#260: Gelong Thubten - How A Retreat Can Help You Find Yourself

my guest today is one of my favorite people on the planet an amazing soul that truly went through an amazing journey I've had enormous support in going in and spending time in Retreats as I was growing up I didn't really think about meditation and when I was a teenager I went quite off the rails I became a bit of a party animal and I became very wild and living a very kind of Hardcore party lifestyle which made me very ill I did a very long retreat that lasted four years and the reality is after 10 days I completely fell apart the predominant emotion is fear and we're living in a culture that is all about identifying risks all the time even as we're safe it's almost as if the the painful thoughts and feelings are a doorway into a much deeper place of happiness than you ever knew before [Music] my guest today is one of my favorite people on the planet gelung doctor I actually never met top 10 before we we met on on a zoom call two and a half years ago during the times of covid where he truly changed my life he doesn't know that actually I'll talk about it in a minute but at the time I saw in Topton a an amazing soul that truly went through an amazing journey to help the rest of us Souls find a path to happiness and Enlightenment we stayed in touch as much as we could after we recorded our podcast episode and now finally uh here at Kate Dowdy is my best friend's studio in London we meet for the first time and we meet for me to realize that he is exactly what I thought he was Topton has written a new book that he so kindly shared with me before he's about to share with the rest of the world and it's called a handbook for Hard Times such an appropriate title for what we're about to go through if you don't mind me saying it's a monk's guide to fear this living I I consumed it very quickly I have to admit to you and I absolutely loved it uh the book is out uh in just a few days uh August 31st I would ask you to please pre-order it because I would really love for that book to be a bestseller and you know how the publishing industry works so if you like our conversation today please make sure that you don't put your phone down before you get a copy of a handbook for hard times and so I'll uh I'll start first by thanking you for being who you are thank you I get that Joy of uh you know traveling the world and meeting some of the wisest but most interestingly kindest people that most of us don't get a chance to meet and you know I don't know how to say it any other way but I have a very soft spot in my heart to those who choose I think people have heard me many times saying that uh if I actually had the choice I would probably not be in the mainstream of life I would probably choose the same path myself but when you and I spoke back in 2021 I uh was it 21 or 2020 I don't even remember it was during the pandemic did you tell me you were actually sick when we had that I don't know if I did but I was I was pretty sick oh my God we'll come back to this in a second because when you when we when we spoke you taught me that meditation I remember I'm an engineer to me everything is about perfect performance highly optimized oiled machines and you taught me that meditation was all about mind wondering it was all about losing your focus to be able to pull yourself back down exactly and you know you never really know the how far a word that comes out of you can affect people and Humanity I took that to heart completely flipped my Approach because believe it or not not that I was struggling with meditation at all but before you taught me this I was such a perfectionist and I used a meditation device that measured my brain waves and I did 97 calm most on most of my my meditations but that lost the joy of meditation altogether and so I will hold that I will hold you as one of my teachers whether you like it or not for the rest of your life were you actually sick when we uh when we were talking yeah I had covered I was getting over coveted I had a very very it didn't look so okay you looked okay I had very very severe covid at the start of the pandemic and I think when we spoke I was in that long covered phase and I was still very sick I'm okay now but I went through uh yeah two years of two years two years of being not able to do much is that why the book is about hard times actually I decided on the book before covid I'd already written a book um about happiness I know yeah and and then I I thought now I want to kind of go deeper and talk about yeah a guide to unhappiness you know how how do you how do you find your way through unhappiness in a creative way so I wanted to talk about how to work with suffering work with pain work with difficulties and so I had the idea in 2019 and I started to write the book and I got through one chapter and then went down with covid I got covert at the start of 2020 and so I was very very sick and when we spoke I was in sort of recovery but still very ill because my heart and lungs were quite badly affected wow in which way uh I had blood clots in my lungs and I had myocarditis where the heart is swollen and you were still actively well I was watching doing a as we all were we were doing stuff through Zoom so I was Finding ways to position the camera so people couldn't see the duvet around me and then probably you know in a bed man robes from here up pajamas down below now I'm really weirded about that conversation but yes fine fine fine but that but that kind of dedication I mean you continue to travel as soon as we came back from covert yeah yeah you're you're you have your monasteries are in multiple places around the world right yeah so so the headquarters is samueling Monastery in Scotland and that's where I've uh where I became a monk 30 years ago and where I've been doing my training but we have branches in other places and one of my roles is to help out at some of the branches okay and so you travel to to visit I travel to branches and I will I also do give talks outside of that setting I do a lot of talks in hospitals and schools and even prisons I like to bring meditation into all walks of life and to really take take away the idea that it has to be a religious thing or a house to be Buddhist for me