Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this nearly two-hour evening talk, Liana Taylor introduces Buddhist and mindfulness-based approaches to workplace challenges and everyday life as part of a series called Buddha in the Boardroom. She opens with a poem on happiness and invites participants into experiential practices, beginning with a foundational meditation on breath and body sensation. Through a memorable story of a party host unable to manage an uninvited guest, Taylor illustrates how fixation on what we dislike causes us to lose sight of what we value. She then teaches the core framework: that thoughts are mental events, not facts, and that our habitual reactions to experience—avoidance of the unpleasant, attachment to the pleasant, and delusion or numbness toward the neutral—often sabotage our wellbeing. Using personal anecdotes and group dialogue, she distinguishes between useful discernment and destructive judgment, and shows how returning to raw emotional experience rather than elaborate self-stories enables wiser choices. The teaching is pitched at a general adult audience with no prior Buddhist background, mixing psychological insight with practical meditation instruction.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 10 31 Buddha in the Boardroom 31-10-08.mp3
UUID: 467f7a0c-b920-49d4-9210-8ef3979507cf
Teacher: Liana Taylor
Collection: Liana Taylor Buddha in the Boardroom (Liana Taylor)
Date: 2008-10-31
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~12,530
Welcome. I’m Liana Taylor. Can I have a show of hands for who was here last week? Week before? Yes. That’s right. Was here last week. You should be the only person with your hand up there. Welcome everyone.
It’s nice to meet you. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Liana Taylor, and I’m obviously giving the talk this evening as one of a series of eight talks titled Buddha in the Boardroom, looking at ways in which we can adapt the Buddha’s teaching for everyday life and life at work as well. So I’m pleased to see you here. Those of you who were here with me last week might know what I’m about to do. The rest of you, I really encourage you to raise your right hands. Everybody in the room, reach your hand out to someone near you and very, very tenderly touch them. Feel free to reach behind and just say to them gently, if your mobile phone is still on, could you turn it off?
I’d like to start tonight by reading a poem. It’s called The Way to Happiness.
For a long time, it had seemed to me that life was about to begin, real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, or a debt to be paid. Then surely, life would begin. At last, it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.
So stop waiting until you finish school, until you go back to school, until you lose five kilos, until you gain five kilos, until you have kids, until your kids leave the house, until you start work, until you retire, until you get married, until you get divorced, until Friday night, until Sunday morning, until you get a new car or a new home, or until your new car or new home is paid off, until your song comes along, until you are born again, to decide that there is no better time than right now to be happy. Happiness is a journey, not a destination.
So the two things that are important to us in life are love and happiness, and they’re the things that we all seek, love and happiness. And the ways in which we seek love and happiness and the things that make us happy and that make us feel loving and feel loved are the things that matter most to us in the world.
So what I’d like you to do now as we start the evening is choose someone preferably you don’t know, despite the anxiety that this might arise. You really will live through it, believe it or not. Choose someone preferably that you don’t know in the room and take about five minutes to talk with them about, only say what you want to say. You don’t need to go into too much detail about some things. But talk to them about what you love and what makes you happy. What matters to you? Off you go. Find someone to talk to. And if there’s an odd number, find a threesome.
Just wind up when you’re ready and refocus around this direction.
And while we’re sitting here, let’s come into a short meditation. Find yourself sitting upright in a reasonably dignified position that signifies to yourself that you’re about to meditate. You may choose to close your eyes. If you have your eyes open, I encourage you to just go into a soft gaze, soft focus, and look down on the floor about two meters in front of you in order for you to focus your attention inward.
Come into an awareness of exactly what’s happening for you right now. The thoughts that might be present. Just noticing that they’re there. The emotions that might be present. And the bodily sensations that you may notice. And then on the next breath in, come into an awareness of the movement of the breath in your body, noticing the rise and the fall of your belly and your chest with each breath in and the fall with each breath out. One after the other as each breath breathes you, just noticing the movement of the breath in the body as the body expands and deflates.
The breath is always available to you as an anchor. The breath is always breathing you. You can always bring your awareness to the movement of your breath in your body as an anchor to help still you, reconnect you to yourself, quieten your mind.
And then allow your awareness to expand out to your whole body, just noticing your whole body. Notice your posture on the chair, your facial expression, and the sense of yourself in this room among other people. And as you’re ready, allow yourself to come out of the meditation and your eyes to open, and you may want to stretch.
As we start this evening, I’d like to share with you a story about a fellow, very career-wise, very successfully and financially successful fellow who lived in Sydney. Young fellow, early, well, young to me. That’s how old you are. In his early thirties, lived in Sydney, very successful life, doing really, really well. Top of his game, kind of turned around one weekend and had a look at his life and kind of thought, well, you know, I’ve achieved everything I need. I’m earning a fortune. I’ve got this great place in Sydney, but I’m not happy. You know? What’s missing?
And he decided for himself that what was missing from his life was a sense of community and connection and family. He didn’t have any of those things. And so he decided on a sea change, and he moved to the Adelaide Hills. Up near Stirling, you can imagine the kind of area that he’s living in. And he looked long and hard for the right place to live, and he found this just glorious large place out at Stirling with a big view, overlooking the valleys. Just a really, really beautiful place, a good place for entertaining, swimming pool, everything he needed. He could put in all of his sound systems and just have the place looking perfect and being perfect. And he thought that was a good place to start his new life, and so he bought this house.
And he’d heard a lot about Stirling before he went, and that was his local town. And he knew it was kind of a rural community feel, and he really wanted to be a part of the community. He really wanted to step into a different life. He wanted to create the possibilities to meet someone that he could marry and have children with and just to be a part of a community and have a different lifestyle than the one he’d been having. So he had a vision. He knew what he wanted. The vision was shining its light on his path forward, so he knew what he wanted.
And so he decided to have this big party and invite all the local people to the party. So he got the day of the party ready, and he did up all these flyers, and he started sticking flyers all over the town, like flyers everywhere, with this open invitation for all the people from the town to come to the party.
And he was really pleased. The day of the party’s coming up, and he’s used to organizing fancy affairs. So he’s kind of used to getting things organized, and everything’s looking stunning. There’s wonderful music blaring, the sun’s shining, you know, it’s late afternoon. There’s just food and grog everywhere. It’s all perfect for this party.
