Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 33-minute teaching from 1987, Choedak offers practical Buddhist guidance for meditation practitioners encountering physical pain and emotional difficulty during retreat and daily practice. He begins with pain management during meditation itself: how to reframe acute discomfort by widening perspective, enlisting the support of pain-free parts of the body in a “logical argument” against catastrophizing, and developing the “diamond posture”—mental stability that resists being destabilized by small pain. He then moves to deeper emotional work, using a life-review lens to combat depression and self-criticism. The core teaching: avoid singularizing your own suffering by studying the universal pattern of difficulty across all lives, deliberately recollecting the kindness of others, and balancing painful memories with forgotten goods. He stresses the importance of tears as spiritual purification, not failure, and of making small, sustainable progress in practice rather than sudden dramatic change. Throughout, he emphasizes self-compassion—acknowledging weakness as strength—and gentle persistence as the true path forward. Suitable for practitioners of any experience level facing personal hardship.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 TtT.mp3
UUID: 22c28cab-7b20-42c7-a2bf-d0f564c6b220
Teacher: Choedak
Collection: Calm Abiding (Choedak)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,371
And try to downsize the pain, I call it, downsize the pain that whether you are bigger or the pain is bigger, you know, if you really look at it, as part of the body that is in pain, I use this idea all the time, a part of the body that is in pain is probably legitimately there is some temporal pain but is having a hard time. And then think of the parts of the body that are not in pain. Ask their opinion, what should you do? And the knee says let’s go out and the rest of the body says no, no, you can go yourself. We’re not going with you.
I have some real real true argument in the mind so that the rest of body also have a say and mind is negotiating, no no see my see in the left knee I told you they’re not going up and unless you’re able to win some kind of argument that is logical you’re always going to have that very very alarming mind and then lose it, rely oneself to even a very small pain. So it’s important to be very strong with oneself. That’s the meaning of the diamond posture. Diamond posture is that you’re not going to be destabilized by a small pain. And to try to see the transient nature of the pain and at the same time to see that you should use that as a reminder to evolve greater compassion.
If you have any self love or self compassion instead of self hatred, there it has come, there it comes, you know, there it comes for oneself to be able to practice. And then practice of patience, practice of diligence, you know, when are they best called for? Practice of diligence particularly. When you’re discouraged you need to practice diligence. Diligence is diligence that comes at a convenience is not diligence. Diligence that comes handy when you really nearly run out of all energy and all of a sudden you can evoke this energy diligence that can totally bring and almost you give up the idea of denying pain.
The pain is something you had to have and see whether you can focus on something so that you can just learn to forget. It’s not denying though, denying or ignoring the pain, you know, ignoring the pain. If there is a corner of mind that you can just keep an eye on that pain and rest of my mind says look you just keep an eye on it or as long as it doesn’t burst, the knee doesn’t burst, it’d be okay. Just in case it does let me know. I’m just going to go to the blue flower, will I?
Just use those as strategy whether that works or not. You know, because otherwise mind tends to alarm a lot as it’s going to be terrible things going to happen. And you’re saying it probably will not happen, just if it happens let me know. In the meantime I have to go and watch the blue flower or watch the breath. When you’re able to do that, I call it slowly learning how to prioritize whether the pain is the most important thing or something else.
Pain is important but it doesn’t deserve the full attention. So it’s not ignoring but you’re trying to see whether you can just do something while keeping an eye on it and then you gain some concentration and with it all and therefore you’ll be much stronger too so that pain doesn’t swell in you. And sometimes when people have small physical symptoms of pain in meditation it becomes a reminder of their greater deeper pain in their mind and quite a few of you said that. And it’s important that you don’t emotionalize that in the middle of meditation. And that’s again the selfishness comes in, you know, oh me, I know that I have so much pain, here comes again, you know, and I knew that, I knew that, you know.
I broke my leg when I was thirteen, yes, I got a migraine, yes, I got cancer, that’s right, yes. You know, really good at making it very very tragic, you know. And so just downplay this, it’s therefore important not to do that, not emotionalize it. And say, I’m having a little bit of pain while I’m meditating. I have pain while doing anything.
So this is pain. Pain is meaningful pain, you know. People break their shoulder, their collarbones just trying to get the ball across the line. So, you know, it’s not a problem. I’m sure my leg will be okay when I get up.
