The Power of Mindfulness and Compassion

The Power Of Mindfulness and Compassion by Ajahn Brahm Transcription How last week, I wasn't here. Uh, because I went over to Sydney to teach at a conference, uh, called mind and His Potential and talking about a lot of the mindfulness and meditation techniques in the various forms of Buddhism. It is how powerful that has become in our world and how it's affecting many, many parts of our society, especially, uh, people who are into psychology, psychiatry, medicine, uh, business, even government. There we go. Isn't that beautiful sound to accompany the talk. And. Part of the, uh, the talk. I was actually mentioning that, uh, how popular meditation has become. Now in the Western world. And that's one of the reasons why even here, we're building our meditation retreat center, and we got our building permission now, so we'll be starting very soon. How to construct this? And when some people ask, well, why are you spending all this money just building retreat centers for meditation. It's there to serve a need, but it's also to change the world. Because sometimes people don't realize that. The patron for our retreat center is the former premier of Western Australia, Doctor Geoff Gallop. You know who, because of his depression, he used meditation. He came to our monastery down at serpentine, on the quiet, just without telling anybody and, uh, to actually learn a bit of meditation, to use what he calls eastern philosophy, basically Buddhism, to help with his depression. So he was so grateful for the help he received that he became our patron. And this is the start of changing the world, because you all know that Doctor Gallup's best friend, the person for whom he was the best man for their marriage, was Tony Blair. And Tony Blair's best friend is George Bush. I know that Mr. Bush has only got maybe a year and a half left, so I'm really rushing to build a retreat center soon because we would have Jeff Gallop as our patron. Sure, he'll invite his friend. He's got a lot of time left on his head now. Tony Blair and Tony Blair can get George Bush to come to our retreat center down at serpentine. And then, true, we would have changed the world. Okay. Might be a bit loud trying to push it as far as try and push it through our castle, because this is important. This is changing world. But I took a long time giving the building license. But anyhow, you can see the meditation actually does have a huge impact. And being serious that people were seeing that impact, there was this a huge number of studies which have been printed in journals throughout the world in different disciplines, and is just showing just how that the meditation which is practiced here and other places, it does sort of increase your attention, basically wakens you up so you see more and allows you to regulate your emotions and moods and creates huge benefits in many, many samples of people know benefits of like some more compassion and to some more ability to socially interact with other people. Which is why it's so important that Mr. Bush learns this so she can socially interact with the president of Iran and with the people in Iraq and maybe, who knows, have a bit more interaction with us and bin laden. Maybe we can save the world after all. Because it actually studies have shown this. And uh, interestingly, to see anecdotal experience, which I've had 24, 20 was 25 years now here in Western Australia, one of the, uh, the people who learned meditation with me, uh, she was a deputy principal of one of the school's primary schools. She's retired about ten years ago now. So she shows you how old her story is. But she would, uh, be teaching meditation in her class of kids, and there were year sixes, grade sixes, and now grade sixes. You know, they're starting to get close to puberty and starting to be a bit troublesome. But she started teaching the meditation from the very beginning of the year. Now, she called it quiet time rather than meditation, because that meditation is, uh, looked upon as being Buddhist and for a good reason, because basically Buddhism invented meditation and we started it off. So it has that association, even though that, you know, anyone can meditate, you don't have to be a Buddhist to meditate. And now even some people say that when they sit down meditating at home, their dogs meditate too, which is one of the other nice areas. They do sit quietly next to you. And I'm sure that people who meditate next to their dogs, their dogs, bark less and are much quieter. Maybe that could be. This could be a study on how to quiet down dogs. But the, uh, she was teaching quiet time, starting off with five minutes at the beginning of the year and finishing off with 15 or 20 minutes as a group activity, which started every morning of the school year. And as she told me, actually, it wasn't her, but it was her principal. Um, because I remember going to the school once and obviously having some tea with the principal, and he was he was not a Buddhist, but he was praising sort of this lady and how that her meditation, introduced in this year, fixes the changes which he saw happen, which was not just the children's intellectual ability increased because their attention. Was strengthened and but also and their academic results increased. And he could see this having been a principal. Looking at it from an objective position. But also he found out some other things which were happening, that the social interaction of the children in that class improved. There are more sensitive, more compassionate and