Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Thubten Chodron guides practitioners through a structured inquiry into the causes and conditions that trigger disturbing attitudes like attachment, anger, and jealousy. Working with one chosen emotion, students examine five key factors that bring it to life: the underlying seed or predisposition in the mind; contact with specific objects or people that activate it; detrimental influences such as toxic friendships; verbal stimuli like media and television that shape perception; habitual emotional patterns; and inappropriate attention that exaggerates or projects qualities onto situations. By understanding how each factor operates in daily life, practitioners learn concrete skills to sidestep their generation and prevent disturbing attitudes from arising. The meditation is suited to anyone with basic familiarity with Buddhist psychology and a genuine interest in emotional inquiry.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 28 GM.mp3
UUID: 05aef167-99d7-48a5-8be6-878defa223f1
Teacher: Thubten Chodron Guided Med
Collection: Guided Meditation (Thubten Chodron Guided Med)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~720
After we examine how the various disturbing attitudes operate in our lives, then it’s helpful to look at what factors stimulate their arrival because that will give us an idea of how we can avoid generating those disturbing attitudes. So as we do the following meditation, pick one particular disturbing attitude. Let’s say attachment or anger or jealousy. Pick one and look at all these factors and how they help to generate it. So first of all, there’s the predisposition or the seed of the disturbing attitude in our mind.
So this is the potential, let’s say, for attachment to arise simply because we haven’t eliminated attachment from our mind completely because we haven’t realized emptiness directly. So get a sense of those potentials or seeds of the disturbing attitudes that are there ready to blossom into the full manifest negative emotion. So given that there are those seeds or predispositions for the disturbing attitudes in our mind stream, when we meet with an object, that can make a particular disturbing attitude arise. So for example, if you’ve chosen attachment to meditate on for this meditation, then check what objects or people trigger the arrival of attachment in you. And do you pay special attention?
Are you especially mindful when you’re around those objects or people? Or if you’re meditating on anger meditation, then what objects or people do you have to contact that trigger that predisposition of anger in you to blossom into full blown anger? So do a little bit of research in your life. Check this one. And the third factor that stimulates the arrival of the disturbing attitudes are detrimental influences such as wrong friends.
So it’s interesting to examine how much we’re influenced by the people around us. Do we hang around people that encourage us to become attached or who encourage us to dislike other people? Are we friends with a lot of people who are critical of our spiritual practice or who encourage us to act unethically? And how do we handle that peer pressure and the wish for our old friends to approve of us? So look to see how much peer pressure in other people influence disturbing attitude.
Another factor is verbal stimulus. For example, the media, books, television, magazines, newspapers. So how much do you involve yourself with the media, and how much do the media shape your life and your self image? When you watch television, is your mind generating virtuous thoughts or non virtuous thoughts? You read the newspaper, magazines, do you generate craving to get more things or to be other things?
So check and see how the media operates in your life to generate various disturbing attitudes. And try and think about how you want to relate to the media so that you can be in contact with it in a healthy way instead of a distracting way. The next factor is habit. So what emotional habit or patterns do you have? Do you have a habit of getting angry or a habit of being attached?
Are there certain situations in your life where you see over and over again the same disturbing attitude arises? Basically, because we’re habituated to that disturbing attitude, we feel like there’s no other possible alternative to how to react emotionally and check if that’s really true, or are we just creatures of our emotional habits? And finally, what role does inappropriate attention play in the arrival of our disturbing attitudes? For example, do we pay attention to negative aspects of a situation focusing on them so that we automatically generate anger or jealousy? Or whenever we’re around certain people or objects, do we pay inappropriate attention to their good qualities, exaggerating them or projecting them, and then getting very attached?
So is our mind full of biases, and do we tend to be quick to jump to conclusions or to be judgmental? So do a little bit of research and check how inappropriate attention causes your disturbing attitudes to arise. So by understanding how these factors operate, we can begin to manage which ones we come in contact with and which ones we can avoid. And thus, we are able to get some skills in how to prevent our disturbing attitudes from arising. So make some determination to do this.