it's just a human experience yeah you can take it anywhere yeah have you always been a Buddhist yes in the I grew up in a Buddhist family but my parents never particularly pushed it onto me it was just there in the background um but as I was growing up I didn't really think about meditation and when I was a teenager I went quite off the rails I became a bit of a party animal and I became very wild and living a very kind of um yeah hardcore party lifestyle which made me very ill I got very ill and that that that stopped me in my tracks sickness seems to be a theme in my life that I was just going to ask if you don't mind me and I I feel that looking back whenever it comes up it's almost like my body's way of telling me stop and go deeper because that first sickness I had which was also heart related in uh when I was 21 is what took me to a monastery I had a very severe burnout and I think probably because my parents had told me about Buddhism I already had some kind of faith in it and I heard about a monastery where you can go to be a monk for a year and I went to this place and I was only going to stay a year but then I stayed I stayed I stayed longer and longer and finally loved it so much I took lifelong vows um but the initial how old were you I was 21 and the initial idea was just to stay a year and get my health back together get my head together and then I was going to go back to my old way of life but um things got under my skin in a really good way the Buddhist philosophy the thinking about compassion meditation all of those things and I stayed longer and I met amazing teachers I met my my teacher there Akron rinbache who sadly passed away now um but I had many many years training under him which was just incredible how does that feel like to train under a teacher you you find that it's not what you expect because you expect to meet some kind of wise old person who is going to impart very formal teachings to you and there is that you get that but you also find it's about the moment-to-moment relationship of the the teacher showing you where you where you need to tighten up and where you need to you know tighten the way or to to your mindfulness is too loose or or where you're not being kind enough they're kind of teaching you in the moment so I worked together with aquamarinpoche as his sort of attendant or assistant for many years and that gave me a lot of time to study under him but in a in a way of studying in life through life through through working together through traveling together through doing projects together observing yeah yeah I mean that that normally the the image we have of a of a teacher uh from the movies is either Yoda or like you know long white beard exactly yeah but then actually one of my teachers does have a Long White Beard I can remember his brother lamies but uh it really is it's it's not what you think it's not like you're sitting at their feet and they're kind of saying now my child I'm going to teach you the open the secrets to the universe it's not like that it's that you work together and you you learn by example and you talk and you sometimes you even talk about your own emotions and your own problems and they they talk to you about how you can find Solutions so yeah you navigate them yeah yeah yeah I mean so so I as I said at the beginning I have that addiction to spending time with monks and I know quite a few of them well you already have the haircut I do it's I wish I was further there I I attempted you know last year uh but I yeah I think it's never too late but I think with my current vows if you want my current vows are focused a lot more around the rest of the world than myself and I think a big part of my value it's not because I teach anything new at all it's because I am that modern day Warrior I'm the Google executive who couldn't be a monk can do that I can I understand I'm very much out there and yeah giving talks and writing books and out in the world but but I've also had the Good Fortune to have time in the monastery yeah we need that don't we we're time and Retreat whether you're a monk or not doesn't matter it's about going in and so I've I've had enormous uh support in going in and spending time in Retreats that's important there is a lot of spiritual faith not just Buddhism that will tell you that this time alone you know sometimes uh you know Moses walking the desert or you know Muhammad sitting in the cave or you know Buddha sitting under the tree or whatever that this is really where the enlightenment happens or the at least the reflection happens if you want and and definitely I feel the need that this is this is really really what my soul is craving very very strongly really I find that Retreat where you completely alone with your own mind yeah you become very honest about yourself absolutely I mean my my experience of retreat was I I did a very long retreat that lasted four years 40 years alone yeah you weren't alone so there were 20 other monks who were in a retreat enclosure but you didn't spend much time with each other you're mainly alone in your room uh meditating all day and it was a it was a very interesting experience because I'd already been a monk for about 12 years and I think I had a lot of spiritual arrogance when I went into that kind of Pride like I thought I am a monk I'm you know I was maybe one of the more senior monks as well so maybe I was a bit like yeah well I'll just sail through this this will be you know I didn't know I didn't think I'd sail through it but I thought I would do well yeah whatever that means yeah and the reality is after 10 days I completely fell apart and in that Retreat I had the most horrible time which looking back was very useful definitely but I think it kind of humbled me to myself in that I had to sit there with my own thoughts and feelings and there's no audience there's no feedback you're just you and that can be quite devastating at first because you discover your own inner demons or whatever but it can be also very healing 12 Years A monk and then you discover your inner demons can you explain that maybe I did a little bit of uh suppression before that maybe I did a little bit of suppression because you know when I when I um became a monk I was definitely driven by