Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute healing workshop, Ven Kaye Miner guides practitioners through thought transformation practice and introduces Tonglen, a method for working with suffering and developing compassion. She begins by exploring how to reframe problems as opportunities for spiritual growth, drawing on her personal experience of sudden job loss and ordination crisis to illustrate how difficult situations can purify negative karma and strengthen inner resilience. The core teaching centers on six ways problems serve spiritual development: they cultivate compassion through shared experience, reveal the nature of suffering, generate determination to escape the cycle, catalyze awakening, and teach us to rejoice in purification. She then explains how aversion to pain creates barriers to the good heart, using the metaphor of protecting a soft spot of innate kindness. The workshop moves toward Tonglen practice, which transforms pain by willingly taking on others’ suffering and sending relief—a practice that dismantles the protective barriers that block compassion. Aimed at practitioners ready to engage directly with difficult emotions and develop genuine, embodied understanding rather than intellectual knowledge alone.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 Healing Workshop 1995 07 09.mp3
UUID: b9a5c77b-488b-4bfa-bc63-082e2f7530aa
Teacher: Ven Kaye Miner
Collection: Healing Workshop (Ven Kaye Miner)
Date: 1995-07-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.0 minutes
Words: ~6,068
Are we working? We didn’t work yesterday. They asked me to repeat all that I’d said in the afternoon. Isn’t that ridiculous? And I know in my own life, you know, I just don’t allow enough time for that, you know, for that space.
When I do, you know, a good breathing practice we’ve just done now, I realize the benefit of it. It’s just so incredible. Other people feel like that? Yeah. Amazing, isn’t it?
I mean, it’s in ways, it seems so simple just concentrating on your breath. I mean, we all know that it isn’t that simple because of the way our monkey mind carries on, but really, really so effective. So how are people feeling? Okay? Did we have dreams last night?
Were you here yesterday? Friday night. Because, I said yesterday before everyone left that you may find that you’ll have some interesting dreams. And and people had some interesting dreams? Good.
Really interesting. What I thought we could do now is just if there’s any other questions that have come up as a result of the material that we covered yesterday and that you had time to digest overnight. Maybe if there’s something like that that people didn’t like to bring up now, we can do that. Anything anyone’s thought about? Sometimes hard in a big group, isn’t it?
I think what we’ll do for, this afternoon after lunch is that we’ll try and break up into smaller groups and have some discussion of the material that’s been covered over the weekend so people that find it a little bit difficult discussing things in a larger group can have that opportunity at that time. No questions? I’ve been really clear, have I? I’ve been making a lot of sense. Oh, that’s good.
Oh no, not without minds, but with a clear mind. Clear and calm mind, yes. Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? You just get that kind of that space. And I must admit I often find it difficult to, after a meditation like we’ve just done, to get into gear to start thinking about what am I going to ask, what am I going to say.
Well, we’ve got about another twenty five minutes before morning tea time. And so I’d actually had scheduled down before morning tea another meditation. Could we cope with another meditation straight away? No? You can’t?
Yes. I forgot right at the end of the day. But when you say mantras, normally do it with a bit of a meditation as well. So if meditation’s not appropriate straight away after the last one, then, maybe we should just leave that for a little bit later in the day. Is it possible to have morning tea early?
There’s no problem with that. Would you prefer to go and have morning tea now? I think I have to make the decisions here, right? I think in ways it might be good if we had a bit of a break now because obviously there’s some people popping off to the loo anyway. But maybe if we had sort of a cup of tea now, a break and then come back by eleven o’clock.
I think that might be a good idea because personally I find it hard after a good meditation like we’ve just done. The Taking and Giving meditation which we’re going to be talking about this morning and hopefully getting on to doing. It’s also been known as the Tonglen practice which anyone of you who have read this book might have come across. So maybe not worry too much about that piece of paper just at this stage. But again, it’s something that you can take home and it’s a very simple outline as to how to do this meditation so that you can take home and use at home.
We’ve got everyone here? Anyone missing? Okay, I think we should begin. What I wanted to talk about this morning was what’s called thought transformation and then go on to describing this Tonglen practice of giving and taking or sending and receiving. When I first heard about thought transformation, I thought, uh-oh, here comes the brainwashing.
But it’s not like that at all. It’s basically just about getting our minds to look at things in a different way. I’ve mentioned a couple of times over the weekend so far that we tend to have pretty concrete concepts and ways of viewing things. We tend to project qualities onto things that aren’t really there. This thought transformation is all about transforming the way we view things.
