Transcript for:
Meditation and Modern Life

we're all at the mercy of our own minds but the problem is is that in modern life we're constantly made to feel we're not good enough something's always missing and I will be happy or unhappy if this or that happens to me so we become prisoners of life and you learn this the hard way yes when I was in a long retreat cut off from the world for 4 years and memories were coming up from the past it would build into horrific amounts of depression anxiety pain and I jumped over the wall and tried to escape because of what happened to me when I was 14 are you comfortable talking about this gerong Tupton is a Buddhist monk who spent over 30 years helping Hollywood stars CEOs and corporations stay in control within a world overloaded with stress addiction anxiety and burnout here we go i became controlled by distraction controlled by negative thinking what is life going to do to me next how will I handle it and things only changed when I hit rock bottom i had spent so much effort trying to push that suffering away because it's so disgusting and so shameful but it was just making it worse so many of us run away from pain though but the reality is you can run to the end of the earth and that thing that has been tormenting you will always trip you up and so I went back into that retreat knowing the methods are there i just need to know how to use them and I could learn to conquer this and that's where meditation comes in do you think you can teach me because I very much feel like I'm on the receiving end of life first of all chuck all those things away there's a lot of spiritual tat isn't there i mean I said it i actually hated meditation when I first did it because there's a lot of misconceptions and actually all you're doing is these three things to be less controlled by negative thinking and the beauty of this is that they can show in brain scans there'll be visible changes in your brain so let's try this listen to my regular listeners i know you don't like it when I ask you to subscribe at the start of these conversations i don't like saying I don't like it being in there none of us like it it's frustrating do you know what's also frustrating it's also frustrating when I go into the back end of the YouTube channel and I see that 56% of you that listen frequently to this podcast haven't yet subscribed and so many of you don't even know that you haven't subscribed because I see in the comment section you say to me you go "I didn't even realize I didn't subscribe." And that actually fuels the show it's basically like you're making a donation to the show so that's why I ask all the time because it enables us to build and build and build and build and we're going for the long term here so all I'd ask you is if you've seen this show before and you like it help me help my team here hit the subscribe button and we'll continue to build this show for you that's my promise thank you to all of you guys that do subscribe means the world to me let's get on with the show galong Tupton why is your work more important now than ever before why is your message more important now than ever before i think uh because we're now living in times where we need meditation more than ever because of the the speeding up of life obviously with technology and the way we live and also I think because meditation has become more widespread there are loads of misconceptions about it so I do try to put some effort into kind of clarifying some of those misconceptions when you look out into the world and you perform your sort of own analysis on what the world the western world is getting right and getting wrong what are some of your sort of big picture feelings thoughts and concerns well the way we are all buried in our phones is quite something isn't it and the way we interact with information has changed so much so we we are kind of bombarded or invaded by constant flow of information which has a lot of persuasive undercurrents to it and this is affecting our stress levels and also affecting our confidence levels we're constantly made to feel we're something's missing something's always missing we're not good enough if you get this you'll be okay i if if and when this happens to you then and only then can you be happy so we've kind of lost our power we talked a little bit about the word purpose as well what is your perspective on the state of human purposefulness so I think um this issue around purpose I think it it is connected to the breakdown of religion in that I would say well I think we'd all say that religion used to be very much the center of the table and it sort of gave everybody their a sense of their place in the universe and the question of purpose was never such an issue because everything was uh in context according to one's religious belief and of course now we're in a post-religious culture and it's much more about the individual and there are good things about that of course but what happens then is we become very obsessed with our purpose and the word purpose itself suggests I want something I want what do I want and in in Buddhism we look at that wanting mind and see how insatiable it is and how the more you want the more you're going to want and so from a Buddhist perspect perspective we're all looking for purpose but maybe externally because we get what we want and then want something else and maybe what we're actually looking for is something deeper within but we don't know how to access it so is it wrong then to be in search of purpose is it a misguided pursuit no I wouldn't say that but I would say what's misguided for us is that we are obsessed with the idea that happiness comes from the outside and on the other side of the coin suffering too so I will be happy if I get this or get that or this situation or that situation and I will be unhappy if this or that happens to me so we become at the sort of receiving end of life what life is going to do to me next how will I handle it so so there's there's not much strength there and I think the message of meditation is that you become your own purpose and you you become the generator of your own experiences because you learn how to take hold of your own mind in this conversation do you think you can teach me how to do that because I very much feel like in my life I'm on the receiving end of life well I'd love to show you how or maybe help you to see that meditation is easier than you thought or more more applicable to daily situations than you thought when we think about the state of well-being in the western world everybody knows these stats around suicidality um if we look at the US for example they've slipped further in the unhappiness rankings than ever before the US fell to 24th place in 2025 in global happiness rankings in 2011 the US had been 11th place and now they're 24th and the UK followed the same pattern the UK dropped to 23rd in global happiness rankings which is its lowest position in a long time but then more sort of horrifically the suicide numbers in the UK the US are tremendously alarming in the UK suicide has reached its highest level in many many decades something is going on here absolutely so so we we have developed the most you know materially comfortable culture in history we are materially more comfortable than ever and yet emotionally more uncomfortable so something hasn't added up you know we've created a comfortable to a certain extent out outer world for oursel and we can achieve high levels of material comfort and somehow the more of that we have the more emotionally uncomfortable and I think this is all to do with the mechanisms of desire so so when we are in a culture that is constantly promising us the next piece of enjoyment the next hit the next bars the next thing we're caught in a sort of cycle of wanting more I I I was described this the the search for happiness that the problem in that is the search itself because s searching is a habit that will lead to more searching so we're always looking for the next thing so we get what we want not always but sometimes and then very soon we want something else so the more we're wanting the more we're feeling we don't have so we end up possibly with a lot but feeling quite empty inside and then we're back to this question what is my purpose what's it all for i've I I've reached the the I've reached the the goal I wanted to reach but I still feel empty i still feel something is missing we're told something is missing all the time because to keep a consumer message going you have to tell people they're lacking