So it’s no problem. You have to think like that, you know. Ordinary people can do anything. And Śāntideva says, the ordinary people are willing to risk so many things just to get some material possession or something, just to gain. They will do anything.
And here I have dedicated this session for the benefit of all sentient beings when I sat down. And here I’m now just worried about my own legs. How can I do this, you know? And in history nobody has lost leg in meditation. So it’s a completely alarming fear.
It’s just fear mongering. They’re saying that it’s a terrible thing going to happen. It’s never going to happen. Some people talk about labor pain, you know. It’s a bit tragic, sort of, bit more dangerous situation than meditating.
But, you know, sometimes the pain is very excruciating, that’s true. But when the mother is having labor pain she can’t wait to see the baby too. When she focuses on the baby and its cry comes and she’s so happy with open eyes, she can bear all the pain. I have been a mother in my past life, remember that? No.
I don’t know exactly whether it’s immediate past life or not, but definitely I would have been a mother. Yes. It is true. Why do they have tragic life?
And who doesn’t have tragic life? It’s important to understand the universality of the tragicness of life in general. Because if one singularizes oneself, that’s what makes the pain difficult to accept, or one can’t deal with it. And it is in my talks on depression I always talk that a person who is depressed usually thinks about what went wrong in their life and therefore they got reason to feel angry, reason to feel sad about their life and even though everything is fine today, the person still carries this frame on their head and saying that my life is tragic, my life is tragic, my life is tragic. And they can’t enjoy even anything that may be otherwise a perfectly perfect day. And so it’s important to see a bigger picture.
And if you were to ask anybody how their life was, okay, people whose country was completely overrun by enemy. Just think of those people. People who have lost everything in war, people who lost their family in tragic circumstances. And when you’re ready to think about all those things, they’re just all over the place, you know. So it’s important not to singularize oneself and become overly focused on ourselves.
While it is true, we may have suffering that nobody understands, you know, and therefore we feel nobody understands my suffering. But whose suffering do we understand? That’s important. Whose suffering do we understand is more severe, more worthy of our compassion than that of ours? Have we tried that? When you do that, it completely lightens your severity of the concern about your life’s difficulties. And that’s what is very very important. When we become overly focused on our own well-being then it makes it worse.
So it is important that the sufferings are prevalent, but what do you do about it? How can you minimize it? How can you stop from here, change from here? Past is past. You can’t blame on, you know, I wish I never did.
I wish I would never have a life like that. I wish I never have a family like that or people like that in my life that I have to go through. You can’t say that. That would be too, I think, critical thing to be doing, you know, because there are a lot of good things that our life had from those very people. It’s good to remember what are the other things that happen in our life with those people.
And then you prepare an inventory of all good things you have had with these people. And then there seems to be quite a list, you know. All the education you had, all the milk you drank, all the food, all the nappies you wore, everything that you have been given to think about how much it has taken somebody to give and share everything to us, education, everything that we have in this world. And they all came from people. So it’s good to really balance that which is called recollecting the kindness of other people.
Because we find our life as a tragedy in many ways, many situations, and not only the way people have treated us, but what we have meant to our own self. But let’s not be too self critical about that. But you have done many things. You are doing many things for your own kindness, out of your kindness, out of you. The fact that people are coming to the Dharma and learning teachings, that’s a wonderful gift that we are giving.
You know, so we can’t be too critical about ourselves. We are trying. We are trying, you know. So it’s good to remember that. Those things we are doing right or beginning to do right.
And those people who have done something around, wronged us, you really look at it, be fair about that. They have done so many good things too. Just think about that, and then it looks like a bit unfair to be so critical about them, and then the selfishness becomes fairly evident. That’s what I have to deal. I have to appreciate what I have already been given. When you remember all the good things people have done, the few things, the trivial things that have really upset problems and blown out of proportion are actually very small. And then you realize that you have reason to feel a little bit sad about your lack of intelligence. But at the same time, the overall picture really makes you feel, after all, my life wasn’t really bad at all.
I have to thank. I didn’t thank enough in my mind of all the people what people have given me and I have tried myself to give to myself. So I haven’t been that bad at all to myself and I’ve never intended to be and such and such people have really never been that bad to me after all, probably they never would have intended to hurt me anyway. When you downplay all those things then you start generating amazing renewed affection because otherwise the very objects of love has turned into objects of aversion and anger and that’s what makes us feel that we have mistaken, we wasted our life with that or doing that or going there or like that. But if you really look at it you have learned so much too.
