How To Be Positive

How To Be Positive by Ajahn Brahm So this is my first talk here for about three months. But of course, it's not just, uh, as he used to say, not all beer and skittles for monks. No beer, no Skittles at all. Is that, uh, monastery down at serpentine? I'm still teaching the other monks and the novices the only characters. And also, this year, um, the sisters from Damansara have been traveling a little bit at the very beginning of the retreat to Sydney for a conference of psychologists. And at the end for another conference in mental health in Singapore. In the middle, doing something good for Australia with a big conference with all the leaders of Australia trying to give some good spiritual vibes. The people who run our country. But in all of these things, that one of the reasons I invite Sir Monk to these things is actually because of the positive attitude and the vibes which a man gives. And I was contemplating at a talk which I gave recently. Uh, in psychology, in life, we always ask to have a positive attitude towards things, towards whatever happens in life, whether it's an economic crash or whether it's the death of a loved one or the separation of the relationship, and all of the ups and downs of life, we all say that have a positive attitude helps enormously. And of course, there's plenty of evidence just what that does to sickness and to tragedy in life. But what I want to focus on this evening is how to be positive. Because sometimes it gets really frustrating when people care to be positive and you're not. And it makes you feel even worse when you're having a hard time. They say, come on, be positive and you get you can't even do that, right? So to see things talk is how to have a positive mind and the results of that attitude change in life. And of course, you all know what's coming, that the positive attitude all comes from like training your mind, especially in slowing down, leads to positive energy. And to understand that this is a classic story. And some of you may have heard the story before, but I usually tell it to milk it and squeeze different understandings from the same story. One of those times of life which gave an experience which changed much of the way you looked at things, and as the experience of walking up the hill to birding in a monastery and serpentine. How many of you have been down there? Hopefully some of you will come on Saturday, on Sunday for our Katrina ceremony. But we built that 25 years ago. 26 I think now. And for about nine years, I had gone up and down the road to the monastery, always in a car. In some sort of vehicle, and it was like one of those days we had sort of a couple of days ago, just one spring morning, I remembered just coming back from some sort of appointment and feeling to so positive, so energized and having plenty of time. I told the driver dropped me off at the foot of the hill. I'm going to walk up today. Just not for exercise so much as just for enjoying the morning. Have plenty of time. So I started walking from the southwest highway at Kingsbury Drive to the gate of Banana Monastery. As I started walking, I got very surprised. Actually. It was a shock. As I looked around me, I could not recognize where I was. That hillside looked totally different than what I remembered seeing looking through the window of a car. It was totally different. I was seeing things which I never knew was there, and what I saw had more detail and more depth of color. It was just basically more beautiful. And of course, that surprised me. And not being in any rush, not being in a hurry, I just stood still. And as I stood still, the whole hillside changed again. It was like evolving as a monkey. Not on any sort of psychotropic substances. You don't take alcohol. Although during our Ranger retreat, somebody offered the monks some chocolate cake, and fortunately, before we ate it, one of the monks looked at the the little, uh, writing on the cover and saying it had alcohol in it. Fortunately, we stopped in time because sometimes you're not sure when you get this some chocolate cake. Sometimes I pour the alcohol in edges for the taste, and then they cook in or the alcohol goes, it doesn't matter. But we didn't know whether it was put in before or afterwards. And so, you know, we decided not to take it. And we gave it to one of our visitors, you know, like who was very happy to be a guinea pig. Was a food taster, and when he came back next week, he said that was a lot of alcohol and it hadn't evaporated. It was a very good job. We were very careful. Otherwise, we may have gone to our monastery just after lunch and arranged retreat and seeing all the monks singing and dancing and goodness knows what else, it would have not done very much for our reputation. So you've got to be very careful. So we don't take such things, you know, we're sort of sober, mindful, alert. So here I was, having an experience like sometimes you have in life when things become really weird and they start changing in front of your eyes. But what it happened was what I was seeing became he had more detail, more information. That