Buddhist Teacher: No One Is Talking About This Hidden Epidemic! The Western Lie Behind Depression and Anxiety

29:21But 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 examination of awakening, the inner awareness. It's a path of mental discovery. It's a science. So it's not a religion, per se? 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.

30:10It's really about the power of your own mind. And is there a hell and 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. They say these are all mental experiences. Everything is mind, according to Buddhism. So you get to the monastery. Yeah. Talk to me about your journey of healing. So I was quite ill for a while in the monastery, and they kind of left me alone. They let me rest a lot.

30:52I did little bits of light work around the monastery, started to meditate.

31:00You know, I actually hated meditation when I first did it. This was a problem. You know, I believed in it. I grew up in a Buddhist family. There's been this kind of faith in Buddhism as I grew up, but I never actually did anything. 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 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 even. Why did you hate it?

31:40I 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, and the more I tried to clear my mind, the louder it was shouting. And 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. 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.

32:28What is it then? 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. 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.

33:10it's like trying to get a small child to sit still in their high chair while you're feeding them. They're going to 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 10 minutes of just being blank and then you carry on with your day, where's the journey? What journey is that? You just passed out on the floor for 10 minutes. Might as well sleep or something. Yeah, yeah. And I can fully understand that if you're really stirred up and miserable and stressed, the idea of 10 minutes of switching it off would be great.

33:57But it's not the solution. It doesn't work. What is the solution? 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. 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.

34:41You know, 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 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? I can relate. It takes me seven seconds to drift off when I'm trying to meditate.

35:16So it's not that at all. It's that 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. That 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.

35:55you suddenly realize, oh, where was I? I'm supposed to be meditating. So that is meditation. You're back with your awareness. And 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, 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.

36:36And if you do this like an exercise, almost like going to the gym and getting strong day after day, week after week, you're teaching yourself how 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 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 suffer hijacked by our thoughts yeah hijacked is a great great you know, it's stormed the like pilot's cabin and it's flying us.

37:26Yeah, exactly. Wherever it wants to go. Exactly. That's kind of the experience we have. So then meditation puts you behind the wheel of the car. Most people haven't had the experience you've had training yourself to sort of disassociate or realize 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? 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.

38:04I have so many friends who meditate while they have families and busy jobs and they do 15 minutes a day or twice a day or whatever. It can absolutely be done in anybody's lifestyle. But the whole point is that you are learning to find your own inner freedom. you're learning how to discover that you you are bigger than the pain and suffering that seems to drive your life because what 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 so interesting is when you start to think about okay when when I'm unhappy or when I'm angry or whatever, if I am observing myself being unhappy, is the observer unhappy?

38:54Is the observer angry? And if I feel angry and I know I'm angry, the part of my mind that's 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's where we can find our freedom. And when we talk about seeking purpose 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 drinking a cup of coffee or water, small moments.

39:34In every moment, we're looking for release or freedom. We think we're looking to feel happy or we think we're looking for love or sex or whatever it is. 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 you meditate and you step back and look at your mind, that observational aspect is key. To become the sky. Yeah, to become the sky rather than the clouds. and then I think it can change your life because you know when I first met my teacher, he was quite a straight-talking person.

40:24He wouldn't, you know, say much, and what he said was often could 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 said, stop taking yourself so seriously. 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 is peanuts, you know, stop taking yourself seriously. 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.

41:01Try 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, 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 that's a very limited happiness. But imagine if you could be happy no matter what.

41:40Is that what Buddhism helps us to do? 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? I think through freeing our minds and helping others to do the same. Can I be in that state of mind where I am the sky while also being incredibly effective in my job as a CEO?

42:17Yeah, I think this is possibly one of the misconceptions. You know, this is something I came across quite early on when I was teaching meditation. I started to give talks about meditation in the workplace like 25 years ago. So before it became very popular, now mindfulness is everywhere in the corporate world. But when I started, 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 the side and he said, please don't make them too relaxed. I said, what do you mean?

