Gelong: Morning. Together: Morning. Gelong: I'm so happy to be here. And thank you so much, Vishen, for inviting
me to be part of this. So my talk is about meditation. My talk is about pain, and my talk is about
compassion. So I wanna tie together these three areas. So as you heard in the introduction, I do
quite a lot of courses. I give a lot of classes and courses in meditation. And one of the things I've noticed, which
I'm sure you've noticed too, is that many people have a view about meditation that it's
like shutting yourself down. A lot of people struggle when they meditate
because they try to clear their mind. And that phrase clear your mind is sort of
thrown around a lot, clear your mind, clear your mind, clear your mind. And of course you're sitting there trying
to clear the mind and the mind is screaming. And so people are struggling to clear their
mind, to switch off their thoughts. I think people are struggling because the
whole concept is not helpful. Trying to sort of go into a blank state is
more like trying to become unconscious. It's like being in a coma or unconscious. And so I think meditation has nothing to do
with clearing the mind. It has nothing to do with switching off. It's about switching on. It's about waking up. And so the thoughts and the emotions, and
particularly our pain are very powerful catalysts in the practice if you can learn how to work
with them in a creative way. So when we talk about meditation and we talk
about consciousness and we talk about expanding our consciousness, which is obviously the
theme here, what we're talking about is realizing that our mind is bigger than our thoughts. And some of the metaphors used for this in
the texts, the ancient texts on meditation are metaphors such as the sky or the ocean. Okay, so imagine you're flying in an airplane
and the airplane is coming down to land. You look out of the window and it's all blue
sky, and then you look down below you and there's this blanket of clouds. It's like cotton wool, and it looks very solid. The plane is coming down to land. Of course we know that the plane is gonna
come down through the clouds and land. But if you didn't know that, maybe if you're
a small child or somebody who just doesn't know how these things work, you might think
that the plane is gonna crash into the clouds because they look very solid. So in the metaphor, obviously the sky is our
mind. The clouds are our thoughts and emotions. And this is what happens to us is that when
we are experiencing our thoughts and emotions, especially if they're difficult, painful thoughts
and emotions, we tense up because we think we're gonna crash. But of course if you understand that your
mind is just like that sky and the airplane is your awareness and you're able to just
move through those thoughts and emotions without grabbing onto them and without pushing them
away, then that's meditation. So another example is the ocean. The ocean has its natural flow, the waves. The waves are coming, the waves are going,
the waves aren't separate from the ocean. They're just the natural expression of the
ocean. So because of that non-separation the ocean
doesn't need to push away its waves or grab onto its waves. The ocean has no problem with its waves. So similarly the mind doesn't need to have
any problem with its thoughts and emotions if it learns just to accept. So I wanna talk about very a simple meditation
technique, which I'm sure you've all practiced, but I want to talk about it in this context. And that's when we meditate by focusing on
our own breathing. I mean that's a very basic, very classical
meditation technique. And I wanna talk about how this helps us to
enhance our awareness. So when we're focusing on our breathing, we
all know how quickly the plan fails because we sit down with the plan that we're gonna
meditate and we're gonna focus on our breathing, and then within a few seconds we're thinking
about what's for lunch, or the mind is, you know, going here and going there. That is where the training now kicks in because
here we now have the chance to notice that our mind got lost and bring our attention
back to the breathing. So we're not trying to remove the thoughts,
we're just bouncing back to the present moment. So we're just leaving the thought alone. We're not blocking it, we're not chasing it,
we're just letting it be and returning. So every time we return to the breath we're
strengthening our awareness, we're building a relationship with our awareness. We are being that awareness. So we're being the sky instead of the clouds. And we do that again and again and again. And obviously we're gonna get stronger at
it and more able to come back to the present moment more swiftly. But we're not looking for anything. We're not searching for anything. So this is often the problem is that we're
searching. So myself, as you heard, I became a monk 24
years ago. I was 21. I was incredibly tormented, tormented by stress,
tormented by unhappiness, pain, physical pain, emotional pain. And I came to the monastery to learn meditation
to get rid of my pain. And what happened was I started to become
kind of addicted to meditation. I was meditating in quite a sort of addictive
way, and I was doing all these sessions of meditation and I started to get more and more
depressed. I started to feel this incredible heaviness
in my heart area, like a kinda sinking feeling, like a disappointment, depression. And I went to my teacher, Tibetan Lama, and
I said, "You know, I'm doing all this stuff and it's making me depressed." And he said, "No, it's not making you depressed." He said, "You're meditating like somebody
who's taking drugs. You're looking for a high, you're looking
