Compassionate Mind and Its Enemies | Paul Gilbert in conversation with Maitreyabandhu

[Music] so it was really good to crash into your house uh this morning thank you very very much for letting us come and talk to you that's really really great it's a great pleasure thank you for coming all that way from london nice to appear in derby yeah so that the first thing i wanted to talk to you about was well one of the things you say in your book you say that we human beings are sort of we're we're designed as it were to thrive on compassion and kindness i was really struck by that that we're we we thrive through compassion and kindness and of course i'm really aware just as you're really aware of the war in the ukraine at the moment and it doesn't look like there's a at a glance at you know europe now and even more so of european in the world history it doesn't look like we're thriving on compassion and kindness i wonder whether you could we could jump in with where how did you get to that idea that that's that's what we're built to do and how do you put that alongside you know the horrors that we're seeing around us just now i thought we'd start with that larger question yes it's a it's a great question so i mean a lot depends where you look i mean if you look at what's happening in poland and how people are trying to help refugees then you would see a lot of compassionate kindness wouldn't you so it depends where you look so the key really is to understand the transition that humans made from basic primates through to being human right so if you look at most primate societies not bonobos but other ones and they're all pretty much dominated through aggression aggression is what real runs the show so you've got your dominant males who kind of terrorize all the subordinates and if the subordinates try to get a bit uppity then they get whacked won't you so that's the way it is now what happened was there was a transition during a period of what we call hunter-gatherers we started a little bit before that and what that happened there was that the subordinates started to gang up against aggressive males and basically kick them out the group and there's some very interesting work that sapolsky found in terms of monkeys who got rid of their aggressive males actually by mistake because the aggressive males at some poison food so they all died off and the group actually became quite a peaceful group now this is quite important for what comes later when we think about ukraine so that's quite important so the key thing then is to see so what happened in that transition so we went from a transition where you had power and dominance really running the roots through to what we became hunter-gatherer societies and that was care and share care and share was a way in which we survived by literally caring and sharing for each other and a lot of our social brain is orientated for sharing and caring and if you think about people whether the happiness that's when they're at their happiest where they have relationships they can share and care before they go out and enjoy being with each other go to the go to the restaurants or whatever it is and they share a joke or a story or whatever so we are basically orientated for for that and that's that's very important and we also have a range of physiological systems in our body that's very sensitive to signals of being cared for and and being liked and friendships and so on unfortunately what happened uh was we then invented agriculture and agriculture changed the game completely because caring and sharing societies were uh groups were immediate foraging and returning there wasn't any storing of resources people couldn't really have more than anybody else and and so on but with agriculture we the groups got larger we could start storing resources resources could now be owned and within a relatively short time we'd recreated dominant hierarchies again with dominant males primarily but not only at the top and if you look at all of the major civilizations from the um hittites through to the egyptians through to the romans through the vikings they're all pretty much the same pretty violent societies that suppress the population through terror if you think of the romans the awful crucifixions and stuff that went on there um and we're only just beginning to emerge once again out of being run by terrorist groups really uh even and say even um in the in britain as well you know we went through a terrible time in the middle ages where we hunted down witches and we tortured people and we hung loads of people for simple crimes like stealing the loaf of bread so we're only really just beginning to think about well do we really want to live like this or do we want to have a much more sharing and caring society but and that's so in the last you know 100 years i think we've we've moved on quite a bit you know got rid of slavery and all the other horrors that we've managed to create because we have we are probably one of the most vicious nasty species that have ever existed and we have to understand that we have a terrible dark side really nasty dark side so we're beginning to stand against that we're beginning to understand the importance of the rule of law and and so on but in a way putin is a bit of a throwback in a typical old-fashioned aggressive male into conquest into control into entitlement and if we don't find ways of subduing and stopping these individuals getting into positions of power we're always going to be you know haunted by them because we have over the last five thousand years right there's nothing new about future it's a classic dominant male you know if you look at the second world war you had a whole load of them stalin hitler mussolini a whole load of them get these guys together if you look at some of the things that are going on in niamhar and all other places you know where you have these problems all the time these dominant aggressive males who are into entitlement and will turn their populations against each other and so on so that's the issue so the issue then is so we can understand it in terms of the process and the next thing is how do you bring a compassionate solution well we do actually have solutions one is of course prevention that's very very important and we can talk about how you do that but the other one is that we probably missed an opportunity in 89 1991 when the war came down across khrushchev i think did a fantastic job and there was an opportunity then to almost treat russian russia in the way that we did germany after the second world war which is to not humiliate your enemy but build them up and make sure they're integrated into your into democratic societies because russia doesn't really have much of a history of democratic societies but for all kinds of reasons to do with right-wing thinking uh that was decided not to go down that route but rather to go down the route of uh we're just going to go back to being a primate and we're going to be stronger than you and more threatening than you and then you won't be able to do anything and that was a disaster so we're coming up to a fork in the road where we have the opportunity again post-putin to integrate to work to show compassion to um russia and how you know to be aware that actually they like all other populations they just get pulled along by the processes that these dominant males and dominant organizations create but underneath that most russians like most humans i really would prefer peace and cooperation integration and we've got some not only have we got germany and japan there's another country which has completely changed but also south africa have got the truth and reconciliation so compassion is going to have to go down that road if you if you ask me how we stop it we have to have a very good truth and reconciliation process after the war how that happens i'm not quite sure we've got to be very careful about once again starting to say that nato has to build up his arms and become tough yeah of course you need to be able to defend yourself if you want to but your first move that shouldn't be your first move your first move should always be to try as best you can to integrate these societies into democratic uh socially just rule of law uh control over the media control over politics uh as best you can that that's how you we end up with a peaceful world really gosh there's a lot in there that i'd like to explore but one thing i'll just explore quickly or perhaps not quickly is you know this question of of hierarchy and dominant males and you know the horrors of we've we've seen yeah through history do you have any sense that there could be a positive hierarchy where because you we've all haven't we also seen sort of leading males who i can't actually think of it at the moment but haven't we seen leading males who aren't acting in that in that way oh yes of course there are leading you know nelson mandela comes to mind and of course uh uh that's true and then you have gandhi and various others and of course then you have the buddha so you know just want to go back to this question of you know these the dominant males that we were just talking about and you know history as you you say is it's full of of that terrible story and yet at the same time i think it seems to me that human beings are naturally hierarchical that you can't sort of get rid of that as it were and there are instances on there of positive hierarchies of of you know male figures or female figures indeed being you know are very good for what what's your sense of that you know what what makes a difference and what would you think about sort of hierarchy generally you know from that point of view oh absolutely we have a lot of different hierarchies don't we we have hierarchies of wisdom you know you want to go and see the senior consultant rather than junior yeah so hierarchies are very important and the key issues with hierarchy is what what is their function what are they there to do and to what extent are they useful to the people below them or to what extent are they being exploited by the people who have