Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Diana Taylor guides practitioners through advanced meditation and compassion practices in this 42-minute session from a 1997 retreat. She begins by clarifying that visualization need not be visual—focusing on sensation or breath is equally valid—and emphasizing the importance of self-awareness to find techniques that work for each person. She addresses common pitfalls: distinguishing between mental dullness and useful distractions, maintaining focus on the meditation object, and using short frequent sessions rather than pushing toward long meditation periods. Taylor offers practical remedies for scattered mind, including energy visualization, breath focus, and mindfulness checks, before introducing the Tonglen practice—taking on others’ suffering and radiating healing compassion. She candidly reflects on abandoning protective visualizations once she realized they defended only the ego, sharing how removing her imagined glass dome deepened her effectiveness as a therapist. Taylor stresses that Tonglen requires inner strength and protection through refuge-taking and purification practices to avoid harming oneself; it can transform personal pain into compassionate service for all beings experiencing the same affliction. Aimed at practitioners with some meditation foundation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 Ret..mp3
UUID: 1b57368c-8b60-456d-825d-9c7fc70bb60c
Teacher: Diana Taylor
Collection: Retreat (Diana Taylor)
Date: 1997 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 41.7 minutes
Words: ~5,092
Mhmm. Right. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
But that technique of simply feeling what it would be like as though you’re standing under a shower is very potent too. You don’t have to visualize in terms of actually seeing. If you’re doing or studying tantra and doing those sorts of visualizations, then the visual aspect does become important. But for many of these meditations it’s not important. So any way which keeps your mind focused, use it.
This is where self awareness is so important because a technique that works for you is not going to necessarily work for somebody else and vice versa. Trying different techniques and seeing what works for you, then you can set up a situation which is effective. Otherwise, you’re sort of pushing against your own energy too much. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Mhmm. Lots of strange things can happen. I mean in the context of what we were doing this time, that’s actually a distraction. A distraction is anything which takes you away from the object of meditation even if it happens to be something positive. Some of these distractions can be quite useful in the sense of they are positive visualisations or positive imagery that they can give us the energy and the motivation to keep going.
Some of them can be quite frightening. People come up with often quite frightening images under those sort of circumstances. It’s a sort of hypnagogic state where halfway between awake and asleep where all sorts of images can come up. But that hypnagogic state is not what meditation is about. It’s a state of mind which we seem to go through in the process of bringing the mind down to be calm and still but that sort of hypnotic state is classified as mental dullness within the teachings on meditation.
Mental dullness doesn’t mean lack of intellectual ability in this case. What it means is that the mind is heavy and soggy when falling asleep. So a lot of the trance states which develop through hypnosis come into that category that the mind is heavy and soggy and might be quite interesting and there’s certainly you can develop states where there’s no perception of pain. But the aim with meditation is to develop a mind which is calm and which is clear. So because we want the clarity we don’t want too much mental agitation, too much mental excitement.
Because of the aspect of calmness, we don’t want too much of that either. But in the process of trying to create the mind as being calm and clear, we fall down into the state of being soggy and heavy. And it’s as we fall into that that these images come up. So we need to also keep track of what the object of meditation is and keep our mind focused on that. That any images come up are actually a distraction.
Except if you are wanting to analyse those images because of their significance for you in terms of self awareness and what they mean in terms of self development and your spiritual development. If you want to develop that sort of awareness then you meditate with that in mind. That is then your object of meditation. So you might say to yourself, Right, I want to sit down and meditate and I want to understand more about myself through symbolic imagery. So as the image is going to come up, I’m going to watch them and remember them.
Then those images are actually your object of meditation and they’re not a distraction. But if you’re trying to visualize yourself as a body of light and they come up, then you’ve lost that image of the body of light so they have become a distraction. If we’re not aware object of meditation our minds can wander in all sorts of directions which might be quite pleasant but it’s not having this quality of bringing the mind to be still and to be focused in on one thing. Okay? So it all depends.
You’ve got to it’s important to decide what is the object of my meditation in this particular meditation practice. Right. Yes. Yeah. I can do it for long periods of time.
One of the dangers is that you think you’ve developed single point concentration when in fact you haven’t at all. One way is to keep your meditation period short and that you are quite aware of the timing of your meditation. If necessary, an alarm clock which has got a soft alarm to it so it doesn’t sort of zap you out of meditation like that. Or some way of bringing yourself out of the meditation after say five minutes. When you’re beginning to do it for a long period of time, again it’s like sitting your kid down at the piano and saying, Now you’ve got to practice for two hours.
