Exploring Impermanence Day 5: 'Reality Is Not What It Seems' | Sona

been well done nick thank you um what to say today um i guess in a way it's natural to kind of do a bit of a conclusion kind of winding up kind of gathering together all the various things that we've done today and maybe the um what we've been learning over the nature of mind um talks and um you know i woke up about four o'clock this morning just thinking about what to say i tend to leave things the last moment um just seems to work better for me um coming up you know when i'm sort of confronted with people i usually think of something to say um and i like to be more spontaneous anyway what i i was thinking of during this the early hours of today was that um i don't know if we've really sort of thought about the nature of mind we've been looking at the nature of mind from different ways different angles different aspects it seems to have many facets and this will be this will continue in over the course of the next few months we'll be looking at nature of mind in different ways different experts giving their opinions on mind non-buddhists as well as buddhists and it all seems as though the nature of mind is very very complex and um complicated um [Music] and from and yesterday i mentioned the story about the buddha's teachings which when you first come into contact with the buddhist approach to mind and that's basically what buddhism is mainly about really is working with the mind it can seem to be rather complex and complicated and so i i retold the story that um the message is that the buddhist teaching is quite simple that um the message is of a very advanced practitioner in um ancient china who said that they but his teaching was to cease to do evil and to do good and purify the mind and it's quite interesting and i yesterday i talked a bit perhaps more about um the purifier um they're ceasing to do evil and learn to do good and i probably need to say a bit more about that today but the um purifying the mind is quite interesting idea because it's probably pointing to the fact that you have to work with your mind and what you begin to realize or maybe you're beginning to realize or you've already realized many years ago that um sometimes it feels as though you haven't just got one mind and so you've got more than one mind [Music] you've got a kind of a mind that can be um aware of your mind another part of your mind doing something can't you you you can be aware that you're thinking something for instance and this we've been practicing this in the meditations of course you know we've been watching our breathing being aware that we're being we're we can stay with that feeling of the breath coming and going we can be aware of that and then suddenly we become aware that we've stopped doing that and we're thinking about something and we know what we're thinking about and we can be aware not everyone is by the way but um i suspect all of us here are able to do it we can be aware of what we're feeling you know in terms of our emotional tone you know whether we're feeling happy or sad or irritable or um depressed like you know or buoyant um etc etc you know we can actually be aware of those things um as though there's a sort of slight distance between the actual experience of that and the awareness the mind part that's actually being able to observe us experiencing that so it's all kind of slightly complex and to make things even more complex there are in the buddhist tradition there's also the tradition of um with some of the highly advanced practitioners who kind of insist or their insight is to seeing that mind essentially is pure that if you can strip away all the habitual complexities that we bring into our lives to bring the mind back to what one teacher causes um famous padmasambhava calls naked awareness the mind is just pure in its natural state and its nature unfortunately this um that may be simple and it may be true that the mind is pure but our minds aren't pure because it's probably why we're here we have our minds that are constantly making more and more complexity to the um essential nature of um of mind so you could say that the nature of mind in its kind of natural state if you like is pure isn't is just just as it is and it's not a thing it's um it's a an ability um a way of being um that's constantly flowing and that's been the um kind of background theme this week is that everything is flowing everything is changing and we're always trying to fix things and hold on to things and that causes um [Music] difficulties for us sort of creates a world in which we have difficulties and um and it's good to remember that it is the mind and this certainly is what the buddhist says and is certainly what um hani satori realized oh i'm sorry ian and gilchrist realize i think and um is that the mind comes first it comes before anything so it's as though we're actually creating our own reality which is very difficult to believe isn't it because we look around and there's just reality and we we can't really take on board that we're creating it and maybe we don't need to actually because it's too complex to contemplate but what we can take on board is the way we respond to this reality that we live in that we may be co-creating is some we do have some degree of control over is the way we respond to situations to experiences that we're having how we respond we do have some control over when we have an experience by the way there's sort of two parts to it in in a sense there's the part that is like the pure experience but you suddenly realize you're irritable you know you're you're tight you kind of usually my face goes like this when i'm irritable so you're kind of irritable without if if if i had a mirror in front of me all the time i'd know when i was irritable by just kind of frowning i do although sometimes it's i'm thinking so i'm not quite sure but you can tell how you're feeling but how are you then that's so that's a kind of that's a kind of resultant if you like of what has