Resilience | Ajahn Brahm

Ajahn Brahm talks about how meditation can change our attitude to life and our skill to deal with life's experiences in a wholesome way. And it changes how we look at the world and we get more resilient as well. This talk is part of an online retreat organized by the Anukampa Bhikkhuni Project. Ajahn Brahm is the popular Buddhist teacher to a growing international audience of people keen to learn meditation and develop a deeper spiritual understanding.

Transcript

So you sometimes say the final warning,

But retreats keep going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

And sometimes when I look at the participants,

There's lots of what I keep calling these days the usual suspects.

In other words,

You'll find out whether it's another retreat and join in,

Which is wonderful,

Which is fine.

But please don't forget the people.

The main reason you're here is to support Anukampapikuni projects.

So please give the focus on to that.

But also all the talks which you've given so far,

Has just been focused on meditation.

And meditation is the main reason we're here.

Sometimes you could give all sorts of talks on the theories of Buddhism,

All the talks on what the Buddha said,

And what the Dhamma means and what Nibbāna means and dependent origination means and all these other things mean.

And sometimes they can get so complicated.

They fill people's minds up with ideas and theories,

And they spend the time arguing on those things.

And instead of like spending the time just filling your mind with more knowledge and more and more reasons,

And more facts and stuff,

Sometimes I always feel that what was missing many times in Buddhist practice is actually putting those things into reality,

Not just as thoughts and ideas in the head,

But as motivations,

As emotions,

Just ways you look and deal with the world.

Now remember that because sometimes each one of us is faced with problems in our life.

When we are faced with problems,

How do we deal with it?

And if you have experience,

Some meditation,

Peace and clarity,

It does change the way in which you look at the world.

It does make you more what we call resilient.

Even that word resilient is something which is a lovely simile for that in Buddhism.

And that's not to adapt Buddha's similes.

This is the simile of the guitar string.

There's no guitar string when it's pulled tight,

But something hits it,

It goes bing!

And if you loosen the tension on the guitar string,

Something hits it,

Boom,

It's got a softer resonance,

And it's got a lower pitch to it.

This is no tension on that guitar string at all.

You find that something hits it,

And it doesn't resound at all,

It doesn't make no sound,

It's silent.

I often thought that's one of the reasons why the people get sick,

Why they get upset,

Angry or whatever happens to them,

Simply because they are too tight.

They're stressed,

Too tense.

Many years ago,

Someone told me that a psychiatrist saw this man come into his office and said,

What's wrong with you?

And he said,

Well,

I have these delusions.

Sometimes I think and I act like I'm a marquee.

When you have events like in the garden in summertime,

You put this big tent,

This marquee out there,

You can put tables in there and other stuff so you can have an outdoor function.

Sometimes I think I'm a marquee,

And other times I think I'm a tipi.

A tipi is one of those indigenous like wigwams,

They sometimes call them.

So that's my problem.

Sometimes I imagine I'm a marquee,

And other times I'm a tipi.

And the psychologist got it straight away,

He said,

Sir,

Your problem,

Your problem is you're too tense.

Too tense.

Okay,

That's a funny story to begin with.

And it's a Buddhist story.

People are too tense.

When they're too tense,

They usually mess up.

They can do things so easily when they're not tense.

But when they are trying to prove something,

It's important to them,

The whole world depends upon this,

And then of course you do mess up.

And so often,

I've seen that too,

In even my life,

Not so much these days,

You're trying so hard to do something.

And that tension inside you makes the whole body and the mind too tight.

So you cannot sort of perform.

Even just some of the chanting monks and nuns do,

We do some chanting,

You have to really relax to the max.

And if you do,

Then you don't have to worry about forgetting anything.

It's one of the reasons,

If you don't know this,

One of the reasons why Buddhist monastics will prefer chanting in the Pali language,

Because in the Pali language,

When we do the chanting,

No one else understands when we make mistakes.

So we can get away with mistakes without anyone noticing it.

But if it was in English,

People would understand and get in big trouble.

So but anyway,

When you relax,

You tend not to make mistakes.