for bliss, you're searching, you're pushing, you're trying to feel something." And I realized he was right and this completely
changed my attitude to meditation because I started to realize that in our life we're
always searching something. And our culture is very much a culture of
exaggeration of the senses. Feel good, feel high, feel buzzy, get something,
kinda ramping up our senses, or the media that we all view, the Internet, the movies,
it's all very snappy, very kind of exciting. So we want that lift. Even the food we eat is laced with E numbers
and additives and buzzy chemicals to make us feel something. So then we start meditating and the same thing
happens. We're looking for that feeling. We're looking for an experience. And the problem with that I find is that when
we're searching for that experience, we're telling ourself we don't have it. So at the same time as looking for happiness
and looking to feel good, we're creating a deficiency. We're creating a sense of lack, a feeling
that we don't have it. So in a way, we're denigrating, we're denigrating
our present experience by saying happiness is over there, and that's how we've lived. That's how we've lived in our society. Happiness is over there. If you're thin enough, rich enough, beautiful
enough, whatever enough, then you'll be happy. So then we meditate and we say, if I'm blissed
enough, if I'm high enough, if I'm...then I'll be happy. So the same cycle starts up again. So I think if we learn to let go of that desire
and discover that happiness and joy are in this moment now, then we can start to progress. I mean, something else I can share with you
from my own story is after being a monk for 12 years, I went into retreat. In our tradition, we do these really sort
of extreme retreats of four years where you're kinda locked away for four years. There's no interaction with the outside world. There's no computers, no news, nothing, and
you're just in retreat for four years. We were on a Scottish island so you can't
even get off the island. And there's a small courtyard where you can
walk for fresh air, but there's a wall around it and you can't go out. It's voluntary, okay? You heard I worked in prisons. It's not that kind of thing. So I spent the first two years in tears. I spent the first two years of that retreat
incredibly depressed. And what happened when I went into the retreat
was I had a lot of arrogance because I'd been a monk for 12 years, I was kind of a bit more
senior than the other people in retreat. I thought, you know, I'll be fine. There was a kinda pride there, a kinda arrogance. I'll do this, I'm okay. And I crashed. I crashed into a very, very severe depression
and anxiety. And I remember being unable to even meditate. I remember feeling like I was falling through
space with nothing to hold me. And it was such a bizarre combination of like
lying at the bottom of a well and also extreme anxiety. And the overriding sensation was like a knife
twisting here in my heart. And I hated it and I cried and I pushed. I was pushing, pushing it away. And who would wanna feel like that? Of course you're pushing it away. And I really hit rock bottom. And of course when you hit rock bottom, the
only way is up. So something changed in the last half of the
retreat where I started to learn how to make friends with that feeling. It was a massive breakthrough for me because
I learned how to...instead of push away that feeling, I learned how to move closer to it. And almost that you expand your awareness,
you expand your awareness around the feeling, and you completely embrace it. You're opening, you're melting into that feeling. And the key is you have to drop the storyline
because there was a story with the feeling. There was my past, there was this happened,
that happened. Those are the storylines that we tell ourselves,
which actually distract us from the essence of what is going on in this moment. So when I learned how to not get caught in
the story and instead relate with compassion to the feeling, it started to change, it started
to melt into a feeling of love. The practice is unconditional kindness. The practice is unconditional love. So you're becoming one with your feeling. Until that point, there's always two things. There's the difficult feeling and there's
me being bothered by it. There's the subject and object. I am bothered by that. If you become one with it, who's bothering
who? How can it hurt you if you are it and it is
you? If there's a oneness. And that's what compassion is, compassion
is oneness. I don't like the word compassion. We don't have a word in English that really
sums up what is expressed in the teachings on meditation. We use the word compassion, but it's not enough
because it sounds like a separation. I am looking down on you. You are sad. I am feeling sorry for you. That's not it. It's oneness. And it's trained through this interaction
with your own mind, this interaction of non-separation and learning that the discomfort that we experience
is the key to happiness and the key to compassion. So this feeling started to shift. And the second half of my retreat was completely
opposite to the first half. The first half of my retreat, the overriding
image was I felt like I was inside a metal box, inside a metal ball with spikes on the
inside digging into me, and any move I made mentally or physically, the ball would roll
and the spikes would dig into me. The second half of the retreat was like sinking
into a comfortable bed. You are in the comfort of your own mind because
you start to make friends with yourself. So this was enormously helpful for me. And something I'm still learning about and
