Secret Buddhist Practice To Stop Self Hate _ Overthinking_(M4A_128K)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
We're all at the mercy of our own minds. But
the problem is is that in modern life were constantly
made to feel we're not good enough, something's always missing,
and I will be happy or unhappy if this or
that happens to me, So we become prisoners of life.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Can you earn this the hard way? Yes? When I
was in a.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Long retreat, cut off from the world for four years,
and memories were coming up from the past, that it
would build into horrific amounts of depression, anxiety, of pain,
and I jumped over the wall and tried to escape
because of what happened to me when I was fourteen.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Are you comfortable talking about this? You're along? Tupton is
a Buddhist monk.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Who spent over thirty years helping Hollywood stars, CEOs and
corporations stay in.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Control within a world overloaded with stress, addiction, anxiety, and burnout.
Here we go.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
I became controlled by distraction, controlled by negative thinking, what
is life going to do to me next? How will
I handle it? And things only changed when I hit
rock bottom. I had spent so much effort trying to
push that suffering away because it's so disgusting and so shameful,
but it was just making it worse.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
So many of us run away from pain, though.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
But the reality is you can run to the end
of the earth and that thing that has been tormenting
you will always trip you up. And so I went
back into that retreat knowing the methods are there. I
just need to know how to use them and I
could learn to conquer this. And that's where meditation comes in.
Do you think you can teach me? Because I very
much feel like when the receiving end of life, first
of all, chuck all those things away. There's a lot

(01:22):
of spiritual tat, isn't there. I mean you said it.
I actually hated meditation when I first did because there's
a lot of misconceptions. And actually, all you're doing is
these three things to be less controlled by negative thinking.
And the beauty of this is that they can show
in brain scams. They'll be visible changes in your brain.
So let's try this.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Gullum Tipton, Why is your work more important now than
ever before? Why is your message more important now than
ever before?

Speaker 1 (01:56):
I think because we're now living in times where we
need dictation more than ever because of the speeding up
of life. Obviously with technology and the way we live,
and also I think because meditation has become more widespread,
there are loads of misconceptions about it. So I do
try to put some effort into kind of clarifying some

(02:16):
of those misconceptions.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
When you look out into the world and you perform
your sort of own analysis on what the world, the
Western world is getting right and getting wrong, what are
some of your sort of big picture feelings, thoughts and concerns.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Well, the way we are all buried in our phones
is quite something, isn't it. And the way we interact
with information has changed so much, so we are kind
of bombarded or invaded by constant flow of information which
has a lot of persuasive undercurrents to it, and this
is affecting our stress levels and also affecting our confidence levels.

(02:54):
We're constantly made to feel something's missing, something's always missing.
We're not good enough. If you get this, you'll be okay.
If and when this happens to you, then and only
then can you be happy. So we've kind of lost
our power. We talked a little bit about the word
purpose as well. What is your perspective on the state
of human purposefulness? So I think this issue around purpose,

(03:19):
I think it is connected to the breakdown of religion
in that I would say, well, I think we'd all
say that religion used to be very much the center
of the table, and it sort of gave everybody that
a sense of their place in the universe, and the
question of purpose was never such an issue because everything

(03:42):
was in context according to one's religious belief. And of
course now we're in the post religious culture and it's
much more about the individual, and there are good things
about that, of course, But what happens then is we
become very obsessed with our purpose. And the word purpose
itself suggests I want something, I want? What do I want?

(04:03):
And in Buddhism we look at that wanting mind and
see how insatiable it is, and how the more you want,
the more you're going to want. And so from a
Buddhist perspective, we're all looking for purpose, but maybe externally
because we get what we want and then want something else.

(04:23):
And maybe what we're actually looking for is something deeper within,
but we don't know how to access it.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
So is it wrong then to be in search of purpose?
Is it a misguided pursuit?

Speaker 1 (04:38):
No, I wouldn't say that, But I would say what's
misguided for us is that we are obsessed with the
idea that happiness comes from the outside and on the
other side of the coin suffering too. So I will
be happy if I get this or get that or
this situation or that situation, and I will be unhappy

(04:59):
if this or that happens to me. So we become
at the sort of receiving end of life, what life
is going to do to me next? How will I
handle it? So there's there's not much strength there. And
I think the message of meditation is that you become
your own purpose and you become the generator of your

(05:21):
own experiences because you learn how to take hold of
your own mind.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
In this conversation, do you think you can teach me
how to do that? Because I very much feel like
in my life on when the receiving end of life.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
Well, I'd love to show you how or maybe help
you to see that meditation is easier than you thought,
or more more applicable to daily situations than you thought.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
When we think about the state of wellbeing in the
Western world, everybody knows these stats around suicidality. If we
look at the US, for example, they've slipped further in
the Unhappiness rankings than ever before. The usfl to twenty
fourth place in twenty twenty five and Global Happiness rankings.
In twenty eleven, the US had been eleventh place and

(06:06):
now they're twenty fourth, and the UK followed the same pattern.
The UK dropped to twenty third in Global Happiness rankings,
which is its lowest position in a long time. But
then more sort of horrifically, the suicide numbers in the
UK the US are tremendously alarming. In the UK, suicides
reached its highest level in many, many decades. Something is

(06:30):
going on here, absolutely so.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
We have developed the most materially comfortable culture in history.
We are materially more comfortable than ever and yet emotionally
more uncomfortable. So something hasn't added up. You know. We've
created a comfortable, to a certain extent, outer world for ourselves,
and we can achieve higher levels of material comfort, and

(06:55):
somehow the more of that we have, the more emotionally uncomfortable.
I think this is all to do with the mechanisms
of desire. So when we are in a culture that
is constantly promising us the next piece of enjoyment, the
next hit, the next bars, the next thing. We're caught
in a sort cycle of wanting more. I always described

(07:17):
the search for happiness that the problem in that is
the search itself, because searching is a habit that will
lead to more searching. So we're always looking for the
next thing. So we get what we want, not always,
but sometimes, and then very soon we want something else.
So the more we're wanting, the more we're feeling we
don't have. So we end up possibly with a lot,

(07:40):
but feeling quite empty inside. And then we're back to
this question, what is my purpose? What's it all for?
I've reached the I've reached the goal I wanted to reach,
but I still feel empty. I still feel something is missing.
We're told something is missing all the time, because to
keep a consumer message going, you have to tell people
their lack king in something, and the insistency with which

(08:03):
that message is fed to us through our phones basically
and through the media that we consume is going to
affect us.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
I think nineteen percent of people listening right now would
say that their meaning in life comes from the pursuit
of something, the journey towards something. It might not come
from the attainment of it, being successful, being on the podium.
But they would say that the meaning they experience the joy,
the thing that gets the matter bad, is in the
pursuit of something, whether it's building a business or I

(08:32):
don't know, becoming an athlete or building a charity. Are
they misguided in that thought.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
No, it's just that we could look deeper into our
own internal psychology and see how well the word pursuit
is everything. So we're always in pursuit of something, and
the chemistry of our body in the state of pursuit
is that chemical dopamine. The interesting thing about dopamine is
it falls away just before you get what you want.

(09:01):
So the chase is much more exciting than the having
or the getting. And so we're locked into this constant
chase and what is the next thing? When will I
get the next thing? And I think the reason why
we feel so sort of empty or disappointed is because
what we get is never enough. And meditation comes into

(09:22):
this conversation to show us that actually what we were
looking for was already there inside. That's the key point.
What were we looking for? We were looking for freedom.
If you think about how it feels when you get

(09:42):
what you want. You know, there's the chasing, the wanting,
and then there's the getting. There's a kind of relief,
isn't there. It's a feeling of, oh, the wanting's gone away.
It's like hunger, you feel hungry, you eat a sandwich,
the hunger's gone away. I mean that's a metaphor for everything,
and that you when you get what you want, there's
this relief. The wanting, the needy feeling that oh, when

(10:07):
will I get it has gone and there's a relief.
So actually, what we're well momentarily and then it kicks
in again. We're looking for the next thing. But what
we're looking for is the absence of wanting. The happiness
we achieve when we get what we want is a
kind of freedom from wanting. So the problem is is
that we're caught in a cycle where we then just
want something else. So I'm not suggesting let's all go

(10:30):
and sit on a mountaintop and meditate and not have
lives and not have careers, not at all. I'm simply
suggesting that we've put our focus very strongly on material things,
and I think there needs to be also a focus
on the mind. And I think that's how we can
learn to free ourselves.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
You learned this the hard way through your own experiences.
Can you talk to me about how you learn these lessons?

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Well, I definitely became a monk through extreme suffering. I
wouldn't describe myself as having been a kind of, you know,
a spiritual seeker. And I went to a monastery with
a kind of open, glowing heart wanting to find the answers.
I went to a monastery in a completely broken state
because I had been living in this kind of ambition cycle, wanting, wanting, wanting,

(11:21):
and really not looking after myself. I had a very
self loathing and unhappy mind for a lot of depression,
a lot of anxiety, and I was. I went to
that monastery feeling completely at rock bottom. And I didn't
go to a monastery to live there forever. I just
kind of dipped my toe in. But you know, I stayed.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
If I was a fly on the wall in your
life on that day when you showed up at that monastery,
what would I have seen?

Speaker 1 (11:51):
So I was very ill, and I arrived at the
monastery really needing help.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
So I was.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
I was living in London and New York, I was
trying to become an actor. My mother's an actor, so
I sort of wanted to follow in her footsteps. And
I got into a really kind of dangerous kind of
party lifestyle, really wild and burning the candle at both ends.
I basically made myself ill. I had a very very
dramatic burnout living in Brooklyn and waking up one morning

(12:22):
in my apartment thinking I was having a heart attack.
I went to I didn't have medical insurance, but I
managed to find some kind of like cheap ECG place
and they checked my heart out and they said, you
have a heart condition. What have you been doing? And
you know, I really was had to stop in my
tracks and I was very very ill after that for

(12:42):
a few months.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
What age was this twenty one? Wow?

Speaker 1 (12:46):
And during that time of being horrendously ill, I had
to question everything I was doing with my life.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
But that illness is a symptom.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
It's a symptom of unhealthy living, but also an healthy
relationship with my own mind.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
And where did that unhealthy relationship with your own mind
stem from?