in something and the insistency with which that message is fed to us through our phones basically and through through the the media that we consume is going to affect us i think 90% of people listening right now would say that their meaning in life comes from the pursuit of something the journey towards something it might not come from the attainment of it being successful being on the podium but they would say that the the meaning they experience the joy the thing that gets them out of bed is in the pursuit of something whether it's building a business or I don't know becoming an athlete or building a charity are they misguided in that thought no it's just that we we we could look deeper into our own internal psychology and see how well the the word pursuit is everything so we're always in pursuit of something and the the the the chemistry of of our body in the state of pursuit is that chemical dopamine the interesting thing about dopamine is it falls away just before you get what you want so so the the chase is much more exciting than the having or the getting and so we're in locked into this constant chase and what is the next thing when will I get the next thing and I think the the reason why we feel so sort of empty or disappointed is because what we get is never enough and meditation comes into this conversation to to show us that actually what we were looking for was already there inside that's the key point what were we looking for we were looking for freedom if you if you think about how it feels when you get what you want you know there's the chasing the wanting and then there's the getting there's a kind of relief isn't there it it's it's a feeling of oh the wanting's gone away it's like hunger you feel hungry you eat a sandwich the hunger's gone away i mean that's a metaphor for everything and that you when you get what you want there's this relief the the the the the wanting the the the the needy feeling the oh when will I get it has gone and there's a relief so actually what what we're well momentarily and then it kicks in again we're looking for the next thing but what we're looking for is the absence of wanting that's the the happiness we achieve when we get what we want is a kind of freedom from wanting so the problem is is that we're caught in a cycle where we then just want something else so I'm not suggesting let's all go and sit on a mountaintop and meditate and not have lives and not have careers not at all i'm simply suggesting that we've put our focus very strongly on material things and I think there needs to be also a focus on the mind and I think that's how we can learn to free ourselves you learned this the hard way through your own experiences can you talk to me about how you learned these lessons well I definitely became a monk through extreme suffering i wouldn't describe myself as having been a kind of you know a spiritual seeker and I went to a monastery with a kind of open glowing heart wanting to find the answers i went to a monastery in a completely broken state because I had been living uh in this kind of ambition cycle wanting wanting wanting and and really uh not looking after myself i had a very uh self-loathing and unhappy mind a lot of depression a lot of anxiety and I was um I went to that monastery feeling completely at rock bottom and I I didn't go to a monastery to live there forever i just kind of dipped my toe in but you know I stayed if I was a fly on the wall in your life on that day when you showed up at that monastery what would I have seen so I was very ill and I arrived at the monastery um really needing help so I was I was living in London and New York i was trying to become an actor my mother's an actor so I sort of wanted to follow in her footsteps and I got into a really kind of dangerous kind of party lifestyle really wild and burning the candle at both ends i basically made myself ill i had a very very dramatic burnout living in Brooklyn and waking up one morning in my apartment thinking I was having a heart attack um I went to I had didn't have medical insurance but I managed to find some kind of like cheap ECG place and they checked my heart out and they said "You you have a heart condition what have you been doing?" And you know I really was had to stop in my tracks and I was very very ill after that for a few months what age was this 21 wow and during that time of being horrendously ill I had to question everything I was doing with my life but that illness is a symptom it's a symptom of of unhealthy living but also an unhealthy relationship with my own mind and where did that unhealthy relationship with your own mind stem from so I think things that that happened in my early life uh traumatic things difficult things uh and then me not knowing how to deal with those and just bottling them up and pushing through pushing forward and not looking at myself i had this very sort of escapist way about myself i think that's what all the partying was about to kind of get out of my head and so so when I had that burnout I think it was a combination of physical stress and mental stress that just exploded very very suddenly literally overnight did you have an abusive childhood because I was I was reading some of the things that you had said and it suggested to me that there was things that happened when you were young that left imprints on you that you had to work through yeah yeah i I would say things happened in my teens that were troubling you know when I was uh when I was quite like 13 14 I started to run with a much older crowd so I had a kind of double life i was I was at school and very studious and very quiet and then outside school I was in a rock band with much older people um when I was 14 I started to actually work as a jazz pianist in wine bars across London pretending I was 21 and the the people I was running with at that time were much much older than me and um yeah there there there were some situations where the relationships turned I would say abusive and I I would say I was a victim of at the time maybe I thought I knew knew what I was doing but looking back definitely not and I think that left imprints and I think it made me um frightened of myself and frightened of other people are you comfortable talking about this was this sexual abuse yeah from from uh from one of the people I was in in a band with yeah and when you think when you sort of trace the steps of the behavior that you then saw in your early 20s the sort of escapist behavior the sort of self-medicating behavior is is that the cont is that where that originated from the sort of processing of that and the dealing with those it's really hard to make a very specific direct connection isn't it and that's what we always want to do we want to say this happened because of this and there's this you know this happened and therefore I went off the rails in a way that's too easy because I think there's a mixture of many many elements that can send one off the rails you know my parents are are incredibly loving people i mean they really loved me and brought me up very well but they they split up very very suddenly when I was 17 my my dad literally ran off with one of my mom's friends and it was a a very huge explosion in the family and we were all very broken by it and so there are many many things many factors that came together in my teenage years that I think sent me off the rails i got into uh Oxford University and that was a big prestigious thing but I fell apart in Oxford i started to get horrendously depressed and I actually got expelled it's actually quite hard to get expelled from Oxford i didn't I've never met anyone that got expelled exactly my mother was delighted she said "Oh that's like Lord Byron Shel those are you know very hard to get thrown out of Oxford you have to you know do something pretty horrendous but I think in my case they they threw me out because I was just not functional and that then just led to my demise and then on the one hand I was started acting and being in plays and and having this kind of um almost like a glamorous persona and on the other hand crumbling inside i had this incredibly persistent monologue of self- disgust you know like like a voice in the head that says "You are disgusting you are no good you are a failure." I used to call it my devil voice but but it it it's obviously part of me and and that's something that later on when I started to do retreats became incredibly loud in my head and I had to work hard on meditation to help not to get rid of that but to integrate it and and