happened before something some conditions have come together that have produced within you within me irritability and that's a kind of is what's it's called vikaka in buddhism it's like a fruit or the resultant of a number of conditions that we've been conditioning ourselves and the way we've been responding to reality that makes something happen within us that um it's too far it it just natural it just happens and it just comes into being and it's good to feel kind of neutral towards that you know it's not bad if you suddenly feel really angry and a lot of ill will it's not it's not helpful to sort of get all um guilty about it it's just like the resultant of things that have happened before that's the first thing that happens but then almost immediately you produce activity around it in buddhism it's called karma it's usually got an ethical basis and um you're either this experience you've got you're either taking hold of it and making it more real um or you don't like it you're pushing away which equally makes it more real and it all happens so fast that you don't really you just think it's one experience and then then after that you interpret it you turn you think about it and you explain it to yourself i'm irritable because of some various reasons and what what you can try to do with the practice of working with mind is create this space between recognizing something's happening and how you're responding and then you work out the more useful way of responding to each situation ideally every situation that you have every moment in life you become aware because you've created this kind of little bit of space of how you're going to respond and if you can respond in a way that is helpful that's more life affirming that's um more generous kind and so on you will then be setting him try setting up the conditions for as it were new moments of experience these moments don't really exist you just have experience but that's how we experience things so again it's quite a simple process isn't it you just all you have to do is kind of create this space it's actually the technical term is called awareness or mindfulness is you make this space this gap between something happening and the next thing you're going to do about it whether it's to think it through or you know someone shouts at you or you almost react immediately by shouting back or thinking of you you're going to fear apparently this all happens because of the brain it's um it's kind of in our hard wiring if we see danger approaching if we're going to cross the road and we see a car whizzing towards us we'll step back we don't need to think about it and we don't actually want to create a gap at that point because we might be too slow in reacting so you know it's normal and and it's it's wonderful that we have this ability to respond to certain situations immediately but when it comes to um our inner sort of life is sort of more important than to be working on creating more of a gap so that we don't do foolish things or when i say foolish things unhelpful things that create more difficulties for us sometimes what when you become more experienced at this whole thing that the gap can kind of doesn't need to be very big um to start with it you might need to make a longer gap so let's let's take the experience of receiving an email today you turn your emails on and there's an email and you don't like what someone's saying to you in this email i'm sure you've all had one of those emails or you get a bill through the door or um through the electronic mail and you immediately respond to it you so you you're already hitting the reply button and you're typing and you're or you're thinking about what to say and in that situation it might be good to just say when i'm dealing with those things i'm going to have i'm going to make a break i'm going to just stop look at something else or reply to if it's a personal thing with people you know maybe do it tomorrow or later in the day or something when you've created a gap but other things where you suddenly feel like oh wouldn't it be nice to um send someone an email or ring someone up today or go and do something buy some flowers for someone or send someone a card or something like that it's quite good to not make too big a gap because you'll start you'll start thinking about it and all the complexities you know go if i'm going to send the cardio i'll get a stamp an envelope i've got to go to the post office if they're abroad you probably have to go to the post office or you have to walk down the street and it all gets very complex and complicated and you think oh i can't be bothered anyway i've got to do the other jobs and you don't do it so sometimes simple things where you feel an ex you have an expression of gratitude for instance you can do it quickly it's good to learn to do that so you learn you train yourself basically in learning how to respond quickly to what we could say more positive more helpful more skillful ways of behavior mental states and to hold back a bit on the ones that are um [Music] are sort of unskillful and unhelpful so basically the message is we've got a pure mind that in its [Music] uninfluenced state is pure and is natural and um it's sort of our essential nature however we seem to have accumulated around it or i don't know how it's happened no one knows but the reality is that um the mind and buddhism has some strong words to use for this he says the mind is poisoned it has three poisons in within it it's poisoned by a sensuous craving and that's craving of all sorts that satisfies all their different senses it has a poison of ill will um of not liking something and even hating something and it has the poison of um delusion thinking things are definitely this way but the world as i said is definitely like this and you're right and everyone else is wrong or everyone else agrees with me and uh and we we kind of are poisoning our minds all the time it's just an ongoing process because everything's in flow it's quite a strong term to use actually