Speaker 1 (13:06):
So I think things that happened in my early life,
traumatic things, difficult things, and then me not knowing how
to deal with those and just bottling them up and
pushing through, pushing forward, and not looking at myself. I
had this very sort of escapist way about myself. I
think that's what all the partying was about to kind

(13:28):
of get out of my head.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
And so.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
When I had that burnout, I think it was a
combination of physical stress and mental stress that just exploded
very very suddenly, literally overnight.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Did you have an abusive childhood? Because I was reading
some of the things that you had said, and it
suggested to me that there was things that happened when
you were young that left imprints on you that you
had to work through.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Yeah. Yeah, I would say things happened in my teens
that were troubling. You know, when I was quite like
thirteen fourteen, I started to run with a much older crowd,
So I had a kind of double life. I was
at school and very studious and very quiet, and then
outside school, I was in a rock band with much

(14:17):
older people. When I was fourteen, I started to actually
work as a jazz pianist in wine bars across London,
pretending I was twenty one, and the people I was
running with at that time were much much older than me.
And yeah, there were some situations where the relationships turned

(14:38):
I would say abusive, and I would say I was
a victim of At the time, maybe I thought I
knew what I was doing, but looking back, definitely not.
And I think that left imprints, and I think it
made me frightened of myself and frightened of other people.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Are you comfortable talking about this?

Speaker 1 (14:56):
Yeah? Was this sexual abuse? Yeah? From one of the
people I was in a band with. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
And when you think, when you sort of trace the
steps of the behavior that you then saw in your
early twenties, sort of escapist behavior, the sort of self
medicating behavior. Yeah, the content is that where that originated
from the sort of processing of that and the dealing
with this.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
It's really hard to make a very specific direct connection,
isn't it. And that's what we always want to do.
We want to say this happened because of this, and
there's this you know, this happened and therefore I went
off the rails. In a way, that's too easy, because
I think there's a mixture of many, many elements that
can send one off the rails. You know, my parents
are incredibly loving people. I mean, they really loved me

(15:42):
and brought me up very well, but they split up
very very suddenly when I was seventeen. My dad literally
ran off with one of my mum's friends, and it
was a very huge explosion in the family and we
were all very broken by it. And so there are many,
many things, many factors that came together in my teenage
years that I think sent me off the rails. I

(16:03):
got into Oxford University and that was a big prestigious thing,
but I fell apart in Oxford. I started to get
horrendously depressed, and I actually got expelled. It's actually quite
hard to get expelled from Oxford. I didn't I've never
met anyone that got expelled exactly. My mother was delighted.
She said, oh, that's like Lord Byron Shelley. Those are
the you know, very hard to get thrown out of Oxford.

(16:25):
You have to, you know, do something pretty horrendous. But
I think in my case, they they threw me out
because I was just not functional, and that then just
led to my demise. And then on the one hand,
I was started acting and being in plays and having
this kind of almost like the glamorous persona, and on
the other hand, crumbling inside. I had this incredibly persistent

(16:49):
monologue of self disgust, you know, like a voice in
the head that says you are disgusting, you are no good,
you are a failure. I used to call it my
devil voice, but it's obviously been a part of me.
And that's something that later on, when our started to
do retreats, became incredibly loud in my head, and I

(17:11):
had to work hard on meditation to help not to
get rid of that, but to integrate it and learn
to be at peace with it. It's definitely, you know,
it's gone away. Now where does that voice originate from?

Speaker 2 (17:23):
You're not the first person that I've sat with here
who's talked to me about a similar voice in their mind.
And I'm wondering, is that something from we inherit from
our environment, something that happens, a culmination of things that happen.
Is it genetic or is it all of the above.
It's many things, because that's very specific.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
It's many things, and it's I think in my case,
it was because I became very good at suppressing my suffering,
because I became very proficient at pushing things down and
just going to as many parties as possible and trying
not to suffer. I think the when you push something down,

(18:00):
the kind of volcano effect happens, and then this angry
voice comes up. This pressure leads to a kind of
backlash inside yourself, and it's an internalized anger that also
is fed to us from our environment. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
So you arrive at the monastery, Yeah, who told you
to go to a monastery?

Speaker 1 (18:25):
So my oldest childhood friend, Tara, we grew up together
and when I was completely falling apart with this heart
condition at twenty one, she basically scooped me up and
took me to the monastery. She's the one who told me.
She said, Oh, there's a monastery in Scotland which it's
called Samueling. It's a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and for the

(18:47):
first time ever, they've opened their doors to people who
wanting to be monks for a year one year, and
so she said, let's go and do it. This could
She wanted to do it too, but she said this
could really help you. So she basically pretty much carried
me there.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
What were you saying to when she asked you how
you were doing or what your symptoms were?

Speaker 1 (19:09):
I was lying in bed with horrendous heart palpitations and
any move I made, my body will be bathed in sweat.
I mean we were in California because I got sick
in New York. I managed to get to California where
my mother was living, and Tara was there and they
looked after me, and then literally flying back to the UK,
had to lie down on the plane. She was almost
carrying me. It was really really heavy, but she said, look,

(19:33):
this place could help you. It's just a year. It's
just a year out of your life. I thought, okay,
I'm going to do that and then I'll go back
to New York. I almost sublet my apartment in New York,
but I didn't in the end. But there definitely was
a feeling in me of Okay, I'm going to go
to this Buddhist retreat, get myself straightened out, and then
go back to what I was doing before. So it

(19:53):
didn't feel too outrageous because it was only a year.
Of course, it wasn't a year. This is thirty year later.
I'm still there.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Wow. And to give people like me who don't understand
what happens in a monastery a picture into the what
I would describe as incredible dedication and sacrifice that you've
gone through over those thirty years. Can you share some
of the practical things that you've done in those thirty
years that most people would think of as being just outrageous?

Speaker 1 (20:25):
But do you know what you say, sacrifice? But to me,
it didn't feel like a sacrifice. It felt like immediate
relief because I yes, when you become a monk, you
take vows to give up things, certain things, but the
things I was giving up with the things that have
made me ill. So you know, you're giving up intoxicants
and you become celibate, and you I mean there are

(20:46):
also kind of moral vows such as you give up
telling lies and stealing and harming others. These are all,
you know, good principles to follow. But I suppose the
two major things are no intoxicuce and celibacy. And to
me that was such a relief to just kind of
give all of that up and be in almost like
a kind of like a rehab situation. And but I

(21:08):
have to emphasize it didn't feel too heavy because I
thought it was only going to be for a year.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
So celibacy is sex, yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
And what I found is that you actually develop stronger relationships.
So people often think monks must be very lonely. But
what I found was that you were in a community
of people where there's the sexual chemistry is off the agenda.
So you start having friendships that really are so heart based,

(21:37):
and you meet lots of people who are on the
same path as you. So I didn't feel lonely at all.
What is it about sex that is maybe a distraction? Yes,
that puts on the list. It's not to say that
that sex is wrong or evil or bad. It's not
a sort of weird, sort of moralistic anti sex thing
at all. It's simply about where you're putting your focus.

(21:59):
So when you're when you're a monk, you're giving up
family life, you're giving up sexual relationships, you're giving up romance,
you're giving up all of that so that you can
focus very intense, intensely on meditation practice with the purpose
that you can eventually help others. It's not a selfish thing,
as you're doing this so that you can be of

(22:19):
more benefit to others, but you want no distractions, and
also you at a deeper level, you want to start
to experiment with what happens when you don't immediately run
after a desire, you start to experiment with trying to

(22:39):
not suppress your desire because that's incredibly unhealthy, but wash
your desire and observe it and find out that you
are more than your desire. And so celibacy is an
amazing environment to start doing that work.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
And that also means no masturbation in those kinds.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
Of Yeah, yeah, I mean it's really about working with
desire rather than just When I say working with I
mean observing it and learning ways to transform it rather
than just giving into it or suppressing it. And I
wouldn't say celibacies for everybody, but it suits a certain

(23:20):
type of person. And you know, in Buddhism in general,
in the UK or America, there's thousands and thousands and
thousands of Buddhists, but maybe a small handful of monks
who become celibates. It's a very specific, particular way to
practice Buddhism. It's not the only way.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
I'm inquiring about this subject because it's actually because of
a conversation I was having with a really good friend
of mine over New Years who's had some troubles in
his life, has struggled in relationships, has struggled professionally, has
also struggled a little bit with purpose and meaning and
has now sort of started to investigate religion. And one
of the things he said to me, because there's a
particular stranglehold that his sexual desires has over him, is

(24:01):
that he was thinking about abstaining from masturbation and sex
just for a short period of time. And I think
actually the reason for that is kind of what you've
described there, which is just to trans separate, get back
control from desire.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
He'll need to meditate, because just abstaining from the thing
you want to the thing you're desperate to do, and
you're abstaining almost like locking yourself in a cage and
saying I won't do that thing, then what are you
replacing it with? Or So, for example, when I work

(24:35):
in you know, I often teach meditation in drug rehab centers,
I talk a lot about how, okay, yes, you've had
to give up the drug that was making you ill,
but that's not the whole story. The rest of the
story is what are you going to do about the
mind that is addicted to that substance and how you're
going to resolve that, how you're going to fill the

(24:56):
hole inside that was craving something. Okay, So with the meditation,
you're not just giving up something, you're learning to fill
your fill your own spirit with something more positive for yourself.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Almost to heal from the thing. Desire.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah. Yeah, Desire is such an interesting thing because it's
we think we want something, but what's going on under
the desire is a feeling of lack, a feeling of hopelessness,
a feeling I don't have. There's something missing, and so
meditation is about filling that with with light and with
with love. You know, the deepest addiction we all have

(25:33):
is the addiction to our own thoughts.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Hm hm.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
That that's that's really the root of it all, is
that a wanting thought arises in my mind and then
I jump on it and I want to get something
to kind of alleviate that. But it's that internal attachment.
Buddhism talks a lot about non attachment, and I think
this is widely misunderstood. People think it means you're supposed

(25:58):
to be, you know, detached and have no friends and
be unattached. It doesn't mean that at all. It means
how we're so attached to our thoughts and our emotions
and they get into the driving seat and send our
life in all kinds of directions we don't want it
to go in. How do we learn to transform that
inner attachment to the thought itself, And that's obviously where

(26:19):
meditation comes in.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
Let's talk about Buddhism then, So I said to you
before we start recording that, in the last sort of
twelve months or so, I've got really interested in Buddhism.
I started reading some books about Buddhism, and I find
it to be most aligned with It. Sounds like a
strange thing to say, but I'm going to say it anyway.
With almost like the medication that I need. And I
know it's not a medication, but basically it is a

(26:44):
deep medicine. It's a medicine. It's a science. To me,
it's not so much a religion. It is more of
a medicine or a science. Yeah, I've struggled with the religions.
I was Christian growing up, but I've struggled with like
deities and gods and these kinds of things because there's
like five thousand different gods through history, so I don't
really know which one's real, and there's lots of books,

(27:05):
and I'm still on that journey. But when I found Buddhism,
it wasn't framed like the other religions, and it was
much more compelling. What is Buddhism? Can you tell me
where it's come from? Is it a religion? Is there
a god? Do I have to worship? Do I go
to hell heaven?