learn to be at peace with it it's definitely you know it's gone away now where does that voice originate from you're not the first person that I've sat with here who's talked to me about a similar voice in their mind and I'm wondering is that a is that something from we inherit from our environment uh something that happens a culmination of things that happen is it genetic or is it all of the above it's many things because that's very specific it's many things and it's I think in my case it was because I became very good at suppressing my suffering because I became very proficient at pushing things down and just going to as many parties as possible and and trying not to suffer i think the when you push something down the kind of volcano effect happens and then this sort of angry voice comes up this this this uh pressure leads to a kind of backlash inside yourself and it's an internalized um anger that also is is fed to us from our environment absolutely so you arrive at the monastery who told you to go to a monastery so my oldest childhood friend Tara uh we grew up together and um when I was completely falling apart with this heart condition at 21 she basically scooped me up and took me to the monastery she's the one who told me she said "Oh there's a monastery in Scotland which it's called Samuel Ling it's a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and for the first time ever they've opened their doors to people who wanting to be monks for a year one year and so she she said let's go and do it this could she wanted to do it too but she said this could really help you so she basically pretty much carried me there what were you saying to her when she asked you how you were doing or what your symptoms were I was lying in bed with with horrendous heart palpitations and any move I made my body would be bathed in sweat I mean on we we were in California because I got sick in New York I managed to get to California where my mother was living and Tara was there and they looked after me and then literally flying back to the UK I had to lie down on the plane she was almost carrying me it was really really heavy but she she said "Look this place could help you it's just a year it's just a year out of your life." I I I I thought "Okay I'm going to do that and then I'll go back to New York." I almost sublet my apartment in New York but I didn't in the end but there there definitely was a feeling in me of "Okay I'm going to go to this Buddhist retreat get myself straightened out and then go back to what I was doing before so it didn't feel too outrageous because it was only a year of course it wasn't a year this is 30 years later i'm still there wow and to give people like me who don't understand what happens in a monastery a picture into the what I would describe as incredible dedication and sacrifice that you've gone through over those 30 years can you can you share some of the practical things that you've done in those 30 years that most people would think of as being just outrageous but do you know what you say sacrifice but to me it didn't feel like a sacrifice it felt like immediate relief because I Yes when you become a monk you you take vows to give up things certain things but the things I was giving up were the things that made me ill so you you know you're giving up uh intoxicants and you become celibate and you uh I mean the there are also kind of moral vows such as you give up telling lies and stealing and harming others these are all you know good principles to follow but I suppose the two major things are no intoxicants and celibacy and to me that was such a relief to to just kind of give all of that up and be in almost like kind of like a rehab situation and but I I have to emphasize it didn't feel too heavy because I thought it was only going to be for a year so celibacy is sex giving them sex yes yeah and and what I found is that you actually develop stronger relationships so people often think monks must be very lonely but what I found was that then you were in a community of people where the the sexual um chemistry is off the agenda so you start having friendships that really are so heartbased and you meet lots of people who are on the same path as you so I didn't feel lonely at all what is it about sex that is maybe a distraction but what is it that puts on the list it's not it's not to say that that sex is wrong or evil or bad it's not a sort of uh weird sort of moralistic anti-ex thing at all it's simply about where you're putting your focus so when you're when you're a monk you're giving up family life you're giving up sexual relationships you're giving up romance you're giving up all of that so that you can focus very intent intensely on meditation practice with the purpose that you can eventually help others it's not a selfish thing is you're doing this so that you can be of more benefit to others but you want no distractions and also you you at a deeper level you want to start to experiment with what happens when you don't immediately run after a desire you start to experiment with trying to not suppress your desire because that's incredibly unhealthy but watch your desire and observe it and find out that you are more than your desire and so celibacy is an amazing environment to start doing that work and that also means no masturbation and those kinds of things yeah i mean it's it's really about working with desire rather than just when I say working with I mean ex observing it and learning ways to transform it rather than just giving into it or suppressing it and I wouldn't say celibacy is for everybody but it suits a certain type of person mhm and you know in Buddhism in general there are in in in the UK or America there's you know thousands and thousands and thousands of Buddhists but maybe a small handful of monks who become celibate it's a very specific particular way to practice Buddhism it's not the only way i'm inquiring about this subject because it's actually because of a conversation I was having with a really good friend of mine over New Year's who's had some troubles in his life um has struggled in relationships has struggled professionally has also struggled a little bit with purpose and meaning and has now sort of started to investigate religion and one of the things he said to me because there's a particular strangle hold that his sexual desires has over him is that he was thinking about abstaining from masturbation and sex just for a short period of time and I think actually the reason for that is kind of what you've described there which is just to try and separate get back control from desire he'll need to meditate because just abstaining from the thing you want to the thing you're desperate to do and you're abstaining almost like locking yourself in a cage and saying I won't I won't do that thing then what are you replacing it with or so so for example when I work in you know I often teach meditation in drug rehab centers I talk a lot about how okay yes you've had to give up the drug that was making you ill but that's not the whole story the the rest of the story is what are you going to do about the mind that is addicted to that substance and how are you going to resolve that how are you going to fill the the hole inside that was craving something okay so with the meditation you're not just giving up something you're learning to fill your fill your own spirit with something more positive for yourself almost to heal from the thing that was had the desire yeah yeah desire is such an interesting thing because it's we think we want something but what's going on under the desire is a feeling of lack a feeling of hopelessness a feeling I don't have there's something missing and so meditation is about filling that with with light and with with love you know the deepest addiction we all have is the addiction to our own thoughts that that's the that's really the root of it all is that a wanting thought arises in the my mind and then I jump on it and I want to get something to kind of alleviate that but it's that internal attachment buddhism talks a lot about non-attachment and I think this is widely misunderstood people think it means you're supposed to be you know detached and have no friends and be unattached it doesn't mean that at all it means how we're so attached to our thoughts and our emotions and they get into the driving seat and send our life in all kinds of directions we don't want it to go in how do we learn to transform that inner attachment to the thought itself and that's obviously where meditation