First people come to the door and he opens the door and they welcome each other and he lets them in and they come in and he’s really happy, you know, really, really happy. And this continues for a while. People just keep streaming in, and there are more and more people in this place. And he’s having a really good time with all these people around. And then, you know, ding dong goes the bell, opens the door, and there’s a guy standing at the door. He’s kind of like a hobo. You know? Really disheveled, daggy looking, unkempt, you know, bushy, matted hair and unwashed hair and daggy clothes, you know, obviously sleeping in the streets kind of person.
And he says, oh, I’m here for the party. And this fellow says, oh, I’m sorry. You’re not welcome. And the guy says, well, yeah, I am. There was an invitation to everybody that everybody’s welcome. Yeah. Well, but you’re not welcome.
Anyway, so he’s standing at the doorway having this conversation trying to stop this fellow coming in. And this fellow is just calmly kind of stating that he is welcome and he’s planning to come to the party. So this conversation goes on for a little while. You know, the guy’s getting more and more agitated. This goes on five minutes, six minutes, eight minutes, ten minutes. Then all of a sudden, somebody else arrives. Of course, he’s gotta open the door for them. So he opens the door for the new guest, you know, welcomes them in. Meanwhile, this fella just waltzes in. He’s mortified. He’s, you know, set up this great big party for all these people and all this stuff around, and this hobo’s waltzed into his place smelling and looking awful and not representing him very well at all.
So he chases this fellow around. The hobo’s gone over to the food, of course, as you would, you know, if you’re hungry, if you need food, and starts eating. And this fellow is very quietly, so that he doesn’t want other people to know what he’s doing, trying to talk to him, trying to convince him that he should leave, trying to have conversations with him. So conversations going back and forth, back and forth. You know, somebody would come and talk to him, and so he’d turn around and talk, and the guy would be off eating something else and say, you know, chase after him, start talking, start nudging him, you know, then he’d feel all yucky because he touched him and, you know, it just went on and on, you know, with this guy trying to convince this fellow that he should leave.
Of course, he couldn’t say too loudly, and he couldn’t manhandle him. For aside, he didn’t want to touch him. And second is he didn’t want anyone to see that he was manhandling this person out, that everybody was welcome, but only the nice people, of course. Only the people that he liked were welcome.
So this goes on and on. Then the guy starts going after the grog, and then the owner gets really worried. Meantime, more people arrive at the door, so he goes to the door, opens the door up, welcomes people, but he kind of hurries them in now because he’s all anxious worrying about the hobo. So he’s hardly greeting people at the door. He doesn’t remember people’s names because he’s rushing back to try and get rid of the hobo. And so he keeps, you know, coming back to the hobo time and time again. Meanwhile, the hobo’s eating more food, drinking more drinks.
And this goes on for nearly two hours. Nearly two hours. And then all of a sudden, at one stage, he’s just come back from the door where he’s welcoming yet more guests and, you know, rushing from, you know, gotta open the door, let these people in so he can hurry back to the hobo to try and convince the hobo to leave. And somewhere in that process at about the two hour mark, he realizes he’s just spent two hours of this party in this idyllic life that he’s trying to set up, trying to get rid of something he doesn’t want. And in the process, he spent all of his time engaged with the thing that he doesn’t like, and he has completely missed all of the things about the party that he does like.
I don’t know if anything like that has ever happened to you in your life. When you spend all of your time so busy trying to fight the thing that you’re not enjoying or that you don’t want, that you actually really miss living the life that you really do want to be living and doing the things that you really do want and really do value.
Obviously, in order to live wisely in the world and to live happily, we need to have a vision of what we want. We need to see really clearly what it is that matters to us, what we love, what gives us purpose, what we value, what will bring us happiness. We need to have that vision there because that vision shines the light on the path toward us so we have an idea of where we’re going. And whilst that direction might change and that vision might change, when we check in on our hearts and we recognize it’s changed, so we change direction, we still need something shining the light on our path forward for us to move forward.
The other thing we need to see really, really clearly also is other things that get in our way of moving toward that. And a lot of tonight’s talk is about those things that get in our way that we haven’t had other ways of dealing with. I mean, we’ve got many ways of dealing with obstacles in our life. But tonight’s talk is very much about looking at what are those things that get in our way of living into the life that we most value, that we most love, that would bring us most happiness, and particularly the inner obstacles that we have, particularly around self-doubt.
Let me read you a very, very short story. Don’t sneeze. You will miss it. Just have a little listen.
John is going to school. He’s worried about the math test. He wonders if he’ll be able to control the class. After all, it’s not the duty of a janitor to do that.
Now I want you to tell me when I read the first line out, John’s going to school. What were you thinking?
Kid. Yep. Kid. Student off to school.
He’s worried about the maths test. What were you thinking?
Kid. Kid. Kid. I’m worried about maths.
He wonders if he’ll be able to control the class. What were you thinking?
Teacher. Yep. Assumption changes. More information, assumption changes. Reasonable assumption.
After all, it’s not the duty of a janitor to do that. Wasn’t a teacher after all. It was a janitor.
So what we know about the mind is that it’s normal for the mind, normal and useful for the mind, to make all sorts of associations and connections like that one. It’s normal and it’s healthy. That’s how we get through life. That’s how we’re creative. That’s how we get things done. It’s also the case that not all the associations the mind makes, not all the things the mind thinks are actually true. And so the single, the first really important thing to remember is that thoughts are not facts. They’re mental events. Those mental events may or may not have a lot to do with reality. But when we’re having mental events, our tendency is to believe them. Yeah? So first thing. Thoughts are not facts. They are mental events.
Not only that, once our minds have a particular thought or a particular mental event, it’s often the case that once you’ve made one thought, the next thought comes immediately afterwards, and the next one after that, and the next one after that. And what’s more, we often have really regular patterns of these things, of those automatic cycles of patterns.
And so what I’d like to do now is take you into another meditation. This is a body scan. It’s a particular type of body scan. Who here is familiar with doing body scan meditation? About half the group. Yep. Okay. So you’ll be familiar with what’s going on. The rest of you, it’s a really easy thing to do.
And the task in the body scan is to see as best you can to follow my instructions and just notice what the mind does. Notice the places that feel good, the places that don’t feel good, and notice what your mind does when it feels good or when it doesn’t feel good. Just follow me as I take you along.
Once again, come into sitting meditation posture. Sitting upright in a reasonably dignified position to signify that you’re going to meditate. If your legs are crossed on the floor, uncross and put your feet flat on the floor if you can. Especially if you’re a girl, make sure there are cushions there if that’s helpful or if anybody wants to sit on the floor or have a cushion under their backside or a cushion under their feet. Whatever you do, sit in a way that’s comfortable. It’s the most important thing.
