Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 65-minute session, Ven Jamyang guides practitioners through a detailed meditation on the mechanics of suffering and how to interrupt them. He begins with precise instructions on posture and breath awareness. The core teaching addresses the automatic pattern of following pleasant feelings and resisting unpleasant ones—reactivity rooted in the illusion of a solid, separate self that perpetuates suffering. When we simply observe without reacting, karmic results naturally exhaust rather than multiply. He closes by introducing the clear, spacious nature of mind itself—like an open sky—in which thoughts and feelings arise like passing clouds, temporary and not the mind’s essence. By resting in this vast quality, reactivity subsides. Suited to those with basic meditation experience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Track 1.mp3
UUID: 5ace71c9-e5ca-4760-9c91-1b03b71d34f0
Teacher: Ven Jamyang
Collection: Ultimate Healing (Ven Jamyang)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 65.7 minutes
Words: ~1,872
Yes. Welcome for the courageous ones. So we start again with doing meditation. Part to relax the mind, to create some space in the mind. I don’t know if people have had a lot of thoughts on the topics and then it goes to the mind a little bit too tense.
So we use that to open up the mind and to create a space again to hear whatever the Geshe is going to talk about today which will be probably in the same kind of line as yesterday. Yeah. And in the middle, we have a break again where you can stretch your body if you need to. So if you feel ready, go to your meditation posture. Make sure that your back is straight.
If you sit in the chair, make sure that your back is not leaning to the back of the chair. That your feet are touching the ground. And if you need a cushion underneath your feet, just get one. And focus for a while on your spine. Making your back straight means that you somehow stack your vertebrae one on top of the other so that you don’t need any strength of your muscles to hold your spine like that.
So go to it with your awareness to your tailbone and to your sacrum. And try to put them in a position that you feel that your spine is straightening up without effort, purely because you put your sacrum in a certain position. And then bring your awareness to your lower back and check if you have to adjust something. And I move slowly upward, checking each and every vertebrae. And try to place them in a position that you feel that you relax that your muscles relax more and more.
Move up to the middle of your back. Between your shoulder blades, to your neck. And when you arrive there, make sure that you drop your shoulders completely. Did you let go of all the tension in your stomach? And then bring your hands in a position that is suitable for the meditation.
You can put a right hand on top of the left, the thumb slightly touching each other, and the elbows a little bit away from the body. Or you can just have them relax in your lap or in your thighs. Your head is a little bit bent forward. And if your eyes are open, you would look at the floor two meters in front of you, three meters in front of you. Your jaws are relaxed.
Your tongue is touching the palate. And your eyes are closed. And at the same time, you allow a little bit of light to come into your eyes, which can help you to be stay more alert. However, if it distracts you too much, you know, you close your eyes a little bit more. And then bring your awareness to your stomach.
Where you can observe the rising and falling of abdomen every time when you breathe in and breathe out. Allow your mind to rest on the movements. At the same time, be very aware or alert of that resting mind. Try to check every moment if the mind is still resting on the movements of your abdomen. Abdomen.
And if you notice that your mind is wandering off, then just bring it gently back. Allow the mind to settle down. We hear teachings that are difficult to understand. We try to grasp the concepts. So we bring our energy more up to our brains.
Work very hard. So try that to completely let go and allow your energy to sink down as if all that energy that you used yesterday, that all sinks down and comes to rest on the movements of your abdomen. And the best way to do is to do this is that you go with your awareness into your abdomen, into your pelvic area. Can you observe the rhythm of your breath? As if you are laying in the water experiencing the waves.
Just enjoy. Enjoy the coming and the going of your breath. Let all the weight in your body sink down to your buttocks. Return your awareness to your thighs. Just observe whatever feelings arise from them.
Unfold the feelings. Don’t interpret the feelings. Don’t judge them. Just be aware of every moment those feelings arise. Now when we go through our body, try to be aware of two aspects of your mind.
One aspect is an aspect that rests on the object. That’s a complete letting go. And the other aspect is mindful of every moment of that. It’s very alert. If we are too alert, if we put too much energy in that, we lose the aspect that is resting.
If we rest too much, we can lose alertness. So keep on checking these two aspects throughout the meditation and adjust it again and again so that you train both to a maximum extent. And bring your awareness to your knees. Really observing the feelings. Feelings arise and then dissolve back into the mind.
Into your shins. Your ankles. Your feet. Your toes. Tip a few toes.