You have learned so much from those tragic difficulties. So it’s good to have this overall picture. And this is why karmic viewing is very good, you know, like this. And then you’re trying to gaze the eyes so that you can see those things. Not just the blue flower, overall you’ll be able to open your eyes, inner eye to be able to see those things that you weren’t looking at. You only see what you’re focusing upon.
And when you focus upon how my life is in a mess, why this isn’t right, why this isn’t right, then you only see those things. Then when you magnify, even a dust mite looks like a big bug. And it’s important to focus that there are many things that we haven’t focused at all if you really look at it, they’re just as nice. When you have that, then your life becomes like a, there’s a lot more thing to accept, you know, a lot more things. They say when you grow rice it comes with a husk.
You like to enjoy the kernel but you know, you have to remove that husk. And people who have forgotten that they have eaten the kernel, they don’t like the husk. So life comes with that unfortunately. It comes with packaging. A lot of packaging comes in.
And sometimes a bit difficult. And it is difficult to understand that life has to be like that. It’s the same with everybody. It is important to have greater compassion for oneself and wisdom for oneself by not overly focusing on the difficult things that we have gone through. Okay, that may be true.
Listen to somebody else’s story next to you. Just let them tell the story. Oh, you went through the same thing too. Oh, really? You know?
And then you realize it’s just not us at all, you know. All people go through all sorts of things. It doesn’t matter what you have, what kind of people you have in your life. It isn’t just them. They seem to have a wonderful family but you didn’t know they had those problems.
Oh, I didn’t know you had such a problem. And then when you look at other people’s lives you realize. And because human beings universally have greed, hate, and ignorance, they are not all enlightened enough to avoid sufferings, and they all have that. And so therefore, our own personal misery becomes a periscope through which you see the greatest sufferings of the world. And your suffering is a great reminder of compassion. And aversion or hating one’s life or not liking one’s life, wish it was this, wish it was that, will make oneself even more aversive.
So it is important what they call, it’s hard to understand the truth. The truth is very painful. Truth is very painful to accept, you know. And when you do that, when you accept once, when you accept twice, then the person actually again learns to focus on something other than they have been focusing. And that totally opens a new perspective.
And when you’re able to do that, nobody is laughing at anybody’s suffering. If they are, they must be cruel. And if nobody knows the person who doesn’t know the cause of the suffering, even if they cry, it doesn’t really help. So if one knows the cause of suffering, then there is a beginning, there is a chance of opening. If one doesn’t know the cause of the suffering, merely saying we have suffering, this is too hard, it has been like this in my life.
When we think like that again and again, even the wonderful day that you have, everything is wonderful on that day. Mind is too complex. We try to fix so many problems in a simple sit. And we just bring it back to the flower. It’s quite humbling because you just say, okay.
Just focus on the flower. That’ll do. That’ll do. It’s beautiful. Just watch the flower.
Oh, look. That’s perfect. And you’ve got to be so engaged, engaging and meaningful to do. You know? And that’s what many of the therapies do.
They help people. Try to let your mind focus on certain things that you haven’t been able to focus, depending how good the therapy is, I suppose. And most therapy try to help us to open our mind in a bigger picture so that we’re not totally, you know, feeling stuffy with them because one is too familiar to us. And we never can go away anywhere without, say, a person who, by the way, there’s somebody missing here who I’m expecting in the retreat. She was in Sydney retreat a couple of months ago, and she very openly said, honestly, she actually goes out two, three times each session, and she sort of unashamedly goes and smokes three cigarettes and then comes in, you know.
And then I said, oh, you’re smoking? And she said, yes. She said, oh, I usually smoke three, four packets in a day, but here at least I’m just doing one a day. That’s pretty good. And I said, that’s really encouraging.
That’s very good. Because I didn’t say at all, no. No. No. You shouldn’t come to the retreat smoking. Because I knew that wouldn’t really go very well with her. And then she said, yes, I’ll come to the next retreat where I’ll be probably doing one half of a packet a day. I said, yes, I’ll see you there. So it’s important to make small progress, you know.
It’s important to make small progress, encourage oneself, you know. And I thought that was quite good, you know, because she was quite, she actually thought that I or others will be tolerant enough to accept her where she is because she kept apologizing, sorry, have to get up so many times. I said, no, no, no. It’s your own discretion. You’re not doing anything wrong.