There’s no way you’re going to get a seven year old child to practice the piano for two hours unless they are an incredibly exceptional child. So our mind is the same. It doesn’t want to sit for two hours on one thing. But you might get a seven year old child to sit down for five minutes at the piano and if you do it that, say twice a day every day for a week, that child will develop its music quite quickly, quite effectively. Similarly with meditation, if we do it just for short periods but frequently, then we’re more liable to be able to keep the mind concentrated.
That’s one thing, having short meditation periods rather than long ones and not trying to move into the long meditation periods before you are actually ready for it. Another way is by you can visualize energy coming up rapidly out of the crown chakra and sending the energy up. That can have that quality of enlivening. Another way is by focus back in on the breath and being aware of taking breath in rather than being aware of the out breath. When we focus in on the breath, In ordinary mindfulness of breathing we’re not focusing on in breath or out breath.
But if you want to bring your mind down very quickly, if it’s very active and you keep your mind focused in on the out breath, that will help to bring the mind down because naturally when we breathe out, our body is naturally relaxing. So by focusing on the out breath, we’re focusing in on that quality of relaxation. If we focus in on the in breath, the body is naturally developing a quality of energy and process of coming in and so that can zap us up. Very useful if you’re down a long drive and you’re starting to get sleepy. Don’t do it for too long because it might be dangerous but if you start focusing in on your in breath while you’re driving then that can give you an extra couple of minutes to get to the next big mac or whatever it is that you need.
So don’t focus in on the out breath while you’re driving the car. So that’s another technique to do that. The other one is just being mindful, being aware. Why is it that I’m sitting here? It’s hard to do when you’ve actually lost it.
But practicing this mindfulness, so as you’re meditating, just having this part of your mind checking up all the time, Now what is it that I’m doing at this particular moment? I’ve actually got here a chart. Familiarity is another one which is being familiar with the thing that you’re trying to meditate on and also it implies having done a lot of practice on this before. So that helps to keep the concentration going. Effort I’ve talked about, introspection and mindfulness which is this awareness.
Sinking and elation are the other two. So also reading text about meditation and single pointed concentration and the advice that they have to offer in those and all those sorts of things. Yep. Right. So the question for those of you who couldn’t hear is about physical pain when you’re meditating.
In this case it was lower back pain but people also experience pain in their neck or their knees or various places. One thing to do is to experiment with the meditation posture To find a posture which is appropriate for you. Another one is to find a good yoga teacher who can help you strengthen up the necessary muscles and to do that sort of physical yoga practice will help a lot. Keep the meditation period short so the pain doesn’t build up. Those would be the main things.
Also once your concentration is deep you simply lose awareness of pain in any case. Once you get to that point it’s not too bad. Definitely finding a good yoga teacher and building up the necessary muscles. A lot of the pain in the knees is because the ligaments haven’t been stretched sufficiently to sit in the meditation posture. And by doing yoga exercises, you can just gently stretch those ligaments out and make it easier to sit in the meditation posture.
Yes. Yeah. And use a support at the back if necessary. Just something having a stool which has got a small back to it to give you support there. That’s what I mean by experimenting with your meditation posture and your cushion, changing the height of the cushion.
See if it’s easier with a higher cushion or whether it’s easier with a lower cushion. I actually find it’s best for me if I’m sitting for long periods to have a cushion where one buttock is slightly higher than the other. Otherwise I get pins and needles in this leg. But it works. I don’t doubt if it will work for anybody else.
I don’t know why it works for me, but it works. So experimenting like that and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. If you can, definitely. It’s very difficult to try and maintain that quality of awareness once you start actually doing things because then your conscious mind is focused in on the doing. But what does happen is that the more subtle parts of mind are nevertheless influenced by the meditation practice.
But even though you are not consciously thinking, then there will be some impact on your ordinary day to day activities as a result of doing that. And similarly, I mean if you go home every night and have switch off with a glass of wine or a glass of beer then that also has an impact on the body in a subtle sort of a way. Or if you switch off by watching television. But as you can imagine, switching off using those particular techniques is not going to have the same quality, the same beneficial impact that sitting down and meditating will have at that particular subtle level. And also by remembering why you’re doing the meditation, establishing your motivation, doing the dedication at the end, that helps to influence these subtle aspects of the mind.
