Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 62-minute session, resident nun Ven Jamyang guides beginners through mindfulness meditation while exploring how ordinary mental habits create suffering. After teaching posture alignment and the basic technique of gently returning attention to the breath and body when the mind wanders, she leads a detailed full-body scan meditation. She then explains a key insight: the untrained mind automatically pursues pleasant experiences and rejects unpleasant ones, generating vivid internal stories that feel real but disconnect us from the present moment. Both positive and negative stories produce mental tightness and suffering. Through sustained observation—watching the mind’s reactions without judgment—practitioners can recognize these patterns in real time and access the peace of present awareness. Designed for those new to meditation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2009 03 09 16 guidelines for a happy life.mp3
UUID: 7473924e-55e5-40ba-ba90-2bc1d6b4f703
Teacher: Ven Jamyang
Collection: 16 guidelines for life june (Ven Jamyang)
Date: 2009-03-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 62.5 minutes
Words: ~2,465
Welcome everybody. Is that too loud? No? Okay. I have to talk really soft now.
Are you sure? Just not too much. K. That’s better. For those some people here for the first time today.
No? Yeah. No. I don’t know all the faces, so I’ll introduce myself. I’m Jamyang.
I’m a resident nun here and I’m going to guide you through the meditation. We’re doing mindfulness meditation, which means that we’re going to try to focus the mind and then somehow counteract that tendency that we have, that the mind is running around like mad and we’re not able to control it. So the only instruction that you’re going to get is that you try to focus on whatever I ask you to do. So in the beginning that will be your body and then we will go to your breath and maybe we go first with the body. I’m not sure.
I will see what we’re going do. So the only thing that you do is you try to bring your mind to that object and you let it rest, you know. So you don’t hold it very tight but you bring it there and you let it rest, completely relax. And then most likely your mind will start thinking again or, you know, caught up in all the stories that we normally create. If you notice that you bring your mind gently back and then your mind will take off again and you bring it gently back.
And that’s actually all that we’re going to do, bring your mind back. Very simple instruction, very difficult to do. So try to persevere without being hard on yourself. Try to be very kind to your mind in a sense that you are very gentle with your mind and at the same don’t think that you’re gentle when you let your mind get covered up in the stories. That’s not being gentle.
Gentle means that as soon as you notice it you bring it back. But you’re kind in how you bring the mind back. We sometimes think, oh I have such a nice thing in my mind. I give myself a present but keep on thinking about it. In meditation that’s not a good present.
We stop also the nice stories. So when we meditate we meditate with the mind but the body can help the meditation. So if we bring the body in a posture that helps to support the mind and what it’s doing, meditation becomes a little bit easier. There are two things important: one is you keep the body still as much as you can without getting again too tight. If you get in pain it’s okay to move and to change your posture.
But if you’re not in pain and you’re a little bit restless try to let that restlessness come to rest somehow. Don’t follow it, don’t try to go everywhere. Whatever feeling goes into your body, just let it be there. Don’t react to it if you can. And try to keep your spine straight.
You feel it on the floor if you’re sitting on a cushion. I like sitting cross legged. And what I normally do is in order to make the body straight without being tense I roll with my pelvis up and down and there is a point that you have your pelvis a little bit rolled forward, it’s like your spine gets pushed up naturally. And if you find that point you don’t have to hold up your whole torso, it just stays there naturally and then you can drop your shoulders. So try to find that point and sometimes have to feel in the beginning I had a feeling I had to make a hollow back in order get there.
But it’s somewhere in the middle. Yes. Did you feel that? Do it again. I might have moved out of it.
So there is a point that there’s it’s like something lifts you up. And you can’t sit in that then it’s like that’s the place where the energy can move freely and that’s the place where your mind will calm down most quickly. Okay so try to find that. Okay and then close your eyes and even just finding that place, you know, your spine stretches or straightens up naturally. That is like the start of the meditation.
It’s like you’re listening to your body and to your mind, and you say, where is that point where it feels more naturally, most naturally. So finding the right posture is actually already part of the meditation. Your hands are either in your lap or on your thighs, wherever it’s comfortable for you. In the Buddhist meditation posture, we normally put the right hand on top of the left and the thumb slightly touching each other. And the elbows are a little bit away from the body so that the air can circulate.
Your shoulders are relaxed. Your head is a little bit bowed forward. Your tongue is touching the palate. And your eyes are closed. Allow a little bit of light to come into your eyes.
So that we don’t fall asleep. And then you go one more time through your body, checking all these points and adjusting where you need some adjustment. So you start with your feet, sitting in the chair. And then you go to your pelvis, your back, your arms and shoulders, your head, your jaws and your tongue and your eyes. And when you feel that you are sitting in the right posture, Just let your body stay there.
And you bring your mind to your stomach where you can observe the rising and the falling of your abdomen every time when you breathe in and breathe out. So you try to let your mind rest on the movements. When you notice that your mind is wandering off, you bring it gently back. If your mind is wandering off, you bring it gently back. And the main thing that you’re doing in the beginning of the meditation is you give your mind some space to unwind, especially if you have been busy today.
We are all doers. We have so many things to do, and we all have to push ourselves in order to do what we set out for in the morning. And it’s like a stress in the mind. It winds up the mind. So if you just sit down and you let your mind rest on your body, on your breath, the mind starts to unwind.
And that can feel like part of you still wants to keep on moving, wants to get up and do something. Give your mind the time to come to rest. And then bring your awareness or your focus to your thighs. We observe the feelings that arise from that part of your body. You don’t follow the feelings and you don’t push them away.
