Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Diana Taylor leads a 45-minute guided meditation session on healing physical and emotional pain through visualization and breath work. She begins with foundational posture guidance—spine straight but never in a sleeping position—and introduces breath awareness as a tool to draw the mind inward and develop calm. The core practice involves becoming vividly aware of physical pain, noting its size, shape, color, and texture, then breathing white light of healing and compassion around and into the pain. Taylor then shifts to the same technique applied to emotional pain like grief, anger, and jealousy, emphasizing that imagery can work through any sense, not just vision. The session concludes with a framing of purification as the Buddhist psychological method for clearing emotional obscurations, connecting it to modern psychotherapy and relabeling techniques, illustrated through the Buddha’s teaching on a grieving mother seeking a mustard seed from an untouched house. Open to both newcomers and ongoing practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 Ret..mp3
UUID: 366cafd9-753d-45cd-af7e-ec2ebeeb1b3a
Teacher: Diana Taylor
Collection: Retreat (Diana Taylor)
Date: 1997 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~2,936
Have your spine as straight as is possible. It can be horizontally straight or it can be vertically straight. It doesn’t really matter. But the other thing which is important is not putting yourself in the position where you normally would go to sleep in because otherwise you’d probably go to sleep and not meditate at all. If it’s important to sleep, that’s okay.
But if you want to meditate, it’s not okay. If your back needs support, then find somewhere where your back gets support. Focusing back again in on your body and beginning by being aware of the breath. The breath is a very, very simple way of taking the mind inside rather than outside. And just by being aware of the breath for a moment and in this way you take your mind into yourself and develop a deeper quality of introspection through being aware of the breath.
Bringing the mind down to a quality of calmness through focusing in on the breath. Staying with your own body, your own breath. From there, become aware of the pain in your body or of a pain in your body. If there is a lot of pain then it’s helpful to select one specific site. So choose which aspect of your own physical pain that you’re going to become mindful of.
As you’re doing this, become very clear in your mind about exactly where in your body this pain is residing. What are its boundaries? How far does it extend? Or is it small and contained? What is its size?
You may find that it changes. That’s okay. Just watch the changing of it. What is its size? And what is its shape?
Is it contained like a ball? Or is it spread out like a crab? Is it spiky or smooth? What is its outside texture? And what is its inside texture?
Is it heavy and dense, fluffy like a cloud? Being aware of it. What color does it have? Does it have a color? What color would it be if it did have a color?
Now we’re going to do something with this pain. We’re going to imagine white light coming in as we breathe in. And this white light is a white light of healing and compassion. As we breathe in, white light surrounds the pain. As we breathe out, then some of the pain goes with it.
Breathing in this white light of compassion and healing and allowing it to simply flow around the pain. And if some of the pain goes out as you breathe out, that is fine. Otherwise, you simply allow the white light to wash around the outside of your pain. Each time you breathe in, breathing in the white light of healing and compassion. Allowing that to surround your pain.
And then breathing out. Now imagine that this white light, which is healing and which is compassion, as you breathe in it goes right inside your pain. Covers each tiny aspect of that pain. And then you breathe out again. This time the white light goes right inside the pain.
And then you breathe out. Now doing these two things breathing the light so it surrounds pain and then breathing the light so it’s inside the pain. So for three breaths you imagine the white light surrounding the pain. For three breaths it is inside the pain. If you wish to do so then you can choose other parts of your body that might need healing or where you might be experiencing pain.
You do the same thing, developing an awareness of it, Breathing the white light to the outside of the pain three times and letting it surround. And then three times letting the white light be absorbed into the pain and transforming the pain and then breathing out. Just continuing that in your own way. Keeping your mind focused in on this light. Light.
Allowing it to move around the pain. Allowing it to move within and to transform the pain. Keeping your mind focused. It’s nice having a dean to come over the meditation. Anybody have difficulty with that one?
It’s easy to see the logic behind that visualization. But I wanted you to come out of the meditation first of all so that you can move around a little bit because it’s hard to sit in one position for a long time. Before doing the same exercise with emotional pain. With emotional pain sometimes it’s more difficult to have a visual image of what that pain might be. When we’re working with the imagination in this way, it’s useful to remember that although we use the words visualisation, our imagery in fact is not just stuck with visual imagery, but all our senses have a quality of imagery associated with them.
