Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Diana Taylor leads an intensive 43-minute workshop on the practical art of guiding meditation and leading healing practices. She opens with a core challenge: how do we know which inner impulses are spiritually valid versus ego-driven, and how do we authentically guide others through such experiences? The session moves through three meditation techniques—white light healing, loving kindness, and pain control—used with different populations, then scrutinizes the mechanics of delivering them effectively. Taylor covers essential delivery skills: voice modulation and strategic pausing (longer than seems natural), reading each person’s unique responses and adapting in real time, avoiding rigid scripts, and understanding the context in which you teach (she notes teaching farmers differs from teaching practitioners already steeped in Buddhist philosophy). She emphasizes that daily personal practice is non-negotiable for anyone guiding others, grounded in ethics and compassion, and warns against spiritual materialism and false gurus who claim powers they lack. The workshop culminates in structured partner practice where participants lead each other through a chosen meditation and give honest feedback. Suited for healers, meditation facilitators, and those interested in Buddhist-informed helping.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 Ws 1997 03 08.mp3
UUID: 183c57e4-f9dd-4b89-a028-8d62dc16ce85
Teacher: Diana Taylor
Collection: Workshop (Diana Taylor)
Date: 1997-03-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.5 minutes
Words: ~5,135
Our minds could be like that. But the teachings are there that say that is what happens when you get to that level. It’s just simple, straightforward. It’s like a, tour guide of being a bodhisattva. This is what happens when you go to Tibet.
It’s a bit hard to visualize it until you get it actually get to be there. This is what happens when you become a bodhisattva. So also when we’re talking about the highly realized lamas, we’re talking about people who’ve got minds which are incredibly powerful minds. But their ability to use the subtle and to use the very subtle aspects of mind is way, way beyond anything we can even imagine. We can talk about theoretically.
I can talk about theoretically traveling faster than light but we can’t actually really imagine. Same with the realms of Dharmakāya. So, yeah, we’re just at kindergarten stage really and truly even after years and years of practice. But the point is also that even after years of practice these are the things if we continue the practice these are the imprints which go through to our next life. These are the things which we need to be doing now, not two days before we die because we don’t have the capacity to do it two days before we die.
We need to do it now so the imprints are there so that when we die, then that is the mind with which we die. Then next time around, we’re sort of one stage ahead of where we were this time around. Oh, definitely. Yes. If somebody is suffering from dementia I’ve got an aunt who is quite elderly and every now and again she goes through phases of just slight dementia But I know that if I’m talking to her, if I talk within her framework then often I can get through.
But if I try and bring her back to an ordinary framework that everybody else understands, it’s just lost. So working within a person’s framework certainly is helpful. But if the thought disorder is so scatty, so schizophrenia where there’s severe thought disorder, it’s very difficult to do that the thoughts are jumping around. So again it depends on being able to see each person for what they are and having a flexible mind which has got lots of methods sitting at the back of it because you’ve done the study and you’ve talked to each other and you’ve shared things like this and being able to pull one of them out of the back of the mind and say, Oh, well maybe I’ll try this. I’ll see if this one works.
If it doesn’t work, try something else. There are no rules you can go by. You can’t say do this in this case, do that in that case. We have to be creative, we have to be experimenting and also taking refuge within them because, and again I’m talking in this case from my own experience, that when I do take refuge under those sorts of circumstances something happens, something occurs in my mind and I find myself talking I think my god where did that come from? Or I’ll think of something I can’t possibly say that to this particular person.
I find myself saying it in any case and it’s been profoundly fruitful for them. So this thing about taking refuge is very, very important. Very important. Being creative, taking refuge, knowing what is valid and what is not valid in our own thinking. How do we know this?
Well again there’s very profound texts which are available. These yet. This is after I get through all the ten bodhisattva levels. Might get on to this lot. But I’m only on the first level of bodhisattva at the moment.
It’ll be a while before I get to it. But knowing what is valid within our thoughts and what is not valid. How do we know what is valid and what is not valid? How do we know when we’re kidding ourselves? How do we know if I mentally take refuge and a thought comes up in my mind and I allow it to be expressed, is this valid to let it be expressed because it’s an intuitive thought or is this my ego coming in and a bit of ego inflation coming in saying, well, you know, this is really the lama, it’s not me, but I’m going to say it.
How do we differentiate that within ourselves? It’s a very difficult question and nobody can give you an answer. Yes, but then how do we know to what degree? This is a very important question and everybody must think about this within their own mind and within great depth. How do I know which thoughts are valid and which are not valid?
