Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Diana Taylor leads a 44-minute workshop exploring the nature of mind as the foundation for healing work. She opens by asking participants to observe their own minds directly, then establishes a core principle: mental afflictions that cause suffering are inherently problematic, while the mind moving toward enlightenment brings release. She addresses how to make ethical judgments based on whether actions create suffering or happiness, drawing on her background as a psychologist. The session then develops the Buddhist framework of gross, subtle, and very subtle minds, showing how practices like deity visualization activate finer levels of awareness and wisdom. She concludes with practical pain-management techniques: distraction (redirecting attention away from pain) and investigation (working directly with pain to distinguish fear from physical sensation). Throughout, she emphasizes meeting each person as an individual and drawing on spiritual refuge when personal resources are insufficient. Aimed at practitioners with some familiarity with Buddhist practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Ws 1997 03 08.mp3
UUID: cd917223-a09c-4758-868e-93ac42036d3f
Teacher: Diana Taylor
Collection: Workshop (Diana Taylor)
Date: 1997-03-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~4,012
Now, if healing ultimately depends upon the mind, then we need to know something about the mind itself. What is this mind that we’re talking about? Anybody want to hazard an answer to that? All right, so I won’t make you embarrassed. But I will make you work.
So I want you to just sit with yourself. We won’t call it meditation, so you won’t feel as though you have to be special or anything. I just want you to think now what is this mind that we talking about? What is my mind? What is it?
It’s not the body, obviously. So so just sit with your own mind and observe it and see what happens. It’s easier to do in the meditation posture if you’re actually going to do this, but you don’t have to do that. Just what is this mind that we’re talking about? And in particular, what is it that needs healing within this mind?
What is this mind and what is this healing of the mind? Bring yourself back to that thought. Okay. Now coming back into the room. So what happened then?
What is this mind? It’s a whole lot of things, isn’t it? What are some of the other thoughts that people have had? Is it a gateway or connection with these thoughts or Buddha-nature? Any other thoughts?
Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a lot of things which come into this idea of mind, isn’t there? What is it that needs healing in the mind? Why do we talk about the need to heal the mind?
What is it that has to be healed? self-cherishing. Mhmm. Yep. Yes.
Yeah. To be. Mhmm. Mhmm. So we’re making very definite value judgments here, aren’t we?
There is something which is bad about the mind and there is something which is good about the mind. Mhmm. So why are these things bad? They cause suffering. The basis of our value judgment is very, very simple.
The afflictive mind, if you want to use that term, is the mind which creates more suffering. And then there’s this other aspect of mind, which is the mind which is moving towards enlightenment, or in the end becomes enlightenment, which is the one which gives release from suffering and brings happiness. It’s important to realise that it is a value judgement. There’s no doubt about that. If you’re involved in healing, you do make value judgements.
In my training as a psychologist, I was taught that you shouldn’t make value judgements. Ments. Now it was meant in a slightly different context, but the reality is we do make value judgements and it’s very important to know the basis on which we’re making those value judgements. So if you make a value judgment at any stage, you need to check: Has this value judgment come from knowing that the behaviour of this person is creating suffering? Has it come from some quality of ignorance where I haven’t even thought about whether there’s the creation of suffering here or not?
It’s knowing those criteria which brings us out of the value judgments which create problems, the sort of biases and the prejudices which create problems in our relationship with people. So in order to make that value judgment we need to know what is going to create suffering and what is not going to create suffering, what is going to bring happiness. The positive emotions bring about the release of suffering and happiness. Those two are not quite the same, but they’re virtually the same. We define them through knowing the dharma, basically.
Yes, through understanding what it is which causes Now, overcoming ignorance, yes. Some things are pretty obvious. If I go and stomp on a snail, then I know I’m going to create suffering from the snail. Some things are not so easy. If you’ve got somebody, say, who’s an alcoholic and you want to know whether to throw them out of the house or give them support, it’s very hard to know what is going to create suffering and what’s not going to create suffering.
There we need a much more subtle form of wisdom. So if I don’t teach you anything else in this weekend, at least I hope to get through the message. To heal, we must know what the spiritual path is about. We must know the bases and the fundamentals of it. Yes, if that’s what’s appropriate.
Yeah. If have the wisdom and the insight to know that that person is going to, or at least has a chance of achieving some sort of awareness through experiencing the pain. If pain is very severe, then it’s very hard to achieve any awareness through the pain itself. Somebody mentioned about being in hospital. I was in intensive care last November for a couple of days and the same sort of happened.
