Buddhist Monk: Why You’re Angry. We’re Living in Fight or Flight! The Biggest Toxins Are In Your Mind. I Hated Meditation! Gelong Thubten.

0:00In the modern world, we are slightly making ourselves ill. I was starting to look at all the reasons why, from burnout to a monastery. I just wanted to find a way to accept myself. But the reality is... I'm going to start crying. I've got to stop crying in this podcast. It's absolutely ridiculous. I feel like stress is a massive one. I just can't stop thinking about my soul. We need fight or flight in certain situations. We're not being chased by tigers. We've been chased by WhatsApp notifications. And then I think the mistake people make is they assume that... Yes. I knew I wanted to meditate.

0:32I really needed to. I was incredibly stressed. The first few times I was quite shocked at how difficult I found it. One of the barriers that I felt when I started was thinking. I just kept thinking, oh, I'm thinking. Oh, I've ruined it. People make it harder for themselves. I thought you're supposed to kind of clear your mind. That's not how it works. And the more you try and do that. Yes. What's the promise with meditation? Everybody can transform. This is like really, really important. I think if people don't understand this, they just struggle all the time. And the whole point is you... Oh my God, actually, sorry, that's just blown my mind.

1:09Tupton, hi, thanks for joining us today. Thank you. And I mean, there's a lot to get at with you. I'm very excited. But I wanted to start by asking you quite a broad question. What do you feel is your purpose with regards to getting a message out there to the general public? Well, I do like to communicate about meditation, but in a very general broad way so that people of all religions or no religion can appreciate what it can do for them. And I suppose my focus is to help people understand meditation is maybe easier than they assumed. People make it harder for themselves. I give a lot of meditation classes so I hear a lot of questions from people and I think people struggle for reasons that they don't need to be struggling for so I like to kind of simplify it and demystify it and help people understand how it can really transform their lives and also transform our society it's interesting because in in your book um the last one the second one handbook for hard times I felt like one of the common themes or threads is that we seem to give ourselves a hard time and then think that hard time is the barrier to everything

2:34and particularly in meditation if we're going to start by maybe touching on that one of the barriers that I felt when I started was thinking I just think I'm thinking oh I've ruined it, you know, give myself a hard time. Can you talk me through, you know, because I think lots and lots of people think thoughts are bad things during meditation. That's the problem, isn't it? You're meditating and you think, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to meditate. I'm just going to sit here and I'm not going to have any thoughts. And then thought comes, thought comes. And the thoughts are really random.

3:07You know, one minute you're thinking, did I feed the cats? The next minute, what should I do tomorrow? I want to go on holiday. What did I see on TV last week? You know, the thoughts just come up. And then that's when people start to feel, I can't do this. I can't get rid of the thoughts. Or people kind of disqualify themselves by saying, well, I've got a very busy mind. There's no way I can meditate. But that's what people say to themselves. That's the story people tell themselves about their journey with meditation is I can't do it. And I definitely found with myself that actually when I started meditating, I really hated it, really hated it.

3:50How old? Did you meditate at all before you went to the ministry? No, I just, in the deep end, I became a monk and learned meditation all at the same time. And I knew I wanted to meditate. I really needed to. I was incredibly stressed. But the first few times I was quite shocked at how difficult I found it and I didn't like it. And I thought, well, it's too late to back out now. You know, you've signed up for this thing. And I think the reason why I hated it so much was because of this very problem, that I thought you're supposed to kind of clear your mind and empty yourself of thoughts. And the more you try and do that, the louder it shouts.

4:31Yes. So the more you push the thoughts away, they're going to just bounce back with equal force. and then you start feeling, I don't know, it becomes like a battleground. And a failure. And you feel like a failure and the meditation actually makes you more tense. But the whole thing is based on this premise that I'm supposed to sit down and clear my mind and that's absolutely not true. That's like putting yourself into a kind of comatose state or unconscious state. That's not, you know, imagine if you could. Imagine if you could sit down and for 10 minutes just be blank blank. Well, the question is, so what?

5:10Is that what we're aiming for? Just to kind of go blank for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, then you're back to normal life. It hasn't changed you. That's not the way, that's not how it works. What's the promise with meditation? Well, I think we want to get more in charge of ourselves. We want to get more in charge of our own minds. We want to have more freedom inside. It's almost as if we have a very complex relationship with our minds, that we're trying to feel a certain way or be a certain way, but the mind controls us too much. So we definitely have thoughts and emotions we'd rather not be having throughout the day.