What does it mean? What is a valid thought and what is not a valid thought? Yes. So all these things. Because there is ego involved so often, is one of the reasons why we dedicate any merits that we benefit from for the benefit of all sentient beings.
This is one of the basic teachings in Buddhism. But you don’t have to be Buddhist to understand the meaning of that. Instead of taking it to inflate the ego, you take it and say, May the sense of joy I’ve gained from this and the sense of pride that I’ve gained from this, may I use that joy and pride so that all sentient beings benefit from it. That helps to stop it from becoming something like ego inflation. So I think we might stop talking and do some meditating again.
Just as a story to add to that, this comes from our training in hypnosis. One of the teachers was saying that he was really tired one day and he was using a hypnotic induction technique and in this particular technique you get the person’s arm to raise up like this as the hypnosis deepens you see so he’s saying he’s going through the trance induction and saying and you’ll find that as hypnosis gets deeper your arm rises and it gets lighter and lighter and it goes up he said after a while he noticed his hand was up like this He said he felt fantastic afterwards. So, yes, it’s worthwhile knowing that technique. Are there any questions? Yes.
We if we If we do the meditations, which we’ll do tomorrow, where we visualize our own death and we visualize the disintegration of the body and we go through the visualization of imagining the appearance of light until we get to the point of clear light. If we do that practice regularly then what we’re doing is we’re training our minds that we go through that experience when we die. We know what it is that’s happening so we’re not freaked out by it. Which means also we’re training our mind to hold in on that and to lock in particularly on the clear light part. If we do that then we can maintain awareness of it instead of just flipping through it so quickly we don’t acknowledge it.
We can maintain awareness of it so that we do then have the experience of being enlightened because that’s what enlightenment is about. It’s about being in that clear light of mind, that pure mind. So we can become enlightened at this particular point of our existence. I was going say about life but maybe that’s not the right thing to say in this context. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. So somebody who’s a highly realized yogi can stay in that sort of state for weeks. So it’s that the enlightenment well it depends on what we mean by enlightenment. The clear light of the mind is there. The awareness of it can come and go.
Alright? So that’s what’s permanent, the awareness of it. Until somebody has got up to the level of being a bodhisattva and then it becomes firmly established. But even then it goes through another ten stages. So where the mind still has a few obscurations and they become more and more subtle but they still have to be cleared away.
So you can become aware of this non duality if you like. Become aware of the emptiness of inherent existence as there’s nothing which is permanent. We can come aware of that in an experiential way as distinct by thinking about it. Mean we can think about it easily enough. Yes, yes.
The important thing is this experiential one So we can have little flashes of it but they don’t stay because our mind won’t reside in that. It’s not trained to reside in that so it comes and goes. Oh definitely because I mean if I go back to the story I told you where I read the book and I had this experience of it was in a sense an enlightenment experience. I wasn’t experiencing emptiness but I was certainly enlightened. The fact that I felt the burdens were dropping off, that it was enlightenment certainly in that sense.
That gave me the motivation then to say, What is this about? This is something which is critically important that I need to know about. If I hadn’t had that experience it might have been something curious but I wouldn’t have had the same sort of energy to go and seek the Buddhist path or some spiritual path. I tried various spiritual paths at that stage. It wasn’t specifically Buddhist.
When we have these peak experiences, we say, What was that about? I want that back again. Another example is when I took up piano again about five years ago and at this stage I’d had maybe half a dozen lessons and I was playing through no it must have been more than that anyway it was within the first three or four months. I was playing through piece and my teacher said, Well, you’re playing it technically correct, but there’s something missing. So I thought, Right.
Well, by this stage, see, I’d done all this studying and was into meditation and so on, so I thought I’ll try and use some of my knowledge. So I sort of mentally lined up all my chakras you see and started playing the piece and he got really excited Diana that’s fantastic that’s exactly what I want you to do of course then I got excited and came out of it and ever since then I’ve wanted to be able to consciously sit down at the piano and play in that particular way I still can’t do it but having had an experience like that we want to get back to it we want to be able to access it when we feel accessing it, not just something sort of coming out of the blue by accident. It’s not just an intellectual exercise or something that you can do. Yeah. Yeah.
See, when I went to talk to his holiness, it was very, very intellectual. I’m a good academic. I like intellectual stuff. But it wasn’t an inner experience and I couldn’t even see any need then for it to be an inner experience. Then gradually, through physical pain, through not being well, things like that, I became aware that this intellectual stuff is simply not enough.
