Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Liana Taylor opens this 100-minute workshop on wise leadership with a guided loving-kindness meditation that emphasises self-compassion as the foundation for authentic leadership. She defines a leader as anyone who has followers, whether chosen or accidental, and explores how the qualities we cultivate in ourselves shape those around us. The core of the teaching focuses on the four Brahma Viharas—loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity—as capacities that enable people to lead from clarity and depth. Taylor then examines each quality’s near enemies and opposites: how loving-kindness can slip into selfish attachment, how compassion can become idiot compassion that enables harm, how appreciative joy can become frivolous exuberance, and how equanimity can turn into dissociation. Through partner conversations and reflection, participants identify which of these qualities they naturally possess and which patterns they’ve either overcome or currently struggle with. The evening includes practical exploration of how these emotional and relational habits show up in workplace leadership, families, and communities, and concludes with a closing loving-kindness meditation extending compassion to all beings. Suitable for anyone interested in Buddhist psychology applied to contemporary leadership challenges.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 12 05 Buddha in the Boardroom 05-12-08.mp3
UUID: 115ccf61-628a-47ba-b73a-3e58516e83cf
Teacher: Liana Taylor
Collection: Liana Taylor Buddha in the Boardroom (Liana Taylor)
Date: 2008-12-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~8,550
Everyone. It’s the I’m Liana Taylor, and I’m leading the discussion this evening, the presentation. Is there anybody here who hasn’t been to any of this series yet? Yes. Well, welcome.
I won’t I won’t go on further to introduce myself. You’ve probably read that in the in the information blurb, so you don’t need a lot else about me. Let us start this evening with a meditation. Just a short meditation to lead our topic into leadership. What’s love got to do with it?
We always start with a sense of love for ourself, and so coming home into ourselves. Find yourselves in a comfortable posture with your feet comfortably on the floor. And if anybody needs any cushions under their feet, which you might, there are plenty under the chairs on either side. Or if anyone needs a cushion under their back which some of the guys might. It’s much better, isn’t it?
Set yourself back into your seats comfortably, and you might want your back backside well back in the chair so that your pelvis is slightly tilted forward. And your spine is upright sitting on your sit bones. For those of you who are not sure what to do with your arms, make sure your shoulders are in a comfortable position. You might like to wave your arms down by your side and just flop them from the elbows onto your lap. And in that way, your shoulders will be in a comfortable position.
Rocking your bodies from side to side. Allowing those movements to get smaller and smaller until your body finds its own balance point. Point. Rocking your head from side to side. Allowing those movements too to get smaller and smaller until it finds its own balance point.
Tucking your chin in ever so slightly so the back of your neck is open. Relaxing your tongue and your jaw. Relaxing your shoulders. Relaxing your belly. And either closing your eyes or having your eyes in a soft focus, looking toward the floor a couple of meters away.
Noticing the contact of the bottom of the soles of your feet on the floor and letting your feet sink into the floor. Noticing the contact of the back of your legs and backside on the chair, and letting them sink down. Noticing your hands in Listening to the sounds in the room just as sound. Listening out as far as you can to the sounds in the room, the sounds in the rest of the building, and the sounds outside. Listening out as far as you can.
Softening into the sensation of sound as if you were resting in a huge sphere of sound that gently supports and nourishes you. And bringing your awareness into the movement of the breath, noticing the movement of the breath, the nose, or the mouth. Noticing the cooler breath in and the warmer breath out. Nothing else to do right now. Simply noticing the movement of the breath in through your nose or your mouth and out again.
If thoughts arise, just notice them. Let them go and bring your awareness back to the movement of the breath. And on the next breath out, let go of the awareness of the breath moving at the nose and the mouth. And on the next in breath, notice the breath moving all the way down into the chest, noticing the rise of the chest with each breath in, and the fall of the chest with each breath out. You may want to notice the movement of the sides of the ribs with each breath in and each breath out.
And on the next breath out, let go of the awareness of the chest and the ribs, and the following breath in, just slow the breath down ever so slightly, following the breath all the way down to the belly, the abdomen, and noticing the rise and the fall of the abdomen with each breath in and each breath out. If thoughts arise as they naturally will, that’s what minds do, just notice them. Let them them go and bring your awareness back to the movement of the breath in your belly. Noticing the way all of the organs in the flesh in your belly expand with each breath in and contract with each breath out. Again, again, coming back to the movement of the breath in the belly.
The breath is an anchor. It is always there for you. The breath is always breathing you, always available for you to come back to, to make contact with yourself, to collect yourself, to steady yourself. And as we move into a contemplative meditation in a few moments, Just remember that the breath is always there as an anchor to come back to. If at any time you want to come back to the anchor, just do so.
