Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Lolo Houbein explores how Buddhist practitioners can live their spiritual values in the workplace without preaching or pretending to be perfect. Drawing on her experience working with vulnerable populations, she emphasizes the quiet power of consistent compassion and integrity, then addresses the hidden cost of service-oriented work: spiritual practitioners often absorb others’ suffering until they collapse. She outlines personal techniques for preventing burnout—silence to conserve energy, time in nature or the garden, Buddhist reminders in your workspace—and argues that the bodhisattva path requires periodic rest and recharging, not relentless self-sacrifice. She closes with the importance of humor and lightness as expressions of deeper wisdom and enlightenment. The talk balances practical self-care with the demanding ethics of engaged Buddhist practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 B in W no date.mp3
UUID: a7b4634b-a9a3-4569-ba7c-e4ae4b3be0ca
Teacher: Lolo Houbein
Collection: Buddha in One's Work (Lolo Houbein)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,019
It’s getting harder and harder. But the way you treat them and the way the way you keep on having love and compassion for them is eventually going to tell on them and and create a certain trust. I think that’s much more important than even if they hadn’t got a clue that you that you had become a Buddhist, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter if it was never spelled out. Oh, I don’t have to spell it out, but No.
He goes off to retreat or I’m a little Buddha. Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Kids have my own Yeah. Where you’re going, what you’re doing. Yeah. Well, you just say I’m treading a path, I think. And and you could say that from time to time you find things which you would like to tell them, and and start to tune in to their situation, and and pick one of these things that may be very relevant to them.
It could be a certain virtue, it could be one of the five precepts, or it could be a little Buddhist legend that you have read somewhere that suddenly you can see playing a role or or having a significance in your child’s life and and just pass that on. On the other hand, there there’s nothing against you occasionally going to church if your children want to go to church in Calveston. Yeah. And I remember a very nice meeting once when an Indonesian acquaintance was spending a Sunday at my home for literary purposes. I was writing up something of his life for publication and so on.
And he said, but he said, I do have to go to the mosque at such and such time in the afternoon because there was something going on, I forget what it was. And so I have to break out of it and then come back. And he said, would you like to come with me? And I said, would love to because I’ve been in the mosque before, and I found it a very pleasant community. And so I went with him to the mosque, and if if you know it, in Little Gilbert Street, you come into the little courtyard, and there’s a little house as well, where they have their meeting room and they make coffee, coffee, tea, whatever, refreshments, and be bent into that first before the the service.
And who would sit there but one of the local Buddhist monks in his saffron robes, and I said, What are you doing here? He said, What are you doing here? That’s kind a bad voice. And we started to do ecumenical trips, you know, and he was clearly on a path of getting to know all the other religions and not hiding what he was, and getting to know them as people. He comes back to Adelaide occasionally, but he roams around the world as an itinerant monk man.
But I I have gone to church on quite a few occasions, mainly to please other people, and have found it beneficial in some way because in as there weren’t any Buddhist congregations, I was a loner always, and to be together with a group of people who were trying to be spiritual on Sunday morning was, you know, could be quite positive. And I once went into retreat, I must tell you this little story, when I was working at university. We had Catholic sisters who used to be teaching sisters and so they would do a university degree or do certain subjects and do exams and all that and come into the office. And some of them were quite elderly, one of them was quite elderly. And that particular year, Mother’s Day was coming up, and it so happened that all my children came to me and said, Oh, sorry, Mum, I hadn’t realised it was Mother’s Day, that date, and I had promised to go to so and so for the weekend, and the other one said: Oh, and I was going to go to that camp, and the other one was going off to dad, by that time I was the breadwinner and provider, dad was living somewhere else and the youngest was going off to dad.
So suddenly there was Mother’s Day coming up and no children. And they said, who will give you tea in bed? And I said, well, sometimes it may be good for a mother to have a day all to herself. So don’t you worry about a cup of tea. I’ll make it myself.
And you all go off and do your own thing. I wasn’t trying to lay it on too thick, but I was really looking forward to this Mother’s Day. And with this in the back of my mind, then this little Catholic sister came in. In the conversation that we had, something came up about she’d just come out of retreat. And I said, oh, I would have loved to go into a retreat.