Has yeah. Yeah. Well, we all come from different aspects but that that was the way it developed for me. Yep. Well, is can become a form of grasping.
Grasping has got the quality of compulsion in it and of wanting it for one’s own ego. Wanting something for one’s own ego is different from wanting spiritual development because in the process of spiritual development we actually have to let go of the ego. So we can’t develop spiritually by hanging on to the ego. In the early stages it’s very hard to differentiate between one and the other. If it’s leading us towards that spiritual path, it’s while hanging on to it in any case.
Ultimately, we’ve got to let it go. But in that case, we’re using the quality of grasping as a sort of a scaffolding. But if we’re using the spiritual path to inflate the ego, which comes when people set themselves up, say as gurus, for example, and say that they’re enlightened and things like this and claim all sorts of powers which they haven’t got, then there is a lot of ego grasping. That’s not being on the spiritual path. That’s a travesty of what the spiritual path is about.
But when we’re yearning to have this sense of wholeness and this sense of well-being, certainly at this stage of our existence we’re using concepts, we’re using duality, we’re using all these things but we’re using them with an ultimate end in mind. So it’s very important to know what this ultimate end is. Then we know ultimate we’ve got electrical. So it’s like we’re using it as a scaffolding. Eventually, scaffolding is going to go.
That’s okay. Cutting through cutting through spiritual materialism. Yes. Cutting Through Your Spiritual Materialism is an excellent book to read in that area. You’re right.
Yes. The Lama say over and over again the spiritual path is something which you need to work slowly, slowly on. The basics of the spiritual path are morality and ethics and generosity. These are the fundamental aspects that we start with. If we do nothing else but practice those, at the very least we’re building a foundation for spiritual realisations to come in the future.
If we haven’t built that foundation, if we have any sort of clairvoyant experiences, then there is a much greater danger that it will become simply serving the ego inflation and not serving the spiritual path. So these very basic things about spirituality which we don’t like to know about, we want know about, or you know being enlightened and being transformed and the top end of it. But we attain it through this very ordinary day to day living basic principles. Well, this is why I’ve got the last session on burnout for precisely that reason. Make sure you’re here tomorrow afternoon.
Well, you see, as I say, if you’re exhausted, then it’s just the session you need. That’s why it’s the last session of this of the weekend. Yes. But it is very common, and it’s about self awareness and knowing what our limitations are. I was talking to Geshe Tashi Tsering who’s the Geshe up at Chenrezig Institute about this one day.
He said to me, in Tibet, often there’s stones in the field and all the villagers come and help clear the stones. He said, you get little people to carry the little stones and leave the big stones for the big people. So let’s take a break for lunch on that note. Back here at one thirty. If any of you have done Vajrasattva then you’ll recognize some of the elements of that.
But what’s important is just this sense of purification and the healing that comes from it. It’s a very simple meditation. While we’re doing it I want you to not just focus in on doing the meditation for yourself but I want you to think about the style of delivery of meditation. Right? So what is it that is helpful and what is it that is not helpful when you’re actually leading a meditation for somebody else?
Right? So after we’ve done this then we’re going to have a discussion on how we go about leading meditation and part of it is simply about the delivery of a meditation. So what is it that works for you? What is it that doesn’t work for you? Remembering also that people are different.
What works for you might be different for somebody else. So having that focus, having two minds, one mind actually doing the meditation and the other mind thinking what is it that’s working, what’s not working. Into the meditation posture. Important for anybody who works in healing to have a daily meditation practice. That one is an excellent daily meditation practice to use.
There are other practices which you can use as well. Medicine Buddha of course is a key, one, White Tārā is another one, Chenrezig, Green Tārā. So you can choose whichever practice is suitable for you but the advantage of the White Light Healing Meditation oh Vajrasattva is the other one of course. White Light Healing Meditation, as Lama Zopa wrote it here, doesn’t depend on any particular deity. It doesn’t depend particularly on being Buddhist.
What it does depend on is that when you visualize the source of the light, that that source is something which symbolizes the perfect pure mind of full enlightenment. What you call that source, what clothes you put on it, is not so important. What is important is that that source is the perfect pure mind of full enlightenment. It could be a stupa, can be a crystal, it can be a visualization of a ball of energy, you can call it God, Krishna, anything you like, as long as it has this mind of full enlightenment. That’s another thing which I want to emphasize very much is the importance of having a daily practice.