Make sure your knees are comfortably apart so that your belly is not pulled tight, holding your knees together. Just make sure your shoulders are relaxed, your tongue and your jaw are relaxed, your belly’s relaxed. Rock your body from side to side just to let your body sort itself out, and allow those movements to get smaller and smaller until your body finds its own balance point. Rock your head from side to side, allowing those movements to get smaller and smaller until it too finds its own balance point. Tuck your chin in ever so slightly just so the back of your neck is open.
And come aware of the skin on the bottom of your feet, in your socks or in your shoes or on the floor. Just notice the sensation of your skin, where it’s contacting. And let your feet sink into the floor. Notice the contact of the back of your thighs and your backside and your back on the chair. Just feeling the sensations that you might feel there. And then let that sink back into the chair. Feel your hands on your lap, and let them rest.
Open up to all the sounds around you, listening to sound just as sound. Listening for the sounds in the room. Any sounds outside. Listen to sound in all directions as far as you can. Opening up to the sensation of sound, as if you were resting in a huge sphere of sound, which gently surrounds you, nurtures you. Softening into the sound.
On your next breath in, just imagine in whatever way you imagine things. Just imagine following your breath as you breathe in through your nostrils and your mouth, following the breath all the way down through your body, through your hips, and down into your left leg, all the way down to your left toes. And then when you breathe out, imagine following the breath all the way out the same way. So just following the breath in through the mouth and nostrils, following the breath as if you were following it down through the body into the left leg all the way down to the left toes, and then following the breath out again. Just continue like this for a little while.
Some of you will find it easy, and for some of you, it’ll be a little bit of a challenge. If thoughts arise as they naturally will, it’s what minds do, just notice the thought and bring your awareness back to the breath going down into the left foot and back out again.
And on the next breath out, let go of the awareness of the breath moving up and down. Follow the breath down into the left leg, and just notice all the sensations you notice in the whole of the left leg, the ankle, the foot, and the toes. Rest your awareness in the left leg and foot and toes, noticing any places that feel pleasant, places that are unpleasant, places where you don’t notice anything at all. Nothing to change. Nothing to fix. Just noticing what is there.
And on the following breath out, let go of your awareness of the left leg. And the following breath in, follow the awareness. Just imagine following the breath all the way from the mouth or nostrils down through the body, all the way down into the right leg, foot, and toes. And then follow the breath out from the right foot all the way up and out. Just follow the breath like this for a few breaths.
You may not get it exactly. However you experience this is just fine. If thoughts arise, notice the thoughts and bring your awareness back to following the breath as if you were following the breath in through your mouth and nostrils all the way down through your body, all the way down into your right foot and toes, and then out again. One breath after the other.
And on the next breath out, let go of the awareness of the breath going down and back up. And on the following breath in, take your awareness down into the right leg and ankle, feet, and toes. And just notice any sensations there, resting your awareness in the right leg, ankle, feet, and toes. Noticing any places of comfort, of discomfort, of tension, or the places where you’re not noticing anything at all.
If thoughts arise, just notice them. Let them go. Bring your awareness back to the sensations in your right leg, ankle, and foot.
And on the next breath out, let go of the awareness of the right leg and foot and ankle. And on the following breath in, follow the breath down to the pelvis, the hips, the lower back, the lower belly. Just notice any of the sensations there. Nothing to change or fix. Just noticing. If thoughts arise, just notice them. Let them go. Bring your awareness back to the actual physical sensations in your lower body.
Then on the next breath out, let go of the awareness of the lower body. And on the following breath in, follow the breath into the upper part of the torso, the waist, the ribs, chest, upper back. Just notice any sensations there. Becoming aware of the places that are pleasant, those that are unpleasant, where there’s tension or discomfort, and the places where you don’t really notice anything at all. If thoughts arise, just notice them. Let them go. Bring your awareness back to the sensations in your upper body.
On the following out breath, let go of the awareness of the upper body. And the following in breath, follow the awareness down into the left shoulder, left arm, all the way down to the left hand and fingers. And rest your awareness there, noticing any sensations in your left arm, hand, fingers. Nothing to do. Nothing to fix. Nothing to change. Just noticing how your body is experiencing itself.
And on the next breath out, let go of your awareness of your left arm, and on the following breath in, follow your awareness all the way down through your right shoulder, your right arm, hands and fingers. And let your awareness rest in your right arm, hands and fingers, noticing the sensations there. Thoughts arise, just notice them. Bring your awareness back to the sensations in your right arm, hands, and fingers.
And on the next breath out, let go of the awareness of the right arm. And on the following breath in, allow your awareness to move all over your entire head and entire body. Just noticing the sensations all over your entire head and body.
And allow your awareness to rest in any places of particular discomfort or tension as long as it’s okay for you to do that. Allow your awareness to rest there momentarily, being curious about these places. And as you’re letting your awareness rest on a particular place in your body where there might be discomfort or tension or just any other place you choose that has some energy, some experience you can sense. Just notice whether this area has a sense of heat or cold. Whether it’s long or short. Whether it’s solid or spacious. Whether it’s still or moving, gently lean in with curiosity and interest to this experience.
Particular pain there, you may choose to follow the breath down into that area, breathing into that area of discomfort, and then breathing out from that area. And just notice whether the sensations are staying the same or whether they’re changing.
And then let go of your awareness on that part of you. Once again, notice the movement of the breath in your chest and your belly. Noticing the rise of your chest and belly with each breath in and the fall with each breath out.
Let go of your awareness of the movement of the breath in the body, and notice the hands on your lap, the touch of your body in the chair, and your feet on the floor. Open up to all the sounds around you. And as you’re ready, slowly come out of the meditation and allow your eyes to open. And you may like to stretch.
And what I’d like you to do is find somebody else that you don’t know and take about five or six minutes to talk with them about what happened. Now it’s not a matter of right or wrong. It’s a matter of what actually did happen. Did you nod off to sleep? Did you get really annoyed with it and frustrated and spend the time planning tomorrow’s dinner? Did you want to shoot me because this isn’t what you were expected? Were you blissing out? Were you noticing the pain in your body? Did you notice the pain in different places? Did you not notice anything at all?
Just it doesn’t matter what happened. The task is to notice what did happen. And so find someone you don’t know in the room, if there is someone you don’t know in the room. Five or six minutes. See if you can share. I’ll ding the bell about halfway through so you’ve got a sense of sharing the time.