the power those are the big issues really and of course the damaging hierarchies are the ones which attract individuals who want to be up the hierarchy because they can advantage themselves whereas individuals who want power because they can make it the value to other people that's a different kind of situation and so you're quite right i mean there are many many hierarchies in everyday life all the time but those hierarchies work for the benefit of us not for the detriment i want to because it read you know reading the compassionate man and looking at your your work i wanted to what what strikes me is it feels like a big idea as in in the best sense that you're and this bit the idea seems to me to be that you know what we've said about you know we're here to thrive through compassion and kindness uh and we'll explore some of the issues that evoke come out of that but two elements of the big idea i thought would be good just to hear about is something about old brain a new brain that you've talked about quite a lot and these three systems in the mind i thought it'd be good just to sort of because they they form to me those are the basis of this the idea as it were of compassion yeah so i don't know whether perhaps start with an old brain new brain yes well that's to do with uh um our competencies because you can make a distinction between things that motivate us right things we want to do that's our attention and that will carry us through our lives they want to be a good a good buddhist or you want to be a good father or a good psychologist whatever it is um and then we have our emotions which come and go you know you can have a period of feeling joy or a period of feeling anxious but they're there they guide your behavior in the moment but not over many years really and then we have what we call competencies now competencies are very important because uh for example birds need wings to fly but they also need a brain that will guide them and one of the things that humans evolved very rapidly over about two million years is cognitive competencies issues are we call them new brain functions which is our ability to think and reasons we have a capacity for understanding the nature of the world and our place in it vastly superior as far as we know might be wrong than any other animal we also have capacities for empathy and understanding the mind of the other and recognizing that people behave because they have motives and emotions just like you and i and we also have this uh competency for consciousness of consciousness to be consciously aware that we are aware which of course is the basis of mindfulness because without that you can't can you and these three give rise to what we call as knowing intentionality they're quite fundamental they are the game changers of life right basically in two humors as far as we know uh life didn't understand itself it was no it was not conscious of itself but we are okay so for example a lion intends to hunt its prey and will do so so it clearly has intention and motive but it can't do it knowingly it can't suddenly decide you know what all this hunting is very cruel i think i'll become a vegetarian or i need to train because i'm so unfit you know i'm not catching anything these days so so but we have knowing intentionality and part of the meditation um process as you know is to facilitate our ability for mind awareness and knowing intentionality so that we can knowingly choose our intention of how to live and of course i would say compassionately is very very important but in order to do that we have to be able to be have mind aware so those are those are what we would call new brain competencies that we don't think other animals have they might but we don't think they do and they're absolutely game changers and we can use our competencies for good but also for ill we can also choose to make weapons of mass destruction or something and um so in that situation because we would often confuse empathy with compassion compassion is basically a motivation a desire and empathy is a competency an ability and you can use empathy in different ways you to be deceitful of course or to be helpful you know if you're very in tune with people you can work out how you can fool them as well as how you can help them so distinguishing between the different dimensions of mind are very important and cognitive competencies our ability to think and reason and understand and have science and our ability to be empathic and our ability to be mindful and aware and constantly aware choose our intention they're all very important and they're not necessarily uh go together i mean you can have people who are incredibly intelligent win nobel prizes but they're not particularly empathic nor are they particularly mindful and equally you can have some wonderful empathic people who are never going to win a nobel prize because they're just not quite there you know what i mean so these are different competencies in the brain that that's why we call them new brain competencies yeah and then you've got these three one one of the you know absolute bedrocks for your thinking is these three systems that we have a threat system an incentive system yeah a soothing system um and i was particularly struck you know by the relationship between affection and kindness and the soothing system yes uh something that i think i've actually missed out a bit in my life yeah but let's let's talk about those three systems of it and then perhaps start to look more individually yeah well for a long time of course psychology said positive emotions negative emotions that was the way it was but if you think of emotions from an evolutionary point of view then emotions need to do three things and there are three basic all life forms have three basic motives one motive is to be able to detect and respond to threats so plants it would be water you know they curl their leaves to protect themselves from water shortages and stuff even bacteria in your gut can distinguish between toxic and un and uh and healthy areas for them and they move away from the toxins so this capacity for the detection of threat and the ability to respond to threat when it's detected that is a fundamental motive the poor living things but of course also all living things need to be able to get resources they need to not just to deal with threats but they need to be able to eat or whatever and for animals that move we need to be able to find find food and shelter and mates and reproduce and all that stuff so we those are all what we call drive emotions emotions which really propel you out there to do things achieve things and so on and so on but you can't just spend your whole life either achieving things or running away from predators or whatever there's also important for the body to be able to rest and digest and that is to for the body to be in a state of more quiescence where the drive for achieving and doing and obtaining resources and also for working with threats is settled and this other aspect which is linked to part of the autonomic nervous system we call the vegas so that you can just then settle and rest and you're not seeking anything now what we know so those are your three basic systems and really they just link on to the three basic life tasks so the threat system obviously has the emotions of anger and anxiety those sort of things um the drive system has anticipation excitement and various things and your rest and digest system has what we call the soothing emotions which is the contentment the slowing the grounding they're just being present the being mode is it's sometimes core that's important so the question you're interested in is very important which is that as we grow up our parents have an impact on how those three emotions become developed cultivated and regulated so unfortunately children who grew up in in abusive homes obviously the threat system becomes very overly stimulated and they may be very driven to achieve things and do things but that's partly because of the dealing with the threats you know they're trying to work with the threats so people are being in a way like putin you know people have had a difficult background which he did he i think his parents um treated him as special but he he he he lived a very um in a lot of poverty his mother nearly died of starvation there were lots of rats where he was he was a small chap got bullied a lot so those then they seek power to because they want control it's a threat-based process of power as opposed to a joyful uh i just like doing well you know joyful the joyful so joyfulness is extremely important um and how parents do that is through play and affection and make the child feel you know the ability to play very very important for children the ability just to feel i don't have to worry about i can just have fun i can just be you know full of beans and if you watch children because we've got a grand child who's just uh nearly four now i mean he just runs around and so he a lot of joy a lot of drive a lot of joy jumping them down watch me do this and i can do this so then that's important but what parents also do is through the process of loving and kindness and holding they also they also act as a soothing object so when the child is very distressed they will sue the child down and this capacity to be experience others edu parents as soothers they are individuals who will be there that can help you that means that we have a very different way of dealing with threat because most animals to deal with threat they have to deal with it by themselves they run away or whatever but humans can turn to others for support and help and and feelings of kindness and then that stimulates that rest and digest system and that rest and digest system then calms down the threat system that's what it does it calms it down so when children don't get those inputs particularly they can be left with a sense of disconnection a sense of yearning and then a sense of emptiness or loneliness because the the systems are still searching they're looking for it right because a lot of these systems are