hillside, he started to see little flowers, start to see rocks and just the shape of the rocks and the liking on the rocks. And just look at the tree barks and the whole tree bark was this amazing, beautiful. And what was also strange was that the colours, the colours of everything you saw started to grow more intense, more rich, more deepen and more beautiful. The whole thing was exquisite. And of course, when a monk has experiences like that, we don't just enjoy, sort of contemplate afterwards what the heck was going on? And I decided to analyze it through science. And it became quite clear to me that when you see things, sight is a chemical reaction on the back of your eye, on the retina. And what happens with most people is that when they see something, they move on to another image almost immediately. So the image on the back of your eye doesn't have time to properly form, and the colors don't come out. They're just maybe 10% of what's there. And the detail is all smeared because the image does not have time. And when I walked more, when I walked I was going slower. The images on the back of my eye, the light had more time, so you could see a much more full picture with more detail. And the colors were deeper because they had more time to to manifest. It was just a simple physiology of sights which was occurring. And of course, when I stood absolutely still. Only then did my eyes have all the time they needed to form a full picture. And for the colors which were out there all the time to be fully represented in the image on the back of my eye and from my mind, to have time to explore it fully, to appreciate it, and to taste it 100%. And of course, I realized a very good simile of why people don't have a positive attitude in life and why they don't understand life. Because too many people live life as if they're in a fast car, looking through the window, always going on to the next thing. And pretty quickly too. So what we're experiencing now doesn't have a time. We can't feel it fully. We're about to feel we get 5% or 1% of the sensation. We have to move on to something else. Sights. Tastes. Feelings. Everything. We don't have time for it to fully form, but we do go slower when we do move more gently through life. When we get out of the fast cars of life and just go on, bicycles and bicycles can be too damn fast. Get off the bikes and walk. Not even walk, but walk slowly. What happens is you find that your senses at last have time, and a mind has got the opportunity to explore whatever comes into your senses. You see things more fully. You get more information, more detail. And the surprising thing at first for me. But now I understand that this is part of this experience. That what you see, what you feel, what you taste, what you know becomes more and more beautiful. Ordinary grass becomes this green which is like, alive, vibrant and rich. It's an intense green. But when you're going through the window of a car is pastel simply because you haven't given it time. When I had experiences like that, of course, I realized that that's basically what happens when we slow down in meditation. You go on the retreat. You just take time out of life. Or you learn to move more slowly through your day whenever you can. And you do have many opportunities. What happens is you feel more. You get more information and what you see becomes very rich. Is a positive psychology because sometimes that hillside might be just, uh, not enough trees, not enough grass. It's just all just Ozzie Bush. It should be like some garden. Like some Japanese garden or an English garden or whatever. No. When you really slow down and stop, you can see the beauty there. Now imagine you could slow down and stop and see the beauty in some other things in life which we're going too fast to truly appreciate. For example, in my fortunate life as a monk, I don't just hang out with prime ministers like in this place in Hayman Island. Sometimes I hang out with murderers and rapists. When you go to prisons, you amazing. As a monk, you see just such a range of human beings. And when you go and see rapists, murderers, thieves, some people have done some terrible, terrible, terrible crimes. It's amazing what happens because you know how to go slow. You can look at a person and despite that hillside, you see the grass becomes so beautiful. See the rocks? You see features in there which you never notice before. You see, it's just the bark on the trees. The tessellated texture becomes exquisite. So you look at someone who's murdered a child and you see things there which most people will never notice. You see their exquisite beauty. That's a great test. It's easy to see the beauty in a hillside, but to see such beauty in such people, or locked up in jail for many years is more of a tough ask. What happens when you do that when you have such a positive attitude towards life? You can see beauty in the most unexpected places. What happens is has happened many times, so often and I noticed this is really useful. That prisoner, that murderer, that rapist, they feel that someone is respecting them. And that's an