The habitual part, the instinctual part if you like. So we instinctively become compassionate. We instinctively have wisdom. We are not having to think about it so much. I haven’t spoken about it.
I mean, that relates to the use of music, of course, doesn’t it? And the use of sound, the repetition which influences again that habitual part of the mind. If you want to build up a habit you repeat something very often and most of what we do is coming from habitual things. We react in habitual ways all the time. Once we’ve labeled something we react according to that label and that reaction to the label is a habitual reaction.
So by mantra we’re using a different type of label. We’re creating a different sort of reaction. So we’re influencing the mind through that. Well they will because we all have different there are different sorts of consciousnesses within the mind and within the Abhidharma it describes all that quite clearly. So we have the eye consciousness, the ear consciousness, the mind consciousness.
These are all present and can be functioning. It’s just that our mental consciousness tends to focus on on one thing and jump around a lot. But there are other consciousnesses which are functioning at the same time. Yes. Well, have a counter there so you don’t have to worry about how many you’ve done.
This is why we have the malas, to keep track. But it’s very easy once you get used to a mantra to be mumbling the mantra to yourself and be thinking of something entirely different. I’m very good at it. But it’s just an indication of how little control we do have over our minds. And we need to be very gentle and aware of ourselves and say okay, this is something that I have to learn and I have to develop.
It’s a skill, that’s all. So there is nothing particularly magical about Buddhism. It’s about developing skills, developing understanding, accepting where we are at this particular moment of our life and having some idea of where it is that we want to go. That’s all. We should stop for lunch at this point.
I said I’ll stop at twelve thirty and back here about twelve thirty, one around about two o’clock. Should give us plenty of time to have a good break. Okay? It’s more New Age y type music but I thought it is music reflecting the Otway Ranges down in the southern part of Victoria so it’s very close to my home as well. But I thought you might like to spend a few minutes just listening to part of one of these tracks.
Whatever the senses in your mind. Sitting with that single pointedly. Just being aware of how your mind moves away from where it had been. Bring your mind back. That was using music in a more unstructured way.
Just allowing the music to bring the mind in and just staying with whatever was there at that particular point. There are many many techniques that we can use. Be creative and try some out. Any questions or comments about that? The CD is Southern Mystique by Simon Lewis.
It’s a Melbourne group. Simon put most of the music together but I know a couple of musicians who play on that which makes it special for me. He’s now got I think he’s now got two or three CDs out. Yeah. Yes.
Have any of you been to the Otway ranges? Yeah. They’re just incredibly beautiful. Because the music has been inspired by such a beautiful environment and it echoes that sort of quality and the calm and the peace that you sense when you’re in a serene environment like that. And so because it echoes that, then it brings our mind down to that particular point.
So choose if you’re going to use music, choosing the right one is very important. Or maybe that was a bad idea. So you had a very energetic mind to be aware of. Yes. And different types of music affect us in different ways obviously I mean not everybody likes classical music.
I’ve got other music here I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do over the weekend so Having that sort of flexibility and having that sort of creative attitude towards your own meditation is very important. You can have that creative attitude if you know what it is that you’re trying to do with your meditation. Otherwise you’re just jumping around and not getting anywhere because there’s no focus and no direction. But if you know what it is that you’re trying to achieve by using music or by using poetry or if you don’t want to do that if if you prefer getting a paintbrush out and and doing some watercolor painting or something like that. Again these are all techniques which bring the mind down which make it focused and which bring it to its quality of calmness.
So by knowing yourself and knowing what works effectively for you then you can choose those techniques and utilize them. Sometimes you produce good art in the process too. That’s a side benefit in that case. So in this session, what I want to do is to extend the meditation program, if you like, into the more specific generation of compassion to other people by bringing in the Tonglen practice. I know some of you have done this practice before.
Some people have read about it in Sogyal Rinpoche’s book but haven’t actually tried this particular practice. But I need to make a few comments about it before we sit and do it That is that in this particular practice what we’re trying to do is to take on ourselves the sufferings of other people. Those of you who have been mothers or fathers, when your kids have been sick and they’ve been in pain and just this feeling of wanting to take the pain away from the child and knowing that in fact you can’t physically in any way take away the pain of a child who’s say in a high fever or has got a broken arm or whatever it is that they’ve got themselves into at a particular time. And just the agony of sitting and seeing your child in pain and not being able to do very much about it. So it is utilising that mind which wants to take on the suffering, to relieve the suffering of other creatures and other beings.