Even though I say my mantras every day, I could only say one or two at a time and then my mind would wander off onto something else. I just couldn’t hang on to it. So within that context, it’s very hard for me to actually learn anything at that particular point. But later on, having been through that whole process and having been through the experience, I can look back and make some sort of learning. So again, we need to develop our understanding of people.
We need to develop an understanding of the various illnesses that a person might be going through and how those illnesses have an impact on that person’s life. When the suffering becomes too intense, then pain control becomes absolutely essential. When there’s relief from the pain, then there’s the ability to look at it. Sometimes it’s very fruitful to actually work through the pain. I’m actually going to do a meditation, a pain control meditation, where we do precisely that.
Yes. Does anybody want to hazard an answer to that? What are the ways in which we can know For somebody else. If you’re working with a person who maybe has got a cancer and that cancer is, let’s say, bone cancer which is incredibly painful, how do you know what’s relevant? How are you going to find out?
You can ask them. Yeah? That’s obviously an important way. What else can you do? Yep.
Yes. Right. Right. Yes. Yes.
There are two aspects to that wisdom. One is the wisdom which we can acquire in terms of understanding another person, this empathy one. The other one is the wisdom of knowledge in reading about it or asking the doctors involved in the situation, other people who might have experienced it, acquiring knowledge like that. Now there’s a third source. Yes, definitely.
This is part of the wisdom of knowing how to understand people and developing empathy with them is simply asking. Often that’s the best way to do it. There’s a third way in which we can get assistance in this. Right. Yes.
Through meditation. Your own meditation. What do you mean by through meditation? Through using mantra and basically asking for support, tapping into that, with that notion of wisdom. Yes, that’s precisely what I meant.
In this case, the helper. You’re doing it. Right. So, in other words, this is what taking refuge is about. We use this term over and over again and if you’ve done initiations, then you’re taking refuge every day or if you’ve taken any vows then most of you take refuge every day.
What is this about? When we take refuge what we’re doing is saying my mind is not big enough to handle this situation and I need something beyond my mind. Now when we talk about our mind in this context, we’re talking about our conscious mind. I don’t have enough information in my conscious mind to make decisions so I have to tune into something else. When we’re tuning into this something else, we can visualize it as coming from outside, which I did with the white light, was coming outside.
But when we sense the appropriateness of that, that’s also the same wisdom which is within us, is another part of the mind. So it’s being able to use our conscious mind to tune into that energy and then allowing that energy to be expressed. So this is where faith comes in and this is where our spiritual practice comes in as being critically important. So if you’re ever in a situation where you don’t know what to do, that’s what we do. We take refuge.
And often as a psychologist when I’m talking to people I haven’t got a clue what needs to happen so I’m sitting there mentally saying Lama Zopa, what the hell do I do now? Yes, yeah and it’s an incredibly powerful thing to do. I mean, it’s not taking refuge in the formal sense, but it’s certainly taking refuge from the heart, I can assure you of that. And the more often we do that, then the actually easier it becomes to do. And this is how spirituality becomes part of our ordinary day to day life.
Those of you who do have a Guru, this aspect of Guru devotion, is also part of this whole process of taking refuge. That’s right. That’s right. Yep. Yep.
And in the healing kit, Lama Zopa has listed ways in which we can actually do that, different techniques we can do. For those of you who are not classifying yourselves as Buddhist, if I talk about Buddhism in this particular way, can always translate it for yourselves in terms of, Okay, anybody who has a spiritual practice has some idea of this quality of omniscience, this quality of total compassion, this quality of total enlightenment, which mostly in the West we give the name God to. But you don’t even have to do that if you don’t want to. Can just think of it in an abstract sense. So if I’m talking about Buddha, if I’m talking about taking refuge in the Buddha and that’s not part of your own thinking and feeling then please translate it in terms which is suitable to you because it’s effectively the same thing.
Buddha is simply a label. If we’re thinking about the omniscient mind, we’re thinking about this complete compassion and enlightenment. It doesn’t matter which label we give it to, it’s the same thing. It’s also important when you’re doing leading meditations for other people coming from different traditions that you can use the sort of visualizations that they use. Let’s say we’ll take the Christian one which is easier and they might have a connection say with Christ or with Mary.