She said, well, you’re quite welcome, my dear. And I said, well, it so happens that Mother’s Day is coming up and all my kids happen to be away for the day, for the weekend, so I could go into a retreat on Saturday and Sunday. She said, well, come to Mount Saint Catherine up in Sterling. I said, well, sister, there’s one problem. She said, what is it, my dear?
I said, I’m not Christian. She looked at me. She said, oh, that doesn’t matter. And I said, Well, there’s one more problem, Sister. I said, Sister, I’m a Buddhist.
She looked at me and she said, My dear, do you mean that you don’t know what Jesus did for the world? I said, sister, I I have heard of it, and Jesus takes a special place in my life. She said, that’s enough. I said, Sister, there’s one more problem. She said, What is it?
I said, Sister, I can only pay the housekeeping money for Saturday and Sunday because I can’t afford any more. She said, Do not worry about money at all. Just come. So I took the train, got off the station, walked to Mount St. Catherine, and went into retreat.
I was the only person to go into retreat that weekend. There was a bevy of sisters, some had just come out of retreat, some were about to go into it, and I was given a beautiful little room on the first floor looking out on trees and, you know, in those days I didn’t live in hills like I do now and it was just heaven! And I had said to them before I went into retreat and stopped talking because I had said I wanted a retreat without talking, because my job was talking, that I would disappear out of the door and go for a walk, I would be back at a certain time and what were the times they wanted me in for meals, so I knew that. So I went to walk up Mount Lofty and back. And I sat in that room after the walk and rested and I drew, I took a piece of paper and I thought, Now I can write, there’s nothing to stop me.
And all I could do was draw a little mushroom with a pixie on it. I still haven’t found out the significance of that except it went back to my childhood experiences. And eventually there was a quiet knock on the door and an Irish sister came in and she said, now, I don’t want you to talk at all if you don’t want to. But I thought, ‘Just come in and see how you are.’ I said, oh, Sister, I’ve got no objection to talking, it was just so nice not to.’ And she came and sussed me out whether I had problems, whether I was stressed, whether I anything. And I wasn’t, to that extent, stressed or problematic or anything.
I mean, I had a hard life and I was working hard, but, you know, I was fairly sane. And she realised that, and it was beautiful because she started to talk about her childhood in Ireland and she had ten brothers and sisters and several were in the habit, you know, as monk or sister. We had just a marvellous communication. Then she said, I’ve talked all this time and you’re supposed to be in a retreat, better go! Off she went, and then it was mealtime.
Mealtime was an absolute revelation to me. I came down to the dining room, and I walked in, and I thought I would be sitting at the table with all of them. And there was one small table set for one person, and it was set as if for a princess. It had a candle on it. It had a bowl with flowers.
It had beautiful serviettes folded in a way that no restaurant can do it. Everything was put down with a precision and a care that I had never seen in my life. Then they came in one after the other, about three that were on duty, and without speaking a word they served me. They put down the soup and went away, and I ate. And the moment I put down my spoon, even though they weren’t in the room, one would come in and take away the plate, and the next course would be brought.
And so it went through the whole meal in absolute silence, with an attitude of service as, frankly, I haven’t come across since then. I realized what service meant, And those sisters, they taught me something. I spent the Sunday without talking as well, and I left at the end of that Sunday absolutely smiling and thanking them for what they had given to me. So that, okay, you live in a society where you are deviant, belong to a minority religion, but in every religion there are the beautiful people, the people who work on their religion, the people who strive to extend themselves beyond themselves and to meet up with them is just absolute bliss. From time to time it can happen in your work as well.
And they don’t always have to be people of religion because they can be people who have a philosophy. They’ve worked it out themselves or they’ve read a book that they follow that means something that sustains them for decades, but they’re on a level with you somehow, and and, you know, there’s just beauty to be shared. It’s through half past nine. One person obviously had to go earlier. I’m prepared to go on a while.
The only thing is we have a young mother at home with nine puppies. She delivered on Saturday. So we we would want to go by about ten o’clock at the latest, wouldn’t we? Because she’s inside, and and we we have been babysitting her a bit because she she’s physically physically still a bit big. Are there any experiences that you’ve had in your work?