what we call lock and key like because we talked earlier about jung you know they they have they have a seeking you know you're meant to be getting love and affection that's what you're born together so if you don't get it the the caring system doesn't give up it kind of sits underneath giving you that sense that actually there's something missing you you need to you know when people have that experience they think well maybe i'm not kidding in love because maybe i wasn't good enough or i was there so i was that whatever it is so maybe if i change myself then i will be able to have a sense of connectedness with other people then i will feel uh part of and a sense of belonging and i can get joyful and i can be played in all that stuff so that's how those three systems work really but loving kindness is important for all three of them yeah i want to let's explore a bit more before we come to the person because one of the things that strikes me again is well one of the things interestingly exploring your work is that you do talk about childhood but you also talk very much about social context yeah in fact you know reading the compassionate mind it's quite a long time before we really get to the it's certainly not just all focused on childhood right that's right one of the things that struck me is how how much you're talking about how brain is co-created yes how your experience is co-created yes that's right uh i wonder we might just say something about that they have social content because there's a lot about social context in your work yes yes yes and i mean you say my idea which is lovely is but of course there's a huge number of people who you know are saying pretty much the same things in in certain ways so that's right i mean if you think about you know if you and i had been born into italy say two and a half thousand years ago we wouldn't have thought anything about having slaves and treating them not very well or going to the roman games and enjoying people being slaughtered as ah yeah good right because that was all part of the culture and we know that in the way in which we operate within cultures it can also have even have an epigenetic effect even the genes that get turned on and on on and on in us can be related to the social context in which we are living so it is extremely important that we think about how we create social context that will facilitate the best in us and that does require us to have much better education about the nature of the mind and what it is that will facilitate us to move towards compassionate stars and living because we're not living in hunter-gatherer societies now so we live in a very different world but we do need a hunter to gather a tight brain that caring and compassionate brain to to texture our relationships um so that's very important the other striking thing is your critique with them i mean there's a social critique in your work but also quite an interesting critique of excitement itself and and of you know going back to those three systems that in my own experience i think i've been in some ways quite driven you know um driven to achieve things driven to um succeed and so on and one of the things that i was struck by you know in in my exploration of your work is the downside of that this has an upside obviously but the downside to that i wonder whether you might say a little bit about that and then we'll talk a bit more sure so what was what what did you perceive as your downside for that well i i definitely felt driven you know that that sense of um because i i think you know to talk more personally that i i felt that i needed to be a someone yes you know i didn't quite know what that meant yes and it was always a disappearing horizon yes and i'd often have this sense of achieving something which other people would say was great but it didn't please me by the hint yes um if anything i felt worse for you sometimes yes and then that would often drive me to think okay well i can do yes more yes um you know i could i could that could be better i could always i can always tell you how things could be better yes yes i don't know what you said no no it's a great it's great question so the point about it is you you we're always in a catch-22 when we're like that right because we're trying to earn a sense of connectiveness basically that's when you have a sense of loneliness and or disconnection or whatever for reasons that you would know um so the brain then thinks ah hang on a moment but i can win the ticket i can work it out you know if i become ex or why then people are going to really like me aren't they that's great right the cash 22 is that yeah but there's a part of you that knows you're buying it and therefore it's not genuine because if tomorrow you fail then they're not going to bother again are they so you have to keep it up don't you see so although it gives you a short-term buzz it can't give you a long-term bus because it's the wrong system it's in the the drive system it's not in the green system so it can't give you that sense of connectedness because people want you because you you just you regardless whether you succeed whether you're fair it doesn't really matter it's just you we're interested in that's all we're assuming um it's difficult to get that feeling of just i'm okay as i'm i am right now you know um so you know part of what psychotherapy does is to help and what buddhism does as well as to help you understand your you're okay as you are and yeah if you can do things and people like it that's that's kind of cool rather like it uh but that that aspect that there's a sense and understanding both consciously and unconsciously that if this is the only way i can get accepted it's it's not worth anything because the moment i can't do it anymore you'll forget me won't you you won't want me anymore yeah i'd like to continue talking more personally because one of the things one of the reasons i wanted to be able to meet you here in derby is is to thank you um i feel as a personal gratitude to you because you know to share a sort of slightly personal story but you know we're all persons like we thought why not you know i've been practicing buddhism for many many years um and i kept on finding myself in the same kind of problem i would be in meetings where i'd feel that something very important was at stake and i needed to speak up for that important thing or i could see that it could be better i then get sort of rather hot about that and upset about that people would then sort of withdraw from me and then i'd have to i felt that i'd get hotter and more confused to try to explain what i was trying to see um and i then i'd feel quite ashamed of that afterwards and wish i hadn't done it so so i out of that in that repeating experience i a friend of mine suggested cft compassion focus therapy that you created and um i mean i've been doing it for a few years now and i've found it's made a huge difference so i do feel you know personally grateful to you without you knowing you haven't actually helped me well thank you so much me to me it's quite important you've really actually helped me that's great and you see how that is i i really struggled with wanting to be helped because i've been practicing buddhism and i've been doing this practice called the metabolism i thought we might explore a bit in a moment and uh you think i should be able to do that yeah and i there was something i was tripping up on yeah yeah um i don't know where i want where i don't know whether that strikes anything for you whether i could ask you more questions about that but yeah and i think it's a wonderful question because i think people do uh look to these practices almost for psychic healing you know psychological healing which sometimes it can be but it's like saying you know i've been going to the gym i'm super fit but i've still got my my ankle still hurt and you say yes because you've got tendinitis right it's actually you want to do less exercise not more so a lot of the buddhist practices really are about developing this deeper wisdom of knowing intentionality uh insight into the nature of mind and so on and so on but they're not specifically designed to address underlying um emotional problems partly because in the buddhist traditions they don't exist i mean you you know it's the dalai lama says you know if you're part of a monastery and you're part of a connected community you're part of the sangha i mean you are part of it you know why would you have a sense or you're not so they then they don't it it's the western society that has this serious problem with people feeling disconnected and detached and not part of and the drive to be part of which is within the buddhist communities of course that just wasn't the way that didn't exist like that so you we need to have a therapeutic process that would address the fractures of the attachment system or the problems that people have and like the ways in which they try to compensate which is you spoke brilliantly elegantly about that but as you say part of the problem is that there's an urgency in it an urgency to recognize me to accept me to see i've got the good i got the right i can sort it you've got to do this all of that stuff which is really coming from this deeper level of uh need for connectedness really that's where it is you see and um so in the cft what we would do is as you probably know we take all that we'd say oh that's really interesting let's just talk to your the self that wants to kind of get hold of the committee and say do it this way without shaming them okay so let's explore that let's really be a take a compassion that to this part of you that wants to say those things to people relatively playful and allow you just to really explore what is that drive about because when you really explore what that drive is about rather than being ashamed of it and i shouldn't be doing this then you begin in touch with the underlying that takes you into your own anger but it will also take you into grief then the grieving will facilitate the process of allowing you to open and then have a different