42:58He said, well, I like what you do, but I 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, 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 you meditate it can make 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 here.

43:57Some 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 meditation which I also think he cites as being much of the reason 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 in their missions, their professional missions?

44:41I 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 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 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.

45:40Meditation makes you more ethical. It makes you not ethical in a kind of, you know, 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. I was just looking for a couple of examples. And Ray Dalio, who a lot of people know is one of the 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.

46:15And 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 Dorsey, let's say, who's the co-founder of Twitter and Square, said there's nothing more impactful on my work than meditation. And Steve Jobs 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 zen buddhism and was a regular meditator and he um says that his minimalist design philosophy and focus were strongly influenced by his spiritual and meditative practices you see i think the the um 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.

47:06I'm not going to be a workaholic. I'm going to drop the ball. Yeah. If I'm too calm, but I don't think of calm in that way at all as almost like a tranquilised calm. I think of calm as being able to keep a cool head under fire and be really precise and really on the focus, 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 areas of your psychology that trip you up. I'm hearing like clarity and emotional control. Yeah, optimizing how your brain performs. I started my first business at 12 years old, and I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18.

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49:54Because when we think about victimhood, it is 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 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.

50:33You are right 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 meditation, you're learning 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 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. I mean, it's very scientific that there's a Buddhist meditation, which literally is about a table, like, you know, here we are with this table.

51:13And they say, if you take apart this table, you'll find it doesn't exist. Because the table, as it seems right now, 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 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.

51:55There is no such thing as the partless particle, because if it's a particle, it can be 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 throw this cup at somebody, it's going to hit their head and hurt them. There's no point saying, well, it's all empty. Don't worry about it. 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.

52:37whether that be people or objects in the world around us or our mind itself and if we can desolidify some of that we could become more free we all 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 a comment in our instagram page of someone some something someone said about us how does one go about alleviating ourselves from this kind of burden Yeah. So for me, it's very much about dropping the story and looking at the feeling. Okay. Explain that to me. So for me, this became a very, very important practice for me when I was in a long retreat.

53:30So I went into a very long retreat for four years. I became a monk for a year. I stayed a bit longer, stayed a bit longer. It was after about four years that I decided to do this for life, and I took lifelong vows. And then I knew about these long – I did some short retreats, but I knew about these long retreats. But it wasn't until 12 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. Nobody goes in or out, and you are meditating many, 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.

54:11It'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 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 12 years, and I'd already started to, you know, give a few talks about meditation. And maybe I thought I was quite sorted, but I wasn't.

54:51And 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 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, 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 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 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'm I was feeling completely alienated from the whole thing.

56:05I 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, 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, like, saw red and just ran. I legged it out of the retreat. which is unthinkable, you know, in a four-year retreat, you're not supposed to leave. I jumped over the wall and tried to escape. I say tried to escape as if I was in some kind of, 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.

56:48And I remember, like, freaking out and running and running and running down this road in the rain. 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, the abbot of my monastery said, okay, 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 he will let you back in.

57:32And during that time, I thought really deeply and I really knew I wanted to go back in because there was at that moment a thought of, shall I give up being a monk? Shall I give up the whole thing? I can't do this. 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 heal myself. I'd been sinking so badly and if I was to go back in there, I would have to try a completely new approach. Why did you choose to go back in? 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.

58:28If 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 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. Why did you want to do it? If something is painful and causing you anxiety. 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.

59:10This pain could be the breakthrough. Most people in their lives, when they think about the things that give them anxiety or pain or fear, we live as sort of discomfort avoiding humans, so we try and run to comfort or pleasure. Exactly. So life is hard, let's run from it. Exactly. Let's get on a plane, fly to another country, and try and just set up a new life somewhere else. It 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 run to the end of the earth, and that thing that has been tormenting you is part of you.