amazing change for someone who's done such an act. The person comes in to where they've been confined to their place of imprisonment, and it is a mental torture, and they've respected. And it's such a strange experience for them to have someone who looks at them and sees something beautiful and good, that they to start to change the way they look at themselves. If I can see something in them and they respect me for being honest and truthful, then they think maybe that such beauty does exist in them and they start looking for it themselves. The murderer starts to see another part of their being, the beautiful part. When that starts to grow and prosper, you find that when they do get released. They are healed. The reason the sickness, the so, the the cruelty, whatever it was that pain which allowed them to do such a thing is now gone. And in this life and in future lives, they will never do such a thing again. It's amazing what happens as was a whole attitude was reinforced when last weekend I was teaching at a conference of the Institute for Mental Health in Singapore. Those from Singapore as a few here, the old Woodbridge Hospital, which now they've moved and renamed because maybe had a bad association with mental sickness. And I was so pleased that after I gave a presentation was so well received that one of the fellows there, who was quite a staunch Christian, he asked me, can you come and bless my ward? Give a Buddhist blessing, please? Which was floating, you know, Singapore was quite something. But when I was talking to him and to many other staff there, the heads of department, they told me that the philosophy in that hospital was to focus on that part of their patient, which was sane, sociable, which was kind, which was intelligent. There weren't focusing on the psychosis. They weren't ignoring the schizophrenic fantasies. They were focusing on something else. I thought, wow, you guys have understood. Because if you focus on somebody's faults now, the old two bad bricks, the fact that sometimes they act in a dysfunctional way, they speak in hallucinatory ways, or they behave in sort of a violent to themselves or to other ways. If you focus on that, then you make this person into someone or make this dysfunction the hold of them rather than just a part of them and a positive psychology, say, yeah, that said, let's put it aside. Let's focus on the other half of them. Too often we focus on the dysfunction. How about focusing on the rest of the time with a perfectly. I won't say normal because being normal is stigmatising so-called abnormal when they are kind, sociable and able to sort of flow in society without any problems or reactions from other people. When you focus on the other side, a healing happens. And this is such an important psychology to see. This. I was so pleased. At last, somebody's getting the message. When you have a sickness, I don't know how many people, when they have, say, a cancer, say a breast cancer. Forget that most of their body hasn't got cancer. There is still other parts of them focusing on the other parts of them. It's the incredible beauty, incredible strength, incredible fitness and power, which means that you can harness that power. The power of the positive side of a sickness. The power of a positive side of someone's behavior. And I know, and I think many other people can understand intuitively how that is therapeutic, how that grows. I've mentioned before just to try and have simple ways of talking about this so people can remember talking, that if you have a garden and you water the weeds, it's the weeds which grow and take over your garden. If you water the flowers, the flowers grow and they take over. It's what you water. What you focus on is what grows in life. And this is one of the great ways out of illness. Out of her tragedies. Out of dysfunctions, out of psychological problems in life. Just out of sorrow and grief. If we focus on the grief, the cause of the grief, the problem, of course, it would get worse and worse and worse. And I've noticed this. I was talking to someone recently that just this afternoon. I remember this because I just coming out to town today. We went past Observation City in Scarborough and it was there I gave a another lecture at a grief and loss conference. And many of you noticed the positive attitude of Buddhism and how we learned to let go and how we move through the pain of losing a loved one, how we let them go, and how we let the pain go and how we move forward and how we change our perception. You know the old story of the the concert and looking at life as a concert. And I always enjoyed concert, so much so that I never cried. And when the concert was finished, you know that story. But one of the women afterwards, after hearing my talk, came out to complain bitterly. Her complaint was you saying I shouldn't grieve. Are you saying it's wrong to grieve? You're taking away my grief, she complained. For her, she had associated with grief as she became Mrs. Grief, whatever her name was. But that's her persona. That's who she was. And she would go to many of those conferences and she