And she was very honest talking about it. And it’s true, you know, she thought there was nothing wrong about smoking one packet a day when she used to smoke three packets a day. So she thought the Buddhist retreat was doing some good to her because at least she can reduce thirty percent or sixty percent of her smoke intake a day. And so it’s good to encourage little by little, slow and steady, you know, not to make too much drastic a change too soon too quickly. Then we realize that we can’t change so quickly and then fail.
And that’s what the twelve step thing that they teach in the people who have the drinking problem. It’s really true. It helps people step by step, you know, in a step by step. Sometimes we fall, but it’s good. That’s okay.
You know, at least you’re trying to walk. And if you fall, you don’t blame the floor, it’d be okay because you need to stand on that very floor. So just lie down flat on the floor for a couple more moments, and then you balance and then get up again. It’s good to do that, being slow and steady, and we try to correct too quickly, and then all of a sudden we realize, how come I’m such a mess? I’m not like, I shouldn’t be like this.
And then we become very reactive and self sabotaging. We might even, you know, punish ourselves, and that’s not going to be a very kindly response by anybody to anybody. So it’s important not to become focused on ourselves. And when you do something, when you do certain things for the benefit of others, when you benefit others, you have no idea how much it means to other people. And we are constantly doing many good things unconsciously too, you know.
We don’t even look at them that they are just as important. And when you keep accumulating those small pills, small jewels, you know, and one day you will have a huge garland you will wear, and then you didn’t know you would have so much, and you’ve been doing that all the time. So it’s good to look at what good things we’ve been doing too, small things like that. Small, small things. And if you look at the difficult things in life, also it’s just accumulated.
They all accumulate. They didn’t become overnight, you know. Our life wasn’t made difficult just in one instant. It’s not like that. It’s just built up over a long period of time.
Now you try to balance that by trying to start. Also, you know, positive merit when you try to do that. It is important to do that. We have to be kind. We have to be gentle with ourselves.
And as much as we discover our weaknesses, discovering and acknowledging our weakness is a strength in itself. And many deny that they have two weaknesses, you know. The wise and fool is not distinguished by who makes mistakes and who doesn’t, the wise is one who acknowledges it. And if one, you know, when one acknowledges it, then at least that’s the first step, step number one, you know. And there’s the next step.
Don’t blame yourself, you know, and see that now at least I’m beginning to see what can I do? Yes, I’m already doing something about this, otherwise I wouldn’t have realized. Thank you. You can say thank you to yourself, what initiative you have taken. And slowly we have to be able to mind ourselves, care for ourselves, nurture ourselves, because compassion is not just for other beings, you know, and compassion is also for the well-being of ourselves with it. We need to be kind and gentle to ourselves.
So it is not so much, what you call, the suffering is not permanent, and one’s mind needs to be a bit more resourceful in how to negotiate the difficulties we have at hand. And whenever the mind is under certain difficulties, you need to see, okay, what was the technique? What did I hear? What did I learn there and then? What are the tools?
And when one is able to focus onto that straight away, then those techniques become available, and you might even try one here and there. And try to not build up the difficulties, but try to use, you know, sparingly apply the techniques and try to remedy them as they become handy. And the pain is, all pain in many ways is just accumulation of it, unresolved accumulation, that’s harder to deal with. Now when you learn the very technique of the breath and breath technique particularly as we’re talking about, when you do it mindfully a couple of rounds here and there and slowly one is breathing out more so that one is not holding back anything, and because of that the mind learns, mind develops a technique of its own. How to build up your stock of wholesome, what do you call, wholesome stock of merit, meritorious things that you feel.
You do something that makes you happy and focused, and the pain doesn’t seem to all of a sudden overwhelm you as much as it used to. And when people talk about tears, you know, tears about pain, sometimes it’s good to let the emotion, sadness of tears, of sadness, of pain, just come. Let them come. Let them, have a good cry. Have a good cry.
You know, there are a lot of wet pillows everywhere. People do cry. People do cry on their own, with people, without people. They do. And it’s good to have a good cry.
After you cry, most people are laughing. It’s very therapeutic to have a cry. There’s a bodhisattva called Sadāprarudita, means the bodhisattva who cries all the time because he finds it very therapeutic. Avalokiteśvara nearly became one of that. But Avalokiteśvara became instead always praying.