59:49And until you learn to integrate that, it will always trip you up. And so I went back into that retreat knowing, okay, this is your last chance. If you mess this up again, that's it. You know, forget it. So it was a real, like, make or break situation. And I went back in and I... Everything changed. Because I found... I had to find a different way of dealing with that suffering. What was that? OK, so I'm back in there and it's coming up again. The depression, the anxiety, the pain. To me, it felt like something that was piercing me. It felt like there was a knife constantly twisting, twisting and turning in my heart, like in the middle of me.

1:00:47It was 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 14? Is it what happened to me when I was 17? Is it this? Is it that? Is it my family? What is it? That's the story. I say story, I'm not belittling people's stories. I'm just saying it's the narrative, isn't it?

1:01:14So I decided to use the knife as the meditation, to actually meditate on it. And the whole thing starts to change when you do that. Because 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. And how can it hurt you if you've decided to move towards it? you you've made that choice so what I started to do was 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 key um 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 it you start it starts to change it starts to change because you're accepting it my teachers had always said to me they'd always go on and on about acceptance and I just I just wanted to hit them when they said it because it sounded so grim.

1:02:41You 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 that what they meant was compassion and self-acceptance at a very, very deep level. So I was 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 one with that pain. And then you relax and something 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, stress hormone.

1:03:27When you relax, the endorphins 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 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 you hated so much. So for me, 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 love.

1:04:16And I started to have this image in my head as if I had found a 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 up until that point had been so harsh and so self-hating and I think in my teenage years when I was trying to become a successful actor I think that was the drive 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 as a monk and you become celibate and you're you know having this kind of more like looking after yourself lifestyle I 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.

1:05:33And 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. 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 love for that part of myself and for me that's only possible when you stop getting so distracted by all the 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.

1:06:26That's quite kind of nebulous. 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 in an accepting way. It's not about, you know, becoming an egomaniac. 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 was...

1:07:05Well, my teacher. Oh, your teacher. Well, he was my best friend as well as my teacher. He was murdered. He was... So 11 years ago, my teacher, Akon Rinpoche, who had been my everything for all those years. You know, he was my teacher, my closest friend. 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 monastery in Scotland. And part of his work was he would run a charity called Rokhpa, which has, oh, that's him. He would go to Tibet every year and look after projects there, feeding orphans, looking after schools, hospitals, etc.

1:07:55He was on his way to Tibet one year and he was in Chengdu in China and he was basically ambushed and stabbed, killed. And, I mean, this completely rocked the Buddhist world. It's like, you know, horrendous news. But on a personal level for me, I was one of the first people who found out I'd been on the phone to him every day. Until then, I was his assistant and working very closely with him. So it completely blew me apart. I mean, it blew me to pieces. I cannot describe how badly it blew me to pieces.

1:08:39But the meditation I've described to you saw me through. 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. And in a way, staying busy when you're grieving, it kind of helps you to, you know, stay focused. But then the nights, the nights was, 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.

1:09:30Because I had a mixture of grief, anger, despair. It was 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. We knew him. He actually had the same name as me, and we knew him quite well. So there was all of that mixed in with what on earth happened to this person, that he did this thing. 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 happened because I'd done it in retreat. It had seen me through it.

1:10:09It 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, but it absolutely calmed things, absolutely. And 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 it's all okay but I've made peace with his death

1:10:57and I mean he taught me this practice. He taught me how to do that and then he died and I had to do it. I think of it as his last gift to me.

1:11:11and I'm you know I I'm I will be forever grateful when you talk about sending love into the flames what is the the actual practice there is it certain sentences you're saying no thinking 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 so to make it really practical you know you're feeling incredible trauma in your body. Finding it physically is the easiest way to do it. 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.

1:11:56So 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, 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.

1:12:25You flood it with love. And the reason this is possible, I mean, this is touching upon a major, 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 who we are naturally deep down. so when you clear away all the the words and the 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 and if you if you were sitting with a friend who was freaking out or grieving or whatever you you're not going to slap them around the face and say snap out of it you will hold their hand and we all know how to do that.