This is halfway through your time, just to give you an idea.
And as you’re ready, come back into the large group.
And so just very briefly, because we’re gonna go off for a we’re gonna have a tea break in a moment. Very briefly, I hope that’s what the people that are organizing are expecting. Just thought I’d warn you. Short tea break. Thanks, Lindsay. We were gonna do that last week, but we actually broke at ten past nine, which is, you know, a bit late for a tea break, so we just had a quick pee break instead.
I just want a quick overview. Just give me some indication of what happened for you during the meditation.
Quite comfortable in the first half of it and very uncomfortable in the second half. I just wanted it to finish.
Yep. Yep. So felt uncomfortable, and then you wanted it over?
Yes. Yes.
And what were the thought processes that went with the wanting it over?
Because it was hurting in areas that I was concentrating on that were hurting before, but I wasn’t really concentrating on them.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And do you know what your mind was saying?
Stop this. Open your eyes and stretch.
Right. Okay. Great. Other people, what happened?
Similar.
Okay. I think the more I focused on the discomfort, the more it magnified.
Magnified?
To shift my focus.
Yep. Instructed to…
To stay there.
To stay there. Yeah. And then what did you feel after you were kind of feeling pulled toward doing what I was telling you rather than what you wanted to do?
Well, obviously, it’s frustrating.
Yeah. It makes you unhappy.
Yes.
And do you know what your mind was doing? What was it saying to you?
More like about me or the situation? There’s a lesson in this somewhere. There’s gotta be some value in this suffering.
Yeah.
I was simply thinking the lesson is that all I focus on is that which hurts.
Right.
Focus on stuff that makes me happy about it.
Okay. That might be one lesson. In fact, that wasn’t really the lesson I was trying to give, but it doesn’t matter. That’s a lesson that can be really useful to know. Yes. Absolutely. What else did people, anybody nod off?
Mhmm. Mhmm.
Was that nice?
Yes. Thank you.
Good. I’m glad. My voice has that effect on some people. Actually, often. What else was happening for anybody? Anything else happen?
I found that when I was focusing on areas that were neutral, areas that were not so neutral were kinda grabbing my attention.
Yeah. Yep. So you’re trying to pay attention here where it’s neutral, but the discomfort’s pulling your attention.
Yep.
Kinda like life, really. All these neutral parts, but the part that’s driving us spare takes up all of our brain space.
Yep.
Yeah. Anything else you noticed?
I just felt, like, very relaxed, but it was all just a happy little tingle. I didn’t feel, you know, I have pain sometimes. I don’t know about it. Just not today. Not tonight. Was very nice. Thank you.
You’re welcome. I’d love to say it will happen again that way, but, you know, things always change. And nice tonight, not nice tomorrow night. Yeah. But nice experience of bliss.
Okay. What I want to do now is, well, in just a moment is go for a break. And when we come back from the break, we’ll start to have a look at how is it that, you know, from a Buddhist perspective, we use meditation both to understand these things, to understand how we respond to life in many different ways. You know, meditation is useful for many, many things. Learning to focus the mind, in this case, also useful for understanding how we respond to life and how we might choose to respond differently to certain situations, and we can use meditation as the vehicle for that.
When we come back in, we’ll have a look how that relates to our ongoing daily life and the places where we struggle and our self-doubt and other fictions of the mind come up.
Okay? Let’s have a break for about ten minutes. Be back in here at ten to two.
So welcome back. I don’t know if this is the right volume, but anyway, this is where I am. What we notice in meditation are things happen in meditation. We like it. We don’t like it. We notice things. We don’t notice things. We nod off. We get agitated. We get blissed out. All these different things happen in the same activity, not usually at the same time. And so meditation is a really useful microcosm of our life. And so it’s one of the ways that we use, you know, in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, for example, one of the ways that we use meditation as a way to kind of have a snapshot of our broader life and put it in a different place.
And so I don’t know how many are used to using microphones, but it’s so weird hearing yourself kind of morph into this person and you kind of feel all these personas and these different volumes. I’m echoing now. Or now I’ve become so timid I can hardly hear myself. As you go through this morph of a sense of personality as the voice changes in the room, all in public, which is even more public now. Nothing unusual.
Okay. So what we know about our lives is that thoughts are not facts. They are mental events. In meditation, just as in life, our minds often run on autopilot. Have you ever noticed that the mind has a tendency to judge its experience? It likes it. It doesn’t like it. It’s good. It’s not good. It should be like this. It shouldn’t be like this. It should be different. It should be better. It should be worse. Somehow or other, this experience isn’t quite right. Someone’s giving me the wrong experience. I’m not experiencing the experience rightly. I’m not doing it right. I’m doing it wrong. They gave it wrong. They gave it right. I don’t know if any of you have those sorts of thoughts ever in your life.
No. No. It’s not what I expected. It’s not what I wanted. Why can’t I be elsewhere? Why doesn’t this happen differently? The judgments can often lead to a sequence of thoughts and thoughts are often about blame and the blame’s about how things should be different, how they need to be changed, how they need to be fixed, how somebody else ought to have done something differently. They shouldn’t have done this to us. We shouldn’t have done this to them. We should have known different. They should have known different. All of those things. All of those thoughts often take off quite automatically.
You know, we often have something that happens in life that we don’t like, that we’re not enjoying, that we feel agitated about, upset about, frustrated about, hurt about, betrayed about, annoyed about. It goes on and on and on. The list is very long of the ways that we can get upset about our experience in life. I’m in no way taking away from the fact that some experiences aren’t good, you know? Sometimes the way we’re spoken to is not a good thing, but our own responses to that often mean that we just go off in this whole automatic cascade of minds and feelings running on autopilot, and we just kind of one little thing, the kid walks in the door, drops the bag, and all of a sudden, we’re ranting and raving because, you know, they’ve dropped the bag a million times before.
The person we love looks at us sideways instead of front on. All of a sudden, they don’t love us. They’ve never loved us, and they’re never gonna love us the way they should have. Why am I here? We go to work, and our employee somehow rather makes a mistake when you know that they’re really good with detail, and you count on them for this, and all of a sudden they’re the most stupid person on earth and why didn’t they get it right and you’re paying them for details and you think you should sack them.
I don’t know if this ever happens to any of you in your lives. So what we know about automatic pilot is there are often places in our life, and for most of us, there are some regular places that it happens. Either with ourselves, where we do that with ourselves, we just go into this tirade with ourselves about how we’re wrong, we shouldn’t have done it this way, we should know better. We go into a tirade about somebody else or some other situation. Somehow or other it’s not right.