If you're working very hard to try and achieve something,

That tension inside of you means you've lost your resilience.

Something goes wrong,

Someone interferes with you,

Interrupts your quietness,

And you get angry and upset.

That shows you're not really meditating properly.

You're not practicing these teachings of the Buddha properly.

Then you learn just how to relax more.

It's like nothing,

Nothing can upset you.

That's very impressive,

Actually,

To see just how these teachings work out in your daily life.

You make a mistake,

You admit it,

You learn from it,

You grow from it.

This is actually how the Buddha taught.

He said,

Monks,

Nuns,

Lay people,

Disciples,

If you make any mistake,

Acknowledge it,

Forgive it,

No punishment,

And then you learn from it.

That's a wonderful thing about the kindness in the practice.

The kindness in the practice was something which was there in so many parts of Buddhism.

And even in the strictest of monasteries which I ever went to in Thailand,

There was still so much humor there.

And the humor which I saw in Thailand encouraged me that this was a kind place.

An example of that,

There was one of the Thai monks,

I went to see him,

A very good monk,

And people suggested that he was fully enlightened,

He probably was.

I never stayed long enough with him to really check him out.

I was too young at the time anyway.

But I remember just once that when he was,

I went to visit,

He was doing the chanting,

The usual blessing chanting in the Pali.

And he was,

This is how it went.

I know Ven.

Chanda has heard this many times.

He was putting his hand up and going,

SABBA ROGA WINI MUTO That's how he started.

And he would continue,

SABBA SANTAPA WAGITO SABBA WERAMATIGANDO NIBUTO CHATWANGBA WA SABITI YOHI WAGAN TU SABBA ROGA He carried on like that,

Going higher and higher.

I thought this monk was crazy.

But he would do that every morning in front of the lay community.

And the lay community loved it.

There was nothing against the Vinaya for monks chanting like that.

But what it was doing,

It was getting people encouraged.

It was giving energy to them.

And they were listening with a smile on their face.

And I thought that this is a bit weird,

But I realized that this was a great monk.

That was his characteristic.

And this is the way they created so much connection with ordinary people.

So those ordinary people could listen with fun,

With love,

With joy in their heart,

No matter what had happened to them the day before,

Or just even that morning.

And that blessing made their hearts pure,

More peaceful.

This afternoon,

Actually this morning,

I was giving a little bit of counseling to a 14-year-old girl who is having anxiety disorder.

And she said,

Can you give us some exercises to overcome anxiety disorder?

She's an athlete,

But she has some anxiety panic attacks at the weirdest of times.

And I told her that you need to do push-ups in the morning.

If you want to be a successful athlete,

Do the push-ups in the morning.

And that's where the 10 push-ups,

Which I do,

Believe it or not,

I do 10 push-ups every morning.

I said,

Get out your two fingers,

Put them on the side of your mouth.

One,

Two,

Three,

Four,

10 push-ups on your mouth in front of the mirror,

In your bathroom in the morning.

In other words,

Start the day laughing at yourself.

And if you ever get an anxiety disorder,

You will always know you can find a mirror or just in the mirror of a car or something,

Push up your lips like that.

You'll find that panic and laughter cannot exist at the same time.

And it's one wonderful little way of realizing that happiness is not just a waste of time.

It's not just entertainment.

It's something far deeper than that.

It just uplifts the mind.

And it sees not just the negativity,

But the beauty in the mind.

And this is something which I've often taught is an important part of the beginning of meditation.

Please never think that,

Oh no,

More meditation,

Only another day to get through.

This is not like going to the dentist.

And my apologies to any dentists looking at this.

This is something which after a while,

When you do it properly,

You understand it,

You look forward to it.

The mind leaps towards the meditation.

You hear meditation time.

That means you don't have to force or push the mind.

You just leap towards it,

Enjoys it.

Just like Louisa with her dogs,

The support dogs.

Now those dogs love you.

And you love those dogs.

You leap together.

It's not as if,

Oh no,

I've got to be with my dog again today.

Oh no,

I've got to look after the dog.