get a lot of support from her friends. That's who she was. And she was not willing to give it up. A person who lives too long in negativity becomes so associated. When Buddhism called attached to it, they become it. They are it. I am the victim. I am the abused. I am the person who suffered such a tragedy. And because they get so attached to it, even though it's painful, they will not want to leave. For those of you who don't appreciate that. It's a great story, which is one of the last stories I think is the last story in that book opened the door of your heart. This is a story. I hope you haven't told it in public for a long time now. About the worm in the pile of dung. Once upon a time, actually, let's go even further back than that. Once there were two monks. Two Buddhist monks. And I say this because I'm a monk myself. Not all monks behave well. There are many scallywag monks. Unfortunately, those are the ones which people like to read about in the newspapers. The good monks very rarely get in the newspapers. It's not newsworthy to say that Emperor meditated for the last three months. But if I jump and did something stupid, like went to the casino or whatever, then of course, you know, I got dragged because somebody gave us a cake steeped in alcohol, then you might sort of put it in the newspaper, but. One of the monks of these two monks misbehaved. The other one was a good monk, so when they died, one of the monks got reborn in a beautiful heaven room, while the other naughty monk got reborn as a worm in a pile of shit. And like this marks. We have a lot of friendship and community and fellowship. Like even here, we try and look after each other. And so after a few, who knows, days up in heaven, this ex monk was born as a heavenly being. Started to think where is my friend, my old mates? I haven't seen him for a couple of days. So when you get reborn in the heaven realm, according to Buddhism, you have all these powers. And so he used some of his powers to search his heaven well for his friend. He couldn't find him anywhere there. So he went up a couple of levels of heaven trying to find him there, wasn't there either. Lower Heavenly Realms couldn't find him there. And he thought, ah, according to Buddhism, the rebirth as a human being is one of the best rebirths because it's not too much happiness, not too much suffering, a great place to become enlightened, he said, ah, my friend, he's been reborn as a human being again. I bet that's what's happened. Well, I can't find him in heaven. So he searched around the human realm. No trace there either. Oh my goodness, he thought he didn't do some really bad calm and got reborn as a dog or a cat. So he. He looked in the realm of the dogs and the cats. I know some people here think being reborn as a dog is a wonderful rebirth, because you don't have to go to work on a Monday morning. But that's not the case. If you think that being reborn as a dog is a good idea, please remember what they do to a dog after 1 or 2 weeks when it's born, and take it to the vet. You know what they do to it there. So if you want that. But anyway, he couldn't find his friend as a dog or a cat, so he looked. All the other animals still couldn't find his friend. He wouldn't give up. He started looking in the lower realms of the creepy crawlies, and there, to his shock and surprise, he saw his best friend was born as a worm and a pile of shit. Now, what would you do if that was your friend? You go and help them out. So I went out to that part of stinky poo and actually called out and said, hey, worm, worm, do you remember me? We were monks in the past life. We were the best of friends. Now you've made some bad karma. But don't worry, I can get you out of this. Come with me. Up to heaven and the worm and the part of the dung said. First of all, I'd like to ask some questions. Number one, is there any shit up in heaven? Of course there's no shit in heaven. It's pure and fragrance and lovely stuff. They said if there's no shit, I'm not going. Why not? I said, well, look, it's fragrance. It smells so beautiful. It's so warm and cozy inside. And it's also my food. Now imagine, I mean, there's lots of sort of Asian people here. Imagine got reborn sort of in a big pile of noodles. Or if there's any Westerners here, like we bought in a big hamburger so you could eat it all your day. I don't know, what else do you like? But he said, I'm not going to go because this was his home. This was his food. This is where he belonged. He liked it. And so that heavenly being tried to pull the worm out. Now, remember, wewe have worms which live in piles of dime as smeared with slimy shit. And so it's very hard to take them out, especially when they don't want to go. So the worm would wriggle and writhe. And every time this heavenly bean took it out a little bit, it would escape and go right in the middle of the dungeon. Now, this heavenly being, imagine, like yourself, a high being. How to put your hand in the most stinky, smelliest stuff. His friendship was so strong he would not give up because he thought if I could just take my friend the worm up to