still trying to share with others are on how to make peace with your mind. And so I think when we're trying to…going
back to my initial point, when we're trying to clear our mind, that's like annihilation. That's a very aggressive, you know, very aggressive
sort of violent thing to do to try and empty your mind. And then when you are trying to push for a
bliss or a high or a special feeling, again, that's a very aggressive…to me it feels
very aggressive because I'm telling myself, "This is boring. I don't like this. I wanna go over there." So to me that's a kind of aggression. And then to go back to what I was saying about
this very simple technique of when you're focusing on your breathing, so you're focusing
on your breathing, your mind wanders, and then there's a moment where you notice your
mind has wandered. How many of you get tensed with that…when
that happens? That's totally normal, isn't it? We feel like a failure. The mind wandered and we think, "Ugh, I've
blown it," and we kind of pull it back. So that's the kind of aggression. Again, I would suggest a different approach. I would suggest that when your mind wanders,
you realize that that is what aids you in coming back to the breath. So your thoughts are your friend, not your
enemy. They're like weights in a gym. If you go to the gym, you don't wanna lift
feathers, you wanna lift weights. So if your mind is wandering a lot, that's
good because it gives you a chance to return. And that moment of recognition that your mind
has got lost, that moment is key. For many people that's a moment of failure. Like I asked you, do you get tensed? That's like you failed. But if you can learn to see that moment as
a moment of success because you were lost and now you're found and you're back in the
conscious awareness, then you're making peace with your thoughts. This is self-forgiveness. This is self-acceptance, this is compassion. And only through resolving that internal conflict
can we become a more compassionate person in our external world. So I think it's very much about the journey
of friendship, friendship with your mind. So as you heard in the introduction, I was
involved in the film "Doctor Strange" and I noticed all of you put your hand up, you've
all seen it. And to me that's a very interesting metaphor
for what I'm talking about. Of course it's a Disney Marvel movie. It has to be bells and whistles, big effects. That's part of the deal. But I wonder how many people got the true
message of it. I wonder how many people thought, "Great,
if you meditate, you can fly." I got a few emails afterwards saying, you
know, "Is that how it works?" If you meditate, you can open portals to another
universe. That's not the point. Actually, all those scenes where Benedict
was flying through space with kind of colors and psychedelic goings on and hands reaching
for him, kind of demonic forces, it's all a symbol. It's a symbol for the loss of self because
the film starts with this very arrogant doctor who is all puffed up and he goes to the ancient
one and she says, "It's not about you. It's not about you." It's not that he has to remove his ego or
destroy it. He has to transcend it. And so when he's experiencing all of that
wormhole in space and going through all that, those experiences, that's what I've been talking
about. It's a symbol for embracing the shadow, embracing
the darkness. It's not about flying up there. It's about flying in here. If you wanna fly up there just catch a plane,
it's easy. So I think that's the important message about
meditation that I wanted to share with you is that it's about compassion. And now I want to say a few more things about
compassion. I think that there's a lot of people who meditate
understandably to reduce their stress. That's fine. That's okay. But there comes a point where you wanna kinda
go further than that. There comes a point where it's kinda beyond
just relaxing, and that's what my workshop this afternoon will be about. We'll expand more on that in that session. And I think that point is where you start
thinking about compassion and the idea that your practice of meditation is an act of compassion
and you are practicing in order to benefit others, not just yourself. And this is how you expand your practice. You know how when we do a session of meditation,
maybe, I don't know, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and our mind is just wandering the whole time
and we finish our 10 minutes and we think, "Well, what was that about? Was it worth it?" It feels like a drop in the ocean, doesn't
it? But if you motivate that practice as compassion,
you're doing it for compassion, then you're taking that drop and you're putting it in
the ocean. The drop in the ocean becomes the ocean, it
becomes limitless. What is the ocean? The ocean is simply the total of all the drops. So when we do our meditation and we start
each session by creating a very profound intention of compassion, we want to benefit all beings
and we're meditating out of love for all beings. And then at the end of the session, having
a moment of dedicating the practice to all beings. A moment where you think, "I give this to
all beings." What you've done is you've turned your 5 or
10-minute meditation into a compassion practice. In one of the Buddhist texts it says, "If
you have a drop of water and it's just lying on the palm of your hand and you just leave
it there, the drop of water just dries up. If you want to make that drop of water last
forever, you take that drop and you put it in the ocean and it becomes part of the ocean." So similarly with our practice, if our practice
of meditation is very self-motivated, it's like the drop of water on the hand. It just dries up. If it's compassion motivated, it's like putting
