Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 36-minute workshop session, Diana Taylor guides a group of volunteer hospice and palliative care workers through practical and spiritual preparation for their service. The session opens with critique and refinement of guided meditations—the loving kindness meditation, white light healing meditation, and Medicine Buddha practice—examining how to adapt written scripts to one’s own voice while preserving doctrinal integrity. Taylor then introduces a series of introspective questions for volunteers to explore their own experiences of pain, loss, and suffering, establishing the foundation that understanding one’s own difficulties deepens capacity for genuine empathy. The session concludes with fourteen principles for volunteer care drawn from teachings by Lama Zopa and Sogyal Rinpoche, covering compassion and morality as the roots of healing, awareness of one’s own limitations and motivations, freedom from attachment and the need for recognition, and the transformative power of witnessing others’ dying process. Pitched at experienced volunteers and caregivers with Buddhist training.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 Ws 1997 03 08.mp3
UUID: f17197e3-1d56-45aa-869f-8266d6774abe
Teacher: Diana Taylor
Collection: Workshop (Diana Taylor)
Date: 1997-03-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 35.8 minutes
Words: ~4,513
Or being a leader of meditations or being led by meditations that people want to bring up at this stage helpful hints that might have come up when you’re doing your two by two exercise Diana, I had I have a lot of difficulty with reading other people’s things. Yes. And actually and I find I’m except Stephen Levine. I’m I feel really happy with just reading his using his meditations just straight straight off with this little slight variations of getting rid of some of the American-isms. But I don’t I don’t think this is really well written.
I mean, I and it it’s it’s mean, I find it really complex and lengthy and That’s the loving kindness meditation. Yeah. Loving kindness meditation. Yep. And and I I would need to I would want to rewrite it myself and also to say much less.
I feel like there was so much that was said that I just switched off. Yes. Yeah. Exactly what you’re saying. Yep.
That’s a very good point. Mhmm. I agree with you entirely on that one. I didn’t write it. It’s a combination.
It’s a bit of a mixture. I think it’s a sort of a compilation of some who have Kay had passed, some of Kay’s own work in that. I did change it. When I was actually doing it with you, I did change it a bit. I don’t know if you noticed when you read it out.
But going through these sorts of meditations and rewriting them according to your own voice is something which I think is very valuable to do, Provided of course you’ve got the content there. That’s the main thing. A look at it and say okay what is the structure which is here? What how can I say this in a way which might be more clearly expressed And what words do I want to use in this context? So put it into your own voice, by all means.
The white light meditation is pretty much as Lama Zopa dictated it to it dictated it, if I remember rightly. The White Light Healing Meditation. Yes, yes. Particularly, I love that dedication. May all people who see me, touch me, remember me, talk about me, think about me, just by that action alone be free.
It’s a very, very powerful dedication and it reminds us too that so much of our contact with people, much of our influence is not necessarily what we set out to do but some of these things that just happen by accident. And you know just by giving somebody a smile or a nod as you go past things like that can have a powerful influence even if that’s all that is that happens. By having that dedication is a daily dedication, I can assure you. Does something to you. Medicine Buddha, the same sort of thing.
So here we have the influence of a realized lama, whereas the loving kindness meditation, the structure is there, but there’s a lot more input from other people. When Geshe-la leads the same sort of meditation he spends a lot more time on sending light out to other people and then receiving the light back into the heart which I noticed oh the coming back into heart is in there, but then generating yourself as the pure body is not in that particular meditation but it’s a very valuable thing to do. Because in doing that we’re trying to visualise ourselves as we would be if we had that pure body. And so we’re then putting our mind in that framework which is open to the concept of having a body like that. And that can be very profoundly helpful too.
So then you if you’ve got a deity practice, instead of imagining your own body as the clear light, can arise as the deity as you do within other deity practices. But in this loving kindness meditation, you go through the loving kindness and then you bring the light back into the heart and then the body is transformed then into the body of the deity if you’re doing a deity practice. If not, then you imagine your own body as being this body which the reason for the transparency is to emphasize the purity and the lack of any obscuration whatsoever to the mind of this particular body. And then you arise from the meditation with that body. You take that body with you as it were, which is a lovely thing to do as well.
The reason for that, that bit about the drought and so on, that comes from Śāntideva Guide to the Bodhisattva’s way of life, which is why it’s put in there. But you can put that in earlier, It doesn’t have to be just there if you want to put it in. It is valuable to put it in because it brings it back down to these are the realities of ordinary people’s experience. The fact that they are starving and hungry and in pain and so on. But yes, if you want to rewrite it, and particularly that particular one, then go ahead and do it and put it into your own words.
Then you’re more comfortable and you’re more comfortable with doing it. Then, of course, your voice comes through better as well. I think Stephen Levine’s loving kindness meditation is is really lovely. Mean, that’s very good framework. Yeah.