comes in let's talk about Buddhism then so I said to you before we started recording that in the last sort of 12 months or so I've got really interested in Buddhism i uh started reading some books about Buddhism and I find it to be most aligned with this sounds like a strange thing to say but I'm gonna say it anyway with almost like the medication that I need and I know it's not a medication but but it is a deep medicine it's a medicine it's a science to me it's not so much a religion it is more of a medicine or a science yeah i've struggled with the religions i I was Christian growing up but I've struggled with like deities and gods and these kinds of things because there's like 5,000 different gods that through history so I don't really know which one's real and there's lots of books and I'm still on that journey but when I found Buddhism it wasn't framed like the other religions i thought it was much more compelling what is Buddhism can you tell me where it's come from is it a religion is there a god do I have to worship do I go to hell heaven there's there's nothing to worship at all buddhism is a path to to um inner internal understanding the word Buddha means awake and yes Buddhism has a his history in that there was somebody called the Buddha in India 2,500 years ago who attained awakening and gave teachings and Buddhism you could call it that has come from there but actually this word Buddhism is a modern word ism it's a modern word well in the original languages of Buddhism such as Sanskrit and Tibetan you find terms that are so different from religion you find terms such as the science of awareness or the the um the examination of awakening the inner 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 it it'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 um uh 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 the fabric of reality th this table this body this 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 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 they let me rest a lot i did little light little bits of light work around the monastery started to meditate um you know I I actually hated meditation when I first did it this was a problem you know I 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 I never meditated then I get to a monastery I become a monk and read the small print you know you got to meditate and I hated it i really really hated it and I thought oh the 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 i hated it because I was doing it in a way that was making me more stressed i would sit down i 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 was shouting and that particularly that negative voice I told you about that you are no good you're rubbish you're you're awful you'll fail that became louder and louder and so the meditation became incredibly stressful because I thought I I can't do this i can't I can't get 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 what 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 it's like it's like trying to get a small child to sit still in in their high chair while you're feeding them they're going to you know 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 if that was the aim well why 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 Where's the journey what What journey is that you just passed out on the floor for 10 minutes might as well as sleep or something yeah yeah and I can fully understand that if if you're if you're really stirred up and miserable and stressed the idea of 10 minutes of switching it off would be great but it's not the solution it doesn't work what is the solution so 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 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 you 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 failed you know they were they were meditating and they were with the breath and then they realize they're thinking about emails they need to write or shopping or whatever and then they think "Oh I'm I'm 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 in feeling like a failure you know what I mean so so you can relate i mean it takes me 7 seconds to drift off when I'm trying to meditate so it's not that at all it it's that you you're with the breath and then your mind wanders it's not even that you see your mind wandering you kind of find out afterwards don't you it's not 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 you suddenly realize oh where was I am 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 that returning that makes you strong every time you return to the breath you you are making a very powerful decision that's the attachment or the addiction to the thoughts the mind was lost in those thoughts and you are recapturing your attention and bringing it back so you are choosing where to send your mind and if you do this like an exercise almost like going to the gym and getting strong day after day week after week you you're you're teaching yourself how to choose to be happy and how to choose not to suffer so it 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 consequences hijacked by our thoughts yeah hijacked is a great great you know it stormed the like pilot's cabin and it's flying us exactly wherever it wants to go exactly that's kind of the experience we have so then you 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 it maybe that's my my kind of extreme nature i I have so many friends who meditate while they have families and busy jobs and they 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 to 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 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 is the is 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 so in Buddhism they they they use a metaphor to describe this which is the sky and the clouds the clouds can be heavy and rainy and all of that but the sky is always bigger than the clouds so our awareness of our minds that that's where we can find our freedom and when we talk about seeking purpose and seeking what are we looking for in life I think that's what we're looking for all the time in everything we do whether it be big life goals or you know drinking a cup of coffee or water small moments in every moment we're looking for release or freedom we think we're looking to feel happy or we think we're looking for love or sex or or whatever it is but I think what we're really looking for is to free ourselves from from suffering and to free ourselves from need and to to be free to be more in touch with who we really are i think that's what we're looking for and when when you meditate and you step back and look at your mind that observational aspect is is key to become the sky yeah to become the sky rather rather than the clouds and then I think it can change your life because you you know when I first met my teacher he he was quite a straight talking person he he would he he wouldn't you know say much and what he said was often could be sound sound a little bit harsh but he said it with love and when I first met him I'd go on about all the stuff that was happening with me or had happened with me or to me and he just says "Stop taking yourself so 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 your thoughts and feelings and your past and make it so solid make try to be the sky instead of the clouds try to step back and be less solid about everything buddhism is very much into this notion that they call emptiness which isn't emptiness in terms of a kind of vacuous void but more that things are illusurary 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 not the happiness that depends on I will be happy if I will be happy when I can only be happy because that's a very limited happiness but imagine if you could be happy no matter what is 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 but more than that I think it's also about compassion I 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 yeah I think this is this is possibly one of the misconceptions you know this is something I came across quite early on in when I was teaching meditation i started to give talks about meditation in the workplace like 25 years ago so before it became very popular you now mindfulness is everywhere in 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 the people in there about meditation their CEO took me to side and he said "Um please don't make them too relaxed." I said "What do you mean?" He said "Well I I like what you do but I don't want them to become too relaxed." I