So we can also imagine smell. We can also imagine hearing things. We can also imagine touch and taste. Anyway, you know what the five senses are. So all the five senses have their own quality of imagery associated with them.
Some people have very strong visual imagery. But other people don’t have strong visual imagery. And I’m one person that doesn’t have strong visual imagery. So even to imagine something that I meditate on frequently like Śākyamūni Buddha, I only have this sort of vague outline. I’ll never be an artist, not in this lifetime, for that reason because I don’t have that sort of imagery.
But I do have a good imagery for sound which is why I like music. And I do have a good kinesthetic imagery, in other words, does it feel like to be in a situation. So if you ask me to imagine myself being down at the beach, which is one of my favorite spots on the planet any beach just about I find it very hard to actually visualize the waves and the sand and so on, but I can very easily imagine myself lying on the warm sand with the breeze blowing over me and I can very easily hear the sound of the seagulls in the distance. So when we’re doing this sort of work, if you’re not good at visual imagery, then try using one of the other senses. What does it actually feel like?
So when we’re doing this with emotional pain, there’s not a physical sensation that goes with it as there is with the physical pain. So we are building up an analogy through using imagery of what this emotional pain is like. And using exactly the same technique to do it. So you build up an analogous idea if you like. So you imagine it as something physical even though it’s not physical.
Yes. Well, we do. I mean, the emotional pain does trigger off physical pain as well. If there if there’s grief, if there’s a broken relationship, if there is anger. And one of the ways in which we define emotions is we say it’s a visceral response to a state of mind.
It’s the way the body is responding to a state of mind. So that response is definitely there. But it may not be a predominant part of your awareness. Oh yes, definitely. Or feeling everything has been torn out.
Those sorts of experiences. Where there is that physical pain, then you can use the meditation as we were doing it. But where there is not a strong physical pain, then we need to build up some sort of imagination. What is this emotion looking like? So we build up a symbolic representation of it.
So even though I’ll be using visual imagery, if that doesn’t work for you then try using some of these other things. The kinesthetic. What does it feel like? What does it smell like? It’s an interesting one, isn’t it?
What does emotional pain smell like? So we’re going to do the same exercise and I’ll try and help you build up the imagery of the emotional pain. And then we do the same. We breathe around it. We breathe into it and just see what happens.
So it’s the same exercise but we’re directing it towards any sort of emotional pain whether it’s anger or grief or depression or jealousy, as I say all the hatred, all these sorts of things. So settling yourself down and using the process of settling to bring your mind into your body and become more introspective. And this time bringing up your awareness of what this emotional pain happens to be. We usually have a pretty big selection of emotional pain so choose one particular one. Reminding yourself of the situation in which this emotion initially developed or the sort of situations in which this emotion is triggered.
Remembering what it’s like to be in the grip of this particular emotion. Now imagining this emotion as a thing. Where is it actually located? It may or may not be confined to the physical boundaries of your body. Whereabouts in your body or near your body are you sensing this emotional pain?
What sort of shape does it have? Or would it have if it had a shape? What does its surface look like? Maybe it doesn’t have a clear surface, maybe it does. And what is it like on the inside?
Underneath the surface, what do you sense? What color is it? Is it static or does it move? What does it feel like to have that pain there? Now going through that same exercise, breathing in this white light, which is the white light of purification of healing.
Do you allow that to surround your emotional pain? Deep compassion. And then simply breathing out. Now imagining that light moving into the pain, absorbing into the pain and transforming it and then breathing out. Now alternating.
Three breaths breathing around the outside of the pain. Holding that pain with that light of compassion. Three breaths of allowing the compassion to move deeply into the pain. Transforming it and then moving out again. Keeping on doing that in your own time.
If you want to choose to work with that way with another emotional pain then do so. If you want to stay with this one then that’s what you do. Keeping your mind focused. Now just take a little bit of time to write down for yourself so that you remember things that were important to you in those two exercises. Anybody who’d like to share what their experience was in either of those meditations?
Yeah. Sure. Well, use the word dissolving them because the dissolution is a form of transformation in any case. But there are many different ways in which you can do that and I didn’t want to make specific suggestions. That’s all.
Thank you. Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm. Right.
Yeah. Yes. Good. Somebody else? Yes.
Yeah. So it’s very useful. Yeah. Terrific. I know it’s very hard to speak up in a group.