This is what the talk was about. We’ve heard from this lady who works with intellectually incapacitated people which is a very demanding job. I’m sure Mary Anne could add so much to it because of working with refugees where you’re constantly rubbing up against lives which are so raw because of their experiences that your compassion, you know, even if you pour it into them, everything that you’ve got, it’s only like a drop in the ocean. And this can bring incredible feelings of inadequacy sometimes which you also have to work out. Especially when you have to spread yourself around so many people in the class.
So many. And you can pick one out occasionally and attend to that one person. It’s at the detriment of the others. And there’s also the philosophy in teaching that you don’t get into the private lives but of course you do. There’s no way you’re not going to.
It’s one of those professional attitudes in our society that is very difficult to work with as a Buddhist, that if you happen to be in anything that smatters, has a smattering of social work in it, you will be advised to be detached, but not detached in a Buddhist way, to be detached in a way of not getting involved. As a Buddhist, find that absolutely impossible because one’s life is not a closed off capsule and the other’s life is not a closed off capsule. The moment you are in one room with another suffering person, you just flow together with that other person and you tend to take on part of their suffering, but you also probably share part of your suffering with them. It’s like the air that you breathe in together. So the attitude of detachment that they keep in the professional world, I think, is wholly unhelpful.
But way I understand it in Buddhism, the detachment, is to pour out as much compassion as you have available that day and to do this dual observing, to observe that person’s problem as that person in this society experiences it, and to see that problem as Buddhist in the way your worldview forms a context for it and then to sort of find a piece of advice that combines these two. Very hard, but much more rewarding probably. But the other thing that probably is useful to say is that if you are in any sort of work where you are serving other people, you must allow yourself to break down from time to time, by which I simply mean that if your energy has run down and you are just falling to shreds and getting to tatters, which you do, then the best service you can do, the whole of mankind, is to admit it to yourself as quickly as you can and take a weekend off and go to bed or take a week’s vacation or whatever you can do to relieve that situation because there’s nothing so terrible as a limping, frustrated, intended bodhisattva, you know, clobbering through situations and making making holes in the whole the whole fabric of life.
And I’m saying that out of sheer experience of having done that. I am one of those people that’s got to be driven to bed with a club, a wooden club. And it’s not until I finally give in, say, oh, this is wonderful. I can read a book. But, you know, to get me there is really difficult because I spent half my childhood in bed being sick, so obviously I had enough of that.
But it means that in my working life, in many situations, I would just work myself to shreds and I would get more and more frustrated, more and more tense, more and more snappy, intolerant, and, you know, all the other things opposite to the things that I set out to do because I just wouldn’t allow myself to take rest. And it was Lama His name started with an l, the little Lama. Lomondrop. Yes. Lama Lopondrop, who once referred to that in a talk, and I I thought I immediately recognized what he was aiming at.
And he was talking about the bodhisattvas and how they could become ill because of taking on, and that this could express, you know, taking on suffering, whatever situations, and that this could express itself in physical illness that that could actually be threatening to to life, to to their own life. And yes. Have you ever sort of or have you ever asked asked a lama when upon taking on others suffering, any particular practice to get rid of No. I haven’t. I wanted to ask him then, but we were going on to a demonstration for Tibet on the steps of Parliament House, so it didn’t come about.
I think it’s something that should be talked about because I feel that it’s alright to talk about how to be a Buddhist and become happy, but the Mahāyāna Buddhist path is the bodhisattva path, and it’s as well to make a beginning and to realize that that one is principally on that path and therefore the situations of soaking up more suffering than we can deal with will start to happen at some stage. And I think that is much more important than how to be happy. Frankly, I can’t remember, except for fleeting moments, what happiness is. I think that in Buddhist life happiness is a fleeting moment of insight and the rest of life is just treading a path to enlightenment, to relieve suffering. I can’t see how one could be happy in the way the English language understands happiness in the face of the suffering that we see around us.
But there are other languages where the word happiness has sometimes other connotations where it would be more appropriate, but in the English language I don’t think it is appropriate. But I think it’s important that people have consultations with lamas and people from the Sangha to avoid physical illness coming out of spiritual overloading. It was highly apparent in in massage Yeah. Especially when you work when you’re in direct touch with the person and work on the nerve ends and so on, you pick it straight up. The the small things that I devised myself over the years were breathing exercise in the first place.