Speaker 1 (27:19):
There's nothing to worship at all. Buddhism is a path
to in an internal understanding. The word Buddha means awake,
and yes, Buddhism has a history in that there was
somebody called the Buddha in India two thousand, five hundred
years ago who attained awakening and gave teachings, and Buddhism,
you could call it that has come from there. But

(27:41):
actually this word Buddhism is a modern word ism. It's
a modern word. In the original languages of Buddhism, such
as Sanskrit and Tibetan, you find terms that are so
different from religion. You find terms such as the science
of awareness or the the examination of awakening, the inner awareness.

(28:05):
It's a path of mental discovery. It's a science.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
So it's not a religion.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Technically, it is. If you define a religion as a
group spiritual purpose, and there are monasteries, there are organizationals
within Buddhism. But it also defies most categorizations around religion
because it doesn't believe in a creator. It doesn't believe
in somebody to worship. It's really about the power of

(28:31):
your own mind and is there a hell in a heaven.
In Buddhism, they talk about hell and heaven as states
of mind. They talk about everything as a state of mind.
They say this is a state of mind. Buddhism is
very much about exploring the fabric of reality, this table,
this body, this so called self, ideas of hell, heaven.

(28:53):
They say these are all mental experiences. Everything is mind
according to Buddhism.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
So you get to the monastery, yeah, talk to me
about your journey of healing.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
So I was quite ill for a while in the
monastery and they kind of left me alone. They let
me rest a lot. I did little bits of light
work around the monastery, started to meditate. You know, I
actually hated meditation when I first did it. This was
a problem. You know, I believed in it. I grew

(29:28):
up in a Buddhist family. There's been this kind of
faith in Buddhism. As I grew up, and I never
actually did anything. I never I never meditated. Then I
get to a monastery, I become a monk, and I
read the small print, you know you've got to meditate,
and I hated it. I really really hated it. And
I thought, oh, what am I going to do? I

(29:49):
really don't enjoy this at all. I find it an
enormous struggle. So I struggled a lot with meditation in
those early days, days, weeks, months.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
Even Why did you hate it?

Speaker 1 (30:00):
I hated it because I was doing it in a
way that was making me more stressed. I would sit down.
I thought that meditation is about clearing the mind. I'd
heard this phrase, clear your mind. I thought, that's what
you do. So I sat there trying to clear my mind.

(30:20):
And the more I tried to clear my mind, the
louder it was shouting, and that particularly that negative voice
I told you about that you are no good, you're rubbish,
you're awful, you'll fail, that became louder and louder, and
so the meditation became incredibly stressful because I thought, I
can't do this, I can't get rid of my thoughts.

(30:41):
Of course, now since now I've discovered it's nothing to
do with clearing the mind. But because I thought it was,
I struggled enormously.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
What is it? Man?

Speaker 1 (30:49):
It's nothing to do with clearing the mind. It's not
about putting yourself in an unconscious state at all. It's
about working with your mind. So it's about learning how
to be less controlled by your mind. But it's not
about getting rid of the thoughts. In fact, the thoughts
are quite helpful, you know, they actually help you to meditate.

(31:13):
You see what I was doing in those early days
was I thought, okay, just sit down and just push
everything away and go into the kind of zen state.
And of course that's just like suppression, isn't it. You're
just trying to suppress, you're trying to push. It's it's
like trying to get a small child to sit still
in their high chair where you're feeding them. They're gonna,

(31:35):
you know, they're gonna want to move around. So it's
not about that pushing away of thoughts. I mean, you've
got to ask yourself if that was the aim, well,
why would it be the aim? Imagine if you could
clear your mind, so what you have ten minutes of
just being blank and then you carry on with your day.

(31:57):
Where's the journey? What journey is that you just passed
out on the floor for ten minutes? Yeah? Yeah, And
I can fully understand that if you're if you're really
stirred up and miserable and stressed, the idea of ten
minutes of switching it off would be great, but it's
not the solution. It doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
What is the solution?

Speaker 1 (32:20):
So it is definitely about changing your relationship with your thoughts.
So okay, So a typical meditation practice is you sit
and you focus on your breathing. It's different from breath work.
You're not breathing in a particular way. You're not trying
to breathe slowly, deeply or anything. You're just breathing normally.

(32:40):
You know, just let the breath do its own thing,
and you're focused on it. So on paper, that sounds
really clear and clean and simple, focus on your breath.
The reality is it's really messy because you focus on
your breath and within a few seconds you're thinking about
shopping lists or food or sex or anything. You know.

(33:01):
The mind just goes. That's when the work starts, because
at some point you realize your mind has wondered. Okay,
that's when many people think they've failed. You know, they
were meditating, they were with the breath, and then they
realize they're thinking about emails they need to write, or
shopping or whatever, and then they think, oh, I'm I'm

(33:21):
a failure, and they very angrily bring themselves back to
the breath. That's just going to make you more stressed
because you're actually training in feeling like a failure, you
know what I mean, So I can relate.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
I mean, it takes me seven seconds to drift off
when I'm trying to meditate.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
So it's not that at all. It's that you you're
with the breath and then your mind wanders. It's not
even that you see your mind wandering. You kind of
find out afterwards, don't you. It's not like I'm with
the breath and I can see my mind step away
from the breath and then go to a thought. It's
more that I'm with my breath, I pass out and
I wake up the other side of town. Yeah, that

(33:58):
is the meditation. Waking up inside your thoughts. That is
the definition of meditation. So you haven't failed at all.
You are meditating because what happened was you were with
the breath, you got lost, you lost your mind, and
then you found your mind again. Because you're back, you
suddenly realize, oh, where was I'm supposed to be meditating,
So that is meditation. You're back with your awareness, and

(34:21):
then you gently bring yourself back to the breath. And
actually all you're doing is those three things throughout the session.
Either you're with the breath, or you're noticing that you
got lost, or you're returning. And it's that returning that
makes you strong. Every time you return to the breath,

(34:41):
you are making a very powerful decision. That's the attachment
or the addiction to the thoughts. The mind was lost
in those thoughts, and you are recapturing your attention and
bringing it back. So you are choosing where to send
your mind. And if you do this like an exercise,
almost like going to the gym and getting strong day
after day, a week after week, you're teaching yourself how

(35:05):
to choose to be happy and how to choose not
to suffer. So such a simple technique on paper, you know,
focus on your breath, come back when you get lost,
is actually profoundly transformative psychologically.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
Because I think most people listening to this assume that
they're kind of strapped to their thoughts, and their thoughts
are the car driving wherever it wants to go, and
we're just strapped to the back of it, our ankles
tied to the back of it with a piece of rope. Yeah, absolutely,
and we just kind of stuff jack hijacked by our thoughts. Yeah,
hijacked is a great great you know, it stormed the
like pilot's cabin and it's flying ut. Yeah, exactly wherever

(35:47):
it wants to go. Exactly. That's kind of the experience
we have.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
So then meditation puts you behind the wheel of the car.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
Most people haven't had the experience you've had training yourself
to sort of disassociate or real that you're not your thoughts. So,
as someone that's on the other side of this practice,
how can you persuade me that my life will be
better if I listen to this? Like what's the before
and after? I guess for you.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
So, I don't think everybody has to join a monastery
and do extreme retreats and the kind of things I do.
Maybe that's my kind of extreme nature. I have so
many friends who meditate while they have families and busy jobs,
and they do fifteen minutes a day or twice a
day or whatever. It can absolutely be done in anybody's lifestyle.

(36:35):
But the whole point is that you are learning to
find your own inner freedom. You're learning to how to
discover that you are bigger than the pain and suffering
that seems to drive your life. Because what I described
earlier with the coming back to the breath is that
first stage of learning to gain a bit more power
around what your mind is doing. And then what is

(36:58):
so interesting is when you start to think about, okay,
when I'm unhappy or when I'm angry or whatever. If
I am observing myself being unhappy, is the observer unhappy?
Is the observer angry? And if I feel angry and
I know I'm angry, the part of my mind that's

(37:20):
looking at the anger cannot be angry because it's seeing
the anger. So in Buddhism they use a metaphor to
describe this, which is the sky and the clouds. The
clouds can be heavy and rainy and all of that,
but the sky is always bigger than the clouds. So
our awareness of our minds that that's where we can
find our freedom. And when we talk about seeking purpose

(37:43):
and seeking what are we looking for in life? I
think that's what we're looking for all the time in
everything we do, whether it be big life goals or
you know, drinking a cup of coffee or water, small moments.
In every moment, we're looking for release or freedom. We
think we're looking to feel how happy, or we think
we're looking for love or sex or whatever it is.

(38:05):
But I think what we're really looking for is to
free ourselves from suffering, and to free ourselves from need
and to be free, to be more in touch with
who we really are. I think that's what we're looking for.
And when when you meditate and you step back and
look at your mind, that observational aspect is key to

(38:28):
become the sky. Yeah, to become the sky rather than
the clouds. And then I think it can change your
life because you you know, when I first met my teacher,
he was quite a straight talking person. He wouldn't, you know,
say much, and what he said was often could be sound,

(38:50):
sound a little bit harsh, but he said it with love.
And when I first met him, i'd go on about
all the stuff that was happening with me or had
happened with me or to me, and he just says,
stop taking yourself so serious. And initially that could sound
like a slap in the face. I mean, imagine if
you went to a therapist and they said, what you've
been through his peanuts, you know, stop taking yourself seriously.

(39:10):
But he didn't mean it like that. What he meant
was stop clinging to a kind of solidity. Stop making
your thoughts and feelings and your past and make it
so solid. Try to be the sky instead of the clouds.
Try to step back and be less solid about everything.
Buddhism is very much into this notion that they call emptiness,
which isn't emptiness in terms of a kind of vacuous void,

(39:34):
but more that things are illusory, Things aren't as real
and solid and heavy as we think they are. And
I think meditation can help us to think more in
that way and find more happiness, real happiness, not the
happiness that depends on I will be happy if I
will be happy when I can only be happy, because
that's a very limited happiness. But imagine if you could

(39:57):
be happy.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
No matter what is that what Buddhism helps us to do.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
I think Buddhism is about freedom, and I think freedom
is happy no matter what. And I think more than that,
I think it's also about compassion. The way I'm describing
it could sound like this is all just about one's
own personal development and freeing oneself and becoming happier. But
the key point is we're living in a connection, a
world of connection, and how can we genuinely help others?

(40:24):
I think through freeing our minds and helping others to
do the same.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Can I be in that state of mind where I
am the sky while also being incredibly effective in my
job as a CEO?