less aggressive towards each other, which was an important part of what happens when you do become more attentive and more sensitive to see the mindfulness develops a compassion and the understanding. And I remember her giving an example of what happened. And many, many times she said that sometimes in the class of kids in her modern schools, sometimes there be some sort of argument or some sort of altercation, and usually where there would be a fight or a big argument. Now that one of the kids in the class would put up their hand and say, miss, can we have quiet time now? And when I had quiet time just for five minutes, just doing a simple relaxation, watching the breath, calming the mind down. Afterwards, the altercation finished and there was no sort of big argument or big problem. Not only that, the people were sensitive to each other because of their digital development of meditation. Year six. They could actually tell when somebody was in a bad mood, or someone was sick, or someone was unhappy, and because of that, they had this beautiful little mini society in their classroom, which had been enhanced by doing a tiny bit of meditation every day. Now, those are sorts of examples which now professors from Stanford and from other universities over in the United States, and a professor here from Western Australia, the professor of building the Ana monastery down in serpentine. And he also sort of started talking about just the results which we've seen from meditation now, simply that they're very well tested and proved. And while the nice things about it is that, you know, it doesn't depend upon any chemicals you have to ingest. And so it's very cheap and very safe and has very quick and very long lasting results in a human being. So that's why one of the reasons that meditation is an important growth area. Number one, societies. And sometimes, you know, we think that many people come up and tell us their problems or the problems of a husband and wife living together or with their kids or in schools or with governments or with business. And so this is a powerful little tool which we can spread out into this world now to help the well-being, the health, and the emotional sensitivity and compassion of our world. And it is powerful and it does work. And it's a very strong thing. But you have to know how to do it properly. Because many times when we do our meditation and sometimes that the buzz word in many places these days is mindfulness, and sometimes that mindfulness is some of the presenters of the conference mention is a word which is overused, and because it becomes a slogan, many people don't understand what it really is. And I was actually quite surprised that many of the teachers said, yeah, we know that mindfulness works, but actually we can't meditate. They're unable to do that meditation, even though that they have been showing what happens with other people who do learn basic meditation. I think one of the problems is that the meditation becomes just too hard. One of the stories they told, which was quite fascinating. They were doing some research. And when you do research on meditation, it's a scientific studies. You have to have a control group. You get some people meditating, some people not meditating and some people doing something else. And so the professor at Stanford. He got some people who were doing meditation for one day. Some people were doing nothing. And the third control group, they sent at the universe's expense to a spa for the day. And what they found, actually, the people who went to the spa were far more relaxed than the people who did meditation all day. She tells me that's something wrong with that meditation technique you're doing. Well, maybe it's because the university paid for the spa and you didn't. But also, I think that they were mentioning that this the effects of meditation are far more long lasting than just going to a spa. But when I heard her, I said, why is going to a spa? Make it make you relaxed? A lot of times it's because when you go into a spa and never been to a spa. So I'm just, uh, speculating here. And that's honest truth, though. When you go to a spa, I don't know if you install of a Jacuzzi or hot water or being massaged or something. Have you ever noticed whenever you're being massaged, you're actually you're feeling. Sensations in your body in this moment. It grounds you in your body. Grounds you in this moment is a pleasurable experience, so you don't want to wander off into thinking what's going to happen later on you because you're enjoying this moment. And that, to me, is the most important part of like learning how to sort of focus, to bring joy, peace, contentment into this moment. Otherwise, you know, we're not really mindful. We can be doing the meditation. Sometimes people do that. They can be sitting here and just thinking all sorts of things and wandering all over the place. And of course, there's no results to be gained from that type of quiet time because you're busy inside, you're noisy inside, you know, it is why that when we talk about something like mindfulness, the biggest thing is, yes, mindfulness does work. But how do we become mindful now? How do we actually grow that mindfulness? And our biggest mistake is actually trying to think that you have to make the mind mindful. You will work it as an act of will. And because in our Western world, we've got into this habit of thinking whatever we want, we have to work for it. We have to achieve it as a result of our own efforts. And I think this is one of the biggest problems