the drop of water in the ocean, it becomes limitless. What do I mean by self-motivated practice? I mean when we're just trying to get something
out of it for ourself because the problem there is that the self is insatiable, ourself
is...it's like working for a boss who's never happy with anything you do. Whatever you do the boss says, "That's not
good enough. I want more. You didn't do it right." The nagging voice of our ego is constantly
telling us, "You gotta be better. You gotta be bigger. You've gotta be stronger. You've gotta be more this, more that." Because the mechanism of self is all around
pushing for something and pushing away something, wanting more, wanting to get away from something
else, grasping after pleasure, pushing away discomfort. And this is like running on a wheel, like
a hamster on a wheel, you know, running, running, running, but not moving, running towards pleasure,
running away from pain. That's the sort of mechanics of ego. And so when that becomes the energy of our
meditation practice, the same problem happens. The meditation practice actually feels like
it's like a drop of water that's just dried up. It doesn't seem to… There's no juice, you know, it's just dry. And the practice becomes very unsatisfying. Well, you could experience what I experienced
where I was having that sort of heaviness in my heart because I was feeling I wasn't
getting anything from it. It's kinda ego based practice. Compassion based practice is where you're
practicing for the benefit of others, which includes you. I'm not saying you are just this doormat and
you're gonna become this kinda Marta and help everybody and you're going to be miserable. I don't mean that. Compassion is incredibly enriching. And according to Buddhist philosophy, compassion
is the natural state of our mind. Compassion is the natural state of our mind. And I'm very interested in the links between
Buddhism and neuroscience. And when we talked with neuroscientists, they
talk about the natural chemistry of the body, which a baby experiences. Oxytocin. You know, oxytocin is the chemical that a
baby experiences when the mother and child...when she's breastfeeding the child, mother and
baby go into a state of oxytocin. This is also default state, chemically. Oxytocin is the chemistry of love, the chemistry
of unconditional love. You know, when it's love that needs something
like a validation it's more like dopamine, the druggy love. When it's a love that's expanded and doesn't
want anything in return it's oxytocin. So that to me suggests that we are hardwired
for love on a chemical level. In Buddhist philosophy it's been talked about
for centuries, but it's exciting to see how science is catching up with Buddhism, 2,500
years a bit late but anyway. So according to this knowledge, compassion
is our natural state. So the quality of our consciousness is love. The nature of our consciousness is love, unconditional
love, not love that needs validation, but unconditional love. So if we are meditating with that in mind
and we're having that sense of compassion, that giving in our practice, then we're on
the right track. And as I said earlier, how you relate to your
own discomfort is the key. It is absolutely the key. And what I try to work with myself and what
I try to share with others is those tiny moments, those tiny moments of discomfort throughout
the day, I find those very interesting, those tiny moments of physical and emotional discomfort. That's the practice. So when you're standing in a queue or when
you're stuck in traffic, even when you are in like the hotel here and you're pressing
the button at the lift, the elevator and you're waiting for the lift. There's a moment of waiting, isn't there? There's a moment where the body tenses up. "When's the lift gonna come?" We see all these moments of waiting, being
stuck, stuck in traffic, standing in a queue, whatever. We see these as moments of discomfort, moments
of time stolen. For a meditator these are moments of time
given because if you can learn how to in that moment completely surrender, you're reprogramming
your brain, you're reprogramming your heart, you're learning to meet discomfort as a friend. So it doesn't have to be a big huge thing
like sitting in a four-year retreat and having a knife twisting in your heart like I was
describing. It can be a very subtle moment during the
day where you feel that discomfort and instead of seeking another something to get rid of
it, you meet it with love, you meet it with acceptance. These tiny micro sensations are very exciting
when you learn how to work with them, micro sensations in the body, micro sensations of
tension in your shoulders, in your belly, in your hands. Don't even try to relax them because trying
to relax is another kind of aggression. I'm tense. I need to relax. What I mean is you just meet it with awareness. This whole thing is around awareness. This whole thing is around conscious awareness,
being the sky instead of the clouds. The sky encompasses the clouds. So normally when we have sensations of tension
in our body, we push them away. We hate them. But if you can relax with them and just be
compassionate and be in that moment with awareness, you're making friends with reality. This is how to increase joy without looking
for joy. It's a paradox. You know how people fall in love when they
stop looking for Mrs. Right or Mr. Right? It's the same with meditation. One of my teachers once said, "We're mentally
very rich when we desire nothing." We're mentally very rich when we desire nothing. I think that's a very powerful statement. We're mentally very rich when we desire nothing. So what I'm saying here is that if you're