and it may not make you feel very good and if you're not all already feeling very good about yourself being told your mind is poisoned isn't going to be very helpful so it's probably better to think of it in terms of rather than being poisoned that you've got these habits of blocking yourself from allowing something more wonderful something more um beautiful to emerge so um it's a bit like you know you've just got a slightly poisoned but you know you're not a bad person you're definitely not a bad person because you've got a mind that functions like that you're a good person and um you're a good person because you're recognizing that yeah you've got these habits of like i don't like these things and i don't want them and go away i don't like these people oh i love these things come closer i want more and more of it and it's um it's all kind of confusing and um i can't my tendency is to try to simplify things and sometimes i oversimplify things but what i've realized we're living in a more and more complex world and it's kind of more difficult in some ways to just um be aware of what's going on and maybe people have been living in complexity for forever because the buddha said if you wanted to train your mind more one of the most important things to do is to live a simple life so what you find in in buddhism is lots of people go off and they used to go off and live in simple places like caves or shacks not work very much just take all the complexity out of life so they could just focus on their mind and which works really well if you're able to focus on your mind today though is um life is very very complex but maybe it's the same message that we could be giving ourselves is to be looking for simplicity and i think one of the dangers of when one uses this i term talk about term simplicity finding simplicity in order to work on your mind it often seems to bring with it an idea that you have to live a kind of well for me i immediately start thinking of poverty you know it's like life is becoming a bit empty you simplify things by taking out the complexity and what you're left with is emptiness and i don't find that attractive at all actually um i actually would want to live a a rich fulfilling life so i guess the the um the trick is at least this is maybe a rationalization in my part but the trick is is to live a simple life that is full of richness so there are lots of things in life lots of sensual experiences you can have which don't cost anything that are free and actually in their basic um nature they're quite healthy so you know like for instance going out and enjoying walking in the park in the countryside what you call nature um sitting in the sunshine if it's sunny if it's not too hot and some people live in places where you don't want to see the sunshine but um where you can look at the colors of the world around you so many different colors even in a forest there's so many different shades of green there's so many things that are simple that our senses can enjoy that are very very healthy and very um helpful um so video marla was telling me about a workshop she was doing yesterday about food about diet and it seems as though if you can have a very simple a diet of food that's basically basic food plant-based basic hmong processed foods you'll be healthier and i think if one could apply the same principle to life but if we can live a life that is essentially simple not too complex and looking for ways of removing the complexities that we just manufacture and we can look for enjoyment and pleasures that are quite healthy and quite helpful to understanding mind more and more and i think it's it's useful to recognize that there is something i would imagine or i can't say no but i'd imagine we're all here in this group because we're interested in mind and we're interested in mind because there's something in our mind calling us to be interested in mind this is so um we have an aspect of our being that wants to understand that wants to remove the suffering that we might be bringing into our life and to just recognize this that this urge is there this desire is there and if we don't do something about it we just forget about it it will keep kind of coming back and bothering us it's a bit like if you start becoming aware it's very difficult to turn awareness off if you start becoming more and more mindful it's very difficult to stop being mindful no matter how much you distract yourself you know you're distracting yourself so you become aware i'm just distracting myself from being aware and actually it's a form of awareness so we've all kind of got this longing um which we which is a really good thing it's a longing to become something more something better and not to give into it but then it requires us working with it and then removing the complexities so that we can have more spaciousness to understand the principles of what we're going on in our mind the nature of mind and um and then doing things that are supportive to creating a more simple life creating a less reactive automatic reactive way of being a more kind of considered a more creative responsive way of being responsive to all the things that we can be responsive to and we need to be responsive to and that way our life it kind of it has this cyclical ability instead of just going round and round like on the revolution where you come i've just come back to the same thing again and again and i'm just fed up with it you you need to realize you will come back to the same thing but you'll be better equipped to deal with it so it's a bit like life does go around as a revolution but it can also go around as a kind of spiral or as a helix where you kind of rise go round oh here comes that mood again but you think oh yeah i know what to do now and you kind of risen above those sometimes you kind of be like snakes and ladders you kind of feel like you're going up and you slip down again but at least at least you know you slip down which is actually in the scheme of things that means that you're actually