Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 43-minute session, Ven Jamyang examines the deep conditioning that keeps us trapped in self-judgment: the primal fear that rejection by our tribe will mean death. He shows how this belief drives constant efforts to prove we are good enough, yet never delivers peace. He presents the core choice for spiritual practitioners—remain in painful self-criticism to maintain group belonging, or risk losing that connection to find authenticity and peace. This process feels like death and rebirth, comparable to withdrawal from addiction, but modern conditions now make such choices possible where they were not for previous generations. He concludes with a guided loving-kindness meditation focused on healing the self and childhood wounds with compassion.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2009 01 29 mind healing 4-2.mp3
UUID: 17f8e059-3e59-4fb2-9dc7-85e04712dee7
Teacher: Ven Jamyang
Collection: Jamyang Mind Healing (Ven Jamyang)
Date: 2009-01-29
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 42.7 minutes
Words: ~4,557
It’s very interesting, isn’t it? Does it work? So we talked about what would happen if we what would other people do if we would would show or if it would turns out that we’re not good enough? And we said that we are afraid to be criticized, being put down, being judged, not loved, not accepted. And when that all happens, you might be how you say that?
You might be removed from the tribe. You might be ostracized. Yeah. Yeah. And when that would happen, then I think deep, deep, deep down in our roots or in the in the in our DNA is the information if that is gonna happen, I will die.
Yeah. So maybe everything that we are doing is we’re running away from death. Believe might happen. That’s what will happen if we don’t do that. But because we have these beliefs, we keep on doing this.
We keep on holding on to this. You know? So if we do not address the beliefs, we keep on we can tell ourselves hundred times, I am good enough, I am good enough, I am good enough. But if we don’t change what is underneath, it’s never going to change really, isn’t it? So the better we understand what really is driving us, because this is our drive in life.
The more we can see that, the more we can change this. Yes. And I didn’t have the skills at that time to But what you did is you risked this. You risked that you were say this difficult word again? Outcast.
Outcast. You took that risk, and then what happens is that death should follow. So then you’re waiting for your death because you can’t live. You know, the life that you experienced that you still had was unbearable. That is because you are not part of the group anymore.
You want death. That’s the that’s the that’s the conditioning that we have deep, deep, deep inside. If I’m not part of the group anymore Yep. I’m gonna die. Yeah.
And that didn’t happen. It’s unpredictable. Yes. Yeah. Yes.
Oh, this could be be metaphorical death, spiritually. You can still exist in the world, but you have nothing. Yeah. So we have this. I think this is happening on a physical level, in a sense that very deep subconsciously, brain stem level, this is what is going on.
Death. We’re running away from death unless, you know, you made a choice that you would prefer to die than that you would go with the family, whatever that was, that moment. You made that break. You just made a break. You just did it.
It felt like stupid and do anything bad, but at the time, it was mindful. I had a choice and I chose this above denying myself. I prefer to die being true to myself than to have to deny myself. Anyway, I think this is very, very, very deep. And if we normally act in this way, if we are driven in our normal life, we are running away from sometimes we might meet challenges which are so challenging that we have to make a choice.
What do I do gonna do? Do I gonna go with this? Do I gonna give something up that is really important for me? Or do I take the risk that I’m not gonna be part of this anymore? I might lose my job.
I might lose my husband. I might lose my family. I might lose if I’m gonna say this, I might lose everything. I will die. Yes.
So you choose for life. But the way you chose for life is that in previous times death would have followed. Right? So you have to work through this before you really can get to your life. So you have to find another tribe where you can live.
Yeah. This is the good thing about this this I shouldn’t say the good thing because this this is always painful. No matter if it’s your family, your friends, your neighborhood, your this is always painful if you have to leave that. But we will not die. We will die on other levels.
Parts of us will go, you know, but as long as we have this body, we can renew and we have a society where we do not physically die when we do this, but we will die on other levels and it will be very painful. But we can transform, you know, in a like a butterfly, we can fly out and find another place. We find another tribe where we find people who share our values more. Right? That’s the good thing in our life.