I think for any kind of spiritual growth, it’s important to reassess our values, reassess the way we approach life and the situations that life presents us. And when we’re talking about thought transformation, one of the main things is actually transforming the way that we view our problems. And there’s this wonderful book. I don’t know if anyone’s seen it. It’s called Transforming Problems.
Now, why do I think it’s so wonderful? Just because my name’s in the front of it. No, no, It’s not quite true. I was actually at the teachings that this book came from and did help to transcribe them. Has anyone seen this book before and read it?
You’ve read bits of it? There’s one one incredible little phrase in here that just blows my mind whenever I think about it. And it’s it’s something along look. I’ll find it and read it because I think it’s, you know oh, that’s if I can find it, of course. I’m gonna I’m gonna see somewhere.
Ah, here we go. The thought of liking problems should arise naturally. Like the thought of liking ice cream or the thought of liking music. Most of us like ice cream, don’t we? Maybe not in winter.
But I mean, for me, thought of liking problems like I like ice cream seemed just like the most absurd suggestion. But what Lama Zopa, whose teachings this book came from, and in fact what the great teachers who wrote these texts like the Eight Verses of Thought Transformation, etc, what they were all talking about was really looking at problems in a different way to the way we normally do. And getting to a point that rather than having this incredible aversion problems, that we almost like take it in our stride and sort of see that there is a lot of positive that can come from that. I was talking with you, Greg, yesterday and you were saying that with your accident, there were positive outcomes from that. Right, in terms of leading you along to reassess values of life and like that?
Purification Purification practice, yep. So I think many of us, when we look back on a problem or a situation in our life that was pretty difficult to deal with at the time, can actually see that we’ve had some positive benefits flowing on from that. Have people found that to be the case? Often I’m just thinking of a relationship and I do hark back a lot to my friends who are splitting up after twenty two years. Now, it seems like incredibly difficult that they’re going through this agony of splitting up their relationship.
But what’s happened is that there’s been one partner in that relationship who was almost like a victim and sort of very submissive and didn’t really have much of their own independence in the relationship. They were very much the one that always gave in and tried to keep the harmony and stuff like that. And what’s happening now is that person has found their independence. The breaking up of that relationship, although traumatic, has got some benefits for the people involved. Especially this one person who had always been the one that gave in and had really just basically given up any kind of independence and seeking out to do things that they enjoy.
Difficult, but there is definitely some benefit. I think there’s been times when I know when I’ve lost a job, been made redundant or something like that, and it just seems like the world’s about to end. And self esteem just gets completely rocked. You may think think that you’ve got good qualities but then trying to find another job is difficult. It’s like your whole sense of who you are has been so dependent on that job.
And to have that kind of knocked away from underneath you, it’s just like the world’s about to end. That’s the way I felt. I’ll just go into a bit of a story. I hope it doesn’t bore you too much. I became ordained in early nineteen ninety and I was the data processing manager for a fairly large retail firm.
I’d taken a number of weeks leave to to India, not really sure that I was actually going to become ordained because I just wasn’t sure whether it would happen or not. Ten days after I was ordained with a shaved head and everything, came back to Australia and went back to resume my job. Then found that they wanted to save so many thousands of dollars and so that meant that my department, which had been running quite well without me, felt didn’t need me any longer and so I was made redundant. Of course this whole redundancy, if anyone has experienced it, is pretty difficult to cope with at any rate. But also I was trying to cope with the fact of trying to be a Buddhist nun which I hadn’t really had any training in because within this tradition and especially as Westerners, you don’t actually go and do a training course.
And there’s not really a lot of support. I ended up the only ordained person in Sydney. I was there on my own. I’d been ordained ten days. And so that whole situation for me was incredibly traumatic.
And my whole sense of who I was was shifting dramatically because I was the DP manager, you know, and I had this kind of lifestyle and, you know, a way of dressing and behaving and friends and things like that. And all of a sudden it was kind of completely different because the job had gone and who I was was really being thrown up in the air for me to assess. So it was extremely, extremely hard. But these are when these teachings really start to make a lot of sense and are very, very practical. And although it was hard at that stage to think, well, this really difficult situation that is challenging me so much, I should like ice cream.