in our Western world is actually we work too hard. We do too much, and it's become such a habit inside of us to go for things, to work, for things, to strive for things. And we think the only people who are really successful people in this world are the ones who are the hard workers. Understanding that this is not how meditation works. You can see where hard work gets us. We work so much, we become crazy and we sort of become psychotic, if not fully psychotic, just to a big degree of of dysfunctional mental states. We're out of control. Sometimes we get angry at ourselves. We get angry other people. We get depressed when things go wrong. I've often speculated that the cause of depression is because we we try so hard, we try to control. And when we try and control, eventually we come across the barrier, things which we can't change. We get frustrated. Control leads eventually to frustration, and frustration leads to anger, and the angered has consumed so much of our energy it depresses us. So we do go into those negative states of mind. What we just lose are our energy, our commitments with our joy of life. Simply because we just control too much. And very often that people actually go into the meditation, okay, watch the breath. And they sit there with their clenched teeth and trying to watch every breath. And of course, if they do that, it would be much better that you were in a spa. But instead of doing things like that, just understand that, you know, to be actually mindful. And it means actually to be still, to be gentle is that this awareness is a natural state of mind. You remember when you were kids, when you were always mindful, when you were children, you could actually often see children. They could actually sit and play with simple things I'm talking about before they can become computer literate and play video games. Sometimes it will sort of pebble on the beach. It's all they need to be themselves happy for hours simply because we're not working so hard. We become far more alert and far more aware. So no, we do need these quiet times. Times when we do very little. If we can actually stop and really rest not just our body, but rest our minds. And then actually we can we can actually break through and actually become more alert, more awake, more mindful. And the key story is that the faster you go, the less you see. And because we moved so fast doing many things, when we actually try and control and do things, what we actually do is trying to move off into something in the future, rather than stopping being still and seeing what's going on right now. That's why we made so many mistakes. One of the stories which I've been told in the last few days, where this poor person had got so depressed because he used to be a painter and he was involved in a tragic accident, and he lost his arm had to be amputated. You know, when you have like loss of one of your limbs, that sometimes that does create a huge amount of depression in you, especially because that was his love for his career to be painting. Now he didn't have an arm. One day he got so depressed he went to the CBD, climbed one of the office towers and got out on a ledge, was about to jump off to commit suicide. And that's when he saw just down on the street. Where? In Saint Georges Terrace, this fella with no arms, skipping down the street and laughing and dancing for joy. It was one of those occasions of saying, wow, now here am I being depressed. I've only got one arm and here's the guy's got no arms at all, and look how happy he is. And of course, that changed his whole life. He didn't want to commit suicide anymore, but he ran down the stairs quickly and caught up with that guy with no arms to ask him what his secret was. How can you be so happy dancing for joy when you've got no arms? Like I told you, I'm not happy. I'm dancing just because I'm trying to scratch my bum. So that's this evening's joke. If it was worldwide for a little bit about you see what was going on. Instead of jumping to conclusions. But anyway, that's a little funny story, just by the way. But it's true that sometimes when we can actually stop, we become more alert and more awake. And actually, that's how we sort of jump for joy. Which is why that mindfulness is beautiful quality of the mind, which is, you know, trumpeted in, uh, therapy as being incredibly powerful as a way of like, uh, extending your attention and also regulating some of the negative emotions and be able to do that old self cognitive therapy to get rid of the anger, the depression, the guilt, and all those other things which crippled a person's happiness. So as you to get that mindfulness started, it does take a lot of stillness. Time out resting. This is why that, you know, my favorite saying in the last few year or two has been never do today what you can put off until tomorrow because you might die tonight. And that's an important saying. It's not just a joke, because why is it that we just work so hard, getting everything out of the way and doing things, and we never have actually time just to rest and be still and be peaceful and be calm. But when you actually understand, the power of calm and stillness is taking time out, you find your awareness does start to generate. You do become more mindful, but also with that mindfulness coming from stillness, you actually do get more happiness. And so one of the things which I discovered as a meditator, the more still you get, the more joy you get. Strange thing is as if that and this is an old spiritual truth, you have all the happiness and joy