higher than you started so you you're in this constant process of going upwards or going deeper if that if you want to turn it upside down and looking for more meaning and more clarity in the depths of being rather than in the spaciousness of the sky so you can choose your own metaphor for this whatever suits you best so the message is the nature of mind is constantly changing there's probably something in our mind that's looking for understanding clarity um way of living that's more helpful than the one the present one and if that present life is pretty good is how to make it even more creative and brighter and more beautiful and um and it's a bit of it's a bit of work really it's requires um training training ourselves to catch ourselves at those moments when we're going to do something that we know isn't going to be helpful to us and resist ideally resisting doing it if we can sometimes we can't we just have to do it and then we just have to be aware that we're doing something that's probably going to cause problems but that's what we've chosen and we'll learn from that [Music] etc so [Music] yeah that's basically what i've got to say this morning and there was a little ding then um and that's because my phone is still on and that's because we had a little technical issue earlier and i'm just making sure it's not going to ding anymore and i'm just being honest with you telling you what's happening and hopefully you'll be grateful that i'm being authentic and honest with you and [Music] we can all relax i can relax knowing my phone's not going to ring anymore hopefully so we're going to do the same meditation we did yesterday which is just an exploration of um of our kind of way we use our mind to see reality if you like it's actually in a sense it's quite a deep and powerful meditation because you know we all think we've got this solid body that requires all sorts of things to keep it going and the mind that needs all these inputs in one way or another to make us feel happy and so on but the meditation is just a reflection on the fact that actually everything that we are isn't quite what it seems and um you know there's i think there's a book by a um quite well known quantum physicist who writes it's called reality isn't what it seems and it's quite a good thing to a little saying to have you know to remember but what you think is real isn't exactly 100 as real in the way that you think it is that there is always in like science there's always room for error every single law has error within it and so there's nothing perfect and ultimate but um this reflection on the human body as being made up of sort of elements is a kind of or you could say like a template of looking at how we can reflect on most things in the world um so in any situation we could break it down into its elemental parts and see what's sort of happening and this will create sort of space and it's just interesting um reflecting on our body as being composed of a number of elements and as i said yesterday the putter in one of his teaching names four elements but if you include um the space you take up in the world that your body is occupying space as another element and the mind which we all have um is a six element we've got this richness of different elements within our body which we can just reflect on so let's just um prepare ourselves for a period of reflection of letting go of um yeah meditation in a way is making life simple isn't it you sit still you don't move close your eyes stop listening or seeing things you might listen to me um keep it simple but you know let other sounds just pass you by ideally that other thoughts pass you by but that's not always easy so meditation is the um most obvious way of having simplicity in life and a lot of people find um just to give you know just to kind of make a make more of simplicity is that simplicity has this sort of sense of coming home coming back to your sort of more essential nature yourself without doing things without having to do anything and it's where we if we need it we've given ourselves permission to do nothing and the meditation perhaps is best seen as this a period of deliberately giving space to do nothing useless you know it's a sort of yeast completely useless activity and there's something wonderful about uselessness is in uselessness there's so much beauty and ability to have aesthetic experiences of a deeper more richer more wonderful nature so the uselessness of doing things we just or the usefulness of doing things even we just put on hold and we just allow ourselves the simple life we're sitting still ideally sitting upright sitting with a sense of being alert [Music] uh and in this state of stillness of simplicity of not moving we can allow ourselves to just turn our attention to what we're experiencing in our body we can turn our ex our attention to the experience of our body being kind of heavy if that's heavy i kind of mean heavy in a kind of physics a sort of way rather than a psychological way it's just it weighs a lot all our bodies have mass and all our bodies are being poured down held down by gravity and this allows us to experience the bodies having this mass this weight and as we begin to experience the body in this way we can reflect that one of the elements that we are made up of is it has this label called earth the earth element which represents solidity that's the principle and it's um it presents itself in the body structure we all know that we have a skeleton we all know we have bones we can actually experience our bones particularly you can express our teeth you might rub your tongue across your teeth and you know that is solid your teeth are solid the limbs of your body often feel solid if you were to tap your head i'm not suggesting you do it but if you were to tap your head you would know that there's a solid solid bone beneath the skin we can just reflect on all that solid in our body the parts we can actually experience like hair when we can't if we got hair and comb our hair fingernails