I mean, as I say, it seemed absurd. But it was really the way or the means that helped me transform from this kind of depression and anxiety and low self esteem and like what’s the point of it all. These techniques, these thought transformation techniques, was really the way that helped me kind of get better. It’s like medicine. I mean, often talk about in terms of Buddhism that like the Buddha is the doctor, the Dharma or the spiritual teachings is the medicine, and the Sangha, which is like the spiritual community that supports you in your spiritual practice, that they are like the nurses that help to administer the medicine.
And so it really seemed to me that these kind of thought transformation teachings was the medicine that I needed to take. And although I didn’t have a lot of people around me to help me take that medicine, I knew that on a kind of more ultimate level, I could say I don’t want to say cosmic or something but on an ultimate level that I had a lot of support from my teachers and from other people who were like minded. From my personal experience, think this is such an effective medicine or effective technique to be able to deal with the life situations. Confronting that situation, for me, has been very positive. Having to have gone through that difficulty and learn about these other techniques and apply them has, I think, really been of some benefit to me.
Knowing what I’m like as a person, if I hadn’t really had to go through those difficulties early on as being a nun, then I think, I don’t know, how can I put it? By having gone through those difficulties when I was first ordained, it’s meant that I’m not going to give up easily. I’m not going to give up being a nun easily because I went through too much, you know, and I came out the other side. So it’s sort of like you build up, I think, strength as well. Sort of a strength and this word fearlessness is very much associated when we go on to the Tonglen.
But you build up this fearlessness to really learn to deal with or cope with whatever situation you’re confronted with. And you build up this fearlessness because you know that there are techniques. You know that there are ways of dealing with these things. So what do I mean by thought transformation? What is the medicine that I’m talking about that we can take when we’ve got a problem?
Well, rather than viewing a problem as a problem, and I mean we’ve all heard this kind of jargon many times. You should see it as a challenge, Kaye. We heard that? That comes a lot in management. It’s not a problem, it’s a challenge.
Oh yeah, fine. Fair enough. But you know, it’s still if you’re seeing it as a challenge, sometimes still that kind of pushing against it. Do you know what I mean? Pushing against and pushing through.
Whereas when we’re talking about transforming the way we see a problem, it means that we’re not pushing against something anymore. It means that it’s basically turned around into being something completely different. Making sense? So I think it’s pretty hard to actually see that a problem is ice cream. I mean, you know, that’s ludicrous.
But when you can see that a problem becomes I don’t want to use this word opportunity again because it’s another time, you know, like stock phrase that people mention. But when you can actually see it as being a beneficial thing trying to choose my words carefully, aren’t I? It’s a beneficial thing to work with. Okay, then you can start to like it. If you can see that as a result of facing that situation or that problem, that you are able to develop this fearlessness, to develop inner strength, to be able to develop patience, and a whole range of other good qualities, then it is not something you have to push against.
Am making sense? And I think, I mean, I’m going have to use this word opportunity because really it does become an opportunity. It becomes an opportunity to develop your spiritual practice. It becomes an opportunity to develop the power and quality of your mind. So when they’re talking about liking problems, it’s rather than having this aversion, which is what we normally have, and this aversion, which when I talk about Tonglen in a moment, is what blocks us from experiencing the pain of others and developing the compassion.
So rather than having an aversion to these kind of problems, what develops is a state of mind that kind of almost accepts it in their stride and then goes on to say, oh great, I can deal with this. This is going to be some kind of positive thing. They often say that the person who criticizes you the most is your best teacher. Why do you think that is? Can you take us?
Strong mirror for you? Mhmm. Right. Did everyone hear that? What’s your name?
Michael was saying how the people that criticize you and hurt you are the ones that can teach you patience and humility. Is that right, in a nutshell? Okay. And I think that’s actually true because, as Mike was saying, the people that are nice to you don’t ever really confront you. You necessarily develop patience towards them.
It’s really the people that are critical of you that kind of that your ego arises. I know what it’s like when people criticize. I mean, I I still find that sometimes I get this incredible tightness and, like, how dare they? They don’t understand. You know?
But but by doing that, you can have a look at this kind of ego that wants to be gratified all the time. You do have the ability to develop patience. You do have the ability to start seeing, well, what does it really matter? Mean, it’s just words, what they’re saying. It really doesn’t matter.
I know what I’m doing and I’m having some confidence in that. So that’s why they say often that the person that criticises you or your enemy is often really the best teacher, the best friend. I think also, when you’re experiencing a problem, then it gives you the opportunity to actually develop compassion, to understand other people who are in that same situation. As I say, being made redundant I suddenly realized how thousands and thousands of people in Australia and around the world were probably feeling. Mean, sure, everybody feels things a little bit different but you know how it is when someone says to you, oh, know, I was made redundant.
