I'm trying to do. Well, I presume they're bad thoughts in that case. Well, not the bad thoughts. They're the thoughts that... Report an error

1:51:20 Make me aware of the hunger. Does that make sense? And then the hunger is what drives the behavior to satisfy the hunger, to quench the desire. Then because of how you fulfill the hunger, it's what causes the destructive behavior, the patterns and wasted money, wasted time, stuff like that. So the trigger for you then is this moment of feeling relaxed. Because at that point, you could no longer... Report an error

1:51:49 Hide from this underlying hunger, right? The hunger bursts through your consciousness because your mind is relaxed. So as soon as I become relaxed, this is going to burst through. So I can't allow my mind to be relaxed because this is going to burst through. Therefore, I've got to keep my mind busy. Therefore, compulsive behavior of some sort or another. Report an error

1:52:14 Did you want to say something? Yeah, I was just minding that. Yeah. it's really Report an error

1:52:23 The important thing is seeing and finding these moments where the urge is starting to come through, whatever the urge might be. Report an error

1:52:33 When does this happen? Often it is when we're relaxed. But not always, as I say with a hypothetical thing about the woman and the carpet. Not necessarily when she's relaxed, but when she sees that sort of a thing. And we're triggered into all sorts of behaviour. I mean, we walk into a room like this. Report an error

1:52:53 And this room will trigger off all sorts of behaviour according to your background. And for those of us who've studied a lot of Buddhism and have met with the Lamas and had good experiences with that, maybe a feeling of great joy and delight and pleasure about being here or calmness if you've done meditation. Report an error

1:53:11 The first time I walked into a room like this, what triggered me off was panic. I mean, what triggered off in me was seeing all these sorts of things and just panicking because I couldn't understand the art and it was just overwhelming. I ran out. I can remember the Geshe sort of trying to say, come on, no, no, no, ran off, ran away. Report an error

1:53:33 So we, this is, triggers are happening to us all the time and they trigger off behaviour all the time. And some of that, some of these triggers are good and this is why we have ritual. Report an error

1:53:44 Because in the ritual then we're triggering ourselves into positive behaviour. If I smell Tibetan incense, for example. Then that triggers off a certain mind which is associated to being in retreat and seeing the Lamas and doing the different practices that we do. Report an error

1:54:06 Thank you for that question about the trigger of when the mind is relaxed then up spurts all this stuff that is unpleasant to deal with. What would you recommend for people who... This is triggering a memory from... Ten years ago when I first sat with Lama, somebody said like what happens if you get quiet and you deal with this fear that's like overwhelming. Report an error

1:54:34 So I'm kind of bringing that into this present moment because some people are afraid to be quiet with their minds because the awareness from stilling the mind brings up all these monstrosities. So I'm wondering what you would recommend to... Given that stillness is required to identify what it is that's motivating this behavior or thoughts, what would you recommend to someone who doesn't want to meditate because they're afraid that these difficult emotions are going to be overwhelming, that they'll lose control and will maybe have a nervous breakdown or something, worst case scenario? Report an error

1:55:23 What I would recommend is partly comes from my background as a psychotherapist, saying we need to understand why this fear is coming up and what it's about. And what I would recommend from the point of view of being a Buddhist nun or being a religious person is the teachings which are there to help reduce fear. Report an error

1:55:51 Let's say the fear is a fear of being abandoned. So one of the teachings which might be relevant is the teaching of the omnipresence of the Buddha mind or the mind of God. That if Buddha knows everything about God, I mean, sorry, well, God knows everything about, not what I meant. If Buddha knows everything about us, then he must know where we are all the time. And in the Bible, Jesus said, even the very hairs on your head are numbered. Report an error

1:56:22 That's a pretty amazing statement. So that if the fear is about aloneness, then sometimes understanding the spiritual path of our own religion can help to work with that. And the other side of that fear, aloneness, might be related to early childhood experiences and so on and so forth. So these two things can work together. Report an error

1:56:46 It doesn't have to be one or the other. But the spiritual path, however it's described, I'm just talking about Christianity and Buddhism because these are the two that I know something about. However it's described, this path is designed to take us gently from where we are at the moment into understanding ourselves more fully and seeing the potential which is there when our mind is completely clear of all these things. Report an error

1:57:15 So in Buddhism we talk about Buddha potential. That we all have this potential once our mind is completely cleared of all negatives to achieve that. But we need help to do it. And in Christianity, Jesus said we're all born in the image of God, meaning in the image of the omniscient mind and the profound compassion. Report an error

1:57:39 So that means also within Christianity there's a similar notion that somewhere inside ourselves is this... Sense of purity which we can attain and that the religious path is teaching us how to attain that. Report an error

1:57:56 So all these teachings. Sorry. So what I'm hearing is that for someone who is scared of meditation, you know, obviously I'm thinking about other people I know because I want to and they don't want to do Buddhism because they're too like freaked out about like the idea of like sitting still. So I'm hearing which what I'm. Report an error

1:58:18 Correct me if I'm wrong, that what I'm hearing you say is that in these instances, the hope then is to recommend that they read the books or sit with Lama's and hear the teachings and kind of experience kind of in a gradual level the replacement of the fear with the hopeful. Report an error

1:58:44 Teachings, the teachings that will replace or soothe the fears and kind of ease into that it'll be okay if you sit still, nothing, no catastrophe is going to happen, right? So there's a combination of action that's concrete where you actually physically go to a teaching and you're kind of... Yes, because those sorts of problems are very common ones. Report an error

1:59:09 They're not related just to... Being an American and having an active mind, I mean Buddha knew about them two and a half thousand years ago. So the path is designed to help people from where they are at this moment, not when we've attained some sort of state where we can keep our minds together and we're okay, but to take us with our minds which are chaotic and in a mess and say let's take this chaotic messed up mind and let's work with it and see what we can do. Report an error

1:59:43 So when we look at the four noble truths, the first one says our minds are chaotic, truth of suffering. The second one talks about why they're chaotic, which gives us some indication, therefore, that there is a way out of it. So we talk about karma in that sense, but the imprints on the mind, the imprints are habits. Addiction is a habit. Addiction is an imprint on the mind. Report an error

2:00:10 Then, in the third noble truth, the Buddha said, All this can stop completely, truth of cessation. And the fourth one is the truth of the path. This is how you go about getting to this particular point. Report an error

2:00:23 So although when he talked about the truth of cessation, he was talking about cutting all of this, what he calls the roots of saṃsāra, or the very basis on which we have this negative mind. Report an error

2:00:38 There are also little cessations which we can have. So within Buddhist practice, for example, one of the things we talk about is using patience as an antidote to anger. So instead of flaring up with anger, then we just sit back and we say, no need to flare up with anger. I can see that this person who's attacking me is coming from a mind which they can't control. So let me see what I can do to help that person rather than me getting upset that they're attacking me. Report an error

2:01:11 Things like that. And so the path, the religious path is about gradually working with all these things and how we go about doing that. Report an error

2:01:24 So also in doing this particular meditation, okay we can't get rid of the addiction just by doing that meditation once. We need to think about this and we need to develop more wisdom and the way we do develop more wisdom is through following. Report an error

2:01:45 And Western psychology has got methods which help us in the early stages of that physical path. So if you go to a psychologist for counselling or for long-term psychotherapy, these are things which help to identify some of the factors which have been happening in this lifetime and ways to go about healing that. Report an error

2:02:08 But then we need to go further as well. And so then we go into religion. Which is why I became a nun in the end. Because as a psychotherapist I was helping people. But there became a point where officially as a psychotherapist I wasn't supposed to work anymore and this became, this was always a religious thing. Report an error

2:02:28 When I was working in the counselling service at Monash University it was quite clear there's a cut off point. When it comes to anything religious you send them off to a priest or a monk or a nun or whatever. But you don't deal with that as a therapist in the counselling service. When I set up my own practice as a psychotherapist before I was ordained, it was easier because I would say to people, well, I'm a Buddhist. Report an error

2:02:54 Are you aware of this? Yes. I've come to you because you're a Buddhist. Fine. Well, let's get on. And then when it came to developing further into the spiritual path, that was OK. Report an error

2:03:05 And then I began to think, well, this wasn't the only reason I became a nun, but I began to think I could do the... Work on the religious side more powerfully as a nun, as an ordained nun than I could as a psychotherapist. So that when I was thinking about taking ordination, my children wanted to have this talk with me, you see. Report an error

2:03:26 Mum's doing something crazy again. So it was my son who was the spokesperson for my two daughters as well. And he said to me, well maybe you just want to do this because you're on a... high after being on retreat with Lama Sopa Rinpoche. I said, well, that's possible, but I can't take ordination tomorrow, so I'll drop down from that high eventually and the idea will just peter out. He said, that's fine. Report an error

2:03:52 He had three questions to ask me. And then the second question was, well, you always help people in any case. You're going to help people more by cutting your hair short and wearing funny clothes. So I said, well, that's my... Report an error

2:04:10 He said, Report an error

2:04:14 well, I trust you to work this out, Mum. So I'm busy thinking, what on earth could the third question be? Because the second one seemed pretty profound from a guy who was 22 or something at this stage. So I asked him, he said, well, it's like this, Mum. You've always been hanging out for the man of your dreams. What happens if he turns up after you're ordained? Report an error

2:04:11 satisfied with that in my heart, then I won't be taking ordination. He said, well, Report an error

2:04:36 So my son and I, we have some quick repartees sometimes, so I said to him, all right, I'll take ordination and find out who he is then. Report an error

2:04:47 But he hasn't turned up, so I'm still ordained. Report an error

2:04:53 But the point is that in Western psychology and in religion, there is not a cut-off point between one and the other. When you're trying to work with your mind and produce a beneficial mind... Then there are ways of doing this which are not necessarily religious, which we call humanitarian. But when we want to go deeper, then we go into a religious path and there's no clear cut-off point between one and the other. Report an error

2:05:19 So I think we'd better stop there. I've gone over my time. We've only done one meditation. You're supposed to have done about three by now, but never mind. This is always what happens. I never follow my script. But I think it's very beneficial to have this sort of feedback and to listen to what it is that you want. Report an error

2:05:36 So if you have any questions that you would like to ask but you feel a bit shy then write it down and just put it on the table here and I'll look at it after lunch. So we come back here, it's nearly quarter to one now so maybe quarter to two back here, have an hour's break. Is that okay? Alright then. Report an error

2:06:02 What's that? Report an error

2:06:23 No, but there's a tow zone. Where are you parked? That's just the easiest way to answer this question. On the next street coming up. But if he's on somebody's driveway, he could be. So a lot of people, I'm just trying to find out where he's parked. I'm just trying to find out where he's parked. I Report an error

2:06:42 just want to get you hooked up before I take this out. Report an error

2:06:52 The next time you come, we'll have a proper little throne for you, a proper little stage of some sort. Well, this is pretty good, actually. We do our best. Yeah, please sit down. I think this is actually better down. Yeah, probably. Yeah, that should be right. And then the clipboard, did you like it on your collar? Oh, it's on the collar's bits because I keep on throwing the zen around. Report an error

2:07:20 It gets tangled up. There we go. Right. Report an error

2:07:47 it's actually kind of funny. I traveled to Las Vegas very often. in Las Vegas, there's this store. And in the store, there's a done. It works like that. And I was, She's dressed exactly like you are. Well we tend to wear the same stuff. Report an error

2:08:12 So I've been going to this for quite a bit, and I always get like little things somewhere, and I said, so I'm curious as to why you're dressed that way. Because she happened to be working at the register one day, and she told me it all. Report an error

2:08:27 So I started talking to her. And she told me about this place here in San Francisco. And that's how I thought about this institute. I wonder who it is. Report an error

2:08:41 I have her name on to my phone. She works in this store. So she told me that she's basically saving up money to open up this center in Oregon. So she's got a, I guess, her superior to work here. So she's trying to do this to the Senate in Oregon. Report an error

2:09:17 We better wait till Cherky gets back so we know all the recording's happening. Report an error

