Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Robina Courtin explores how attachment works as “honey-covered razor blade” — delivering intense pleasure yet inevitably causing suffering through craving, disappointment, and destabilization. In this 20-minute teaching, she walks through the Buddhist analysis of emotions and delusions as essentially thoughts dressed in physical sensation, showing how genuine change becomes possible once we recognize this. She emphasizes the practical path: first controlling gross behavior to create space to observe the mind; then learning to catch angry, jealous, or depressed thoughts as they arise rather than only when fully blown; finally, softening our brutal self-commentary and developing compassion toward our deeply ingrained habits. Drawing on personal stories — her own volatility, Lama Yeshe’s pivotal instruction, her sister’s recovery from bulimia through cognitive reframing — she argues that meditation isn’t mystical but ordinary cognitive work anyone can do in daily life, whether sitting formally or driving. She ends by pointing toward the subtler understanding of emptiness that follows lunch.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 DAR 2003 06 22.mp3
UUID: 04063031-79bb-48b7-bf04-9919e1ccd29a
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 20.3 minutes
Words: ~4,250
Way that we have it at the moment, is. But it’s a honey covered razor blade because this is the point. Look what happens when you have all that energy, all that buildup, all that energy, all that buildup excitement, and the anticipation, it’s the prelude to the pleasure, isn’t it? That that excited thoughts. But look what happens when he rings up and says he’s not coming.
What happens then? Absolutely shattered. Your mind crashes to the depths. The wind energy is then total aversion, depression, tears, loss, grief, like you’re gonna die. Because it’s like you’re all ready for junkie for the injection and then you realize it’s only sand.
I mean, and you nearly go mad, you know? So this is how attachment is a honey covered razor blade. We think of it as a prelude to pleasure and the way we have it in our life, it is a prelude to pleasure, but the pleasure is the pleasure of the junkie. It depends upon that big buildup, and then it’s shattering if we don’t get it. And then or and or if you have too much, it’ll kill you.
Or if you if it’s not quite the right thing, it’ll be upsetting and so tentative, you know, it’s so nervous. Nervous. So we can see how I’m talking several things here, but it does trigger these incredible physical experiences. But it’s the mind that is the source of it. Now when we can begin first, the first level of practice is to begin to harness the body in the speech.
They say, when you’re with others, you watch your body. You control your mouth and you crawl you control your speech, you know, you control your body. Why? Because that protects you from harming others. Protects you because when you don’t harm others, you don’t create negative karma for you.
That’s the first level of understanding yourself. So controlling your body first, harnessing your energy is the crucial one. Now in my life, anger just poured out my mouth. I was this bundle of little kind of volatile anger and other things. Right?
So if as long as I couldn’t control my behavior, how could I ever even see my mind? It was amazing one time, Lama Yeshe just sort of out of the blue would say these simple things would kind of just like blow my mind, you know, so so skillful, these Lamas. And one time I remember I was having a really hard time and I was kind of all neurotic and guilty and upset and I’m kind of blurting out to him myself. And he just said he said he said, listen, dear. There’s nothing wrong with your behavior.
No. He said, nothing wrong with your heart. It’s just your behavior. So it’s so amazing to hear this because I always just think I’m so horrible. Like, we always think that horrible.
Like, we always think that I’m so horrible. You know? But it’s this miraculous statement that suddenly helped me separate behavior from mind. He said there’s nothing wrong with your heart. It’s just your behavior.
So I, you know, it was like let’s just excuse me when I was, like, thirty eight, not a baby. Embarrassing to admit. You know? So I began to really, you know, after a few years of being a nun, really beginning to understand, first, you gotta control your behavior, and that’s the very first level of practice. That’s why we have vows called no killing, no lying, no stealing, no this, no that.
It’s the first level of practice, so simple but quite profound. When you can harness the gross level of your energy, you have the space to see your mind. So they say when you’re with others, you watch your behavior. When you’re on your own, you watch your mind. Then when you’ve harnessed your behavior, you can do the job of working on your mind.