1:13:24The 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 mean by sending love into the feeling. And what happens then is the feeling starts to change. It starts to melt, the sharpness, the sharp edges of it start to melt, and you start to be okay with being not okay.

1:13:57And it's almost as if a kind of happiness starts to arise, but it's 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. 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 whatever? You know, that's an extreme case, but the practice of forgiveness is a hard one, isn't it?

1:14:48because we've all got people in our lives that we all have wronged us or done something to us which has caused us pain and almost the way that we create our own perception of justice is by holding the grudge yeah now now why do we do that that's my 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 That's how it kind of feels, right? 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 on to that.

1:15:28In Buddhism, there's a teaching that says it's like holding on to a piece of hot metal or holding a hot coal in your hand. And it's just burning you. So if I'm holding the grudge, they have absolutely got away with it because 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 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.

1:16:11You're not going to necessarily write them a letter and say, I've forgiven you, but you're freeing yourself. You're dropping your burden because that rage is toxic and that hurt is toxic. 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 it that easy? I'm just going to let go. It's not that easy. It's bloody hard. But meditation gives you the tools, partly because meditation anyway is helping to loosen up that kind of glue that we have in our minds where we're glued into those feelings. 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.

1:16:59So the feeling of rage can start to be less heavy for you. You've been through several sort of traumatic incidents. You talked about being 14, being 17, sexual abuse, parental divorce, a little bit of neglect it sounds like as well. Have you forgiven all of those people in your life?

1:17:19I 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 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 that you're using for your mental transformation. Rinpoche always used to say suffering is like compost. Compost is made of rotten vegetables.

1:18:17People chuck it away or they know how to make the field grow. And I think it's like that. so with forgiveness um i would say yeah meditation but i would say also thinking thinking deeply about about the situation you know what's really helped me with 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 in somebody 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 Buddhist answer would be, well, what do you mean they should know better?

1:19:04They know what they know. They are driven by their own confusion and their own pain. Why do you think they were out to get you? 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 think about being them and looking at the world out of their eyes. The person that hurt 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 arsehole.

1:19:50Yeah. They, you know, it almost... We 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 realise 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, 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.

1:20:27I'm just saying lighten up a bit because people are just doing their best and sometimes their best is really bad. And that doesn't have to become your problem. It's not really about you. We'll 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 360 degree view of a situation rather than just from your perspective 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 poor them it's 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 make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself.

1:21:15I'm inviting 10 ,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. 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 iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips 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 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 10 000 people that join before it closes so if you want to join our private closed community head to the link in the description below or go to do ac circle.com i will speak to you then i'm gonna let you into a little bit of a secret you're probably gonna 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.

1:22:14And right after she posted it, the entire office clapped in our Slack channel. And this might sound crazy, but at the Diary of a CEO, this is the type of 1 % improvement we make on our show. And that is why the show is the way it is. By understanding the power of compounding 1%, 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 change in your outcomes. 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.

1:22:49Some interactive elements. And the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the 1 % that will ultimately change your life. So if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for a colleague or for your team, then head to thediary.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 becoming a Buddhist monk or starting a business or pursuing a passion or moving to Bali.

1:23:30Many of us have these dreams, these callings, but we're trapped in fear. 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 pervades everything? Yeah, it's both. To me, this became hugely obvious when I came out of that four-year retreat, because that retreat was 2005 to 2009. When I came out of that retreat, everybody had smartphones. During those four years, the whole landscape of technology changed dramatically. Smartphones, social media, the whole thing happened during that time. And you hadn't been on the internet?

1:24:16No, no, we had nothing. Before my retreat, some people had Blackberries and 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, you know, going up the escalator and the tube in London and the little billboards of moving images, that made me feel dizzy. But where I'm going with this is 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 that people have to do we know we all know about clickbait we all know about how the the headline of an article has to be shocking enough to make you read the article and then you see the ads 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 then the other level we're completely influenced by it.

1:25:24So we're now walking around 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 overeat, 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, 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.