On the next breath out, let go of the awareness of the movement of the breath in your belly and bring to mind a sense of someone you love, someone you adore, Might be a parent or a child, a lover, a friend, a teacher, a movie star, a guru, someone you really love and adore. Then just imagine them sitting out in front of you. However you imagine this is fine. You may have a sense of them sitting there. You may have a picture of them sitting there.
You might kinda hear them ruffling sitting there. However you experience the sense of them, to have a sense of this person you love and adore sitting out in front of you. And as you’re looking at them, feel in your body strong feelings of love, the warm flowing feelings of care and adoration, wonder and delight. Allowing those feelings to watch through you as you’re sitting there with that person in out in front of you. And then take those same feelings of love, adoration, warmth, wonder, delight, total joy, those same feelings you have for that person.
And direct those feelings toward yourself, to your own body, to all of the parts of your body that you like or you feel comfortable with. Direct those feelings of love. Allow those feelings of love to just soak into all those parts of your body that you like or you feel comfortable with. And now send those warm feelings of love and delight, wonder, acceptance, joy to the parts of your body that you hardly ever notice, don’t pay any attention to. And now send those beautiful feelings of love and warmth, joy, delight to the parts of your body that you don’t like, that don’t feel comfortable.
Remember, you can always come back to the breath as an anchor if you want to. And now once again, sending love to the parts of your body you like, that you feel comfortable with, and then allowing that to spread to all parts of your body so that you’re sending loving kindness to all parts of your body. And letting go of that and coming back to noticing the movement of the breath in the body, either at the belly, the chest, or the nose, or the mouth, wherever is most comfortable for you and easy. Once again, notice the sounds outside, the sounds in the rest of the building, and the sounds in the room. Notice the touch of your hands on your lap and your backside and your legs on the chair and your feet on the floor.
And as you’re ready, allow yourself to come out of the meditation and your eyes to open. You might like to stretch. As we start the evening, obviously, with a title like ‘Leadership What’s Love Got To Do With It’, we start with a love and kindness meditation. Can you put your hand up anybody who’s never done a love and kindness meditation before? So a couple of people.
It’s a very common meditation in the Buddhist tradition, and usually we start with cultivating a feeling of love and often for ourselves and then for people that we don’t know very well and then we move towards people that we don’t like. And what we found is what I found and the teachers that I work with in Australia is that many of us have difficulty doing that and part of why we have difficulty doing that is we have difficulty doing that with ourself. And so when I start to teach this meditation, start the loving kindness. Let’s start learning to love those parts of ourselves that we can’t love before we start learning to parts love parts of other people that we find challenging or difficult. So that’s the loving kindness meditation.
A leader is a person who has followers. Kind of goes without saying when you think about it. But it’s a really easy way to think of leadership as different from management and then all sorts of other roles that we’re in in life. A leader is a person who has followers. Now some leaders, of course, choose a role of leadership.
Political leader, management leader, all sorts of situations of leadership that people choose. And there are other situations in which people just fall into the role accidentally of leadership. Bob Dylan’s a good example. I’m looking around to see how old everybody is. Everybody’s old enough to know Bob Dylan.
He’s a really good example of someone who became a leader to the young people of his time, but that was never his intention. He wasn’t setting out on a political journey trying to lead the world and have them think differently. He was just writing music that he liked. And so when we see that, we recognise whether we choose the role of leadership or whether we’re accidentally come, I’m learning to build this every time it does that. Whether we choose the role of leadership or whether come into leadership accidentally, we start to realise that not only are we shaped and fashioned by what we love, as Goethe says.
In turn, through our leadership, we shape and fashion those who follow us. What I’d like you to do now is find a partner to work with, preferably someone you don’t know very well, so those people who come with their friends. Be nice if you could choose somebody else, but you don’t have to. And I’ll write these three questions down. You’ve got about eight minutes or so to talk about what do you love and especially in the wider world.
What do you love? Who do you lead? And what is it that you hope to shape and fashion? Yeah. I’ll write those down for you.
Find a partner to talk with and share that information with each other. And as you’re ready, Winding up that conversation. And so can I get some idea just in here of the kinds of people that you’re leading in your life? It may be the children or the people that you work with or the communities or the world. Can you give me some idea for those of you who are happy to share?
Who are the sorts of people that you’re leading in your life that you’re shaping and fashioning? Puppies. Puppies. Like I said before, it’s easier to train a puppy than to train our own minds. You’re doing well if you’re leading a pup.
Lots of success. Who else are we leading? A technical group. A technical group, group of people at work. Yep.