Then, in other words, when you’ve harnessed the energy of the anger, all the volatile, the loud shouting noise, when you’ve begun to work with that by purifying and purifying and doing much practice, your four opponent powers, much practice, so it begins to literally calm down. You then, of course, can start seeing at the bare bones of your mind that anger is nothing other than a bunch of thoughts, but it’s just dressed up in this big cotton-wool packaging. That’s all because of eons of doing it. Then that’s when you can understand you can change anger. That’s how you understand you can change anger because it is only thoughts.
So when we all we think we can’t change anger because we say it’s an emotion. It’s physical. Now as for thinking we can change sexual attachment, well, first we think, well, why should I? Because we don’t understand the suffering part in there. The pleasure is not suffering.
Okay? Pleasure is your human right. Pleasure is not attachment. Pleasure is not wrong. Please hear my words.
Buddha is saying the the way we get our pleasure is the destruction. It causes it to become pain. That’s all. We pollute our pleasure. He says we actually, as we’ve been discussing with meditation and using blissful experience, we have the capacity for such pleasure we can’t even believe it, but we just can’t hear that.
And also because we’re so deluded, we think, oh, pleasure, how boring in my meditation? I want pleasure with other people, please. I want the excitement one, you know, all the puffing and panting. In other words, we’re addicted to the junky pleasure. The the sort of pleasure that’s more subtle and more refined and more profound and internal seems boring to us, which is why we have to think about this so deeply, you know, and look more subtly at the way we get happiness now and realize it’s nothing other than suffering.
It really is subtle. We’re talking still at a gross level of this actually, But all the emotions are just the gross the emotional component, the physical part of it, you know, and all the feeling as we call it, the feeling part is just the the kind of the packaging. The bare bones of it is the thoughts. It’s all come down to thoughts. When we can begin to access that through much contemplating, much analysis, much being our own therapist, much meditation, we can then see we can do the cognitive therapy bit, deconstruct the thoughts that are there, the neurotic ones that aren’t in touch with reality, and reconstruct in its place appropriate, constructive, beneficial thoughts like building up brick by brick a brand new but accurate sense of self, sense of the universe.
It’s a conceptual process. Then we begin to understand how we can do it. When it’s just emotion, we just give up. What can we do? You know, you can’t change your emotions.
What are you talking about? You know? It’s just puzzling to us. So it’s an extremely intelligent analysis, extremely, in my opinion, intelligent view of the mind, you know, and workable. It’s workable because there’s nothing in our mind that we can’t change.
This is why we can become perfect by becoming a Buddha because it’s all just we’ve the wrong thoughts right now. We’ve to, you know, change in their place the right thoughts. And why the and again, why the emotion? Why it seems so instinctive and virtually instinctive in us? Look at us since we’re tiny kids.
I mean, my anorexic sister, my bulimic sister said, since you can remember, you know, we’re all us little girls all having our bath, and this year’s six years old sitting in the bath feeling whether she’s got fat on her body. You know? Little skinny I mean, she’s as skinny as a rake. Even now, she’s only about seven stone. Minuscule little person.
You know? Strong. But this this obsession since you can remember with how she looked, obsessed with this fat on her body. I mean, you know, never occurred to me. Obsessed.
So then, you know, finally by the age of about forty, she works on her mind for years and years, and now she’s, you know, stopped vomiting and got some I mean, she’s done marvelously with her life. She’s incredible. I have such respect for her. You know? She’s amazing.
But she’s realizes that she’s done the work on her mind, you know, changing the way she thinks. The way she thinks. Changing the way she thinks. That’s what she’s been doing. You know?
That’s that’s been interesting. No. Not really. Just I mean, she used different she has great respect for Buddhism and things, but not really some kind at some point she did, but just the cognitive process like I’m talking. Just her own work on her mind, her strong mind.