We do this by consciously absorbing this suffering into ourselves. Now if this is done without a certain degree of skillfulness then it can end up in our own minds becoming quite destructive. When I first started out as a psychotherapist and before I knew much about Buddhism at all, one of the bits of advice I was given was actually to protect myself from the negative energy coming from people who were coming to see me because I might be affected by this and it would affect my health. And I needed to be very careful about it. So it sounded like good common sense to me so I built up this visualization which a lot of people use which is imagining yourself inside a glass dome.
The glass is very clear so that you can see the person on the other side of the dome. You can communicate if the communication goes out quite clearly but anything which is coming towards you, you can select what comes through and what doesn’t come through. So if there’s negative energy that stays on the outside of this glass dome. So this has the effect of feeling, allowing myself in this case as a therapist to feel protected from any negative energy which was fine at the time. But then as my understanding of Buddhism increased I began to think now what was it that I was trying to protect?
And I thought, well the only thing I’m actually trying to protect is my ego. And since my ego is just something my mind has constructed in any case, why am I putting all this effort into protecting? And then I thought, well, you know, maybe I will get sick. And then I thought, well, why should I get sick in any case and even what does it matter if I do get sick? So I began to look on it in a very different way.
This is while I was in retreat. It’s easy to do these things in retreat. So when I came out of retreat and I got back down to Melbourne, I thought, right, I’m going to try this out. I’m going to put this into practice. I’m not going to have my glass dome anymore.
And I was absolutely terrified. And I thought, well, it’s not going to matter if I just do this once. So I’ll try it once. So I tried it once and lo and behold what happened, there’s something, some additional quality in that session which hadn’t been there before. I thought this is pretty good.
So I tried it again and by the end of the day I was feeling reasonably confident about just not having that glass dome there. When I got back at night I thought, oh maybe I’m going to get affected in some way, maybe I’m going to get sick. So this negative mind started coming up again. But I think I must be very obstinate because I thought even with that I thought now I’m going to try this out. I can understand the logic of this ego as just my own mind and if it is my own mind I’m not going to get affected by it.
So over the next few months, more and more often as I was sitting with the clients, I consciously let go of this glass dome. I didn’t get any sicker. But what did happen was, as I say, there was some sort of added quality which was there because I was no longer separating myself out. I was actually able to see more clearly, more objectively without that being there. So that the if in our minds we believe we are going to be influenced by this in a physical way, we can in fact set up our bodies to react in a negative way.
Just as in hypnosis, if you’re put into a deep hypnotic trance and the hypnotist says you’ve got a boil on your arm, then your arm can in fact grow that boil if the trance is deep enough. So the mind can affect the body. But what I suspect is happening is that it’s not so much that we are being infected by the negative energy of these people but that our mind is frightened and is seeing itself as affected and therefore these physical illnesses start to come out and start to appear. So that in the same way the boil that appears on the arm of somebody who is under hypnosis has not come through the ordinary means of some sort of infection and bacteria building up the boil. It is something which has come from the mind.
And if we are affected in this way by that sort of energy then I suspect it’s our own mind which is causing the problem and not the minds coming from other people. And as I say, for me that was a pretty radical attitude to take at the time. But even with that, we still need to have certain amount of strength, inner strength to be able to do this. We need to watch that sort of negative mind. But we can also protect ourselves through the practice of taking refuge and this has been another thing which has developed into a very important part of my practice as a psychotherapist is this aspect of taking refuge particularly when I’m working with somebody and I haven’t got a clue how to help this particular person.
Absolutely no idea. Now when I talk about taking refuge I don’t mean I sit there and chant Tibetan refuge prayer in front somebody. What normally happens is that in the space of my head somewhere I’m saying my root Lama, please come and help me, don’t know what the hell to do now. That is taking refuge, that is saying I do not know, my conscious mind is not sufficiently advanced to know what to do in this particular situation. But through having had contact with the mind of wisdom and compassion in whichever way that you have had the contact, Through renewing that contact mentally something more powerful again can come into our relationships with people and can influence both our own mind in a positive way and therefore influence our relationship person in a positive way.