5:50And those are the causes of most of our problems. Our relationship with our mind is really the cause of most of our suffering. So you learn meditation because you want to change that relationship. And then I think the mistake people make is they assume that means you have to stop the thoughts and just throw them all out. But actually, that's not how it works at all. In fact, the thoughts enhance your meditation. How? Because when you're meditating, you might be using a technique such as your breathing. I say technique but I mean we're breathing all the time it's not even a technique is it? And the whole point is you notice that your mind has wandered and then you very gently bring yourself back to the breath and it's that returning that really counts because every time you come back to the breath you are actually building a skill of being able to make a choice in terms of what your mind is doing you know the mind got it's almost like you lost control of the wheel of the car and now you're back behind the wheel yeah and you drive the car back to the breath so so the coming back is what really makes you stronger which means you have to have somewhere to come back from right and if you don't go anywhere so the thoughts you're not going to learn anything the thoughts that took you away are the very thing that bring you back.

7:18So actually, the whole experience of meditation is all about that process of sometimes you're with the breath, sometimes you're noticing that you got lost, and sometimes you're returning to the breath. And all those three aspects, being with the breath, noticing you got lost, or returning to the breath, they are all meditation. so noticing that your thinking is meditation which means the thinking has enabled the meditation this is like really really important because I think if people don't understand this they just struggle all the time and there is that moment isn't it when you're meditating and then you get completely caught up in a kind of mental fantasy and mind wandering and then there's that moment where you realize, oh, where was I?

8:08That doesn't have to be a moment of failure. Yeah. It doesn't have to be. It's actually a moment of success because you realize where you were and you come back. If you meditate like that, the whole thing becomes more gentle, becomes more loving, more kind, more compassionate. Otherwise, it's a nightmare. I mean, really a nightmare. And I know this because I've been there in that nightmare of trying to squash the thoughts down and feeling dreadful about myself. And in a way, using meditation just to try and suppress everything. I've tried that. It didn't work. I mean, I've kind of gone a bit wonky because I've talked to you about something and I'm desperate to get the backstory because I want to learn about young you.

8:57Okay. and I know that something happened and you literally got burnt out. Can you just talk to me about what was happening to you at that time in your life and how did you get burnt out? I had a very huge burnout at 21. So young. Very young. I was living in London and then New York. I was training to be an actor. My mother's an actor and I kind of wanted to follow in her footsteps and that was my career path. And I started doing bits of acting. I also went to drama school. But I was living an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle. I was a real party animal, but not a happy, it wasn't a happy experience.

9:40It was a real desperate kind of running away from myself because I would have these periods of depression and anxiety that I didn't know what to do with except just get very busy. So very focused on career. very focused on partying and addictions and all of that stuff just brought me to my knees, but in a very explosive way. You know, with some people burnout sort of as an incremental thing. With me, it was just very sudden. Literally one morning waking up in Brooklyn in New York and just having all the symptoms of a heart attack, but not a heart attack, but felt like one. went to the doctor the doctor said you you've burnt yourself out you you've had a breakdown you've got to stop doing everything you're doing and just change your lifestyle I mean this was the this was the seed for me to becoming a monk I know it's a it's an unusual choice you know from burnout to a monastery but for me I was desperate for something quite radical to change my life How did that change happen from burnout to monastery?

10:52How did you get there? So when I had this burnout, I think Buddhism became a very strong option for me. And an old school friend of mine told me about a monastery in Scotland called Samyaling, which is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the borders of Scotland. And they said, oh, they've just opened up this new thing where you can be a monk for a year. I love that. It sounds like a deal. Be a monk for a year. Do you know what I mean? So she said, I'm going there to be a nun. Fantastic. And I said, I want to come with you. Can I be a monk? She said, sure, let's go. So literally a friend dragged me there.

11:30She'd been there before and she knew about it. It was my oldest friend from childhood. And we went there and four days later I became a monk. But only for a year that was the plan. It didn't feel like a huge step because it was only going to be a year. It was like a retreat. It felt almost like rehab. You were, what, 22 at this point? It's an enormous thing for a 21-year-old to have spent a year celibate, no drink, no drugs, no partying in thought. Actually, all of that was a relief. Was it? A huge relief because I'd done too much of it all. Right. And so it felt like, oh, I can breathe. Now, at that point, I never was thinking this would be my whole life, but it was a breather to have some kind of reset.

12:21And I was starting to look at all the reasons why I had got involved in addictions and the lifestyle I'd been in was so much about, there was so much self-disgust about it and about me. and I just wanted to find a way to accept myself. Self-acceptance, you talk about that as well in hard times. How long a journey has it been for you to find self-acceptance and how have you done that? Okay, so what happened to me was I decided to try another year in the monastery. So in my second year, I went into solitary retreat. Okay, this is where you lose me. Okay, so I... I don't know how you did that. Well, I wanted to go deeper.