you want, but you leave it alone when you run off looking for something else. And because we've always been running off, we forgot what we've already had right here, right now, in this moment. It is a powerful thing just to come home. And if one stops, just pauses a while and pauses many whiles and you find that the mind starts to wake up, and when it wakes up, he becomes more aware. When it becomes more aware, it becomes happier. If you don't believe me, why is it that many people in our society the first thing they do when they wake up? Well, maybe not the very first thing, but you know, one of the first things they do is put the kettle on and make themselves a cup of coffee. I know that some people in this world, they're not worth talking to until they've had their first cup of coffee. And if you know someone like that, why is that the case is because when they got the energy, they are much happier and more positive towards their partners and also towards themselves. And I've noticed that. And you can actually see why. It's because that energy of the mind is, is the happiness. Mental energy is happiness. I understand that. Very important points and you can test it out for yourself. It's common sense, but sometimes we forget it. We understand now why is there no happiness? Why is there no awareness? And mindfulness is because we're dull. We don't have mental energy. We are burnt out. Worn out. Just almost half dead. Right? And how on earth could you think you can get more energy in your mind by doing more things? You're already tired. Fortunately, these days we know how to rest the body. And we can go to spa's to rest the body. We can go to the beach to rest the body. We can just lay in the armchair to rest the body. The most important thing is learning how to rest your mind. You keep the mind calm for a few minutes so it can regenerate its energies. That's the whole point of doing some meditation. To stop long enough to pause in this moment. To pause in silence just to watch one thing rather than doing too many things at once. Just slow down. And as you slow down, the mind starts to wake up. And as it wakes up, it gets more peace. More peace means more awareness. More awareness with more happiness. That's basically just how this whole thing works. And when you get more happiness and more peace. The whole point of meditation becomes a thing you love doing you want to do simply because it's fun. I've been a mac now for 33 years, over 33 years now that it is nice to have some monkeys because it's fun to meditate. And even though I have lots of work to do, sometimes I just love just sitting still and doing nothing, simply because I get a lot of happiness and joy out of this. And this is a marvelous thing to understand. When we understand that we can actually get this happiness and joy from being still, and that happiness and joy and that stillness gives rise to this awareness. We understand that how we can not so much control our life, but say like regulate our life. It's not much control. It's like saying saying no to some of the stupid things which we do in life. Some of our stupid habits. Because once you generate mindfulness, know from stillness and it's accompanied with joy, you become more aware and more alert. You start to sort of see some of the stupid things which we do, especially some of the stupid things which we think, and some of the things which you think. I know that sometimes people ask, you know, can monks read minds? And even if I could, the last thing I would do to read your minds. It's like reading a junk novel. Gee, who would want to read your mind? Come on. Because there's so much rubbish in there. You know, talk about Pulp Fiction. You know, it's not even up to that stage. But anyhow, because there's so much junk in that mind. No. No wonder you get tired and you get stressed and you get angry and you get guilty and you feel fear, and all these other negative emotions won't be a wonderful thing to dislike. You have spring cleaning sometimes now in your house. You've got so much junk in the cupboards. Sometimes when? The weekend. Right? Let's clear it all out. There's going to be a council collection this weekend. Get rid of all your junk. Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing to have a council collection of the junk in your mind? And fortunately, you're in the right place. And next week, we're having a retreat as a weekend. This weekend. Retreat this weekend. So if you didn't make it to this weekend, come to the next retreat. If you don't make it for the next retreat, comes the next one. And it's like a rubbish collection organized by the Buddhist society and for all your unwanted goods in your mind. So please pick all that rubbish and dump it in the retreat centres. Wouldn't be a wonderful thing to do that so you have much more freedom in your head between your ears. And this is actually how meditation it does work, how the mindfulness actually just empties out things. But it is so much useless stuff. We have so many useless fears and worries. I don't know what you are worried about, what you're afraid of. Maybe we think every time that you know, I've started being afraid of something. It never happens. When I was, I remember hearing Perth many years ago, there was a locus play. And I remember in the West Australia, you used to get those newspapers and it reached, I think, um, somewhere like in Geraldton, and it was coming to Perth and the next day it was 20km closer, and the next day and the next day and they said it's going to be coming in two days time. And