2:09:24 All enjoy your lunch? Yeah. I did. And then I had a rest and I share my room with a pussycat, you see. Pussycat and I have become good friends over the couple of days I've been here, so she was lying on my lap. She thought it was great. Report an error

2:09:45 Yeah, she's usually up on top of the cupboard. When I come in now, she hops down and she'll sit on my knee or sit on my lap. I think I'm a bit warmer than the top of the cupboard. Report an error

2:09:58 Yeah, she loves it up there. Report an error

2:10:14 no Report an error

2:10:18 that we can it for people that want to download and listen. hard to follow if you have any questions. a mic manager. Okay, well just before the question, how about we do a little short meditation to start the session. Report an error

2:10:48 And once again focusing in on your breath, Report an error

2:11:04 thinking how deeply our own suffering affects us, how Report an error

2:11:15 we need help, we need help from other people, but in particular we need help from people who are wise and compassionate. Report an error

2:11:32 Thinking how these wise and compassionate minds have developed in that way, because they in turn, had to develop their wisdom and compassion. Report an error

2:11:48 wisdom and compassion is developed to its utmost point. Report an error

2:11:54 the mind is completely pure, completely clean. Report an error

2:11:59 that we have the possibility of attaining that state of mind ourselves. So Report an error

2:12:11 if I Report an error

2:12:31 can develop my wisdom and compassion, Particularly in relationship to my own suffering. And like those people who are wise and compassionate who help me, then I will also develop a wise and compassionate mind to help other people. Report an error

2:12:55 So in order to develop that wise, compassionate mind, once again feeling that the figure of wisdom and compassion, Shakyamuni Buddha, is in the space in front of you. Report an error

2:13:09 Let his wisdom and compassion come down upon you like a rain of nectar, Report an error

2:13:20 like a healing energy. Which clears all pain and discomfort from your body and feeling that being washed away and Report an error

2:13:40 all pain and discomfort from your mind, Report an error

2:13:46 all negative thoughts, all disturbances, all racing thoughts. Report an error

2:13:57 These all go, your mind becoming completely clear and pure, Report an error

2:14:04 like the mind which is sending down this healing energy. Report an error

2:14:17 Feeling that this has actually come about at this moment so that there is no difference between your mind And the Buddha mind, Report an error

2:14:43 so that anyone who sits before you requesting that healing, you allow your own wisdom and compassion, which is no different from that of the Buddhas, to heal that people or those persons. Report an error

· · ·

2:15:27 And so thinking, may I through looking at my suffering develop this strength and courage, clarity of mind, wisdom and compassion to skillfully help other people. You suffer in the same way that I do. Report an error

2:15:57 I'm coming back into the room. Report an error

2:16:17 There's one question which has been left here, which actually talks about suffering. Report an error

2:16:27 Okay. We're getting an wireless mic. The wireless mics are good. You just shove them in your pocket and that's it. Report an error

2:16:47 So this question is clearly from somebody who's suffering. It says, my mother just died. I find my cravings have intensified. I'm travelling out of state next week to clear out her storage and I'm terrified. I'm too afraid to even cry and I feel I cannot control my mind. Report an error

2:17:13 How many of you have experienced the death of a mother? Yeah. Report an error

2:17:21 And even when that death is an appropriate death, and even when that mother is old, it's still something which tears at our hearts. Report an error

2:17:31 I remember my mother died many years ago from breast cancer. Then my father died. I've been ordained for 13 years, so it must be 14 years since my father died. And myself and my three siblings going around saying we're orphans now. And although we're all grown adults, just feeling that sense of bereft, bereavement. So that when we feel this, when our parents die in particular, it's almost as though part of ourselves dies at the same time. Report an error

2:18:06 I imagine it would be the same if we lost a child, but fortunately I haven't had to go through that experience. But because so much of who we are is related to our parents and what our parents have done for us, even if they did something bad, still our feeling of who we are is related to that person who is so strong in our life. Report an error

2:18:32 So that that sense of loss can feel like a huge gap somewhere in the middle. And the solar plexus here. And I can remember that, as I said, particularly after my father died, a feeling as though there's a big hole there. And of course, that feeling is something which is incredibly painful. Report an error

2:18:54 And if we are experiencing pain, then our cravings will intensify. It doesn't matter whether it's a pain which has been ongoing, like the post-traumatic stress disorder. Or a pain which has suddenly come upon us, let's say you've just broken your ankle, or a deep emotional pain like the pain of loss of a parent. Report an error

2:19:22 Then our cravings will intensify because of this fear of pain. Report an error

2:19:31 So that one of the most important things that we can do in working with addiction is learning how to face up to pain and what to do about pain, how to work with pain. And this is one of the reasons also why... Relapse is such a big problem with addiction because you can use medications to get people out of their nicotine addiction or alcohol addiction or heroin addiction or whatever. Report an error

2:19:59 But if that pain underneath is not dealt with then something will replace it. And here the pain is loss of a mother. Sometimes the pain can be feeling as though... Report an error

2:20:17 I was going to say that we were neglected as a child. We may not have been neglected in a physical way, but neglected in the sense that our parents wanted us to turn out in one way and we felt that we needed something else and therefore feeling a huge part of ourselves as being neglected. That can be incredibly painful. My father should have been an artist, a painter, not a painter of houses, but a painter of pictures. Report an error

2:20:47 His father, my grandfather, wouldn't let him do that because that wouldn't bring in money. He wouldn't be able to support a family. And I think my father felt this loss all his life. He had severe dermatitis. It was partly the result of war, being in the war. But also this deep abiding pain, which actually goes back in generations in my family, about having a creative ability and not being able to use it. Report an error

2:21:15 Whether the pain has been there before or whether it's arisen because of something which has just happened, addiction is a way of dealing with that pain but it's an ineffective way of dealing with it. That's what we need to know. I'm travelling out of state next week to clean out her storage and I'm terrified. Terror is another form of pain. Report an error

2:21:39 I'm too afraid to even cry and I feel that I cannot control my mind. So this person is in a very tin state. So let's just stop and look at this catastrophizing part and what equanimity has got to do it. There's two things we could do here. One is looking at the meditations on pain and working with pain. Report an error

2:22:02 The other one is the catastrophizing and the equanimity. I don't think we'll have time to do both of them today, but that's the way things happen. So in terms of dealing with pain, whether it's emotional pain or physical pain, There are two ways in which we can go about that. One way is by finding ways to gain relief from the pain, which is not going to form a problem. Report an error

2:22:30 I mean, ways which are not going to be addictive. And the other one is facing up to the pain. Now there are times for one and there are times for the other. And we can't do them both at the same time, so we have to choose. So if you have, say you've been to the dentist and he's just pulled out a tooth. Report an error

2:22:50 And so you've got severe pain in your jaw because the anaesthetic has worn off. Then probably the easiest thing to do is just to take a strong painkiller because you'll only need it for a day or two. You gain relief from the pain, you can get on with your work, you might be a bit groggy for a day or two. But you can do most jobs and you can function. So there are times when specifically it's helpful to get relief from pain. Report an error

2:23:17 And anything which makes us concentrate deeply will... Give us that relief from pain. So meditation in itself, even the single point of meditation, when we're doing it well, will by itself give relief from pain. And I was talking about this in Sydney at one of the workshops and one of the people there said, I can give you an example of that. Report an error

2:23:41 And she had to have some surgery on her foot. I think some metal had come in under her foot and they had to actually dig it out. Report an error

2:23:53 She had a problem because she's allergic to anaesthetics and she didn't want to have any painkillers. So what she said she did, she said she was going to have this done without painkiller, which meant the doctors actually had to cut into the wound and pull the metal out. So you can imagine how painful this would be if it's deep in the foot. So she dealt with this by focusing intently on a mark on the wall where she could see it. Report an error

2:24:18 And she focused so tightly and so intently. She couldn't feel any pain until one of the nurses came up and tapped her on the shoulder and said, are you all right there dear? And then it was really hard, she said she got back into it so she managed it without the pain. And this thing we also know through hypnosis. I did training in hypnosis some years ago and one of our lecturers showed us a video which was herself undergoing an operation and she was having the ligaments of her thumb tied back onto the bone here somewhere. Report an error

2:24:54 So if you've ever had a broken bone or a toothache, you know how painful that can be. So this also would be a painful operation. So you see the video. She's got her arm out there. So the surgeons are working on this. And in the video, she's got a friend who's using hypnosis. And they had worked on this together so that the hypnotic suggestion involved going deeply into a place where the lecturer felt very at home and very comfortable and so on. Report an error

2:25:19 So the hypnotist that was working with her was just keeping her concentration on that. And meanwhile, so you could see she was talking, the surgeons were working on the thumb, you could see the thumb opened up and everything. No anaesthetic. And so she said afterwards when the video had finished and she was explaining the experience to us, she said she knew that there was something happening to her thumb. Report an error

2:25:42 She could feel sensation but not pain. The pain came in afterwards when she came out of the hypnotic state. Report an error

2:25:55 I'll try not to move too much. I think it's because I'm sitting over here and then you look around and see what I thought of that. Maybe I should sit there. But while she was having the surgery, she was fine. So this is a good indication that when our mind is concentrated very, very strongly, then we can give ourselves relief from pain. Report an error

2:26:17 And this is what happens in deep meditation. Our consciousness actually moves inward. We become less and less aware of things. We become less aware, particularly of our physical senses. So another example of this, when I was doing a retreat and we were saying mantras, we were meant to be saying them very quietly to ourselves. Report an error

2:26:36 And I'm in this deep concentration, this is a group retreat you see, so it's about 12 people around me. So I'm saying these mantras and I think I'm doing them very, very quietly and I'm thinking, concentrating very deeply on it. I hear someone go like this, I suddenly wake up and I realise I'd actually been talking out loud. Report an error

2:26:55 But I hadn't heard it because my sense of hearing had, we say, it dissolves, it comes inwards so that you become unaware of it. So she had to bring me out because I was disturbing everybody else, of course. Report an error

2:27:09 So we can use our minds in this way. If you want to get some ideas on this, you can read books on hypnosis to give you some good ideas in that, or you can practice single point of concentration on any topic that you like. And the deeper your concentration, the less you'll be aware of pain at that time. Report an error

2:27:26 But there is a proviso with it. If we avoid pain like that, when we come out of it, we have to recognise what it is that we've done. So when I was training in hypnosis, they said, as one example, using hypnosis in obstetrics when a mother's giving birth to a child. It can be very, very helpful, but it can also mask pain, which is indicating that there's something wrong. Maybe a surgeon needs to come in here. Report an error

2:27:53 Maybe something placenta is pulling away or something which shouldn't be doing. So if we're using that we need to also be mindful that that's what we're doing. We're doing it for this period of time to give ourselves a bit of relief and to have a bit of a rest. There's no harm in doing that, nothing to be ashamed of. Report an error

2:28:15 The other way of looking at pain is looking straight into it. There we look specifically at the pain and we observe the pain. We start to observe it without the catastrophizing that goes around it. Report an error

2:28:32 Another example is people are frightened of flying. They get into a plane and they're immediately, before the plane's even taken off from the ground, they're immediately catastrophizing what might happen. Report an error

2:28:52 So it may not ever get up, it may crash, it may get up and crash, it may do this, it may do that, it may not get down, it may hit another plane, it may be blown up by a bomb, catastrophising. Report an error

2:29:06 And I met actually a Buddhist practitioner who's a psychologist when I was coming over here. We happened to meet up in the airport in Melbourne before I flew off from there and he was going there specifically to become familiar with the airport because he had a fear of flying. And he wanted to develop that familiarity with the airport so that he wouldn't catastrophize around it. So when there's that feeling of terror and when things become overwhelming, one of the things to do is to be more aware of what the pain actually is. Report an error