Speaker 1 (40:37):
Yeah, I think this is possibly one of the misconceptions.
You know, this is something I came across quite early
on in when I was teaching meditation. I started to
give talks about meditation in the workplace, like twenty five
years ago, so before it became very popular. Now mindfulness
is everywhere in the corporate world, but when I started,

(40:58):
it was quite unusual, and I did come across a
lot of misconceptions. The funniest one was before I went
into a boardroom to talk to the people in there
about meditation, their CEO took me to side and he said, please,
don't make them too relaxed. I said, what do you mean.
He said, well, I like what you do, but I

(41:19):
don't want them to become too relaxed. I said, I'm
not some kind of stage hypnotist. I'm not going to
walk into there and sort of, you know, put everyone
into a trance. That's not what I do. But it
was such an interesting conversation because it made me see
that his view of meditation is that you would become
this kind of spaced out, happy with everything, don't care,

(41:42):
and you'd lose your drive. And it's absolutely not that
at all, because it's about precision, it's about being present.
It's about being less controlled by distraction, be less controlled
by negative thinking. And if you can do that, you
can achieve more. So if you are a CEO, if
you are trying to achieve something in your work and

(42:03):
you meditate it, you can work much much harder and
gets less tired. And then also you can start to
think more deeply about why am I doing the things
I'm doing and what am I really trying to achieve.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
Here some of the most famous CEOs in the world
talk about their meditation practice. And this is why I've
also been slightly compelled into it. I think for me,
I'm the type of person that's very influenced by other
people that I kind of look up to. And so
someone like Steve Jobs, who I think had a deep
sort of spiritual practice which involved with meditation, which I
also think he cites as being much of the reason

(42:37):
he was able to see around the corner and be
more of a visionary, was one of the big points
of inspiration for me to get more curious about Buddhism
and meditation. Do you have any examples of like very
high productive, very successful people that have had tremendous benefits
from meditation as it relates to them being more successful

(42:58):
in their missions, their profession missions.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
I mean, I can't think of specific individual names, but
it's just generally very well known that if you meditate,
it makes you more effective in your life because you
are becoming your own boss. I mean, we talk about
being your own boss, but how many of us are
really really our own boss. You know, we can be
the boss of other people, we can be the boss

(43:22):
of our environment to a certain extent, but to be
the CEO of your own mind very very difficult, and
so people who can do that definitely become more effective
in the world. But I think what also happens is
they start to think about how they could be really

(43:43):
successful and then do some good with that success, because
they they start to think about, well, is it all
just about the success and the wealth, or is there
something I could do with that success and wealth. Because
meditation makes you more compassionate, meditation and makes you more ethical,
it makes you not ethical and a kind of you know,

(44:04):
the word ethics sounds so kind of Victorian and so
kind of restrictive, but I mean trying to make the
world a better place. And I think there are many
examples of people who've become enormously successful and used that
success for the good of the world, and I think
meditation is something key in their success.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
I was just looking for a couple of examples. And
Ray Dalio, who a lot of people know is one
of the best investors in the world who wrote the
book Principle, said meditation, more than anything in my life,
is the biggest ingredient of whatever success I've had. And
Mark Benioff, who's the CEO of Salesforce, a tremendously large company,
said meditation is the most important thing I do each day.
Oprah Winfrey, Jack drcy Let's Say, who's the co founder

(44:43):
of Twitter and Square, said there's nothing more impactful on
my work than meditation. And Steve Job said, if you
just sit and observe, you will see how restless your
mind is. If you try to calm it, it only
makes it worse, but over time it does calm. And
he practiced a Zen Buddhism and was a regular meditator,
and he says that his minimalist design philosophy and focus

(45:04):
were strongly influenced by his spiritual and meditative practices.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
You see, I think that the the thing that trips
people up when they think about how meditation could make
you more effective is the word calm, because they think, well,
if I become calm, I'm going to be I'm going
to miss, I'm going to drop the ball if I'm
too calm. But I don't think of calm in that

(45:32):
way at all, as is almost like a tranquilized calm.
I think of calm as being able to keep a
cool head under fire and be really precise and really
on the on the focus on in the now, and
really hold on to your purpose and know why you're
doing what you're doing and be less influenced by the

(45:52):
areas of your psychology that trip you up.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
I'm hearing like clarity and control.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
Yeah, optimizing your how your brain performs.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
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(47:53):
A strong body starts with strong feet. Earlier on, you
said that in Buddhism they talk about tess, which is
kind of this realizing that life isn't so solid solid,
and your identity is a mirage and all these kinds
of things. It almost sounded like that's the opposite of
like victimhood, because when we think about victimhood, it is

(48:16):
I create an identity for myself, and then I create
a story around that identity which has suffered some kind
of injustice, and then I kind of live out that injustice.
How does Buddhism think about victimhood and identity and trauma?
I guess so.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
Of course, we identify incredibly strongly with our past, and
we in so many ways are prisoners of what has
happened to us in our past. And it's totally understandable,
of course, But Buddhism brings in a whole fresh perspective,
which is that you are not your past. I mean,
even on a physical level, every cell in your body
has changed and your mind has changed. You are right

(48:53):
now in the present. The past is an illusion, as
is the future, and we spend so much time in
the past and future or trying to manipulate the present,
whereas with with meditation, you're learning to to be in
the now and not be. It doesn't mean you don't
plan or don't remember, but you're learning to be to

(49:14):
cling less to the past and future, and you're learning
to cling less to or hold less to the idea
that things are really as solid as you think they are.
And it's very scientific that there's a there's a Buddhist
meditation which literally is about a table, like you know,
here we are with this table, and they say if
you if you take apart this table, you'll find it

(49:36):
doesn't exist because the table, as it seems right now,
is a is a top with legs. You take the
bits apart, and now where is your notion of table.
You've got these bits of wood or metal or whatever
it is, and you start kind of dissecting that further
and further and further. This is where Buddhism and particle

(49:57):
physics become, you know, talking a lot. There's a lot
of conversation there in that the smaller and smaller you
go into these wood shavings and then particles, and can
you find the smallest part that makes up all of reality,
and Buddhists would say no, because if it's a part
it has parts. There is no such thing as the
partless particle, because if it's a particle, it can be

(50:21):
further subdivided, so we can't find the smallest base that
makes up all of matter. What we're experiencing is more
like a dream or an illusion, and the reality we
live in, of course, it feels very solid. You know,
if I if I throw this cup at somebody, it's
going to hit their head and hurt them. It's no
point saying, well, it's all empty, don't worry about it.

(50:42):
But the idea behind this philosophy of understanding things not
to be as solid as they are is that we
can learn to suffer less because we spend so much
of our energy constantly reacting to things as if they're
really solid and really real and there's nothing that can
be done about them, whether that be people or objects
in the world around us, or our mind itself. And

(51:03):
if we can de solidify some of that, we could
become more free.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
We will carry so many burdens in this regard, you know.
It could be grief, it could be heartbreak, it could
be a colleague at work that doesn't dislike us and
comment on our Instagram page if something someone said about us.
How does one go about alleviating ourselves from this kind
of burden?

Speaker 1 (51:28):
Yeah, so I for me, it's very much about dropping
the story and looking at the feeling.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
Okay, explain that to me.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
So for me, this became very very important practice for
me when I was in a long retreat. So I
went into a very long retreat for four years. I
became a monk for a year, and I stayed a
bit longer, stayed a bit longer. It was after about
four years that I decided to do this life and

(52:00):
I took lifelong vowels, and then I knew about these
long I did some short retreats, but I knew about
these long retreats. But it wasn't until twelve years later
that the opportunity came up to go into a long
retreat four years long, where you are really just cut
off from the world for that length of time. No
nobody goes in or out, and you are meditating many,

(52:22):
many hours a day. And it was the most frightening
experience of my life because I was in there alone
with my own thoughts and emotions, it's not a completely
solitary retreat. There are other monks there, all doing their
own meditation in their rooms, so there is a kind
of group, but you are very much alone as well.
And for me, the whole thing was for the first

(52:44):
two years, was just horrific amounts of depression, misery, pain, anguish,
anxiety that would build into panic attacks. I was really
really shocked by what happened to me in there, because
I think I thought i'd you know, I'd been a
monk for twelve years and I'd already started to give

(53:04):
a few talks about meditation, and maybe I thought I
was quite sortid, but I wasn't, and I got in
there and really fell apart. But it was an amazing
thing that happened to me, because that falling apart forced me,
after a while to learn how to engage with what
I'm talking about, which is looking at the suffering and

(53:26):
working with that with meditation, looking at the suffering. So
for me, during those first two years of the retreat,
I was completely obsessed with the story because I was
experiencing these horrendous feelings of heartbreak and feelings of depression, anxiety,

(53:47):
just kind of a whole mass of suffering inside myself,
and I was trying to almost do therapy on myself
and think, okay, let's you know, thinking that memories were
coming up from the past and thinking of about things
that had happened in my past, and is this why
I'm suffering now? And how do I resolve that? And
the more I went down that road, the worse it got,

(54:09):
and I found myself really disconnected from Buddhism. And it
was a really frightening experience because I'm there in a
four year retreat, I'm a monk, and I was feeling
completely alienated from the whole thing. I kind of wanted
to just get away from it. I wanted to run away.
And things only changed when I hit rock bottom, like hugely,

(54:35):
in that I actually climbed over the wall of the
retreat to run away. I couldn't take it anymore. At
one morning, I had the most immense panic attack I've
ever had, and I just saw red and just ran
and legged it out of the retreat, which is unthinkable.
You know, in a four year retreat, you're not supposed
to leave. But I jumped over the wall and tried

(54:57):
to escape. I say tried to escape as if I
was in some you know, prison or cult. It's not
like that people do leave retreats, but for me, it
was this kind of dramatic get out of there and
run away. And I remember like freaking out and running
and running and running down this road in the rain.

(55:17):
This was on a very you know, remote area of
a Scottish island, and then just stopping and thinking, what
are you doing? What has happened to you? And I
just stopped and then went back and I asked the
leaders of the retreat if I could be let back in,
and they said, well, no, you've left, But I really
begged them because I had such clarity in that moment
I wanted to go back in. And they said okay.

(55:40):
The abbat of my monastery said, okay, stay stay in
a little caravan on the edge of the retreat boundary
for a week for seven days, and think about what
you're doing, and then we'll see if you will let
you back in. And during that time I thought really deeply,
and I really knew I wanted to go back in,
because there was at that moment thought of shall I

(56:00):
give up being a monk? Shall I give up the
whole thing? I can't do?

Speaker 2 (56:04):
This.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
It's made me so miserable, But I really knew in
that moment what my purpose was. I knew I wanted
to go back in and carry on. But I also
knew I'd been tormenting myself with my past and that
I hadn't worked out how to how to heal myself.

(56:25):
I'd been sinking so badly, and if I was to
go back in there, I would have to try a
complete new approach.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
Why did you choose to go back in?