It’s through that daily practice that when you come to situations which are difficult to handle then you’ve got this daily practice to fall back on by tuning into this quality of energy. By doing it every day it becomes much easier when you’re in a crisis situation to fall back into that which is what the taking refuge is all about. Apart from that it’s just sheer hypocrisy to tell people to do things this every day when you don’t do it yourself. People pick up on that hypocrisy very quickly. So sincerity is important as well.
Okay, now what were some other things which you feel, not just looking at this particular meditation but the other two meditations we’ve done? What are the things which come through to you as being important in delivering a meditation? What has worked for you? What has not worked for you? We’ve done the pain one, we did the loving kindness one, and this was the white light one.
Yes. A monotone is disastrous. If you talk relaxed sitting in whatever position you well, not as badly as that, but sort of like this. Relax sitting in whatever position you find comfortable or even lying down the position of your body is not important that’s not going to lead to meditation so you need to modulate your voice to some extent but if you go too high and too low relax sitting down in whatever position you find comfortable or even lying down that’s not going to generate a state of relaxation okay so voice is important what’s another thing The pauses are one of the most critical parts of it. Right, you might have found when we did the loving kindness meditation which is a long one and also maybe in the pain control it might have been too quick because I was trying to rush it.
Would normally, if I was working with a healing group, take a much longer period over it. Pauses are critically important. When do you pause? How do you know when to pause? Yes, by having meditated before.
What else? Yes, So you break it up. The purpose of my life pause. Because at that point you’re asking people to think about something. The purpose of my life It doesn’t have to be a long pause at that point.
The purpose of my life give them time to think, alright, I’m thinking about the purpose of my life is not just to solve my own problems and obtain happiness solely for myself. Pausing at each introduction of each new thing and then when you’ve given a whole section then leaving the long pause. So if necessary when you’ve got these you can put in marks where you need to pause and practicing is important too. At first when you pause it seems like forever and you’re going to have a you’re going to practice this in a few minutes in any case so you’ll get a chance to do it it seems like forever but it’s not what you have to remember is you’ve put this person in a nice relaxed state if you’ve worked successfully and you’ve got your voice modulated correctly so they’re not going to zap zap zap with their thinking they’re sort of going to come out oh now I’ve got to think about the purpose of my life now by the time you’ve thought that it’s taken a certain amount of time So these pauses need to be usually longer than at first we think about it.
It’s easy to make it too short. It’s rare to make it too long. What else? Modulation pauses. Yes.
Not too short, not too long. Yes. Yeah. So it follows on. Yes.
That’s right. That’s a good point. Putting in? Well, either because all these are helpful. Yes.
Yeah. That drives me personally up the pole when people do that to me. But that that that’s what mean by that they’re different things for different people. Some things work for some people and others don’t. I always feel I’m being patronised if somebody leaves it like that.
Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right.
Yes. Yes. Yeah. It is definitely a good way to lead it and it’s definitely good if you’re concerned about being authoritarian too. Yep.
What other points have people got? Observing the person you’re working with. Like the story I told you about the hypnotist who took the asthmatic into the field of cows. Mean the external signs are pretty obvious then. Yeah, doing things like that.
Yes. Yeah. Definitely. I think for me too is finding the right balance understanding the context in which I’m teaching and knowing how much can talk about Buddhist philosophy. The situation where I’m teaching meditation to farmers and whatever then basically I’ve found that I can actually teach purification and healing and everything without saying one word about Buddhist philosophy officially.
And I feel really comfortable with that. So I think it’s important to understand the context in which you’re teaching. If I did talk about, ask people to do medicine, Buddha practice or whatever, they’d run away. Yes, yes. But I feel really happy with the idea that I can teach people purification practice.
I would actually go through the whole Vajrasattva practice, how Lama Zopa teaches it. There’s three different visualisations, two which I’ve done before but which people have loved. Precisely. It’s putting it in a language which is appropriate for the person that you’re working with. Very, very important.
If you’re working with children, you don’t use these meditations as they’re written down here because they’re not appropriate. If you’re working with children, go through them and say, Now what’s the essence of this meditation? Put it in a language then that a child can understand. That’s right. So here, I mean this is a very good example of how people are different and what works for one person doesn’t work for another.
Yes. Right. And then what do do with a group where one person says, really like business. That’s right. With a group whatever you do it’s going to be wrong somewhere along the line or right somewhere along the line so it works both But you could always ask a person afterwards too if it’s somebody that you’re visiting regularly when you finish the meditation just say well you know is there anything about that would you like me to change which would be easier for you?
