Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Kaye Miner teaches foundational mindfulness practice in this 52-minute session, starting with breath meditation as a method to calm and settle a scattered mind. She explains how watching the breath at the nose or solar plexus creates the mental stability needed for deeper concentration and insight. She then moves into analytical meditation, guiding practitioners to reflect on the disadvantages of self-cherishing — the habit of prioritising one’s own welfare above others’ — drawing on teachings from the Lamrim tradition. Using vivid imagery, she traces how self-cherishing underlies all suffering: conflict, wars, jealousy, arrogance, financial insecurity, even monastic squabbles. Suited to both newcomers learning basic meditation technique and practitioners deepening their understanding of compassion-centred practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Track 6-1.mp3
UUID: 0ef3268a-726c-4fc4-99d1-9d201ec62c9c
Teacher: Ven Kaye Miner
Collection: Mindfulness with a Heart (Ven Kaye Miner)
Date: 2011 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 52.0 minutes
Words: ~960
Find a comfortable position where the back is straight. Hands in a comfortable position, maybe left hand below, right hand above, but as long as they’re comfortable. Then head slightly forward, mouth closed, eyes can be slightly open, closed is also okay. So here we’re simply going to watch the breath. So what we’re doing is just noting when we’re breathing in and breathing out. And we can watch the breath either at the nose, just on the inside of the nose where the air first contacts the nose as we breathe in and then as we breathe out.
We can also follow the breath, say, at the lungs or the solar plexus. The point here is we’re just watching the breath at a convenient, easy location. Then as we watch the breath, any thoughts that arise, any thoughts that arise, we’re just watching them pass away. We’re not following the thoughts. Soon as we see that we’re distracted by a thought, a sound, sense object.
As soon as we realize we’re distracted we bring our thought, we bring our mind back to the breath and just gently hold it on the breath, just noting breathing in, breathing out. One of the main things that we’re doing is to relax the mind. So this does require a little bit of effort. So how we’re relaxing the mind is by just holding the mind to the breath and preventing it from following our thoughts, our habitual thinking patterns. So we’ll just pause the meditation there for a few moments.
Just relax. Stretch your legs. Our habitual thinking patterns which bring us much unhappiness or discontent. So simply to follow the breath and draw our thoughts away from, or draw the mind away from our normal thinking process is really essential. So now we’ll continue with just some analytical meditation. Analytical meditation has some similarity with watching the breath.
The purpose of watching the breath is to calm the mind and from breathing meditation often we then go into placement meditation where we’re just holding the mind on one thing, and we do that in order to generate deeper levels of concentration. And why we seek concentration is the wisdom develops from concentration. So in a sense breathing meditation is settling the mind, just as water when it’s left, it will gradually settle, and anything dissolved in the water will gradually settle, and as the water becomes clearer it’s similar to the process of generating concentration. And as concentration gradually develops then the ability to see, to generate insight increases. And insight is one thing we absolutely need.
Insight into who we are as individuals, and an insight into other beings, our situation, our relationships and so on. So now we’re going to do a little bit of analytical meditation. So analytical meditation is really thinking about a particular topic. So what we’re going to just reflect briefly on is the disadvantages of cherishing ourselves or being self-centered. Really to an extent we can’t help but be self-centered because our consciousness, our being is unique and we’re at the very center of our own experience.
But here self-cherishing means to regard that as being more important than that of other beings. So having this self-centered, self-cherishing attitude brings with it some disadvantages. So why we reflect on this is not that we necessarily will understand the disadvantage, but we can store this away and just examine in our normal lives whether it’s true or not. So here I’m just going to read a couple of things out from the Lamrim. Pabongka Rinpoche says all your unwanted sufferings come from your self-cherishing.
So this attitude of holding ourselves more important than others is the cause of all our suffering. Again, I see this chronic disease of self-cherishing is the cause to produce unwanted suffering. All worldly sufferings that have occurred stem from wanting happiness for oneself. All the suffering that arises through conflict, weapons, wars, poisons, and so forth are due to having engaged in self-cherishing and on that basis having harmed others. Fearing enemies, getting into quarrels, fearing persecution by the authorities, all these are due solely to your lack of self-control or self-cherishing. Being obsessed with food, fashion, fame and so on are all due to self-cherishing.
When those on the top of the social ladder such as presidents, prime ministers, kings, the whole countries fight, or when those who are on the lowest level of the social ladder fight, it is due to self-cherishing. Even when monks squabble between themselves, nuns fight amongst themselves and so on, it’s due to self-cherishing. self-cherishing has created all our troubles with the stock market, thieves, financial insecurities, loss of income, damage to our property and so on. Even if we were to die from eating poison or from undigested food, we do not really die from poison and so on, but the self-cherishing that led us to eat far too much and so on.
self-cherishing is the butcher who kills our chances of high rebirth or liberation. self-cherishing is like the burglar who carries a swag full of the three poisons on his back and steals our crop of virtue. self-cherishing makes us jealous of those who are better than us, compete with those who are equal to us, and contemptuous of those who are below us. self-cherishing makes us arrogant when we are praised and angry when we are criticized. In brief, all our problems come from this thought of self-cherishing.
It is like a voodoo doll buried at the center of our heart. It’s a thought that continually seeks our own benefit to the exclusion of others. Okay we might just stop there.