Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 62-minute session, Ven Jamyang works with anger, grief, and compassion through an extended dialogue with a student who woke in fury after a dream about confronting old injustices. Rather than dismiss the experience, he uses it to teach how emotions arise and why Buddhist practice involves observing anger until it naturally loses power, rather than acting it out. He then explores grief as fundamentally rooted in separation—the impossible longing for wholeness we project onto partners. From there, he teaches compassion practice as the antidote, alongside a challenging karmic perspective: those who harm you are exhausting your own negative karma. The talk is direct and conversational, pitched at serious practitioners working with difficult emotions.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2007 10 23 amyang – session 1 231007.mp3
UUID: 0fc98a4e-fe6e-45ed-bcff-c4437c056cb8
Teacher: Ven Jamyang
Collection: Jamyang Mind Healing (Ven Jamyang)
Date: 2007-10-23
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 62.4 minutes
Words: ~9,470
Yes. Yes. Yes. Not too long. Hello, everybody.
Nice to see you back. Thank you. That was a long break. Three weeks? Yeah.
Three weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good break.
Yeah. Nice to get away. How about three months? Oh, that was great. Not sure where Nick is.
Nobody heard from him. Nick is here. He’s maybe in the shop. Are you sure? Did you see him this morning?
There was a guy here. A a boy, I was gonna say, but that was not Nick. Yeah. And I’ve ringed Sandy, and she apologizes that she couldn’t come the last two weeks. She had to work.
And today, she has a meeting, which was very important. But next week, she’s will come. I sent her the homework and she keeps on doing what we are doing so that we are all on the same page. How did it go with the compassion? Nice?
Did you do something with it? Where did compassion come from? How are you going? Gentle. Gentle.
Gentle. You have to be careful that you don’t push yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Have you tried to do the meditations?
How did it go? What’s that? Sometimes Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That was the first time that you came. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You never had that experience again. I’m sorry that I laugh. We all wanna have these nice experiences while we meditate, isn’t it? Meditation is about changing the mind. It’s about habituating the mind to a new way of thinking.
Yes. So when somebody guides you and you can completely let go, they can bring you to a place that is maybe deeper or more away from you than you normally can do yourself. You think, oh, that’s fantastic. That person gives such a fantastic meditation. But actually, it’s you letting go of your old way, you know.
So if something is new, the tendency is bigger to do that. It’s just as going on holiday, the first weeks is like, especially if you go to a different culture, it’s like, oh, your whole you get such a space from what you’re used to do because everything is so different. You know, then you feel the freedom if from not holding on to what we’re used to. But then you get used to that and everything becomes normal again and you go back to your old habit, isn’t it? And we close down again.
So when you when we meditate, normally we are closed down, you know, unless something happens in our life. Then we can open up, then we can have very good experiences in the meditation. But having a good experience in the meditation doesn’t mean it’s a good meditation. Not necessarily. Meditation can be very hard because what you’re doing, you’re working with that mind that is rigid in a certain way, that is used to work in a certain way and you try to shift it, you try to bring it into a different way of thinking.
And the mind doesn’t like that. So the mind goes back again and again and you have to bring it again there. And it’s not a nice work always, you know. It’s hard work. And sometimes you just work very, very hard and the mind goes a few times a little bit in that direction.
That’s it. Half an hour work, that’s it, you know. But that’s good enough. You work putting in to shift your mind a little bit, that’s good enough. That’s the only work we can do.
Then how much the mind changes, that depends on our own merit, that depends on our karma. You know, we’re not in charge of that right now. That has to do with past actions from many many lifetimes. You know, so so we cannot blame ourselves for that. We cannot we cannot we shouldn’t blame ourselves for that.
That’s just a fact. We can’t change that. The only thing we can do is sit with our mind and try our best to shift it. Even if we feel nothing happens, that’s still good enough. Still we rejoice.
We try it for half an hour. Fantastic. If we don’t try that half an hour the mind will follow its old habits for that half an hour. You gave yourself half an hour break from your old habits. Even if you couldn’t turn it around you gave yourself a break from just following your mind, isn’t it?
From the mind just letting the mind take off wherever it wants to go. That’s good enough. That’s the only work we can do. And if you keep on doing that, if you build up some discipline, no matter what it is, five minutes a day, ten minutes a day, whatever you can, you know, whatever you feel comfortable with. Then, over time, within a month, I can promise you, within a month, you look back and you see the change in your mind.
You know? But you you have to bring it constant consistently to the mind every day. Every day, you try to make the shift. And I can tell you, it’s you know? And it’s it’s you need your wisdom to tell yourself, if I don’t do that, nothing will change.
It will just get worse. But if I do it, it definitely will change but I’m not sure when I’m really going to experience a change. That depends on many many many things. Know your effort now is like if you don’t put in the effort you know that change is not going to come. If you do put in your effort you know the change is going to come.