you can feel the you can often feel the sort of bone in the joints and we can feel the weight of our body because it has a solid a part of it has a solid mass me uh and although we know the body to be solid it's also changing the solidity is um not just fixed but it's constantly changing and we know it's changing because we eat food which is solid chew food digest food and we have the evacuation of solid particles that we don't want so food we eat is what we become kind of the particles of that trans get transferred into us other particles that make up the solidity flow away so we like everything else in a state of change so in the meditation you can allow yourself to feel solid and then reflect actually this solidity isn't as real as it seems because it's also changing and then we can move on to the element that we call water which is the label that represents all that's of a liquid nature within us it's much easier to experience the flow of liquids don't really experience the flow of solids so we can experience the flow of liquids but we might like to reflect that our body most of it's made up of liquids most of its weight the weight of our body is liquid about 70 percent is water in one form or another yeah we think our body is so solid but there's such a large proportion of our body that's liquid liquid exists as tears saliva of course have blood all the digestive juices the sweat that is part of the cooling mechanism for keeping our body temperature at the right temperature and we drink in water maybe in the form of just water maybe in the form of tea coffees other substances but we can't exist without taking in water and of course the liquid it doesn't just keep filling up more and more it remains about the same volume so when we take in water we also have to let go of the water form of urine and this is us we're drinking and allowing not only the solids but the liquids to flow out of us and in this stillness we may feel you might experience the saliva in our mouth or even sometimes you can experience some fluid in your eyes pulsing of the blood foreign and then next we can contemplate or reflect on the element that's labeled fire which represents the heat in our body temperature of our body we generate this heat from food we eat mixing with oxygen in a form of combustion just like you find in a from all other processes of fire so we have internal heat generation we have the heat from the world around us when it's warm when the sun's shining when we're in buildings with heating and we also release heat when we're in situations where the air around us is cooler than our body we even release heat if we're standing outside a dark night to the universe the radiating heat all the time we were closed to insulate this to keep the heat in the heat that we produce when it's cold we have mechanisms for releasing the heat when it's too hot and the whole process is extremely delicate we need to maintain a core body temperature that's within very narrow limits so this constant adjustment it's totally amazing is absolutely incredibly something so wonderful about our body sometimes our bodies are not functioning fully or create pain and the illness and even the sensation of things like pain which can be like burning sensations cool coldness or flowing everything's in a state of flow so there's a wave flowing through everything a vibration uh so and then we move on to the element air which represents the all the gases within our body the air which we know is around us we can move with our hands and find ourselves we're moving through air all the time and of course we need to breathe in air so we're always breathing in breathing out thousands of times a day night we never stop breathing we're taking air from outside of us it flows into us we know we extract oxygen from it and breathe out the waste products of combustion carbon the carbon dioxide the other gases we breathed in this this solid form of me and my body is just like the whole factory process is going on constant breathing transference of production of heat from the air so our being is made up of this element foreign hmm in this element here we can definitely feel the rhythm of it because we're breathing we feel the inflow and outflow and even if we're not focusing on that actual sensation we can we know air is flowing in and flowing out all the time we may feel it in the movement in our belly or back chest uh move on to the elements space this represents the space that our bodies occupy as we grow from a small baby to a child to an adult we occupy more and more space and the space that we occupy is constantly changing shape this is a little it's kind of more subtle this element but there's something we can also experience we also know how important space is because we like to have our own space sometimes we mean that in a kind of maybe a psychological or mental way but also it has its physical application just wanting more room around us so maybe the space of our body is a bit extends a bit beyond the limits of the skin the actual physical body we want to have space to walk through space to swing our arms in if we swing our arms to lie down in to sit in the space we occupy is constantly changing okay you woof c and then lastly we have the element of consciousness the most subtle some ways the most interesting and here it probably means or we can experience it as complete consciousness of our thoughts consciousness of your emotions the whole process of the brain activity the brain activity that creates a reality around us when light comes in through our eyes and it stimulates little rods at the back of the eyes releasing chemicals signals and then we have in our mind an image that we know is tree or a house or another person the consciousness that has a particular way a habit of responding to coming into contact with objects a consciousness that has a narrative or a story if you like about who we are what we are what we believe in views and all this all these things all these aspects of consciousness