Speaker 1 (56:34):
Because I really strongly believed that it was what I
want to do with my life, and a part of
me thought, don't give something up when you're freaking out,
because you will regret it. If you're going to give
this thing up, give it up from a place of clarity,
knowing that there's something better for you out there. Don't
give up because you're having a panic attack and you

(56:55):
can't take it. That's the wrong kind of timing to
make a life change. Because I really do believe in
what I'm doing. This is the life I've chosen for myself,
and I want to do it. But it got so
difficult I couldn't take it anymore.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Why did you want to do it? If something is
painful and causing you. Because because I felt that this pain,
I'm going through. The methods are there, I just need
to know how to use them, and I could learn
to conquer this. This pain could be the breakthrough most

(57:33):
people in their lives when they think about the things
that give them anxiety or pain or fear. You know,
we live as sort of discomfort avoiding humans, so we
try and to run to comfort or pleasure exactly. So
life is hard. Let's run from it. Let's get on
a plane, fly to another country and try and just
set up a new life somewhere else.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
Doesn't work because you go to your new life and
the thing that has been haunting you, like a shadow,
goes with you. You can't run from yourself. You can
you can run to the end of the earth. And
that thing that has been tormenting you is part of you.
And until you learn to integrate that, it will always

(58:12):
trip you up. And so I went back into that
retreat knowing, Okay, this is your last chance. If you
don't if if you mess this up again, that that's it,
you know, forget it. So it was real like make
or break situation. And I went back in and I
I everything changed because I found I had to find

(58:38):
a new, a different way of dealing with that suffering.

Speaker 2 (58:42):
What was that?

Speaker 1 (58:43):
Okay, so I'm back in there and it's coming up again,
the depression, the anxiety, that the pain that to me,
it felt like it felt like like some something like
that was piercing me. It felt like a It felt
like there was like a knife constantly twisting, twisting and

(59:03):
turning in my heart, like in the middle of me.
It's really painful. And what I'd been doing up until
that point was just trying to get that knife out
and also thinking why is it there? Is it because
of what happened to me when I was fourteen? Is it?
What happened to when I was seventeen?

Speaker 2 (59:19):
Is it?

Speaker 1 (59:19):
This?

Speaker 2 (59:20):
Is it?

Speaker 1 (59:20):
That? Is it? My my family? What is it? That's
the story? I say story, I'm not I'm not belittling
people's stories. I'm just saying it's the narrative, isn't it.
So I decided to use the knife as the meditation

(59:40):
to actually meditate on it, and the whole thing starts
to change when you do that, because until that point,
you've been until that point, you've been trying to get
rid of your suffering or get rid of your pain.
But if you turn your pain into your meditation, you're
moving towards it it and how can it hurt you?

(01:00:04):
If you've decided to move towards it, you've made that choice.
So what I started to do is just focus on
the pain, but try to bypass the judgments. I don't
like this, this is so terrible. Why am I depressed?
Why am I anxious? And just feel the feeling and
it's a sensation in the body. Because one of the

(01:00:26):
key instructions in meditation is when you focus your mind,
you focus it with less judgment. This is good, this
is bad. You just focus. So you're focusing on that
feeling without pushing it away, without saying why do I
feel like this? But just the feeling and you start
it starts to change. It starts to change because you're

(01:00:51):
accepting it. My teachers had always said to me, they'd
always go on and on about acceptance, and I just
wanted to hit them when they said it because it
sounded so grim. You know, you've got to accept yourself,
or you've got to accept your suffering. To me, that
sounded like you're going to for the rest of your life.
Be dragging this bag of rocks up a hill. You know,
acceptance is so miserable and so boring. I didn't realize

(01:01:13):
that what they meant was was compassion and self acceptance
at a very very deep level. So I'm focusing on
that feeling in my body and trying not to go
into the stories about it or the hatred of it,
and just move towards it and kind of become become
one with that pain. And then you relax and something

(01:01:36):
kind of releases, And I mean, I think it works
on a chemical level, because basically, when you're trying to
push pain away, you're creating enormous amounts of cortisol in
your body, a stress hormone. When you relax, the end
orphans arise, you start to feel happy. I mean, it's
quite bizarre that the thing that has hurt you so
much starts to turn into a kind of joyful feeling

(01:01:57):
and you start to think, oh, wow, Okay, so happiness
is nothing to do with somebody being nice to me
or this object or that thing. Happiness is about being
okay with your suffering, and not just being okay with it,
but actually sending love into the place in yourself that

(01:02:18):
you hated so much so for me that what started
to change was from having a feeling like a knife
twisting inside me and hurting me and wanting to get
rid of it, I found ways to hold that with
with love. And I started to have this image in
my head as if I had found a like a

(01:02:42):
frightened rabbit or a bird with a broken wing, and
I'm holding that in my hand with tenderness. I'd never
been able to do that for myself. I had never
ever been able to be kind to myself. Everything in
my life until up until that point had been so
and so self hating. And I think, you know, in

(01:03:07):
my teenage years, when I was trying to become a
successful actor, I think that was the drive was I
hate myself, so I better get loads of people to
love me instead, because I can't do it. I'm not
saying all actors are like that by no means, but
there is a kind of actor who is like that.
We know that. And that was me. And then, you know,
even as a monk and you become celibate and you're

(01:03:30):
you know, having this kind of more like looking after
yourself lifestyle, I'd develop all these incredibly strong attachments with
friends where I'd want them to be nice to me,
and I didn't want to be alone with myself. I
couldn't spend time alone with myself. And then in the
first two years of that retreat, I'm hating myself and
hating my pain and jumping over the wall and anything
to kind of jump out of my own skin. And

(01:03:52):
when I learned how to do this kind of practice
with sending compassion into that part of myself that I'd
hated so much, it was really transformative.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
You said it felt like holding a scared rabbit or
a bird with a broken wing. How did you come
to feel about that bird? I felt, I felt love
for that part of myself. And for me, that's only
possible when you stop getting so distracted by all the

(01:04:26):
history and the details of your past, but you're just
relating to the feeling in your body right now. And
I don't know if it's like this for everybody, but
for me, feeling it in the body is a really
easy way to start, because, yeah, it's depression, it's anxiety,
it's trauma, whatever it is, that's quite kind of nebulous.

(01:04:47):
How do you find it? And for me it was
so physical, it was like this twisting of a knife
in the heart or a sinking feeling in the chest,
and just to relate to that sensation with kindness. Taught
me how to love myself, but in an accepting way.
You know, it's not about you know, becoming an egomaniac.

(01:05:08):
I love myself. It's more have kindness for yourself. How
does this translate to things like grief, because grief is
one of the hardest things to get to acceptance on
the sort of finality of life, losing someone you love.
You've been through this yourself. You had, I think a
best friend of yours, who is well my teacher, Oh
your teacher. Well, he was my best friend as well
as my teacher. He was murdered.

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
He was so eleven years ago, my teacher, Akon Rimpochet,
who had been my everything for all those years. You know,
he was my teacher, my closest friend. He I also
I spent a lot of time with him. I became
his kind of assistant, so when he would travel, I
was with him all the time, So we were very close.
He was Tibetan and he was in charge of our

(01:05:54):
monastery in Scotland, and part of his work was he
would run a charity called rock Per which has oh,
that's him. He would go to Tibet every year and
look after projects. They're feeding orphans, looking after schools, hospitals,
et cetera. He was on his way to Tibet one

(01:06:17):
year and he was in Chengdu and China and he
was basically ambushed and stabbed killed. And I mean this
completely rocked the Buddhist world. It's like horrendous news, but
on a personal level, for me, I was one of
the first people who found out. I've been on the
phone to him every day until then. I was his

(01:06:38):
assistant and very working very closely with him. So it
might it completely blew me apart. I mean it blew
me to pieces. I cannot describe how badly it blew
me to pieces. But the meditation I've described to you.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
Saw me through.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
Because I at some point during that grieving process, I
remembered what to do. At first, I didn't because you know,
when you're really in it, you can't think. But then
so there was the whole aftermath. You know, he was killed,
and it was in all the press, and then as
his assistant, I was the one dealing with the media

(01:07:28):
and in a way, that same busy when you're grieving,
it kind of helps you to, you know, stay focused.
But then the nights, the nights, nighttime was when it
started to hurt, because at night I would just be
tossing and turning and feeling like feeling like I was
on fire because I had a mixture of grief, anger, despair.

(01:07:53):
There's a whole mixture of things. We knew the killer,
the person who murdered him had been a monk, a Tibetan.
He had been a monk in our monastery.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
We knew him.

Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
He actually had the same name as me, and we
knew him quite well. So there was all of that
mixed in with what an earth happened to this person
that he did this thing, And so all of that
is consuming me at night, and I'm just tossing and turning,
feeling like I'm in flames. And then at some point
it kicked in the meditation. It just had It just

(01:08:25):
happened because I'd done it in retreat, it had seen
me through, it had really really helped me, and at
some point I just had to lie there and send
love into the flames in me, you know, I had
to send that kindness into the place I was in despair.
I'm not saying that I then just became all right, no,

(01:08:46):
but it absolutely calmed things. Absolutely, and it is it is.
It is all about love. It really is. You are
sending love into the pain you are experiencing. And this
helped me through the grief. It helped me also with
forgiveness with the guy we knew who did it. It
helped me on so many levels. And I'm not saying that,

(01:09:09):
you know, it's all okay, but I have I've made
peace with his death. And I mean, he taught me
this practice. He taught me how to do that, and
then he died and I had to do it that.
I think of it as his last gift to me,

(01:09:29):
and I'm you know, I will be forever grateful.

Speaker 2 (01:09:36):
When you talk about sending love into the flames, what
is the actual practice there? Is it? Certain sentences you're saying.