2:29:44 Because when we become more aware of the pain, then we stop building up these stories. So for my friend who was at the airport, by being at the airport and seeing that there's nothing dramatic about being at an airport, then he can calm himself down so that he doesn't panic when he's there. And he said he knows because he's a psychologist after all that he's got a lot more work to do on this, but he's prepared to do it and go through it because he wants to travel, I think, to Dharamsala. Report an error

2:30:14 I think that's where he was going to go to, something like that. Very strong need to do that. By looking at the pain and by looking at it directly, then we can see what it is and we stop this catastrophizing. And stopping that is also... Was it actually better if we just drop it down there? Sort of tickles my falls off every time I move my head. I'm used to looking around and backwards and forwards. Report an error

2:30:41 If we stop catastrophizing, we develop the sense of equanimity. So there are some dangers in flying in a pain. least you're not Report an error

2:30:54 But mostly, most people fly quite safely. Some people don't. So there's a little bit of truth in it, but when we look at it objectively, there's no need to be panicky about a particular flight. Report an error

2:31:11 And similarly with whatever the pain is, the more we build up stories, then the worse the pain becomes. We start developing more stories around it. Report an error

2:31:29 The opposite to that is equanimity. And equanimity means just that, just looking at the pain and seeing what it is. So I had an operation on my knee about seven months ago. I still get some pain in the knee. If I'm going to catastrophize around it, it's going to stop me doing this, that and the other thing and I can't run yet and so on and so forth. Report an error

2:31:50 Major disaster. Or I can say, OK, I've eaten too many sweet things, therefore I'm... I'm holding too much water in my body, therefore my knee's more swollen than it should be, therefore maybe if I just watch my diet a bit more carefully than I have over the last few days, the pain will drop down. And that's the equanimity, which is just seeing things for what they are and therefore having space to deal with it. Report an error

2:32:20 So maybe we'll do just that part of the pain meditation, where we look at something with equanimity. So I want you again to choose something where you've been, I think maybe where there's been emotional pain, although you can use physical pain if you like, but think of a time when you've been very frightened or terrified or upset or extremely angry. Report an error

2:32:47 Can you all find something like that? Most of us can. It's usually not a hard one, that one. And then we'll meditate on that. So Report an error

2:33:03 the process should be becoming familiar by now. Moving into your meditation posture, focusing in on your breath and when your mind is already calmed down then bringing in this figure of wisdom and compassion and Report an error

2:33:25 have that sense of abiding in that wisdom and compassion. Report an error

2:33:47 And now recalling that moment of pain, that emotional pain and Report an error

2:33:58 presenting that to the figure of the Buddha and observing the reaction of wisdom and compassion. To yourself in that state of terror or fear or anger, a strong emotional pain. Report an error

2:34:31 Wisdom sees that emotional pain for what it is. Report an error

2:34:42 Compassion recognises the fear that surrounds that pain. Report an error

2:34:59 So imagining the mind of compassion which Report an error

2:35:07 sees the fear of the pain and holds it in the mind of compassion. Report an error

2:35:34 What happens to your fear when it's held in this mind of compassion? Report an error

2:35:56 Allow yourself to feel a sense of relief, Report an error

2:36:02 that sense of being held in the kindness, of not being alone. Report an error

2:36:37 Feel the difference in your body with that sense of relief and being held by kindness. Report an error

2:37:00 What happens to the fear? Report an error

2:37:23 Now the mind of wisdom which holds the pain itself that you are so frightened of. The wisdom that sees the anger or the loss or the grief or the jealousy. Report an error

2:37:41 This Report an error

2:37:57 wisdom mind which sees that these things arise because we haven't yet had time to learn more effective ways of dealing with them. Report an error

2:38:13 This wisdom mind which knows that time is needed for wisdom to develop in our own minds. Report an error

2:38:36 The wisdom which knows that whatever that emotion is, however strong it is, it can change. Report an error

2:38:49 It's not a necessary part of who we are. But simply a part of who you are at this moment or at that moment that you're recollecting and Report an error

2:39:06 that that is okay. Report an error

2:39:30 And so now feeling held in that way, Report an error

2:39:35 looking at that negative state, which was so frightening, and looking at it with a mind of equanimity, which doesn't judge whether this is good or bad in any way whatsoever, but simply acknowledges that this is part of being human. Report an error

2:39:58 As humans we do. Experience grief. As humans we do get angry. As humans we do get jealous or resentful or frightened. Report an error

2:40:16 This is who I am at this moment of my life. Report an error

2:40:27 I won't be like this forever. In fact, ten minutes from now I'll be different. Report an error

2:40:42 So looking at this emotion with this mind of equanimity and seeing if you can look behind that, Report an error

2:40:58 see if you can find a thought which gives you insight. Report an error

2:41:05 What is this emotion saying about what I believe or think, particularly about myself and my relationships with others? Report an error

· · ·

2:42:01 Now take time to reflect over this meditation so that you can recollect anything which is important, which has given you insight, which has been helpful in some way, Report an error

2:42:27 putting it clearly in your mind so that you will remember it and Report an error

2:42:41 saying thank you to the wisdom and compassion mind of the Buddha. Report an error

2:42:51 Which has enabled us to reach this point in this meditation. With Report an error

2:42:59 a heart of lightness and with rejoicing and coming out of your meditation back into the room. Report an error

2:43:29 Sometimes there are times to just sit and remember, aren't there? These things are important. Report an error

2:43:45 But what I would like you to do, I'd like each person to share just one thing about that meditation which is important. Clearly the person who was asked the question doesn't want to share that story. Report an error

2:43:57 I'm not asking you to share stories unless you want to. But it's always helpful in a meditation which moves us deeply to hear where other people are coming from as well. So if you could each share just one thing about that meditation which was meaningful to you, then you can share it with the rest of the group. Do you think you can manage that? Report an error

2:44:21 So we'll need the mic. Oh, here we are. Are you allergic to cats by any chance? Yes. Because I've had a cat sitting on my knee. So you might like to move back a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Report an error

2:44:41 All right. Well, she's like on my lap. Report an error

2:44:57 Well, Pema means well. There's just one thing in meditation. I think the one thing that was most meaningful to me was when I put myself in that mind space of being frightened, a couple of things. Report an error

2:45:21 Keeping in mind the image of a Lama that I feel particularly close to. And whenever I imagine his face, I have a real strong feeling of his emotional presence and a safety and an acceptance. And somehow it just calms things down. It makes it much easier to see through whatever is happening. It's just so clearly my mind kind of bouncing around and it's a safe place. Report an error

2:46:03 Thank you. Report an error

2:46:11 I Report an error

2:46:16 think what's helpful for me, and I try to practice, do a meditation that's kind of similar to this quite often because I find it really, really helpful. Report an error

2:46:28 Especially when I'm having a big emotional upset. My tendency is to beat myself up when I have a big drama happening in my life. Not only am I experiencing the drama, but I'm beating myself up about it. And so just having that really compassionate energy is really helpful to just let go of the additional suffering that I'm putting onto it. Report an error

2:46:57 That's right. It's amazing how often we're really hard on ourselves. Yeah. Thank you. Report an error

2:47:09 She wanted to pass, so. Report an error

2:47:14 Share something about the meditation, right? I don't know if this was the right thing to do or not, but I visualized taking all of my fear. And encapsulating it into this black crystal ball and then holding it up in front of the Buddha and watching it evaporate. And then I became emboldened by that almost to a sense of overconfidence. Report an error

2:47:34 Well not overconfidence but I'm like okay let's go. I'm ready to go. That's the right way to do it. Report an error

2:47:43 What was the most useful for me was to visualize myself sitting in front of a Buddha and allowing... I'm not real good at the meditation stuff yet, but for me there was a sense of calm because I saw a compassionate Buddha looking at me and then I could be compassionate with myself because I beat myself up constantly. Report an error

2:48:15 So that gave me a feeling of peace and it was okay. Report an error

2:48:37 It was helpful for me to kind of localize the fear that's present Report an error

2:48:51 before I start engaging in that addictive behavior and to get more of a sense of the particularity of it. I still think I have some more work to do on figuring out exactly what the deeper driving of it besides just wanting short-term pleasure. Report an error

2:49:15 Yeah, that's about all I can say at this point. I kind of have my after lunch fog too. Report an error

2:49:27 Whichever, you can choose. Report an error

2:49:32 Well, I was envisioning some fear that I had many years ago, maybe 15 years ago. So it wasn't as resonating with me as it was at that point. But it was such a strong emotional time for me that I wanted to use that. Report an error

2:49:49 As something to work with. In fact, I haven't thought of it in many years. So eventually I envisioned myself as I am now, embracing my younger self and just being filled with compassion and acceptance and just thinking, well, I can use this at any time, just thinking that my older self is just the wisdom self or the wisdom mind and letting that fear be as it is. Report an error

2:50:19 And it was a very good meditation, although I have to agree with David that it was hard to stay focused because I was getting a little sleepy. Well, this always happens after lunch. But I also remember Geshe Doger at Tara Institute saying to me once when I came up to him with a problem, and he said, well, it's like this diner. Report an error

2:50:44 I think it must have been before I was ordained. It's like this diner. Everybody, no it was after because I was a nun so he must have called me Chonyi. It's like this Chonyi, everybody has problems. Nuns have nun problems, monks have nun problems, lay people have lay problems, Geshe's have Geshe problems, Lamas have Lama problems. Report an error

2:51:01 You'll have the problems until the day you become a Buddha. Report an error

2:51:07 So we've always got that task. Report an error

2:51:12 For me, I was getting a therapeutic sense from the meditation, but towards the end it was sort of like I felt that I was having this kind of conversation with the Buddha and it was sort of like I'm not really giving all my pain away, like I'm still holding on to it. And there's also the false belief or delusion. Report an error

2:51:37 That the addictive habits will on some level get rid of that pain. The confidence that the addiction is not completely going to get rid of my pain. I mean, I understand it intellectually, but to make an emotional embodied connection was a bit challenging. Yeah, that's why meditation is so important. And these sort of analytical visual meditations are very important. Report an error

2:52:03 It's like sports psychology. In sports psychology, they take people through meditations, or they don't call them meditation, visualisations, where they, let's say if they're a swimmer, they imagine themselves swimming in the gold medal Olympic race. And they also visualise anything that might happen, say one of the ropes comes undone and flaps in their face, and visualise themselves dealing with that in a way which has minimal fuss. Report an error

2:52:29 And what happens is that we start to behave in the way that we visualise. And a good example of this was Geshe Sumpton who's a new Geshe at Vajrayana Institute and he's about 34 at the moment, same age as my son. And his attendant had been the tennis coach for the US women's tennis team when they were out in Australia the year before. Report an error

2:52:54 So he's obviously a very good tennis player himself. So he says to Geshe-Sumpton, do you want to come play tennis? And Geshe-Sumpton's never held a racket in his hand. He goes off to the court and, I can't remember his name now, anyway, he hits the ball to Geshe-Sumpton and Geshe-Sumpton hits it back perfectly over the net. Report an error

2:53:11 So they play like this for a while and he says to Geshe-Sumpton, do you want to serve? So Geshe-Sumpton throws it up and he serves it and goes straight into the... And he says, well, how did you do this? He said, well, I've just watched the tennis all the time. Report an error

2:53:24 Power of the mind. Report an error

2:53:30 My mind was all over the place, but I visualized Shakyamuni this time, and there's such a sense of peace, and it's like any fear, and it brought up actually, aside from what I was meditating, brought up another time of pure fear, pure terror. Report an error

2:53:57 It was like at that point, I wish I could have had this meditation because I might have been able to go through it. And it was like I turned it over and it's like I have absolute faith in the Buddha. And if I could remember the Buddha is there, it would be so much better. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Surprise! Report an error

2:54:23 Surprise! I love you all. Report an error

2:54:28 It's so simple, isn't it? And yet we don't realize what we're doing to ourselves. Report an error

2:54:37 I don't really have anything amazing to add because I think I missed half the meditation. My mind was tired, my body's tired. But this one line that you said, I actually had to write it down afterwards, something about it struck. I was remembering a time fairly recently that I got really very angry. You know, just kind of rage coming through me. Report an error