Yes. I had a situation just recently where a young woman came in saying the doctor had told her to come and I’m obsessively compulsive and nothing has ever worked and so I said you know okay we’ll start, we’ll try to do in a small group. The minute everybody shut their eyes she started giggling and so I stopped it and said okay and then we talked about it a bit and I said you know would you she said you know every time I shut my eyes and I’ve done that before and I went to see hypnotherapist and he couldn’t help me and you know and all the rest of strong investment and know she was already wary about it so I said to her and she said concentration is a real problem so I said okay what about keeping her eyes open and focusing on a spot she said oh yeah on the floor you know so let’s focus on a spot on the floor and we’ll just do it for a very brief time She, she didn’t start giggling, until about three or four minutes so what I did was to then say, you know after we kept on going a tiny bit longer and I stopped it and I said Look at that, you concentrated, you were able to concentrate for three or four minutes and before when you did it you couldn’t do it at all.
Then I offered her to come back before the group met I knew it would be really hopeless in a big group. But the fact was that you’re also using little tiny things that you can highlight as being positive. Positive. There’s lots of tricks you can pick up in the literature on non directive methods of hypnosis. Milton Erickson and the people who’ve worked under him lots of techniques like that.
So if you’re interested in that, check out literature. Any other things? Another technique you can use with a large group is to say to them that I’m going to be helping people to bring their minds back, if you find it’s disruptive, just switch off and don’t listen to me, and that can help a great deal too. So give permission not to do things if they want to do it. Any other bright ideas?
Yes. Yep. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Any other helpful suggestions? Yep. Yes. Yes.
Definitely. Yeah. And what they sit on too. Think, you know, a lot of people think that they can’t meditate unless they sit on cushions and, you know, that it’s okay to sit on chairs and you know you can lie down if you want to. Yes.
That’s really fine to do that. That’s right. I also I also say you know that there’s it’s it’s actually to really highlight the fact that if you’ve brought your concentration back to the breath even once or twice then you’re meditating correctly. Because a lot of people think oh it’s just hopeless, whenever I try I tried but my mind was all over the place so Again, the trance induction techniques used in hypnosis. The suggestions which are given on how to induce a trance can be very helpful in that sense of how to deal with external noise, creating the right sort of environment, all the things we’ve talked about modulating the voice.
There’s also the necessity to be wary of one’s own motivation in leading the meditation what is it that we’re doing and why the person wants that meditation led so that we have some understanding of both where we’re coming from and where that other person’s coming from. Now what I’m going to do is to hand out these meditations. Two thirty, three, three thirty. Yeah. So first of all, there’s the white light coming around.
Then the loving kindness meditation. You should end up with three of these. And finally, imagery for relief and control of pain. So one copy each. Alright so you’ve got three meditations there.
What I’m going to ask you to do is to find a partner preferably somebody who’s not in your group. I’d say within your group but some groups are five and some are six so we can’t do it within the not everybody can do that so find a partner who’s not in your group, somebody different this time, preferably somebody that you don’t know and I want you to take turns so that you swap the roles around so I’ll only explain it once but you understand that then once you’ve done it once then you reverse roles and go over the same process again so one person is the meditator and the other person is the meditation leader, if you like, the one leading the meditation. So the person who’s leading the meditation has to ascertain which of these three meditations is wanted, why it’s wanted, these sorts of things. Get to know something about the person you’re leading the meditation for so you get some idea of how to lead that particular meditation. Then you go through the process of leading that meditation with that person.
Then the person who’s been doing the meditating gives feedback. And it needs to be honest feedback. It doesn’t mean to say it’s bad feedback but it does need to be honest feedback. Reverse the roles. It’ll take a while to do this because to do the meditations properly, even the short ones, can take fifteen-twenty minutes.
In between, when you swap the roles, you can go make yourself cup of tea rather than just having a formal sort of afternoon tea break and come back here maybe around about quarter to four okay so that gives that’ll give us an hour and a quarter for the last session so decide for yourselves when you want a tea break between the two of you but give yourselves plenty of time to go through the meditation, get to know each other, see what it’s like. Just one of these? You do just one of these so you have to find out which of these your meditator wants to do. You can do the same one each time if that’s appropriate. It doesn’t matter which one you do.
So when you swap over roles, you don’t have to select a different meditation. When you swap over roles, if you’re doing the meditating, you become the meditator and say you know I want this particular one done for me okay so could you divide up into pairs I don’t know how you’re going to do this just find somebody you don’t know. Go across the other side of the room or something like that. So once you’ve got a partner, disappear somewhere else or sit in a corner, and then we know. This corner.