She didn’t I mean, she was in Brisbane for years working at the relaxation center doing all sorts of techniques, certain kind of self help things, but never one particular method of her own. Just her own mind, just doing it in her own mind. And this is why this is the point Amy’s making, you know. The week, there’s masses mean, you don’t even have to sit down to even close your eyes once to do the work that I’m talking about right now. This is why we shouldn’t mystify meditation too much.
Oh, I don’t meditate. I’m not a good Buddhist. There’s a I mean, if we can do this job day to day in our life, then we’re doing a phenomenal job. You know? I mean, it’s stunning the amount of work we can do day to day in our own mind.
Okay. Some it depends on your person. One of my friends are Buddhist. Same as me, a nun. She says she has to sit down in in meditation to work it through.
She has to. She can’t do it otherwise. So each of us has to find the method that works for us. Honestly, from mean, you know, we talk about this in analytical meditation. I’m a hopeless meditator.
I was telling George this morning, the minute I sit down to meditate, I’ve got my little notebook next to me, and I’m most of the time writing the things that I forgot to do, and I’m going from my prayers to the notebook, you know. I don’t I mean, or if I try to concentrate, I go to sleep because I’m just always busy, busy, busy. That’s okay. I accept that this is my nature, so I work with that. You know, I do my practices, take keep my commitments and everything, but my meditation, my analysis is when I have to do this job of so called going teach.
Lama Zopa told me in eighty seven to teach. I’m eternally grateful because I’m doing my I’m doing my own analytical meditation on the run, you know. When I drive, I can do it. Because as soon as I mean, I’ve got this neurosis, and as soon as something if there’s if there’s movement, I’m happy. So if I’m driving, something’s really happening, so I can have my mind completely calm when I’m driving, and I can do all my analysis and my prayers and everything works very nicely, you know.
So we do it in our own way at different stage. In the long term, eventually, we’ve all gotta get to the point where we can do the subtler meditation so we can do, you know, the the jobs more subtly. But there’s masses we can do, all according to where we’re at. Each of us some of us need to sit down more focused, more quiet to work it through because we’ve all got different kinds of minds, so we have to know what kind of person we are and what works for us, you know. But the bottom line is we’re trying to change the way we think.
We have to see it no matter what methods we use to see it’s a cognitive process. And then that cognitive process just goes to very subtle levels. That’s all. So at certain point, you’ve got to start meditating to go further. But this if we just did it at the conceptual level, you know, my god, we’d be amazing people.
We’d be blissful. Our minds would be maybe still busy, but they’d be busy with positive things, wanting to help others and be constructive. I mean, we have a very very there’s another view, another point. We have this kind of cliched, mistaken view that the busy mind is is wrong. It’s not the busy mind that’s a mistake, it’s the busy neurotic mind that’s a mistake.
To have a mind full of being busy to benefit others, excuse me, go for it. That’s fantastic. There’s nothing wrong with virtuous states of mind. Eventually, we’ve to go beyond even the thoughts at all to get to the non conceptual where we have the very subtle level, but that’s advanced, know, but we’ve got to start somewhere. Well, say neurotic as a as a loose synonym for the negative states of mind.
It’s just a used word I say because the word we know in the West, you know. What do you mean? Just having to say. Yeah. But that’s that’s one particular way of saying it.
But I think I’m using neurotic in the broad sense of any of the delusions at all, any anger, any attachment, any jealousy, any pride, any unhappiness, any depression, any low self esteem, any any all these things that Buddha would call delusions, you know, that are and this is the characteristic. So the characteristic of if it’s being a delusion is it’s linked to the to the unhappy I. That’s the point. That’s what I was saying again, that way. It’s lunchtime.
When we’re all actually doing what we’re doing, we’re busy and then you suddenly ever thought we’re feeling Yeah. And you say to yourself, my mind is deluded. Yes. What do you do then? Okay.