suffering into this Monastery and I was having depression anxiety all of those things and I was looking for a solution and I went to a monastery to find a solution and maybe for me putting the ropes on initially was a way of just squashing all of that down and becoming a so-called spiritual person so I think I was a little bit pretentious I probably am in many ways but I hope I'm less pretentious now you know and those days I think I was just trying to be Serene trying to be calm trying to be what I thought a monk should be and it's only when I went into Retreat that all of that breaks down and it's just you with you and your own mind and then all that depression came back oh wow yes full force really badly and also the anxiety started to build again and and I was having panic attacks the whole thing flooded up in me looking back I can see that was incredibly healthy because here I had to learn to deal with the thing that I hadn't dealt with properly and that Retreat of four years was all about dealing with that suffering and that pain and it almost broke me so halfway through the retreat I I thought that's it I can't take any more but somehow I managed to get myself into a mode of practice where I could work with it work with the pain work with the suffering and and learn how to have more compassion for myself and that's the topic actually of your of your wonderful book right so it's that it's that hard time that takes us to through the thicker walls if you want but I want to come back to that but but before I do I I'd like to just highlight uh what you just said is really really quite interesting pretentious spirituality I don't know there are I think there must be a term for it is is quite common I mean no you don't have to be a monk but there are so many that rush into spirituality and very very quickly go like okay I figured this out I'm going to talk to people about meditation and then I'm going to say namaste when I meet people yeah and you put that kind of um Misty look in your eyes you try to look you know like yeah I try to look a bit otherworldly and a little bit detached and yeah and I don't think it's a conscious thing always it's just you want to be spiritual so you kind of try to look like you think spiritual should look and many people do it I know I was doing it with with being a monk it's kind of tempting that you put the ropes on and then you just try to adapt yourself assume that persona but but then so you know is that a bad thing or a good thing I mean for sometimes a lot of people tell me that they dislike that very much and normally my answer is I say look it's you know the people take different Journeys across the path and it's actually okay if one if someone at least wants to look spiritual then that must be better than not wanting to be spiritual at all yeah and and when you say is it a bad thing or a good thing I would suggest that on a spiritual path there is nothing bad or good it's all part of the learning and you you have to go through um all kinds of ways of trying things and find your own truth through that so you have to make a lot of mistakes interesting but that's why it's called practice because you're practicing you're learning but is in manko about preventing you from making those mistakes you're so sort of like okay let's take you out of the party life put you in a monastery somewhere I sort of in my heart know my answer but isn't that how it appears to be we're we're here to prevent you from doing those things yes but then you you go into this Monastery and you start meditating and then the very thing that made you go to all those parties starts to come up in the meditation and then you start using the meditation a bit like a drug oh and then it becomes hugely problem and problematic so you're you yeah I definitely agree with that you know when I first started meditating I I found myself seeking a high all the time and it was very much um pushing I was pushing myself to get some kind of bliss experience yeah I wanted to get blissed out I I find that quite interesting how people talk about meditation is supposed to be you know your joyful moment of the day when in reality it is a practice right yeah and if you're trying to force yourself to be joyful that's a disaster absolutely because the more you push for that the more disappointed you feel the more un you know the less Joy you get from well you're coming from a place of I need Joy therefore I'm telling myself I don't have that Joy the more you think you need to be joyful the more you're telling yourself I lack that choice you're actually um somehow shooting yourself in the foot constantly every time you sit down to meditate and that definitely happened to me definitely uh there was a a lot of um hope and expectation that I would feel good yeah and and I had to learn how to work with that and change that and it does feel good but it shouldn't be the target meditation can feel good but then if you get stuck with that you're you've immediately made it artificial so that is this is exactly the learning I got from you that to stay at 97 calm was me telling myself that I'm feeling good I mean the the device I used was cheating honestly I mean it's a great device I'm not against it in any way I actually think it gave me a lot of insight into the state at which my wine my mind wanders right but the way the device worked is it gave you it gave you nature sounds right and if your mind was uh wondering your your the nature is a little angry so it gives you rain and wind and so on and when your mind is calm it gives you Birds okay and you know tricky as I am of course I basically said okay aim for the birds like that give me more birds right and very quickly you can train your mind to focus on the birds right uh and and I I have to admit it feels awesome when you're in that calm quiet place but that's perhaps not the exercise at all that's better I don't know how much that would change the person because correct would you then become more addicted to the calm totally and also are you really meditating or is something doing it for you that's the question it's almost as if we lose our own power by giving it to a machine which is a huge topic as we know in in the bigger sense do we want to talk about this