relationship with other people but the grieving in thee of tea as you know is very very important because all of these things are rooted in a deep fracture in the sense of self in relationship to others [Music] you know as i've been really struck by that that fracture you know um you know for instance when i first came to buddhism i was taught the metabolic practice i didn't know whether you've heard about that but that the cultivation of loving kindness and it starts with cultivating love and kindness to yourself very light cft and then you know loving kindness for all beings actually for me it made matters worse because i came to buddhism with a very very self-critical even a time to think self-hating um habit um nobody's fault you know it wasn't my parents fault but you know they were very busy i have four or three older brothers i have a younger sister my parents worked full-time in a in their own business so you know and i think looking back on it that something didn't happen quite it was not wasn't their fault um but i was struck by you know as doing the metabolic practice trying to you know they said okay develop loving kindness for yourself i thought yes i definitely need that develop loving kindness for all beings yes that's definitely the thing to do and guess what i can't do it so here's another thing i can't do and then someone said to me um well just spend all the time just developing loving kindness for yourself and that made it worse still because then it was like you can't even get past the first stage of this so what happened is just to be conventional is i just gave up doing it it just seemed to make matters worse and it was only by having cft that i started approaching that again so what why didn't that work because you could think okay develop compassion for yourself for me that really didn't work for me it actually increased my sense of self problematization because i saw that it was valuable as i said i couldn't do it at least that's what i believed what would you have said to me then you know um well firstly i think it's a wonderful thing you say you know the reasons for thinking about what is it that makes self-compassion so difficult yes very very very important message because it's very difficult for a lot of people and there are different reasons for that there are different things going on to do with that so you know in therapy we try to explore that's about what you feel if you start to do it and so on but you you in cft there's always the big three in in um cft linked to the threat system which is anger fear and sadness there's your big three and so when you run into any block like this you've always got these operating under the surface so in therapy what we would do we would begin to explore what that's about and the key thing is really is helping you we i i to help you be a little playful because if you come from the back once you can be a little playful that loosens it up and then you can begin to think about you know this loving kindness because you can have some fun with it you can say yeah but do i have to be loving the kind of i mean even all souls i mean are you serious so the key thing is loosen it up a little bit and then you say okay so let's think about that so what is it about and then we sometimes when underneath of it there is so much unprocessed rage and uh sadness that it's just not possible because really what that rather is doing if you're not careful it'll start to try to cover it up it's like it'll start to kind of rather than actually know you need to experience this i mean you need to be able to be okay with your rage even if that's all right and you can be compassionate to your raging you know so sometimes um when we work with people have that we really facilitate their ability to rage you know to literally say you and really feel that you know so so they can be compassionate to the fact that as a human being they have that degree of pain or they can just cry whatever there isn't anything that compassion can't take to but if you try to kind of impose it in a sense and not listen to those hurt parts of yourself right not take them and say i want to know about you ray talk to me about your rage you part of you um then that's when the meditations get into church it's trouble i think i mean that's really for me i think it was it's more fear and sadness yeah although perhaps there's rage there as well and we've got plenty of that as well yes yes but yeah let's do the whole thing you know um but it was i think looking back as trying to sort of pump it up that's right you know let's just be well i meant you know you you the traditional phrase may have be well may i be happy yeah maybe free from something absolutely believe in that yes yes but in some way i didn't believe in that yes and um i just tried to pump it up and then for me it just created a sense of i can't do this yes and i've already got a long list of things i can't do yes and feeling love for myself has now been added to the list yes yes which is a very unhappy consequence of that yes so that's a great question because we all also as you probably know we don't go anywhere near love and not so much to kindness in the beginning [Music] because we often depressed people can't they really it's almost toxic to them so in our view of compassion we talk about being sensitive to suffering and being committed to trying to do something about it whether that will involve kindness or not we don't know that's down the road but the first thing is let's be sensitive to your suffering let's see what the nature of your suffering is about let's see where the wounds are let's see what the feelings are around that and then we bring the wisdom of compassion to that so now then how would we hold that how would we be with that okay and that then becomes a way which we then allow facilitate soften if you want to use that word uh and work through those um because there's all wounds you see yeah it's all to do with wounds right healing the wounds healing the wounds particularly when the wounds bite you yeah and then they bite other people though they don't stick with you that's why there's always the three you see there's always the anger there because the anger slips out from time to time you can see it that anger there and it can can it can come out but the key thing is always whatever the dark side of your mind remember you never built your brain you never chose to have that brain that to do that you didn't choose any of that so the key thing is just to say okay let me just find this let me work with my dark side my raging um and then that is what moves you we have you know give you an example of some another common reason that people get into trouble is because um they the the the rage can actually uh slip over into sadistic fantasy and see if they have sadistic fantasies about wanting to hurt people or they enjoy watching horror films order then they say i can't be compassionate to that i'm so full i'm so full of you think i can't i can't be compassionate i can't be compassionate to myself you know i'm not i'm just not a nice person you know i can't do it so that's gonna be another process and then you have to do the same thing again okay so let's think about what it is about you that's not nice and how can we be compassionate to that and so on and so on which is interesting so because i come to some of the more resistances to self-compassion in a minute because but the other thing that i noticed doing cft you know it has been i think very important for me to do doing cft um thanks to you um was um because i've had psychotherapy before and although i valued it what i ended up with feeling is like i've talked about my difficult childhood you know i'm very i can be quite you know i'm fairly aware of that and i can talk without blame about my child but it didn't seem to make much difference after a certain point you know i talked about what i felt at times and this might have been my problem rather than the therapies that i've tried but you know i felt ended up feeling um yeah i had better explanations for why i was often depressed and unhappy which was my history um but i didn't didn't change that very much i'd still feel rotten and unhappy but i could tell you more about it's ideology um and it felt in cft that it was but then i've also done you know sort of cbts and things like that where for me it felt a bit thin a bit like oh yes well to replace this thought with that thought for me it felt i don't know again it might be my fault rather than the therapist but you know a bit a bit too too cognitive a bit more like well here's the answer to this question and perhaps i was but cft seemed to be somewhere between that to me there seemed to be a an exploration of my past and an empathy for that um i was struck by my therapist being quite empathic and feeling that i could talk to them he was saying look i can't pronounce your name and i said that's that's the first qualification yeah i don't i don't want to be seeing a therapist you can quite pronounce my name i didn't want to buddhist in other words i wanted another vision from myself um is that your sense of safety that's somewhere because it seems to have taught it has talking in it obviously but it also has practices and also i'd be given you know it was my therapist you then said how about you there must be something in buddhism that you could help you with and i thought well i had this mettaton method of practice but i gave that up years ago and he you know my whole friends were laughing at me because finally after 30 years i had to have to pay somebody to tell me to do practice i've been taught 30 years before anyway just what do you think is is cft somewhere between those two it's your sense of there's a bit of an argument isn't there between psychotherapy and psychology and yes now i mean there are a lot of wisdoms and different therapies and we do use a lot of cbt because we do help people think about how they're conceptualizing thinking about the world and so on but um we're motivation based so we're interested in the caring motivational