Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 4.6-minute talk, Ven Sanghy Khandro opens with a crucial distinction: some guilt is unreasonable and rooted in magical thinking (guilt over a loved one’s illness, as if your health somehow caused their sickness), while other guilt is appropriate when you have genuinely acted harmfully or without care. The problem is that guilt — even justified guilt — tends to lock us in the past and builds a false, permanent self-image: ‘I am this bad person.’ She introduces the Buddhist remedy: remembering impermanence. Our actions, minds, and patterns are constantly changing; that mistake or harmful deed was not who you fundamentally are. She points toward a Buddhist purification practice using ‘regret’ — a healthier counterpart to guilt — and the liberating effect of reflecting on your own impermanence.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2.10 Working with Guilt.mp3
UUID: 035a891f-65c2-4678-b745-a29f4ba2af59
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 4.6 minutes
Words: ~626
And finally, another emotion that can occur is guilt. And guilt can arise for different reasons, different causes. Again, it’s helpful to do a reality check because there may be cases of guilt arising, feeling guilty about things that we actually shouldn’t feel guilty about. For example, if you’re the one who’s healthy and your loved one, your family member or friend is sick, you may feel guilty about that. You may feel guilty that you are healthy, that you are going on living, that you are able to enjoy life and this other person isn’t.
So is that reasonable? Is it reasonable to feel guilty about that? I don’t think so. So, it’s good to check what it is you’re feeling guilty about and if it’s really necessary and reasonable to feel this guilt. And if you have any difficulty dealing with that on your own, may be helpful to talk someone else such as a counsellor.
To come to a more realistic view of this situation. But then there are also cases where our guilt is over things that we have actually done and that it’s appropriate to feel guilty about. So this is something that can happen when we ourselves are getting close to death. We may look back on our life and remember things that we have done that have been harmful, that have been dishonest, wrong, and we feel, oh, I feel really bad about that. Or this could also happen with regard to a loved one who’s dying.
We may feel guilty about ways in which we were harmful to that person or unappreciative or didn’t give enough love to that person and so on. So, in those cases it’s somewhat appropriate to feel guilt because maybe we did make a mistake, maybe we didn’t act so wisely or skillfully. But on the other hand, guilt is not a very helpful state of mind. Guilt tends to be stuck in the past. We tend to identify ourselves with something that we did or some way that we behaved in the past And feel as if, well, that’s who I am.
That’s how I am. I am this bad person, this unloving, uncaring person who did that bad thing. As if that’s somehow permanent. And that’s actually not the case. Remember impermanence.
We are impermanent. Our mind is impermanent. Our thoughts, our emotions are impermanent. They’re changing all the time. So there may be times when we behave unwisely, unskillfully and even harmfully.
But there are other times when we behave differently. We may behave very lovingly and caringly. And so it’s just not realistic to identify ourselves with and get stuck in the negative things that we’ve done or the mistakes that we’ve made. And instead, there’s a practice in Buddhism, in particular Tibetan Buddhism, whereby we can purify any wrongs that we have done. It’s a practice of purification and it involves a feeling of regret, which is the positive counterpart to guilt.
So I’ll explain that practice and then we can do a meditation on it. But before I do that, another thing that’s helpful with regard to guilt is remembering impermanence. Again, remembering that you know, there’s nothing permanent about me, about my body, about my mind, about my experiences. I’m changing all the time. So again, there’s maybe moments and times when I get angry, where I do hurtful things, behave unskillfully.
But that’s not who I am permanently for all of time. Remember other times when you were not like that, when you behaved very differently, you acted compassionately and wisely and skillfully. So contemplating the impermanent changing nature of yourself, your mind, your experiences, your behaviour can help to reduce a sense of guilt.