I don't know if we can go there but you know what exactly if you want to it's my biggest topic of this that is what we do and if we use too many meditation apps and devices as well it's like we give the power to a machine it's so interesting we tell the machine you you do it for you make you meditate for me you make me meditate yeah and for thousands of years people meditated with no technology so yeah it was not like they were missing something and then technology came and made it all better I mean in a very interesting way are we missing anything at all no I missed the days before technology exactly oh yeah absolutely yeah sure I mean look we're using technology now and of course it has great uses but it's got out of balance as we know yeah seriously out of balance I believe so I believe there was a in in my personal view I think it was 2011 2012 we should have stopped there we should have just said okay this is fantastic it's like eating at some point you have to say I'm full yeah right yeah at some point you have to say I've eaten enough I don't need to overeat yeah we've over eaten yeah when you meditate we're going to come to Hard Times I promise we're going to come to our hard times but you teach me so much when you meditate uh today with your busy life how much time do you put I don't time it I just do a session in the morning session in the evening oh you don't no I don't time it that's interesting again my weird Target orientation I I do think it's good to time it and I often advise people to do that and when I'm leading a retreat or a workshop we definitely time it but the way I find for me at the moment is I just do my meditation every day no matter what a little bit in the morning a little bit in the evening and then for me when I'm giving classes that is really my meditation work because as I'm speaking and leading the class I'm in the mindful state so I get loads of meditation done in that way as well and then I also try to practice tiny moments of mindful awareness throughout the day little drop-ins throughout the day I get that I think I think that probably is more my Approach but also I think what's so crucial and you mentioned this at the start of our chat is how to re reframe that idea that you need to clear the mind or you need to have no thoughts that that's a disaster yeah and I really find it helpful to explain to people that is the coming back that counts exactly it's I I liken it to that rep in the gym yeah totally it's like it's that you know pushing doing a biceps curve absolutely okay it's the movement not you know not keeping the weight up here that's not doesn't yeah it's not like putting yourself in a trance or being in some kind of altered state of consciousness it's it's work your your mind wanders you bring it back every time you come back to your your meditation like come back to the breath or whatever it is you're using you are gaining strength and gaining um more power in your meditation so that means that the thoughts that took you away are the very thing that bring you back well if if coming back to the meditation is what makes you strong you have to have somewhere to come back from ah yeah absolutely so also that's part of the exercise all those thoughts the wandering mind is what allows you to come back yeah so you don't need to feel like a failure of having a Wandering mind it's part of the process can I ask you a very personal question I mean as a as a as a very High Pace executive most of my life I find myself as I go through the Journey of Life wanting more and more of the calm and peace and and you know inner work if you want has it ever happened the other way I mean is it is it on the path at all that a monk would come to a point in time and say I am I am now ready I have found my inner peace I'm going to go the opposite way what is the opposite way just being completely out there in the world no well I imagine that there are people who meditate monks or not monks I don't know who who must reach a level where they don't need to meditate they kind of go beyond meditation I assume that that's where my teachers are at they they seem to spend all their time serving others and helping others and um somebody once asked my teacher how how long do you meditate for each day and he said the question makes no sense and and I got the feeling that maybe he was suggesting that he doesn't he's sort of everything is meditation for him that's probably true I'm not at that level that's why I need to practice each day but I I imagine that that is an achievement we could achieve which is to not need meditation but to just be the meditation at the moment meditation for us is a thing we do but what would it feel like to become the meditation yeah where there's no doer or practice no person practicing no practice that that's fascinating I'd love to experience that one day I'm sure you feel it some days right no I my practice is something I do I I sit down and I do it I I know where I'm at in that I'm not Advanced I'm just doing my thing and hopefully one day we'll I don't really worry about you're just humble I don't worry about where I'm gonna get to I just keep going I trust the process interesting hard times yeah so I publicly said that I don't I don't want to call them hard times but I publicly said that we're approaching some of the most confusing times known to humanity uh partially because of my other topic I Champion artificial intelligence but partially because we held off with uh climate change for too long partially because of political geopolitical economic challenges that might be around on the horizon but partially in my personal point of view because of systemic bias we've held on to a system of constant consumerism constant wealth shift constant Gap creation of in power and in wealth and in education and in knowledge and in everything that is feeding on itself to the point where like you rightly said you know technology is helping in some ways but working against us and others and every other part of the system I think is getting to that break point first of all you you also see that yes and no yes I agree with everything you've said but the no part of me also has a feeling that part of the problem is we we hear about it and read about it much