And that’s why his two hands are always like this, always compassion, always praying. One bodhisattva is always crying, always crying. And it’s good to have that humility and honesty and not deny it as the suffering shouldn’t be there. See what suffering makes you, you know. Suffering makes you do.
And if you really acknowledge suffering, you don’t whip it. And you actually learn so much from it. And even the whole idea of taking on sufferings of others when you’re crying. You know, I’m not crying here for my food, or position or my job or only political reason. I’m crying because I’m having a spiritual purification.
How many times people cry for nothing, and this is a cry that is worth it. And you do that, you don’t feel bad about it. Feel bad about it at all. In fact, when we were doing retreat, my experience with the three year retreat, we were crying all the time. And there was no we, just me.
Just me. Just me. There was not even a tissue box for me. It’s just there, you know. There’s all the doors locked.
There’s no dining room to go to. There’s no hot water bottle up there. It’s just you and the four walls. And nobody looks at you to cry, so that’s much easier to cry. And only the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas know you’re crying.
And it’s good to cry, and hopefully that washes away something. Usually, every drop washes away something, isn’t it? Have you seen one drop of water falling on a tainted glass and then all the dirt of the glass coming down? It does. You know, you just let it be, you know.
Tears of acceptance is a matter of wonderfully therapeutic. Tears of rejection and anger is completely different chemical. And if you have that humility, let it go. In Nepal, I have seen, particularly in Lumbini, there’s a tradition of people, you know, girls who have been married to some other villages, they never get to see their parents. And only once a year, they have big celebrations, they come and meet at a particular meeting point.
And then the tradition is that the girl has to cry over the shoulder of her mother and aunt, everything. And this is a wailing. It’s a form of wailing, you know. And they are talking while they cry. Why did you send me so far away?
Like that, you know. You know? Then they tell the stories of how badly she was treated or whatever, you know. Blaming them for sending her to marry such a far away, and how difficult the mother-in-law is, and, you know, all sorts of stories they tell, you know, they cry. And then the mother who’s listening, just let her shoulder there and then afterwards they’re giggling.
They have to do it. It means they have a lot of affection for each other. It really means I miss you so much, how can you send me so far? Actually she’s happy with her husband by the way. If she was staying at home, she’d be doing the same thing about her husband.
Human beings are very, very funny. Very funny. They cry for small things like that, you know. So if you’re practicing and some kind of past negativities or emotional hurts just come up, just let them come out. Let them wash.
And don’t think it’s bad. Don’t think you have to go out. Just let the tears come. Let the shirt get wet. I’ve seen many practitioners do that.
When they see, when they sometimes hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama teaching or whatever, the monks are practicing, they just, the tears just come, continue like a waterfall continues. Because he’s always talking about how we should be kind to the Chinese and treat them as best teachers and, you know, and the monks just see that’s the teaching, but very difficult to practice. And they just cry and cry, and then they know that is the best thing to do, but it’s very hard to swallow, and they just sit there and cry, and they’re not trying to clean, they don’t think it’s a terrible thing crying in the public too, they just sit there, and there’s not many who’s not crying either, actually, and sit there, and it’s really good, you know. Because crying isn’t a taboo thing at all. It’s good. It’s good.
You have to be able to cry. Being in tears. People think it’s a terrible thing to happen. It shouldn’t be like that. You know, tears is good.
Some kind of release, you know. Something is being released that you’ve been holding. And, you know, I’ve seen kids crying, after they have that good cry, they’re really happy. And they come to the mother and do everything. They’ll do all the things they were refusing to do after a good cry.
So it’s, you have to have some humility about that, because it needs to be washed. It needs to be gotten rid of, and you’re holding it too long, and sometimes we cannot express anywhere else. And crying can be a good trick too, actually. A good trick for others too, you know. If you cry, they’re afraid.
They’ll look. We’re talking about being realistic. It’s not trying to unnecessarily emotionalize it. Try to be realistic about it. Don’t hold things too long and deal with it.
Now, whether it’s meditation or not, sometimes it’s good to be able to feel something and feel that as a result of that, you have gotten rid of that and then you have got over it, being able to go over and move on. And that is very important. And this is the very practice that Avalokiteśvara meditation and compassion is. I think we should go and do that short session tonight as yesterday last night we did the transmission. So today we’re going to do a short practice of this.