To use that but in the process of saying that to get the person to visualize that saint or Christ or whatever to visualize that figurehead as being omniscient, as being complete compassion, as being complete enlightenment. So that you then encourage them to take, to rest in, which is what refuge is, to rest in that quality. That’s what it’s about. Nobody has to be Buddhist in a formal sense. One of the things Lama Zopa did say was that it’s very difficult to help a person who doesn’t have any spiritual faith, particularly when they’re dying, because then you don’t have this third part of being able to help a person rest in those sorts of qualities.
But it’s fairly rare to meet a person in that category. My mother had no faith and it was a cause of great distress to me prior to that I also felt that I needed to really talk with her and I was on the island and my father rang and said in the middle of the night and said I think you need to come over quickly and I had a dream that she basically took me in her arms and gave me everything that she hadn’t given me and it did away with any need to try to talk so that when I got there I could literally just be with her but she’d been just terrified of dying and it held regardless. But in the end she actually had a peaceful death. You know, nice little love of mantras at the time and it was just an absolute blessing. Yes.
But I had been very worried about that aspect. I felt that she I really didn’t want her to suffer. Yes. But it was actually alright in the end. Yeah.
Yeah. Any other questions? That way, diverging away from where I was meaning to go, but never mind. Any questions on that before I get back to it? Well, this brings me back to my topic, which is actually the mind and pain, because when we’re talking about the mind, we’re talking about something which is quite complex.
It’s not a simple thing. Mostly, when we’re talking about the mind in ordinary conversation, we’re talking about our thinking and our feeling, our cognitions and our emotions. In other words, the conscious part of the mind. And we might occasionally bring in some things which are not quite so conscious, things like dreams, intuitions, those sorts of things. Within the Buddhist framework, all these things, including the dreams and the intuitions, are part of the gross mind.
As well as the gross mind, we have the subtle mind and the very subtle mind. So when we are talking about the mind, we need to be aware that there is this way of discriminating the mind. This form of discrimination comes from the tantra, from the Vajrayāna tradition. It’s more in terms of mindfulness on the one hand which is related to the mental factors and cognition including the, as I say, intuitions and things like that. And then there’s this main mind which is a factor of basic awareness if you like.
So there’s a differentiation there as well. But this also helps us to understand that the mind functions at different levels and that by having a deity practice, by visualizing the white light coming down or whatever, what we’re doing is allowing the more subtle levels of the mind, the finer levels of the mind to become functional. Now those finer levels of the mind is actually mind which is within us. If we knew it properly, if we knew it in its fullness, then we wouldn’t see it as being my mind, but we’d see it as being the mind, if you like. We’d see it as being non dual.
So that when we achieve enlightenment then there’s a different way in which we perceive all these things. But for the time being, we need to, as it were, come down into that and we need to understand the process of coming into it because we’re not residing in that very clear mind all the time. So by doing these practices, what we’re doing is allowing that clarity of mind to have some form of expression. In that sense, it’s within us. It’s not external.
In the end, there’s no difference between being within and being external. Okay? When you do the practice, do you allow a clear mind to what? Allow the maybe not the clear mind unless you’ve done a lot of practice certainly more subtle aspects of the mind can begin to function. This is the purpose of these practices.
If we’re going to heal the mind, then this is what we want. We want these more subtle aspects of the mind to be functioning, because it’s through those we can understand more profoundly and with greater wisdom what the causes of suffering are. We become clairvoyant. We do develop supernormal powers. You can find all these described.
I haven’t got them. I’m just letting you know straight away. There’s a fantastic article in Mandala and the one before last about a westerner who describes the experience of understanding. That’s right. Yeah.
That’s beautiful. Yeah, I can see what you’re getting at. It is. People become aware of something while they’re doing meditation in any case. You can talk about it, but it’s just words until somebody has some sort of quality of awareness.
But you need to use the words so that people have some idea of where they’re going. And when they have that quality of awareness, say, Oh, that’s what she was talking about. That’s what the awareness is about. Then they start to develop more discriminations about it and start to want to explore it and develop more about it. Within the Theravadin tradition, they would call it this quality of basic awareness, the main mind quality.
When we’re coming from the tantric tradition, we’re talking about the gross, subtle and very subtle minds. It’s a different way of dividing the mind up, so it’s hard to bring the two of them together. I’ve asked various lamas to do this, and none of them have done it for me, yes. Far be it from me to try to do it. It seems a really important question for people, though.
Oh, it definitely is. Well also you see, given that this is a healing group, is also what the fear of death is about. So if you can develop an awareness of this basic awareness and say this is something of what continues after death then the process of dying begins to take on more meaning. And that doesn’t have to be within a religious tradition. So if we can work with people and let them simply do breathing meditation, nothing else, unless they’re asthmatic.