Oh no,

The dog's going to look after me.

It's a sense of that friendship and that care and that trust and that safety.

And that's after a while.

You learn that with whatever you're doing.

You learn to trust yourself,

Have fun,

Even with the meditation.

That is where years ago,

This guy,

He told me when he was taking me to this meditation retreat.

He hadn't done a meditation retreat with me before.

He'd done some of the more strict meditation retreats.

I say strict.

I think it's overly strict.

It's not the middle way.

But anyway,

He went to one of these very strict meditation retreats.

And the hall,

You always had to sit there so many minutes a day.

And then you get up and had to do some walking meditation and back and sit again.

And he had to do this all the time.

And sometimes,

If you don't get up early enough in the morning,

They come knocking on your door and just drag you to the hall to meditate.

And he said it was just like the torture chamber.

I said it's not a torture chamber.

It's a concentration camp.

You know what a concentration camp means.

And he said that attitude to actually be trained into thinking that the meditation hall is a torture chamber,

There's something terribly wrong with that.

The mind won't leap towards the meditation.

It will endure it.

It will try and get through it.

Thinking you might get something.

You do get perseverance.

And you do get the ability to endure pain,

But you don't get enlightened.

So I said stop calling it the torture chamber or the concentration camp.

And that's where I started calling the hall where we meditate.

It's the first time I used the word club med.

Club med,

Club meditation,

Not club Mediterranean,

Club meditation.

So club med in England is now Zoom and a Kumbh Bikuni meditation retreat.

And if you regard it as club med,

Your attitude is there's something to enjoy it here,

Some happiness,

Some peace,

Some fantastic stuff.

So then you don't get anxious about whatever you do.

You kind of have anxiety and joy at the same time.

And quite frankly,

Sometimes when I have to give big talks on live TV,

Live TV is one of the most scary things you can ever do.

Because live TV,

Especially if it's nationwide or something,

That any mistake you make,

Then that's actually rebroadcast.

Anything wise you say these days on state TV,

It doesn't really go very far,

But you make a big mistake and that's repeated so often.

That's why I sometimes feel very compassionate towards politicians.

They say a lot of good things,

Believe it or not.

They say one bad thing and that's repeated so many times.

But anyway,

Just learning how to enjoy whatever you're doing helps you relax.

When you relax,

Your body is comfortable.

When your body is comfortable,

It's easy just to watch the mind with ease.

That's one of the reasons why when people do get tense,

They get bored in meditation.

That's why I've taught them many different ways of meditating.

One of them was I called backwards breath meditation.

I don't know if any of you know what backwards breath meditation is,

But I will now demonstrate it to you.

Backwards breath meditation was when I asked the meditators,

Close your eyes,

Breathe in and out three times and at the end of the third breath,

Open your eyes.

Simple.

So they breathe in and out three times,

At the end of the third breath,

They'd open their eyes.

And I said almost certainly you had started with an in-breath,

In-breath,

Out-breath,

In-breath,

Out-breath,

In-breath,

Out-breath.

Now I said close your eyes and now breathe in and out three times,

But this time start with the out-breath,

The out-breath first and then the in-breath,

The out-breath and then the in-breath,

The out-breath and then in-breath.

Do it backwards.

When people do that,

The backwards breath meditation,

They find it is different.

It appears differently and it's more interesting.

When because it's more interesting,

It's easier to be aware and you get just more involved in it.

You leap towards it with greater sense of joy,

Involvement.

It's the same breath but you're watching it in a different way.

And that taught me much about the nature of the human mind always to anticipate and to always to take things for granted and not to look deeply enough into what's happening.

When you do the same old thing again and again in the same old way,

Your mindfulness gets weak.

But often,

Often if you manage to do things slightly differently,

Then you find the mindfulness does sort of increase.

So even sometimes people do this if you're really tired,

They do even backwards walking meditation and that's they literally do walk backwards.

It's not sort of some slightly different part of your mindfulness.

They stand up and they walk backwards.

And of course you have to be very mindful of where you are,

Otherwise you hit the wall behind you or for something or other,

I don't know.