You’re seeing yourself when you see a deluded mind, so what do you do when you see it? Well, it’s it’s it it almost is extremely it’s extremely simple, but because the mind is so full of so much emotion, so as we can’t even just gonna get it, you know, can’t even get a get in there. So it’s like if you’re driving on the road and you see yourself veering off into the wrong lane, what would you do? What would you do? Well, get over.
Into the right lane? Look around. You just you you you you kind of you’d rectify the mind. You’d adjust it. You you adjust it.
You you adjust yourself in the car. Well, ideally, that’s if we begin to get a handle on our mind, that’s what we do. So this is where we have to learn to recognize it all. But right now, like I said, it’s a soup of emotion. We can’t tell one bit from another right now.
It’s all just we know we’re feeling miserable. We can’t even begin to locate why. And that’s why we have to do the that is where meditation does come in doing single pointed meditation, and that is where we haven’t discussed them here. We do lots of practice as well, the Vajrasattva practice, the evening one. With those I found those practices or even the things that we do called prostrations, which are the the, you know, the more religious type things, but I just see them extremely practical tools.
They work at a very sublime level of removing the junk at a deeper level that allows you, enables you in the day to see his mind more clearly. So there are many levels of practices, you know, that enable you to do this job well. It’s like you do your push ups, you can play even tennis. So the put you know, the prostrations and the others are like the push ups that strengthen the muscles of your mind to be able to see yourself more clearly. Do you understand?
And that’s up to each one of us what practice you wanna do. But basically, we have to get to the point where we can when feel the emotion, you know, we see it, and we can locate what the thought is, and we have to give it a label. It’s gonna be either anger or jealousy or depression. We have to label the feeling, you know, we have to label the type of one it is. It’s either anger jealousy or depression or or anxiety or attachment or variations of all of those.
We have to have some name if we can, but often it’s not just happening on its own. It’s packaged with a whole bunch of things. It’s quite hard to identify it, you know, but the general idea is when your mind veers off into the wrong direction, your wisdom, your awareness, you know, your your vigilance, like we said in this morning in meditation, should catch it. And then you bring it you you try to avert it. You try to bring it back.
But the fortunate unfortunate thing is when the emotions which they are for us are very strong. It’s like talk about find it hard to change. It’s a bit hard to to you know, you’re going a hundred mile an hour in the wrong direction. It’s a bit hard to bring yourself back into the right direction. You got a lot of work to get yourself back there, and it takes a lot of will to do that because the sadness, the struggle of the delusions is we’re addicted to going in that direction.
So when you’re in the full if so, again, it’s a bit late if you catch yourself when you’re about to crash at a hundred miles an hour. It’s a bit late now. You gotta gotta do damage control. But ideally, if you can catch yourself before you even crash and you can see it coming, then it’s easy to fix it, isn’t it? So that’s the skill in seeing your mind as and when the thoughts arise, that’s when we really begin to be really dealing with things, seeing it when it arises.
We only mostly see it when it’s full blown. When it’s a bit late now to suddenly say just don’t, you know, just avert it. It’s it’s fully blown. This is too much. This is damage control is the best you can expect.
But then we just keep developing, keep developing, keep developing. But the the key is to develop the skill that sees what you’re thinking and feeling. That’s why we only know now that we’re depressed because when we can’t get out of bed one morning, I only knew I was angry when I was a kid, when I burst, when I exploded with my mouth. We have to see it well before that. And that’s why practical things like meditation in the morning, you know, doing certain practices is an extremely useful thing to do as a sort of a training tool.
Isn’t it? So just slowly slowly, you know. But the general thing is when you can locate, let’s say, locate the anger. See, this is okay. One problem is because the f because the habit is so strong.
This so there’s two things happening in our mind now. The habit is really strong. You’re going towards it in the junky mode. You’re just going into this one, and it’s extremely hard to get out of it because we all can see it, so the habits are so strong. So one of the major levels of practice we can do is this one.