And that disrupted the the sort of exchange there. Yes. Because when you become familiar with the meditation, then that’s not a problem anymore. When you become familiar with the meditation, you’ve got the structure in your head. You don’t need this in front of you.
You just go ahead and do it, then you’ve got more awareness of the person that you’re working with. It is quite a technique and when you meet together in the future, and I hope that’s reasonably frequently meeting, I mean you can do that for each other sometimes or even often, depends on what you want to do. But doing it over and over again so you get more and more practice, so you’re also getting the feedback when you get the practice. And then you gradually build up the skills. It’s like anything else, practice helps a lot.
So I’m just saying it was very, you know, more negative. You know, a sense, you know, they They’re saying that they’re more crass. Their behavior might be they appear right away, but they are. So there might be a more skillful way of saying it or a way of saying that which fits in more effectively with your own the way you want to say it. You see, from the Jungian point of view, the person that we dislike the most is the person whose personality is closest to the shadow side of the self.
In other words, that part of ourselves that we don’t want to know about and we pretend it’s not there into the bargain. So that when we come across people like this, it’s actually a great advantage to us if we see them as being part of our own shadow. I say, okay. The reason I dislike this person so much is because there is my shadow being presented to me, and I don’t want to see my shadow. And that brings it back.
Yeah. So the intention there is so that each person who’s listening personalizes it for themselves. So one way of starting that when you’re leading it is to say, now think like this. Or if you don’t want it, now we might like to think like this if you prefer to go that way. Depending on whether you’re me or Carol, you see?
So think in this way, the purpose of my life is thinking this way or you might like to think in this way. So then it’s clear that you’re asking the person to think about themselves in that way. Well, that’s that’s why it’s in the first person is is for that reason. Well, if you start saying that, then it has a sort of a patronizing effect. This is what you ought to be doing.
The purpose of your life is don’t worry about me. I’ve got my life together, but your life, you haven’t got it together. If you say our life, that that that includes yourself plus the person that you’re living with leading the meditation for. That might be appropriate in some contexts too. Well, you can do that.
Often when I do it, I decided to stick I decided to stick to the script when I was doing these because normally, if I was doing these, I wouldn’t be sticking to the script. I’d be sort of going and and intuiting to some extent what needed to be said. Somebody always brings that up if we if we don’t do it ourselves. One one of the things you can imagine the lord of death, the armor of the lord of death gobbling all these things up because he thrives on it. Yes.
The other way to look at it just to say, okay, we’re mistaking a visualization for something which is material and it’s just a confusion of the sort of level at which we’re working. By visualizing this going out, we’re not actually polluting the universe. And you can use all sorts of magic in visualisations. Visualisation is fantastic for that sort of reason. So you can imagine it just disintegrating.
But one of the things I’ve found is that it’s very useful to imagine some sort of strong or wrathful deity gobbling it all up and transmuting it into a powerful energy. This again fits in if you come from a Jungian background at all with saying that the shadow itself has got an important energy, which is valuable, and that we need to be able to understand and utilise this energy. That’s a more sophisticated way of understanding the whole process, but for some people that might be too complex. And then you might prefer to keep it simple and just say get rid of all the negativity. So again, you see, this is why it’s important to know the person that you’re working with.
Oak imagine is compost. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yep.
Yep. Yes. Yeah. If it’s not a distraction, you don’t have to worry about it. Yeah.
You don’t know what kind of person you’re That’s right. Yes. If you try to avoid all distractions, you might end up by making a meditation so complex that you’ve lost the center point of it. That’s the danger if you’re working with a large group and you’re trying to cover all contingencies. So it’s better perhaps in that context just to lead a more simple one and not try to cover it all.
Or say to people if something doesn’t fit, then just follow through with what you think is appropriate. Things like that. But when you’re working one to one, then you can find out, in fact, what’s appropriate for that particular person and work according to that. Children are very good, for example, at magical transformations. They love it.
Yeah. And they can magically transform all sorts of things into something good if they want to. Whereas adults like to be something more logical and rational before they’ll do their transformation of it. Right. I’ve got some more work for you to do.
With pencil and paper, I’m going to give you a hold of questions. Right. This last session, I want you all to focus in on your own needs in the sense of being a volunteer, which is obviously very important for two reasons. One, as has been pointed out earlier today, it’s through understanding our own needs now and suffering that we can have some sort of comprehension of the suffering of other people. And secondly, we need to know what our limitations are, so that we know when it’s wise to keep on going, even though it might be difficult for us, and when it’s wise to pull out and take a break.
So those two things and also having some awareness of the sort of motivations which are relevant or some of the motivations which are there which are not relevant which can interfere with developing that empathy with another person. So here’s the questions. Number one: Why have you volunteered? Number two, which is a sort of a multiple questions. What pain have you experienced in your life?