Now it is upsetting, but our mind just goes off into this automatic cycle of somehow it’s not right, needs to be fixed, something needs to be happening differently. When we’re in that cycle of thoughts we’re losing awareness of what is actually happening in the moment. We’re often losing sight of our own emotional states, our raw emotional states, and what’s really going on. And therefore, we lose the freedom to decide how to respond in that situation in a way that will actually give us the benefit that we actually want, that will actually move us in the direction of the things that we most want out of life, the things that most matter to us.
So what I’d like you to do now is choose another person to talk to, someone you don’t know, if there are still people in the room you don’t know, and got about five or six minutes again to talk with them about the places, the ones that you want to talk about that is and preferably not the most tragic things that happen in your life because we just haven’t got time to kind of process everybody’s tears and angst and so you may want to choose something that’s not the most serious, you know, wrenching, spilling beans sort of thing right at this second, but just have about five minutes altogether to talk with the other person about some of the really common places in your life you know your mind gets off on automatic pilot.
A bit like that guy did at the party. His mind was so lost in I don’t want this hobo in my house. I don’t like this. He lost two hours of the party in the process. It didn’t really serve him very well. Yeah? Doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t like it, but the fact that he was lost in all of his arguments with the person meant that he was lost from his own party for two hours from the thing that he most valued.
So find someone to talk with. Talk with them about two or three of the common ways and places in your life where you get lost on automatic pilot, and because of your being lost in that, you actually don’t act in the ways that most support the life you want to have. Three of you will be in a group of three, but everybody else in pairs. And if you just start to wind up that conversation and come back into the larger group.
And winding up and coming back into the larger group.
And so I just want to check in case I don’t have a good picture here, has anybody in the room not got one or two or three stories like that?
Oh good, I’m relieved. It’s not just me and the rest of the universe.
Okay. So how is it that we continually respond in this way, especially when our responses are such that they don’t actually help move us towards the things that matter to us, the things that we most value. They feel real at the time. The thoughts that we’re having feel very real. The emotions that we have at the time feel very justified. How many of you feel completely justified in the feelings you’re having at the time? Like when you’re completely enraged, sulking, sad, distraught, agitated, want to kill somebody, want to throw your children through the glass window when it’s closed. You know? I mean, they’re real feelings at the time, but that doesn’t make them useful.
So the feelings are real and there is some relationship to reality. But where is that relationship and what can we do about that that’s more wise than that automatic pilot that leads us down a path that takes us away from what matters to us instead of towards what matters to us. How do we do that in a way that is also honoring ourselves?
Well, what actually happens? We respond to experience, whether it’s inner experience, which we notice during meditation, or outer experience, which we notice all the time in life, in one of three ways. And pretty well, that’s all we do. These one of three ways. This one is problematic, by the way.
If the experience we’re having is unpleasant, we tend to want to avoid it, push it away, get rid of it, blame it, judge it, attack it, fight it. We’re just angry with it. Yeah? So some of you might notice in one of your situations that that’s how you respond to that situation. Now the fact that it’s unpleasant, it’s unpleasant. You’re allowed to feel that something is unpleasant. You’re allowed to not like something. The fact that you then respond with this, if this does not support your life and move you toward what matters to you most, then that’s where the problem comes.
So this is not the problem. The fact that you find something unpleasant isn’t a problem. It’s what you do with that. That’s the problem. I mean, I’m sort of stating the obvious. I’m just putting it in a particular context.
Same. When we have experiences that are pleasant, we like something. Oh, you know, this hot chocolate’s really nice. I think I’ll have another hot chocolate. Oh, that was really nice too. Perhaps I’ll have another one of those. I feel sick. And oh, this, you know, staying awake late at night watching this movie is really good. I had a really nice time watching this movie. I just blobbed out from my life. I ignored everything else. Perhaps I’ll put another video in. It’s only twelve o’clock. I’ll handle this tomorrow.
This PA doing all my work for me. This is fantastic. I can just keep handing stuff on all the time. This is just wonderful. I’ll just keep handing everything on. I will just stop paying attention to anything myself whatsoever. There are all these ways we can have experiences that are pleasant. Sex is another good one. Food. Drugs. Alcohol. Relationships. Jobs. Money. Status. Security. You know. Ego. All these ways that we can feel quite pleasant, and when we feel pleasant we tend to get a bit attached.
Now the fact that they’re pleasant is good. The fact that we know what is pleasant in life is good. We want to do more things that are pleasant, but if we get so attached to them that we do them to the degree and we want them to the degree that doesn’t serve our life, doesn’t move us towards what matters to us most, then that’s become problematic. That’s when it becomes attachment, and it’s also when we get really upset when we lose things that we really like as if our whole life is dependent on that where it’s just this little aspect.
Then there’s the other of the three ways that we can respond to things, the places like in the meditation where in your body you kind of, did you ever have that experience in your body where you kind of didn’t really notice anything at all? Most of us have experiences like that in life where we kind of don’t really notice our emotions or we don’t have really any thought about it or we don’t know what it is. Sometimes you see that in an argument between two people where one person is earnestly trying to explain to the other why something is a problem. For them, it’s a problem. Yeah. The other person’s, okay. What’s the problem? So, you know, just kind of oblivious.
Now, again, there is the place in which something is not a problem simply because it’s not a problem. Yeah. And that’s lucky because then you can usually act quite wisely. Then there’s a place that something is not a problem because you can’t kind of register it. You just can’t register it. You might feel confusion. You might feel some sense of delusion. Often boredom fits into that category. Kind of bored with something. It’s an odd sort of feeling going on. Often spaced out.
I don’t know if any of you do that. Do any of you space out in situations that, yeah. What we notice in life is that in situations we’re different. We respond differently in different situations. Some of us have more of a tendency toward these kinds of behaviors. Some of us have more of a tendency toward these behaviors, some of us have more of a tendency towards these, and some of us have more of a tendency towards these.
One of my best buddies who’s a meditation teacher, her tendency is here and so you know you try to talk to her about a problem and she kind of sits there with a vacant look on her face with sort of no registering that there’s anything going wrong and so she has no register that says maybe something needs to happen here. And so for her, her level of no feeling around those sorts of things can be actually problematic. The good side of that is she doesn’t get agitated about too much. Incredibly accepting and put up with just about anything.