But what you do that because that creates the greatest sense of awareness for you.

And there's this old story many years ago,

Please I don't recommend you do this.

But this was some of the old stories from the forest monastery traditions.

Sometimes there was this monastery in Laos,

Jungle forest monastery in Laos.

And I only know one monk who went there and said this is how they change you.

The meditation master,

The old monk would take you on a walk through the jungle in the mountains.

Now most of the day you finish your lunch and then in the afternoon just this long walk and towards the evening time,

Still light,

He would always come to this place in the jungle,

It's kind of a clearing.

They had these huge trees in that forest right there.

And on the high up on the trees and one of the big branches of these meditation platforms,

There's no square pieces of uneven wood,

No railings on them,

But a bamboo ladder to climb up.

And every young monk had to climb up this bamboo ladder,

Sit on this platform with no railings,

Just big enough to sit on,

But no sort of area on the side or the front or the back.

And then the meditation master would take the ladder away and say,

I'm going to come back tomorrow morning.

And these monks had to sit up there all night,

No room to lay down,

No way of climbing down,

Stuck up on these platforms with nowhere to go except death or if they did survive,

We just tiger food when the tigers came roaming in the evening.

It's pretty scary.

But he said that many of the monks who did that got amazing meditation afterwards because they had to.

At least he said,

The monks who survived.

You can't do that these days because occupational health and safety will sort of send me to prison even for suggesting things like that.

But there was an interesting way that sometimes when you really have to,

You can.

It's that part of the mind,

You're not forcing it,

You're just making it more interesting and more meaningful when we're doing things like coming into the present moment.

It's also one of the reasons why people with sicknesses,

They tend to get good meditations pretty quickly.

Why?

It's because they have to.

Otherwise you find you're going to be in big trouble.

Even when I was only five years as a monk,

I remember just going from one monastery to another.

It wasn't that far,

But trying to get there.

There was a lot of walking.

And then in one of these buses in Thailand,

Where you were squashed for hours,

There were the chickens and the ducks and everything else they were taking.

There was the village bus.

And by the time I got to the monastery where I was intending to get to,

It was about 5.

30 in the afternoon.

You've been traveling most of the day,

You're sweaty,

Tired.

And then when I got to this monastery,

They said,

Oh,

You're just in time,

You've got about quarter of an hour.

And then we're having our evening meeting.

And that evening meeting was just a four hour meditation sit.

I've been traveling all day,

I'm tired.

So,

Well,

That's some monastery rules.

So,

Remember just doing that,

A four hour meditation.

What I had time to do,

I don't think I've had time to have a wash,

Just unpack my bowl and put my robe on the line,

Quickly wash my face,

Go to toilet,

And then go and sit down to meditate.

It was a really tough ask.

But if you know how to meditate,

You don't mess around.

You just go deep inside the mind and you meditate there.

I remember just complaining afterwards,

Those monks behavior,

Because they only,

They rang the bell after three hours and 45 minutes,

Apparently.

It's too early.

You're taking 50 minutes away from me.

I was having fun,

Honestly.

So this is actually sometimes how.

It's really important.

It's amazing what you can do.

Because of that,

The meditation also gives you a sense of courage,

A sense of being able to,

Okay,

Let's try this out.

Let's see if it works.

And a lot of time,

Without being stupid about what you're trying to do,

A lot of times you find it does work.

Weird stuff.

And one of the other types of meditation,

I haven't taught this much to you this time,

But it's really worth teaching because sometimes you do get sick.

You have not sort of chronic sicknesses as much as acute sicknesses.

In other words,

These are sicknesses which suddenly appear in you and how you deal with them.

And the one I'm going to talk about now is a way well known,

I'd say about it very often,

But it's totally,

Absolutely accurate,

True.

Just having food poisoning.

This was over here in Australia.

I don't know what I ate.

But sometimes people bring you food,

They really try their best to give you delicious food and you can't blame the lay people,

But sometimes something goes wrong.