more than we used to and of course the way news media is presented is always shocking and arresting and grabbing and clicking to find the ad embedded in the in the news story we know that so yes of course things are in in trouble the world is in trouble but how we perceive that has changed in that it's coming through our phones all the time in terms of breaking news alerts and the negative bias in the way things are presented yeah I mean I heard that argument before I don't know if it's necessarily uh entirely there is definitely a lot of Truth in it that we are much more informed than the 1900s about a child that falls in a well in Morocco and that becomes part of our you know canvas of events of the day when the child did fall in the well in 1900 we never heard about it I think what what I'm starting to pay more attention is that that same lens has not changed drastically in the in the last 10 years we still had the same amount of access to information uh but the intensity of it I think in the last 10 years has accelerated a little bit uh and I and in in either situations whether it is really changing or not it seems to feel uh a little overwhelming for everyone isn't it I would say so yeah I would say that we feel overwhelmed and also the predominant emotion is fear yeah fear anxiety yeah and we're living in a culture that is all about um identifying risks all the time yeah even in terms of even even as we're safe yes or or just the risk is always uh presented very strongly even you you buy a a coffee and it says caution contents may be hot yeah yeah I mean you buy coffee you know it's hot yeah it doesn't have to be printed on the label so yeah it's just that they don't want to be sued so yeah yeah we know and and we know that that's that's the kind of yeah culture we're in but aren't we being over presented with risks all the time now yeah and you get on a train and they tell you if you see something suspicious phone this number so immediately you're well you're you're on red alerts yeah there's suspicion everywhere sure there's danger sure there are things going wrong but I I wonder if our fear and anxiety has been over over stoked it's like stoking the Flames yeah very heavily I can feel that um you're absolutely right I I and I and I have to say from my following and from my work uh you can see that people are more worried concerned uh anxious and you know it's all around us and in your book you're saying that there is a monk's way to deal with that yeah I I suppose saying a monk's way sounds a little bit um um as if you have to become a monk I don't mean that at all I just mean what I'm writing comes from my learnings as a monk and I hope that people everywhere can benefit from benefit without becoming monks um but I talk about fearlessness yes and I talk about how fearlessness comes from understanding fear it's not the absence of fear if you just have no fear that that's not fearlessness yeah fearlessness is where you work with the fear and you start to embrace your fear and transform it so for me the message of the book is hard times are amazingly useful as The Crucible for our Alchemy or transformation which I think must be true I mean this if if you look back at your at any any anything that you value in your life today that makes you the person who you are it must have had some kind of a root in a hard time definitely yeah definitely we all do that we all look back and see how we've suffered and how we grew through it in my life the good times aren't particularly as powerful for me as the the troubles I've had and yeah things that have helped me grow at the time is horrible yeah if somebody says you know you're learning from this you want to kind of punch him in the face but afterwards you think yeah I did learn from this so if you look at the Four Noble Truths it is you know in a in a very interesting way it's just very confronting to say that the truth of suffering right uh and and you you know you have to wonder why why why does one of the noble truths of Life have to be suffering well the Buddha began his teachings by saying look here's the situation what are we going to do about this situation exactly it's like no I'm look I didn't create this it's not it's not the Buddhists believe in suffering as if it's a choice it is what it is but the word suffering is a little bit heavy-handed it sounds like we're talking about very overt extreme pain the the word the language the Buddha used uh means many things the word suffering actually covers all kinds of discomfort okay any type of dissatisfaction just that feeling that something is always missing and the Buddha's message is that the reason we feel something is missing is because we look outside all the time and we don't look inside because we don't know how to oh beautiful because we don't tap into our own Limitless potential anything outside feels incomplete we're trying to complete ourselves by looking in the wrong direction so look within and we'll find that completion yeah that's what suffering means to me it means looking in the wrong places but isn't isn't you know the modern world entirely about that incompletion it's like and we have to feel incomplete so we'll buy more yeah that's we're told you are incomplete how can you possibly Feel Complete unless you buy my product that's what we're told we've created that we've created a world that tells us we're incomplete yeah and that you are incomplete is needed in order for the wheels to keep turning so it's made us quite ill what'd you do about that I think uh we need to use things like meditation to protect ourselves from um being over influenced by those those voices but on a deeper level I think if we use meditation we can discover something within us that we were always looking for the the beauty the happiness the wisdom The Compassion if we start to tap into that within us we can become enormously strong and resilient and we can help others I mean meditation is absolutely about compassion and being of benefit to others so we have that capacity all of us yeah so let's go back to fearlessness you said understanding fearlessness working with it our descending fear and working with it I I think so how would you do that so I feel that um fearlessness can arise when you