said "I'm not I'm not some kind of like stage hypnotist i'm not going to walk into there and sort of you know put everyone into a trance that's 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 get 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 some of the most famous CEOs in the world talk about their meditation practice and this is why I've also been slightly compelled into it i think for me I'm the type of person that's very influenced by other people that I kind of look up to and so someone like Steve Jobs who I think had a deep sort of spiritual practice which involved 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 um 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 i mean I can't I can't think of specific individual names but it's 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 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 meditation makes you more ethical it makes you and 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 um 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 and Mark Benoff 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 mhm because they think "Oh well if I become calm I'm going to be I'm going to miss I'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 tranquilized calm i think of calm as being able to keep a cool head under fire and be really precise and really on the on the focus on in the now and really hold on to your purpose and know why you're doing what you're doing and be less influenced by the areas of your psychology that trip you up i'm hearing like clarity and emotional control yeah optimizing your how your brain performs i started my first business at 12 years old and then I started more businesses at 14 15 16 17 and 18 and at that time what I didn't realize is that being a founder with no money meant that I also had to be the marketeteer the sales rep the finance team customer service and the recruiter but if you're starting a business today thankfully there's a tool that wears all of those hats for you our sponsor today which is Shopify because of all of its AI integrations using Shopify feels a bit like you've hired an entire growth 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planticitis that I had where suddenly my feet started hurting all the time and after that I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using the Vivo Barefoot and research from Liverpool University has backed this up they've shown that wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for 6 months can increase foot strength by up to 60% visit vivobarefoot.com/doac and use code diary 20 from my sponsor for 20% off a strong body starts with strong feet earlier on you said that in Buddhism they talk about an emptiness which is kind of this realizing that life isn't so solid and your identity is a mirage and all these kinds of things it almost sounded like that's the opposite of like victimhood because when we think about victimhood it is 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 you are you are right now in the present the past is is an illusion as is the future and we spend so much time in the past and future or trying to manipulate the present whereas with with meditation you're learning to to be in the now and not be it doesn't mean you don't plan or don't remember but you're learning to be to 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 there's a Buddhist uh meditation which literally is about a table like you know here we are with this table and they say if you if you take apart this table you'll find it doesn't exist because the table as it seems right now is is a is a top with legs you you 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 uh this is where Buddhism and and and particle physics become you know talking a lot there's a lot of conversation there in that the the smaller and smaller you go into these these wood shavings and then particles and can you find the smallest part that makes up all of reality and Buddhists would say no because if it's a part it has parts there is no such thing as the partless particle because if it's a particle it can be 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 uh the reality we live in of course it feels very solid you know if I if I throw this 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 whether 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 I for me it it's very much about um dropping the story and looking at the feeling okay explain that to me so for me this became very uh very important practice for me when I was in a long retreat so I went into a very long retreat for four years i became a monk for a year and I stayed a bit longer stayed a bit longer it was after about four years that I 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 uh four years long where you are really just cut off from the world for that length of time no no 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 I was in there alone with with my own thoughts and emotions it's not a completely solitary retreat there are other monks there all doing their own meditation in their rooms so there is a kind of group but you are very much alone as well and for me the whole thing was for the first two years was just horrific amounts of depression misery pain anguish anxiety that would build into panic attacks i I was really really shocked by what happened to me in there because I I 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 and maybe I thought I was quite sorted but I I wasn't and I got in there and really fell apart but it was an amazing thing that happened to me because that falling apart forced me after a while to 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 I was experiencing these horrendous feelings of heartbreak and feelings of depression uh anxiety just kind of a whole mass of suffering inside myself and I was I was trying to almost do therapy on myself and think okay let's you know thinking 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 I'm there in a 4-year retreat i'm a monk and I'm I was feeling completely alienated from the whole thing i I kind of wanted to just get away from it i wanted to run away and things only changed when I hit rock bottom like hugely in that I actually I climbed over the wall of the retreat to run away i couldn't take it anymore i I 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 un it's unthinkable you know in a four-year retreat you're not supposed to leave but 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 and I remember um 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 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 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 stay in a little caravan on the edge of the retreat boundary for a week for seven days and think about what you're doing and then we'll see if you will let you back in and during that time I I thought really deeply and I re 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 I can't do this it's made me so miserable but I I really knew in that moment what what my purpose was i knew I wanted to go back in and carry on but I also knew I'd been tormenting myself with my past and that I hadn't worked out how to how to heal myself i I I'd been sinking so badly and I 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 I really strongly believed that it was what I want to do with my life and a part of me thought don't give something up when you're freaking out because you will regret it if you're going to give this thing up give it up from a place of clarity knowing that there's something better for you out there don't give up because you're having a panic attack and you can't take it that's the wrong kind of timing to make a life change because I do I I really do believe in what I'm doing i I I 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 this pain I'm going through I've the the meth the methods are there i just need to know how to use them and I could learn to conquer this i I this pain could be the breakthrough most people in in their lives when they think about the things that give them anxiety or pain or fear you know we live as sort of discomfort avoiding humans so we try and run to run to comfort or pleasure exactly so life is hard let's run from it let's get on a plane fly to another country and try and just set up a new life somewhere else 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 you can run to the end of the earth and that thing that has been tormenting you is part of you and until you learn to integrate that it will