13:09I wanted to kind of lock myself away in a room and meditate very, you know, sort of full time. And it was during that time that I started to have these very revolutionary thoughts about my life. And what am I doing after this retreat? Am I going to go back to my old lifestyle or do I want to go even deeper? And that's when the idea of staying for life started to emerge. I'm so interested about when you're meditating or when you're alone and there's no one to talk to, there's no one to bounce off and there's no phone to interrupt you. is it that sometimes then when you meditate you're able to meditate on a concept about yourself or would you keep the meditation for switching off and then when you stop meditating then your mind is so clear you see things so much clearer actually it's a it's very messy it's a it's a it's a jungle you're walking through a dark jungle of your own mind because you're you're doing these meditation um methods all day where you're trying to kind of harness your attention and keep it on the different meditation practices you're learning.

14:30But the reality is it's you stuck in a corner with your own thoughts and your own feelings, and you really have to find a way to make friends with yourself. And actually during those nine months, I experienced levels of self-hatred I'd never thought were possible, like really bad. because all the props have gone, all the things that you're using to not have to be with yourself, they've gone. It's just you in a room. And then you start to experience your own trauma and your own sadness and your own misery and all of that stuff that was really bubbling away becomes on the surface. And then for me, on top of that was a whole heap of shame, a whole heap of self-criticism.

15:34I shouldn't be like this. Why am I like this? Why am I so depressed? Why am I so anxious? Why am I so useless? I'm a failure. I can't meditate. I'm a terrible monk. I'm a terrible human being. I mean, the whole lot. It's just everything. but that's the process. I mean looking back it's all fantastic because it's a process of discovering more about yourself and how to accept yourself but at the time it's very dark, very, very dark and I think in that retreat I just saw how much work I need to do on my mind and it wasn't actually until a later retreat 12 years later which was much longer, a four-year long retreat.

16:15It wasn't until then that I started to learn about self-acceptance. So how much later was that four-year retreat? 12 years into being a monk. So I'd been a monk 12 years. I'd already made the decision by then. I'd already become a lifelong monk. And I was also even teaching a bit of meditation. And I did have a feeling that I was really needing to go deeper. And I had a feeling that I was in a way just sort of suppressing myself, you know. There was something else to get at. Well, I think I went through a phase of being a bit of a sort of, a bit sort of like fake, you know what I mean? I do, yeah.

16:59Where you feel that you've earned the spiritual stripes, as it were, but there's something in there somewhere where you know there's an itch to scratch. Well, also you sort of think, well, I'm a monk, so I better look like one. Yes. I better act like one. I mean, that's super self-aware, right? I better be sort of serene. You know, I better do the serenity thing. Wow. And I think I went around trying to look a bit calm and peaceful where really there's a volcano inside. I think there was a hell of a lot of suppression going on. So that's why I went into retreat because I thought I need to get real.

17:38And tell us about that retreat. It was horrible. but very transformative. Yeah. I really hope you're enjoying this episode. And if you can, give us a follow. I went into this long retreat, four years long, on the Isle of Arran. So, you know, a remote-ish island. And the retreat is, you're in an enclosed space. It's an old farmhouse that's been converted into a retreat. So there's a wall around it and you've got a bit of a courtyard to walk in. But basically you're... You don't get out. No. And you only have one letter a month from your family. There's no internet, no phones, no news, nothing. No interaction with the outside world.

18:21And you have a very solid schedule all day of meditation. It starts very early in the morning till late at night, long, long sessions of meditation. I mean, we're talking 16 hours a day, right? I think the schedule is like, yeah, 16 hours, 14 to 16 hours a day with gaps, little breaks throughout the day. And that's all you're doing. And again, you're back to that experience of you in a room with your thoughts. And I mean, it was quite shocking because after 10 days, I already crashed, really crashed quite badly. And to be honest, the first half of the first two years of that retreat was hell. in that I...

19:06So I'd gone into the retreat with this slightly suppressed thing going on in me of just pushing all the pain down and trying to look as holy and spiritual as possible. And then there's no audience there, is there? They're all gone. So you can't... Who are you going to fool? Who are you going to try and look spiritual for? It's just you. That's when the work starts. and I really, I got incredibly depressed and it was a very toxic mix of depression and anxiety where it was oscillating from one to the other so I felt like I was just falling down a very dark hole all the time kind of screaming it was really horrendous because what I realized was that I'd been constantly pushing something away and constantly hating it and hating myself and all of that stuff.