well they make up things they recall create an inner and outer world consciousness that tries to fix things down ask questions wants to know wants to have answers that are fixed and real consciousness that can create complexity consciousness that also can create simplicity or a lack of complexity consciousness that is constantly changing there's nothing still or fixed about a conscious mind we know this from just experiencing our thoughts can we pay attention to what's going on perhaps there's this other conscious aspect of consciousness of something that is more pure that's the consciousness that's able to observe watch so to speak be aware of all the mental events that are taking place in our mind we don't really know where consciousness is or where it's located or even if it has a location somehow connected with the body because it comes it comes with a body a live body mysterious amazing maybe it's all around us this is another aspect of consciousness we can allow it to imagine to not fix things to permanently rigidly consciousness can experience itself as changing flowing and there we are we have a body made up of these six elements that we relate to as being a fixed thing object very attached to he's scared of losing but in reality it's just a whole mass of processes flowing moving changing and because it's not fixed not rigid [Music] we can make changes at least to some extent in the habit of being in a certain way but we could just reflect for the last few moments that we have some authority or ability to make changes things aren't so fixed that they have to be as they are in a fixed sort of way we can change we can become something more so [Music] [Music] so your body is probably telling you you need to move it now and um it's one of the other things about bodies that actually did seem to if you can say body's designed the body is has a need to move and be active so it's good sitting still for a while but and we'll have a little stretch and move the body around and stand up if you want to so this is um we have a little while for any questions so anyone want to share any experiences so there's a question from um ming that says you said initially that we may need a longer gap of awareness between the resultant and karma until we become more experienced how does this tally when we do become more experienced as we become more in flow and time slows down and elongates so then it feels like we have more time to respond what's the last bit we have more time to um so i think it's saying that does time sort of slow down uh an elan gate so there's more time to respond when you become more experienced i think that's the question um sorry i might my mind usually throws up complexity with people answers to people's questions um i suppose you know if you if you um if you think about time you can think about in different ways you can think about time as clock time you know that there's one minute one second after another second after another second and it's linear and it's kind of fixed that's how we live our lives but actually our experience of time is much more flexible isn't it you know we can have an experience of being somewhere where maybe we're enjoying ourselves and time seems to go very fast you know we we were doing something and then suddenly it's gone you know the time we we thought it had only taken we thought we'd been sitting here for hours or something we realized it was just a short time or you know very often we're doing something which we're not particularly interested in or it's a bit boring or it's like having to wait for a bus or a train to go and we're sitting at a time just seems like to take even longer doesn't it seems as though it stretches out so when we talk about time i suppose when you have to kind of be clear what you mean and i think maybe what we experience is that this gap although we think of it as existing in time maybe that time is more that kind of flexible time so you learn first of all to create a kind of a gap in like fixed time um but you might actually think all right i'm going to give myself a few seconds or take a few breaths which is a way of measuring time if you like before you act about something which you know needs to be considered action so you you kind of create that gap but um as you become familiar with um functioning in this sort of way you kind of the the gap is there still but maybe it just feels like it's it's much much shorter and more spontaneous so you know one of the dangers of talking about creating a gap in with awareness and mindfulness is that you can become a bit kind of mechanized like like you you're not going to move too quickly you're just going to do things you can slightly alienate yourself from your emotions and how you feel so it's quite complex in a way it's easy to talk about creating a gap but i think the um i think maybe in a way the gap is almost more of a metaphor so it sort of exists but it doesn't quite exist in the way you think it exists and um the metaphor really is for responding consciously to situations which require you to respond consciously to situations so you have this ability part of your brain will just automatically save you from danger like if something's going to hit you you'll move out of the way as best you can so that you you don't need to worry about that but when you're dealing with um thoughts and emotions and things knowing what you're actually feeling and what you're likely to do with those feelings is very helpful so it's a kind of then a need to slow down and give you give yourself space in in terms of time um allow something new maybe to emerge and how you're going to respond to a certain situation so i i think i don't know if i'm really answering your question actually but um just just trying to perhaps give a different angle on looking at what we mean by time and the gap between things so probably what i'm talking about more is learning how to respond creatively to situations then react instantly to situations which really require a more considered