Children. Children. Yours and others? Yes. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yep. Clients. Clients.
Yep. Who else are we leading in here? The family. Yep. Adult children.
Little children. Bosses. Bosses. Yep. The people that we speak to.
Community. I’m not sure I hope to shape the people in that community. Try and shape the environment. Okay. Influence the people around you just by the way you Be interact.
Yeah. Sort of modeling as they call it. Yeah. Embodying whatever it is that you want to be, hopefully. Anybody else?
Notice the people that they’re leading in their life. Anybody else that you’re leading? Mutually leading of my partner. Like, me leading him and him leading me. Yep.
Nice ideal world, that one, isn’t it? It’s very cool. Here’s a some of the there are many things in the Buddhist teachings that we can learn about and embody in order to help us lead wisely in embody in order to help us lead wisely in what we do, to know what we love, to lead wisely in that area, to shape and fashion in a way that we value, that leads us to somewhere we want to go and leads the world to somewhere we want to go. One of the things that I talked about and some of you would have seen this here before is this notion of seed consciousness that you know we all of us have in us seeds of joy, of love, of peace, temperance. We most of us also have seeds of anger, of rage, of jealousy, of envy, of insecurity, of self doubt, of lack of confidence.
So, you know, unless there’s somebody unusual in the room, most of us have got a range of those seeds in our life. And so a part of what we’re doing in in our work with ourselves is watering the seeds here, cultivating the seeds of love and leadership. And so there are many tools that we have to cultivate the seeds of love and wise leadership. And one of the tools we have is meditation. And one of the many types of meditations that we have to cultivate those seeds is the love and kindness meditation we just did.
And all of you will have done other kinds of mediteachings which also water the seeds in all sorts of different ways in terms of bringing peace and calm, stability, vision, hope, replenishment, a whole range of things that we water the seeds with with meditation. One of many other offerings from Buddhism that supports our cultivating the seeds of love and wise leadership I’ll just turn this around. So if someone could you give me a hand? Just so that I don’t actually yank out the cord from the if you come this way because I’m turning the whole thing around. Oh, the whole thing.
So if you go from your end Yeah. Just spin it around. All the way around this way. Yeah. Just the board.
Just spin the board. I don’t know. Will I get it up the right way if I spin the board? No. Oh, no.
Don’t think so. Okay. Thank you so much, guys. One of the other teachings from one of many teachings from the Buddha is the Brahma Viharas. The Brahma Viharas, these are the four Brahma Viharas, The qualities of metta, which is love and kindness.
I’ll come back to these in a minute and talk in more detail. Kuruna, which is compassion. Mudita, appreciative joy, and Upika, which is equanimity. I’ll come back to talk about those a little bit more in a moment. By the way, those of you who are taking notes, feel free to take notes, but this is in the handout.
Quite clearly written if you want it. So you can have it later. The Brahma Viharas are often also called the four immeasurable or four uplifted states. So they’re states of being that we cultivate, that we move toward, that we look toward, and that we cultivate in ourselves by watering the seeds that help us. They’re also called the four divine emotions and the four divine abodes.
As you can imagine, if you’re living in the abodes of loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, equanimity, peacefulness, you might well be in a place of deep love and clarity in which you might lead very wisely from that place. So we come back to the four Brahma Viharas. First of all, I’ll start with these, and then I’ll talk about some of these other things I’ve written on the board. Meta. Have have how many people here have looked at these before?
Some about half the room. Okay. So meta, loving kindness. We just did a loving kindness meditation. When we have let meta, loving kindness for people, we we’re happy.
We want them to be happy. It’s that urge. I want you to be happy. Be as happy as you can. Be joyful.
I want the best for you. Enjoy your life. That quality. And you’ll know either yourselves or the other people in your life who have that quality in abundance. Most of us have some of these qualities more naturally than others, like everything about us that we’ve talked about over the last weeks.
So you’ll notice the qualities here that you have in abundance and those that you don’t have in abundance. You’ll also notice the qualities that other people who you know have in abundance. So love and kindness. Be happy. Be joyful.
I wish the best for you. Karunā, compassion. Compassion is very much that empathy, understanding someone’s suffering and wishing them to be free of suffering. So it’s a different kind. This is being happy and loving kindness and this is really understanding suffering and having empathy for that and wanting people to be free of suffering.
The third one, medita, is appreciative joy. Appreciative joy is that quality that we have when somebody else is doing well and where joy is for them. We’re delighted. Oh, you’ve just got a brand new car or, oh, you’ve just got this job or, oh, you can sing like an angel or, you’re the most, smartest person I’ve ever met, whatever it is about them that we are able to be joyful in their virtuousness and in their joy. Yeah?