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
No, Yeah, I'm glad you asked this, because it is
so much about going beyond the words and going into
an experience of oneness. So to make it really practical,
you know you're feeling, you're feeling incredible trauma in your body.
Finding it physically is the easiest way to do it

(01:10:05):
like your body's in flames, or you've got like a
feeling of a knife twisting in your heart, whatever it is,
there's this feeling in the body, and first of all,
you just focus on that feeling. So anybody who meditates
knows how to focus on their breathing. It's the same thing.
It's just where you're focusing. So you're feeling the feeling

(01:10:26):
and you're trying to bypass the thoughts of this is uncomfortable,
I want this to go away. Why did he die?
What happened? You're just feeling the feeling, and then you
pay attention to that feeling in a loving way, you
flood it with love. And the reason this is possible,

(01:10:50):
I mean that this is touching upon a major belief
in Buddhist philosophy, which is that our minds are naturally compassionate.
We are not these fight or flight killing machines that
some people like to think the human being is. We
are our natural state is to be kind. It is

(01:11:13):
who we are naturally deep down. So when you clear
away all the words and the ideas and you just
sit with the feeling and you send love into that
feeling with your mind, you're just loving that feeling, holding
it with compassion, as if you were with a friend
who was grieving. If you were sitting with a friend
who was freaking out or grieving or whatever, you're not

(01:11:36):
going to slappen around the face and say snap out
of it. You will hold their hand. And we all
know how to do that. The question is can you
do it for yourself? And for me that was a
huge challenge because I hated myself so much for so
many years. I was my worst enemy. So to hold
my own hand internally in that sense, that's what I

(01:11:59):
mean by saying in love and to the feeling. And
what happens then is the feeling starts to change. It
starts to melt. The sharpness, the sharp edge of his
edges of it start to melt, and you start to
be okay with being not okay. And it's almost as
if a kind of happiness starts to arise. But it's

(01:12:20):
not like a it's the kind of happiness you haven't
tasted before. It's a happiness of I can be okay
with this. It makes you immensely strong. You talked about forgiveness.
Did you forgive the man that murdered your friend? And teacher, Yes,

(01:12:41):
quite quickly. I mean in a way it was made
easier because it became really clear that he was psychotic.
And of course that's no excuse or condoning or anything
like that. But somebody who is really unable to control themselves,
I mean, how can you hate them or what? You know?
It's that's an extreme case. But there are the practice

(01:13:05):
of forgiveness. It's a hard one, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
Because we've all got people in our lives that we
thought to have wronged us or done something which has
caused us pennstantly, and almost the way that we create
our own perception of justice is by holding the grudge.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
Yeah, Now why do we do that? That's the question
is do we think do we think that if we
let go of the grudge, we have let the other
person get away with it?

Speaker 2 (01:13:33):
That's how it kind of feels, right.

Speaker 1 (01:13:35):
Wouldn't you say that by holding the grudge, they've got
away with it because you're the one suffering, they've really won.
They're winning in each moment because you're holding onto it.
In Buddhism, there's a teaching that says it's like holding
onto a piece of hot metal or holding a hot
coal in your hand and it's just burning you. So

(01:13:56):
if I'm holding the grudge, they have absolutely got away
with it because they are the thing they did, which
was one thing. Maybe I am now constantly hurting, and
they are absolutely the winner. So I wonder if we assume,
I think we do assume that forgiveness is a kind
of giving up, even the word forgive, the give in

(01:14:18):
the word. So it sounds like we're taking a weaker position,
we're giving up, we're sort of surrendering. But I think
forgiveness is a strength or a power, and it's actually
nothing to do with the other person. They might You're
not going to necessarily write them a letter and say
I've forgiven you, But you're freeing yourself. You're dropping your

(01:14:38):
burden because that rage is toxic and that hurt is toxic.
But it's so hard to let go of it. And
people can say let go, and you just want to
slap them in the face because what, okay, is that easy?
I'm just going to let go? You know, it's not
that easy. It's bloody hard. But meditation gives you the tools,

(01:15:01):
partly because meditation anyway is helping to loosen up that
kind of glue that we have in our minds where
we glued into those feelings, that even just a simple
meditation like coming back to the breath is helping you
to be less glued into those thoughts and reactions and feelings,
so the feeling of rage can start to be less

(01:15:22):
heavy for you.

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
You've been through several sort of traumatic incidents. You talked
about being fourteen, being seventeen, sexual abuse, parental divorce, a
little bit of neglect. It sounds like, as well, have
you forgiven all of those people in your life?

Speaker 1 (01:15:39):
I don't know. I don't know if forgiveness is a big, huge,
massive moment or if it's a process. I'm friends with
all those people, very close friends with all those people,
and I think here's what I think. I think I've
learned how to forgive the feelings that those incidents gave

(01:16:03):
rise to. That to me, is much more important than
forgiving the people. And I think what's also happened to
me is I've started to find that the suffering that
I experience has some use because it is the thing

(01:16:25):
that you're using for your mental transformation. Rimpoche always used
to say, suffering is like compost. Compost is made of
rotten vegetables, people chuck it away or they know how
to make the field grow. And I think it's like that.
So with forgiveness, I would say meditation, But I would

(01:16:48):
say also thinking deeply about about the situation. You know,
what's really helped me with my dad and with other
people is to think about the suffering they were going
through that kind of like propelled them to behave the
way they've behaved. There's always something, isn't there in somebody

(01:17:11):
that has made them behave the way they behave. And
there's a part of us that gets very indignant and thinks,
how dare they? They should know better, Whereas the Buddhists
answer would be, well, what do you mean they should
know better? They know what they know. They are. They
are driven by their own confusion and their own pain.
Why do you think they were out to get you?

(01:17:32):
Why do you think they were deliberately out to maliciously
get you? Weren't they just caught in their own suffering
and you were there? But it's not so much about you,
And I think that starts to lighten the burden a
bit when you start to think about you know, there's
a meditation. I sometimes do where you swap places with
the other person in your mind. You sit and you

(01:17:54):
think about being them and looking at the world out
of their eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:17:58):
The person that you Yeah, so many people will be
thinking about that person in their life as you speak,
and they'll be The challenge I guess they'll face is
they'll continually come back to this idea that this person
is an asshole. Yeah, they you know it.

Speaker 1 (01:18:11):
Almosts all are though we are too. We all are
I am, We're all because we're all just confused. We're
all at the mercy of our own minds. If you
meditate regularly, you realize how out of control you are
because you're trying to sit there with your breathing and
all you're thinking about is shopping lists, and you think, Wow,

(01:18:31):
the human mind is really pretty messed up. We can't
make it do anything we want it to do. So
this person that you think, they're so evil and so
terrible and how dare they do the thing they've done.
I'm not saying that we're condoning it and saying yeah,
you can do what you want. I'm just saying, lighten
up a bit, because people are just doing their best,

(01:18:52):
and sometimes their best is really bad. And that doesn't
have to become your problem. It's not really about you.
Will obviously take things personally. If something is done to you,
of course you're going to take it personally. But meditation
helps you look at the three hundred and sixty degree
view of a situation rather than just from your perspective.

(01:19:14):
And very important here that we don't get into that
kind of victim shaming reality where you think, oh, it's
all about me and for them. It's not that at all.
It's simply that you think we're all We're all messed
up in various ways, and that's the human condition.

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):
Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself.
I'm inviting ten thousand of you to come even deeper
into the DIREVERSEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is
a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world.
We have so many incredible things that happen that you
are never shown. We have the briefs that are on
my pad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips

(01:19:53):
we've never released, We have behind the scenes conversations with
the guests, and also the episodes that we've never ever released,
and so so much more. In the circle, you'll have
direct access to me. You can tell us what you
want this show to be, who you want us to interview,
and the types of conversations you would love us to have.
But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first ten
thousand people that join before it closes. So if you

(01:20:15):
want to join our private close community, head to the
link in the description below or go to doac circle
dot com. I will speak to you. Then I'm going
to let you into a little bit of a secret.
You're probably going to think me and my team are
a little bit weird, but I can still remember to
this day when Jemima from my team posted on Slack
that she changed the scent in this studio and right
after she posted it, the entire office clapped in our

(01:20:37):
Slack channel. And this might sound crazy, but at the Direversio,
this is the type of one percent improvement we make
on our show, and that is why the show is
the way it is. By understanding the power of compounding
one percent, so you can absolutely change your outcomes in
your life. It isn't about drastic transformations or quick wins.
It's about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting

(01:20:59):
change in your out. So two years ago we started
the process of creating this beautiful diary and it's truly beautiful.
Inside there's lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation
as well some interact developments. And the purpose of this
diary is to help you identify, stay focused on develop
consistency with the one percent that will ultimately change your life.

(01:21:19):
So if you want one for yourself or for a friend,
or for a colleague or for your team, then head
to thediary dot com right now, I'll link it below.
Many of us live trapped in the life we have.
I guess maybe the word trapped isn't the right word,
but held back in many ways because of fear. And
I wondered what Buddhism teaches us about fear in terms
of fear of taking risks or you know, going and

(01:21:44):
becoming a Buddhist monk, or starting a business, or pursuing
a passion or moving to Bali. Many of us have these,
these dreams, these callings, but we're trapped in fear.

Speaker 1 (01:21:55):
And would you also agree that the fear can be
about those bigger things, but also it's a moment to moment,
subtle anxiety that just like pervades everything.

Speaker 2 (01:22:04):
Yeah, it's both.

Speaker 1 (01:22:06):
To me, this became hugely like obvious when I came
out of that four year retreat, because I came out
that retreat was two thousand and five to two thousand
and nine. When I came out of that retreat, everybody
had smartphones. During those four years, the whole landscape technology

(01:22:29):
changed dramatically. Smartphones, social media, the whole thing happened during
that time.

Speaker 2 (01:22:34):
And you hadn't been on the internet.

Speaker 1 (01:22:36):
No, no, we had nothing before my retreat. Some people
had blackberries and then that was it. And then suddenly
it's all different. And I arrived in London and everybody's
walking around with their face buried in phones. And I'm walking,
you know, going up the escalator and the tube in London,
and the little billboards of moving images that made me
feel dizzy.

Speaker 2 (01:23:00):
Where I'm going with this is.

Speaker 1 (01:23:01):
I'm maybe because I've been in this unusual environment and
now I'm back in normal reality, I see it with
more of a shock. And I started to think, how
much have we been made to feel afraid all the time?
When news media becomes digitalized and monetized, and then you
have to keep the person reading, we know the tricks

(01:23:23):
that people have to do. We all know about clickbait.
We all know about how the headline of an article
has to be shocking enough to make you read the
article and then you see the ads, so you don't
actually find out the information until two thirds way down.
You know, we know that, and we're all wise to
that on one level, and on the other level, we
are completely influenced by it. So we're now walking around

(01:23:45):
in a world where we're constantly being told we are
in danger. I'm not here to you know, I'm not
anti technology. It's great. It can do so many good things.
But it's like food. You've got to eat it in
the right way. If you over eat, you get sick.
If you're not discerning about what you eat, you're going
to get ill. It's the same with technology. And so yeah,

(01:24:08):
fear is now used in every walk of life. Fear
is used more than ever in politics to make us
afraid so that we vote for people because of fear.
Fear is used so much now to make us go shopping,
hurry up while stocks last.

Speaker 2 (01:24:22):
So what do we do about that? When we live
in a world that is commercially driven or driven by
power dynamics that mean that fear is just a great
motivator and a great way to influence.

Speaker 1 (01:24:34):
I think we have to protect our minds with meditation.

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
Does this mean like through your phone away and don't
go outside? What does it mean?

Speaker 1 (01:24:42):
Don't throw your phone away, don't go and run away
to the mountains. Learn to face the fear, learn to
be fearless in a frightened world. And I think this
is something very practical because I do this through practicing
microscopic moments of metay meditation in busy situations.