I’m an asthmatic. What do you call not necessarily asthmatic, anyway at the moment, it’s just certainly you can’t breathe very well. Right. How do get around that? We can focus in on other things other than the breathing.
Can focus in, say, on sound and simply to be aware of the different sounds. I mean particularly if you’re living in the city but even in the country the sounds around all the time. So if you simply sit and allow these sounds to come and go in the way that we allow the breathing to come and go, then the focus is on a different experience. If somebody’s having breathing difficulties, to focus in on the breathing can be quite destructive. Distressing, yeah.
That doesn’t help if you’ve got a physical obstruction, say, the trachea. It doesn’t matter how relaxed your lungs are, it’s still not going to work. But if somebody is very tight around their chest, yes it will work. So again this brings up the issue of getting to know the person you’re working with and getting to know the physical aspects of the problem as well as the mental aspects of the problem. If breathing is constricted through fear, then breathing meditation can be incredibly helpful.
And even in the middle attack of asthma, and I can say this from personal experience, that to use breathing meditation to reduce the fear will reduce the severity of the attack of asthma doesn’t necessarily stop it. it’ll actually stop it. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Depends, you see, on the causes. I mean, if you’ve got bronchitis, then releasing the fear will alleviate the distress, but the phlegm is still there, so there’s still a distraction to the breathing. What may happen again, see all the time we have to work with each person as an individual what may happen if you focus get her to focus on her hearing because she’s focusing in on the hearing she’s no longer having fear of the breathing her breathing may calm down If that happens, then you can point that out to her. No, I don’t. Right.
Yes, so it’s yeah. But if you’re working with somebody and you’re using that technique and the breathing does calm down, then certainly at that point, just ask them to be aware that their breathing is calmer take them back to the hearing so they’re not focusing on maybe then coming back to the breathing then they gradually build up the awareness by focusing in on the hearing then their breathing is alleviated as well You can use all sorts of ways of distracting the mind in that sense. So when we’re talking about pain control which is what this is meant to be about the mind and pain the one aspect is distracting the mind from the pain, which is what I’ve just been talking about. The other one is going into the pain and utilising the pain itself and understanding the pain and in that way helping a person to differentiate between what is actually fear and the muscles closing around an area of pain and what is the physical pain itself. I suppose we could bring in a third aspect which may or may not be relevant and that’s the psychological implications of the pain.
But for somebody who’s close to dying, then working on the psychological implications not likely to be particularly fruitful at that particular point. For somebody who’s, say, in the early stages of a chronic illness, it can be incredibly helpful. But as I said last night, it depends on what the causes of the suffering are about, whether it’s something distant which has come from a past life or whether it’s something which is more related to this particular life. So we keep on experimenting. We don’t know.
We have to keep on experimenting. And if every person’s a new person, that’s the other aspect to it. Whatever you’ve worked out for one person may or may not help, but the probable oh, it’s not true to say that. I tend to remain sceptical and say, Okay, this worked for another person. It may or may not work for this one.
I’ll try it out. If it doesn’t work, then we’ve got to try something else. So you keep on. It’s Definitely. Yes.
Yep. Yep. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Definitely, yeah. Yes.
That’s another thing that Lama Zopa recommended actually is when people take meditations but they visualize it as Medicine Buddha or one of the deities and in that way the medicine can be much more effective because you’re visualising the whole healing process. If you’ve got a bias against medicine, then that bias is going to work against the effectiveness of that medication. So you’re going to end up needing more medication in any case, probably in the end. So, if it is important to take medication, then that’s a very fruitful way to do it, is to visualise that medicine as being the healing power. I mean, it is healing power or it should be healing power if your doctor is working well.
But visualising it as healing power. There’s a story that Lama Zopa tells of two monks at Buxa, which is where he went when he came out of Tibet and where he had I think it was there he had tuberculosis. Anyway, one of the monks had a bad fever and at that stage there was an illness going through and it was a very severe illness and this monk who had the fever thought he might catch it, might even die. So the monk sitting next to him didn’t know what to do, but he was pretty grubby, he’d been working out on the road, so he scraped some of the dirt off his body and he rolled it up and made it look like a pill. You’ve seen the Tibetan pills, they’re sort of round and about this big and he handed it to the monk who was sick and he said look this is a precious pill take this so the monk took it and got better as being a healing thing and imagining it going through actually, visualizing it going into her body and and being that white light Mhmm.
Or blue light throughout. Well, blue is medicine Buddha, so that’s great.