go into your fear and you learn how to work with the energy of fear rather than the thoughts about the fear yeah so when I when I was in that Retreat and I was experiencing very strong anxiety I I had to teach myself how not to listen to the story about the anxiety I'm anxious because of this or that or what if this happens or what if that happens you know the words that the mental chatter and instead I I had to learn how to move into the feeling in my body the anxiety or any emotion has a physicality to it you know you feel the kind of heart thinking or the the belly fluttering there's a feeling so when you move into that feeling you you give the feeling compassion because the the the quality of our awareness is always filled with love yeah if if we take away the stories we will just find love our mind is a loving mind because why is that is because we want to be happy anybody who wants to be happy is because they have love in them their heart they want happiness happiness is a expression of Love isn't it so so if you move into the fear with that loving mind the fear starts to change it starts to transform because you're not pushing it away I think the main problem is that we have a difficult emotion and then on top of that we have resistance but isn't the energy of fear itself Direction and it's basically saying run away yes and sometimes of course run I'm not suggesting that if you're being chased by a tiger you should sit there and say I'm going to lean into my fear I mean get the hell out of it yeah sure yeah there are dangers deal with them of course but but don't we also just have this rumbling undercurrent of fear for no reason or there is there are reasons but we're not in actual immediate danger that's when we can start to seriously work with uh transformation of the emotions which means what I can take fear and turn it into I feel that if you rest into the emotion like relax into the emotion uh the resistance disappears because you're fully embracing how you feel yeah and then when you fully Embrace that so-called negative emotion how is it negative anymore it's Just Energy in your body and when you take away the resistance that energy starts to transform so fear anger hatred unhappiness can start to melt into Joy because the resistance is taken away I find that quite intriguing actually because a lot of the time you know you I think most of our audience will have uh experience this when you stop resisting everything seems to work fine yeah resistance is the issue isn't it yeah and in my book I I kind of asked the question is there any any suffering other than resistance that's such a profound question does suffering exist Beyond a feeling of I don't want to suffer wow that's the question isn't it and how much are we conditioned especially in Modern Life to constantly seek comfort and constantly push away any tiny bit of discomfort and so how much is that just making us into resistance machines which means they'll always be suffering it's almost like the resistance creates something to resist or be resisted so we're almost building suffering through our resistance yeah so what if we take away the resistance and of course meditation is about that because you just rest into or move into the feeling without pushing it away without judging it without telling yourself stories about it you it's just you in the feeling the resistance goes and then where is the suffering yeah suffering is resistance so if he managed to find acceptance then by definition you're not suffering yes and I always struggled with that because my my teachers always used to tell me you need to accept you need to accept yourself you need to accept this except that and I always assume that meant you you have to put up with it I thought acceptance meant you have this kind of grim resignation oh well I'll just deal with it you know I'll just it is what it is it is what it is I hate it but I'm gonna put up with it and I'll just power through that's not acceptance that's just gritting your teeth I I think acceptance is much more about opening yourself up and relaxing into what you experience and being okay with it having love towards your feelings for me what was very very important was in that long retreat when I learned how to stop hating myself and my emotions and instead moving towards them with kindness and the the whole in in a landscape inside you starts to change when you do that so I find that interesting because you know one of my early meditation practices was you know I I had a resistance at the beginning of my life to the idea that breathing is life and you know focus on your breathing and not that focusing on your breathing doesn't get you to calm but that I didn't like the concept of breathing his life because my mathematical brain said yeah and heartbeat is life and you know brain waves his life and peeing his life and everything is life so why did we single that one out and in my highly resistant mind I say this is because breathing is mechanical so if you you know if you focus on it your focus on on something other than thoughts and in my early meditation practices I would actually take a drop of water and put it on the tip of my nose and then it starts to itch around 40 seconds in and it's quite quite analogous to what you're just saying it's because at the beginning I would tell myself I'm going to spend five minutes just you know resisting the itch and that's gonna draw my thoughts into uh into the itch not my incessant thoughts but then I would have to admit eventually you sort of freely tune into that feeling and it doesn't feel negative anymore it has no polarity to it it's just a feeling and it you know I don't know how if people will will sort of go as crazy when I say this but then eventually it feels like living so you you eventually just focus on it and feel completely alive I think that breathing is is used to a certain point I mean it's not that we have to use breathing for the rest of our lives but it's a starting point yeah and the reason we might focus on our breath is simply because it's something happening all the time in the present moment something to come back to and it's very useful but what you described just then is a a further level where you don't necessarily need the