Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In a 7-minute concluding session of an introductory Buddhism course, Ven Sangye Khadro teaches creative visualization as a practical mind-training technique—framed not as mystical but as useful for anyone, Buddhist or not. She starts with everyday examples: counteracting self-doubt and negative self-talk by mentally rehearsing success, whether preparing for a speech, managing work, parenting, or teaching. She then shows how to reshape habitual emotional patterns; if you always feel irritated by someone, you can visualize that encounter differently and train a new response. Throughout, visualization is positioned as a core Buddhist meditation practice for mind transformation. She closes by encouraging all listeners to adopt meditation as a tool for clarity, calm, and better relationships, regardless of religious background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 Basic.mp3
UUID: f0548a55-1c67-4a2f-b76d-532cd7009175
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Basic Buddhism (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Date: 1985 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 7.3 minutes
Words: ~688
Ourselves. People laughing at us or, you know, finding us ridiculous. You know what I mean? We tend to imagine that’s that’s going to happen. So we do that anyway.
That’s kind of a part of the mind, an instinctive activity in the mind. And we can counteract that by visualizing, creating visualizations visualizations in our mind of positive things. Instead of imagining ourselves looking foolish, making mistakes, coming off really stupid, we can imagine the opposite, doing really well, making a great speech, whatever it is we have to do that we are nervous or apprehensive about, imagining doing it well and having a good response from the people, the audience, or whatever it is, feeling good about it, feeling positive about it, successful. Doing that, can actually make the whole thing go better. If we do it with enough concentration and confidence in ourselves and our ability, we can actually transform a situation.
So if we think that it’s going to be a disaster, we’re more likely to make it a disaster. Disaster. Whereas if we think it’s going to come off well, we’re more likely to make it come off well. And we can do that with anything, even with whatever our ordinary job is teaching or parenting or working in an office or teaching. Whatever it is we normally do, we can sit down and imagine, visualize ourselves doing it well, doing it to the best of our ability, receiving a good response from other people and so on.
That way we’re setting it up so that it will go off well. That’s called creative visualization. Can be used too with, say, a habitual way of responding or acting that you find yourself doing again and again and again. The way to counteract that is to, in your mind, run through the whole scene and see yourself behaving differently, responding differently, doing the whole thing differently, and doing that over and over again, becoming familiar, becoming habituated with that way of doing things in your mind, you can actually bring about a change so that you can change the way you Like I say, if there’s somebody that you always get irritated with, every time you meet that person or every time that person does a certain thing, your response is irritation. You feel really bad about that and you want to change it.
So you can imagine, you can visualize that situation happening and how you can respond differently and make the whole thing more positive for yourself and for the other person. And if we do that enough with with enough kind of concentration and confidence, then when it comes to the thing happening again, we can stop our usual habitual way behaving and learn this new response. So visualization is quite a a helpful technique, It’s used a lot, actually, Buddhist meditation, a way of transforming the mind, transforming our experience. So that brings us to the end of the course. Any last questions?
Well, I hope anyway. I hope something something useful has come out of this and that you I learned something about Buddhism, at least about meditation. Really feel meditation is quite a useful tool, a useful technique. Whether or not you are interested in Buddhism, it doesn’t matter. Learning to meditate, mindful, relaxed and clear, it’s so helpful in so many ways.
It makes you feel better within yourself and helps you in your relationships with others. And for whatever lifestyle you want to live, whatever religion or philosophy you want to follow, I think meditation is really helpful. So I would encourage you to, if feel interested to try to keep it up and work on it, train this sort of technique. And if you’re interested in any further information about Buddhism, any courses about Buddhism, we we’re always having new ones, so keep in touch. And I’m available if you have any if it’s something you wanna talk about personally, about meditation, about Buddhism, anything you feel I might be able to help you with, you can just call up and come and see me.