system because that both physiologically and psychologically will organize your mind and that is where humans are really rooted right in our ability to be caring and accept caring the problem is that um just understanding it is necessary can help but it isn't necessarily going to move you how is it that you then experience caring coming in somebody who genuinely cares about you now the therapeutic relationship is very very important for that but one of the exercises that we do of course is compassionate image and practicing what it is to have a compassionate image and learning what compassion is now when you start off with compassion image you think oh compassion image is going to be kind and nice to me but later on you realize that you could just swear at it [Laughter] so that you can just let yourself go you know uh um uh just having a tantrum if you want and the compassion image is always there and accept you whatever right if you're gonna have a touching have a tantrum um and so the whole point about it is as you begin to try to create in your mind an experience of receiving okay because you giving compassion to yourself if those early attachments are a little bit fractured that's very hard it has to come has to come from the outside first so the therapeutic relationship is part of it but also practicing compassion imagery and just practicing imagining talking to an individual who you would regard as the most compassionate person who will accept you come what may okay that's the key thing i want me come with me so um and as you know a lot of my compassion is based on rage uh because i think a lot of biological life is pretty horrible you know all life has to be other life we're very vulnerable to diseases and injuries you just think of covet i mean what a nasty little thing bit of dna that just goes around killing people it's not very nice but there's loads of these viruses out there we don't live for very long and every you know the buddha the buddhists for noble truths obviously are very very important everything is impermanent and so forth we're full of all these illusions so you know there's a part of me that says he the designed this i mean shoot the bastard so compassion caused us actually into yes but now nature had no mind but you do so now it's up to you to understand it and now bring a new kind of way of for nature to be which of course in my view would be the compassionate position [Music] i want to talk a bit about the the resistances to that because you know when i first sort of started cfd i was very very resistant to it i mean like really resistant to it eventually i had to apologize for being so registered you know that's good this is good um what what what what what's your sense of because you'd think that people would and i and anyone and anyone watching would be okay self-compassion that sounds really good clearly we need to be more compassionate and i mean you only need to glance at the world to think we need to be more compassionate why is it so difficult what are the resistances personally to it that you've seen yeah well we call them fears blocks and resistances so the fear is a really yeah but i don't know what it will do i don't think it can help me uh what will i become i'd be letting myself off the hook all kinds of resistance and the blocks are the fact that people simply don't know what it is right they have all kinds of strange ideas about compassion um particularly if they get it off the internet you know if you have compassion you've got to love you've got to have this love no you don't you do not need love love is uh love's good i'm all in favor of love but what you need is this dedication it's the buddhist position you know this dedication to to be sensitive to suffering nor sentient beings with their commitment to seek to relieve it and unders under the causes um what's the actual thing you know sensitivity to suffering and its causes it wasn't yeah yeah yeah i didn't i used to know so far it kind and so that's the key that's what it is whether you love people whether you've done is irrelevant right okay that's really important very very important it's irrelevant it's just this dedication this dedication to try as best you can to be sensitive to suffering where you see it try to understand its causes and do what you can to relieve it and certainly not to cause it you don't want to be a cause of suffering if you can possibly help it so that's it whether you love people whether you don't doesn't really matter um so like you know doctors they don't need to love all their patients but they hope they want to be as professional with everyone coming through the door you know they'd be the same professional in the same professional support as they possibly can so that that's very important because love in the west is means you have to like and all of that stuff in the the the tibetan concept of course is benevolence which is a different a concept the concept of benevolence the the benevolent wish and it's got slightly translated i think incorrectly with this concept of loving kindness matter is a sort of thing but it's more benevolent kindness a wish for you to be free of suffering and i would do what i can to help you where are your respective whether you like that person very much very much so that's absolutely right and that has implications for later if we get into the ukraine but so that that is very very very important so first of all then sometimes you have to clear out all this stuff that you don't need to like yourself particularly okay why do you need to like yourself you know you get up in the morning you have a do you like that particularly nobody has to do it have to do it cleanly but i don't need to like oh yeah so understanding that you know i'm a biological being that's been built and i've got all these things about me i've got two arms and two legs they're getting arthritis arthritic now and so on but i didn't just like it it is what it is right but what i can do is to treat it with respect and try to do what i can to minimize suffering so i don't you know cause myself too much pain really and so on so and so the key i think is understanding this sensitivity of what the buddhist says is that life is about suffering that's what it's about right and the the in my view the the at the center of the buddhism how do we deal with the life of suffering this short life that's full of disaster grasping that's full of pains and diseases and sorrows and losses how do we deal with that right and buddha said design stuff it's our reactions to these things that can actually step it up so we can have a lot more duka than we need to by how we think about these things right so i think so from my point of view it's got a little bit um tricky when people start thinking about love and all that stuff that's right you want to strip it back yeah yeah i'm really struck by that with that it's to do with sensitivity and suffering and a desire to yes right minimize it and uh and that in a way is it's right it's at least straightforward in one sense yes because the other thing that i looking at my own sort of com slightly complicated sort of resistance to it is and i don't want you think of this but i was i was concerned partly i thought do you know what i don't want to go into my difficult childhood again um i've done it lots of times it doesn't make much difference and let's let i had this sense look i've got a limp you know i can manage i can still do stuff good stuff but i've got a limp and that's just how it's going to have to be one of the things i realize in looking at your own work is and of course i should know is that the brain can it's always plastic so you're not stuck with something now you're not stuck with that you know i'm 60 now and i still can change yeah yeah very much so i mean the assumption is that you can't isn't it yeah you can't teach an old dog new tricks yes yes but that's not the case we now know something called neuroplasticity that we can change our brains but also when you get different types of insight you can suddenly change quite almost overnight and a particular kind of insight can really help you like if you you know you were talking you would get quite you you had this monitoring system this critical system that's constantly telling you you can't do you can't do you know good you can't do you know what you can't do so one of the things is to slow it down and say okay critic i want to have an interview with you i'm going to interview you okay so tell me what do you actually think see and then the critic says i think yes i think this all right then so what do you feel about me i think you're pathetic i just got content for you and what do you want to do to me i want to shake your wake up so when we do meet your critic what we find is that the critic carries a lot of the hostile energies the sadistic attacking energies and so okay that's all right they can do that and then you want to get behind them so what's this about then and then of course when you get behind it you realize that actually there's a lot of wounds sitting behind the critic so the process is that if you just have loving kindness right do that do that you're not dealing with that hostility that the critic is carrying and then you're not getting to the next part which is all of the wounds that sit behind it and that allows you then to be compassionate to that fighting critic but actually at the same time saying yeah yeah i can see that but i'm not gonna take it on board because that's harmful to me you know you know what i mean i can see you're very angry with me i can see that then you're carrying all my wounds and all my pain i can see that but actually that's not going to help me so i'm not going to take it on is that okay do you have a slightly playful but also this taking it less seriously you're allowing yourself just to settle to become less serious about yourself and to realize as a human being we've got all this crazy crap going on in our heads um and so does a lot of the western society so it's not just about me particularly we've had very fractured