heaven so he could just see for himself. Of course he would give up his shit and come up to heaven. It's so much nicer. But of course, because a worm never wanted to go, it wriggled and writhed, escaped every time, and eventually the heavenly being had to give up and leave the worm to his pile of shit. And I often tell that story because I don't know how many years I've been teaching here. Tried to pull you. But do you want to curl? Sometimes I pull you out a little bit on a Friday night, and by the time you go home, you're back at it again. Well, that's what was happening with this lady who was into grief. She would not get pulled out of the shit. She was attached to it. She liked her and was so sad to see that. But how can we get out of this? There's a whole bit about the positive psychology is you can't just think it's. You can't explain it. You can't just have a lecture and sort of get people out. They've got to feel it. They've got to know it. Shit. And the only way to do that is actually to get more information by going slower, because the slower we go, the deeper we see and there's a deeper we see. We also see this incredible, positive side of life. I know that people Singapore, these psychologists over in Sydney, they say that one of the biggest epidemics is not Aids or cancers, but depression. I suppose many people here have come because of depression before or going through it now, or maybe sometime later on in your life being depressed. Now look at me having to come to work again after three months of bliss in my monastery. You'd think I should get depressed. And depressed. It's incredible. As a monk, you know you've got this attitude. No matter what you have to do, you just enjoy everything. And some of the stuff I have to do is crazy. Again, just being in Singapore last Sunday. There's a couple of people here from Singapore, you know. You know this is true. I started off my Sunday morning at 615 in the Canning Fork Park teaching meditation. So it's supposed to be a short meditation, even though it's like afterwards people start asking you questions and taking photographs. How to rush for the the morning so-called breakfast. It was not a breakfast. It was morning banquet. People saying, please eat this, please eat that because I made this specially for you right now. You may always see I'm a fat monk. It is not my fault. I get pressured, forced, cajoled. And if you don't believe me, you just come and follow me for one day and see what happens. So I had to eat this big breakfast and then talk to people. And then as soon as that was finished, I had to go off to this morning service at the Buddhist fellowship. You know, it was only supposed to be like a talk for now, but went on and on and on with questions and stuff. And then I was supposed to have some lunch. But on the lunch, people come up and ask you to sign the book and ask them questions. Some very big problems in life. So you give them free counseling. You sort of. You're trying to put a food, a spoon of food in one mouth and counseling them about their marital problems, and the other is really working nights. And after that was finished. Then you had to sort of rush off to a seminar they'd organized for four hours of giving talks and asking questions. And of course, it wasn't for hours. It lasted for 5 or 6, finished about 8:00. And after that he had to go to this golf club where they were having a sort of a launch of, um, an education program which had to give another tour, but didn't get back to bed till about quarter to midnight. And if anyone looked at that schedule, you'd call that torture. Amnesty international would probably take the Buddhist fellowship in Singapore to court for that. A human rights abuse. War crimes. But of course, I enjoyed every minute of it. And it's again, you do that because you look at it and say, well, you can look at this other negative side of this. Why me? Why do I have to do all of this? Or you can look at just the positive side of it and the reason why I can do the positive side of it and see the beauty in anything, see the beauty and prisoners. To see the beauty in the cancer ward. His be able to go so slow that beauty too stands out at you. It is so easy to see it is right there in front of you. And I realize that in life it's not. What's out there is the problem, not what's inside you as a problem. It's always this what we see, what's between us and whatever we have to experience in life. And by going slow and not rushing too fast, life becomes so beautiful and meaningful. Not only that, you don't only see just the beauty in any type of food, or the beauty in any type of experience. No matter what you have to do in life. Even the beauty in waiting at airports for for aircraft sitting in planes, the beauty of just going through customs, waiting in line. The same sort of question as did you pack the bags yourself, sir? I said, look at them. There's only one of them. What do you mean, bags? I travel light. So when you go through all this but you enjoy every moment, have you had this positive attitude? And life becomes incredibly beautiful and nice no matter