1:26:02So 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. I think we have to protect our minds with meditation. Does this mean like throw your phone away and don't go outside? What does it mean? No. 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 meditation in busy situations. What does that mean?

1:26:43So 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 stressy 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 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're re 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 impatience.

1:27:41But if you do a micro moment of mindfulness, you are changing the wiring. You're teaching yourself that you can meet stress 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 situations. Instead 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 impulse and action. Because so much is reaction. So much, I think we spend so much of our lives just reacting.

1:28:22In 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 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 we're 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 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.

1:29:03I don't have to bite their head off and then regret it. I could hold back. So you say meditation is the solution to many of the things we've 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, what would that plan look like? 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. Yeah. So we're going to chuck all the paraphernalia away.

1:29:37In the bin. OK, we're going to bin all of it. OK. Let me... You know, you don't need any equipment. There's a lot of spiritual tat, isn't there? I mean, you said it. You know, it's about you and your mind. It's not about having little symbols and incense. You don't need it. and okay, what is the plan? The plan is to start with 10 minutes a day. Okay, 10 minutes a day. When? 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. So I get up, I check my emails, check my WhatsApp, then meditate.

1:30:22I'm joking. If you want. No, no, tell me the optimal way. You're going to be my teacher. Get up straight away and meditate. Okay, get up straight away and meditate. because you're starting your day right and 10 minutes is enough to start with and the beauty of this is that you know they can show in brain scans that 10 minutes a day after four days there'll be visible changes in your brain so knowing that keeps you going because you think okay this literally is like weight training 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.

1:31:04And this is what elevates the meditation from being just a kind of brain gym 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 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, oh, today I want this or want that.

1:31:42It'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 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 aware of yourself. So, okay, so let's just try this. so take a moment to set the intention of compassion

1:32:27making the intention that you're doing the practice for yourself and others

1:32:38and now just become aware of your hands 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.

1:33:07Bring 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.

1:33:30Bring your focus to the front of your body.

1:33:40Start to notice your breathing.

1:33:45The trick here is not to try to breathe or go into deep breathing, but just let your breath be natural.

1:34:01And focus on 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 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

1:34:42and then you'll realise your mind has gone somewhere and you gently bring it back ok and to end the session we'll just do a short one for now take another moment to think about compassion

1:34:59you're dedicating your practice to freedom, compassion and happiness for yourself and all beings and stop there. 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's very different. You know, when I first started meditating, I described how I really hated it and found it, you know, 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.

1:35:49And 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 in my chest and I thought, you know, I'd struggled with depression anywhere. I thought it's making me more depressed. And I went to Rinpoche, my teacher, and I said I'm doing loads of it. It's making me depressed. He said it's nothing to do with the meditation. It's how you are. He said you're a junkie. You're using your meditation like 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.

1:36:26And 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? 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. You know what I mean? I'm already saying to myself I don't feel good. so I'm actually promoting a sense of lack. So how do we perceive the meditation then if it's not something? Just give up judgment. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it and it's not going well, going badly.

1:37:04I like it. I don't like it. You just do it and try to let go of quality control. Quality control. I really need to start doing it. My partner, she's so great. She does it every morning for like 20, 30 minutes. So why didn't you sit next to her? She said this to me. What stops you? What stops me? Hmm.

1:37:28I mean, it's there on tap. She's doing it every morning. What's stopping you sitting next to her? I think...

1:37:42I think one of the things that comes to mind is how uncomfortable I feel in silence and the idea of like silence and being... Because she's there. Would you be okay better on your 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? That's welcome to the modern world. I'm pretty extreme. Are you? Yeah, I'm pretty extreme. So like if I go into the shower, 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 my i've like almost wired my brain in the opposite way where it's there's always something yeah i went through a phase where i couldn't eat unless i was also watching something i mean yeah i mean i do that i can't have dinner unless there's something playing but that's why meditation is perfect for you yeah i know tell me about it because this is giving you a way to find a different way to experience yourself.