When it’s going to come, how big it’s going to be, that depends on many many other things too that we’re not in charge of. So we cannot guarantee when it’s going to happen and how quick it’s going to happen. You can only guarantee it is going to happen. You can only guarantee if you don’t do it, it’s not going to happen. At this point?
Sure. What you just said, you don’t know when it’s going to happen is so apt to what happened to me this morning. I I I find that confront I call it confronting the demons, almost bitterness, anger, all those things. And you do it in meditation, and it becomes a daily observation of what you’re doing and how you’re thinking. But last or early this morning, I had a dream.
And And I was in a room having to talk to a panel about my experiences with my injustices and bitternesses and all of that. And every time I started to say something, somebody else would come into the room and interrupt, and I would have to bury it a bit more for a while. And then I’d just start again. And something else, there’d be another distraction. And by the time I actually got to speak, I was at such a peak of anger, and I woke up in such a fury at the injustices that I felt that had happened to me.
And it was a horrible way to wake up, but all the work that I’ve been doing, looking, introspecting, meditating, thinking, observing, came to a head. And it was this morning, and it was So what did you what did you do with it? I recognized it for what it was. Yeah. What I’ve done is recognize the people and the treatment that I’ve accepted from people.
And What have you done with your anger? I think just recognizing where it came from and why just let it be there? Well, it was there. It was I I would have But you didn’t you didn’t put it away. You didn’t scream it out.
You just let it be there. Where it’s come from, and and it’s it all goes back to that nurturing that little inner child. So what happened with the anger when you just recognize it? It’s it’s recognizing the tormentors for how pitiful people and controlling bullying people they were and how I had allowed that to happen to me and now recognizing. That’s your wisdom aspect, but I wonder what what happened with the energy of the anger.
I think I’ve I’ve spat it for so long that that that was the But it rose in your mind this morning. Then after that, what? How is it now? Is it still there? Or has it so That was the dissipation.
How did it dissipate? Because in in the dream, I was I vented. I was In your dream, you did it? I and I woke up, you know, exhausted. Oh, and it was gone?
It was gone. Good. Fantastic. Yes. That that was it.
I didn’t actually physically do it, but it was as I mean, I did it mentally. I I really I forgot to stand in front of this panel of people that were it wasn’t about injustice to women or something, wanting to know people’s. And I got eventually the opportunity Yeah. This is not something that we really don’t wanna do. Right?
If that happens in your dream, that’s fine. But that’s not what we practice, really. We with our anger, we’re not doing that. We’re not gonna scream. We’re not gonna tell people off.
We’re not gonna that’s not what we are doing. That’s not Buddhist teachings. Right? So you can do that, but I cannot say that is the way that Buddha says to deal with your emotions. Where does the anger do?
Oh, man. Usually, reflects So that’s why I try yeah. So you can see there’s a black smoke coming out. It’s not that you wanna hold it in. You want it to to let it dissipate, disappearing out of your body but you’re not actually acting towards that other person who has harmed you.
What you’re trying to do is develop the compassion for that person, to see where that person well, you yeah. You did that. But then you if you really have compassion for that other person, what you want is you never want that person to suffer. So if you would direct your anger towards that person, that person is gonna suffer. But even directing so that means that you haven’t harmed them.
That’s good. But still bringing your anger out and living it out creates a habit in your mind of dealing with that strong energy how to get rid of them. And if you do that, you create a habit of getting angry because it’s a very fantastic feeling. If you get angry and you really let it out, after that it’s gone. You did it on the beach screaming.
Fantastic feeling of freedom, you know. But so you give your body and your mind. You give them the the the information. If you scream if you’re angry, after that you feel fantastic. Next time an anger comes, you wanna scream.
Next time an anger comes, you wanna scream. So then you have the habit of getting angry and screaming. You don’t harm anybody else but what you do is you create a habit of letting the anger to arise and living the anger. And that is actually damaging yourself. But if it’s lifetime of negative experiences that we’ve all had and we haven’t been blessed with the teachings for a lifetime and we’ve got all of this on a cellular level, then where is the release apart from the black smoke?
You just what I what you actually do is that when you sit with her, you allow it to arise in your body. And if you if you can step back from it and observe it, it will naturally dissipate. It will naturally dissolve back into the mind. Mind. Then you and then you recognize anger for what it is.
You don’t have to do anything with it. And it’s really it’s very uncomfortable in the beginning especially when you have strong anger. You know, it’s like you sit with it and it’s like your whole body wants to scream and you tell yourself, I’m just observing this. This is just not me. This is appearing in my mind and it was all dissolved back into my mind.
But if you if you sit with that, the first time is awful, the second time is a little bit less awful, and the the tenth tenth time, it’s like it’s just a little bit that arises. It’s it’s it it loses its power. And when it loses its power, it’s not gonna come back anymore. Not like that. Not like that strong feeling.
And it’s not then that you have suppressed anger. It’s just not there anymore. It just, you know, it can arise a little bit and then it goes away. It’s like you can see like I’m not gonna follow that. I’m not gonna live that.