So that in doing this particular practice, if we perceive ourselves as being isolated and as being alone and as being limited and as being weak. That our mind is open to being affected by the negative energies that we are trying to take on. But if we see that our mind in fact is something which has incredible power. If we see our mind as being positive, if we see our mind even if not that way, we see our mind as being strengthened by our spiritual practice and by connection with our spiritual teachers then we don’t fall into that trap of believing that we’re going to be caught up and made sick by this. But then the Lama say well if you get sick it just means it’s working really well so why worry about it?
But we do need to worry about it because we don’t want to make ourselves ill through the various negative energies of the people that we’re trying to help. So I need to say that as a preliminary to doing this practice, if it’s done with a negative mind and with a sense of weakness then we do open ourselves up to being affected in a negative sort of a way. So we need to be careful about that. So one way of protecting ourselves is through this practice of taking refuge. The other way of protecting ourselves is through doing the purification practices.
So just as we did that, the white light meditation practice, so that we come to the point where we are simply radiating white light and there is no confusion, no weakness, no negative mind there at all and then doing the Tonglen practice. We’re doing it with a mind which has been very strongly empowered and if we lose that, if in the process of doing this Tonglen practice we lose that sense of being empowered and having that strength, then we can go back to doing the purification practice. And then once we feel strong again, doing the Tonglen practice. Or we can have a combination of doing the purification practice, taking refuge and waiting until that sense of inner strength is there and then doing this Tonglen practice again. Tonglen just means giving and taking.
It means taking the negative energy, the suffering from other creatures and giving the positive energy, that white light of healing and compassion that we generate. We don’t generate but we absorb and radiate in the process of doing the purification practices. In this way we send out positive energy. In this sense we are actually sending it out in an active way. Purification practice radiates from us in a passive way.
It just happens to be radiating. The Tonglen practice, it’s an intentional sending out of the energy. This Tonglen practice is something that we can do within our own minds. It doesn’t have to be anything that anybody else knows about. And it is something we can do even when we are physically quite weak or bedridden.
It’s something we can do when we are separated by physical distance. It’s something we can do in the presence of a person who is suffering from dementia or under a coma. So it’s a very potent way of helping people and it relies upon the fact that the energies of the more subtle parts of the mind work in ways that from an ordinary psychological aspect we simply can’t comprehend. Or in Tennyson’s words, More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. So we utilize that sort of energy and it seems as though that sort of energy is quite independent of space and time and can have a powerful effect.
When people are talking about spiritual healing, healing from a distance, this is the sort of quality of energy and quality of mind which is functioning in those cases. This is the Tonglen practice. It is a practice utilizing compassion, trying to absorb the suffering. One of the other advantages of Tonglen practice is that when we’re caught up in a particular problem of our own whether you’ve got a migraine headache or whether you’re burnt out because you’re working too hard or whether you’re sick with cancer or AIDS or whatever, whether you’re depressed, whether you’re angry, regardless of what the problem is. Instead of being focused in on us as being problem is building up an awareness of all the people in this world who are suffering from the same problem and saying okay well since I’m in pain at the moment let me at least utilize this migraine in a way which is bringing compassion to all sentient beings who are suffering from migraines.
So if I’ve got to suffer I might as well suffer on behalf of everybody else. That’s the sort of state of mind. So you sit there with your migraine headache and you imagine yourself drawing all the migraine headaches out of everybody else who’s suffering from migraine headaches at that particular time. So that your suffering becomes expressive of the suffering of every migraine headache on the planet. And in the process of doing that then we are taken out of our own state of misery.
But also in the process of giving. We’re not just taking in the migraine headache but we’re giving our own joy and our own sense of peace. We’re giving that out at the same time. In the process of doing that we are opening our minds up instead of closing off because we’re in pain. We’re making our minds open up, making our hearts open up I should say and developing this mind of compassion.
So it’s a very potent practice. It does require energy. It does require effort this particular one. But it does also require some knowledge of ways to protect yourself if you’re feeling you’re going too far. If you don’t feel safe with it, if you feel apprehensive about it, then you simply go back to doing the purification practices.
Going back to taking refuge in that quality of wisdom and compassion however that happens to be represented for you. Which also reminds us to do that every time we’re stuck as well if we do it in that circumstance. So it’s a very useful practice to know. It’s a very powerful practice for generating compassion. So that’s what we’re going to do right now.