The more we challenge this, the more we will be able to drop this, the more we will be able to feel that we are alive. Can you see that? You missed a little bit. Okay. So all this is not going to be so we have the choice between two pains every time, every time.
If we are on a spiritual process, we choose between two pains. One pain is that we feel I’m not good enough and I keep on doing things to make me feel good enough. This is a pain. I’m not good enough. The other one is, alright, I’ll take the chance that I am not good enough and that I’m going to be thrown out, but at least I can relax.
Then you feel with yourself more at peace because you choose for yourself, but you might lose connection with others, which is very painful. So here you are in constant negative relationship with yourself. You beat yourself up negative relationship. But at least you know you’re part of a group. At least you know that you survive.
Here you go into a negative relationship with your group or you risk that it becomes a negative relationship. You risk that what you’re doing, they’re going to disapprove of. And they say, oh, wait. Sometimes when you go on a spiritual path people start saying, I don’t recognize you anymore. You’re not the person that I knew before, you know.
You get a negative relationship. People cannot connect with you anymore how they did it before. Then they might decide to guilt you. First, they’re going to do an emotional trip. I don’t recognize you anymore with others.
And they’re going to push emotionally to see if you’re going to go back to this, where you constantly damage yourself until you say, no, I really can’t do that, you know, even if you don’t like me anymore. That’s fine, but I know that this is what I have to do for myself. Then you leave the tribe. You do that very consciously. You know that’s going to be good for you, but you will meet this.
It’s going to be very painful. The moment you leave, you will experience emotional death or psychological death, or you will feel that part of me doesn’t exist anymore. That part of me cannot exist anymore. It is normally a part which is not so good. You know, it’s a part where we beat ourselves all the time out, where we’re never good enough.
But that part has been with us for a long, long, long time. So it’s somehow that feels as part of me. It’s it’s it’s not a healthy part. It’s rotten, you know, but we feel this is me, and we have to give it up. So it’s painful.
This pain is a limitless pain. We’ll always come back. Has no end. This pain, very painful, but has an end. If we are prepared to go through this process after death, new life will come.
This has no end. We keep on repeating the same thing. I’m not good enough. I’ll go and buy some new shoes and feel better. But next break, I need again, I need to go again.
So this is something that this is like smoking cigarettes. Constantly you need a cigarette to feel satisfied and every time when it’s finished the craving comes again. Then when you stop smoking it’s painful, it’s very difficult. You get withdrawal signs, you know. Let’s say the same.
The death is like withdrawal of the nourishment that you got from your tribe, you know. And although it was self destructive, you still have the feeling oh, maybe we should this actually. You do have the feeling that you let something go that you have felt as a nourishment. Cigarettes feel like a nourishment. And although we know it’s very destructive, it still feels like a nourishment.
This is exactly the same. So when the only way that you can get rid of the dissatisfaction of smoking is to completely quit it and bear the withdrawals that you’re going to have, go through that pain, and then you know that you get to a state where you feel free. This is freedom. This appears normally as something which is much more difficult than this. We survived life after life after life doing this.
Now I think and I think that’s why the world is in a change. We can we can choose for this. Only now we have the facilities that we can make the choice. Right? If you look at women, you know, in in even after the war, if they wanted to divorce their guy, this would happen.
They would not be able to survive. My mom said they couldn’t run away because there was nothing, you know. Now women can say, I am not going to do this anymore. I’m going to choose for this. And we know abused women, when they leave their husband, they have the withdrawals because they go through this.
And only when they do the whole thing, they will go to the freedom. Very difficult because it’s it’s it’s like you learn that you can only survive when you accept this and when you completely conform to those who keep you alive or appear as those who keep you alive. It’s not even true. At the moment, it’s not true anymore. And certainly not in our society now?
Not anymore. No. There’s still emotional pressure. There’s still psychological pressure. That’s huge too.