So maybe if you just get into little groups of about three, two or three people, and just just sharing with each other for a moment before lunch. Because in sharing these stories with each other then it’s somehow or other in this quality of recognizing each other’s humanity that the heart of loving kindness does develop. So if you’d like to do that, if you don’t want to do that, if you feel it’s too personal, you don’t want to share, then just take some time out to walk around in the garden for a little while. So would you like to either go for a little walk for five minutes or just get into little groups of three and share your stories of what happened then. Just a five minute one.
This is not a long exercise. One of the ways of dealing with the disturbing emotions which stop our mind from being calm. So in this section I want to look at the process of purification, which is another way of dealing with these disturbing emotions. Purification simply means becoming clean. So if we want our minds to be calm and clear, then we’ve got to get the dirt out.
As Lama says, If you wash a dirty rag then you’re expecting to get dirty water from it. It’s this aspect of Buddhist psychology which overlaps a lot with psychotherapy. In psychotherapy, again, we’re looking at the disturbing emotions and saying, Let’s see what we can do about them. What are they? What are these disturbing emotions and how do I avoid getting these emotions back in my mind?
So any of you who’ve been for counselling sessions or been for psychotherapy sessions or doing that sort of work yourself, one way of understanding it from within the Buddha’s perspective is by seeing it as part of the process of purification. Psychotherapy is a form of purification. The word purification sometimes is difficult for people to deal with because it’s got this sort of religious connotation. But as a concept it’s really very, very simple. It’s saying that our minds have become obscured through ignorance and through the emotions which arise from grasping attachment.
And that if we want to have positive emotions, if we want our mind to be calm and clear, if we want to be able to deal with our lives a quality of wisdom, and if we want our relationships to have that quality of compassion, then we need a mind which is calm and clear. So that’s all purification is. It’s a technique for making the mind calm and clear. Also, you read the text on thought transformation, there are many, many ideas in the thought transformation text about helping your mind to become calm and clear. Things like looking at the way in which we label.
If you read the textbooks on the labeling of phenomena and, for example, how we generate a great fear of death because we label death in a certain sort of a way as being something bad and something terrible and something grotesque which cuts off life. If we take away that label of death and simply have a label of death as being, well this is the moment when the mind leaves the body, consciousness leaves the body, then the whole notion of death in itself becomes something which is not terrifying. A lot of the terror of death comes from the way in which we label death. So a lot of the confusion and fear in our mind comes from the way that we label. You can get a lot of techniques about this also in the Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy textbooks if you want to look at it purely from a psychological point of view.
I can remember giving a presentation with four other psychologists, one who was an REBT therapist, talking about the use of rational emotive behavior therapy in grief. So I got up and said, the first rational emotive therapist was the Buddha. The reason for that is when a woman came to the Buddha once who was grieving over the loss of her son. Whether this had been a SIDS death or something, we don’t don’t really know. Like today, when somebody loses a small child, there’s this incredible grief thing, incredible suffering, particularly if a baby and there’s all the hormonal aspects of the breast milk drying up and the changes to the body which happen when the baby suddenly is not there and not feeding.
So this woman was distraught. And she went to the Buddha saying, Please help me. And the Buddha said, I want you to go out into the village and bring me back a mustard seed from a house where there has been no death. Where nobody has experienced death. She said, Easy, right, off I go.
So she went from household to household to household. And of course she couldn’t find a household where there was no grief, no experience of death. And then as she was doing this she began to realise that death was something which everybody experiences, which comes to us all at some stage. She went back to the Buddha and she said, Now I understand. So the Buddha was teaching her through doing something practical, through relabeling this whole thing.
Death is something dreadful. This child for me has been taken away. To death is something which happens to everybody. Everybody has experienced grief on part of humanity. So her mind changed just through that experience.
So we can change our minds through this process of labeling. That’s one way in which we can purify our minds. We can change our minds by understanding the causes of our emotions. By understanding how our emotions arise from the way in which we value or don’t value the things that happen to us. So if we’re in pain, if we’re in physical pain, normally we consider this to be something pretty bad.
And we give it a negative label. And certainly when we see other people suffering, then the mind of compassion is that mind which doesn’t want people to be suffering. So we don’t want pain, we don’t want to suffer. So if we become sick, or if we’re suffering pain, we label this as being something bad. That very label, in fact, can make the pain much worse.
It can make the illness seem much worse than it actually is. And it stops us also from seeing, Well, what is the cause of this emotion in my mind at the moment? Case?