20:01And when I learned how to sit with it and sit in the pain, it's a very physical thing. How do you do that? Well, it feels physical. So there's an emotional state. There's a very strong misery and upset and like a storm in your mind. but I felt it in my body because our emotions resonate in our bodies, don't they? So you can feel sadness like a sinking feeling. You can feel fear in your belly. You can feel stuff in your body. So for me, it felt like a constant pain in my chest, like a heaviness combined with almost like a knife twisting, twisting constantly in my chest. and so that became my meditation.

20:55I'd never thought that, I'd always thought that's all nasty stuff, I've got to get rid of it so I can do the good stuff. But actually using that as my meditation became very, very helpful. And you sat with the pain? Sitting with it. Right, okay. Sitting with it. Because when you turn something into your meditation focus, your whole relationship with it starts to shift because you're allowing yourself to stay with it and when your mind wanders you bring it back to it so instead of trying to get it away you come back to it yeah oh wow and so the second half of the retreat was very different because I was started working with that and that's the that's the first time in my life and I'm I'm quite surprised to say this, you know, after 12, I'd already been doing meditation for 12 years.

21:47It's the first time I started to enjoy meditation. Because before it had always been an experience of trying to get rid of something. And now it was all about bring it on. Bring it in. Bring it on and be with it. So we... Be okay with it. It's funny, when you were talking earlier and you were talking about meditating and things coming into your mind, And the worst thing for me, I don't know if you know Johan Hari. Yeah. He wrote a great book called Stone and Focus. And the worst thing for me is that I just can't stop thinking about my phone. I just want to look up. I wonder what. What if? What am I missing?

22:27Yeah. Could something really interesting be happening? Yeah. It's incredibly addictive. Oh, I must just check. It's so addictive. I'm in the middle of meditating. Yes. What am I doing thinking about my phone? Put it in a different room, maybe. So what's your relationship to your phone? How do you do that? Okay, so it was a big shock to me to come out of that four-year retreat and find that everybody had phones. So what years did you go in? Like, what happened? Did you not hear any news? Nothing. Oh, my God. Actually, sorry. That's just blown my mind. Four years in our life now is so long. But also four particular years.

23:03It was 2005 to 2009. Oh, wow. Twitter. The whole lot. Facebook, all social media and smartphones. So before my retreat, a few people had blackberries and that was it. I come out of retreat. I literally feel like I've entered a zombie film because everybody's walking around. No one's looking at you. No, they're walking around with these gigantic things in their hands and just totally in the phone all the time. I'm in London. I came out of retreat. I arrived in London. You went straight to London? Yes. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe I should have like gradually. But no, I was in London and you're going up the escalator in the tube and the pictures on the side are all digital moving images.

23:48Before my retreat, they were static. A subtle difference. But boy, did it make me feel sick. I felt dizzy. And so I'm coming out of this retreat and I'm experiencing the world very differently because everybody's got phones. You know, maybe when you're in it, you don't see the speed speeding up. But when you go out and come back in, you see it. Yeah. And, you know, I'm thinking, what is this doing to our mental health as a species? What's going on with us is that our relationship with information has completely changed. because you used to have choice. You could choose to go to the news. Yes. Now the news comes to you.

24:35It's invasive, isn't it? It's invasive and also it's monetized and so there's a whole different vibe. We're all frightened. Well, there's a different energy to how the information is portrayed. Because of the monetization of digital news, you've got a whole system where headlines have to be written in a certain way to grab your attention so that you open the article and then you've got the ads so how do you grab somebody's attention you frighten them so I do have a phone and I've often questioned I've often thought could you actually do the stuff I do without the phone because I write books I give talks I travel I'm catching trains I mean nowadays even to catch a train nobody has tickets anymore it's all on the phone and I do have a phone and I do see how addictive it can be and so my policy with myself is there's no point me being all holy about it and saying I'm not going to use a phone.

25:36I'm going to use the phone but I'm also going to give myself medicine in the mind. So as many times as I'm checking my phone I also want to meditate. So I practice micro moments. Oh tell me about those, they sound amazing. Micro moments of meditation many, many times a day. You know, like we're constantly, it's like snacking on the phone. Well, also you can snack on meditation. It's a way of rebalancing things. So I'll be standing somewhere and I'll feel the ground under my feet just for a few seconds. I'll be aware of my shoulders, aware of my breathing. Tiny, tiny moments repeated often. I feel that that is a very powerful way, well, to integrate meditation into your daily life.