You know? Financially, on a physical level, we do not need to do this anymore. Emotionally and psychologically, we still, you know, we most of us, many people do not have the self confidence, the strength, the courage to go there. And I think spiritual practice is something that can help you to build up a sense of yourself where you are not so dependent upon emotionally not dependent upon others, where you’re psychologically not so dependent upon others, where you feel like emotionally and psycho, I’m I’m I’m very happy with myself. I don’t need others to feel good about myself.
If I can start feeling good about myself, I don’t need others to tell me that I’m good enough. When we do meditation, you know, we all have Buddha nature, we all have Buddha potential. In Buddha potential, we feel perfect love for ourselves. We feel perfect acceptance of ourselves. We there is no judgment.
There is just fully accepting from whatever is there. All have that nature. So the more we connect with that nature, we would the more we can we can learn how to go through these transitions because we have that capacity in us naturally. It’s part of us. Negative than not to have an identity, so to speak, at all other than This feels like death.
Death feels like nothing. Nothingness. I disappear. What happens to us when I die? Do I still exist?
We do not exist anymore. So when you go this, this can feel like non existence. But actually, so yes, there is a big fear for that, but I think fear for non existence is the same as fear for death. Yeah. When you go here, what you’re going to find is you’re going to find everything.
Because this is all not really, you know, it it has something concrete, but it’s all negative. This feels very lucid and very you can’t grasp it, but it’s full and it’s complete and it’s any good word that I can think of. Right? But you cannot have that identity of this is me. Doesn’t exist.
It’s a fear of not having an identity then possibly or the illusion that we don’t want to have. Yeah, because, yes, you still have identity. This is a slow process. When you go through one death, you like you woke up, when you realize I’m still alive and I still function and new people coming in my life and I like them much better. And what you normally do is you take another role and you go back into this until you realize, I’m doing the same.
And you go to your next death Yeah. And you come out of it. And in that process of doing this again and again, you learn to work with the subtleties of mind and you learn to identify with the subtleties of mind instead of with these more these are very coarse states. The more you identify with anger or fear or, you know, strong excitement, that’s these are all very, very visible or very feelable feelings. They give you a feeling of concreteness.
Right? If you go to this, there’s nothing concrete. It’s all all the time changing, all the time moving, all the time fluctuating, but somehow in the middle, you know what is happening and you feel completely safe and you completely and you can go with it. You know that there is nothing to fear. Still wobble sometimes.
We still wobble. We’re not but I think, you know, when when the further you go, you the more comfortable you become in that spacious aspect or I don’t know how to say it. It’s subtle. Here, you’re gonna feel more and more love and compassion for yourself, for others. Love and compassion, if you feel that it’s a very light energy, it’s a very subtle energy to even be able to perceive it.
You know, if you are living, if you are being grown up in an abusive situation where everything is harsh and, you know, the moment that you start to feel the subtleties, it’s like, what’s that? You know? First, you don’t recognize it, and then somebody points it out and you say, well, what’s you don’t know how to get there because this is your habit. And then maybe sometimes the subtlety comes in, oh, there is it again. I know I’m actually that, but this is so habituated and so comfortable in some ways because I know how to live.
The subtlety, I don’t know how to live. Do people still gonna see me? Do people still recognize me? Do people still like me? Do they still I do gonna be a better person, but I’m not sure if people are gonna like me, you know, because people would say, hey, where are you?
You know? My brothers would come and say, punch me and say, try to get a reaction of me. And if I don’t do it, you know, I’m out of the game. You’re so worrying. And all these negative things come.
Well, I have to be strong in this in order to realize that what where they’re coming from and not to change this back into my old behavior because they invite me to be part of the tribe again. Come on. Come on. You were part of us. And if you wanna be part of us, this is what you have to deal with.
No. I don’t wanna be part of that. You know? I’ve never heard a story to be so true. I have to write this down.