The soles of your feet. Do we have calluses? Your knees. Your hamstrings. Tailbone and your sacrum.
Your lower back. Now move for your where awareness upwards to the middle of your back. Your shoulder blades. Your shoulders. The upper arms.
Elbows. On the arms. To the wrist and the back of your hand. Fingers. Tip of your fingers.
Now into the palm of your hand. Upper arms. Shoulders. Your shoulders and your neck. Try to let go of all the tension in your neck.
Top of your head. You can visualize it. You create some space between your skull and the skin. And slowly, you move towards your forehead. The old worries disappear, dissolve into light.
The nose. Let all the muscles completely relax. Relaxation can feel like softness. So your eyes are soft, your nose is soft, your cheeks soft. Your upper lip.
Lower lip. Your chin. They are soft. Make it to your throat. Allow any tension that you feel in your throat to dissolve.
Now to your chest. Make it soft. Your stomach. To your abdomen. Now rest again on the waves of your abdomen?
Rising and falling due to the inhalation and exhalation of your breath. And if you feel that you need a break or a stretch, you can slowly open your eyes and move your body. And if you feel that you are still okay in the meditation posture, you can do that another twenty five minutes. Just stay there. And then go back to your posture.
Check your back. Make sure that all your muscles are relaxed. And then focus again on your stomach and your abdomen, observing the rising and falling. And you keep on applying the technique that as soon as you feel your mind gets distracted, you bring it gently back to your abdomen. If we’re doing a more analytical meditation, if you get lost due to the distractions, first bring your mind back to the abdomen.
And when it has settled down again, you follow the meditation again. And then you can focus on whatever arises in your mind. Thoughts, feelings, don’t follow them. Don’t judge them. Just allow whatever wants to arise to arise.
And while you observe it, you can also see that it naturally results back into the mind. Positive feelings might arise. Negative feelings might arise. Just observe. We are not mindful about what goes on in the mind, about what arises in the mind.
We have the tendency to follow whatever feels pleasant, appears to be pleasant. And we have the tendency to resist or to push away whatever feels unpleasant or what we don’t like. And this tendency is the cause of many problems, is the cause of most of our suffering. It is based on that self grasping mind that holds that I to be truly existent. And is based on a self-cherishing mind that feels that the happiness of I is so important, more important than the happiness of anybody else.
So the only reason why we like to experience pleasant feelings and don’t like the unpleasant feelings is because of the concept of I. So if that concept is a mistaken concept, we can train our minds as long as we believe in it. We can train our minds as if we are not holding on to that concept by allowing anything that arises in the mind to be there. Pleasant feelings and unpleasant feelings are both feelings. Those are the thoughts, negative thoughts, are both thoughts.
We believe that when we follow our pleasant feelings, we will experience more happiness. And when we resist our unpleasant feelings, we prevent ourselves from suffering. But if we really would investigate that method of finding happiness and avoiding suffering, we would see that it is not based on reality. Feelings arise due to previous actions. They are our result.
They are results of previous karma. So if we can just experience them, karma will naturally exhaust. If we react to our feelings, we create new karma, which we will have to experience the result at a later stage. And if we react from that self grasping, that self-cherishing mind, the results will be suffering. Definitely in the nature of suffering.
So if we can abstain from our reaction, if we can find a space in our mind, why don’t we just observe the feelings? Don’t follow them. Don’t resist them. We stop creating new karma. The nature of the mind is clear and knowing.
We can say that the mind is like space in the sense that it has no color, no shape. And this is vast. Like space. And in the mind, feelings arise due to previous actions. Thoughts arise as a result of the feelings.
But the thoughts and the feelings that arise are not the mind itself. So try to connect with that spacious aspect of the mind. And the more you can do that, the more you can observe the thoughts and the feelings, the more you can abstain from reacting to them. And it can be helpful to compare the mind with the blue sky and the thoughts and the feelings with the clouds. If you connect with the spacious aspect of the mind, you focus on the blue sky.
You’re not worried about the clouds. When you can observe the blue sky, you can see how clouds come and go. You can see that the clouds are not part of the blue sky. They are adventitious. Just like our thoughts and feelings adventitious in the mind.
So allow your mind to expand while you focus on its nature. The nature of the mind is like the blue sky. Vast. Cannot be touched. No matter what arises in it, that will never affect how it exists.
And then become aware again of your body. Your breath. Give the mind some time to go back to its normal state. And if you feel ready, you can slowly open your eyes and move your body.