So I, on the other hand, I’m a bit more inclined here as maybe offers for someone who’s my size. That’s where my addiction has come from. Well, part of it. It’s a small part of that. But, you know, I’m kind of a mushy girl. I like love and being in love, and I like cuddling up to my kid who’s, you know, six foot tall and twenty-nine years old. And I like all that mushy loving stuff. I like my romantic poetry and my love songs and stuff like that. And that can lead me down the line of, you know, staying up till two in the morning talking to my daughter on the phone when I can talk to her anytime I like. She’s in South America. It’s not hard on Skype these days. That might lead me to watching two lovely romantic comedies on television instead of one and going to bed at a decent time. This is sort of it’s a bit of a habit of mine.
I’m not so easy to anger or blame. It’s not that it doesn’t happen, but it’s not a regular habit of mine. But there’s another good friend of mine who has had some screaming matches with me because he very easily goes into here. If we’re having a conversation and something goes a bit wrong, he just starts yelling at me and gets really angry and says really nasty things which I feel shocked out of my boots. But, you know, after a few years of watching this happen every now and then, I learned not to take it too seriously and think, well, you know, that’s just his overreaction to that situation. And just as this is sometimes my, you know, that sort of clinging to something nice and mushy, my overreaction and just as this is my other friend’s overreaction. And so they’re just different ways we respond.
And what I’d like you to do at the moment is just quietly to yourself, reflect on those situations you were talking about before and notice in any of those situations, do you notice that you’re tending to do one or more of these?
So just give me a show of hands if you’re noticing that in any of those situations you’re tending to have one of these kinds of responses.
Pretty well all of us, not everybody, but most of us.
Okay. So once we understand that and we start to get a bit more familiar with that. Now we don’t want to take away from the fact that some things are unpleasant, and some things are pleasant, and some things we, you know, we’re a bit oblivious to. And then there’s all the kind of easy free space where we’re just light and free and able to see things easily, but we’re more talking about problematic areas. So the really important distinction here is to stay here, to stay with these experiences. Yeah.
An example being that I pick up a potato. I’m in a hurry. I’m cooking food. If it’s just me and I’m cooking food, I’m in a hurry, I just go without food. But say I’ve got guests, you know, the stakes are higher, and I’m in a hurry. We’re cooking food, going to the movies afterwards. It’s important. I pick up the potatoes, start peeling the potato. It’s a green potato. Put the potato down. Pick up another potato. Peel the potato. Oh, another green potato. Holy shit. What am I gonna do? You know?
Unpleasant experience. It’s not pleasant to me that the potatoes that I need right now for a dinner before you know, an important time frame are green, especially if I don’t have a whole lot else to cook which is quite likely because I don’t cook a real lot and so that’s an unpleasant experience. Okay. But the difference here is I can register that as unpleasant. I can take a breath and notice what my tendencies might be, you know. Oh my god, you know potatoes are green, they’re always green. What are people gonna think? People are gonna come. They’re not gonna be able to feed them. Oh my god. You know?
Whatever your mind has a natural tendency to do, it will do at this point. So if it’s blaming the universe for growing green potatoes, then that’s what you’ll be doing. If it’s blaming the greengrocer for buying the wrong potatoes and the greengrocer being an idiot, that’s what your mind will do. If it’s being caught up with the judgments that you think your friends are gonna make of you because you haven’t cooked them a decent meal with potatoes at a decent time. Of course, it was me I’d just go and buy takeaway. It’s easy at that point, but most people aren’t like that. Most people feel the need to cook. And I can understand that. It’s quite a sensible need, but I don’t have it. But if your tendency is to get hooked into, oh my god, you know, these people are gonna judge me because I haven’t cooked the potatoes, that is what your mind will do.
I’m sure you can think of the other things your mind would do in that situation. Yeah? So that’s what the tendency of the mind does. The more we understand the tendencies of our mind and the regular tendencies that our mind has especially in those regular situations that happen to us over and over because most of the dramas that happen to us in our life happen pretty regularly, pretty repeatedly, either at home or at work with our friends, the same little scenarios that go over and over. When we start to look at that and start to see the pattern of it, we can actually start to get a bit, you know, lighthearted about it. Yeah?
So we can actually start to see what’s actually going on here and not to get too hooked in our version of this and particularly not to get too hooked in other people’s versions of this. Not to say that these things over here are particularly useful because they’re not, but it doesn’t help either to get hooked in it because if other people are dancing out their crap, well, it’s just their day for dancing out their crap, we dance our crap out another time. Yeah? If you’re in a relationship where only one of you is dancing out all the crap and the other one’s copping it, maybe you don’t wanna be in that relationship. But most of the rest of us, we’re just in relationships where one person dances out their stuff and the other person dances out their stuff.
The relationship doesn’t get too bad unless you’re both dancing your stuff out at the same time and it’s particularly nasty. If both of you have got this as a regular pattern, that’s not so bad. You just have a screaming match. But nobody’s gonna get scared or upset or hurt. Yeah? But if one of you has got this pattern, one of you has got this pattern, this person’s gonna want to be feeling all loved and mushy, and this person’s gonna be dumping on them. And every time that one feels more love and mushy and wants something nice to happen, this person’s gonna judge them even more because they’re such a wuss. And this person’s gonna feel even hurt because they’re being so angry.
And so it’s the way that those patterns blend together that make that feel so unbelievably toxic. Yeah? So it’s not about that we have this pattern or that pattern. It’s the way when both people are caught in this stuff at the same time and the way that those patterns collide into each other or this one and this one or this one, you know, any difference. It’s the way those things get caught together that really generates a lot of pain and suffering. Yeah.
So the importance here then is to make the distinction between what I would call, this is number four, am I spelling this right? I should just yep, check on that. I can’t spell so well without a computer these days. Does it have an e?
Yes.
Well, actually, I still was okay before the meningitis, but since the meningitis and without a computer, you know, the combination of those two things make me really not very confident. I don’t even know when I’m not spelling right now.
So the difference is what I would call the difference between discernment and judgment. You know, you just need to be able to discern what’s working well, what’s not working well. You need to be able to say, I like this. I don’t like this. This is working well. This isn’t working well. This potato’s too green. This potato’s white enough. This work was good enough. This work wasn’t good enough. This person has sufficient self-awareness for me to trust to give them, to go for counseling with. This person doesn’t have sufficient skills for me to trust them.