So we can really enjoy those things for them regardless of the fact that we might or might not have them ourselves or might or might not want them for ourselves. And the fourth quality, Upekkha. A lot of meditation is directed at Ipeka, creating equanimity, peacefulness and when we have enough equanimity, when we have enough meditation practice we can see things as they are without reacting with oh I don’t like this, oh I do like this, oh I don’t want to see that, oh I didn’t get get that at all. You know, that kind of backforth stuff that we’ve been talking about over the weeks. The more we develop our equanimity, the more that we can let things be as they are.
We might make wise choices about what we do about them. We may not like them, but we can let let them be as they are. So that’s developing equanimity, peacefulness. What I’d like you to do is go back to the same person you were talking to and just talk with them a little bit just for couple of minutes about which of these qualities do you know that you have in greater abundance and which of these qualities are perhaps not in great abundance in you as best you understand it. Just take a couple of minutes to share.
Great abundance. There’s not a test here. There is no you’ve got to get this one hundred percent. You’ll just know about yourself that as compared to yourself, you have some of these qualities in more abundance and some of them in less, not as compared to everybody else in the world. You don’t have to compare yourself against Jesus, Buddha, Moses, or anybody else.
Okay? Struggle? And as you’re ready, wind up that conversation. Have you had enough time? Thought you might.
Okay. Now I don’t know about any of you in the room, but for me throughout my life there are different times where I recognise different qualities, all sorts of useful qualities and all sorts of unusual qualities I have about myself. So who we are in this room and who we are now and the sorts of tendencies that we have now might be different from six months ago, from a year ago, from ten years ago, from twenty years ago. And so even recognising those things as an act of compassion and awareness for ourself, both recognising those changes in ourself and recognising the changes in the others. This is some information that I looked at first time about, I don’t know, ten or fifteen years ago and it was I wasn’t very economist when I looked at this and saw the parts of myself and thought yes I recognise that and I recognise that and I can see how these things have really got me into trouble.
So some of you may well have already seen those things in your life and started bringing some new information to those areas. Let’s have a look. In the Buddhist teachings they talk about these things having near enemies and opposites. Yeah? So love and kindness.
The near enemy of love and kindness is often described as just let me selfish affection. So it can be somewhat controlling. It can be extreme romantic love. It can be extreme attachment. It can be about confusing sex and intimacy and wanting all those things together when in fact they’re not always.
It can be about dependency. So some of you will have recognized that at sometimes in your life, you’ve kind of thought you were being this, but maybe you were being a little bit more like this. The second one is often called sentimental pity. The name that I prefer to give it, which I use a real lot, and those of you who know me will have heard me use this, is idiot compassion. It’s my favorite affectionate term for this one.
I’ll say it quite affectionately. I have had a lot of compassion in my life. In a way, it’s acting in a way that keeps suffering going. So you think what you’re doing is being compassionate and caring about somebody, but what you’re doing is kind of a bit idiotic and being a bit over the board and often in, you know, psychopathological terms, enabling someone to keep going with their suffering. So, oh, oh, you know, you’re drunk.
You’re you’re you’re you’re you’re running you’re running out of alcohol, and you really need some more. Let me go and get it for you. It’s the kind of more extreme version. Yeah? And all those sort of softer versions of, you know, when we really sympathize with people because, you know, they’re worried that the they’re getting paranoid about somebody who said something and it means such and such and we haven’t figured out yet actually that’s just an automatic thought that happens in their mind it very rarely bears any resemblance to reality in their life it’s just an old habit of mind and us sympathising with them with it, especially colluding with them in an act of trying to be compassionate, is really idiot compassion.
It’s also idiot compassion to keep helping people who in in the same ways who are not helping themselves. I’m not saying don’t help, just don’t keep helping in the same way. If it’s not helping, don’t keep doing it. It’s also idiot compassion to do more for other people than you’ve got to give. So actually I’ve seen a lot of people do that.
Just giving and giving, giving till there’s nothing left. That’s kind of idiot compassion. I don’t know if any of you have ever suffered from idiot compassion. It’s a cute one. She said it’s a cute one.
I’m very tickled by it. The next one is exuberance. Medita is that being really glad for somebody else. Oh my gosh. You got that job.
That’s fantastic. I’m really happy for you. You’ve got this thing that you really wanted. I’m happy for you. You’ve got the voice of an angel.
I’m so happy for you. That that’s just appreciative joy. Exuberance is the kind of leaping up and down all over the place, which can be really quite fun sometimes. But sometimes it’s quite ungrounded enthusiasm. Yeah?