I’m not so it has no power. You don’t take it serious. Just like mine. And it’s hard to get really exactly the the the right mindset that that can happen. It’s very difficult.
You know? But but you can do it. And then it goes out of your system completely. Not only that you release it out of out of your cells in this body, it goes out of your system from many lifetimes ago. Completely.
And anger is not part of your system anymore. Is part of your system in a sense that as long as we haven’t realized the nature of reality, it will still arise. But it’s like you have people who have just you think would I ever be angry? You know these people? They have this appearance that you think I cannot imagine this person to be angry.
Know? It’s like we can become like that. That nobody can think that we can become angry because it’s so out of our system. We just never ever wanna go there again. So that was bad, what I did this morning?
No. That wasn’t bad. That happened in your dream. Right? And we’re not in control of our dreams.
So that’s not a problem. And I think for you having that release, that’s a way of dealing with things and it feels like it did something really good to you. But right? So if we don’t have control and things like this happen, I rejoice. You know, because I know that you subconsciously have done something with it and I know you’re working very hard with these teachings.
So I trust that whatever happened is good. It’s fantastic. I think you got rid of something. But if you think like, Oh, I’m going to practice that during the day, or this is something that I want to cultivate in my mind, be careful with developing that thought. No.
I I I know where you’re coming from there. No. This was I I I can’t do that in my daily life. No. No.
No. You walk away and you just dismiss it. Yeah. And I think, you know, when you start applying Buddhism and we have all these Western techniques how to deal with our anger, sometimes you have this period that you you use both techniques. You know?
But more and more, you’re gonna work towards using the Buddhist because that’s less harmful for yourself and for others. It’s exhausting because I wake up. Also I’m absolutely I I feel terrible. Really, know, absolutely horrible. But I I’m at least advanced enough to recognize of of that anger now and why it was there.
Yeah. And who did it and why it was done. But it was I feel so empowered now as opposed to what I used to put up with. And that’s a part of respecting yourself and taking your own power back. I actually have a really good insight.
Yeah. Well, we use we use anger. Our anger is our protector. Our anger is the person that says stop. You know?
If we get abused, if we get tormented, if we get tortured, and we let we allow that to happen, we withdraw our anger because naturally you would say stop, you know. And there are many situations in our life that we can’t say stop. When we’re too young, when we’re very dependent, when there is a power difference in power, we have to allow these kind of things to happen to survive. What happens then is that because of that withdrawal of what you actually wanna do, that’s that’s like the suppressed anger. Then in order to come back, you know, then some the anger is something that can help you to get your place back.
That’s why we use anger. Anger is to say stop you. This is my place. That is your place. Buddhism never uses that technique but that is that is the function of anger.
We believe, we have learned that anger is that what protects us. The anger is that what keeps us safe. The anger is that what keeps us alive. The anger is that is what is taking care of us. The anger is that what empowers us.
We even you know? But if you really look into anger, anger is a complete negation of who we really are. Really, inside, we have Buddha nature. We have complete love and wisdom inside us. Being angry is saying that you don’t recognize that nature.
That is not who we are. Right? But it is something that we have adopted since beginningless time, you know. Many, many, many lifetimes we have adopted that that is how we can be me and how we can survive and how we can stand up to others. But that’s all based on illusions.
It’s not based on reality. It’s not based on what we really are. So that’s why anger is seen as a fault. But in order to really apply that, we have to think a lot about how reality is then and what we are and how to deal with the situations. Because we will get into situations where if we feel that threat then we need the wisdom to see what really goes on, to see what we really are in order to transform that anger that wants to arise into something else.
We need so much wisdom that we feel safe. Even the threat appears there. You know, as soon as we feel not safe, the anger is going to come. Wisdom is that what is going to help us to see the situation for what it is. And there are many, many things how to look at situations where a threat, how we can transform a threat into something that is not going to harm us, you know.
The wisdom, the more the wisdom is developed, the more we can as soon as somebody starts is is there to harm us, we can transform the situation in that we are helping that person and that person is not harming us. Takes quite a while to develop that, but that is where we’re heading to. Right? How could it be with a child though? I mean, if you’ve been a child that’s been been tormented from the time it was born and and you get to be a four year old, and you’ve never been able to you’ve always had to be a good girl and and do what you’re told, and and underneath, there’s this boiling resentment constantly.
Yeah. And you haven’t got that wisdom No. At, say, ten or twelve years old. Yeah. And you how do you how do you get rid of that?
You don’t. You don’t. What I’m saying is that now, where we are now, right, it’s like we have all these convictions about what anger is and why we need it and how to use it. And I’m saying that is a complete wrong idea. What we’re going to do is we’re going to transform that idea into something else.
We are going to do that. We. We have that opportunity. We met the teachings. We can do that.