attachment history so that's not my fault either um so by having this orientation it allows that that genuine compassion itself to then start to come through because commercial staff not trying to suppress anything and it has the courage and the wisdom to actually deal with any of your dark sides you know um so i mean the other thing that struck me was because you know in working with with people one of one of the things that again i was a bit resistant to compassion was i've met quite a few people who's who under the guise of saying that compassionate to themselves won't help you know i don't know whether you you know where you're trying you're trying to look could you help oh no i need you know i'm i'm looking you know yeah i need to be kind i keep meeting people who need to be kind to themselves yeah they need to learn to say no yes and i'm afraid what that can often mean is that they don't help people very much um and that so that's turned me off self-compassion yeah does it mean um oh i need to be i'm being kind to myself yes um the amount of people i l i meet who say they're learning to say no yes i'd like to meet a few people to say yes i don't know whether you know what where that fits inside of compassion but that was one of my resistances to it yeah no i think um that's again a basic misunderstanding about what compassion is about you know the whole idea about that i mean the key thing really is that the more you can give people if you give with a joyful heart you don't get exhausted really it's when you don't give with a joyful heart then you say i'm sorry i've done my 10 minutes of compassion today you've had it right i try to be compassionate to one person every day but unfortunately you're not that person yeah so you've got compassion fatigue yeah so people talk about that and you see it all the time you know south these self-care movements you know when they just say oh you know i have to be to be compassionate to myself you know what i mean i've got to look after myself i mean that's a complete misunderstanding about what compassion is really yeah because it's not quite like that what why is it not because it can sound like you just mean be nicer to yourself you know have longer baths you know get some body rub yes um why is it is it what's what's the difference the primary difference well ci will always come back to the basic definition that's sensitive to suffering so be aware of your own suffering and to what degree you are causing it right so your critic is causing you a lot of suffering right so you don't want to ban it or get rid of it you want to go and interview it so so why are you causing me this much pain why do you keep challenging me and telling me i'm no good and i can't do anything what's this about why would you want to do that because you're just inflecting a lot of pain right so i want to find out what is this pain the desire to make me suffer why are you wanting to do that so that's for me one of the key dimensions of self-compassion is that we become aware of our own dark sides that we can launch against ourselves and that when we learn to stop doing that and actually have a genuine desire to be sensitive to our own suffering then for us to flourish as best we can that's what self-compassion is now the degree to which you then want to go and say to people like i'm so sorry i can't be congratulated today i've done my my five minutes i'm i'm done um you know um i mean i i you know we've got therapists who therapists say oh i have to treat myself with compassion i can only see three or four patients a day because i just got to have self-care and look after myself that's okay but my view always will see as many as you can until you get tired and don't do it anymore [Laughter] um so well that self-care thing seems to me can't just get so tight it does get rid of like it's a bargain with life all the time do i not talk to you very much because i need to conserve something for later that's exactly the point that they see it as like giving out something that's uh you know i've got 100 pounds here once i've spent it that's gone but compassion is not like that in fact what you find is the more you give out the more actually it fills you up the more joy you can have actually so um yeah i mean you just you've got to be sensitive sensible with compassion of course i mean it's like if you go to somewhere in the world where they're starving and you give all your food away so we end up starving too that's probably not terribly sensible but you just got to be sensible really we'll come on to that a bit more in a minute but the other thing i wanted to mention was um what was it i mean it could go into my mind that kind of floats off again um oh yeah you know that this thing about self-criticism and i mean it's striking how many people i mean i i want to say how many people i meet who are very successful now it's very common i'm one of those people so i can hardly know it's very cool but also there's something really good about you know i think artists are very psychical musician you know you play the guitar in there musicians are very self-critical um scientists presumably are very critical you know presumably you're not an art you're not arguing against self-criticism no this is a wonderful question um because self-criticism is extremely important it's all to do with the motivation so hostile self-critics really are just to undermine you and make you feel bad and punish you that's what they're about you're no good you listen but compassionate self-criticism is to actually inspire you to do better right so like if i play guitar and not do very well i can get frustrated but then my compassionate self says yeah okay well just settle down and then maybe tomorrow another go and see if you do look you know look at this video or whatever it is so the key thing about self-criticism is the ability to perceive error because you actually want to do that you don't want to be deceived nobody wants to be deceived if i'm not doing any good or i'm making mistakes i absolutely want to know that but then the next question is so what am i going to do well the compassion itself says well then let's improve let's do better let's have another go let's see what we can do right and we've done quite a lot of research to show that individuals who are um quite driven if they're driven with this positive emotion to do well not the fear of not doing well and bashing themselves about but they just want to do well and they get joy from doing well they quite enjoy seeing where they've gone wrong and then they have another go you know because the the the assumption could be oh you know i'm practicing my guitar i feel awful about it i'm rubbish at this and i want to be i'm going to practice self-care so i'll stop playing the guitar yes because it makes me feel awful yes and that's not what you're saying i think no no no no no what i'd say to that person is you put your standards too high you're not playing the guitar you're not learning to play the guitar you're learning to try to be a certain kind of guitar player but that's not the same thing right you guys i can play like this you know i can play like the other paul gilbert i'm not quite as good as him the other example is that i'm not one of you but when you play the guitar let's see if you can make can you make a note sound interesting can you make two notes sound interesting then you're playing the qatar right yeah that's right so that's the point then that in our society when we don't want to go through the steps you know we want to play the guitar for three months and then be have the experience of playing for 20 years we want to play like a 20-year player you can't do that right and so part of the compassion is the wisdom to realize that everybody starts at the beginning there are steps to every practice and you cannot be further ahead than you can be that's it i want to really come back to that wisdom side because one of the other things that strikes me about compassion focus therapy and your work is is a is a con the wisdom side of of compassion but i keep wanting to rehearse my resistances sorry please resistances or wisdoms in our approach they're the wisdoms and you've got to we we try to find out what that wisdom is right right because you you're not resistant just to be awkward there's a reason for it okay because if there is a fracture or a hurt or a wound somewhere okay it's like a dog if you go to stroke it and it backs away it's probably got a you know a nail in its poor or something right so see the other my other one other resistance was was this fear of being self-indulgent um now again you know i'm not saying obviously not saying that self-compassion is self-indulgent but there is such a thing uh as a sort of being is there not something about oh being overly preoccupied with yourself yes i i sort of feel that i have you know when i was young i was very much um preoccupied with the feeling of being a victim yes yes you know my brother's aggression of you know uh i was i'm gay from a small town where at that time that was um you know a horrible horrible thing you know um so i've grown up with this sort of sense of being a victim and then i looking back and i was indulged that a lot um so one of my resistances to self-compassion was i didn't want to go back to an indulgent place of in my case self-pity and and and so on but self-pity can feel a bit like self-compassion weirdly yes it's like you're trying to do that but in this kind of narcotics what you think about self-indulgence and self-pity yes well be compassionate to it okay because the key thing the key thing always is not to put your mind against yourself all right so i shouldn't be indulging but why not be indulging if you want to is all right you'll see what that's about what's that about um so the moment you're trying to stop yourself and so i don't want to do that i should do that um whereas the compassion will allow you to just move yourself to a position where well i don't want to it's not it's not relevant i don't i don't i'm not instantly being self-indulgent it's