what you have to do. That positive attitude is comes from just moving a little bit more slowly in life. So you can see it was there all the time. We go so fast doing so much that we see none of it at all. See just a fraction of the beauty. I don't know when I was young. We used to, at school, develop our own photographs. If any of you have had that experience of know to get a photograph not. It's digital age and we miss so much with modern technology, high tech and high stupidity. That's what I call it. But when you had these photographic films and you put it in the sort of a train, put all these chemicals in it and the image would actually disappear slowly. And if you took it out too soon, then so the image wouldn't fully fall. It was emerged slowly. First of all, you can just see the silhouettes and then more detail. The color became richer as the chemical reaction progress. That's almost exactly the same. What happens in your eye? That's what your senses are. When you go too fast? Yes. So much so. Just when you're eating, if you're going to have, like, one of the beautiful curry puffs which are out here, why is it that when people come here to actually to eat the food, even like the curry puffs, which no people actually sell here just to raise funds for something or other? Why do people like eating them? Why are they delicious? A lot of times it is because when you come here, you deliberately slow down. When you're slowing down, you can actually get more taste out of the food. When you slow down and get more taste out of the food. You digest it much better. This is my trick. Anyone who has digestive problems. Slow down, especially just before and during your food, so you can get more taste. Because when you get more taste, all these juices get secreted in your body. And actually the chemicals are out there to digest it. When you taste more. To prove that, just think of your favorite food right now. Think of it. Close your eyes and imagine it hot and steaming right in front of you. Saliva comes out. Not only that, stuff in your tummy comes out. I remember learning this when one of my fellow monks a long time ago, he had some digestive problems and so he went to the local doctor. This was in Thailand and they decided to give him a barium meal. I don't know if they still do though. They probably do ultrasound or MRIs these days, but I'm not quite sure. But what about me? Was he had to drink this radioactive guk? And he lay in his stomach, and they had a sort of some X-ray machine that could actually see how this barium meal actually went through his system. And that way they could actually test if there was any blockages anywhere or any difficulties in his digestive tracks. But the stupid doctors. They scheduled his appointment for about 2 or 3:00 in the afternoon. And, you know, monks, we'd only eat in the morning time in the afternoon. We don't eat. And he'd been a monk for about 4 or 5 years. So when he was lying down there, that barium meal was just sitting there wasn't going anywhere because the stomach wasn't used to doing anything. In the afternoon, it was half asleep, you know, it was resting. That's what happens in for monks. And so he'd actually had this smear, had he, upon all the nurses or doctors and technicians were around him, and they couldn't proceed because the bare meal was just sitting there until one of the nurses were very smart girl, said monk. Think of your favorite food. And he had his thing on the back. On his back. As soon as he started thinking of his favorite food. Then the barium meal started moving here and all over the place. Just the thought was enough to actually to get the whole system going. If you're not thinking about your food, if you're thinking about the TV show, or you're thinking about what's on the screen, or you're too busy talking to the person next to you, how on earth do you think that your stomach will work and your digestive juices will work? It's one of the reasons why, as monks, we eat always in silence. We're supposed to be mindful of our food. So that's why we usually have much better digestion, simply because we slow down, enjoy and make peace with things, and allow the whole body to do its job without us interfering. Simple things like that work. Not only that, but you can enjoy your food more. It's strange to think that a monk is telling you how to enjoy your food more. Well, monk is telling you how to enjoy seeing more. Because sometimes people think, oh, monks, you should tell people not to get out so attached to things. And it doesn't work that way. There. The path of Buddhism is a path of ever increasing happiness. But coming from stillness, coming from a natural happiness, not a forced happiness. So I love being a monk. And you're happy, monk. You're enjoying it. And monks in our monastery are happy. There's more coming every year. But how that positive attitude, how that happiness comes, comes from stillness. He starts seeing beauty in things. But the most important thing about this positive psychology and how it's generated from stillness, is you start to see the positive side of yourself. You