When we start to hear the Buddhist teachings, they say we say, oh, anger’s wrong, and this is wrong, and that’s wrong. A common mode we fall into is, oh, I’m a bad person. I shouldn’t be angry. I shouldn’t be jealous. I shouldn’t be attached, I’m a bad person, it’s so terrible.
So you’re kind of double trouble now. Bad enough being angry but now you got sort of self hate as well. So one of the things to do, see that it’s an old habit, see yourself going in that direction and you can’t change it, but change the commentary of it. Okay. I can see I’m angry.
I can’t change it right now. It’s really difficult, but I know it’s not the real me and it is okay and slowly slowly I’ll be able to get over it. So you start having a kind of softer interpretation of it instead of this brutal this brutal kind of commentary. That’s the one that drags us down. The anger’s bad enough and it’s an old junky habit, you know, can’t just change it overnight.
No way. Can’t. Not possible. But we can begin to see the thoughts, the commentary. I’m bad.
I’m this. It’s terrible. I hate myself. We can change that one. And I can see in my own life moving along, the anger took a long time to go, to begin to go, but beginning to change my commentary, when that started to change, it was like a miracle, you know, then there’s space.
Because, you know, I’m angry, I’m bad, and then someone says, you’re not bad, Robina, but I am bad. I am horrible. That’s what keeps us stuck, you know, and that’s the worst enemy of all. It’s almost like the anger really isn’t the problem. It’s silly to say that, but you see my point.
We have to change the commentary. We have to learn to be kind, and it’s it’s it takes us courage to say that because we love it’s like we love to have it. We love to hate ourselves. That’s the worst one of them. You understand?
So there’s a it’s very subtle, actually. There’s a multitude of little things we have to do. The key is awareness, which you can only get from training yourself and practicing it again and again and again. The the the key is to learn to have a softer attitude towards yourself. Yes.
I’m deluded, but it’s some eons of habit. It’s not the real me. I can change. That alone itself is a miracle. Then you’re prepared to be patient with your old junk.
You know? And like I said, again, talking to my sister Jen, she’d say this is one of the major ones she used to do. I mean, there she was, you know, stuffing herself like a pig, and at the same time, this low self loathing, as she’s doing it, hating herself. So learn to she said to learn to love herself. She said be kinder, noticing the garbage habit, but changing her view of herself, a softer kinder view, and that is totally valid and the hardest one of all we have to do.
We love to think we’re horrible, you know. It’s kind of bizarre, isn’t it? So, you know, we all know twenty seven people can say that we’re a nice person. We don’t believe it at all, actually, although we’re desperate for them to say it again and again. If one one person says I don’t like you, which one do we go to like a magnet and never forget and believe totally?
We believe totally that I’m a creep even though twenty seven people said they love me. So it really shows what we think of ourself that we’re a creep. Where does the fear feeling come from? Where does that attack? The fear is to do I mean, this is quite subtle actually.
The Buddhist approach to it. The fear because lunchtime, you guys, is quarter to one. The fear the fear is this primordial coming from the primordial wrong sense of I, which we’ll talk about after lunch. It’s just it’s just primordial, you know. It’s in its nature is fear.
You know? It’s very, very profound. We will talk about emptiness after lunch. So please enjoy your lunch. See it now.
Just visualize it now as blissful nectar, whatever it’s gonna be. Imagine as blissful nectar, oceans and oceans of it. It doesn’t exist from its own side. Just like the chocolate cake, it’s our own mind making it up as delicious. You know?
Or if it comes what you when you and it’s not what you want, you see it as ugly. It’s your mind making it up. Okay? So don’t believe in it. Just see it as oceans of nectar instead, as big as the universe, and we now think offering it to all the holy beings, the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas and all the holy beings and all the suffering sentient beings in all the realms of existence, every single one of them experiencing the joy of receiving this food that we are offering them.
Then as Lama Zopa says, once you bless it and offer it, the bigger your stomach, the better. So please enjoy it. Don’t forget to enjoy it. So I see you at, like, quarter to one, quarter to two. Quarter to two. See you then..