Speaker 2 (01:25:02):
What does that mean?

Speaker 1 (01:25:03):
So I might be standing in a queue and I'll
feel the ground under my feet. I might be in
an airport queuing up and instead of going into that
impatience thing and the stress e mode or checking my phone,
I'll do a moment of meditation. Something that's very important
to me is to meditate every day, sitting down and

(01:25:24):
doing it kind of formally, but also these micro moments
throughout the day, tiny moments where you just become aware
of yourself, become aware of the ground under your feet,
become aware of your shoulders, drop your shoulders, be aware
of them, become aware of your breathing. And I find this.
If you do this in queues and traffic jams, it
changes your entire reality because what are you doing? You

(01:25:46):
You're rewiring your own brain. You know how whenever we're
in a stuck situation like a queue or a traffic jam,
we are wired to respond with tension and patience. But
if you do a micro moment of mindfulness, you're changing
the wiring. You're teaching yourself that you can meet stress

(01:26:09):
in a calm way. You can be okay with being
stuck in the traffic. So what that does is it
then makes you more fearless because you're almost like looking
forward to the next traffic jam, whereas most of us
are just reacting to of reacting, you're thinking, bring it on.
There is a gap, isn't there between what happens and
how we react. That's the crucial gap, the gap between

(01:26:30):
impulse and action, because so much is reaction, So much
I think we spend so much of our lives just
reacting in that I feel hungry, so I eat. Somebody
says hello, I say hello. But even on a moment
to moment basis, how much are we consciously living and

(01:26:51):
how much are we just reacting? And so when we
can find that gap between the impulse and the action
and make a different choice. I think it's almost like
in every moment where it was standing at a fork
in the road. In every moment, what one road is
the road of reaction and the other road is the
road of response. Meditation helps you pause and see. You

(01:27:13):
could make a choice. I don't have to get stressed
out in traffic. I could instead be mindful or I
don't have to get I don't have to my colleague
at work is grumpy. I don't have to bite their
head off and then regret it. I could hold back.

Speaker 2 (01:27:28):
So you say, meditation is the solution to many of
the things we talked about today, including the response versus
reaction fork in the road. So if you were making
a plan for me from this day onwards on how
to implement meditation in my life, Yeah, what would that
plan look like?

Speaker 1 (01:27:43):
First of all, chuck all those things away. Okay, all
of this stuff on the desk, paraphernalia. Okay, So on
the desk, I have like a sound healing bowl, some
incense and rings and little I don't even know what
these are.

Speaker 2 (01:27:53):
Yeah, so we're going to chuck all the paraphernalia away
in the bin. Okay, we're going to bin all of it.

Speaker 1 (01:27:58):
Okay, let me you know, you don't need any equipment.
There's a lot of spiritual tat, isn't there.

Speaker 2 (01:28:08):
I mean you just said it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:12):
You know. It's about you and your mind. It's not
about having little symbols and incense. And you don't need it.
And okay, what is the plan. The plan is to
start with ten minutes a day.

Speaker 2 (01:28:25):
Okay, ten minutes a day when.

Speaker 1 (01:28:28):
Ideally morning, okay, simply because you're starting your day right
and your cortisol level is highest in the morning when
you wake up, there's a spike of cortisol. Bring it
down with meditation.

Speaker 2 (01:28:38):
So I get up, I check my emails, check my WhatsApp,
then meditate. I'm joking. If you want no, no, tell
me that the optimal way you're going to be.

Speaker 1 (01:28:45):
My geting straight away and meditate. Okay, get up straight
because you're starting your day right and ten minutes is
enough to start with. And the beauty of this is
that you know they can show in brain scans that
ten minutes a day, after four days, they'll be visible
changes in your brain. So knowing that keeps you going
because you think, okay, this literally is like weight training.

(01:29:05):
I'm going to get muscle. And what do I do?
So I sit down somewhere. You sit down, and you're
going to focus on your breathing. But what I find
really crucial is that you are not just launching yourself
into it. You are introducing a bit of compassion into
the process. And this is what elevates the meditation from

(01:29:26):
being just a kind of brain jim into being something
that takes you to a much more kind of like
spiritual realm of it. And it connects in with what
we were talking about earlier about learning to be more
compassionate to yourself and others. So you start with that intention.
So you start by just settling and sitting. You know,
some people sit cross legged on the floor, but it's

(01:29:47):
also okay on a chair. But on the chair there
should be some sense of posture, so you're sitting up straight.
And you would start with setting the intention. And I
don't mean an intention such as so today I want
this or want that. It's the bigger intention. Why am
I meditating? I am meditating for not only myself but
for all living beings. I'm doing this for me and

(01:30:10):
the world. And I'm not trying to fool myself by
thinking if I do my meditation somehow wars will end
or whatever. No, it's more that if I do this,
this will help me become more effective in the world
and spread more love and compassion. So that's the reason.
So you're setting that intention with your thinking for a
few moments, and then you're going to start to be

(01:30:32):
aware of yourself. So okay, so let's just try this.
So take a moment to set the intention of compassion,
making the intention that you're doing the practice for yourself
and others. And now just become aware of your hand.

(01:31:01):
Maybe your hands are resting on your knees or your legs,
and feel that there's a lot of nerve endings in
the fingers. So it's easy to start here where you
just feel the contact between your skin and your clothing.
You're aware of your hands resting on your legs. Bring

(01:31:27):
the focus up to your shoulders. Most of us have
tense shoulders because we're on our phone or behind a desk.
So as you're aware of your shoulders, the tension can
just drop away. Bring your focus to the front of

(01:31:51):
your body. Start to notice your breathing. The trick here
is not to try to breathe or go into deep breathing,
but just let your breath be natural and focus on

(01:32:21):
the rising and falling of your chest or your belly
with each breath, and when you realize your mind has wandered,
gently come back to the breath. Now you can make
the focus more precise by feeling the air in your
nose or your mouth. If you can breathe through your nose,
then do that, otherwise the mouth, and you're sensing the

(01:32:46):
air as it comes in and out of your nostrils
or your lips. You can feel the air brushing against
the skin at the edge of your nose or your mouth,
and then you'll realize your mind has gone somewhere and
you generally bring it back. Okay, And to end the session,

(01:33:09):
we'll just do a short one for now. Take another
moment to think about compassion. You're dedicating your practice to freedom, compassion,
and happiness for yourself and all beings and stop there.

(01:33:31):
I mean that was short, but it gives you an
idea of the process. And one major warning is you
trip yourself up if you try and think, well, did
it go well? Partly because of the culture we're in
and how everything's about sensation. I think we only think
something's working if it makes us feel something, and meditation

(01:33:55):
is very different. You know, when I start. When I
first started meditating, I described how I really hate it
and found it really stressful. One thing I remember that
happened to me was I started to do quite a
lot of it because I thought, Okay, I'm going to
get into this thing and do it and become like
a pro. And I was doing loads of it and
finding it was making me feel more unhappy. And I
was feeling this kind of sense of like sinking feeling

(01:34:16):
in my chest. And I thought, you know, I'd struggled
with depression anywhere. I thought it was making me more depressed.
And I went to rimpichat my teacher, and I said,
I'm doing loads of it. It's making me depressed. He says,
nothing to do with the meditation. It's how you are.
He said, you're a junkie. You're using your meditation like

(01:34:36):
a drug. I said, what do you mean. He said, well,
I think you're sitting there waiting for it to kind
of like come on. You're waiting for it to give
you a high. And It's so true because I realized
I'd been sitting there, like getting addicted to it and thinking, Okay,
I'm going to do my meditation. Right, I've done five minutes.
Where's the bliss? When am I going to feel good?

(01:35:00):
And what he was trying to tell me is that
if I'm trying to make myself feel good, I'm already
coming from a place of lack.

Speaker 2 (01:35:08):
You know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:35:09):
I'm already saying to myself, I don't feel good, So
I'm actually promoting a sense of lack.

Speaker 2 (01:35:15):
So how do we perceive the meditation?

Speaker 1 (01:35:16):
Then? If it's not, just give up judgment, just do it.
Just do it, Just do it. And it's not going well,
going badly? I like it, I don't like you. Just
do it and try to let go of quality control.

Speaker 2 (01:35:32):
I really need to start doing it. My partner, she's
so great. She does every morning for like twenty thirty minutes.

Speaker 1 (01:35:38):
So why don't you sit next to her?

Speaker 2 (01:35:40):
She said this to me. What stops you? And what
stops me?

Speaker 1 (01:35:44):
Hmmm? I mean it's there on tap, She's doing it
every morning. What's stopping you sitting next to her?

Speaker 2 (01:35:55):
I think I think one of the things that comes
to mind, is how uncomfortable I feel in silence and
the idea of like silence and being.

Speaker 1 (01:36:12):
Because she's there, would you be okay better on your.

Speaker 2 (01:36:15):
Own then No, it's just like silence with my own thoughts.
I spend a lot of time trying to kind of
not I spend a lot of time trying to distract myself,
don't we all.

Speaker 1 (01:36:28):
That's welcome to the modern world.

Speaker 2 (01:36:30):
I'm pretty extreme, are you. Yeah, I'm pretty extreme. So, like,
if I go into the shower, yeah, I have to
have something playing, something talking, a podcast, it could be
the news, it could be YouTube. If I'm no matter
where I am, I always, even when I go to sleep,
I have to be listening to something. So I've like
almost wired my brain in the opposite way where it's
there's always something. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:36:49):
I went through a phase where I couldn't eat unless
I was also watching something.

Speaker 2 (01:36:52):
I mean, yeah, I mean I do that. I can't
ask us something playing. But that's why meditation is perfect
for you. Yeah, I know, tell me about because this
is giving you a way to find a different way
to experience yourself. Yeah, I mean you know you. I'm
sure you exercise. Yeah, so you go to the gym. Yeah,

(01:37:14):
and you that's challenging. Yeah, and you're you're you're pushing
your muscles and there's a kind of like there's an
effort required. Do you know what it is? Same thing,
same thing with the gym. I know that if I go,
my muscles are going to grow, I'm going to be stronger,
I'm going to be healthier, happier, all those things. And
because I've never done meditation, I don't actually have evidence
of the uside.

Speaker 1 (01:37:34):
Just have a brain scan after four days and you'll see.

Speaker 2 (01:37:37):
That's why I ask you the question about you before
and you after? Yeah, what is the difference? And if
whoever's listening to this right now, can you give them
a before and after picture of how their life will
will be practically different if they implement just ten minutes
a day meditating.