Sometimes it’s really over the top, and it’s frivolous. And so sometimes it can be kind of like affirming for somebody for doing something that really was, you know, like jumping all over the place for someone doing the dishes when really it were kinda what they should have been doing in the first place. Or jumping up and down when your kid draws a picture, which is lovely. I mean, your kid drew it. So any picture your kid draws is lovely.
But, you know, jumping up and down and giving them a little bit of a false impression about, you know, that they’re gonna be the next Picasso. I’ve seen that. Those of you who watch television, some of you may know. I watch So You Think You Can Dance. I really like So You Think You Can Dance.
The last ten of the series, you see some amazing dances. In the first few of the series, you see some amazing things that people do, including, you know, get up on stage and dance in a way that shows that they have complete lack of awareness of what might be expected in a context like that. So they’re actually putting themselves in quite a vulnerable position. And, you know, I’ve seen one person come three years in a row with his mother completely ungrounded. Here’s this boy on prime time television all across America getting slammed by the critics and her saying, you’re wonderful, and they’re, you know, you’re wonderful.
You know, you were great. Well, you know, you weren’t. So ungrounded, frivolous exuberance is not always useful. The last one is often called ignorant indifference. Now it’s very interesting if you’ve been hanging around Buddhist circles for a while because some people start with ignorant indifference.
You a kind of real sense of slight dissociation from their feelings, not that any of us have ever had that. But some people have more of a pattern of that than others. Sometimes they they come into Buddhism and start meditating now this is not the intention of Buddhism it’s just life we you know we do what we think is best and they start meditating and become even more dissociated from themselves and more still and it can feel really nice because you know they’re in this kind of inner spacious separate kind of place but sometimes they’re losing contact with their own affect so there’s often a flattened affect and there’s often too much of a sense of boundary or limit with others. Have you ever seen that in people? Just sort of yeah sometimes you might have had it yourself just that sense of you know and the reason that I talk about this in terms of coming into Buddhism is that because anybody can suffer this and anybody in any context who can it’s just unfortunate that people learning to meditate if they have this that can actually collude with the pattern instead of open the pattern.
It doesn’t have to. If you see what’s going on, then you use different types of mediteachings. If you already got a bit of a habit of this, you might choose different kinds of mediteachings than you would if you had some of these other habits. Yeah? So these are some of the near enemies.
Now what I’d like you to do, if you’re happy to, don’t share anything you don’t want to. You can just fill up the space talking about whatever you want. But if you’re happy to talk about it, take two or three minutes to talk with your partner about some of these that you’ve noticed that you’ve either currently got, that you’ve had in the past and you’ve now brought some difference to, or that you’re dealing with people around you who have got those things. Off you go. Feel free to change partners if you want to.
And So for those of you who have ever noticed yourself, I don’t mean occasionally, I mean occasionally we all do all sorts of things in life. However, for those of you who really have recognised, either sometime earlier in your life you recognised this and have brought some change to it already, or you’re recognising it tonight, or in fact you recognise some of these earlier on have brought some change to those and now you’re recognising some subtler elements of some of the others in you that are not serving you well. If these things serve you well, well then do them. If they’re not serving you, they’re not serving the people around you and if they’re not serving the world well, then just let me ask you what are some of the things whether you’ve changed these earlier or now that if you were able to make a difference and not operate, certainly not habitually out of these places, what difference has it made or will it make in your life? Those of you who either have made some changes there or who see that you might like to make some changes there.
I’ve certainly feel I’ve just recently been through the idiot compassion in a huge way. And recognising that for me was quite daunting at the time, but I feel better about it because I can actually do something and do something better in terms of the person that I was helping for them. So still being compassionate and it’s helping them in a better way than what I was before. It’s kind of really learning what it means to be compassionate in a skilful way. That’s right.
But also I I completely depleted myself, and so I had nothing kinda left to leave anyway. Yes. So I’m actually feeling more centered now that I’ve stepped back from that. Yeah. And it’s interesting when you see that, one, you see that that’s what’s actually happened, and two, that you recognize as you step in again, especially if it’s been or anything.
You know, anything in life, if it’s kind of a a habit, you just do it habitually. That’s the nature of habit. Even a strength, if it’s a habit, it it can cause you problems. Strength is only a strength when you can choose when to use it. If it happens habitually, it ends up not being such a strength in those moments.
As you say, recognising it allows you the next time you step into that situation to just be a little bit more conscious of what it might mean to be operating from here and not there and to use the tools, the meditation tools, community tools, support you have in your life, the thinking tools you have in order to support you to do that. Yeah. Other people have already made changes here or can see that it might be useful? I think it’s big thing. Especially when it’s up in front of you like that in black and white, it’s just so much easier over there.