Secondly, to become silent, and I this is really interesting. Here I sit, and I’ve been talking for two and a half two hours. I I am a good talker. I can go on indefinitely almost, and a lot of creative energy goes into that talking. So that I found when I was being on the mind, the first thing was to save energy.
And for me, the very first thing the very first method to save energy was not to stop work, but to stop talk. And that would save a great deal of energy. That meant that I became a better listener, and I also found that there are range of little groans that one can utter that suffice for most people, because a lot of people really just want to talk and they’re not waiting for your answer and they don’t really want a discussion. So I can apply those in appropriate circumstances and save a lot of energy. And I would also then do my work, whatever it was, with a greater intensity because I felt that my energy was less and therefore my concentration had to be more, but I would knock off on time and not do extracurricular things in order to get home and go to that little shrine and recharge batteries and read Buddhist texts.
When it got very bad, I would go and lie on the earth outside in the sun. At the moment I wouldn’t advise that with the tear in the ozone layer. It depends on how old you are. If you’re still fairly young, you probably haven’t absorbed that much sun yet, but if you get to my age spots, it might be skin cancer. I’m staying out of the sun quite a bit, but I find that the sun is able to give me that energy that has been seeping out.
You’d have to be very careful about it now. Those were things I advised, but there are many other things that people can do, I’m sure. But it is very necessary to find ways to stop from disintegrating because some people are like sponges, you know, and if you then see your work environment as a pool of troubled water and you roll in at nine o’clock in the morning, you being the sponge, then there is your imagery, you can see what’s happening. You just have to get out of the pool to squeeze yourself out somewhere. But I wish there were more discussions on it.
I think it’s terribly important because we do more damage than we are run down and hold on for dear life to our beautiful principles, unable to really put them into practice because we are so shattered and fractured. It’s all from good intentions, so we aren’t really to blame but it is happening. And that is partly because we are deviants in a society which says to us, if you choose to be a Buddhist, then you better be jolly well perfect about it. They’re putting such a load on the person who chooses to be different from the main stream. So you’ve got to really remind yourself that you are not perfect, and you have to remind the others that you are on this path because you want to become enlightened, not because you are already.
And I think anybody attempting to live by those principles even if they’re not calling themselves, even if they’re not a Buddhist or not telling anyone they’re a Buddhist, will you still get absolutely exhausted? Yes, but that’s where the recharging comes in. I mean, in periods when you’re not exhausting yourself to the very bottom of your being, you need to be recharged. And I think you have to make a daily practice of that. I can’t see that you can do without a daily infusion of something that makes you feel light and fine and able, you know.
Not happy, It’s not necessary, I think, but capable. Capable of performing something skilfully, even if it’s only going to be one thing in that day that’s going to be done really skilful. Fully. Recharging is something that you have to find out yourself, how you’re personally going to arrange that. With me it is my little shrine.
Nowadays, where we live, it’s very much trees. We we now live in the middle of a forest, and, oh, tell you what, that’s a shrine and a half. So that it’s only a matter of stepping out the door, and it becomes very easy. I’m a gardener, and if you have a professional life full time, you can’t hope to use this method, but because I worked part time and eventually gave up even the part time and became freelance, I have a lot of time that I can freelance wherever I will, and I can do it in the garden almost. So I am a gardener for about twenty hours a week, and I find that coming back to fingertips just to get my fingers in the soil, there’s a lot that drains out and goes right down.
So I take some of my problems, which are usually other people’s problems, into the garden and just work in the soil, and I disappear there, get washed away. That might work for some people, but for that you have to have the physical time. That’s difficult. Yeah. But I would say surround yourself.
If you can, if you have a working environment which is steady, like a small office or a workplace or a room, whatever, where you work, surround yourself with things which are living, like plants. I don’t advise goldfish in bowls, but plants do thrive indoors as well and can have a very happy life there. And and do surround yourself with some little things that remind you of your Buddhist path. I have a traveling Buddha, which is a tiny little one. It’s brass, and it’s hollow inside.
And because it isn’t solid but hollow, it once lost its head. It just snapped off. But amazingly, where I where I was going to, I arrived and I unpacked, and there was a traveling Buddha with its head severed. And the person who happened to be in the room when I was unpacking said, oh, I can fix that. And it was fixed.