You just let them arise and dissolve back again. You just observe them. If your mind wanders off to another part of the body or to things that have happened or might happen, bring it gently back and let it rest on your thighs. Into your knees Your shins. Your ankles.
Your feet. Your toes. The tip of your toes. Then go to the soles of your feet. Your calf muscles.
Your hamstrings. And sometimes you might feel that some tension comes up in your muscles. Just allow that to happen. Don’t push it away. It is as if you step back so that it can surface and then dissolve back into the mind.
Then go to your buttocks. Your lower back. Let your mind rest on your body. And then move your awareness slowly up along your spine, the outer parts of your back. Shoulder blades.
And go to your shoulders and down your upper arms. Your elbows. Your arms. Your wrists. And your hands.
The back of your hands. The fingers, the tip of the fingers. the palm of your hands. In every moment of our mind, feelings arise. Try to bring your mind to that moment the feelings arise.
Can you catch them when they start arising? Can you see them? Can you observe them? Then move back to your shoulders. Go to your neck.
The back of your head. The top of your head, crown of your head. And then when we come down the face, allow your face to completely relax and become soft. Your forehead. Meditation, we do not have to pretend that we are somebody or something.
Meditation is about completely relaxing all these layers that we put on top of ourselves. Your eyebrows. Your eyes. Your nose, your cheeks. Your upper lip.
Your lower lip. Your chin, and then go down your throat. Being aware of the feelings that arise from your throat. Just observing them. You don’t follow.
You don’t push away. Then go to your chest. Your stomach. And your abdomen. And if you can sit like this in our twenty five minutes, you can stay in the meditation.
If you need a break and you would like to stretch your body or get up and walk a little bit around, you can do that now. Just be mindful of those who keep on meditating. And when you feel ready, go back to your meditation. And you can very quickly reset your posture, going through all the points, your feet, your pelvis and your back, your shoulders and your arms, your neck, jaws, tongue, and your eyes. And then focus your awareness back on your abdomen, Observing the rising and falling.
You breathe naturally. When we talk about observing, what we’re trying to do is to observe what is. As soon as we stop observing and get involved, we somehow manipulate what is there. We change it. We make it look better or worse.
And that makes that the mind gets tight. And we all do that twenty four hours a day. It’s like, I was gonna say second nature, but it’s a habit that we have, a deep habit. So during this meditation we’re going to look at the mind and how the mind functions. You try to let your mind rest on your abdomen, observing the breath.
And then you try to follow whatever I’m saying. You try to observe if what I’m saying is true. You try to see if you can observe what I’m talking about. And if you somehow get lost or you can’t remember what we were doing, you just go back to your breath, observing the movements of your abdomen. And when you have refocused and feel that the mind is calm and clear again, you start listening and following again.
If the mind is not in the present moment, if the mind is not the observer, it has a tendency to react to whatever arises in the mind. It has the tendency to react to the feelings that arise. If something makes us feel good, we want to have more of that. We follow that. If something makes us feel bad or unhappy, we don’t want that.
So we push it away, try to get out of it. See if you can recognize these two tendencies. If we have met somebody that we really like, we keep thinking about that person again and again. And we’re thinking about how we can share more time with that person. How we can have more fun with that person.
And that feels like we are happy. But if you think about a situation like that, observe how that really feels in your mind. Feel if that relaxes your mind or makes it more tight. If we meet somebody that makes us feel bad, that is rude to us, hurts our feelings, then our mind has the tendency to walk away from that person, to avoid that person, or to push that person away. With words, with our body, or just in our mind.
And these thoughts, when we like somebody or do not like somebody, they are also in our mind when the person is not there anymore. And even when the person is not there, we keep on reinforcing these thoughts. We go over it again and again and again. Maybe we change the story, but the story is still there. And when you think about that, try to be aware how that feels in your mind.
If you feel relaxed or tense. So the moments that we make stories, and these are many, many moments in a day, we lose touch with reality. We lose touch with what is. Check if that’s true. Stay connected with the movements of the abdomen.
And most of the time, we even believe that our stories, whatever comes in our mind, that that is reality, That it is true. That it is what happened. That it is what is gonna happen. We can make this story so vivid that it is as if it really is happening right now. And if you would check on the spot, we would say, no, of course, it’s not happening.
But in our mind, we experience as if it is real, true. And both the good stories and the bad stories, they make our mind more tight. And that tightness doesn’t feel like happiness, doesn’t feel like peaceful, it doesn’t feel calm, it doesn’t feel spacious. So when we meditate, we create some space from these stories. We reconnect with what is.
We reconnect with reality. Our body, our breath. Our mind in this moment. We don’t try to change it. We don’t try to make it look better.
We just observe. As soon as we start to create a story, good story or bad story, it doesn’t matter, we started creating suffering for ourselves, tightness, stress, Because we disconnect from what is, from what is real. Instead, we’re living in a fantasy world. Which is completely non existent. So the moment you can recognize that, you bring your mind back to your body, to the movements of your abdomen.
And then come slowly out of the meditation. Hear the sounds. Feel your whole body. Start moving. And when you feel ready, you can open your eyes.
Thank you for coming. Buddha House would like it, if you come here, write down your name and so if you haven’t done that or paid, I ask you to do that when you go out. And if you like to stay for the teachings from the Geshe, please feel free to do so. If you need a newsletter, if you haven’t had one this month, you can take one outside. We hope to see you next week.