not just not relevant it's not much fun it's not much fun right so it's not about i have to stop myself you know if i let myself be compassionate then i'll become self-indulgent it's not quite like that it's recognizing if you become self-compassionate you're not interested in self-intelligence particularly and i've even started to feel something more of that it's just but not so it because you're weird i was weirdly attracted to that as well you know i thought it was terrible and sort of kept getting stuck in it yeah it's definitely self-pity yes um um which can feel like it's going to help but it is never dark no never never does but the key thing always always always is when you get something like self pity or whatever is always try to see it as a as a as a wisdom in the sense of let me open this up let me see what this is about right rather than trying to i should be like that or push it away let me just see what this is about south pity well humans have self-pity so i want self-pity everybody else can have a lie on it you know i don't want to be the only one without somebody what's ridiculous so you kind of take this view that whatever's turning up in your mind that you would then take a compassionate position to it not fight with it or suppress it or tell you you're bad or criticize yourself for it and when you do that you decide um nah don't really want to do that that's much better isn't it so look we've been talking quite a lot about the resistances to self-compassion yeah but i want to you know we're better i'm also aware i'm using no no we're fine we'll find the time i've put some other things i'll put some things back i want to go to this question of wisdom because you know self-compassion has even the word compassion has a very emotional flavor obviously and it can easily be mistaken i think with being nice to yourself a self-care movement that's you know if you're not careful buddhism will get dissolved back into which i don't think works i don't i my instinct is that self-care doesn't work it it creates what i see it creates anxiety and sort of you know sort of frozen that's all most of times uh that i've only got like you said i've only got so much to spend um and i've probably spent most of it now and you know i need to be in a vacuum sealed bubble or something for the next one where where how did you get to this wisdom element of compassion because it it seems to be as much about growing as anything yes you know and really living out your potential yes and how it seems to be a pragmatic way of how do you do that without turning against yourself yeah i used to think if i told myself off enough for doing things yes feeling sorry for myself getting into a mood about things which i used to do very much yes i'd stop doing it of course it never worked yes um but that's the instinct isn't it i tell myself off and then i'll stop doing it yes how did you get from sort of to that wisdom um it's a great question i don't know that i can answer it i think interestingly because i was at boarding school and had all the stuff there that goes on the abuses and stuff like that and i was always quite an angry person no i wasn't angry with people never angry people i think it was always you know quite fun to be with people but underneath i was always quite an angry person and uh very anti-authority and uh i just would never put up with a star critic if a soft critic tried to be authority i was like off right what are you doing i'm so i was never that kind of person that was very self-critical i just wasn't i mean i get frustrated with myself of course i get annoyed and because i do things so i say are you fooled or you've done that but never really had a strong sense of being either particularly good or particularly bad i just just carried on through life really and um so i think that i think the the other thing is that people try so hard because self-criticism often comes from effort yes it's this deep deep effort under that there was i wasn't never like that i mean why is it that south criticism is not it seems to be epidemic yeah it's a very competitive society the competitive motivational system is a monitoring system all the time monitoring how good you are compared to super competition compared to fred you know are you good are you like that may not like that so we're taught from a very early age from school to compare ourselves to other people all the time um and that social comparison drives a lot of of uh self-criticism particularly in the in the young um i'm saying in teenagers very much you know it's a great tragedy or wanting to be better i want to be better then i'll be loved and i'll be accepted if i'm better that if i'm better if i then i can be cool you know i can be this i can be that i can be part of the group and all of that stuff and uh it's all to do with the competitiveness you know that this neoliberal nonsense that we're into at the moment and you know that's that's that's quite a major problem for the young people and social media presumably absolutely because you can now compare yourself with thousands of people rather than five friends that you've got all this right i mean in hunter-gatherer societies i mean robin dunbar has done brilliant work on this i mean he you know about 150 people were in the group hundred 250 you know them from the day you were born to the day you die right there wasn't any kind of this social competition you just had fun with them and went hunting with them or presumably you knew their strengths and weaknesses yeah you didn't have life one person everybody had a place and there was a place for everybody and the child rearing was very different you know there was the the whole group would raise children they would be responsible we wouldn't have these sort of locked up in these homes when you've got your parents who can batter you or whatever um yeah so it's an interesting question i've never been particularly um self-critical disappointed of course i'd like to be a better guitar player of course that's true but um i just find i always found the world i always i just had always had there was always a sense that there is something seriously wrong with the world always had that feeling since i was very very young this shouldn't be it shouldn't exist that sort of sense when i was in africa i remember some of the things there when i saw how they used to kill animals and stuff and one day um somebody visited because we lived in the outback we didn't have any um running water or anything my father had been very traumatized by the way he'd been in the raf and decided he didn't want to stay in europe and took a job in africa um this person with leprosy came and oh it's terrible and i remember that haunted me for a while and just thinking oh this shouldn't be it shouldn't people shouldn't have to experience this you know i mean um so i always had that very quite strong sense that this is not right um and then in 95 i watched the documentary on the the holocaust it was a 50-year anniversary of the holocaust and it was one of the bbc specials and they do these things so really well then they with all the music and everything and what went on in the camps and everything and i mean i cried for about two hours and i was never the same that was not the same i just thought this is seriously wrong you know humans are seriously up seriously up if you can do that if you can do that on the scale that you're doing it uh that's serious we have to stand against this dark side we have to so that so that partly is after 95 that's when you start to see a lot of the push to study compassion so compassion must be the way that we can go how does it work what do we do how do we make it happen how does it work in the brain well as you say you know you you because one of the things about those holocaust documentaries that one we should always remember is that you could have been on either side yes yes um yes you could have been the in the jewish in the camps and you could have been the commandant it's extremely important it's so easy to sort of think that you would be always on the good side of history yes that's right um and one of one of the wisdoms of your approach i think is to yes completely look at the yeah as you would say the dark side of this right because we've often been on the other side of history you know we've often been the slave traders what we did in india and so on and so on so no no there is no escaping every human being has the potential to be a buddha or a hitler perhaps not quite as extreme as those but they on a dimension somewhere in that sort of sorrow somewhere in and it's partly luck in the way you know if you get born into or you get a certain genetic hand and you get born into a certain environment certain families certain culture you're more likely to go to the dark side so i want to sort of we'll better start to draw this close but we know we're talking a bit about quite a lot about self-compassion i do think that is very very important now i've experienced it as being important in my life and one of the reasons i wanted to meet you is to because i'd like more people to know about your work and cft because i meet lots of people like me are very self-critical um depressive times you know um and uh you know i've harmed myself and i've harmed other people through that you know and i'd be nice enough not to do that on balance okay um but you know we we're talking here and we're with you know in the we're in war in europe again um you know and what on earth can we do here we are again and if you know i've got friends whose parents are in ukraine and you know i was going out for a coffee with one friend and i'd met just met another friend whose parents were packing their car to drive to poland uh and i had that same instinct we can't be doing this we can't be in this divided world where my friends pirates are packing to go to poland and then blowing up the bridges in his town so they can't be invaded and i can go to a posh coffee shop and have a in a completely safe place you know and the fear of self-compassion is oh yes here we are again