start to look at yourself and see your incredibly beautiful person. People can say that and say, I'm a beautiful person. I'm a beautiful person. Oh, I'm not. And that's what most people really think is as a monk is you get all these people coming to talk to you and giving their problems. It's very rare for a person to come up to you and be at peace with themselves. They always think there's something wrong with themselves and usually something big wrong with themselves. And it takes ages. Years and years and years of talking to people to try and convince them. Number one, they're all right. But I want to go much further than that. They're beautiful. There's something inside of you. It's incredibly nice. And I've told this before, but just a couple of weeks ago, every year on was October, the 6 or 7 or so. It's John Curtin Day, the day that John Curtin died or got elected as as prime minister or something, because four years ago, on that day, the John Curtin, Curtin University gave me this medal, the John Curtin Medal. It's actually for community service, for doing good things for other people. And the first year after I got the medal, I thought, well, other people came to see me get a medal. I should go and see them. So I rocked up thinking I was just doing a duty, but I really was impressed with what I saw because there were people who'd done good things for the world, especially just now, this part of the world, and now getting rewarded. And I was just really impressed every year to see how people were really giving and serving for others. It was inspiring. So I've gone every year since it was a couple of weeks ago. Ha! There was, uh, one lady there who had done a huge amount, uh, in, uh, around the Kalamunda area for the local community when she got her medal. She came up and to give her a little speech and she said, I don't know why you're giving it to me. There's so many other people who are much more deserving than me and even my group. These other people work much harder than I do in this group, and I've founded it and led it. But and she was saying all this stuff and I remembered, oh, here we go again. Why can't you see that? Actually, you do deserve that. Because when I was listening to what she did, it was amazing. Woman. How much he'd given and sacrificed and served her for no reward through 30 or 40 years of her life given to others. I thought, wow, you really deserve that medal. But could she say she deserved it? No, I know I did to say when I got my medal. What the hell are you giving it to me for? There's many other people who work harder than me. Me too. I could not see the beauty in myself. Really? What I should have done was go up there and say thank you very much. I do deserve this medal. But it was true. I do deserve it. And she deserved it. Why can't p why can't people accept praise? Because we have this terrible feeling of ourselves, of inadequacy. Some force has been hammered into us. To always admit your faults and to reject your finer points. No wonder human beings are get so sick. If you'd made a mistake, remember it. Feel remorse. Make amends. You do something good. Oh, no. No, that's. That's usual. I'm not. I just get big headed. If I keep remembering my finer points, you don't get big headed. If you receive praise and acknowledge it and accept it and embrace it, you get big hearted. Not big headed, big hearted. So it's a symptom of what we call lack of self esteem, the inability to see oneself as others would see it, and actually praise oneself and value oneself and see the beauty in oneself. And that's what happens when you get still. You don't just see the beautiful grass in the hillside when you go more slowly. You often see yourself and this see you be absolutely stunned just how much beauty you can see inside of yourself. He never thought that was there because he had been going too fast to see it. When you slow down, amazing. You just you blossom, you just. You just unfold. And some of the stuff inside of you you've never seen before. It's just so clear in front of you. Delightful. Beautiful. Wonderful. You look. Yourself. Wow, I am okay. Actually, I'm more than okay. This is amazing. This is wonderful. Why is that so hard to accept? Even the very idea of that. Some of you were sort of cringing against the idea of thinking yourself as beautiful, wonderful, incredible. You can do that. And that's what happens. So person, when it starts slowing down, meditating, living a more peaceful life, they have much more respect for themselves, even admiration for themselves and what they admire. What they respect is like the flowers. They grow and grow and grow and eventually they just they just take over the garden. They smother the weeds. The beautiful part of yourself once is appreciated. Notice. Embraced. Accepted. Recognize that growth and all that other little stuff. Which are your faults, your negativity. All other stuff which, you know, causes too many problems in your life that vanishes. You know what this is called? The path to enlightenment. The path to freedom. The path to joy. To happiness. And I focused on it. The