We have to be able to make those discernments, otherwise we can’t get through life. So the discernments, it’s easy to do this. Well, we know we’re getting into trouble, and we need to act wisely on the basis of that. You know, somebody’s not doing something well. We need to act on that. But judgment is where we start telling a story. Invariably, the story is gonna talk about this last time. The story is something about well, they didn’t do that very well. They must be a bit of an idiot. I’m smarter than they are. If they had done this better, they would be smarter. If they were smarter, well, actually, they can’t be very smart because if they were smart, they would have a different job. Well, why have I hired them for this job anyway? Well, I have to get rid of them.
You know, there’s some sort of story and it’s always about a comparison. Someone’s better, someone’s worse, someone should have done something, someone shouldn’t have done something. There’s always a story. So you know full well when you’re getting caught in judgment, which is more about these things. Don’t like that? I’m gonna tell a story to myself to really feed it. Yeah? Do like that? I’m gonna tell myself a story why I really need to have this and why I’m gonna be attached to it and why I’m gonna be devastated if I don’t get it. You know? Not feeling? I’m gonna tell myself a story about, you know, this is boring. You know? I’m just spacing out. I’m not interested here. Yeah? Why would I be paying attention to this? Let me out of here.
So that’s the judgment. We tell a story. Now have you ever noticed yourself in these situations we’re talking about tell stories to yourself? Are they familiar stories that you tell? Are they useful? Are any of those stories actually helpful to your life?
I don’t want to take away from that you’re in a mixed situation here. So some of you might be thinking, boy, yes, that is helpful. And it’s particularly helpful because I’m really pissed off with him, and I wanna feel justifiably pissed off. Of course, it would be helpful for that. So I don’t want to put you under too much pressure. You don’t have to all agree with me. However, if we hold out in front of us the vision for how we want our lives to be and that vision is shining the light on our path forward, we may want to look at some of these things, particularly the regular things that happen in our life and think, is me making this judgment supporting me to move on that path toward what I most value?
And if it’s not, how might I start to deal with that a little bit differently? I’m not gonna teach you those tools tonight. You know, some people spend lifetimes working that out, but at least to start to have a look at that and start to think about that. We are allowed to like, not like, or not even understand what’s going on around us. How we respond to that really makes a difference to how we create our own happiness or unhappiness. And of course there is a whole story behind why we get like this. None of us act like idiots just for the fun of it. But many of us act like idiots a lot of the time.
Well, I see nobody laughing, but maybe you don’t act like idiots. I sure have acted like an idiot a lot in my life.
You didn’t like to laugh at you.
Say it again.
You didn’t wanna laugh at you.
I’m the only idiot in the room. Okay. I can handle it.
So what I think about with these things is starting to really start to look in terms of taming self-doubt and fictions of the mind. Self-doubt’s another one of those things. Self-doubt arises. You know like when I come up here to speak and I’m sitting in the room thinking oh gosh I’m gonna give a meditation, there are two serious meditation teachers in the room, you know they’re both being ordained and I’m not. And I actually wasn’t doing that tonight, but I have done it before and relatively recently. So, you know, that’s my self-doubt. Now what I can do with that is that’s an unpleasant experience. You know, I’m feeling scared, so that’s my unpleasant experience.
And I can start doubting myself, or I can start getting attached to wanting to be better than I am. I can start telling myself a story about how I’m never gonna be as good as them, and I can start giving myself a delusional story about how they’re gonna be sitting there judging me, which they might but you know probably not, or if they are who cares. You know I can start telling myself any kind of story at all. Does that support me to do what I want to do tonight? No. It doesn’t.
So coming back to the experience is coming back to the experience. So if the experience for me is a bit of nervousness or a bit of fear and that’s unpleasant, bit of fear and a bit of nervousness, just come back and be with the fear and the unpleasantness. Increase my tolerance to have that feeling, then I don’t need to have my mind go off in this whole tangent of the whole story and the judgment because the tangent, the judgment of the mind feeds the whole story and keeps it alive.
So as we go through our life, what we want to do, one of the things that we can do that I’m offering you is, now I’m not saying this is all, this is the kind of map. There are layers and layers to this, and some of these things we need to understand because it serves us to understand them. Some of them we don’t need to understand. We just need to see the habit, and we’re ready to change them. So we need some wisdom about how what do we do with these things? How do we work with this? It’s not all click a finger. Now I see it. Now it’s gone.
Some things are, oh, shit. I never saw that I did that before. A friend of mine who’s sitting in the room once said to me on the phone, stop having digs at me. I don’t have digs at you. Yes. You do. I said, will you tell me next time I do that? And the next time I did that, he said to me, you just had a dig at me, and I went absolutely horrified. You know, I’m attached to the idea of being a nice person. I was very attached to the idea of being a nice person till I found out how unnice I was sometimes. Then I still was attached to the idea of being nice. I just recognized the reality that I wasn’t always recognizing that, so I gave up my attachment to this idea of being nice.
I listened to what he said. He was quite right. I had a little dig, and I didn’t even know this about myself. But that one moment of that conversation with him struck me so strongly that I saw no purpose in that habit. I recognized that that was simply a habit that I danced out when I felt helpless and was not very conscious of what I was doing, and I stopped that habit. And it’s extremely rare that I do that. And on the rare occasions that I do that, I see it really quickly and think, whoa, must be helpless. That’s why I’m having a dig. Okay. Take that back. Do something more constructive.
So that was just me being unaware. That was one of those things. Just the information was enough for me to move it. There are parts of other things I have really seen really clearly, and, you know, ten years later, I’m still finding my way through, as you will be. So we just need to use wisdom about where these things come and go.
So what I’d like to encourage you to do as we’re coming to the end of this evening is to look at some of those aspects in your life, some of those places where you get caught, where self-doubt comes up, which is kind of unpleasant, where other unpleasant things come up, where even pleasant things come up, the places in your life where you get stuck, and look at the ways that you’re responding in that situation, and look at how might you come back to, in that case of the dig, I was feeling helpless. That’s the raw feeling.
How might you come back to the raw experience? Whatever it is, you know, helplessness, betrayal, hurt. Share the raw experience with yourself or share that with another person, and then you’re dealing with what’s actually going on instead of the story about what’s going on. And in the end, then your life becomes like the clouds and the weather that, you know, all of us, we notice the cloud patterns in the sky. If we’re planning to go out and play tennis for a day, we want a nice sunny day, not too hot, but not raining. Enough cloud so we don’t get too burnt, but not so much cloud as it feels dull and horrible.