breath but you're just going to meditate on your experience of the Here and Now so that's very good because then you're kind of transcending the need for a particular support you're just in the now and you're meditating with your your present experience and the meditation is not really about focusing on something it's about being you being the awareness being here being the awareness it's about getting in touch with your own awareness rather than what you're being aware of yeah so so when we when we say okay we understand fear we tune into it we stop resisting the emotion that that's not the end of Hard Times Hard Times continue the hard times continue but you have a different relationship with them and you you have a tool through which you can work with the emotion that the hard times triggers because ultimately it's all about how we are triggered yeah and once you start to work with that emotion you can start to suffer less and that gives you the space to be able to help others so hard times then become the the the fuel for your compassion training yeah and we know this anyway everybody in this world will say yeah I I I certainly understand people more because I've been there I've walked in their shoes we all feel that don't we the hard times have given us some kind of compassion and the meditation path is all about growing that expanding that and letting that become who you are do you believe that hard times are or future expectations of our time are also a bit exaggerated I mean some of the work I did was uh you know it doesn't look very positive economically for the next few years and you could see that for a few years in the past and so I started to understand what happened with the Great Depression for example and interestingly when you when you when you hear interviews of people that went through the Great Depression which is the deepest economic downturn in history uh they talk about things like yeah so I had to move in with my brother-in-law and then you know we had to work things out together and it turns out that he has a tool that I needed for myself right it's quite interesting when you think about it that's many we'll talk about it fondly which is quite unusual because it seems to me that a big part of the suffering is anticipation of the suffering yeah and afterwards you look back on your times of suffering and you you feel that you it was a very fruitful meaningful time in your life yeah at the time it's very hard to think that yeah you know when I was nearly dying of covid I wasn't thinking yeah this is great I'm going to write a book about this that wasn't in my mind I was just trying to survive but looking back you I at the time I had covered also the hard times I had in retreat I I miss that in a way because you do yes because it's a big state it was a it was a beautiful time of discovery um and I learned so much from it I've become stronger through those experiences so I absolutely am grateful for those experiences is there a moment at which things settled what do you mean so when we were having lunch and I was talking about my silent retreats I you know I'm you know resisting and I want to reach out to my phone and you know if in my case it normally lasts seven to eight days and then afterwards you sort of start looking at the phone and go like what's that I don't even remember what this is and then eventually you go you look at it and you go like oh my God I really never want to hold that thing again right so somehow there is there are moments of transformation where I don't know if it's fair to say get back to your nature to your truth okay and your truth is not supposed to be what we've made it in the modern world you began by asking do things settle and I wonder if that is the point of retreat do do we want to get into a state where everything just calms down with sort of tranquil I would find that quite boring you know if you just calm chilled Serene yeah what to me is Meaningful is where you are in a very creative dance with your own emotions and thoughts and you're working with them creatively and learning through them yeah and that's when you feel you're doing the work yeah I know that's not my experience at all my experience is that as I go through those Retreats um I I think what ends up happening is that just the the absence of the distractions of the modern world that leaves behind when that settles okay when the noise you discover some space that you know unbelievable space it's just pure joy so and pure pure I don't know what it what the word is not Enlightenment but pure a lot of clarity around things that were very confusing in your mind and you just give them space and they sort of like you know just keep settling down and suddenly you look down and they're settled the blue is here and the red is here and the green is here and you didn't do any effort at all I think what many people discover is that they go into that that sense of clarity and peace and then if you do an even longer retreat then that gets shattered oh yeah good 40 days works for me then let's not go to 41. I mean 40 years I I I I wish I could actually you know vow to experience it's fascinating because you maybe do feel that that the busyness of life is is is uh dissipating and you can you can feel more calm and more present and then after a few months maybe well in my case it was 10 days but that's quite rare after a few months the suffering starts to maybe manifest the the suffering you haven't dealt with it's almost as if the river is more still and now you can see what's at the bottom the mud at the bottom and that's when you start to feel you're really doing the work and it's quite unpleasant but surgery is unpleasant but you have surgery if you need it to save your life to me the retreat felt like surgery with no anesthetic but I've wanted that if somebody had said I can take you out now and you won't have to feel it I would have said no leave me here leave me in this because I'm learning something wow so so in the times where we're now hopefully everything will be easy but if times become difficult what are your sort of like three tips to people I will struggling when people say three because I usually just think of one one is good one is even better yeah I well to to understand