and more creative response so i don't know if i answered the question fully or maybe sometimes questions are complex and yeah so there's a question from lisa about um it being more difficult to be mindful and to meditate with um sort of menopausal hormones and she was wondering if you've got any thoughts about how to work with them probably not the right person to ask actually um maybe if you come back next um next month when videomile is here she could answer that much more fully i don't have um i don't as far as i know men don't have menopausal hormones but certainly have hormones um and what was the can you just repeat the first part of the question how do you work with vomiting yes yeah how do you work with that in meditation well i guess with anything really you know it basically applies to anything that happens to us that we don't have much control we have no control over let's say i guess we've had menopausal hormones they're being released into your body the hormones and you don't have much control over them you may have certain control like by taking certain medications or your behavior in you how you behave in some sort way i don't know but with anything that's where there's an automatic process going on all you can do really is accept that that process is going on and if it's unpleasant and you can't do anything about it you in a way have to without not without gritting your teeth and thinking oh god i'll put up with this but you you think more in terms of this is what's happening to me how am i responding to that and of course if it's hurting something's really hurting and it's painful it's confusing it creates a cloudiness in your mind and so on um the first thing to do really is to learn how to kind of accept it in a very kind of caring loving sort of way you know it's not like trying to push kind of get rid of these get rid of these hormones you know it's a bit like realizing you're a human being and this is part of being human it's unfortunate if it's causing problems but that's that is part of life we're all going to get pain at some point in our life and there's not much we can do about that but when we when we have it so when we can't just get remove it simply with medication or whatever then we have to go through a process of um learning how to in some kind of caring sort of way accept it and and then work with it in a sense the more you resist things that are unpleasant and you just you're doing it you you learn to do it automatically i don't want this don't want this done on this you end up with creating more extra pain and tension in doing that and you're wanting this this is nice i don't want this you're just sitting there like strung out between it's what's called stress actually a lot of people live with stress because we're trying to make something happen that's nice and pushed things away that we are not nice and to de-stress you have to kind of learn to sit with an experience so to speak unless i sit with i don't necessarily mean sitting there you know maybe walking around you're having to learn how to accept that at this moment this is going on for you so how do you respond to that in your mind you may decide to distract yourself from it you you know you may think i've had enough of this i'm going to do something i know that will stop me functioning this way and i can forget about it but it will come back again certainly with things like menopause and you know if you're very i know people get women become very hot sometimes your hot flush with menopause so you can do something about that to some degree you can if you can cool down by having cold air coming around you that's one thing you can have but there will be things that you can't do much about and the ongoing thing that is usually you know it runs for a period of time and during that time it's you know learning how to have the best creative responses for this interestingly video mothers actually recorded a whole load of meditations for women with menopause it's on a on an app probably the name of it but um she'll probably tell you about it next time as needed but you know for the rest of us who don't have um menopause it's the same process with any kind of just painful physical painful or mental painful experience is learning how to um accept it in a kindly compassionate way you know sort of treating yourself with kindness realizing that's not nice it's unpleasant um yeah what can i do that's most creative with this situation if you want to know more about it probably breathworks is the place to go to advertise my um organization i started up with a developer that's the sort of thing that people are dealing with all the time how to deal with pain painful bodies and painful situations so there's a question from annie uh you mentioned that a means of weaning ourselves off the sense of craving is to delight in more simple sense pleasures such as hiking in nature and watching the sunset is there not a danger that we begin to crave these experiences as well or is there something inherently different in the nature of these simpler experiences that prevents craving yeah i know why there is something essentially different they're usually more wholesome and they're less neurotic a lot of our um the cravings that we have for central pleasures we're not careful the kind of the kind of neurosis comes about you know we can't live without it um whereas you know if you go out into nature you you can enjoy it and you can let go of it you don't have to photograph it all and take it home with you i mean that would be um that could become neurotic um you know sort of thing i've gotta have this you're trying to hold on to it but you just allow yourself to flow with the experience of the world around you which is beautiful um even you know i mean sometimes it's not beautiful wars and famine and things like that but you know in the in our normal everyday life when we go outside we look at a plant we look at something that's living it creates a kind of it can create a pleasure within us