2:54:58 And you said as human beings we do have anger, we do have fear. And I just, it was that same thing of I spent so much time not just having the emotion but beating myself for having, especially being a nun and long time, somewhat long time practitioner. You know, it's just like I'm not supposed to have this anymore. I'm not supposed to feel this. I'm not supposed to show it. You know, like that. Report an error

2:55:20 So really beating myself up first. So just hearing that, it seems like it would be a useful mantra. I'm a human only. As human beings, we do have it. And it's not to mean that I can't work with it, but you can't begin working with it if you're beating yourself up. That's right. It's like you can't even get close to it. Report an error

2:55:39 That's as far as I got. That sounds pretty good to me. Report an error

2:55:49 From a therapeutic point of view, do you feel that imagining yourself, Without the addiction, do you feel that one will start embodying that if that becomes part of a meditation, i.e. like if I was a smoker and I imagined myself not smoking? Report an error

2:56:08 Yeah. And particularly if you visualize that at the times when you'd normally be smoking. So if you just shut your eyes and if you're normally smoking, say when you've got your friends around you. So you imagine yourself there but you're not smoking. You're still talking to your friends but you're not smoking. And there's no impetus to pick up the cigarette or anything like that. Report an error

2:56:35 You're just happy to be there and smoking's not an issue. And then that will start to come about. This is part of the power of the mind. The mind's incredibly powerful. Report an error

2:56:46 Do you think one can do this also with failed relationships, like i.e. if somebody's partner left them? You can imagine yourself without the partner being happy because I see in a lot of situations my sister's husband just left her and she's very upset about that, you see. And it's also attachment fixation on the person. This person's going to make me happy. Yeah. Report an error

2:57:14 But imagining herself without this person. Being happy. Being happy or communing with others. Yeah. What can I do now that I haven't got him around? Wow. All sorts of possibilities. Yeah. Any other questions? Report an error

2:57:35 Oh, that's right. I thought there was something else. It's not really a question, but it brought up about... he's doing. Report an error

2:57:42 The whole thing of addiction and one of the hardest addictions, and obviously I haven't done the hardest ones yet because I'm still addicted to them, but one of my harder chemical addictions was smoking. Report an error

2:57:57 And the single thought, we used a self-hypnosis video to kind of start on the weekend, but the single most useful thought... The only thing that it presented, and I'd never considered it before when I was trying to stop an addiction, was I'm a non-smoker. Report an error

2:58:20 And I used that thought, and I held that thought, and it was the one thing that made it much easier. Because if I was thinking of myself as a smoker trying to quit, I was still a smoker. But I thought of myself as a non-smoker. Because when I put out a cigarette, I become a non-smoker. So if I'm a non-smoker, so if I'm a non-foodaholic, you know, and I have kind of thought of that. Report an error

2:58:54 And I haven't really put it to use as well as I could. But it's like I... It's the labels that we put on ourselves, isn't it? And the power that those labels have. Yeah, and either you're trying to stop something or you're the other thing, one or the other. So if you're the other thing, it makes it easier not to do that other behavior as opposed to I'm engaged in this and I'm trying to stop it. Report an error

2:59:24 So this is also what's behind the deity practice that we do, where for those of you who don't know so much about Buddhism, one of the things that we do... In Tibetan Buddhism is to imagine ourselves as being one of these deities around here. So let's take Medicine Buddha over here who's blue and Medicine Buddha was once a bodhisattva who vowed when he became a Buddha he would also help with healing. Report an error

2:59:51 So with the right sort of training then you can imagine yourself actually as Medicine Buddha and the reason you do that is so that you can become that, that sort of energy. Report an error

3:00:07 One of the things I liked doing, or liked doing, I haven't done it so much lately, is playing the piano, playing classical music. One of my teachers used to say to me, just imagine you Claudio Arau, who's one of my favourite pianists, just imagine you Claudio Arau playing the Chopin Nocturne. Report an error

3:00:24 And in imagining myself doing that, I would play it differently to if I was just me trying to learn it. Report an error

3:00:33 So this thing about visualizing ourselves and, as you say, being a non-smoker instead of a smoker who's trying to stop, incredibly powerful stuff we can use. Report an error

3:00:50 Could that lead to some kind of delusion, though, where you say, I'm not a smoker, therefore I'm not addicted to cigarettes, therefore I can have one without it being a problem for me because I'm not a smoker. Report an error

3:01:06 Well, I'm thinking, you know, my internet addiction, you know, and it's when I start believing that it's not a problem for me anymore that I think that I can just, you know, spend a little time doing it and then it sort of gets out of control from there. Report an error

3:01:20 And so by, and I know in AA, you know, you never say, I'm not an alcoholic. There's not, there doesn't come a point where you say, I'm no longer an alcoholic. Report an error

3:01:30 I imagine that it's because there must be a lot of self-delusion where you think that you're not susceptible anymore. You think you've done it and you haven't, yes. Well actually one Buddhist who had spent a lot of time in AA asked me about this statement when you go to AA and you say I'm an alcoholic or I'm an addict and I dot dot dot dot. Report an error

3:01:53 Which she's been doing for a long, long time and she's practising Buddhism and she was saying to me that she was feeling as though in saying that over and over again that she was confining herself to one particular view which she wasn't quite sure that was still valid or not. Not that she wanted to say I'm no longer an alcoholic and therefore I can have a drink but simply to say my understanding of myself can be wider than that. Report an error

3:02:22 So that's the other side of that is you can constrict yourself in that way. And then as David points out we can also fool ourselves. But hey we're human after all. If we overdo it in one way then we've got to come back and do it in another way and counterbalance that. And this is part of where the wisdom comes in isn't it? So we can try these methods and if they're not working then we try something else. And what works for one person? Report an error

3:02:51 Not necessarily going to work for another person. What works at one time might need to do something different at a different time. Where you've got the addiction there in front of you, people who have an addiction to sex have a similar sort of a problem. That these sexual images are bombarding us all the time from billboards and from TV advertising and newspapers and everything. Report an error

3:03:14 So they're constantly confronted with it. Or people with a food addiction. You can't not eat. That's an even more difficult one. So what do you do about that? Then in those cases you have to work with the mindfulness of having sufficient but not overdoing it. The equanimity that comes with, the awareness that comes with applying equanimity to these things. Report an error

3:03:43 So that if I take the food addict who has to eat, if that food addict starts to do that with a mind of equanimity saying, I have to eat a certain amount of food and I also need to recognise when I've had sufficient and when I've had sufficient then I need to stop. So that person has to observe and develop up this equanimity to the observation. So similar in that sort of situation. Report an error

3:04:12 I need to do some work on the internet. Obviously with your job you have to. So you can't not work on the internet. And if you're anything like me you get some sort of pleasure on it. Report an error

3:04:23 And I've got a little chat group that I get involved with where I'm just, most of the time I'm an ordinary person but they know I'm a Buddhist nun as well and it's a really nice group of people actually. And I enjoy that side of it but if I'm using it to run away from doing other jobs then it becomes a problem. Report an error

3:04:41 So it becomes again this mindfulness and equanimity towards it and with the equanimity, okay, this is what I'm doing at the moment. Report an error

3:04:52 Why am I doing this? What is the motivation here? Do I just need a rest? Is that a valid thing to have a rest? Sometimes it is. Am I doing it to run away from something? Well, do I need relief from that or is it running away so I'm not facing up to it? So the mind of equanimity is always looking like the scientific observer. Report an error

3:05:14 Why are the facts not the way I want them to be? Something's gone wrong. Is my apparatus wrong? Is my measuring instrument wrong? Is my theory wrong? Is somebody else's theory wrong? So these are the things that we look at with the mind of equanimity. Report an error

3:05:45 Yep, yep. Report an error

3:05:50 But I want to do some more work on this attitude of kindness to ourselves because one of the things which is also true for most people in an addiction, I can never say 100 % so I say most, is that... People who have an addiction are usually angry with themselves for being in the addiction. They don't want to be there. And there's a certain amount of guilt which goes there because of the harm which has come about. Report an error

3:06:24 And so there's anger towards oneself for being involved in the addiction. In the meditation that we did, we were looking at ourselves, we were looking at Shakyamuni Buddha holding us with that compassionate, wise mind. And the difference that that makes. And I want to extend that meditation one step deeper so that we start to see what it is that we're doing to ourselves and find ways of working with that. Report an error

3:06:56 And this also means finding ways of acknowledging the guilt, but in a way which is helpful and not a way which is destructive. Report an error

3:07:19 Take it back to your meditation position. Report an error

3:07:42 And this time you shouldn't need me to lead you in. You shouldn't. We've done it enough. Breathing, quietness, bringing forward the mind of wisdom and compassion into the space in front of you. Report an error

3:08:24 Thinking about your motivation, thinking that by doing this meditation I Report an error

3:08:34 may be able to understand myself more clearly, be kinder to myself. Report an error

3:08:43 I do that, then the catastrophizing. Around the times when I am not so perfect will be a little bit less and my pain will be a little bit less. My pain is less, my mind is clearer, I'm a better person to live with and therefore I benefit the people around me as well. Report an error

3:09:30 The first thing I would like you to do in this visualisation is to visualise yourself with all your good qualities, whatever they might be. Report an error

3:09:47 When you're feeling good about yourself, what are the qualities which you experience in yourself? Kindness towards others, awareness, generosity, Report an error

3:10:06 patience. Report an error

3:10:10 So however you see yourself, Report an error

3:10:15 when you see yourself in a positive light, Report an error

3:10:45 on the feeling of feeling good about ourselves when we visualize ourselves in this way, Report an error

3:11:02 on this good part of ourselves, which we'll call the angel for now, we sit down on our right-hand side. Report an error

3:11:13 So imagine this good part of yourself is sitting on your right hand side. Report an error

3:11:31 Now bring up an image of yourself when you're feeling really bad about yourself. You're angry with yourself or depressed, disappointed in yourself in some way, when you have failed in some way, you're unacceptable in some way. Report an error

3:11:55 What sort of qualities do you have when you're in this state? Report an error

3:12:05 How does your body feel when you're in this state? Report an error

3:12:32 And when you have a strong image of yourself in that negative state. The devil, if you like. Imagine that on your left hand side. Report an error

3:13:06 Now once again, imagining Shakyamuni Buddha in the space in front of you. And there's two aspects of yourself on either side. Report an error

3:13:18 Imagining, first of all, that the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha enters your heart, your mind and your body so Report an error

3:13:32 that your body begins to feel lighter and clean and your mind also. Report an error

3:13:46 You become more and more filled with all the good qualities each Report an error

3:14:01 time you breathe in more and more of these qualities, clearing out even the subtlest parts of the darkness and misconceptions which we have. Report an error

3:14:20 So there comes to be no difference between your mind and the mind of Shakyamuni Buddha. Report an error

3:14:43 So now with yourself as being no different to Shakyamuni Buddha, look at these two parts of yourself which are now sitting in front of you, the part of yourself when you feel good. Report an error

3:14:59 And the part when you feel bad. Report an error

3:15:17 So you look first at the positive part of yourself, Report an error

3:15:24 thinking may this part of myself be free of hurt and anger and greed and arrogance and jealousy and any other mental afflictions. Report an error

3:15:40 May this part of myself be free from any suffering which arises from afflictions. Report an error

3:15:52 May this wise and kind part of myself recognise and cultivate more loving kindness and compassion. Patience and generosity and all other good qualities. Report an error

3:16:14 May this positive part of myself experience the sense of well-being, of joy and bliss, of calmness and clarity which arises when one is happy. Report an error

3:16:35 May this positive part of myself develop profound quietness of mind that allows me to develop great insight and great compassion. Report an error

3:16:56 In this way may this positive part of myself be well and happy. Report an error

3:17:03 May this part of myself be a source of similar peace and joy and well-being to all those people whom I love and indeed all people and creatures whom I have contact with and even those people and creatures I have never met. Report an error