You say, yeah, yeah, I know. I know what it’s like. You have some kind of empathy with them, right? So then you’re able to start developing some compassion. It’s the same if you have an illness.
Greg, you would feel, wouldn’t you? You would have some kind of compassion and understanding of how other people in your situation would be feeling. Right. And I mean, even if we don’t have an illness, if we’ve had a headache and someone says, I’ve got a headache, you can understand how somebody else is feeling, can’t you? I mean, really, it’s very practical simple stuff, this.
I mean, it’s not The aim is not to become like a martyr. Right? It’s not to deny the fact that if you’ve got a problem or you’ve got an illness that it’s invalid to feel some kind of sorrow about that situation. It’s not to say that deny the fact that you don’t feel one hundred percent happy and positive about this. What we’re actually doing is using it though.
You know, rather than just being kind of bogged down with this I don’t want to say self pity because I’m not meaning self pity but rather than being bogged down with this almost sense of hopelessness, I think, you can do something with it. I know personally I don’t mind getting the flu. I mean, because, you know, the flu doesn’t last very long. You know that you’re going to recover from it, which is completely different to having something like cancer or AIDS, which you know you may not recover from. I find that it’s an incredible opportunity for me because it means that I have to stop, which often is a good thing for me, that I have to stop.
I have to go to bed, which is really nice to be able to just sort of spend a few days in bed even though I may be feeling lousy. The opportunity just to rest is positive for me. Then the other thing is that I get the opportunity to read. There’s all those kind of positive things I can put on the side to do it. But it also means that I have the time to actually think about how other people are and to actually generate some try to generate I don’t say that I actually succeed but to try to generate some kind of compassion for others.
And one of the other things is to actually think, well, I’m going to take I’m going to experience this illness so that nobody else has to. Now that’s kind of, it is mental gymnastics, isn’t it? It’s mental games that we’re talking about here because, I mean, it isn’t actually that you’re taking on the other people’s illness. But it’s a way of making the experience that you’re having more useful, more worthwhile. The other thing that you can think about when you’re experiencing problems is that it sort of opens up a window to the reality of our existence.
This is like the fundamental kind of the foundation of Buddhism is about our existence. Have people heard of something called the Four Noble Truths? Four Noble Truths is basically the four facts about existence that the Buddha realized. And basically that our existence is suffering. Now, at first, we think, oh come on, because suffering we associate with incredible pain, don’t we?
But I like to use different terminology to suffering. Maybe the word actually is unsatisfactoriness. That didn’t sound right, did it? But the fact that things are not one hundred percent right. If we look at our existence, things are never one hundred percent right.
Now, as we were talking about yesterday with karma, there’s a cause. There’s a cause of this suffering or this fact that things are not one hundred percent right. And that’s the karma we create. That’s the actions that lay down imprints on our mind stream. But there is also, the Buddha said, there’s also a state where you have the cessation of that dissatisfaction, the cessation of things not being one hundred percent right.
And then there’s a path to follow. And so what we’ve been talking about all we can is basically revolving around this. This sort of healing thing is about recognising that things are not right, recognising that there’s a cause for them not be right, recognizing that there is the possibility of things being right and the stopping of the suffering and the problems, and recognizing that there’s a method to follow. So this thought transformation is about having that kind of recognition. And then using the situations that we confront ourselves to progressing along the path to the point where we don’t experience problems any longer.
So already we’ve said, okay, that problems can help us to develop compassion. And as we were talking yesterday about karma, about these imprints on our mind stream that will result in negative experiences in the future, we can see that the problems that we’re experiencing now are actually, as Greg was saying, purifying. They’re like purifying the negative karma. And the thing that I didn’t mention about karma yesterday is that it’s what they call expandable, which means that if you do a negative action, that kind of negative imprint on your mind will actually expand over and over, expand over time. They say that if you kill a being, then within fifteen days it’s been multiplied like a thousand times.
Something like that. It’s like having killed a thousand beings. I don’t know about that. Anyway, it is expandable. I mean, you can see in ways how you build things up, can’t you?
Things magnify quite easily. So those kind of imprints on your mind can also sort of magnify. You know how it is when you do something wrong and you get away with it that it becomes very easy to continue to do those things wrong? So it’s kind of expandable. So when you’re experiencing a problem, you can see that it’s purifying negative karma.