Well, you just do whatever happens, you know. You just do whatever happens. And person that is just tough. Really has suffered a lot in her life. Then as soon as you want to take that suffering on and want to give her happiness, your anger is gone, isn’t it?
Felt so sorry for her. I felt don’t know why I was so angry. She irritates me. She still irritates me, and I still don’t try to stay away. But I was not it all comes comes back to my dad and all my my aversions towards certain personality traits and things that they can do.
It’s just a feature of the person, isn’t it, that triggers that? Can we stop this? I’m sorry. Can we stop this? Because we’re gonna talk a lot about anger if we do this.
And it’s not about and I’m gonna be sharp with you. You’re justifying anger. Anger is never, can never be justified. Never. No.
Never. Anger is harmful. Anger is destructive. And I can say that because I was a very angry person. Anger is only destructive.
There is no good in anger. Nothing. No matter what situation arises, and I’ve been in horrible situations, so I have the right to say that. No matter what arises, there is no right for anger to arise. Never.
All the positive karma. It destroys all your positive karma. All your goodness, your own goodness is gone. I’ll tell you many many disadvantages of getting angry. And not one good thing about getting angry except a temporary good feeling.
But actually, do you really feel good? You woke up and you didn’t feel good. You know? It’s nothing good comes from anger. What we feel, that is what we feel.
Somebody harms us. Hey, I have the right. I’ve said this many times in my life. I have the right to defend myself. If I don’t do it, who’s going to do it for me?
That’s anger. It’s not about defending each other or ourselves. It’s about how can we create a a world where everybody’s happy and keeping that in mind again and again and again. What I’m saying doesn’t mean that if a child is in a difficult situation that the child doesn’t get angry or that the child is not allowed to get angry. It’s not like that.
Of course, it’s in the nature that the child gets angry if the wisdom is not there. It’s in the nature. We cannot stop that and we’re not trying to stop that. But what we’re doing now is we have found in our life the situation that we can look at our mind and at whatever arises in the mind. And we have the opportunity to make different decisions.
Decisions we have more freedom, have more conditions that support us, we have more safety, we have more you know we feel more nurtured maybe which gives us a lot of conditions that we can look at that anger and say do we really need this or do we have other tools? Cannot change the nature of human beings. We cannot change the nature of sentient beings. And every time when there’s harm, if the wisdom is not there, the anger will arise. That will always be like that.
You know? And what we do is recognizing that that is intense suffering. And what we do is trying to get that out of our own system. We’re trying to wish that everybody else is free of that torment, of anger. And then from there, if our heart starts opening up and starts to develop more and more compassion and wisdom, we will attract more and more people that we can share this with.
That is a job that we can do. You know? And with that, it’s like throwing the stone in the water and it will ripple. You And everybody that we are kind to, maybe I don’t know. I had a period in my life that I thought if I smile to a person and that person is happy, that happiness will go with that person.
And that person is maybe more kind to whoever they meet and then maybe this person are more kind. It’s like a wrinkle that you spread out. But we can only yeah. Or ripple. Sorry.
Sorry. We can only that little bit, that action we have control over. And all the rest, if we have done that we have done our job. We have done good enough. We don’t have to do more.
Don’t have to. We cannot change the mind of other people in the sense of we cannot do we can only take care of our own action and that might have an influence on the mind of others and that might inspire person to do something with their own mind. Even Buddhas cannot change the mind of others. You know? If they could, they would have changed our minds.
We would not be in the suffering that we experience now. I wouldn’t say that that feeling that I had this morning in that dream was absolute rage. It was more like grief. But many times anger and grief go together, you know. There is anger.
Anger is to defend ourselves and as soon as we have that space then we can actually feel the hurt that is underneath. There’s many times hurt underneath the anger, you know. And only when we have the space and sometimes the anger is the energy that creates that space then we can start grieving. If we keep on hanging in the anger we never connect with the grief. But we can connect with the grief without really getting rid of all that anger.
I hope we’re gonna talk about all these technique that help us in that. Okay? We’re getting there. We’re getting there. Remind me on the break.
I write that down because this is very important. We all have that same tendency. You know? We all have that. And if we can shift that somehow, we can actually That’s the main thing that happens.
That’s what we are doing. Somebody harms us, that becomes our enemy. Somebody benefits us as our friend. And we’re constantly in between these two. And we wanna have more of that and less of that.
And that is what we’re constantly doing. We’re obsessed by that. I wanna have more of that, less of that. Always. Any moment of our life.
You know? So we all have that mind. And the more we can shift that and see that it doesn’t matter what comes to us, but we can use both. And, actually, we can use that what we don’t like much better on our path than that what we like. Yeah?
That what we don’t like benefits us much more. And does that mean that you have to hang around in a relationship? No. No, honey. We’re not doormats.
If you can get out of it, you go out and get out of it. No. It’s not that we’re going to look for suffering. It’s not that we’re gonna stay in suffering. It’s that if suffering arises and we have no choice, then we try to use that for the best.