Sometimes I leave the food a little bit too long and some bugs get into it or I don't know,

But on this occasion,

It's full on food poisoning.

You know,

Sometimes I think that's just a bit of indigestion,

It will pass away.

This time it was full on food poisoning in my cave.

I live in a cave.

There was a monk built cave and the reason they built the cave and why I was very happy they did was because it gives me seclusion.

And seclusion means when any of the monks just need me in the afternoon,

Certain time of the day,

They can't get me because there's two doors and you knock on the outside door and they can't hear it inside.

So it's really lovely.

We love that place.

But anyways,

Inside my cave,

If I get really ill in there,

Really sick,

You just have to die because there's no emergency bells or anything.

So it's a wonderful place where you can have some seclusion from the world.

What happens if you do get sick?

This was one of those occasions,

Getting sick with food poisoning.

When I get food poisoning,

What happened?

I chanda knows what's coming in a moment.

When you get food poisoning,

You get these contractions in your stomach,

Which is this excruciating.

So every few seconds I was going,

Ah,

Ah,

Oh.

And you know,

I love doing that during some talks when people are just,

It may be a hot day and they're falling asleep.

Ah,

It wakes people up.

It gets their attention when you're giving talks.

But anyway,

That was true.

I was describing what it was like.

And the thought came,

Should I just go down?

The only phone we had was in an office,

Which was maybe,

Oh,

It was only maybe 200 meters away.

But when you're really sick,

It's a long way.

And anyway,

Because we live in the forest monastery,

The doctors are a long way away.

And even just if you ring up the ambulance,

The ambulance says,

Can you please explain exactly where you are?

It takes half an hour to get here,

Minimum,

Because we're secluded.

So because of that,

I thought,

Nah,

No need to ring the ambulance.

This is how I teach other people.

Why don't I practice it myself?

So what you did,

You've learned for many,

Many years is how to be mindful of unpleasant things.

Knowing that it's only a chronic pain and then it vanishes and it comes back again,

It vanishes.

But then I decided to be kind to it.

So I opened the door of my heart to that pain.

To let it be,

I couldn't control it.

It's going to happen anyway.

The weird thing was,

You might say it's weird,

Even I know what's going to happen.

I always think this is incredible.

I mean incredible,

Powerful,

But just unbelievable how easy this is to do.

And then you just,

The pain started getting less every time.

Your mindfulness noticed that something was easing off.

You were relaxing.

What I was doing,

Not just being mindful,

But being kind,

Was kindfulness again.

That kindfulness was so powerful.

Every time you had a contraction,

Sort of a spasm in your stomach,

The kindfulness kicked in and it wasn't so painful.

Only a tiny bit less,

But every time it was a tiny bit less,

A tiny bit less,

A tiny bit less.

And after about half an hour,

Sometimes I say 40 minutes or 20 minutes,

I can't remember exactly how much.

But only about that sort of time.

After half an hour,

The contractions are totally vanished.

There was no pain left at all.

No stomach ache,

Nothing.

It was just a healthy stomach.

And it was just amazing to experience that person that you're in big trouble painfully and really thinking about calling an ambulance because I have no medicine in my cave.

And instead just sit down there quietly and just focus on the pain,

Go right into it,

Right inside it.

Sometimes when you do things like that,

You find that the pain vanishes and goes.

And afterwards I often thought what had happened to all those bacteria or viruses,

Whatever it was causing the pain,

Causing the inflammation.

And the times when I did see bacteria through microscopes,

I always remember them as little blobs with tentacles coming out of them.

I just kind of imagined my visualization,

Saw those little bacterial globules and with all of their tentacles all crossed like in meditation or the left hand over the right hand.

And I imagined that all these bacteria were meditating in my tummy.

And so they weren't rampaging around and causing pain because you can't just suddenly get bacteria to disappear,

But just say calm down.

They weren't causing any problem whatsoever to me.

That was honest and then a true project never came back again.

The fact that you could experience that and then you teach it to others so other people can also overcome any fears of pain,

Incredible pain,

And be relieved of it.

That's the only reason why I tell these stories.