positive attitude towards yourself, to others, to life in general, even to death. Whatever happens in life. Embrace it. See its beauty. See its just the circles of life going round. The winters and the springs and the summers. Of course, it's not so bad, I think, because I don't know, over here in Australia. But, you know, the global financial crisis somebody wants on a completely different subject. Okay, this wonderful simile. And I was sharing this with so many people in a place like Singapore where they're very, very worried about the finances. So it's like a financial winter because I was born in the northern hemisphere, and I remember the winters in England. In the winters, you go outside the city and you wouldn't see a leaf on the trees. The flowers were all dead. There was no life. Even the animals were hiding underground, sleeping, hibernating in the deep winter time. Outside of London, everything was grey. Dead like trees were like skeletons in the forest. Nothing was alive. There was no hope. It was cold and dead, a withered landscape. Like an economic crisis. But you know what? Underneath the soil. You knew this because you've seen it so many times. Underneath a saw. There were seeds, the animals. There was life. Powerful life. Just waiting. It's waiting for the time. For the warmth of the tiny bit of rain to germinate. And then you get the spring months, March or April, and suddenly the whole landscape will be bursting with life with greenery, or his animals would jump out and start to mate and all sorts of other hanky panky, which a lot of monks had. But anyway, that's just life. And this is what you'd see. What was dead and hopeless and cold and withered was now full of energy and life and beauty and fibroids. And that's always whatever happens in life. It's in the cycles we go. So this is economic crisis. This is like a winter time. And you know that winter time is always followed by springs, the cycles of the world, you know that. But we forget it was too easy to get depressed in winter times. But those of you who have more experience can see in that winter time this beautiful pause, the pause of our life when many people are forced to see something more important than economic activity. It is reminder times I king winter time. We can stop and be still and peaceful when not so many things are moving. When you see the beauty in a dead tree and you see the beauty in the lifeless landscape, the stillness, the life inside, then you know that this is just one part of the will, and this is all this is right now in our economic times, in your life. Cancers, death, falling in life, getting married, getting divorce, having kids, all that sort of stuff. The cycles of our life. So when it is winter, always know there's a spring coming soon. You know it happens. You've been there before. But don't forget. This is a positive side of life and you see it more and more and more still you get. So take time in life. Don't go always running around. You have to run sometimes. But there's times when you just slow down and stop to remind yourself to center yourself. That's what meditation is all about. Learning how to stop. We sometimes people don't meditate properly. They go meditate. Just go and try to achieve something else. Try to go for it. Sometimes people get more stressed out when they meditate than before they start it. You're trying too hard. You know, some meditation objects we don't recommend. Like someone told me this a couple of days ago, in Buddhism, we don't recommend meditating on a candle because it burns your bottom. And that's that's today's joke. It doesn't improve with the years. And it's what I haven't told before anyway. So when you sort of meditate, meditate for peace, for stillness, because in stillness you see more deeply and you see more beautifully, and your positive attitude to life grows and grows and grows and grows. That's why the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which is the arm of the British National Health Service, which does test therapies, find out what's the best for the amount of money they have to spend testing depression or other therapies for depression compared three types of treatment medication. Cognitive behavioral therapy, which is basically counselling and meditation. Which one were the best? Of course you know. Meditation. By far the best, sir. The British National Health Service. The preferred therapy for depression is meditation. If they could only find enough people to teach it. It works. Hopefully today I've shown why it works. Stillness exposes beauty and power and energy. And with that power and energy and positivity and that beauty. Wow. You're not just going to heal depression. You're just going to go and create a beautiful world, respecting your beauty. Be able to go into prisons and see prisoners just chained like a catharsis. If you do that with prisoners, with rapists, with murderers, what can you do with others? What can you do with yourself to heal, to grow, to get out of the ship power once and for all and leave for heaven? That's how we become positive. And thank you for listening.