Can you say a bit more about grief? Because that’s my thought. So I must have brought anger somewhere to do it out as well. I think grief has a lot to do with not understanding the nature of reality, not understanding the nature of relationships. Shall I go a little bit in that?
Are people happy if I do that? Yep. Under my papers aside, I thought why is nothing coming to me? Grief. If I give you the essence of grief, and this comes from me, you know, this you don’t find in Buddhist teachings like that, but grief has to do with the feeling of separation.
Feeling has to do with if we how to say? We are all looking for a feeling of wholeness. Right? Of being and I read somewhere and who was that that set up? I think it was Buddhist because I don’t read other books.
But he said from the as soon as we are in the in the womb with the mother, there is this feeling of being one. And I think even before that, there are feelings that we are connected, fully connected. Then we get born. There is the first separation that is painful. Then we grow up and at a certain point, you know, the mom is still there all the time, then mom we lose sight of mom.
You know? Then that is the second period that is really painful. Can you you you know that? When mom away and the child doesn’t know that mom still exists even if she’s beyond, you know, outside of the door? The separation fear, how you said it?
Separation anxiety? And then and then we grow up further and we go to school and, you know, our world gets bigger and bigger. And every time when our world gets bigger, we get more separated. And that hurts. If we don’t I think then we grow up, then we go to into a relationship.
What we still want, we want to have that oneness, that wholeness. That is what we are looking for. Wherever we can’t deal with that separation, we have this neediness that gets bigger and bigger in ourselves. We bring that neediness into the relationship. We expect a partner to fulfil that neediness, to have that job, to take that function that a mother had, you know, where we were in the womb.
Womb. Or to give us the feeling that we had before we were born. Right? That’s all not realistic. We’re never ever going to get that.
So our whole life we feel more and more and more we feel the separation, separation. We feel on the basis of that separation, we build up a neediness that we have. That is what how to say? It’s a need to experience the wholeness. But the need is that, you know, we need somebody who understands us.
We need somebody who can know our feelings without we even telling to them. We need somebody knows how you know? Know everything. They know everything about us and do exactly the right thing. That is what we are looking for.
True? Mhmm. That is our neediness. That is coming from a longing for wholeness. We’re never ever going to get that.
No, we don’t. Know. Never ever. If we accept that, we’re going to experience the pain of the separation. Right?
The pain of the separation, if the more you can experience that, the more you start to feel connected. Oh. Also, I think the pain of separation, what we try to do is we try to get that feeling of wholeness in the form of how to say? We become this little child with a neediness, and we expect somebody there to arise who’s gonna fulfill that. What I know that helps to get over that feeling is that instead of a neediness, me, me, me, me who wants something to be fulfilled, is that we’re gonna think, oh, so what neediness do all these other people have around me?
Me? They have the same kind of I sitting in here being needed, wanting something, craving for that feeling of wholeness. What do you need in order to get that? What do they need in order to get that? So then I’m to focus on others.
How do I do that? To think my suffering, whatever I suffer from, they are suffering from. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if they would have happiness? Wouldn’t it be beautiful if I could give them the happiness? What do you need in order to find your happiness?
Wouldn’t it be beautiful if you could be completely relieved from all your suffering? I would like that so much. Please give me your suffering. Give it all to me. Right?
If if I can say that, give it all to me, my suffering is gone. My feeling of separation is gone. It takes us out of the victim mode too. It takes us completely out of the victim mode. That’s the thing.
The neediness is the victim mode. And we all can identify with that victim mode, isn’t it? That’s what actually what we do when something happens. We identify with the victim because we know that pain that the victim goes through. We don’t know how to how and we know tools to overcome it.
We know the mother who helps us to overcome it. The mother who gives us the comfort. That is what keep we keep it well, even if your mother hadn’t given you the comfort, somehow we expect the mother to do that. And even if she hasn’t done it, we still expect her to do it. And even if we are seventy, we still expect the mother somehow to do it.
And the mother, even if the mother would try, she can never completely fulfil that. Because what we are looking for is something different than the mother can give us. We are looking for something different than any relationship can give us. We are looking for something different than anybody in the world can give us. Whatever we are looking for is not in the world.
It’s not there. So we are never going to find it there. Right? So we first have to accept that and see that. And then somehow we have to give it up.
We have to give our neediness up. I’m separated, I feel separated, I feel like big, big pain, I’m not going to put any attention to it. Or knowing that no matter what I’m going to do in my life, I will never be able to fulfil that neediness. Not in the way I think I can fulfil it. Because I think I can fulfil it if I get what I want.
Right? That’s how we think. I have this neediness, if I get what I want, that neediness is gone. And that’s not true. No matter what we get, that neediness will not be gone.
Never ever. We think, oh, as long as that person wouldn’t be in my life, I would feel much happier, you know? Then I would have the space and that’s not true. We would feel happy for two seconds. Then the neediness comes again.