Yeah. It’s very stressful. It is. And other people notice that. Yeah.
It’s so kinda stressful. Yeah. Yeah. Just on the sentimental pity, thought that got an ego aspect to it. If you’re targeting somebody, it’s I’m fine’, and you’re a bit weaker and lower’ that kind of thing.
So there’s a tendency to keep feeding it yourself because it builds you up. Yeah. Well, for some people that’s where it comes from. Absolutely. Yeah.
I don’t know that it comes from there for everybody. It just doesn’t always turn out to be so useful. People are driven by different things. Thanks, Anything else you notice? Anything else that you’ve changed or will change and make a difference to your life?
I think there’s too of the idea of compassion, of giving and giving, because you don’t want to be seen as not being compassionate and therefore you can’t say no. So it needs that adjustment of looking at why am I doing this? I don’t have to do all this, this and this, I can choose and I can actually say no. That was a big thing for me to actually feel okay about saying well no, I can’t take that on board’, whilst in the past I would have done it’s almost like the straw that broke the camel’s backs, I would keep giving. Now I’ve learnt that nurturing of myself and protection of myself is the first priority.
Knowing it’s not necessary. And that’s the real irony, that’s not what’s needed all the time Mandy, to give and give. You don’t have to give. And if it’s okay to ask you, back at that time, what drove you to give and give, do you think? For you, what was the motivator?
Think at that time in my life I was coming up twenty one and I’d had to call it pimples and felt inhibited by this and embarrassed by that and wanted to be liked. Yeah, that was what was driving it at that time. Absolutely. I’m a nice person regardless of looking. Yeah, of having pimples all over my face.
I can remember not wanting to disappoint my children and being aware that they wouldn’t just for example, I them I lived in New South Wales then and promised them to take them to the the Easter show, a big agricultural show. And I had a migraine headache and I knew they were very good children. If I was sick, they would not expect me to go. I could not bear to disappoint them. Yes.
To disappoint them. And I remember really thinking about what is wrong? It’s like a sickness or something. Yeah. Yeah.
This driving urge. And I worked out, I thought, I think I was so disappointed very, very early in life. I could not bear Bare to do it to somebody else. Painful to feel they’d be disappointed than to be, you know, in pain. Yeah.
Absolutely. That was really weird. Thank you for that. And I think that that gives us an example, just talking about the one that there are slightly different drivers. It doesn’t matter what we get caught There are different things that drive us.
They’re all intended at some point to be self protective. Whatever habits we develop in life are intended at some fundamental level to be self caring and protective. If we develop those habits when we’re three years old, we may not be very wise yet about figuring out what is self caring and protective. And yet, if we do something at three years old that seems to have a positive outcome, then that reinforces that that’s a good thing to do, so we keep doing it. It’s wide in our brain by by the time we’re five years old and you know at fifty we’re doing it without any recognition whatsoever of where all that came from.
It doesn’t matter what we see in us, what is useful and what is not, just to see that which is not useful knowing that whatever is not useful to us was developed for some self caring purpose at some point. Whether that actually turned out to be well serving is a whole different thing. Itself. So, on that note, what I’d like to do just now, before we go on to this last category of opposites, is to have a break for a cup of tea for ten or fifteen minutes. See you back in here just before nine.
One of the questions that came to me just before just now before we started was in relation to these things, is this are we talking about these things in relation to ourselves, like, be happy? Do we mean that toward ourself or to others? And it’s both. So we want ourselves to be happy. We want other people to be happy.
In terms of be as you are, we want to accept ourselves. Hence, the loving kindness meditation of sending love and warmth and acceptance to all those places in your body that you don’t even notice and all those places that you don’t particularly like or don’t feel comfortable with as well as the places you do like. So it’s one of the practices that we have to practice equanimity, to just be with what is, and to send loving kindness to ourselves in the loving kindness meditation. So all of these apply to both ourselves and to other people. Okay.
Opposites. Some of you will guess some of these. I heard at the break a lot of people talking about idiot compassion, and I was making a guess, but I’ve made other guesses here and been really, really wrong about who might be here. But that I would think that there are some people in the kind of more helping caring looking after professions that might get a bit more caught into this now I don’t know if that’s true but certainly that was the conversation we were having at the break time. It’s all very good to be compassionate but compassion starts with the self.
Loving kindness meditation always starts with the self. Opposite what would be the opposite of loving kindness of wanting other people to happy, of wanting ourselves to be happy? It’s commonly named as I can’t even read my own typing. I can’t believe that that’s true. That’s what the problem is.
Do I really mean that? I must say this differently normally. I probably do need my glasses. No. I’ve got glasses here.