trying to push yourself into a state of joy, you're just focusing on the absence of joy. You're focusing on lack. If on the other hand, you meet pain with joy,
you're programming yourself, you're teaching yourself that you can be present. And in this moment, everything is there. Everything you always wanted is there. And what this exercise does is a very clever
thing. You know, the exercise of learning to be mindful
or aware or present in traffic jams or queues or when your phone slows down, any of these
kinda waiting situations. It's very clever because next time you're
stuck in traffic, you're gonna think, "Oh great, I can try that thing now. I can do that thing I learned from that monk. I'm gonna do it." So you're almost saying, "Bring it on. Bring it on. Bring on the pain because this is my training." So then your relationships change. That person you find uncomfortable becomes
your friend. Because instead of mentally shutting down
and feeling, "Oh, this pain, I want it to go away," you're opening to it. Your consciousness is expanding to just be
with what is and not push anything away. So you have a kinda oneness, like a unity. And that means anytime anything goes wrong
in your life, you could kinda get excited about it. You could think, "I'm gonna rewire my neurons. I'm gonna change my brain chemistry." It's counterintuitive, isn't it? Because normally we wanna feel good, but feeling
bad. It doesn't have to be feeling bad. It's a subjective experience. It's a matter of opinion. So I'd like to just end this session with
a short meditation. I know some of you are gonna come to the longer
session I'm doing this afternoon, but I'd love to meditate with you guys together now
if you like. You know, a lot of people like to close their
eyes when they meditate. I do the opposite. I keep my eyes open. That's how I was taught. And the reason for that is it's about being
in this moment rather than shutting down this moment or changing this moment. And the meditation I'd like to share with
you, which is really easy to do here, maybe not in this room, but here is to look at the
ocean, to look at the ocean or look at the sky. So in this room I'd like to ask you to visualize
the ocean or the sky, but I'd like to also encourage you later to go and do this on the
beach where you're literally looking into the horizon. You're looking into the where the ocean and
the sky meet and you're looking out many miles in front of you in a straight line. Blink whenever you need to. Don't sit there with your eyes watering. And what you're doing is you're mixing your
mind with space. Your mind is expanding. Your mind is becoming one with the sky. You're not kind of hemmed in, you're completely
open, and all the distractions are just like waves in the ocean or clouds in the sky. And you're just almost looking through them,
looking beyond them, and you're not grasping after them and going into a whole journey
and you're not pushing them down. Let's try a little session like that, but
it's got three steps. It's what I call a compassion sandwich. You're gonna start with compassion, you're
gonna do the practice, and then end with compassion. Compassion's either side of the technique. So let's sit up nice and straight. [00:33:53] [Silence] [00:34:10] You can close your eyes to start with if you
want, and we're gonna take three deep breaths. We're gonna breathe in deeply through our
nose. We're gonna breathe out deeply through our
mouth just to settle. Breathe in deep. Breathe out deep. Feel yourselves waking up. Breathe in deep. Breathe out deep. Feel yourselves dancing. Breathe in deep. Breathe out deep. Feel yourself singing. Open your eyes. Let's spend a moment generating the intention
that you wish to benefit others. Generating the intention that you wish to
bring peace to this world. Generating the intention of love, unconditional
love, love towards the enemy as well as the friend. Generating the wish that we may practice to
wake up and wake everybody else up. Now just look straight in front of you and
feel or imagine that you're looking into space, into the sky, into the sea. Your mind goes on for miles. There's no edge, no boundary. You are that space. Space can encompass everything. The pain, the pleasure, the distraction, the
angry thoughts, the idle thoughts, the, what's for lunch thoughts, the, when is he gonna
finish thoughts. It's all there, but you are space. You're looking into that horizon where the
ocean and the sky meet. Later on you can do this for real on the beach. Now we're doing this in our mind. [00:37:26] [Silence] [00:38:15] Your mind will get distracted. Just try to look through those distractions
like clouds or waves. They're just natural. They're not to be rejected and you don't even
need to follow them. Following them is like trying to change them. Rejecting them is like trying to change them. Don't try to change yourself. You're fine like you are. [00:38:39] [Silence] [00:39:11] Okay, now to finish the session, become aware
of your body. Just to ground yourself, feel the chair underneath
you. Feel all the points of contact between your
bottom and the seat, your back and the back of the chair. You can close your eyes if you want to. Just feel the body where it's present, touching
the chair. Feel the ground under your feet. Feel the contact between your feet and the
floor. And then we end with a moment of compassion
again. Make a strong intention or a prayer or a commitment
in your heart to bring peace to the world, to bring compassion to others. Your practice is the path to compassion. And stop there. It's great to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you.