We need more or we need something else. Never ever we’re going to find that satisfaction. So we have to give that up. No matter what you were grieving for, you’re never going to get that. No matter what you try to get from your partners, you’re never going to get that.
Never ever. Never ever. Even if you have hundred more lives, it’s never going to come. Even if you have the most beautiful body, you have wealth, you have everything that attracts the most fantastic man, it’s never going to come. Never.
Never like that. It’s like our tools are not the right tools. The method that we use is not the right method. It’s the wrong method. That method cannot give us what we are looking for.
So that we first have to give that way of trying to get it. We have to give that out. So if you feel your neediness and you feel your grief, what you could do, first you acknowledge it. Right? We don’t have to suppress it but you say, okay, there is the grief again.
I feel it in my heart. I feel it. And then you look around and you think, that person is the same as me, has the same kind of experiences. Maybe they don’t experience a grief that intense but they know they have other kinds of sufferings and in our suffering, we are the same. And just as me, that person is looking for a way to get rid of that suffering.
And just as me, that person is trying to find a way, you know, to get comfort. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if I could really help that person? Because you know how difficult it is to find anybody that can help you, isn’t it? You know it. It’s like it’s almost impossible.
So wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find somebody who could help in that? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could be that person? And then you can imagine, take that suffering of that person onto me. I’ll I wanna take it away. And in order to do that, in order to really take the suffering of others, we first of all have to like that person somehow.
Isn’t it? If it’s our enemy, it’s hard work. If it is if you would have a mother and her only child that is that is how Buddhism practices compassion. You think of a mother with her only child, the mother is prepared to do everything for her child to be free of suffering. If the child is sick, the mother says give me ten times more sickness as long as my child is free of suffering.
Right? So what we’re trying to do is to try to develop a feeling in our mind that is similar to that of a mother for her only child. So in order to do that we have to see all essentially being a very very attractive, as very very dear, as the most precious thing in our life. So somehow we have to find a way how can others be attractive to us. If we follow our instincts, you know, there are so many people who don’t fulfill our needs.
We don’t want them. That reaction can never make that we develop that compassion in our mind. So we first have to make them attractive. Attractive can be that we see their suffering. If you really see somebody suffering and you feel it in your heart, your whole wall will disappear.
Okay? You have that experience? It’s like you can’t hold on to the wall. It’s really if you really see the suffering, you can’t hold on to do your own defense. You wanna be there.
That’s our nature. Right? But we don’t like to feel the suffering. So we we have we so we have to put some effort in that. I want to feel your suffering.
What’s going on for you? I want you to be happy. You know, sit next to somebody and say that. Making somebody attractive, you can think about good qualities of the person. Making how do we make somebody attractive?
Seeing the suffering? Seeing their wish to be happy? Seeing them as special? Their unique feature? So you’re going to look what are the good qualities of that person and you’re going to only focus on that and then that person becomes very special.
You think, Oh wow, there’s only one person in the world that can do that unique feature. It’s that person. How wonderful. You can think like that, yeah. If you think this person is completely unlovable, you think, Oh no, that person had a mother too and the mother loved their child just as my mother loved them.
Even if we as child might not perceive that her love of a mother was complete, the mother has given everything they could. Right? That’s what a mother is prepared for. Even it might not meet the needs of the child, a mother gives everything they can. Can I say something?
Even if you Can we do it short? Because I wanna finish the story and I I lose always track if I find it difficult to keep track. Just wanted to say, even if you did that that you could look at a person and think, well, that person might be a horrible person. They might have some good points, but not everybody has had the privilege of a kind mother. And if that child has been orphaned and grown up to be Yeah, that person has reasons why this is the way it is.
To develop that compassion, you can think along those lines of, you know The suffering that a person might have gone through in their life. Yeah. True. That’s true. Sometimes the father’s kind.
And then the mother always is doing the best job she can anyway. She’s doing good jobs. And it’s about developing that love where you’re prepared to do the best job we can. We also are not perfect so in relationship to others we cannot do the perfect job but we can do our best, the best we can. That’s good enough.
So the best we can we can generate, I wish you to be free of suffering. I wish you to be free of suffering. Give it to me and you practice it. Give it to me. I’ll bear it all for the whole world.
You know? Even my own needs are not met because my separation, the feeling of being separated, my grief is still there. At least I have made my life of benefits because I take on the suffering of all sentient beings. At least I’m doing that. And if I can do that, you know, I’m only one sentient being.
If there are so many sentient beings and I can help to be free from suffering, it doesn’t matter if I suffer or not, at least they are all free from I’m just one person. It’s not that important. This is only one life. It’s not that important. After this, many more lives are going to come.
Before this, many lives were there. This life is not that important. I don’t have to be perfectly happy. I’m giving up my happiness. If that makes everybody else happy, I’m giving up my happiness.
That’s an attitude. This is very profound psychology. This is not about really giving up the chance that happiness is going to come to you, but it’s giving up your grasping to the happiness. Right? If you give up that grasping, the happiness will naturally come.