I think that’s what spirit comes from. It’s very interesting that we have a choice almost. It explains a lot to me, you know, if I look at that, because they do say that when you go into psychological change that you your relationships are gonna be challenged and you might lose friends and you might lose and I also, why do I have to do that? You know? But now I can see, like, they don’t give you much choice because they know you in a certain way and I wanna keep you there because otherwise they would have to change with you.
And for many to change with you is too difficult. They they still you know, it’s not coming from their initiative. It’s But that’s your part and not their Oh. Yeah. But if if you’re scared to be Yeah.
Then you fly back to there. Mhmm. Alright. I wanted to finish with a meditation on love. Is that okay?
And I don’t know you have the clarity of the mind. Do you? You have clarity of mind? No. You have the meditation on the clarity of the mind.
Last week, I gave you Have a look at this. Last week, I gave you oh, not on impermanence. I don’t know if you did. I did. I went outside and copied it for you.
Did you take it home and you just put it somewhere and you forgot to look at it, or did you really not get it for me? I think I did. Okay. You don’t have it, do you? That’s it.
Thank you. And you all have it. True? Yeah. But, obviously, I’m not gonna get that yet.
Oh. Afterwards. This is just to make sure that you have everything. And good to repeat these meditation teachings at home, you know. Impermanence, clarity, if you do the clarity, you get space from the being caught up.
If you do the impermanence, you get space from being so caught up. They’re all focused on the same thing. They’re all focused on trying to get you out of your natural natural, not natural, your natural behavior. Habitual behavior. The meditation teachings that we’re doing are focused on that and they all take you from a slightly different angle, you know, but they all have eventually the same kind of effect.
Okay. Carol said in the beginning, she said I’m doing them every day and she said the whole week anger doesn’t arise in my mind. Just by doing the meditation, somehow you remind yourself and then the whole day. When you did a meditation in the morning, you set the peace for the day. I still can’t I mean, I do it at home every once in a while, but I feel come here every day to do it here.
I don’t have Yeah. Do you still Mhmm. But you’re also scared on your Yeah. Yeah. We’ll have to fix that.
Yeah. I don’t know. I prefer to do it as a group. It’s more powerful here. Definitely.
But what we want, we wanna have a good relationship with ourselves. You know, we’re all locked up in that negative relationship with ourselves. So it is hard to be on your own and meditate. If you are here, you can forget yourself and be part of the group. That’s much easier for us.
You like that? Yeah. Good. Good. Well, you start with that.
You you start with that. And slowly, slowly, you go more inwards. Yeah. That’s the problem for everybody, sitting down and looking what’s going on. Because in the beginning, you go mad, it’s negative, it’s not nice, it’s not pleasant, it’s walking is a distraction.
To sit and really be with whatever’s happening, it’s very difficult. Don’t push yourself, you know, and don’t punish yourself, but just be aware why that is the case. I don’t understand why you slip backwards because I was doing really well. And then now Did you slip backwards or did you go to another level? Oh, I always did something really don’t know.
I was gonna say definitely. Defineo means? Oh. It’s slang. So All right.
What does it mean? Say it again. So I don’t I don’t I don’t I don’t get a message. Like, I don’t know. Right.
Yeah. All right. We have to go backwards. No. But we repeat.
We go from one to the other. So we try to get out of something. And then suddenly, we find ourselves being caught up in the old one, and we think, oh, I went backwards. But maybe not, you know? Maybe you go like a spiral.
Yeah. So you always go back to the same pattern. You always go back to the same pattern no matter how much you try to get out of it because that is what we have to clean up and you have to go and check what is still there, what an opportunity. And you don’t wanna be there. We all wanna be in the bliss, you know.
But after the bliss, straight after the bliss, life takes us back to another level and says, that was it for a little while. Don’t ever think you went back. You need these experiences that you have in order to fix this one. Where you sit with yourself. You sit anxiety I know.
I know. I know. And that’s why I always have been hesitating to have people with anxiety and depression in this group, but we’re gonna we’re gonna find a way how to do that. Oh, you want to join? Yes.