all saying yes we need to be kind to ourselves that's why i wanted to be so testing of that um because it could be so indulgent in a world that's you know full of horrors you know what it's too big a question but what you know what where can we go with compassion and self-compassion that to help you know a hugely troubled world that's always been in trouble doesn't it it's not just now we've just created more and more ways of hurting each other yes well you've mentioned before the issue of the wisdom part right yeah okay so look look but let me give you some examples supposing there's a fire right would you prefer to have a firefighter who's trained to get or would you like me to rush in not knowing what i'm doing because i'm terribly keen to save you right i think you'd probably choose somebody with some wisdom so the first thing the first thing right is um what is the wisdom of conflict resolution now there's been lots of studies on this it's not it's not complicated there's lots of studies about this so we can begin to use our wisdom begin to build up our wisdom about how are we going to sort these conflicts out so the first part of compassion is then to allow yourself not to know i don't actually know right i don't know i don't actually know how to make a vaccine but i know that was important to do and i know that there are people that did know and then i know that people made vaccines so we as a as a group as a society we develop the science we develop the wisdom to create a vaccine blah blah blah we need to create the wisdoms of how do we deal with these conflicts because what we know is if we go back to the primary way of doing things i'm stronger than you and i can protect myself from threatening you by threatening you that is not what the world needs right now okay there has to be other ways so compassion is firstly then become informed become politically engaged take an interest find out what are the what are people thinking about in terms of conflict resolution now there's a whole other issues about should one ever use violence i personally would probably have been in favor of a no-fly zone personally because that was still over the territory of ukraine it wasn't going into russia and it was just simply saying look we cannot allow you to bomb these cities that might have been a bad idea not a good idea so the idea that compassion is never defensive that is not the case a good society has a good police force because we realize that not everybody is unfortunately has the opportunity to be compassionate some people are not so criminal um and we do a lot of work in the prisons as well so we work with people who've done criminal things okay so we can certainly be compassionate to them but the prevention of suffering is extremely important and you know in our definition we talk a lot about the the psychology of prevention so prevention is very very important so not only do we need to deal with this situation now but we also need to think about how are we going to prevent the same old story that we've had for over 6 000 years all over again in another country somewhere near neymar be it wherever it is because we have to find a way as human beings to live together and to prosper together so you know because i already we've heard i've listened to things on the on the internet saying oh you know nato needs to build up you know we've had the peace dividend now we need to build up our weapons you know we've got to put the money into the yeah and these people probably got a lot of shares of the webinars yeah i know but that is not wise because we have to see that violence might be necessary but it's a failure it's not a success creating safe environments where people can feel safe and secure their integrated societies that's how we feel safe and saving the palestinian-israeli situation if they treated the palestines in the way that we did with germany and built them up they'd have a very different case now so we i think we have the wisdoms we just don't have the political will at the moment to instigate them so that's why we need everybody now to get politically active and demand that the world finds compassionate solutions to conflict we demand that's really great that's really great before we finish i want to just because i'm thinking of you know people watching this and you know we've said we talked globally we talked personally i don't know and this might not be what you want to do but i i wonder for someone watching this say someone like me when i was young you know a tendency to depression you know you're seeing depression now is becoming a pandemic and it's you know like used to be the sort of thing that middle-aged men would have and it's now happening to young teenagers and um and it's becoming a major disease burden and you've written about depression uh yeah so let's say someone like someone who's very very self-critical can you what what you know perhaps they can't afford at the moment cft or whatever what what would you say to them how what what would you how could you help them can you help them now you know say well here's here's some things you could do yes so friendships i mean firstly is when you get depressed you tend to want to socially isolate yourself and not talk to anybody so the first thing then is to open up a little bit now there are a number of self-help organizations like um there's one in um in mind yeah and other places so find out a little bit about other people who are depressed right find out a little bit about them realize you're not the only one secondly it's not your thought you're depressed you didn't choose to have a mind that made you depressed you didn't go on a course how can i be depressed today you didn't practice suicidal depression i needed a suicide leader so all of the dark side of the mind are angers or panic attacks or depressions are they're not chairs we don't choose them they just get turned on in us because we have brains where that's capable of happening and that's true for as you say an increasing number of young people so the first thing is try to as best you can no take this personally i mean you're feeling it personally but your brain has gone into depressed state for whatever reason it's important to try to figure that out as best you can but don't blame yourself for being depressed first thing very important you know i'm weak i'm this or whatever no depression is a horrible state of mind i had a depression in my early 20s because i got very angry about something you could read about it in overcoming depression if you want to so yeah so these the first thing the second thing is that if you are being driven by self-criticism realize that underneath self-criticism right and it can be horrible the self-criticism is what are you yearning for you're yearning to be loved basically you're you need to be valued you you need to be connected you're yearning for people to really want to be with you and so on and so we honor that yearning and then we think okay so now i'm going to be compassionate to my yearning i'm going to work with my i'm going to accept it and if i have to have a cry then i will but the key thing then is imagining then having compassionate conversations with yourself so the next thing is supposing you could imagine a really compassionate person or a compassionate part of you having a conversation with you have it talk to them imagine talking to a really compassionate being because your critic would just turn up wait did your critic tears up so you don't want to talk to them listen to me because i know your really i know you're very crap so your credit will always turn up because you don't you don't invite your critic that you don't say today i think i need to criticize myself critic could you come and criticize me please it never happens doesn't it no it just turns out whereas your compassion itself you do need to kind of practice that and develop that and and work with that and the other thing is to always remember that your brain will respond to what you focus on so for example if you're if you're very hungry and you'll see a meal then that will stimulate your saliva and stomach acids if you uh just imagine a meal it can stimulate the same pathways in your brain if you see so very sexy on the television that will stimulate your pituitary which will give you arousal but you can just imagine something which will stimulate the same pathways in your brain just your imagination if you somebody's critical to you that will stimulate your threat system but if you run it in your mind you're stimulating the same pathways if somebody is kind and supportive to you helpful to you that will stimulate particular systems in your brain and if you do it for yourself you can do the same you can stimulate your own brain systems by what you practice what you imagine what you think and then so it's just a case of them practicing having compassionate conversations with yourself right yeah you can beat the out yourself if you want to there's no law against it but it's not going to do your brain a lot of good whereas if you practice the more difficult the more courageous the wiser route which is learning how to support and look after your fears and your worries and the injuries and hurts that you might be carrying that will help you and always of course if you are really struggling going to see a gp that's always very very important going to cgp and reach out for whatever help is out there for you well that's a really great place to thank you to finish just to say thank you personally uh for what you've given me and i hope by our conversation more people can be helped by you and by what you've discovered in your yes that would be wonderful and i just carry all of the things of all the thousands of people over the thousand years that have all been saying similar things anyway look it's been a great pleasure thank you so much

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

Views: 5,175

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Id: ETfRgNf98V0

Length: 81min 52sec (4912 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022