Because once you learn how to meditate,

Be kind,

Be aware,

Then you find the body does relax and irritations can vanish.

Arthritis,

This is elderly lady in Poland wrote this beautiful letter to me,

Email sorry,

How her arthritis,

Extreme arthritis,

Having to take medication which had hugely disruptive side effects in her life,

The painkillers.

And instead she learned how to meditate and it worked for her.

She said,

I don't need those painkillers anymore because the arthritis is gone.

And to me,

That's the best,

Honestly,

The best donations I've ever received,

Are words like that,

Saying this actually works.

There's a one woman in the world,

And there's obviously many who actually,

They have survived.

They don't have the pain anymore.

But it's not just not having the pain anymore and not being able to live a life.

They've learned so much dumber from that.

You may read that in the books.

You may figure it out for yourself,

Logically,

But experiencing it is a totally different ballgame.

It works and it's wonderful and it's peaceful and it's joyful.

You feel so much more free in this world.

The number one is something which you arrange for yourself.

And you're not at the mercy of other therapists,

Psychologists,

Psychiatrists.

This works for you.

And also,

I don't know why I'm talking about this,

But this has actually just came up just to maybe help inspire you and give you other ways of dealing with the difficult problems of life.

One of the most extreme examples of this was,

I'm sure this is organizations in other parts of the world,

But over here in Perth,

I was invited to visit an organization called ASSETS.

And it was an acronym for the Australian Society of Survivors of Torture and Trauma.

And these are really unfortunate people who have been some countries where you're abducted in the middle of the night and put into places where you don't know dark underground dungeons or whatever,

Tortured,

Raped,

Beaten.

Some of these people survive.

They make it sort of overseas as refugees.

And when they come,

They have freedom of movement.

In a country like Australia or UK or Europe,

There's so much freedom there.

But they can't really sort of have freedom of their mind.

They're still in those torture chambers and underground sort of military camps where they're just hurt for no real reason,

Intensely.

And this particular group of psychiatrists,

Psychologists,

Therapists,

Their job is to give healing to some of these people who seek asylum in Australia.

And I remember just hearing some of the details of what these women and men go through,

Have gone through.

And it is mind-boggling to me just how one human being could treat another human being.

There was also amazing just how they could find freedom from their past.

And apparently the reason I was invited there was because many of the people who work there came to our meditation centre and our temple in town.

And I remember one of them saying to me,

I'm not exaggerating,

They said that we get our license to teach by going through the universities,

But everything practical which they learn,

They come along from Buddhist centres like mine.

This is what they learned there.

They learned like opening the door of your heart.

This is how they practiced it.

And I was just really touched.

The reason why I keep telling this story so many times and probably too much inspires me.

I enjoy saying this because it's powerful.

They said that when their client from overseas somewhere has gone through hell,

Real hell,

When they actually they are ready,

They feel confident,

They feel most of all feel safe and nothing is going to happen to them.

And if they go too far,

They can always come back again.

They feel confident of giving this little meditation a go.

They sit in a comfortable posture and they imagine a heart in their stomach,

In their chest,

A Valentine's Day heart,

Not a real heart because that's just too,

It's not inspiring,

It's too complicated.

There were just little arteries and veins going all over the place.

The human heart to me anyway,

When I see a real one in the jar in a medical lab or something,

It's not all that inspiring.

But the Valentine's Day heart,

I don't know,

That feels like a symbol of love and kindness and acceptance and warmth.

So imagine like a Valentine's heart in your chest.

And then you imagine two doors in it,

Right in the center,

Like the doors of a hotel,

The doors of a hospital or doors of a big house.

And then when you imagine those two doors,

You open those two doors and inside your heart is you or rather the part of you which you trust,

Which you're at peace with,

Which you can accept,

The part of you which is positive,

Which was experienced kindness in the past or love or peace.

There's many times you haven't always been abused.

There's many times in your life you've had lots of fun,

Lots of joy,

Lots of peace,

Lots of respect.

You felt kindness.

But then you look outside that door on the ground in the cold,

Rejected,

Stigmatized,

Expelled.