Speaker 1 (01:37:51):
Okay, So I find it really inspiring to know that
there are visible changes in the brain scan after four days.
You don't necessarily feel all those changes, but knowing that
gives you faith and confidence. Just let you know, if
you eat healthy food, your you know your body will improve,
your health will improve. So knowing that is a good
thing in terms of seeing the results everybody's different. There's

(01:38:15):
no you can't draw a graph, you can't say if
you do X amount of days you will reach this
level of calm or focus. But what happens is as
you start to meditate, after a few days or weeks,
you just start to feel you can handle stuff better.
So for me, the practic, my main practice is very
much connected what I was talking about before with trying

(01:38:37):
to sit with discomfort and stop pushing it away. And
that's a total revolution in my life. I was always
on the run. Always.

Speaker 2 (01:38:46):
I think we failed to realize that actually our entire
human experience is just in our minds. Does that make
sense what I'm trying to say there, because I'm and
they're asking you about like what's the upside of this whatever?
But it's falling into the trap of not realizing that
everything I will experience today is actually formed in my

(01:39:09):
own mind.

Speaker 1 (01:39:09):
That's the whole reason for meditation, is to know that
everything is dependent on your mind, the good and the
bad everything. So instead of being so obsessed with the
details of what's going on, go to the source. Yeah,
go to the source the projector rather than the movie,

(01:39:30):
go to the source and change that and transform that
and work on that.

Speaker 2 (01:39:35):
So how has your projector changed in the last thirty years.

Speaker 1 (01:39:38):
I'm definitely a happier person. I'm definitely more at peace
with myself. That negative voice doesn't come up, you know that,
that self hatred has really kind of like what's the word,
kind of like yet gone away. And I'm happier and

(01:40:00):
I've got I feel so so lucky to have tools
that I know I can use when I'm suffering. You know,
for the last few years, I've suffered with quite a
lot of ill health because I had really really severe
COVID right at the start of the pandemic, and it
did something to my heart and my lungs. And since then,
I've had you could call it long COVID, you could

(01:40:21):
call it heart lung damage, whatever. So I live with
kind of levels of illness that are hard to deal with.
But this practice is something I can do. I can
sit there with an ill body and send love into
that body and feel kind of okay. So it's made
me stronger and I can function better than before. But

(01:40:42):
you know the other thing is I don't really care.
I don't really care whether it's working or not because
I trust it and I'm just going to keep going,
and I'm in for the long game. I'm just going
to keep going. You signed a lifelong vow, I did.
I have taken vows to be a monk for my life.
Why when I put the robes on, I felt every

(01:41:02):
I felt every cell in my body.

Speaker 2 (01:41:06):
Click.

Speaker 1 (01:41:07):
And it sounds a bit weird, but it just felt
like that. I felt all my cells fall into place.
I just felt, really, this is this is this is
really right for me. I think it's what I've been
looking for all along. When it is a way of
working with my mind. I'm not really interested in religion.
I'm not really interested in faith, but I'm really interested

(01:41:29):
in the mind. And being a monk has given me
this opportunity to work on my mind, but also an
opportunity to be of some use in the world, like
some help to others.

Speaker 2 (01:41:41):
So can let me challenge this a little bit in
terms of how I imagine someone listening might might respond.
They go, Okay, so you went through this process. You
worked on your mind. Now you've worked on your mind. No,
no working, it's not over. Okay, total work in progress.
And this is the mis This is part of the misconception.
If someone will listen and say, well, you've worked in
your mind now, so go live now.

Speaker 1 (01:42:01):
No, it's an ongoing process. I'm still a mess. I'm
still a mess, but I'm okay with being a mess.
That is a huge difference is that I still get stressed,
i still get upset, but I'm really gentle with myself
in a way that I never knew how to be.
I was always you're so disgusting. What's wrong with you?
You should be ashamed of yourself. That's gone. Now I'm
okay with with myself and that that is happiness. That

(01:42:25):
really has made me happier.

Speaker 2 (01:42:26):
So it's for me.

Speaker 1 (01:42:27):
It's not about oh, you've done it and now it's ongoing.

Speaker 2 (01:42:32):
What is the most important thing we didn't talk about
that we should have talked about as it relates to
the suffering that my viewers are probably experiencing in their
own life.

Speaker 1 (01:42:41):
You know, what's missing always is we can talk about
this stuff, but are we going to do it? And
what's really missing for so many people is they will
listen to this episode, or they will read a book
about meditation or see a video, and it all sounds great,
but then we get busy and forget to do it.
What's missing for everybody is doing it. How do we

(01:43:04):
jump from being interested in something to actually doing it.
I mean, there's a joke which is the definition of
a Buddhist as somebody who's either meditating or feeling bad
that they're not meditating, and that is it isn't it.
It's a bit like exercise. We know we should be
doing it. So for me, the missing link is people

(01:43:24):
try and force themselves to meditate because they know it's
good for them, and then it's a hopeless process. They
won't do it because it becomes another should on the
to do list. I think the only way to become
really enthusiastic about doing it every day is to really
think about it and realize that it will give you

(01:43:44):
what you were looking for anyway, from the coffee, the drugs,
the alcohol, the sex, the whatever it is you're into.
Whatever we're looking for out there, meditation it was happiness,
it was freedom, it was release. The only place you
can find that is in your mind, because going down

(01:44:05):
those roads is just taking you further into needing. More So,
I think that the thinking process that helps people meditate
every day is to think about how it will give
you what you were looking for anyway, and then you
want to do it. Then you feel like, oh, okay,
we have no sense of exhaustion when it comes to

(01:44:25):
chasing our addictions, do we? So imagine if we could
meditate with that kind of energy.

Speaker 2 (01:44:33):
Often think I often think maybe I need to go
do some kind of meditation retreat as well, just to
get me sort of started, and just to have someone
there with me who can help me think through some
of these things. That can be a good thing just
to get started. It doesn't have to be four years.

Speaker 1 (01:44:51):
Yeah, like a weekend, three days, five days, two days,
that can be a good thing. And that's why Buddhist
centers are good places because they offer that and there's
never a kind of you've got to sign along the
dotted line and say I'm now a Buddhist. We're so
not interested in converting people to Buddhism. Is yeah, go
to a retreat.

Speaker 2 (01:45:10):
Is Buddhism growing, Yeah, I imagine.

Speaker 1 (01:45:12):
You know why it's growing. It's because it doesn't try
to attract followers, and because of that it grows interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:45:19):
And also because of everything else that's just going on
in the world at the moment, with people feeling more isolated, lonely, purposeless, depression, suicidality,
all of these things we're seeing a lot, especially in
young men as well. The stats around young men and
their suicidal ideation and their feelings of purposelessness and their
loneliness status are worse than women's as well.

Speaker 1 (01:45:40):
But I think yes, the way the world is with
all of these challenges and negative things. At the same time,
what's hugely growing in modern culture is people getting more
interested in their own minds. There are more and more
people going for psychotherapy, counseling, meditation, any kind of discipline
that helps us to understand our minds better. That interest

(01:46:01):
is growing. So we're in a really exciting phase in
history where people are wanting to transform their minds, wanting
to take control of consciousness.

Speaker 2 (01:46:12):
It's because we've had something fail us.

Speaker 1 (01:46:14):
Maybe we're waking up to realizing that the system hasn't
worked for us. We've created a kind of gilded cage
for ourselves. This beautiful material world that is also running
out of resources, so it's not going to be able
to serve us much longer if we carry on abusing
the planet. So we have created our own prison, and
now we're looking for the way out.

Speaker 2 (01:46:37):
It turns out it wasn't the individualism and the materialism
after all. Maybe it was always there inside us.

Speaker 1 (01:46:49):
That's Buddhism would say that we are Buddha within. We
all have a sleeping Buddha within us, and we have potential.
We have great capacity for awakening, great capacity to help others.
It's just like a crystal covered in layers and layers
and layers of mud, and we need to clear the
mud away.

Speaker 2 (01:47:10):
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the
last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not
knowing who they've left it for. And the question that
has been left for you, what are the ways that
you express your love and appreciation for people who matter
to you in your personal or professional life.

Speaker 1 (01:47:29):
I don't do this very well all the time, but
I try to be there for them when they're going
through a hard time. Because I used to find it
really scary, and I'd run away and i'd close down.
I try to in the same way as I try
to move towards my own discomfort, I try to be
there with other people when they're uncomfortable and not judge.

(01:47:52):
I try that. I'm sure I fail a lot, but
I try A.

Speaker 2 (01:47:57):
Friend who mine describe that as sitting in the mud
with them.

Speaker 1 (01:47:59):
Yeah, yeah, we.

Speaker 2 (01:48:01):
Often try and fix and correct.

Speaker 1 (01:48:02):
And yeah I haven't I see myself trying to do that,
give advice or whatever. It's not about that. It's about
being with the person, being being with them without judging them.

Speaker 2 (01:48:14):
Thank you so much for what you do. And we've
got these incredible books which I'm going to recommend everybody
check out, both Sunday Times bestsellers. I believe in amongst
Guide to Happiness, Meditation in the twenty first century, and
this book is called Handbook for Hard Times, amongst Guide
to Fearless Living. I think that your message is more
important now than it's ever been, because there's I mean,

(01:48:35):
much of the reason why I've probably stumbled across Buddhism
is for the same reasons that many people are, which is,
it feels intuitively like that the answers we've been given
in the way of life that we're all living is
failing us in some way, and we know that we
can feel it inside ourselves, but the answers that we
see to as antidotes to that feeling aren't much better
all the time, And they're again often they're about self

(01:48:58):
for it's about, you know, join this group of people
that are doing this sort of thing over here, or
there's this religious group that you can join. But actually
Buddhism offers us an alternative approach, which is to go
inside ourselves and to alleviate ourselves from the suffering that
we've self imposed by understanding that maybe the answers we

(01:49:19):
were looking for were inside the whole time. And I'm
so glad that people like you do podcasts are like
this because that you're getting the message out there into
the world, and it's a message that I think is
so unbelievably important. And I think maybe, maybe, just maybe
maybe you've persuaded me today to just give it a shot. Yeah,
And that's the hard thing, because it's good enough, and
it's all well enough knowing about something, But then what

(01:49:42):
will I do tomorrow morning?

Speaker 1 (01:49:45):
When you sit there tomorrow morning, Yeah, and your mind
starts racing. Whatever you do, don't feel like you've failed.
Just remind yourself that the thoughts actually make your meditation stronger,
because if coming back to the breast is what you're
trying to do, you have to have somewhere to come
back from. Yeah, the thought that took you away is

(01:50:07):
exactly what brings you back, So bring it on. The
more thoughts the better. Okay, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:50:14):
I'm so appreciative of you, and thank you for spreading
the words that you're spreading, because, as I said, you're
going to be saving and saving a lot of people
from a lot of pain and suffering, but also giving
them an alternative approach to sitting with it with a compassion.

Speaker 1 (01:50:27):
So thank you, thank you. It's really lovely to spend
time with you.