always trip you up and so I went back into that retreat knowing okay this is your last chance if you don't if if you mess this up again that that's it you know forget it so it was a real like make orb breakak situation and I went back in and I I I um everything changed because I found I I had to find a new a different way of dealing with that suffering what was that okay so I'm back in there and it's coming up again the depression the anxiety the the pain that to me it felt like it it felt like like some something like that was piercing me it felt like a It felt like there was like a knife constantly twisting twisting and turning in my heart or like in the middle of me it 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 my family what is it that's the story i say story i'm not I'm I'm not belittling people's stories i'm just saying it's the narrative isn't it so I I decided to to use the knife as the meditation to to actually meditate on it and and uh the the whole thing starts to change when you do that because until that point you've been if 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 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 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 cuz it sounded so grim you know you've got to accept yourself or you've got to accept your suffering to me that sounded like you were 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 was compassion and self-acceptance at a very very deep level so so I was I'm I'm focusing on that feeling in my body and trying not to go into the stories about it or the hatred of it and just move towards it and and kind of become 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 cuz basically when you're when you're trying to push pain away you're creating enormous amounts of uh cortisol in your body the stress hormone when 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." And happiness is about being okay with your suffering and and and not just being okay with it but actually sending love into the place in yourself that you hated so much so for for me um that what started to change was from from from having a feeling like a knife twisting inside me and hurting me and wanting to get rid of it i found ways to hold that with with love and I I started to have this image in my head of as if I had found a like 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 until up until that point had been so harsh and so self self-hating and and I think you know in my teenage years when I was trying to become a a successful actor I think that was the drive was I I hate myself so I better get loads of people to love me instead cuz 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 as a monk and you become celibate and you you're you know having this kind of more like looking after yourself lifestyle I developed all these incredibly strong attachments with friends where I'd want them to be nice to me and I didn't want to be alone with myself i couldn't spend time alone with myself and then in the first two years of that retreat I'm hating myself and hating my pain and jumping over the wall and anything to kind of jump out of my own skin and 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 it 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 um 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 the the the details of your past but you're just relating to the feeling in your body right now and I don't know if it's like this for everybody but for me feeling it in the body is a really easy way to start because yeah it's depression it's anxiety it's trauma whatever it is that's quite kind of nebulous 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 in the chest and just to relate to that sensation with kindness taught me how to love myself but in an accepting way you know not it's not about you know becoming an egoomaniac like I love myself it's more have kindness for yourself how does this translate to things like grief because grief is one of the 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 you had a I think a best friend of yours who was Well my teacher oh your teacher well he was my best friend as well as my teacher he he he was murdered he was in so 11 years ago my teacher Akon Rimpiche who had been my everything for all those years you know he he was my teacher my closest friend he I also I spent a lot of time with him i became his kind of assistant so when he would travel I was with him all the time so we were very close he was Tibetan and he was in charge of our monastery in Scotland and part of his his work was he would run a charity called Rockpa which has um oh that's him um he would go to Tibet every year and um look after projects there feeding orphans looking after schools hospitals etc he was on his way to Tibet one year and he was in Changdu in China and he was um 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 I've been on the phone to him every day until then i was his assistant and very working very closely with him so it complet my it completely like blew me apart i mean it blew me to pieces i cannot describe how badly it blew me to pieces but the meditation I've described to you 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 in in it you 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 that you stay 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 turning and feeling like feeling like I was on fire because 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 and so all of that is consuming me at night and I'm just tossing and turning feeling like I'm in flames and then at some point it kicked in the the meditation it just had it just happened because I'd done it in retreat it had seen me through it had really really helped me and at some point I just had to lie there and send love into the flames in me you know I had to send 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 it is it is it is all about love it really is you are sending love into the pain you are experiencing and this helped me through the grief it helped me also with forgiveness with the the guy we knew who did it it helped me on so many levels and I'm not saying that it you know it's it's all okay but I have I I've made peace with his death and I mean he taught me this practice he taught me how to do that and then he died and I had to do it that I I think of it as his last gift to me and um I'm you know I I I I'm 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 it's thinking yeah I'm glad you asked this because it 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 you're feeling incredible trauma in your body for finding it physically is the easiest way to do it like you your body's in flames or you've got like a feeling of a knife twisting in your heart whatever it is there's this feeling in the body and first of all you just focus on that feeling so anybody who 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 you you 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 orflight 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 you know if you if you were sitting with a friend who was freaking out or grieving or whatever you 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 the question is can you do it for yourself and for me that was a huge challenge because I hated myself so much for so many years i was my worst enemy so to hold my own hand internally in that sense that's what I 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 edge of it edges of it start to melt and you start to be okay with being not okay and it's almost as if a kind of happiness starts to arise but it's not like a it's a 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 it 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 it's that's an extreme case but there are the practice of forgiveness is a hard one isn't it because we we've all got people in our lives that we think might have wronged us or done 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 in Buddhism there's a 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 they are the thing they did which was one thing maybe I am now constantly hurting and they are absolutely the winner so for I I wonder if we 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 they might you're not going to necessarily write them a letter and say I've forgiven you but you're freeing yourself you're dropping your 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." You know it's not that easy it's bloody hard but meditation gives 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 