Well, you’re not the only one. What do I? Nobody. Most people here have the same kind of Yeah. Yeah.
You know? I want you to think over this again and again and again and again because just thinking over it will help you to get out of it. And there will be a point that you say, and now I can sit down, you know, but you’re gonna sit down very, very, very slowly. You just keep on yourself busy and do nice things and do beautiful things and slowly, slowly you’re preparing your mind to be ready to go to the next step, but not yet. Okay?
Don’t push it. Be kind to yourself. Good. I see the pain. Huge pain.
But on the out, she looks fantastic. She does. She has good merit. She has fantastic merit. But also she’s twenty two.
She’s here. You know? It’s good merit. But she has a big job to do at the same time. You know?
So that’s good. It’s wonderful. See, two things coming together. It’s wonderful. If you had only the merit, you would never come here.
You know, you would just have parties everywhere. It’s because you’re sick, you wanna come here. If you would be only unhappy and not have the merit, you would not be here. You will be in mental hospital. So be happy with what you have.
You know? She’s wonderful. You know? But she doesn’t have such nice relationship with herself, like all of us. And that’s why we’re here.
So this is about loving oneself, meditation. Okay? It’s a long meditation and I might not go through the whole one, but we’ll do a start. So first, go to a place in your mind where you feel relaxed. Allow yourself to let go of all the tensions.
And in these meditation teachings, you have special permission to completely let go. Completely let go. And even if your mind is very distracted and you don’t follow me and you everything is a mess and it’s all good, just allow whatever happens to happen. On a deep level, your body, your mind will perceive everything. On a deep level, your body and mind will do with the information that you get, whatever is needed to bring you into the right direction.
You do not need to have that control. You do not need to have to do anything for that. Healing takes place the moment we completely let go. When we stop trying, when we stop interfering, when we stop knowing better, When we are prepared to give up, give up on life or what we think that is on life. And then see yourself as you are right now, with all your faults and shortcomings, and with the recognition that you have the potential to free yourself from all your problems.
See your needs, your hurt, your love, your tolerance and your compassion. Generate from the depth of your heart a wish for yourself to experience all the happiness and goodness you can imagine. And then send from your heart white light, which fills your whole body, giving you everything you need. And imagine that light to go to all your organs, your blood vessels, your bones, your muscles, your skin. And when you focus on the different parts, you might feel a hurt, a pain because you’re looking at it.
Just you send white light, giving that part of your body all the nourishment you need, all the love you need, all the recognition. Every cell becomes filled with love. And every cell starts to vibrate. Go to every part of your body, to every layer, every structure. And feel that slowly, slowly, all your needs are fulfilled.
You experience happiness, bliss, and a smile appears on your face. And see yourself when you were younger, somewhere in your childhood where you went through some painful experiences that you haven’t dealt with yet. See your pain and your needs. And generate from the depths of your heart a wish for the child to experience all the happiness and goodness you can imagine. Send from your heart white light, which fills the child’s whole body, giving it everything it needs.
The child experiences happiness, bliss, and a smile appears on its face. And you can go over this meditation again and again, going back to many little children when you were one year, two years, three years. Anything that you feel needs healing, you can go to that child and do exactly the same exercise. You can also imagine all these children there together, and you heal them in one go. Then imagine the future.
See how you look like, how your body looks like, how it feels like. Recognize the hurt, the pain that will definitely come, that might come from now until the moment you imagine. And then from your heart, send out love, white light, filling your body. Filling all the parts, all the levels, giving you everything you need. And then think how wonderful that I have been able to heal one sentient being.
How wonderful that I’ve been able to give that sentient being happiness. And then dedicate in a way that this meditation might lead to the temporary and ultimate happiness of yourself and all sentient beings. And try to think that may any living being just by seeing, hearing, touching, remembering or talking about me. May they be immediately freed from all obstacles to happiness, from disease, spirit harms, negative actions and obscurations. And may they all quickly achieve the highest happiness of enlightenment.
Thank you for coming. I’ll give you the loving kindness meditation.