I usually only need these two or three days a month and this is the two or three days. I’m always lending my glasses out. I really did write this. Wow. It’s funny because I talk about this all the time but I don’t use these words but this is actually what’s in my own notes so it’s interesting that I don’t have in my brain.
Yeah. Painful ill will, self hatred, self criticism, judgment of others, hostility, hatred to ourselves or to other people. So it’s kind of painful ill will, a real active, I hate you. I hate this. I hate this about myself.
Now it may be that nobody in here has ever said I hate you to another person. Quite possible some of us have or felt it. However, it is interesting that some of us will be saying that about our own selves. I hate this about myself. I wish this wasn’t here.
This is really awful. I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t be this. I don’t want this. There are all these ways I am that I hate.
So you’re in the opposite of loving kindness. Most of the time, if you’re in there it’s actually not serving you very well probably that’s obvious. Say what? You said most of the time. Most of the time.
Probably Well actually I think all of the time it doesn’t serve you. It’s just I like to be inclusive. So sometimes I soften what I say so as not to seem extreme. The second one, opposite of compassion, is cruelty. You know, the cruelty and the kind of wanting revenge, wanting people to suffer.
I want you to suffer. I’m gonna do this to make you suffer. That kind of cruelty is the opposite of compassion. Third Third one, the opposite of appreciative joy is resentment. And that also includes boredom, cynicism.
So instead of being able to joy, enjoy somebody else and have pleasure for their pleasure, have joy for their pleasure, or have joy for our own pleasures, to have joy for their own parts of our daily life that are beautiful. We have resentment. We might have boredom, extreme cynicism, depression and despair can all fit in that category yeah because they’re all ways in which we’re not appreciating ourselves or other people in life so we can get caught in those things. And the last one is craving and clinging. So it’s the lack of in the Eightfold Path the lack of right view that means that we don’t see things as they are and so rather than having a peaceful attitude towards everything and just accepting things come and go and figuring out how to act wisely around that we have this kind of craving I want this I’ve got to have it it doesn’t matter if it’s serving me it doesn’t matter if it’s serving the people around me or the world I want it I’ve got to have it.
Or I don’t want this, I don’t want to do this study, I don’t want to be nice to this person, I don’t want to finish this job, I don’t want to take care of my body, I don’t want to whatever it is, you know pushing it away so craving, clinging and also pushing things away. Part of the part of this opposite here is also this this compulsion of being sucked in. You’ll notice some of the time some of you might have had this experience in your life where rather than your boundaries being too strong and not letting something in like the limits being too strong the limits are too soft and the boundaries are too soft and so you get pushed and swayed a lot in that situation So craving, clinging, pushing, pulling, attraction, revulsion. And in that, you know, we very easily while here, we get caught in a kind of romantic delusion and just kind of want what we want and don’t wanna let go of it. Here, we’re more, you know, putting someone up on a pedestal and then getting really angry with them.
They don’t turn into the person that we know and sort of pull push pull push pull push that kind of thing really unclear boundaries so we don’t sit in a steady place yeah so what I’d like you to do is choose someone to talk to you can choose the same person or choose somebody else feel free to choose somebody else and just talk with them about which of those now you may not have these in any extreme degree yeah you may just notice a flavor of them coming through you every now and then or you may notice that you’re dealing with a flavor of that and the people that you love or care about or the people that you work with. So just take two or three minutes to talk about how you see those things flavoring your life. I’ll just write some of the aspects in other aspects in there to help you kind of understand them well okay find a partner to talk to. And let me pause you just for a moment so you can continue that conversation and this time just considering in the places that you love with what matters to you in the world and the places you’re leading.
How do these things affect you? Certainly, what are the strengths that you bring to leadership and what are the things over here of the near enemies and the opposite of yours or of other people that you’re leading that affect your leadership in the And so as we’re exploring these things tonight, are there new ideas coming to you or directions coming to you about what you want to do with your leadership, especially as love in relation to leadership and love in the terms of this is what I mean by love. So are there new ideas or directions that you’re taking from we’d like to take from the information tonight? Think for me you’re helping to throw some of these concepts into stark relief. Confronting in stark!
So that you see situations more clearly. Yes. Yeah. And so when you sort of contemplate workplace situations that we’re all, most of us are a part of, I’m sure, and some of us are in both leadership and being led Leadership and followship. And how these apply in our leadership and how they apply and how we follow and how people around us fit into those categories.
And then figuring out how we manage ourselves in the context of that, especially when it’s other people’s stuff. But to just see what it is, just unskillful patterns that they’ve developed. I’m particularly interested in that because just contemplating just in that little session then about the third category on the right there. And so many of those characteristics are actually what enable a lot of people to attain positions of leadership. Yes.