it even just a simple meditation like coming back to the breath is helping you to be less glued into those thoughts and reactions and feelings so the feeling of rage can start to be less heavy for you you've been through several sort of traumatic incidents you talked about being 14 being 17 sexual abuse parent parental divorce a little bit of neglect it sounds like as well have you forgiven all of those people in your life i don't know i don't know if forgiveness is a big huge massive moment or if it's a process i'm friends with all those people very close friends with all those people and I think here's what I think i think I've learned how to forgive the feelings that those incidents hap gave rise to mhm that to me is much more important than forgiving the people mhm 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 rimpache always used to say um suffering is like compost compost is made of rotten vegetables people chuck it away or they know how to make the field grow and I 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 there 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's answer would be well what what do you mean they should know better they know what they know there they are they are driven by their own confusion and their own pain wh 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 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 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 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 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 realize how out of control you are because you're trying to sit there with your breathing and all you're thinking about is shopping lists and you think "Wow the human mind is really pretty messed up we can't make it do anything we want it to do." So this person that you think they're so evil and so terrible and how dare they do the thing they've done i'm not saying that we're condoning it and saying "Yeah you can do what you want." I'm just saying lighten up a bit because people are just doing their best and sometimes their best is really bad then that doesn't have to become your problem it's not really about you we we we 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° 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 and that's the human condition make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself i'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 guest 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 daccircle.com i will speak to you then i'm going to let you in to a little bit of a secret you're probably going to think me and my team are a little bit weird but I can still remember to this day when Jamaima from my team posted on Slack that she changed the scent in this studio and right after she posted it the entire office clapped in our Slack channel and this might sound crazy but at the D ofio 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 some interactive elements and the purpose of this diary is to help you identify stay focused on develop consistency with the 1%s 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 the diary.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 uh monk or starting a business or pursuing a passion or moving to Bali many of us have these these dreams these callings but we're trapped in fear and would you also agree that the fear can be about those bigger things but also it's a momentto- moment subtle anxiety that just like pervades everything yeah it's both to to me this became hugely um like obvious when I came out of that four-year retreat because I I came out 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 those that No no we had nothing before my retreat some people had Blackberries and then that was it and then suddenly it's all different and I arrived in London and everybody's walking around with their face buried in phones and I I'm walk you know going up the escalator and the and the tube in London and the little billboards are moving images mhm that made me feel dizzy but where I'm going with this is is I I I 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 are we being 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/ird way down we know we know that and we're all wise to that on one level and on the other level we are completely influenced by it so we're now walking around in a world where we're constantly being told we are in danger i'm not 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 got to eat it in the right way if you if you overeat you get sick if you 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 every walk of life fear is used more than ever in politics to 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 so what do we do about that when we live in a world that is commercially driven or driven by power dynamics that mean that fear is just a great motivator and a great way to influence i think we 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 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 I do this through practicing microscopic moments of meditation in busy situations what does that mean so I might be standing in a queue and I'll feel the ground under my feet i might be in an airport queuing up and instead of going into that impatience thing and the stressy mode or or checking my phone I'll I'll do a mo 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 cues and traffic jams it changes your entire reality because what are you doing you're re you're rew you're rewiring your own brain you 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 but if you do a mic micro moment of mindfulness you're changing the wiring you're teaching yourself that you can meet stress in a calm way you can be okay with being stuck in 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 so much of I think we spend so much of our lives just reacting in in in the I feel hungry so I eat somebody says hello I say hello but even on a momentto- 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 we're 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 i don't have to bite their head off and then regret it i could 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 um 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 some rings some little I don't even know what these are yeah so we're going to chuck all the paraphernalia away in the bin okay we're going to bin all of it okay let me You know you don't need any equipment there's a lot of spiritual tat isn't there i mean I said it you know it's about you and your mind it's not about having little symbols and incense and you don't need it and okay what is the plan the plan is to start with 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 i'm joking if you want no no tell me the the optimal way you're going to be my 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 4 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 and 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 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 it's the bigger intention why am I meditating i am meditating for not only myself but for all living beings i'm doing this for me and the world and I'm not I'm not 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 making the intention that you're doing the practice for yourself and others and 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 bring the focus up to your shoulders most of us have tense shoulders because we're on our phone or behind a desk so as you're aware of your shoulders the tension can just drop away bring your focus to the front of your body start to notice your breathing the trick here is not to try to breathe or go into deep breathing but just let your breath be natural and focus on 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 and then you'll realize your mind has gone somewhere and you gently bring it back okay and to end the session we'll just do a short one for now take another moment to think about compassion you're dedicating your practice to freedom compassion and happiness for yourself and all beings and stop there 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 is about sensation i think we only think something's working if it makes us feel something mhm and med meditation is very different you know when I start 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 cuz I thought okay I'm going to get into this thing and do it and become like a a pro and I was doing loads of it and finding it was making me feel more unhappy and I was feeling this kind of sense of