3:17:20 So imagining yourself, this positive side of yourself, being filled with the same light of wisdom and compassion which you received before from Shakyamuni Buddha and which you now generate towards this positive part of yourself, Report an error

3:17:39 seeing joy and happiness. Peace and bliss come into the mind. Report an error

3:18:04 This positive part of yourself becomes so filled with all these good qualities and there becomes no difference between the positive part of yourself and the mind of Shakyamuni Buddha, equally radiating light. Report an error

3:18:42 Now you return your attention towards the negative part of yourself, Report an error

3:18:52 seeing the suffering of this part of yourself, the hurt and the fear and Report an error

3:19:02 the compulsions which arise from hurt. And fear and loss. Report an error

3:19:13 Since your mind is no different to the mind of Shakyamuni Buddha, looking at this part of yourself with equal joy and love and compassion and wisdom. Report an error

3:19:31 And so thinking may this negative part of myself be free of hurt and anger, greed and arrogance, jealousy or loss and all such mental afflictions. Report an error

3:19:49 Seeing these drop away from the negative part of yourself. Report an error

3:20:01 May this part of myself be free from the suffering which arises from such afflictions. The Report an error

3:20:14 suffering drops away. Report an error

3:20:23 Once again radiating loving kindness and wisdom. Thinking may this negative part of myself recognise and cultivate loving kindness and compassion, patience and generosity and all other good qualities. Report an error

3:20:40 Seeing these good qualities arising in the negative part of yourself. Report an error

3:21:00 Thinking. May this negative part of myself experience the sense of well-being, of joy and bliss, of calmness and clarity which arises when one is happy. Report an error

3:21:15 We're seeing the happiness arise in this negative part of oneself. Report an error

3:21:36 May this negative part of myself develop profound quietness of mind that allows the development of great insight and deep compassion. Report an error

3:21:46 We're seeing this great insight and deep compassion arising within this negative part of yourself. Report an error

3:22:00 In this way, may the negative part of myself be well and happy and may this negative part of myself be a source of similar peace and joy and well-being to all those people whom I love and indeed all people and creatures with whom I have contact and even those people and creatures I have never met. Report an error

3:22:23 And so you begin to see that this negative part of yourself or what had been the negative part of yourself is now radiating peace and joy and well-being. Report an error

3:22:37 Spreading this around, great abundance. So Report an error

3:22:48 there's now no difference between your mind and the mind of Buddha, Report an error

3:22:55 between your mind and the positive part of yourself, and between your mind and the negative part of yourself. Report an error

3:23:19 Thinking very strongly, may this be true here and now. Report an error

3:23:33 May I be guided to see the way in which I can develop these qualities so Report an error

3:23:44 that I can benefit myself and all other people from this moment onwards. Report an error

3:23:57 With that thought in mind then coming out of your meditative state once again. Report an error

3:24:32 Anybody want to make any comments on that meditation? Report an error

3:24:59 I don't know if it's significant, but I noticed when you started with this positive person, when you turned first to the positive one, I was inclined to jump to the other one because they so obviously needed help. Report an error

3:25:16 But then I saw when you finished, it was more effective the way you did it, I think. But this compassionate mind was much more drawn to the crazy one. Report an error

3:25:39 We're often very hard on ourselves. No Report an error

3:25:49 time when we shouldn't. Report an error

3:25:55 You like being the devil's advocate, don't you? Report an error

3:26:03 Isn't there a time when we should be hard on ourselves? Well, I mean, we talk about enthusiastic. Perseverance in the lamrim, which you well know. Enthusiastic perseverance is that quality which we're encouraged to have when it's difficult to do the good things which we need to do. Report an error

3:26:22 And when I was down at LMB, the teacher down there was actually teaching on this particular quality. And as he was teaching, I couldn't help thinking, but how does that fit in with patience? Because in patience you just... You sit back and wait as it were for things to develop and you're mindful that it takes time and enthusiastic energy you sort of push through. I didn't ask the question, I should have asked him then I could answer you more effectively couldn't I? Report an error

3:26:49 But what was in my mind at that stage was thinking there are times, of course there are times when we need to push ourselves but those are not the times when we're angry with ourselves. Report an error

3:27:02 There's a difference between having enthusiastic energy and Remembering also the word, I don't know what the Tibetan word is which is translated, but it has this connotation of enthusiasm so it's not just pushing through regardless but it's an enthusiasm which arises from recognising there's something to be attained and there is a joy in attaining that. Report an error

3:27:27 And there's a certain strictness with ourselves sometimes in doing that as well. But when we're starting to... Berate ourselves for not being able to achieve things, that's a different thing again. And that berating of ourselves for not achieving things tends to push things downhill. Report an error

3:27:47 So we've got this choice between, well glasses are steaming up, but it's a choice between saying okay there's a lot of hard work that I have to do, I can't do everything at the moment but I'll push myself through and I'll make that effort like you're trying to climb Mount Everest and I'm not quite there but I'm already there but I'll take joy in that. Report an error

3:28:07 Or between thinking I'm bad, I'm hopeless, I'm no good, I'm a disaster because I haven't got there yet. So it's related to the attitude that we have at that particular time I think. Report an error

3:28:25 I just feel like my addiction, it doesn't come up when I'm relaxing, it comes up when I have something that I need to do. and then my addiction is in part sort of saying it's okay to relax that's kind of the voice going on in my head you Okay, so out of these two, which one is positive and which one is negative? Report an error

3:29:07 There's the part of you which is saying you should just relax and enjoy it and part of you saying get on with it. Which one is positive and which one is negative? Report an error

3:29:22 Well, I think the part that says get on with it is actually the positive part because that is the course of action that is going to make me happier with myself in the long run. It doesn't lead to short-term pleasure, but it does lead to greater personal satisfaction and a greater quality of life. Yeah. So then it becomes clear. Report an error

3:29:41 Or more clear which voice to listen to, doesn't it? Not that there was that much doubt. Report an error

3:29:52 Sometimes there is doubt about these things. It is important to bring it up. And often I say to people, whatever is the opposite of what you think you ought to do is probably what you should be doing. Report an error

3:30:05 So when people get burnt out, for example, my experience of people being burnt out. but you know but it Report an error

3:30:11 It's usually that they've pushed themselves beyond the point where they're effective and people like that need to relax. People who are not achieving things, who are just sitting around, need to get a bit more behind themselves and be a bit firmer with themselves. So if you berate yourself for not being energetic enough, then you probably need to relax. And if you berate yourself for being too energetic, then you probably have to push yourself. Report an error

3:30:40 Does that make sense? You see where I'm coming from? It's the thing of how you relax, though. If you're always sort of behind the eight ball because you're wasting a lot of time, then you're always thinking, I should be doing more, even though you're not accomplishing that much. And so you need to cut yourself some slack in some way, but you need to relax in a more appropriate way. Report an error

3:31:05 Be more skillful in when and how you choose to do that. I know from my own experience with the internet that when I start doing things like that, it's because I'm pretending to myself I'm working because I'm on the computer, you see, but I'm not actually working. I'm playing Sudoku or something like that. So I'm actually kidding myself. It looks as though I'm working. Report an error

3:31:28 Somebody comes in, all right, he's typing away on the computer. The fact that I'm putting numbers into a Sudoku game, they can't sleep. Report an error

3:31:38 It's not always easy to be clear cut and the further, the more careful we are with our Dharma practice the harder it is to become clear cut too because we start seeing subtle variations in it. Report an error

3:31:54 So this again is where we have to develop more of that discriminating wisdom. Okay, what is actually going on here? What are my motivations behind this? Report an error

3:32:08 Often the motivations are mixed. Which ones do I need to listen to at this particular point in time? Because it strikes me that someone in that situation does need a vacation perhaps, but they're not giving themselves vacation because they don't feel they deserve it on some level. Report an error

3:32:28 But then they just exacerbate the situation by continuing to waste time in the short run and then... And penalizing themselves by not giving themselves a vacation. Yeah. And this is what I mean by that it becomes more and more subtle to work out the motivations which are there. What is it that's necessary at this particular point in time? Report an error

3:32:57 Yeah, Report an error

3:33:03 there's the addiction of procrastination, which I was very much addicted to. And I realized that in procrastinating... I always seemed to be very busy because I had so many things on my mind that I was doing, that I was supposed to be doing, and I'd think about them all the time. And so I always seemed busy because my mind was always busy. And it was really tricky until I actually decided to start writing a list of things to do and clearing out my mind to a piece of paper. Report an error

3:33:43 And it's like... It was amazing how much free time I had. Report an error

3:33:53 Yeah. These mixtures are actually really difficult. When I first went down to my house at Sandy Point, I was really run down, burnt out. And I needed to rest a lot. So what I would do is I'd try and do something. I couldn't do it because I didn't have the energy. So I say, OK, give yourself a rest. So I'd lie down on the bed, get my laptop and start playing games on the computer, or read the age of the local newspaper on the computer and things like that. Report an error

3:34:24 But now I'm in a different state because we're a couple of years down the track and my body's had some time to recuperate. And so there's this tendency to think, hmm, I'd like to enjoy myself now. I think I'll pick up my laptop. So what was beneficial at one stage and did give me... Report an error

3:34:42 A way of stopping myself and doing something which didn't require a lot of intellectual activity now has become, like David says, something that I have to really be more mindful of and say, OK, well, what am I doing here at this particular time? So you can't... Things change all the time. So let's take a break. It's 3.50... Report an error

3:35:07 Well, I can't remember. Watch. Yeah, quarter past three. We'll come back at half past three and we'll have another hour together. Is that okay? Report an error

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3:35:47 It's interesting the time. soon as the meditation starts, I've noticed that if you're okay on the lives of the business, but as soon as you relax, the meditation starts to... Report an error

3:36:08 Unconscious, uncontrollable. Yeah, it's out of your control. Exactly, it's out of your control. But if you choose to do something, couldn't it just be a bad choice for medicine? Because I think about what we were talking about. See, I have this thing in my email. So I have my email program to pick a dean every time I have an email message. Report an error

3:36:29 And I'll be in the middle of doing something like a report that I know is due the next day. it was the beginning of that. Like Pavlov, I've got to go check an e-mail. And it's a no. I have to stand. Do it. But I still have that. You know what I'm going to say? I don't know. I really appreciate it today. I mean, right now. Report an error

3:36:55 You know, I had something good in that day. Yeah, it was very useful what you said, because I find my addictions, I mean I used to have addictions to shopping and things like that, but since I've been into Dharma, I've worked to help you use this Dharma practice, I appreciate it too much, becoming too obsessive, and getting lonely and all of that, and so there's that, what you're saying, applying the equity, I think. Report an error

3:37:21 you know, how much to actually do, you know, because it's, it can seem like not an addiction, but because I have, you know, it's a really good game to do, I'm afraid of wasting my life, so, you know, but then, because I have loan, it's very apparent to me that this is a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right, yeah. What role was it that? I don't know if somebody had a subconscious bracket. Or he'd hide behind and play with the kids. Report an error

3:37:58 That wasn't the thing I used to do. I said, I'm not saying that's good. no, no, I mean, it's the things I had, I need to play later. She's going to the car, she's going down the streetway in Cratch, and fortunately, she's been here to search a family. She's been here to search a family. And the paranormal. Report an error

3:38:20 So what are these things here? They paint it? Yeah. What you talked about before is, you know, they call them babies, they're not babies, they're Buddhas, but they're different manifestations, so each one may be divided. Report an error

3:38:54 There's always something, something that we're going to do. Well, it's good she's doing the same to me, there's always something that you need to do. Amy, would you like the tamper? I can't mind it. I wish I could do it too. Okay, good, good. Do you take black tea with milk? No, just ordinary tea with milk. Ordinary tea meaning just black tea though, right? Report an error

3:39:19 Yeah. White tea. All right. Let's just say white tea. I don't know. It's interesting. So you're studying all this? Yeah. I'll say white tea. Oh, yeah. I guess I purchased a minute table about 20 years ago. Oh, yeah. I called myself a minute. Yeah. What do you mean? Yeah, I'll do a white tea. What am I supposed to say to you? I don't know. Report an error