26:20but also particularly with the phone is to, in a way, detox the mind and in a way a counterbalance to the. Yeah. And so social media as well. I mean, I like to post things that are inspiring. So why not use social media to reach more people, reach people with a positive message? It doesn't have to be here's the food I've just eaten. Everyone, please be jealous of my meal. It doesn't have to be that, does it? It can be something different. It's all about motivation, isn't it? But I'm going to be completely honest with you. I can see that I get over-addicted to my phone. I can see that. But I've also got methods I use that help to balance that.

27:06So let's talk a bit about fight or flight, because I feel like in the modern world, and especially when you're thinking about people, perhaps in their second chapter, maybe 40 plus we're looking at the next you know part of our lives and we're all interested in trying to be a bit healthier because we're looking at trying to maximize our enjoyment of the second part of our lives and we're not getting any younger so but stress it seems I do feel like we are slightly making ourselves ill yeah and it's not even necessarily with you know we're all exercising more, all trying to eat better. But there are outside things that are making us sick.

27:49And I feel like stress is a massive one because I, maybe because of my childhood or something, but I constantly feel like I am ready for a disaster at all times. Now I'm really, I started meditating for that reason. What's your take on the stresses that are put on us today? It's huge. And I do think that we put a lot of effort into the body, but not enough into the mind. I mean, you can drink the green juices, you can not drink out of plastic bottles. You can try and avoid as many toxins as possible. But the biggest toxin is our toxic thoughts. And if we are not learning how to detox the mind, no amount of green juice is going to work.

28:39You know what I'm saying? Yes. And we are up against it because of the inputs we receive through advertising, social media, the whole messaging around you're not enough, you're not good enough. When you're told you need this product in order to be happy, which is a kind of, I mean, that's a very sort of like simplified way of describing advertising. But that's basically what it's saying. When you're told that again and again, aren't you also being told there's something wrong with you? Yes. There's something missing. So aren't we constantly receiving this kind of battering from life saying you're not good enough?

29:21You don't have enough. Even though we've got more than enough, we feel we don't have enough or we're not enough. And so I do feel that we are constantly under siege in that way. and there's a lot of fear, a lot of, it's that fight or flight. You know, fight or flight is a natural response. It's useful, you know, it's used properly. If you're being chased by tigers, bring on the fight or flight. I'm not going to sit there all zen and like meditate away. I'm going to run from the tiger. That's fight or flight in full force. But we're not being chased by tigers. We've been chased by WhatsApp notifications.

30:04aren't we? And I did feel I think in my life and I know a lot of my contemporaries have felt the same that we were almost proud of our stress levels like oh you know we are like I can do a 14 hour day I'm cooking and breastfeeding at the same time whilst coming up with a great TV idea and I'm calling everybody and I operated like that for many years and thought that I was bossing it because I was in vital flight 24-7. That's not good for my health. No, it produces a lot of cortisol in the body. And cortisol is a natural part of the body when we're in danger. But to be constantly stoking up those stress levels means we are absolutely draining ourselves.

30:54Cortisol is very draining. It's debilitating. And meditation must be an antidote to that. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's what a lot of the science shows is that you can do brain scans on people who meditate and you can see that their brains are healthier. There's less of an activation of the fight or flight mechanism. The part of the brain which deals with that, the amygdala, is less overreactive. because that's the problem is that we need fight or flight in certain situations, but we don't need it constantly throughout the day. And it's true what you say. We really go through these phases in our lives where, and it's sort of culturally encouraged where, you know, somebody says, how are you?

31:37And the right answer is busy. I'm busy. I'd like literally admire somebody if they said that, you know, maybe in the past I'd go, oh, well done you. Yes, I'm busy. Therefore, while I'm completely stressed, I'm literally on the verge of burnout, that means, oh, you're doing really well. Great. It's mad, isn't it? Great for you. If you say I'm not doing very much, there's something wrong with you. Yeah. Is that not a bit, is it not quite weird? I mean, I now admire people who say I'm taking a few days out for me. I really admire that. Because sometimes I think it's hard to identify feelings. or you know I had a um I mean I say I had it I'm sure it's still there but but I've definitely worked on it a lot a fear of abandonment and um if you were to ask me where of my fear of abandonment would be it's here you know I know where it is I know what it feels like I spent a long time using drugs to try and squish it I mean I probably had a similar youth to you the same sort of running away from things don't want to look at things I went to Narcotics Anonymous and spent years talking um and it's helped a lot but the older I've got it's helped a lot I'm more willing to look at things or go to dark places that I didn't really want to go to before and and can you when when you do that do you do you feel a sense of acceptance yes I think feeling Yes, because...