1:38:48Yeah. I mean, you know, you, I'm sure you exercise. Yeah. So you go to the gym. Yeah. 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 upside. Just have a brain scan after four days and you'll see. That's why I asked you the question about you before and you after.

1:39:20Yeah. 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 be practically different if they implement just 10 minutes a day meditating? 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 those changes. but knowing that gives you faith and confidence just like you know if you eat healthy food your your just you know your body will improve your health improves so knowing that is a good thing in terms of seeing the results everybody's different there's 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 um the the practice my main practice is is very much connected what i was talking about before with uh trying 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 i think we failed to realize that Actually, our entire human experience is just in our minds.

1:40:37Does that make sense, what I'm trying to say there? Because I'm there 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 own mind. 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. Go to the source and change that and transform that and work on that. So how has your projector changed in the last 30 years?

1:41:18I'm definitely a happier person. I'm definitely more at peace with myself. That negative voice doesn't come up. You know, that self-hatred has really kind of like, what's the word, kind of like gone away and I'm happier. And I feel 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 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 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.

1:42:11I 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, 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 cell in my body click. 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 really right for me.

1:42:58I think it's what I'd been looking for all along 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 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. Okay, let me challenge this a little bit in terms of how I imagine someone listening 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.

1:43:37And this is part of the misconception is someone will listen and say, well, you've worked on your mind now, so go live now. 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 myself. And that is happiness. That really has made me happier. So for me, it's not about, oh, you've done it and now.

1:44:10It's ongoing. 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. 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 the doing it. How do we jump from being interested in something to actually doing it?

1:44:48I mean, there's a joke, which is the definition of a Buddhist is 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 try and force themselves to meditate because they know it's good for them and then it's 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 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 those roads is just taking you further into needing more so so I think the 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 then you feel like oh okay we have no sense of exhaustion when it comes to chasing our addictions do we so imagine if we could meditate with that kind of energy I often I often think I often think maybe I need to go do some kind of um meditation retreat as well just to get me sort of started and just uh have someone there with me who can help me think through some of these things that can be a good thing just as just to get started it doesn't have to be four years 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 yeah go to a retreat is buddhism growing yeah i imagine it is you know why it's growing it's because it doesn't try to attract followers and because of that it grows.

1:46:59Interesting. 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 it 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 stats are worse than women's as well. 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.

1:47:34There are more and more people going for psychotherapy, counselling, meditation, any kind of discipline that helps us to understand our minds better. That interest 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. It's because we've had something fail us. Maybe we're waking up to realising 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.

1:48:12So we have created our own prison and now we're looking for a way out. It turns out it wasn't the individualism and the materialism after all. Maybe it was always there inside us. That's what 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. 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 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 I try that I'm I'm sure I fail a lot but I try a friend of mine described that as sitting in the mud with them.

1:49:40Yeah, yeah. We often try and fix and correct. And yeah, I have a I see myself trying to do that give advice, whatever. It's not about that. It's about being with the person being being, being with them without judging them. Thank you so much for what you do. And you've got these incredible books, which I'm going to recommend everybody check out with Sunday Times bestsellers, I believe, and amongst guide to happiness meditation in the 21st century. And this book is called handbook for hard times a monk's guide to fearless living i think that your message is more important now than it's ever been because there's i mean 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 the 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 or it's about you know join this group of people that are doing this sort of thing over here or there's this religious you know 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 were looking for were inside the whole time and I'm so glad that people like you do podcasts 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 it's good enough and it's all well enough knowing about something but then what will I do tomorrow morning when you sit there tomorrow morning and your mind starts racing, whatever you do, don't feel like you failed.

1:51:34Just remind yourself that the thoughts actually make your meditation stronger. Because if coming back to the breath is what you're trying to do, you have to have somewhere to come back from. The thought that took you away is exactly what brings you back. So bring it on. The more thoughts, the better. Okay. Thank you. 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 a lot of people from a lot of pain and suffering, but also giving them an alternative approach to sitting with it with compassion. So thank you. Thank you.

1:52:09It's really lovely to spend time with you.

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