So things like cynicism are highly valued. In some context. Yeah. Yeah. It’s such an antithesis to what we aspire aspire to.
And it’s really interesting when you look at that in the leadership research because certainly those qualities are often valued and in the last twenty years I suppose there’s been more of a push to kind of more human heart values in leadership and you look at the top fortune five hundred companies and the kinds of leaderships that are working well for them I’m just talking top five hundred fortune five hundred companies and that you know there there are a lot of talk about different styles of leadership and one of the ones that I particularly am aware of is level five leadership which talks about the need for equal parts of toughness and humility and when you’re starting to look at mainstream management research talking about humility and toughness being the two aspects that one needs to hold and in a sense the toughness comes from here you know we need to be clear about what we do we need to make wise decisions and sometimes they’re tough sometimes it’s a compassionate thing to sack someone, compassionate you know for the people for the people around for the organization and humility which means that we get to see these things about ourselves and try to come back to here.
But in the main run of things, yeah, you’re completely right that those are often seen as qualities that are required. But in practice, it doesn’t always work that way in the long term. Great leaders. I mean, that we Great leaders? We see this.
So it’s yes. We see this in the great leaders. Yeah. The ones that we stay in our mind. Other things that people other new directions that people might take from this evening Or other questions they have?
Comments? I just like to ask you about that you talked about level five. Leadership. Where does that come from? And what what other levels are there?
It’s just called level five leadership, and to tell you the truth I actually can’t remember. I know the book that it’s in. It’s in blue cover. Leadership in the Australian context. Have lent it to Jenny, I’m sure.
Remember the book? Do you remember the It’s not wisdom leadership, is it? No. It’s not the wisdom leadership. It’s with leadership in the Australian context.
I can send you the reference. Actually, I’ll put the reference on the on the what’s his name. But how many levels are there? It just talks about level five. Okay.
I mean, does talk about the other levels, but in terms of leadership, it talks about level five. That’s right. Thank you. Yeah. So let us as we move into the last ten minutes of the evening, let us come back into meditation, another love and kindness meditation.
Find a place that’s comfortable on your chairs, laying down if you want to, making sure that you’re comfortable. If you’re sitting in a chair and you’re tall, you might want a cushion under your backside, or feel free to grab cushions and sit on the floor or lay on the floor or lay on the benches wherever it’s comfortable for you. There are tons of cushions. Find yourself in a comfortable position with your back well supported. Rock yourself from side to side.
Allowing the movements to get smaller and smaller until your body finds its own balance point. Your head from side to side, allowing those movements too to get smaller and smaller until your body finds its own balance point. Softening your tongue, your jaw, relaxing your shoulders, your belly, your arms. Either closing your eyes, allowing your eye eyeballs to be soft inside the eye sockets, or your eyes open with a soft gaze on the floor about two meters in front of you. Come into the awareness of your breath wherever you notice the breath, at the nose in the mouth or the chest or the belly, wherever it’s easiest for you to notice the movement of the breath in the body.
If thoughts arise as they do, that’s what minds do. Just notice them. Let them go. Bring your awareness back to the movement of the breath in your And then imagine in front of you in whatever way imagining works for you, someone that you truly love and adore. And allow all the feelings, waves of love and adoration, a sense of light and wonder, the beautiful thoughts and feelings of that person that you have for that person.
Allow yourself to feel all of those. And then direct all those feelings of love and acceptance, kindness, compassion, joy, and peacefulness. Direct all of those to yourself, to your whole being. And you may or may not want to silently be saying to yourself, may I be well? May I be happy?
May I be well? May I be happy? May I be well. May I be happy. May I be well.
May I be happy. May I be well. May I be happy. May I be well. May I be happy.
May I be well. May I be happy. May I be well. May I be happy. May we all be well.
May we all be happy. May all sentient beings be well. May all sentient beings be happy. Bringing with you that feeling of acceptance, of love, compassion, joy, and peacefulness. Allow yourself to slowly come out of the meditation, and let your eyes open.
You may want to stretch. And the talk tonight’s been about leadership. What’s love got to do with it? Love is the answer, love is the reason, and love is always the way. Thank you.
If anybody wants the notes from tonight, can go on to my website. They’re all listed under Adobe Acrobat. And so password, you need to go in, and it’s called Acrobat, and yes you can see those there if anybody wants any to do any meditation classes do check the courses that are out here if anybody wants to do any mindful training or mindfulness work do check my website. The website address is w w w dot mindfulnesscentre dot com. I don’t know if it matters and I don’t think it’s got a capital.