That’s what we want on a tennis day, but if we wake up in the morning, there’s a bloody great thunderstorm outside and hail coming down, we are unhappy. This is an unpleasant event. But most of us know what to do with this unpleasant event. You know, we get a bit grumpy. We get a bit unhappy. We don’t blame the people in our tennis team that we’re unhappy. We’re all unhappy. We know what to do. We know that we have to ring around, cancel the tennis match, figure out what else to do, try and find something else to entertain ourselves for the day, find something else fun to do, or feel happy that we get to do something else. We know what to do with a rainstorm. Yeah? We also know that it will pass, so we don’t make a big drama out of it. You know? It will pass. This too will pass.
What’s more, all those times we felt absolutely devastated, enraged, in the depths of despair, those times pass too. Now I’m not saying they don’t have meaning and value, but they pass. And when we more and more see that these experiences pass and that we can make choices about them, then we’re taming the self-doubt and we’re taming the fictions of the mind so that we can allow our experience, our moods, and our thoughts to pass through more lightly and for us to make wiser choices about how we act in the face of those things that will support the life we most want to lead.
That’s all I have to say unless there are any questions. Thank you.
Thanks, Liana.
Ah, and there’s a handout over there, which I made after last time because I realized I wouldn’t have known how to get on the website, which tells you how to get onto the website to get the notes from tonight, which my PA is away for the weekend, so that won’t be available till Tuesday. And also just some notes about other courses that I’m doing if you want to know about them. So feel free to take one, and you can get onto the website and put a password in and get the notes from this evening for free. Yeah.
And I’m a young person present, I feel like I think sometimes as a young person, I go into confusion.
You cycle into here?
Yeah. Into there.
I’m sure that we flop from one to the other to the other a lot. I’m also sure that we often, what we often have, I don’t know if I told this story the last time I was here, cautious because I don’t like to tell the same stories over and over. There’s a woman I was dealing with. I was coaching her and she was the CEO of a large organization. She rolled up in my office one day for a regular appointment. We had some particular things we were supposed to do, but that particular day this really upsetting event happened so we were dealing with that.
What had happened is she’d rolled into work that morning and her second in charge was away for the day, and so then the reception staff and the other admin staff were supposed to be staffing the desk but the reception staff had organized a training day so all the reception staff, all of them and all of the admin people were at this training. So the boss arrives into the office and no one is staffing the front desk, you know. The desk has to be staffed. This woman, the CEO, you know, had really important policy issues to sort out that day, really important meeting with a minister that afternoon. Really serious stuff that she had to get done. The last thing she needed was to have no staff supporting her, let alone her to have to do somebody else’s work, so she was enraged.
So when her staff came back at lunchtime and you know she got talking to them, she kind of she was pretty tame, I mean you know she’s a good woman, a sensible woman. She tries really hard to do a good job. So she tried to contain herself and kind of said that she was pretty angry about having been left to all this and pretty annoyed that nobody thought about you know that this was a planned day off for the two second in charge, so you know who was gonna staff the desk and she didn’t even, nobody even told her about it or anything like this. So she told the staff member this.
Next thing she hears back about an hour and a half later, you know, the whispering through the staff that the staff are all feeling really attacked by her and, you know, dumped on by her because she’s always aggressive and she’s always angry. At first, she feels really angry about that, and then she starts, so her first because that wasn’t really unpleasant, so she’s angry, but then she kind of flips into really feeling upset and feeling like the staff don’t like her, and then she flips into, actually, maybe she really is abusive. Her father used to say she was aggressive. She probably is abusive, and then she’s aggressive. And, you know, within the space of two hours, she’d wound herself into a really deep depression, had to cancel the meeting with the minister. You know, it’s a high functioning person like the rest of us, you know, just falling into a hole.
And she just kind of fallen into this massive depression, you know, and fair enough, she’d had this horrible history. So it made perfect sense that she’d fall into this. And she’s on my doorstep telling this story. Okay. So what happened with her? There were a series of unpleasant events, but always cascading into these things over here. You know, she’s wanting this. She’s not wanting that. She doesn’t want to think about this. She’s reacting to all of it.
And when I took her back through the story about, you know, talking to the staff, I said, well, you know, what were you feeling? I was really angry. What were you feeling before you were angry? Well, I don’t know. You can imagine she’s looking at me and saying, oh god, Liana’s such a wanky thing. It’s typical of you to say such a wanky thing. Sort of she would have had at me. She doesn’t think like that now, but she used to.
And so I asked her, you know, so what came before the anger? Well, don’t know. Well, how did you feel when you walked in there? Let down. What else? Betrayed. What else? Disappointed.
I said, that’s the raw feeling. That is the raw feeling. I said, what would have happened if you’d said to your staff member, I felt really disappointed, quite shocked, let down, and a bit betrayed, and I didn’t know what to do. Yeah. Because she went into, you know, confusion, overwhelmed, didn’t know what to do. I said, what would happen if you told that to your staff? And she said, well, I imagine they’d sort of feel sorry for me. And I said, yeah. What would they do after that? They would apologize. What would they do after that? They’d make sure it didn’t happen again. They would have felt like it was their responsibility, which let’s face it, it was.
And how would you have felt? I would have come out of the day feeling supported as a, you know, annoyed about what had happened, but supported as a leader, good about myself. I would have got to my meeting blah blah blah. The day would have happened really differently.
So there’s something to come back, if something is unpleasant or not to your liking or if you find something that you really like, but you get attached to it and then you lose it. If you’re having those reactions, come back to what the raw feeling was. We’re not all in work situations or in fact in relationships where it’s kind of safe to say that, but you need to know that that’s where you’re operating from. When you come back to what the raw feeling was, then you’re in a much better position to figure out how will I move from here. What do I need to do to take care of myself and this situation?
I’ll stop there. Forms are over there if you, oh, by the way, Sandra brought in a copy of, I can’t walk over there because I’m tied up. Thank you, madam. You always wanted to be one of those models, didn’t you?
This is Jack Kornfield’s latest book that Sandra bought in, The Wise Heart. I haven’t actually read this book, but many of you will know Jack Kornfield’s books, and he writes beautifully, wisely about many things. So thank you for that. Well worth reading. Well worth reading, Sandra says. It’s nearly as good as A Path with Heart. If you haven’t read that one, you’re missing out on it yet. It’s Buddhism for the Western person, and he’s probably one of the best teachers, if not the best, in the United States. He and Stephen Levine and Quantum Bookshop. And there’s some in the bookshop here too.
Oh, are there?
That one’s not, A Path with Heart’s out, and all over there.
Thank you so much once again.
You’re welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Hope it was useful.