3:39:46 book that I'm kind of, opened my eyes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think. My book. Yeah. Yeah, that's the book that I've done. Did the nun tell you about that? No, actually she was, I told her about that book. She knew who he was. Because he's right in Arizona. Exactly, he's in Arizona. In fact, I went down to Arizona to try and meet with him. Report an error

3:40:16 But he had to fly to China or something like that. When he was going to be there, when I was there, when he was going to be there, but then he had to fly to China. ask maybe it's pretty good, so, interesting, yeah. Actually, I didn't do that for a minute, sorry, I'll share it back. Report an error

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3:45:49 whole office is in San Jose, California. always go up one-on-one to get there. Report an error

3:45:59 I've been there quite a few times. Report an error

3:46:04 E-myth. E-myth. The myth of being a business owner. It says that most people that start businesses shouldn't start a business because just because you're good at something doesn't mean you shouldn't start a business doing that. And so that's what he teaches you is how to do it the right way. Your chances for success are Report an error

3:46:35 to understand what is it. Yes, I do. That's good. Report an error

3:46:39 Yes I did. Although I started my business before I read his book. Report an error

3:46:47 And then it wasn't until I was about to go bankrupt that I actually listened. Report an error

3:46:53 Oh yes I did. Report an error

3:47:02 I owe the whole turnaround in my business to them. Report an error

3:47:16 We are cost savings experts. We have organizations to save money. Report an error

3:47:37 It's actually funny because now that I'm thinking in terms of the whole Buddhism context is really what I help people to do is to... Attach from their attachment to the wrong things and reattach it to the right things. That's what we do. You'd be surprised how many organizations out there keep track of the checkbook. Report an error

3:48:05 It's almost scary. Report an error

3:48:32 Is that just a good thing about it? Before you met? Well, that's because, well, see, I was going to think of it because I wasn't going to have this business the other way, that's, so to say, it didn't mean that my client is going to get that relevant to what's perfect, to submit that I think about my business, in a way that we can talk about that idea, and experience it, and not all Thank you. Report an error

3:49:00 Thank you. The only people that should start businesses are business owners. So the question is, how do you do a business manager? Report an error

3:49:27 They still do what they have to do. It really comes down to, you have to manage. so many interviews. There's so many interviews. They like to do, because that's what they're good at. Attachment. Yeah, it's different from some of the other ones. It's different from everywhere. It's different from everywhere. Or maybe this is my mind. Report an error

3:49:52 I think we're all in agreement we want you to come back. I haven't finished yet. It's okay. Maybe it's our grasp of mine. Report an error

3:50:11 where is this oh dear If I have it sitting there, is that all right there? Because I was breathing into it when it was that way and in the meditation I could hear my breath. Report an error

3:50:28 Now we've got one person still, two people missing. No. Yep. Our numbers have been a bit depleted by people who've had to go. So I could feel paranoid if I wanted to. But I've been assured I don't need to. Report an error

3:50:54 Oh yeah, she had to leave too. And Emily had to leave. Report an error

3:51:01 Yep. So that gives us just over an hour. Report an error

3:51:11 Uh-huh. Yep. Report an error

3:51:20 I just told her we're all angry. Report an error

3:51:31 Well, unfortunately I never actually follow my script. So then I have to say, well I've done this, but I haven't done that. So what I'm going to do is to go to page six at this stage. Report an error

3:51:56 Because I want to talk about... And part of reconnecting is also about cleaning out the rubbish from our minds. Cleaning out rubbish is also called confession and purification. Confession has got a bad press in the West because of the Catholic Church and its attitude towards confession. But there's nevertheless an important psychology associated with confession and that is about... Report an error

3:52:31 Being able to say things which previously had been unspeakable because of our shame and whilst confession as it's formalised in the Catholic Church doesn't always work the way it's meant to be because people just go along and say their confession and they say their Hail Marys and then they're meant to be okay. Report an error

3:52:51 When it's working properly it's actually a very profound psychology because it does give us an opportunity to speak the unspeakable and the same sort of thing happens in psychotherapy. Report an error

3:53:04 Psychotherapy very often is a form of confession where we speak the unspeakable. We talk about the shame in some of our behaviour. We talk about our anger towards some of the people in our lives. We talk about bitterness and jealousy and things like that. And in that sense we're speaking the unspeakable which we don't talk about in polite public, in polite circles. Report an error

3:53:26 And we are given the opportunity to say things which are sitting in our hearts. And gnawing away at us in some way. And sometimes even creating physical damage in the process. So sometimes this gnawing away that comes with shame and guilt and negative emotions causes physical illnesses. And that's reasonably well established at this stage. So unless we deal with that side of it, again, because in addiction shame and guilt is so strong, unless we deal with that, then... Report an error

3:54:03 We're going to go back into the addiction because it hasn't been dealt with because the pain of it is still there and it's still affecting us. So we have to do something about it. Report an error

3:54:15 Part of clearing that up is about forgiveness and being forgiven as well. Report an error

3:54:22 When we are able to say to a person, I'm ashamed of what I did to you, we're asking forgiveness in that sense. We're acknowledging that we did something wrong and we're also looking for a mind of understanding that will hold us and love us at that particular time. That's what we're hoping from it. It doesn't necessarily happen. Sometimes the person that we ask for forgiveness from is so angry that they can't do this for us. Report an error

3:55:00 That doesn't mean to say we shouldn't ask for forgiveness, but that we shouldn't expect a person who is limited. In other words, not yet a Buddha. A person who's limited to be able to hold us with the same quality of loving and kindness and compassion that we experience in those meditations with Shakyamuni Buddha. Report an error

3:55:25 If somebody comes up and asks for our forgiveness because they've done something wrong, then we do our best to hold them in that way, but we're not perfect either, so we don't always do that. Report an error

3:55:38 So although we might try to do that or... Feel that we ought to have done that. Our own anger is too strong. Our own resentment is too strong. And so there's the inclination instead of accepting that person with the loving kindness that they're looking for at that particular point, we actually push them away. Report an error

3:56:02 And so when somebody who's got a severe addiction comes and asks for that sort of forgiveness from people that hurt over and over and over again, often that the people they're asking for... to forgive them are not going to believe them. So in asking for forgiveness this is a mind which comes from ourselves and if we're expecting a certain quality of answer then there's a good possibility that we'll be disappointed. Report an error

3:56:33 Not necessarily. If we were into some of the high lamas with this sort of mind because their minds are already well developed in wisdom and compassion then they would hold us with that sort of loving kindness. Report an error

3:56:45 But if we go to somebody whose mind is unhappy and distorted and ask for forgiveness, then that unhappiness and distortion is likely to knock us back. So when we're asking for forgiveness from a person, we need to be aware of that and say, this is a mind which is coming from me to you and without from our side expecting anything necessarily back from the other person. Report an error

3:57:12 If we get it, fine. If we don't, that's also fine. And this is bringing the mind of equanimity into what can be a very, very difficult situation. With a child, say, who's... Oh, now, let me think of a friend whose husband had been gambling. And he'd said sorry over and over and over a number of times. Report an error

3:57:37 And then he comes to his wife, who's the one who'd been complaining about it. He says, look, this time I'm really sorry. I want you to forgive me. His wife's a good friend of mine. And she says to him... How can I forgive you? You've asked for this so many times. I can't give you what you want. Then he comes to me because he's also a friend of mine and says, it's not fair, here am I trying to be genuine and she won't forgive me. Report an error

3:58:04 Of course they both needed to do a little bit more work on that one. So that's when we're asking for forgiveness. But when we're being forgiven, that means that regardless of what we do... or have done, we're being held with this mind of wisdom and compassion. Report an error

3:58:24 That's what we're looking for when we're asking for forgiveness but we don't always get it back because people are not perfect. Report an error

3:58:35 When somebody comes and asks us to forgive them then we need to have a mind of wisdom and compassion in order to be able to do that. So forgiveness is about acknowledging what we have done. Report an error

3:58:52 Confessing what we have done, if possible, to the person that we've harmed or some of the people we've harmed. And then getting on with our lives. Saying, OK, now I've done this, I've put it behind myself as much as I possibly can, not repeat the behaviour. Report an error

3:59:13 Actually, when I went online yesterday to read the Australian newspapers, yesterday, of course, meant that Saturday's paper was out, which has more articles in it than Friday's paper has that I had plenty to read about. One of the articles was about forgiveness and it was pointing out that there's no research being done into forgiveness and people who are able to forgive tend to be happier people than people who can't forgive. Report an error

3:59:41 But the clearest part of the research was that people who can forgive themselves tend to have the most stable, more satisfaction in their lives. Report an error

3:59:54 And this is what we were doing in that last meditation was looking about... Forgiving ourselves. Report an error

4:00:03 The shame and the guilt is not just in terms of what we've done to other people, but in what we've done to ourselves. So that's the most important part. Report an error

4:00:14 But then confessing and forgiving is not the whole story. So in Buddhism we have what we call purification, which we've got here on page six. Report an error

4:00:28 And there's four aspects to the whole process. Report an error

4:00:35 You see them marked down here, the process of purification. The first one of these is regret, which is having a mind which recognises the harm we have done and being sorry about it. So it's not like one client of mine that I had many years ago who was telling me how she had so many snails in the garden and the great joy she had of crunching them under her foot. Report an error

4:01:01 I can remember cringing when she told me about it. So she was not regretting the fact that she killed the snails. I was regretting it but she wasn't. So the mind of regret is this mind which recognises that we have done harm and wishes that we hadn't done it. Report an error

4:01:19 That is very, very important for anybody who's trying to recover from an addiction, is to have a strong feeling of regret. If we don't have the feeling of regret, nothing much is going to happen. The second one is called Refuge. Report an error

4:01:39 So here I've written it down as recognising the need for wisdom and compassion from a source of great compassion and omniscient wisdom. It's written in that way because I didn't want it necessarily as a specifically Buddhistic type of thing, although obviously in this context we're talking about the Buddha. Report an error

4:01:57 But also it applies to the mind of God in the Christian tradition, the Judaic tradition, the Islam tradition and just about any other tradition I can think of. Always these two things, wisdom and compassion, is the form of the purified mind. So that what we are doing is first of all we regret what we've done and then... Report an error

4:02:17 Secondly, what we're doing is saying, I need to see myself in the light of wisdom and compassion and be seen in the light of wisdom and compassion. And I need help from wisdom and compassion. And certainly we see that in the sense of Shakyamuni Buddha. But also we talk about the Dharma and the Saṅgha. The Dharma are the teachings and the many books that we have. The Saṅgha really means the Arya Saṅgha, so it doesn't include people like me and Churky. Report an error

4:02:54 We try to get there but we're not quite there yet. Or you might be, I don't know. I was speaking for myself. But they're very wise llamas, put it that way. Report an error

4:03:09 So that's two parts of it but the next two are very, very important. Next one is repaying the wrong I have done directly or indirectly. I'm not very good at editing my own stuff. I try to but I make mistakes. My mind is not an editor's mind. Repaying the wrong I have done directly or indirectly. So in other words what I'm trying to do there is to say I want to correct this in any way that I can. Report an error

4:03:41 So let's take my friend who was the gambler. He's not anymore incidentally. What would be a way in which he could repay the harm that he's done? Report an error

4:03:58 I don't know if it's exactly repaying but not doing it. Yeah. That's part of it, isn't it? So he may not be able to repay however much money he'd lost through gambling back into the family coffers. Report an error

4:04:16 But he might be able to repay in kind somewhere. He might say, well, you know, you always wanted this fish pond built in the front garden, so I'll build you the fish pond or something like that. We can't always repay directly. Report an error

4:04:38 So what would be the approach to repaying the wrong you've done There's no real victim of what you've done wrong, and it's more where you haven't harmed anyone directly by your destructive behavior, but there were unintended consequences or effects, but nothing. I mean, you didn't hurt anyone, hurt anyone. So how would you repay or correct that wrong, either directly or indirectly? Report an error