that suffering is a reaction of I don't like this I I hate this and or I am resisting this and to work with that obviously there are situations where we need to speak out for change I'm not suggesting becoming passive and just so internalized that people can abuse you I'm not suggesting that of course there are situations where you need to speak out you need to make changes but generally with with our stress and misery in life what we can really change is our mind and so if we can go within and experience our emotions differently then the hard times will change the hard times are an emotion about the hard times you know you could ask yourself am I suffering because of this this and this or am I suffering because of my thoughts about this business absolutely of course and you can change those thoughts absolutely but I think the method I'm trying to to um describe here is that you're not trying to get rid of those thoughts you're trying to go further into them and discover that they actually unlock some kind of Happiness yeah it's almost as if the the the painful thoughts and feelings are a doorway into a much deeper place of happiness than you ever knew before that's really really cool so if you if you live like that you don't become a like a masochist wanting to have a dreadful time but you certainly can become interested and curious about what life might throw at you because you can go deeper and deeper and deeper into true happiness that is what the journey is truly all about yes in a very interesting way whenever I speak about suffering as the teacher you know the typical reaction pool is people will say okay so maybe suffering is good and even suffering is not good or bad right it's not what you do with it exactly it's just it is it is what it is as a as part of the Journey of you going inwards and that's where all the magic happens basically August 31st is the date uh I have to say to everyone I I think there is a very profound message in the idea of being able to look at tough times and say well they are but the real the toughest part of them is what I'm doing about them what I'm doing expecting them what I'm doing anticipating them uh what I'm doing dealing with them in myself not out in the real world and you may have heard me very frequently speak about the analogy of video games uh video games are wonderful for one reason that they bring a lot of suffering to your avatar and you know if you can manage to look at it and say all right the Avatar is in Hell Fire here so we might as well do something with it and really drill deep into what kind of challenge is your avatar facing uh you you tend to you tend to find you tend to find that it's not as painful as you think it is but more interestingly you tend to find that it's fun you tend to find the value in it top 10 I always find I actually this is one of those episodes I'm going to have to say this this is by the way one of those episodes where I'm not gonna make it an hour and a half because I think there is so many gold nuggets already and they are said in such an easy way that they you may have missed them so I would encourage you to go back and instead of giving you an hour and a half of more things that might overwhelm you I would ask you to uh to go back and listen again I think you'll find quite a few golden nuggets in our slightly shorter conversation today and at the same time I can't recommend the book enough it truly is a very um genuine guide to how to find that piece I thank you very much for being here as always I uh I am proud to know you and I am humbled by the tiny little things that you drop in your conversation that make me think about the world very different I feel the same about you do you I do don't say that I do I say it and I mean it yeah there is a wonderful one I think I think there truly is an element of your experience that is a dream of mine honestly to have it sounds really weird but when you're talking about about your suffering within a four years Retreat after you know 10 days I'm like oh lucky you yeah lucky you so even if I don't ever have the chance to to experience it myself being in your presence to sort of just get close to its Essence it's really wonderful thank you you're an amazing amazing Soul I'm honest so much and for all of you listening uh lucky you I mean I honestly I'm gonna say it this time you should thank me because I you know I get you to meet those amazing Souls I mean I also want to thank you because you get you give me the opportunity to insist uh that tokton and I meet in person while I'm here in London uh and and to get those amazing experiences for me and truly and honestly if it wasn't for you guys supporting what I'm trying to do here with slo-mo I wouldn't get those opportunities so for that I ask you to uh to take that interesting way of looking at life without resistance and maybe internalize this uh as the way that is the best fit for the upcoming interesting times I would say this again I would truly encourage you to pre-order the book don't wait until it's out on August 31st because if you wait until it's out on August 30 31st you help yourself but if you pre-order it the way the publishing industry works is that it may actually give top 10 the position that the book deserves uh on the charts because pre-orders all release in the first week so if you're interested in the topic I encourage you to help my brother out by putting him on the chart you'll be helping yourself out by reading a wonderful wonderful take on suffering and yeah why don't you also help me out by voting this podcast up the charts we've recently become in the top 10 of health and well-being in the US which is a very very very big achievement thanks to all of you we've been very frequently on the top five in so many places in Europe and it's just because of your love and kindness and support so keep doing that share this with others that you love and yeah find yourself a little bit of slow time this week to reflect on that idea of resistance I love you all for listening and I will see you next time good

Channel: Mo Gawdat

Views: 11,942

Keywords: SloMo, Mo, Gawdat, Gelong, Thubten, podcast

Id: 42JuXbdm9Ic

Length: 56min 33sec (3393 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023