Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 3-minute teaching, Ven Jampa Ignyen examines a sharp conflict many practitioners face: the ideal of becoming the servant of all beings, as Śāntideva teaches, versus our actual emotional limits. For a mature practitioner, this selflessness might flow naturally, but for most of us, honest self-examination matters. If another person triggers impatience, feelings of being used, or anger, Ignyen outlines practical moves: spend less time together, know your limits, and if needed, physically distance yourself. Yet he warns that relocating won’t resolve unresolved mind patterns. He finishes with communication advice: raise issues calmly, listen to others’ feedback about your faults, and accept that agreement won’t always happen.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 Dealing with Emotions 2001 08 26.mp3
UUID: a24d3bee-e6fa-49a7-901e-0b8dd31551da
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Dealing with Emotions (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-08-26
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 3.7 minutes
Words: ~421
Yeah. A good practitioner doesn’t make any difference. The fact that other people may appear to be using us, all the better. As Śāntideva says, you know, we should make ourselves the slave of every other being and to fulfill their wishes. A good practitioner will be able to practice like that.
For the rest of us, we have to really examine. And if, you know, we’re really becoming impatient and so we really feel this other person’s using us and they’re not seeing our good qualities and so on, and we’re really getting upset and unhappy and prone to outbursts, and we can’t really, you know, like maintain a positive attitude that we would like to, we should do, then we may need to try other strategies, whatever they may be. You know, spend less time with that person, for instance. We need to protect ourselves and we need to know our limits, how far, you know, we can reasonably go, and then remain as much as possible within that. And sometimes if, you know, we can’t deal with other people, we have to simply go to another room or, you know, another city, another state.
But the other thing is that we always know that our mind is gonna go there with us. If we haven’t resolved the situation, it won’t be resolved by moving somewhere else. But at times that may be necessary. Yeah. Well, we can always, we always should be able to talk to others about these issues.
And if there’s some issue there, then we should be reasonable and bring it up and not get angry. Be willing to learn from the other person. They may want to point out a few of our faults. And we should be patient with that and give them room to express that. And if they’re correct, then we should be able to, you know, say, Okay, you’re probably right on that issue.
I’ll look into it. Or maybe I don’t see it at present like that, but you may be right there. And so on. We need. But if there are issues like that, we should bring them up with them and so on, or with anything.
It’s not always the case that people are going to agree with us and we may not be able to resolve it. So we also need a lot of patience. Anyway, we should stop here. I think we’ve gone over time a little bit. Anyway, just at the end.