4:05:14 I don't know. Well in that circumstance it's hard because you're talking in such a general way that it's hard to come up with creative ideas and if we were running a two day workshop then you'd be sitting around talking about various things and saying okay how can we actually do this so you've got specific situations to work with and that makes it a little bit easier to understand. Report an error

4:05:36 But you're right some of them are very general things and repaying is not so easy so we come down to the next one. Report an error

4:05:45 Which is finding the antidote, finding the opposite, which is about not doing what we have done before. Finding and applying the opposite of my harmful behaviour, for example, generosity can replace greed, thinking about others can replace selfishness, humility can replace pride, patience can replace anger, thoughtfulness can replace mindfulness and so on. Report an error

4:06:09 Hmm? Oh, did I? Well, maybe I'm not very good at editing my own speech. I noticed a couple of times I got sentences twisted around today. Maybe it's old age. So there are these four aspects and when we apply all four aspects as best we can, then we're actually doing something active about it. Forgiveness is about regret and refuge but if we don't do the other two, trying to repay the wrong and applying the antidote, then it doesn't really mean very much because... Report an error

4:06:49 It's sort of like hollow words, isn't it? Forgive me for what I've done, but I'm going to do it again tomorrow and I'll ask for your forgiveness again tomorrow night. It doesn't work very well. So forgiveness is about all those. And the reason it's so important and the reason why it contributes to our happiness is that forgiveness is about reconnecting ourselves with people. Report an error

4:07:14 We're reconnecting ourselves with ourselves when we forgive ourselves. So in that meditation where you see the two parts of yourself and you look at it with equal qualities of loving kindness or equal equanimity, then you're bringing these two up together to be part of a wholeness which is possible, W-H-O-L-E, wholeness. Report an error

4:07:44 And so there's a reconnecting which happens within us when we forgive the bad parts of ourselves. We're reconnecting. With qualities within ourselves which we had seen as being bad, but which actually have an energy which we can utilise. So an example of that would be forgiving oneself for stealing. Report an error

4:08:11 Stealing is a negative quality. But what are the qualities which you need to enable you to steal? You might need to be aware of other people. You might need to... Be very perceptive in some way. You might have to do things in a way which is very skilful so that people don't know that you're lifting the wallet out of their pocket. Report an error

4:08:37 So we don't recommend people do these things. But those qualities of mindfulness can be utilised in a positive direction. So when we start forgiving that part of ourselves, we start saying, well, this quality can be something which is valid in some way. Report an error

4:09:03 Just taking a breath. Any Report an error

4:09:08 questions at this point or comments? Report an error

4:09:15 So when we do that we're reconnecting with ourselves. That bad side of ourselves, that's what Carl Jung called the shadow and he emphasised that the shadow has got valuable qualities within it. So by reconnecting with this part of ourselves we can bring those qualities back into our life in a way which is going to be beneficial instead of something which is harmful. Report an error

4:09:44 And then... The forgiveness in terms of our relationships with other people again is about reconnecting. So there's the reconnecting within ourselves and there's the reconnecting with other people and this is what forgiveness is about. And the other aspects of reconnecting are the reconnecting with our environment which we badly need to do at the moment as a society and reconnecting with our spiritual life which is about reconnecting with wisdom and compassion. Report an error

4:10:21 These things are the things we need to bring together. So Lama Yeshe says down here, towards the bottom of page 6, recognise that for years and years you have been building attachment or addiction, but still have nothing to show for it. It's really important to be aware of this. When you dedicate your life to others, you acknowledge that human beauty is not on the outside, not the view projected by your ego onto another person's skin, but rather one's inner potential. Report an error

4:10:53 When you realise that, you will respect other sentient beings and try to help them, instead of respecting only yourself and developing your two inner departments of ego and attachment. Report an error

4:11:09 So in the next part I talk about a hypothetical person called Coco. Coco has this food addiction, I won't read it all out to you, you can read it for yourselves later on. Report an error

4:11:24 But one of the points I wanted to make in this section... It's down here on the bottom of page 6. The addiction itself is the most powerful tool for destroying the addiction because the suffering we experience as a result of addiction is the most powerful motivator for getting out of it. Report an error

4:11:45 So that as we experience that suffering we also want to get out of it. As we get out of it then we have to say, how am I going to get out of it? And so then we start to look at wise ways of doing things. Report an error

4:11:59 So the story about Coco is just a story about somebody who's got an addiction to food and finds he's a diabetic, he's got all sorts of health problems coming up, what is he going to do? He now has a very powerful motivation for getting out of the addiction, whereas before it didn't matter to him so much. This motivation for getting out is also what sets us off on this path of finding more wisdom and of reconnecting ourselves with each other and reconnecting with... Report an error

4:12:30 The wisdom and compassion, which is what we're doing with the meditations. Report an error

4:12:40 So I think maybe we should do another meditation. Unless somebody's got a question first. Report an error

· · ·

4:13:17 Settling yourself into your meditation posture. Report an error

4:13:25 Establishing your motivation for doing the meditation. Report an error

4:13:58 And thinking first about reconnecting with our senses. Report an error

4:14:07 We'll begin with the ear and with hearing. Report an error

4:14:15 Reconnecting with our hearing sense by just hearing the sounds. Report an error

4:14:24 Hearing them with this mind of equanimity, which doesn't judge whether they're good sounds or bad sounds, it simply recognises what they are. Report an error

· · ·

4:15:59 Connecting now with your sense of touch, being aware of where your body is touching the chair or the mat or the cushions that you're sitting on, whether you're feeling hot or cold, Report an error

4:16:18 whether there's any discomfort or pain anywhere. Report an error

4:16:24 So whatever you connect with again, Seeing it again with this mind of equanimity which simply notes it as it is there. And that's all. Report an error

4:16:41 A sense of toughness Report an error

4:16:52 and fingers are doing. Report an error

4:16:56 Your lips. Report an error

· · ·

4:18:01 Reconnecting with people that have been significant in your life for good or bad. Seeing them now simply as they are or were. Report an error

4:18:21 Imperfect people with their own pain and sorrow. Report an error

4:18:30 People trying to find happiness. Report an error

4:18:38 Some of them being able to bring it to you. Report an error

4:18:44 And some of them distorted because they couldn't find their happiness. Report an error

· · ·

4:19:46 Reconnecting your interdependence on other people. Report an error

4:19:59 About the people who cleaned this space for us to use. People who made the clothes that we wear or grew the materials or manufactured the materials. People who transported them. Report an error

4:20:20 People who prepared our food. People who grew it. People who transported it. Report an error

4:20:29 Reconnecting with this vast web of interdependence. Report an error

4:20:35 Which we all have inevitably, Report an error

· · ·

4:21:11 seeing this vast web of people, again from the point of view of equanimity. Report an error

4:21:21 If we saw some of them in the street, it might challenge our equanimity. Yet they are also the people who have some part in who we are, what we wear, what we eat. Report an error

· · ·

4:22:11 They are reconnecting with our environment so Report an error

4:22:23 that we begin to treasure our environment instead of abusing it. Report an error

4:22:39 And we begin to see that what we do here affects people far away. Report an error

4:23:09 Seeing our environment in a state of equanimity, in its rain or fire, a calm day or tornado, Report an error

4:23:26 a field of corn or a desert, and Report an error

4:23:38 the creatures that live in these environments. Report an error

4:23:47 So that even the smallest of these is part of this vast web of interdependence and connectedness. Report an error

4:24:23 And reconnecting to all that we sense is good and important and valuable in our human life. Report an error

4:24:38 That everybody has this same potential. Report an error

4:24:45 Our spiritual search is about attaining this potential that we have. Report an error

4:25:04 And the path to attaining it is through reconnecting with it. Report an error

4:25:36 And now seeing your addiction in the context of this interconnectedness. Report an error

4:25:54 Whatever we do, we'll influence not just ourselves and the people close to us, but having far-reaching impacts on the planet. Report an error

4:26:23 And then seeing yourself without your addiction and Report an error

4:26:31 the interconnectedness which occurs, When there are no addictions, there's no grasping, Report an error

4:26:43 no fear of loss. Report an error

4:27:03 So remembering that we're always in the presence of Shakyamuni Buddha, Report an error

4:27:13 thinking may this all be so right now. Report an error

4:27:24 I never forget that whatever I do is interconnected with every living being and Report an error

4:27:39 with every aspect of this planet and the system. Report an error

4:27:52 May my role in this be always something. Which is guided by wisdom and compassion. Report an error

4:28:09 May this be true too for all other people and creatures. May their interconnectedness be always guided by wisdom and compassion. Report an error

4:28:27 May this grow and increase without ending. Report an error

4:28:44 And it's more loosening your meditation, Report an error

4:28:52 becoming aware of this room and Report an error

4:28:58 at the same time knowing that even though our awareness has changed, the interconnectedness is always there. Report an error

4:29:14 When you're ready, open your eyes, loosen your body. Report an error

4:29:42 Lovely leading meditations, especially when they're on love and compassion, because you see these little smiles appear on people's faces. Report an error

4:29:53 Always enjoy that. So we're back to question time. Any questions about anything with addiction at this stage? Report an error

4:30:11 Because you could all do with a long sleep, actually. Report an error

4:30:30 I know sometimes for myself... I'm sure that I just bury things way, way down. And it's like even if I try to, you know, don't engage the addictive behavior, if I even put a substitute, it would be still to cover over. And so I don't know. It's just... Report an error

4:31:06 It comes over like mostly at night for me when I'm just sitting. And I was mentioning it at lunchtime. It's like, oh, well, you know, I'm bored. Well, I know I'm bored because I'm not looking at what's really going on. Because if I looked at what was going on, I would probably not be bored anymore. But I use that as an excuse, you know. Report an error

4:31:30 and feel like I need like a really good. Digging tool. Report an error

4:31:42 That's one area where Western psychology can be useful, is digging into those sorts of things. From just a Buddhist mental digging? Yeah. Also, as I said earlier, the whole Buddhist path takes us deeper and deeper. There's the book by, I think it's Alan Wallace's book, isn't it, called Buddhism from the Ground Up? Is that his book? Report an error

4:31:37 Ooh, ooh. Report an error

· · ·

4:32:11 That's talking about practices which we can do where we start with where we are now in our state of imperfection. There's another book by Rob Priest which I like a lot called The Wisdom of Imperfection. I like the title very much and the cover is really annoying because it's just all this stuff packed in together and I want to sort of tidy it up. Report an error

4:32:34 As soon as I want to tidy it up I think, oh yeah, this book's about imperfection, isn't it? Report an error

4:32:41 But again, recognising that there is a path that we have to walk, that we have to walk this path just as every other Buddha and bodhisattva has walked the path. And we tend to think that because we can see, say, Medicine Buddha up there and this is a path which is now completed, we forget that this is a mind stream which at one stage was in the state that we're in now. Report an error

4:33:16 therefore, take the teachings from the very beginning, from the very earliest. So as we ask all these questions, then we start to reflect on our lives and start to see how our lives change. Report an error

4:33:52 I have the stronger and stronger feeling that when we're trying to meditate on emptiness, which is a... We talk about it very philosophically, what emptiness is about. And basically, for those of you who don't know this word, it's about... Emptiness is one word which stands for phrase, which means that things are empty of existing in the way that they appear to exist. Report an error

4:34:18 And Chakyamuni Buddha described in a lot of detail about how things... How we misperceive this. And so we go through intellectual exercises. So Chandrakirti, who was the old teacher, I don't know how many years ago, one of the old yogis in India, talked about a chariot. But we can talk about cars and say, what is a car? If we take the wheels off and we dismantle everything and we spread it all out, do we have a car anymore? Report an error

4:34:47 No, we don't. Do we have a car when it's all together? In a sense we do, but the car's not any one of those parts. So we think about this and say, OK, it becomes a car when we label it as a car, when it can function as a car. Report an error