You see all those little you,

Yous,

That little girl or young woman,

The boys who were abused and treated so badly,

Raped and beaten,

So bad,

For no reason.

And they're outside in the cold,

Outside of your heart,

Expelled,

Stigmatized.

You can't sometimes even bear to think about what you do.

You imagine the ladder going down,

Like the ladders on those aircraft long ago,

Which come out from the door.

And you see those little yous of your past,

A little girl who bears your name.

You remember that was me,

I enjoyed that.

You say to them,

Little me from the past,

This little abused girl,

This boy who's so badly treated,

The door of my heart is open to you.

No matter who you are,

Where you come from,

What you've experienced,

The door of my heart is open.

Come in.

No longer are you having,

It's a tough thing for me to say,

Not longer are you having aversion to what you went through.

You're actually inviting it up.

It takes a lot of courage,

A lot of,

A lot of time to get these parts of you to walk up these steps.

You can visualize it,

These parts of you,

And they feel ashamed.

They feel afraid.

They feel terrified.

You say,

Come up.

They do come up.

One by one,

As many of these people,

Which is part of who you are,

Come back into your heart.

You wrap your arms around you.

You say,

I will never,

I will never be ashamed of you again.

I will never be angry again.

Come in.

You're part of who I am.

One by one,

After many times,

They come in.

And actually,

The results are pretty astounding.

We're meeting one of these women,

Just after one of the talks I gave at our Nodamata Centre.

They weren't sitting right in front of him,

They were sitting to the side.

One of the young men who often comes to our centre was talking to them and she was explaining what had happened to her.

No thought of hers.

And just the torture she'd been through.

And then this boy said,

That's terrible what happened to you.

I remember that because I was looking at the,

I was supposed to be talking to somebody else,

But I just couldn't help but just look at the two of them.

And the woman turned around to him and said,

You've got no right to say that.

That's a terrible thing which happened to you.

That's who I am.

I'm at peace with that.

I've embraced it.

I've allowed it into my heart.

It's not a problem anymore.

I'm free.

When I heard that,

I went to visit their place and see what they were doing.

Wow.

This type of meditation techniques,

They're incredibly powerful.

Important thing again was she did that by herself.

All the people in there at different stages,

When they're ready,

Got psychologists around in cases,

Any excessive reaction to the trauma,

Any little psychosis happens or whatever,

They're there to calm everybody down.

They're in control of the process.

They do it themselves.

And the results was for me,

Mind boggling.

It's all right to say,

May all beings be happy and well.

But actually to make that happen,

Not all beings,

But some beings.

Some of the,

For me,

I thought the most impossible cases and see it actually happened.

And that was so inspiring to see.

So these things actually work.

Needs to some mindfulness and the kindness working together and be innovative.

Don't try to get rid of problems.

That is as,

Say the door of my heart is open to these problems.

Come in.

But also please remember,

A door has two functions.

To allow things in and to allow things to leave.

So keep the door open so all the pain and negativity can one day leave.

Okay.

So I,

As usual,

Talk too much,

But that's my nature.

That's what I get asked to do.

Maybe not too much,

But anyway,

And the reason is,

If you don't know,

I had my 70th birthday this year,

And it's something I noticed even when I was young.

As you get older and older and older,

Your eyes start to lose their focus.

They have to wear glasses.

Your ears are not so good as they used to be.

So you can't hear properly.

You may have an old grandfather or grandmother like that.

They can't hear properly.

They can't talk properly.

Your hands are sort of not so stable.

Your legs difficult to walk.

Everything starts to get weaker and weaker and weaker as you get older.

But the one thing which gets stronger with age is your mouth.

Old people can really talk a long time.

That's why I can keep on going for a long time talking.

So anyway,

That's because I'm getting old.

I'm talking too much.

The last thing I do know though,

I said this at my birthday,

The more birthdays you have,

The older you live.

That's the positive side about having birthdays.

Anyway,

Enough about that.

Reviews

Well worth the listen, a lovely talk and very inspiring

Thank you