But if you keep on grasping, the happiness cannot come. So you first have give it up. You have to be prepared that it’s never ever going to come to you. Only when you’re prepared to that, it can come to you. Right?
So we think all these things that we actually don’t want to think. But we say that because that is going to shift our attitude and that makes that we’re going to get everything that we want. True? So it’s like in mind we want something but the way we are looking for it is the wrong way. It’s the way that it’s not going to fulfill it.
So we have to shift that way we are doing it. So first we give ourselves the complete different information which means that all our old ways can go. And then things can naturally come because we’re creating the causes for that to come. Everything comes from the mind. These are you know, these these these are all one package.
If you can understand how everything comes from the mind, how we create our own happiness and our own suffering, Our own happiness and our own suffering have all to do with our own attitude. I hated these stories. I can tell you. I hear myself talking and I think and still, you know, I have to work really, really hard if I think my own attitude. What’s wrong with my attitude?
Well, that’s wrong with your attitude. Attitude means that that self obsessiveness about I wanna be happy. You know? Walking around constantly looking for that happiness for me. That attitude and we all have that.
It’s not that we are bad people that we have that but that is the cause of our unhappiness. If we can really focus on others and only take care of others really from a heart, we will find all the happiness we need. Taking care of ourselves is knowing. And we have to do that with wisdom. Right?
We don’t have to we shouldn’t do that with exhausting ourselves and trying to make other people happy. I’m not talking about external happiness. I’m talking about having the attitude that you wish everybody to be happy. Having the attitude internally that you wish everybody to be free of suffering. And while you are in the world, you look for that.
You know? But it doesn’t mean that you have to give everybody coffee and make sure that everybody has this and make sure that It’s not like, and now forget yourself. It’s not like that. It’s your attitude. That you when you ask somewhere, that you have everybody in mind.
If you say something, that you have everybody in mind. If you talk about something that you wonder, is this of benefit to all sentient beings who are here? If it is, you say it. If it’s not, shut up. How is that?
Helena’s had a breakthrough. I can see the smile on your face is a mile away. But I also see this. It’s okay. You can hold it there.
I just No. I can’t I I know why I do this because I I don’t trust it happening. So I’m trying to open up. Up. You you don’t trust that it is happening?
That you can really let it go? Excuse me. You you don’t trust that you can let it go or that it’s going? Both. That makes sense.
Yeah. We are very habituated to that mind that holds on to go for more. And somehow I do that too. Somehow, each I have this mirror here. Somehow, we cherish that mind.
That mind is who we are, you know, who we believe we are. So in a way, we wanna get rid of it. In a way, we hold on to it. We wanna get rid of it. We hold on to it.
We wanna So sometimes we try to get rid of it and the other part of our body tells us that we actually still wanna hold on to or have a need to hold on to that. It’s really difficult to completely let it go and to completely shift it. You know, it’s scary. We become very vulnerable. We can’t become it’s like dropping the mask that we talked about.
It’s like allowing that not to be there or drop dropping our defense mechanism or dropping our walls. It’s like, oh my god. What’s gonna happen? I feel so great when it happens, but what’s gonna happen if I do that? Can I still survive?
Is nobody gonna hurt me? Nobody’s gonna hurt you. No. I don’t think it’s in that the other ones that hurt me and and here and They can appear like that. It has nothing to do with that person.
No. I realized that. Hurt is a karma that ripens. If that karma ripens, anybody will appear to you and hurt you. Right?
We cannot run away from the people who hurt us because it has nothing to do with the people. That’s that’s taking responsibility. That’s becoming, you know, self responsible. Saying that a hurt that I experience has nothing to do with what that other person does to me. That’s a big statement.
That’s a very hard one. But you do have the option of walking away, I haven’t. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But it’s like it’s like it’s what you say. If you’re a little child and you get hurt we see a little child getting hurt, we say, The child can’t help it, that it’s getting hurt. We want to save the child. I’m saying now, that depends on the mind of the child, if it gets hurt or not. It’s the mind of the child.
If we have a negative karma ripening in our mind, negative karma means that we’re going to experience pain. We all have that karma in our mind. We all have the created causes for that. We will experience pain in this life. In the form of sickness, in the pain of emotional hurt, in the the form of death, in the form of our life is full of suffering.
We will experience that. We cannot stop that. Sometimes a bigger karma ripens. You know, for instance you get tortured or you get abused. If an abuser appears to you, that abuser can only appear as if that karma seed from your side is there and is ripening.
If that seed would not ripen, that person cannot appear to you. That doesn’t mean that that person doesn’t do it. But that person can only do that to you because that seed is there. That because in the past we’ve done something similar that we need to Lama Zopa says even worse. Even worse to that person, to that person who harms you now.
I ask him this question, right, because I want to know. He says, not only is that seed in your mind which triggers that person to do it, it’s also that because that person is helping you to exhaust your negative karma that person is creating the causes to go to hell. How dare you to be angry at that person? That person is going to hell hell in order to help you to exhaust your negative karma. You should help that person.