That’s emotional or physical pain. How did you cope with it? In what way could your helpers have been more skillful? That’s an assumption there was somebody around to help. Could could they have been more skillful?
What needs did you have which were not addressed at that particular time? The next one is a series of questions about loss. What losses have you experienced in your life? Which ones have had the most powerful impact on you? Of the latter, what made those losses so important to you?
Of the latter, that is the ones which are most powerful, what made those losses so important to you? What was it about them that made them important? And in what ways would you like those experiences to be different? The last one, which on the surface looks like the simplest one, what is compassion? Don’t ask Jampayddium.
So those are your questions. There won’t be time to discuss all of those in your groups because we’ve got it’s now quarter past four in any case. I’ll give you about twenty minutes to talk about it in the group. I also want you to take those questions home with you and think about them overnight. You’ll get through some of it, you won’t get through all of it, but back into your groups of five or six, five groups of five or six, so you can share some of these things with each other.
That also generates ideas about different pains and losses that you’ve experienced. So in this case, we’re focusing in on ourselves. What’s my life actually been like? What has been going on in my life? Okay?
So off you go. You did. Oh, it must have been too superficial. Alright. So what’s compassion you lot?
Oh, yeah. I’m losing control of this group, so I’m not. You’ve done the job too well. Take the questions home and think about them at home as well. But we’ve got a few minutes before we have to finish.
Why I wanted to stop. I’ve got a list here of advice for volunteers, which goes from one down to fourteen. It’s not in any particular order but I did do although I’ve been sitting here a lot while you’ve been working I did do a lot of work before we started the workshop and I went through a lot of the talks Lama Zopa had given, Geshe-la had given, Sogyal Rinpoche, Pende Hawter, things like this. So this is the list of advice for volunteers that I thought you might be interested in. First and foremost, the power for healing comes from compassion, the good heart, which is good reason for having a definition of compassion after all.
The power for healing comes from compassion. Number two: Another cause is that the person is pure in morality, abstaining from negative karma. This is the morality and ethics part, which is really the basis, the foundation of all our spiritual practice. Eventually you will. This is on my list of my list of all sorts of bits.
Yes, you’ll get a copy of this eventually. I haven’t had time to put these points in any what do you mean you’re not going to copy it, Dan? You don’t get a copy for a few days. Okay. I’ll let I’ll let you just listen.
Alright. The first power for healing comes from compassion. Right? Second one, morality, abstaining from negative karma. The third one, which I haven’t said yet, is when one has realization of emptiness.
Well, this is why we generate the wish to become bodhisattvas. When we become bodhisattvas, then we can do all these things. So I’m quoting here. I’m not quoting here. I’m not speaking from Another powerful cause for success in healing is when one has realization of emptiness and is able to do the four types of activity: pacification, increase, control and wrath.
Now if you don’t know what those are, it doesn’t really matter. These are things that Bodhisattvas can do that we can’t. Fourth one, keep in touch with each other. It’s very important to have that mutual support. And in particular, because you’re working from a spiritual framework and it’s hard to find other people who work from that spiritual framework.
So this is a very special opportunity to have a group like this working together. Number five, when you are together, express what works well and what does not work well. This is what you’re doing when we did that meditation exercise where you’re leading each other in meditation. So you’re giving a chance to say this works, this doesn’t work. So also when you get together with your follow-up nights, spending time saying well look I was with somebody and this was just a major disaster.
What is it that happened here? Or, I was with somebody and this was fantastic. You can never tell. I was teaching down at Tārā Institute on the Monday night, which is an introduction to meditation. Normally we keep it pretty simple.
But I decided this particular night, because I’d been talking about karma and people that asked me about death, to spend one night talking about death and dying. So I did this. What I didn’t know was that in amongst the people there were about one hundred and twenty people there so it was a bit hard to see everybody’s faces. In amongst the people there was a woman who’d come to see me a few weeks earlier and she had come to see me because her daughter had died from an accidental overdose. Her daughter was thirty years old, a successful actress, things like this, so it was a great shock to suddenly lose somebody like that.
If I’d known that Monica was there, and she brought her sons with her too, Part of the story is that the son had come in about eleven o’clock in the morning to see if his sister wanted to go to the market and she was her breathing was funny, but he didn’t take much notice of it. She was just zonked out, he went off to the market and she died about one o’clock a couple of hours later. So, of course, the son has got a lot to work through. I didn’t know they were sitting in the audience. If I’d known they were there, I would not have talked about death and dying, because I would have thought this is too much for this particular family to deal with within a context of one hundred and twenty other people.
However, being foolish, I didn’t know that they were there. And when they came out up started walking up towards me afterwards, at first I was horrified. And I thought, oh, dear. What have I done now? And they came up and I said, look.
That was absolutely fantastic, Diana. That was just what we needed to hear. Oh. Have the whole thing put into context. Yeah.