And if that karma was not purified, because karma has to be experienced or purified, If it didn’t sort of ripen, I guess is the word. If it didn’t ripen with the problem that you’ve got now, if that was just left there on your mind stream, at some later time it would have to ripen there unless you’ve purified it in the meantime. And it could actually ripen in a far bigger, worse problem. That making sense? So it’s like I’m just trying to think of a really good example.
Oh, yeah, I know. I know. When I was about ten or twelve or something like that, I went on what we called national fitness camps. Do they have those things these days? National fitness camp?
Anyway, it was like with school and we went off to, some place up in New South Wales and there were other kids from other schools there. One my friends from my school, because we didn’t have to wear school uniforms, right? And she had the most beautiful clothes and my family weren’t very wealthy at all. And I had mostly hand me downs. So this girl started lending me her pretty clothes, which I really liked and enjoyed wearing them.
Anyway, one day, I don’t know, we had some kind of fight over the clothes. I’m not quite sure exactly what the details were. And she started punching and kicking me, you know? And so I wasn’t going to be, in those days I didn’t know about thought transformation and patience and things. And so rather than just sort of, you know, just accepting what was happening, I kind of started hitting back, didn’t I?
The difference was she didn’t have shoes on when she was kicking. I did. And I kicked her and I actually kicked her in the stomach. And I really, it cut her just a little bit, you know. I mean, it wasn’t sort of like a real kind of bobber boy sort of stomp, you know, big boot kind of kick, but it was enough, you know, like ten or twelve year old kids.
I can’t remember how old it was. Mind you, she was the girl that I later got caught shoplifting with. Gee, I tell you the relationship with her. I don’t even know where she is these days. Yeah, perhaps, perhaps actually.
Yeah. Anyway, so I mean, I was the one that got into all the trouble, wasn’t I? Because, you know, it looked like I’d been the main instigator. So I had to clean out the teacher’s room and all that kind of stuff. But nevertheless, the thing is I hurt her when I kicked her with my foot, okay?
My right foot. Now, back in nineteen eighty seven, was living in Kathmandu. I got bitten by a dog. Guess where I got bitten by the dog? Not on the stomach, on the right foot.
On the right foot. And so at the time I thought, and I really freaked out. Being bitten by an animal over there, do you know what it means? Rabies. So it meant that I had to go and start having rabies injections.
And fortunately I was working for a clinic in Kathmandu and I was able to get the best French vaccine, which wasn’t the serum shots in the stomach. It was like in the bottom and in the arm. So I was very fortunate. But nevertheless, you know, was very expensive. It was about six hundred, seven hundred US dollars for these shots.
And I mean, you know, to sort of get to the point of deciding whether I would have the the vaccination or the injections or not was pretty traumatic. But what it was, what I felt it was, was it was actually ripening that karma that I had created, you know, by kicking that girl all those years ago. And so I think, you know, the dog bite, you know, it really was quite painful and drew blood and was pretty yucky, I guess. And so, I mean, you could see actually that maybe the karma could have repaid earlier with just having someone stand on my right foot or something like that. But you could also see that it could have been much worse later on, that having an accident and losing my foot.
Do you know what I mean? So I actually felt at that time that really being bitten by the dog, although it was pretty awful, was few. Actually, it wasn’t a bad thing to have experienced because it was purifying or ripening that karma that could have been experienced a lot worse later on. So what I’m trying to say is that when you are confronted with a problem, then you can actually see that it is purifying karma that has to be experienced at some stage. And that it could be experienced a lot worse.
So it’s like, thank you very much. This is very nice. I don’t mind this at all. I think the other thing, and as I was talking about those four noble truths, as a result of thinking about the things that exist, this suffering, etc, you develop what is termed definite emergence. People are probably familiar with the word renunciation, but I think renunciation is labeled with a whole lot of icky stuff.
For me, renunciation means almost denial. And I think that’s just perhaps a matter of my background and upbringing and experience. That’s the connotation I have with the word renunciation. Do people also feel that way or is it just my kind of baggage? So I often like to use this word definite emergence, which means basically to emerge or to cut off this kind of suffering existence.
Which doesn’t mean, as I was probably talking at some stage over the weekend about going off to some kind of nice little space in the sky, you know. But it means that you emerge from the experience of things as problems. You emerge from that experience of suffering. So as I was saying yesterday, when Buddhists can come back and work in the world, You still can do that, but you just don’t experience problems any longer. When you’re experiencing these problems, can see that it’s a means for developing the wish to have this definite emergence from the problems.