4:35:04 But these are all intellectual exercises which help us to understand what is meant by this word emptiness. And there's lots more of them too. So it takes a long time to really understand what that's about. But the real work in understanding emptiness is, I think, is this... Psychological exercise of understanding ourselves because although we might understand that the table is impermanent and this house is impermanent and the car is impermanent, we don't really understand what it means to say there's nothing inherently existent in me as a person until we start working on ourselves psychologically. Report an error

4:35:51 We start to see that little insight. If I call myself a non-smoker, I change my perception of myself. Are you a smoker? Are you a non-smoker? Well, actually, you're neither of those. Or you're both of those. So we start playing with things like this and we start looking at the way we react. Report an error

4:36:17 If somebody came with a hacksaw and tried to cut off your arm, what would your reaction be? Probably pretty strong. But if we realised emptiness fully, then the reaction would be quite different. There wouldn't be an angry reaction towards the person who was trying to destroy us. We'd still recognise our arms were being chopped off, but it'd be a different reaction. So what's the difference between somebody, if you're having your arm hacked off by somebody who wants to kill you, what's the difference between the person who's simply recognising this is what is happening and the person who becomes angry? Report an error

4:36:59 There is a difference in the psychology there and a difference in the way of perceiving the self. So that as we start to understand more and more of ourselves and start to see this interdependence that we have, then we're less hooked into seeing ourselves as a fixed entity that we have to protect above all other things. Report an error

4:37:22 And when that loosens up, then the addictions become less important because the addictions are trying to protect this. this ego which is sitting here. Report an error

4:37:33 One of the best books which you can read at the moment, did you find copies of it, Cherky? Ego, Attachment and Liberation? Report an error

4:37:49 This brings up the Lama Yeshi Wisdom Archives, which Lama Yeshi, as I mentioned before, is over here on my left shoulder as he usually sits there. And he... As I said before, he was one of the first Lamas. He did many, many teachings and the teachings were recorded and the recordings, many of them have been transcribed and edited and put together in books. Report an error

4:38:15 These books are put out free by the Lama Yeshi Wisdom Archives and they're also downloadable as an e-book. What? Report an error

4:38:30 Except for the books published by Wisdom. All right, that's a Wisdom publisher over there. He's got a vested interest. Except for the books published by Wisdom. So there are several published by Wisdom as well, but the ones which we can download are available free. The ones which you can pick up, which they'll bring upstairs from the Liberation Prison Project because they hand them out to prisoners. If you are able to make a donation, then we request that you do that because that means another book can be published by that donation. Report an error

4:39:03 Or if it's a larger donation, then several books can be published, you can be handed out to people who can't afford it. So if you understand that, then it's genuinely meant to be a donation. Nobody's expected to pay, but if you can make an offering, that would be very beneficial. So this particular book is called Ego, Attachment and Liberation, and the quotes on here in bold type are taken from that particular book. Report an error

4:39:30 And on page one down at the bottom... You've got the title of the book and you've also got the website down there. Well, it's blue on mine. It may not be blue on yours. It's probably just black and white. www.lamayeshi.com So if you go onto that website, there's a lot of other books there that you can download as well. Report an error

4:39:54 And then you can buy the books from Wisdom. So Ego, Attachment and Liberation. In that book, he's talking about attachment. But as I said earlier, addiction is a form of attachment. Or attachment is a form of addiction, whichever way around. So as you're reading through, then you can just insert addiction where he says attachment and then you've got to get a lot of insight. Report an error

4:40:18 Because Lama Yeshi, again, was taking things from where people are, not expecting them to be already to be great meditators or things like that, but saying, OK, this is where Westerners are. This is what they need at this particular time. So by going through that book... You begin to see the disastrous effects that the ego has. So this ego arises from this feeling that there's something in here that we have to protect. Report an error

4:40:47 But as he points out, we just consider ourselves running round and round in circles. That's the attachment. And then by breaking this, that's the sense of liberation that we can get. So here we are. Report an error

4:41:07 Yeah. I've got a copy of it too. Yeah. what he said. Report an error

4:41:18 I'll make sure that the other one and one can cover Report an error

4:41:30 No, I don't think so. I think that's about it. Report an error

4:41:50 So that's about all I've got to offer today. I've had to cut out a lot of things, of course, because there's not enough time and we've still got five minutes left, but that's not the time to do another lengthy meditation. Report an error

4:42:04 So are there any more questions? Yeah. Report an error

4:42:15 I always get stuck on that Buddhism. Ask you to squash your emotions. Report an error

4:42:33 Detachment. Yeah, and I just get stuck on it. So then you just pretend they don't exist, or well they do exist, and if you are sad or if you're hurt, pretend that you don't just forget about it and walk through it. I really don't get it. Good. You know, it's like, and... Report an error

4:42:54 Because you shouldn't get it. Attachment is about this grasping and it's about a neurotic way of wanting things. And detachment is often brought up as the opposite to it. But when we use detachment in the West, we think about not having any emotions. I'm detached from that. I'm detached from the effects of my gambling on my family, for example. Report an error

4:43:24 Meaning I don't let myself have any emotions about that. But there are positive emotions which we do want to have. Things like joy and bliss, satisfaction, peace, having a calm and clear mind. Well, calm and clear mind is not emotion, but you get the idea that these qualities are not attachment if that neurotic component is not there. Report an error

4:43:51 So if I take this picture, I actually have a... A physical photo of this is my son, who's the youngest of my children, with his first child, who's now two. We're a Scottish family, you see, so he's got this blonde hair, very thick hair down his arms, and he's a surfer. He's got typical blonde hair, blue eyes, all this sort of thing. Big shoulders from all his surfing. And this tiny little newborn baby. And in this photo, my son Jamie is holding the baby and he's got his big... Report an error

4:44:23 Hands around his big hairy arms, around his little baby and the look of bliss on my son's face is just a joy to see. And the look of bliss on this little baby's face being held with the strength of her father's arms but without it being crushing in any way is a joy to see as well. Now no one in their right mind would not want those sorts of qualities to be in people's minds. Report an error

4:44:50 And when our minds are free of negative qualities, these are the sorts of things which should come up in our mind and which do come up in our mind. Report an error

4:44:59 So we say we want to develop this quality of satisfaction. Happiness, which I didn't really address, is related to being satisfied with whatever's around us. Report an error

4:45:12 So that that doesn't mean to say we don't care about what is around us, but we take joy in all the little things. Which are around us. And I know again from being in retreat, if any of you have done retreat you'll probably find the same sort of thing, that after a week or two suddenly the world takes on this incredibly light quality that everything seems to have a radiance about it, which we don't see when we're not in that meditative state of mind. Report an error

4:45:44 And the food, regardless of what it is, tastes absolutely magnificent. So taking joy in that. Taking joy in the radiance of the earth, the planet, when we are able to stop and see it. These are the emotions that we should be having, which are part of developing wisdom and compassion. Report an error

4:46:08 If you take somebody like His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he's always laughing. So here is an embodiment of wisdom and compassion, and yet always laughing. Report an error

4:46:19 Here is the embodiment of humility. The first time I met him, which was back in 1982, I didn't even realise he was somebody special. When he says he's just an ordinary monk, that's what he carries as himself. There was some time before I realised I was actually talking to the Dalai Lama. Report an error

4:46:39 Then I was overwhelmed. But aside from that, aside Report an error

4:46:47 from that, when you have these qualities of wisdom and compassion, you have this deep satisfaction, there's no need for pride, there's no need for arrogance. I saw one of our politicians in the airport once and he said, Strutting himself around like this and he's got his bodyguards who are obviously bodyguards because they've got these dark sunnies on and these dark grey suits and they're big. Report an error

4:47:09 And opposite, Dalai Lama, he's walking down the street, he's not wearing clothes any different to this, he's an ordinary monk because that's all he needs and therefore also a deep satisfaction I would imagine in his mind and a deep sense of grief for people's sufferings. Report an error

4:47:30 Grief is also something which is important. I remember one video I was seeing where some of the refugees from Tibet were having their first audience with the Dalai Lama, coming up with cutters and telling their stories in tears in His Holiness' face because these people had been suffering. Report an error

4:47:55 Not anger with the Chinese because he understands that the Chinese are coming from a point that they can't control. But deep grief that people had to suffer. And Jesus on the cross, when he looked at the soldiers, he said, Father, meaning God, Father, forgive them because they don't know what they're doing. Report an error

4:48:17 Same quality of deep grief and compassion and understanding. So it's this depth of quality that we're looking for in happiness. If you're looking for that depth, you will experience grief because of the pain of seeing people suffering or other creatures suffering. And you will also see joy and delight and love and kindness and see so much happiness in such very little things that our lives become changed by that. Report an error

4:48:51 So don't ever think the opposite of attachment is detachment. In some of the monastic traditions the monks are required to separate themselves from the lay life and they have to... Detach themselves from their attachment, remember attachment is neurotic, particularly to women, so in that sense they have to be detached. Report an error

4:49:16 But wisdom and compassion when it's fully developed is something which is full, Report an error

4:49:24 something which is deeply satisfying and which is far, far, I don't know the word, greater, it's the only thing I can think of, far more profound than the sort of pleasure we get from addiction. That's what we're yearning for. It's this deep, deep quality of satisfaction, this deep, deep sense of being connectedness which includes not being frightened of grief and this deep, deep sense of joy and delight when we see anybody expressing wisdom and life and love from themselves, especially little kids because they're good at it. Report an error

4:50:01 They haven't masked it so much. Report an error

4:50:08 So I think we might finish with that particular point because that's a good note to finish on and recognising that... This is the sort of thing that we're looking for, something which is very deep. And apart from needing to understand that, sometimes we need great courage as well because of the pain that goes with the grief. Report an error

4:50:30 That we need to understand and not be frightened of. So let's just finish with a very quick meditation. Report an error

4:50:45 I'll be quick. So settling into your meditation posture again, Report an error

4:50:57 recognising that we're in the presence of this great wisdom and compassion. Report an error

4:51:03 And taking great joy and delight and pleasure in being able to think about these things and contemplate these things today. Report an error

4:51:13 About sensing the incredible potential of our minds. The incredible potential of a human life. Report an error

4:51:24 Being able to sense that interconnectedness which we have with all people, creatures and beings. Report an error

4:51:34 And understanding that this is where our true happiness abides. Report an error

4:51:45 So may this precious mind... Which wants wisdom and compassion for all sentient beings. And in which we want our own minds to develop completely to the mind of the Buddha. May this precious mind, where it hasn't been born, may it arise. And where it has been more, may it never decline but increase forevermore. Report an error

4:52:17 Thank you everyone. Report an error

4:52:34 Thank you very, very much. For those of you not familiar, this is a very Tibetan thing to do. We're thanking her. all right. Mm-hmm. Report an error

4:52:47 And then she's giving it back to me, yeah. And also requesting you to please, please, please come back. You've got to request three times. I did it three times. Please, please, please. Please come back, please come back, please come back. It's also a Tibetan tradition. If you're a teacher and you're requested three times, then you've got to request it. There you go. So your book is due out probably at the beginning of next year, maybe. Report an error

4:53:09 Who's the person that's partly responsible for it to see? So maybe she'll come back when she does a book tour. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Report an error

4:53:18 Well, thank you. It was wonderful. Very, very good. And thank you for coming too, David. As I say, David, this is the first time I've met my editor, you see. So it's a special experience. If you want the book out in a hurry, you've got to make sure David doesn't get into his addiction. Yeah, exactly. The proof will be in the pudding. Report an error

4:53:38 It comes out in 2012. exactly. Report an error

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Talk by Tenzin Chonyi, recorded 23 February 2008. Original at Tse Chen Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/TC_Addiction_20080223. Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US. Transcript generated automatically and may contain errors; the audio is the authoritative version.

Recorded at Tse Chen Ling Center, San Francisco, and archived by the center on Internet Archive. More from Tse Chen Ling

Listen on Internet Archive · CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US