That’s his psychology. That’s very deep. We have compassion. If you really accept that it starts in your mind and that invokes that person to do it. Right?
And you see that that person by doing that creates causes for their own suffering in the future and he only did it because your karma was there. We have a job there. We have a responsibility there to help. Wow. That’s a whole new vista.
Mhmm. That cut through a lot of poor me, poor me, poor me. It’s like but it’s deep and it’s hard. It’s hard to take that responsibility. But if we can do it, we free ourselves completely.
You know, no more blame. Good. Time for tea? I Well, I think a bicky would be good. A bicky would be good to nurture.
You alright? What is it? That’s good. And is the form of hell going to be in coming up in their future lifetimes as something worse than they’ve dished out? That that is the hell.
I mean, it’s not a place where there’s brimstone and fire and so on. According to Buddhism, there is. I But you can you can can think about it. But it’s different than than like in Christianity. Hell is just like in hell is ending.
You know? It’s not that there is an everlasting hell. But it is if you harm, you will experience that back. If you torture somebody, if you experience hell because somebody does that, that person is gonna have that experience at least that bad themselves in the future. If it’s in this planet or it’s in another planet, it doesn’t matter.
That experience, you know, hell is a is a realm where you experience certain things. You can do that in a physical body. You can do that in other kinds of bodies. So it’s not just in this physical world that that Buddhism believes there are many worlds outside this. outside of this universe.
What? Side of the road. The almond doesn’t work. But yes. Yes.
Out of ruins. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna say yeah. I won’t yeah.
The where the experience is is much, much, much worse than we ever can imagine. So it doesn’t matter. That’s just to help us to generate the compassion. You know? It’s if we can really see that, it’s like you don’t you don’t wish that anybody.
And if you would think that person goes to hell when they do that, you don’t wish that that person at that moment, you think that and you don’t wish that that person you can help that person. Can I put another twist on it? Yep. Because if the child is tortured Yeah. Harping back to that Yep.
Does that child have to pay back karma because it’s been brought in onto into this realm to tempt the torturer? Say that again. If the child experiences torture Mhmm. Then? But then it’s the child’s fault, and it will have to pay back because it’s been brought into the world to tempt the torturer to commit those acts while being a tempter.
If the child experiences torture Mhmm. That is due to negative karma that the child has created in the past. It’s not a fault. It’s well, you know, it’s like It’s it’s paying back. So that’s the payback.
That’s that’s not a payback. It’s like an ex it’s we have to be careful how we phrase it because karma is just a natural law. You know? It’s like a law that if I if I let it go, it will naturally fall down. That’s karma.
It’s like a natural law. There’s nothing about bad. We talk we use the words bad and good, but it’s it’s so natural that we we are not in control of that. It’s just like if the wind blows from that side everything will go to that side. If the wind blows from the other side everything will go to that side.
It’s like that. So if we do something things will come back. If we do good good comebacks. If we do bad bad comebacks. So it’s more that the seed ripens for that negative karma that the child created in the past as another being and that experiences the suffering, you know, that is related to the action previously.
If that has worked through the experience the karma is finished. The seat is purified, is exhausted. Not purified, exhausted. If that child will react with anger and start, you know, doing the same kind of abuse to the same person or to others, it creates new causes in the mind for the same thing to happen in the future. That is why we abstain from getting angry.
That is why we abstain from retaliating. That is why we try to be harmless, know, taking care of others. Because even if we suffer, we stop more negative karma from ripening in the future. We’re taking care of our future rebirth. We’re taking care of our future even immediately.
It’s good to apologize if you abused her. Yeah. Lama Zopa, yeah. Actually, he there was a girl who sent she sent a letter and she said she was abused by her parents. And I was upset.
You have to go and apologize. And you can imagine in our culture Yeah. Yeah. You get furious. They should apologize to me.
How can I apologize? And he turns it around. He says, they only do that because you have done something in the past to them. Otherwise, they can’t do it. But that that child would have to really understand.
You need your wisdom. Otherwise, you trigger your abuse, your your victim. You know? You really need the wisdom. And if you don’t have the wisdom yet, don’t do it because you traumatized yourself.
Yeah. Can can you see that it’s very, very important that you really have to have the insight very, very clear. This is why I’m doing it. And that you feel whole and that you feel that you can support yourself completely in that act. Because in the normal world, in the world that we have, it looks completely ridiculous, looks completely insane.
Actually, I didn’t want to. Yes. And traumatizing yourself further. And that is how you can experience it. And and you have to be careful that you don’t go there because then the anger will get bigger, bigger, the pain will get bigger.
We’re creating something that we don’t want. That’s very profound. That was always unbelievable. Let’s have a cup of tea. Hello, friend.
I think that’s what it all amounts to. You know, that moving moving at everybody with such love and friendship. Mhmm.