To definitely extricate yourself from this kind of cycle of suffering. Making sense? I think I’ve probably already covered this other one about experiencing problems really are the most effective means to develop spiritual awakening because it’s only from experiencing things that we find difficult that we are propelled or that they are seen as a catalyst for us to effect some change in our life. I’m not sure whether I’ve covered all of them. Lama Zopa goes into them.
One of the things he says is that yeah, this is the only one I think I missed. One of the things he says is that you should rejoice. It’s like, how fortunate I am to have these problems. And I think rejoicing is something that we find extremely difficult. We find it so hard to rejoice in somebody else’s good fortune.
Unless, of course, we’re going to share that. For example, when we have an Australian athlete who wins a gold medal, I mean, we rejoice in that because we feel like it’s us that’s doing it and we feel like it’s, you know, it’s for Australia. It’s for us. We’re Australia. Do you know what I mean?
But if we find, you know, we’re in a job and there’s a promotion that comes up and somebody gets it rather than us, Do we feel happy for them? We don’t. We find it, you know, it’s like, why isn’t this me? I’ve worked as hard or something like that. We find it very hard to sincerely rejoice.
When we see somebody else do a good action, we still find it hard to rejoice, don’t we? Because it’s like, there’s almost like, oh god, I should have thought of that or that should have been me doing that action. Our minds find it incredibly difficult to actually be open to rejoice in other people’s good fortune and success. And this again is another block. The main thing that we’ve been talking about this weekend is developing the good heart.
Opening up our hearts. And when I’m talking about opening up our hearts, developing the good heart, I’m talking about understanding the nature of our mind which is really that essential goodness, that essential love and kindness and compassion and this purity. They’re synonymous. This good heart is like our good mind. This open heart is like our open mind.
And as I was saying about these clouds kind of obscuring that mind, that good heart, these things like our inability to rejoice, our or sorry, or our aversion to pain and problems and suffering are these blocks that prevent us from having this good heart. Is that clear? It’s hearing words, but it’s very hard to take. Takes time. Absolutely.
I mean, I’ve been thinking about this stuff for years. I’ve been taking teachings on this stuff for years. It was only about two months ago that I got to a point that there was a situation I was in and I thought, okay, yeah, look, this is going to hurt but I’m not going to find it a block anymore. And I really had to sit with that pain. I was feeling that pain, but I had to sit with it and not be averse to it or averse to it.
And what happened was that the pain disappeared. And out of that was this very openness, this willingness to experience my own kind of pain and suffering and therefore the aversion sort of disappeared. And out of that came this feeling of willingness and openness to experience the pain of others. And this incredible feeling of wanting to benefit others. It’s very hard to describe these things because I don’t want to get into sort of some personal trip that I’ve got it all together or anything like that because I really haven’t.
But what I’m trying to indicate is that, as I say, I’ve heard all these teachings and I’ve been thinking about them for years and I’ve watched other people practicing them, etc, etc. And I did have some feeling before that it was valid and logical and all that kind of stuff. Now I’m starting to have a glimmer of some experiential understanding of it. And I think that happens in time. Because this is where we’re sort of getting into the Tonglen type of thing that And I mentioned it yesterday too.
We all have this kind of soft spot that we want to kind of protect and not have exposed. And I don’t think any of us have ever really sat down and thought, well, what is our soft spot? And I think our soft spot is really this innate goodness that we have. This fact that we do care, that we do love. And so we’re forever trying to protect it, and that’s why we build up these barriers.
That’s why we become kind of resistant to experiencing pain and we kind of block it away. I think if you’ve ever been in a situation where someone very dear to you is suffering incredibly, you and it becomes you can’t bear it. And you kind of block out it. You wish that you would be able to help. You wish you would be able to stay with them and help them through it and kind of take on the pain so that they didn’t have to do it.
But there’s this kind of block, there’s this I mean, you become very tense and sort of tight and stressful about it. It’s because you’re trying to protect this soft spot. You’re frightened of being hurt. You’re frightened of, I guess in ways, letting go. Well, this has been my experience.
This is what I’ve felt with a number of people that I’ve been around. And I’ve known that this block makes it harder to deal with the situation, but also it makes it harder for the other person to deal with their situation because they’re aware that you’re having problems almost how can I put it? You know, often, Joy, you would find this, I’m sure with the work you’ve done, that you know, the people who are sick and dying are aware that the family, people around them, are having such a difficult time.