like sinking feeling in my chest and I thought you know I' I'd struggled with depression anyway i thought this making me more depressed and I went to Rimpiche my teacher and I said medit I'm doing loads of it it's making me depressed he said it's nothing to do with the meditation it's 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 to kind of like come on you're waiting for it to give you a high and it's so true because I realized I'd been sitting or like getting addicted to it and thinking okay I'm going to do my meditation right i've done 5 minutes where's 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 at some just give up judgment just do it just do it just do it and it's not going well going badly i like it i don't like it you just do it and try to let go of quality control i really need to start doing it my partner she's so great she does it every morning for like 20 20 30 minutes so why didn't you sit next to her she said this to me what stops you what stops me hm i mean it's there on tap she's doing it every morning what's stopping you s sitting next to her i think I think one of the things that comes to mind is how uncomfortable I feel in silence and the idea of like silence and being 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 unless there's something playing but that's why meditation's perfect for you yeah I know tell me about it this is giving you a way to find a different way to experience yourself m Yeah i mean you know you I'm sure you exercise so you go to the gym and you That's challenging yeah and you 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 health 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 4 days and you'll see that's why I ask you the question about you before and you after what is the difference and if whoever's listening to this right now can you give them a before and after picture of how their life will will be practically different if they implement just 10 minutes a day meditating okay so so I find it really inspiring to know that there there are visible changes in the brain scan after 4 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 you know your body will improve your health will improve so knowing that is a good thing in terms of seeing the results everybody's different there's 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 p 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 that does 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 it's falling into the trap of not realizing that everything I 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 go to the source the the projector rather than the movie go to the source and and change that and transform that and work on that so how has your projector changed in the last 30 years i I'm definitely a happier person i'm I'm definitely um more at peace with myself that that negative voice doesn't come up you know that that self-hatred has has really kind of like what's the word kind of like uh yeah gone away and um I'm happier and I've got I I feel so so lucky to have tools that I know I can use when I'm suffering you know for the last few years I've I've suffered with quite a lot of ill health because I had really really severe COVID right at the start of the pandemic and it did something to my heart and my lungs and since then I've had you could call it long COVID you could call it heart lung damage whatever so I I live with kind of levels of illness that are hard to deal with but this practice is something I can do i can I can sit there with an ill body and send love into that body and feel kind of okay so it's made me stronger and I can 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 I trust it and I'm just going to keep going and I I'm in for the long game i'm just going to keep going you signed a lifelong vow i did i'm I'm I'm I have I have taken vows to to be a monk for my life why when I put the robes on I felt every I felt every cell in my body click i mean it sounds a bit weird but it just felt like that i felt all my cells fall into place i just felt really this is this is this is really right for me i think it's what I'd been looking for all along when I is is a way of working with my mind i'm 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 to be of some use in the world like some help to others so okay let me challenge this a little bit in terms of how I imagine someone listening might might respond they go "Okay so you went through this process you worked on your mind now you've worked on your mind." No no working it's not over okay it total work in progress and this is the 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 I still get stressed i still get upset but I'm really gentle with myself in a way that I never knew how to be i was always "You're so disgusting what's wrong with you you should be ashamed of yourself." That's gone now I'm okay with with myself and that that's such that that is happiness that really has made me happier so it's for me it's not about oh you've done it and now it's it's a it'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 how do we jump from being interested in something to actually doing it i mean there's there's a 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 the 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 that 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 then you feel like oh okay the 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 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 to just to get started it doesn't have to be four years like no like a weekend 3 days 5 days 2 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 got to sign along the dotted line and say "I'm now a Buddhist." We're so not interested in converting people to Buddhism but yeah go to a retreat is Buddhism growing I imagine it is in the world you know why it's growing it's because it doesn't try to attract followers and because of that it grows interesting and also because of everything else that's just going on in the world at the moment um with you know people feeling more isolated lonely purposeless depression suicidality all of these things we're seeing a lot especially in young men as well the stats around young men and their suicidal ideation and their feelings of purposelessness and their loneliness stats are worse than women's as well but I think yes the the way the world is with all of these challenges and negative things at the same time what's hugely growing in modern culture is people getting more interested in their own minds there are more and more people going for psychotherapy counseling meditation any kind of discipline that helps us to understand our minds better that interest is growing so we're 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 we maybe we're waking up to realizing that the system hasn't worked for us we've created a kind of gilded cage for ourselves this this beautiful material world that is also running out of resources so it's not going to be able to serve us much longer if we carry on abusing the planet so we have created our own prison and now we're looking for the way out turns out it wasn't the individualism and the materialism um after all maybe it was always there inside us that's Buddhism would say that we we are we are Buddha within we we all have a sleeping Buddha within us and we 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 the 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 be there for them when they're going through a hard time i 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've I'm sure I fail a lot but I try a friend of mine described that as sitting in the mud with them yeah 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 with them without judging them thank you so much for what you do um you've got these incredible books which I'm going to recommend everybody check out both Sunday Times bestsellers I believe and a monk's 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 there 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 um 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 and that's the hard thing because it's good it's good enough 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 just 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 you're spreading because as I said you're going to be saving and uh saving a lot of people from a lot of pain and suffering but also um giving them a an alternative approach to sitting with it with a compassion so thank you thank you it's really lovely to spend time with you [Music] [Music]