that we allow ourselves to experience buddhism never say don't experience pleasure because what you would do then is just be in a constant state of pushing away anything you'd be ridiculous so it's kind of like trying to replace things that are potentially um i'm calling them neurotic maybe this isn't fully technically the term of neurosis but it's where we just get into the habit we have to have something otherwise everything feels not right we're kind of just craving it it's like it's i think um michael bandu used the metaphor of flight paper it's like where we have a um a craving for something it's like a fly want something and it gets stuck on it so this thing that we're craving we can't get off of it's just sort of like stuck sometimes you can experience in relationships with people they're very very you know you can have a very loving and caring relationship but sometimes it can become quite sticky but you can't be you can't be separated from the person that you're you're in relationship to so what what what a meaning here is that you know there are pleasures that we can replace other central pleasures it's just working out really which ones are going to be helpful for you and less sticky so to speak um and enjoy them enjoy the ones that are that are healthy and happy and available and usually there's also for all the senses we can have pleasurable experiences if we just take the time and energy to explore it more i mean just smelling i i enjoy the smell of fresh bread bread and you know that's kind of a you can just sit and enjoy that smells like the smell of a flower or a plant or something or watching something grow watching ripples on a pond watching ducks you know paddling around all sorts of little pleasures in life which actually when you train yourself to um to experience them and you realize actually all these places are free they're actually all available all around us all the time they have to pay anything for them and you don't that means you don't have to work so hard to entire pleasures in your life you can simplify things can't you it's sort of it's a sort of natural simple process really and look roland's got a cat there that he's taking great pleasure having a cat in front of him and we're having pleasure those of us are like cats looking at his cat so you know you just sort of think oh that's lovely it's a pleasure you know such a pleasure that i'm having at this moment looking at roland's cat that it's free he's not charging me for it and i don't i don't i'm not going to go and get a cat my own cat just because that might be that comes with a whole load of responsibilities and things like that i'd much rather have look at roland's cat and enjoy that i'm not saying you shouldn't have cats i just don't want extra responsibilities sometimes responsibilities are good by the way because they stop you being so focused on yourself so there is a good case for having a cat and you'll have different choices okay how we well i think maybe we should leave it there nick and i just like to again thank you all for coming and just again once more ask you if you would like to do something really beautiful and that is to be um generous in supporting um this project and if you want to give some more money if or gives make a donation if you haven't given anything this this whole project is free but of course nothing's free in life someone's paying for it and what's paying for it is people making donations and they're providing nick with at the moment with a um an occupation a very creative one and it's providing the rest of us opportunities to share with people but mostly it's providing an opportunity to contact more and more people to help them um help those people that want to explore mind and you know feel this calling this urge to understand to work with to become aware of to develop themselves more and more and um you know so it's a very very important project and um it's it's got two it's got all these win-win situations really i mean the more people we can attract and help the more people will benefit more people become aware of what they're doing and if they behave in ways that are creative the world would be a better place that's one thing the other thing is if we have the opportunity to give we change we become bigger and so you know this is like many charities and things that give you an opportunity for generosity so when you you give the charity that runs all this gets the money to finance it and make it happen more you feel better everyone's a winner and so um you know if you can't afford very much you can afford just a little okay if you wanted a figure 50 pounds is be a good figure because you know someone's worked it out if you've got 50 pounds from enough people to pay for what we want to do but the more money we have the longer the project can continue and hopefully it'll continue way into the future so there'll be an opportunity to click on a link and just transfer some numbers and feel that you you're not just moving money around but you're actually supporting something really by far feel good about it so it's almost half past half past eight and here in the uk and time for me to go um i won't be back again um unless something happens just not i'm in the schedule but uh i will be available i will be coming to the retreat in august and i'd love to meet some of you on that retreat so i hope i'll see you then and um yeah i do i do do other things online sometimes and i live near addis and on retreats here so i hope i will meet some of you but thank you so much for being here with me and um thank you for supporting me by being here and it's been a real pleasure you can just unmute everyone now nick you can also goodbye and just to say thank you thank you bye-bye thank you thank you bye thank you thank you very much thank you thank you thank you so much

Channel: Adhisthana Triratna

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Id: zBXpVOj9WuI

Length: 87min 57sec (5277 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022