And the Buddha got its head back, and that Buddha traveled whenever I was going to make difficult journeys that traveling Buddha goes. At the moment, it’s retired, standing on the windowsill in my work shop, but I never travel without pictures of Tārā pasted inside suitcases. You know? I’m a real real pagan. But to have something around me that reminds me of what I’m at is you know, half the battle, I think.
Yeah. I think you raised an important thing. You’ve you’ve got to keep that warm and talk to other people about it because it is very necessary to get healing ways for people who are trying to live up to their Buddhist principles, means by which they can heal themselves or prevent being shattered. And I think the world would be better for it if we all paid attention to that because oh, well. You know?
Any other aspects that anyone wants to bring up? You mentioned feeling light and fine, and I noticed your your sense of humor glimpse through now and then. And even though a lot of these things are quite serious, you described yourself as happiness only being in fleeting moments. But I’ve heard a sense of humor being defined not necessarily as jokes and things like that, but the ability to see space and lightness in a situation when the chips are down. And I think we need that kind of balance in a lot of these things because I think one of the criticism which a lot of people put at Buddhism is kind of thinking, oh, you know, in our pleasure seeking society that why be dwelling on the workplace where all these difficult situations to be able to there’s one lama in America, who writes a lot and well in English.
And he dwells a lot on this sense of humor, not again just to jokes and things, although that can be sometimes a means to Mhmm. Draw our awareness to it, but to keep a lightness in things, you know, not to make it too solid and heavy. I you you touch on one of my great ambitions. I would like to become a humorous writer. I think it’s one of the I think people who have real humor, they must be enlightened.
You know? I think it takes real intelligence and real wisdom to be humorous and to be humorous in in in situations where other people tend to give up. Well, I think that would probably I haven’t heard it said, but, I mean, I imagine that that would be part of what enlightenment would be about. Yeah. Because the world isn’t just No.
Negative and bad It isn’t. Suffering. I mean, Buddhism is also about gaining enlightenment, which is bliss. Yeah. And so I’m sure that I mean, that is what Buddha wanted us to have.
So I think although it’s a it sounds a contradiction. Although we must remain sensitive and aware and compassionate about suffering, I think surely our best source to handle that is is is that bliss. Yeah. Is is those moments of just those heightened moments which which you know? That lady that I mentioned earlier on who said people say I shouldn’t wear lipstick.
I’m a Buddhist. She had had cancer already when I met her, and I’ve known I knew her for about eight years altogether, and eventually she developed cancer again and went into hospital, had surgery, and so on, chemotherapy. And then it spread, and we all knew that she would be dying. And I’ve never seen anything like it. She eventually went into a hospital permanently.
The hospital was just around the corner of a street, tiny little hospital, and her husband said, she’s in hospital. Go and see her there. And I went, and she was lying in bed, and her hair was nicely combed. She was powdered. She had her lipstick on because where she was going, she wanted to look her best.
That was her whole attitude. And she was making jokes. You know, and she was on her deathbed, and she knew it, and everybody knew it. And she was presumably in a certain amount of pain, but her attitude to life and death, death being the next stage, the great adventure, she was she was just looking forward to it. She really was.
But she had this great sense of humor with it all the time. She tackled all the problems in life with with that sense of humor. And although I didn’t know her before she became a Buddhist, I I heard from people and friends who’d known her before that she had been different when she was young. And she started to investigate religion when she was in her thirties, I think. And she started with the Jehovah Witnesses because that happened to be about in the Mormons and whatever it was about, and she went to everything.
And then she heard about Hinduism, and then she read through all of that and met Swamis, and then she met a Buddhist somewhere, and she read about Buddhism, and then she went to Theravāda, the whole hog, and then through the whole of Mahāyāna, and she ended up in Zen. She was cracking Zen jokes all over the place. She did the whole thing in a lifetime, in half a lifetime, and just died with lipstick on and smiling, having cancer. That’s the power of Buddhism and a sense of humor and a certain degree of enlightenment which she had reached. So, yes, let’s strive for more humor, which basically is striving for more enlightenment through sticking to the simple things that the Buddha told us to try, you know, again and again and again from day to day.
Anything else? Or shall we call it a day? And tomorrow is a new day. Thank you all very much for coming. A talk is only as good as the audience is.
So if the talk was good enough for you, it’s because the audience was terrific. Thank you very much.