It was like that. Thank god. But the point of telling the story is that we never quite know what works and what doesn’t work. That share that with each other. And what works in one context may not work in another context.
Things like We’ve been doing a bit of that today as well. Keep in touch with the people who you’re visiting. And if you run healing courses here and you use that as part of your work, keep in touch with those people. Be aware of your motivations. This is the reason behind the questions that I gave you just now.
So as you start to develop an awareness now, what is the self interest which is here for me? It’s not in terms of trying to eliminate self interest but saying this is some of the ways in which I’ve engendered interest in this. This is where I’ve got my energy from so let me utilise it so it will be of benefit. We need to know what those things are. Be aware of your own fears of pain and dying.
Be aware of your own physical limitations. That’s another critically important one. If your own health is not good at a particular time, then you simply can’t do as much. If you’re going through some sort of emotional crisis yourself, again, you simply can’t do as much for other people. You’ve got to focus in on yourself or maybe your family is going through a difficult time.
Be aware of those sorts of things. Be aware of your own limitations of wisdom and compassion and loving kindness. We are not enlightened at the moment. We don’t have profound wisdom, but we do have some wisdom. You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t have any wisdom, don’t think.
So there is some wisdom. There is some something which says there are ways to work and there are ways not to work. So know what your wisdom is. Utilise your wisdom and be aware that there’s still a hell of a lot more to learn. Same with compassion, same with loving kindness.
Another point, very important, don’t feel bad if you’re not always appreciated. One of the traps that we can fall into is that we do this work so people will appreciate us. It’s a very subtle one. It’s very easy to say it’s not a good motivation, but it works on us very subtly. When we do something which we’ve put a lot of effort into and the person we’re working with is just annoyed with us and doesn’t want to have anything to do with us, it can be very to handle.
I remember going to see one man who was dying of AIDS and I’d been to see him that morning and he he just loved the fact that I was there and I did a bit of massage for him and so on and so forth. He thought it was fantastic. And later on that afternoon, I found I’d lost something, whether it was my diary or pen or I can’t remember what it was. But I rang up his home to see if I’d left it there and he happened to answer the phone. He was so angry with me.
He didn’t even know who I was, but he was obviously going through a bad phase. I can remember getting shocked that, you know, a few hours earlier this person thought I was absolutely marvelous and fantastic and now I’m the worst person on the face of the earth. Now if I reacted to that in terms of blaming myself, then I compound the problem. If I see that as coming from his illness, which is I’m certain in this particular case it was, then I can have compassion for him and the anger he was expressing at that particular time. But we can’t do that if we’re wanting to be appreciated.
So if you’re not appreciated, don’t feel bad about it. Do check whether there’s any validity in it though, not in the sense of feeling bad about it but just make sure you know have I in fact done something which was unskillful in this particular situation? Talk to somebody else about it. It’s very important to let go of your attachments to people that you’re working with even more so when it’s family, even more so when it comes to the point of dying. If we develop an attachment as distinct from empathy with a person, that actually can make the dying process for that person much more difficult.
So you know, the sort of situation where somebody might fall in love with a person, that can be disastrous. Or where they’ve been visiting over a period of, say, five years before death occurs and not wanting this connection to go. So we must recognise, not only with people that we work with as volunteers, but with our own families, All relationships come to an end at some stage, no matter how close and how important they are. Recognise that you too must face death at some stage, whether you like it or not, and that the help you have given these people will help you with your own dying. Now you could argue that that’s a case of self-cherishing, which it could be, but it’s not meant to be that.
What it’s meant to point out is that by working with people and seeing how they go through their dying process and reflecting on that and saying, what does this mean to me? How do I want to die? I’ve seen my mother die. I saw my father die. They both died very different deaths.
And through seeing both of those deaths, I can say, well, look, these are some of the things I don’t want when I die. These are some of the things I do want when I die. The more times you experience that, the more you build up an awareness of what you want your own death to be. And as I’ve said earlier, death is one of the most powerful times for transformation, both for yourself and for your family and people who are close to you. So it’s important to develop an understanding of how you want to die.
And we do that by helping people who die. And the last one is to enjoy the benefits of self-cherishing and the creation of merit. Right? I’m not going to expand on that one. Can work it out for yourself.
So that’s just a list. Those are not my own thoughts in particular. As I say, this is just a list of things that I got out of teachings that other people have done, mostly from Lama Zopa and Sogyal Rinpoche. So let’s leave it there without any more discussion. Questions are meant to be unfinished that I gave you before.
You’re meant to think about them. You’re meant to dream about them if you possibly do dream. I mean, don’t have to dream about them, obviously. Compulsive dreaming. If you do have a dream, can be very interesting to bring it back tomorrow.
So go back and enjoy your Saturday night and your families and whatever you’re going to do, and I’ll see you again at nine o’clock in the morning.