the next day we got the paper, it's coming tomorrow and nothing happened. It was a complete sort of wind up because I think, you know, the locals, whatever, they decide to go somewhere else. They didn't like Perth. I don't know why. For whatever it was. It was a complete buildup of fear to much of what we were afraid of is because of the fear, because of the worry. This is actually what harms our happiness and cripples our ability to respond appropriately. And very often what happens with fear is what you're afraid of. You actually make happen. Strange thing, but this is what fear does. We're worried, we're worried, we're worried, we're worried. And sometimes we make it happen. We create our fears and we create what we're afraid of. So it's wonderful actually to just to let go of the fears and how you actually overcome that. You can start with your awareness and mindfulness. It's like the similarly of a train. If you have a train. And actually just today we saw the first train on the Southern Link railway line over in Armadale on the freeway. But when actually it was stopped, wasn't going anywhere. And that was very symbolic. But anyhow. Whenever a train is stopped when it starts, it's very easy to put a brake on and stop it almost immediately. But when a train has picked up speed and it's hurtling along the tracks, and if it has to stop, sometimes it takes 500m, even a kilometer to come to a halt. It's got far too much momentum. Same with your thought processes or especially your emotional processes. Once they've picked up momentum, they're travelling very, very fast. This is so hard to stop, but if you can catch yourself early on, it's so easy to stop. His bad habits of the mind. So you may get angry at your partner. This is a bad habit. You know you love them. You committed to them. But sometimes we say not really nasty things. But no, not kind things to the people you love. This bad habits are so. And if you can actually see that bad habit, you can actually catch yourself earlier and earlier and say, I'm not going to say that thing, I'm not going to do that thing. Or if it may be some other sort of habit which you have know is getting angry when somebody sort of calls you names. Apparently already the monks who are on this walk at the moment, uh, no. Walking to raise funds for the retreat center. They said even just sitting in Monday junk somewhere. They got an Australian salute. Somebody mooned them. They took down their trousers and pointed their backside at them. So what would you do when that happens? Why get offended? What? How was actually how did you get your camera out and take a shot for the newsletter? They went too fast in the car. Why do you get upset at these things? I saw was this a stupid reaction to make? Because it doesn't sort of help anybody. Why not laugh? Because if somebody is trying to wind you up, if they're trying to offend you or they're trying to do is to make your life a little bit more unhappy, they're trying to give you pain or suffering. So if you actually see this whole process working with mindfulness, become more aware of your processes, you know, between your ears. I don't want to do this. Someone can call me a pig. They can call me an idiot, but I am not going to respond. You can actually catch yourself if you start responding. Then the train has left. The station is very hard to stop. Afterwards, you get angry and upset and they're angry and upset. It hurts you and it creates huge amounts of problems in society. If you can just ignore it, people don't do it again, simply because the only reason they try and offend you is to get a rise out. You get a reaction out of you if you don't react. There's no point to it anymore, which is a wonderful way of retraining someone. About six months ago here, I mentioned a great article, which I read in a magazine about one lady who had done an article on one of these water parks where they were training dolphins. The training dolphins actually had to jump through hoops, and she did an in-depth investigation. And actually, how do you train these animals to do these tricks? And they like play a water polo or something. And what he found out was basic psychology. And she thought, wow, this is so good, I can try this on my husband. And exactly the same tricks which we use to train dolphins. She tried on her husband and she said it worked perfectly. That is just basic mindfulness. Whenever her husband did something stupid, she would completely ignore it instead of actually, you know, her husband sort of getting upset at her. Instead of getting upset back, she stopped that whole negative process and just ignored him. Just the same when the Dolphins did a mistake. They weren't pilots, they weren't charter. They just ignored them. So when somebody you can train your wife as well, it works both ways. This is nuts. Whenever you're somebody who does something you don't like, the sort of behavior you don't want to encourage. Ignore it. Don't give them a response. And when they do something, when that dolphin jumps a little bit higher, a little bit closer to the loop. Hope then you give them a fish. So you have to get plenty of fishes to train your husband for your wife, for whatever it is. You know what I mean? And like a little reward because the positive response is always far more effective. Positive rewards. And you can actually see this happen. But to be able to give those positive rewards, you've got to be mindful enough and kind enough to make this wonderful Buddhist combination not just mindfulness, but with kindness as well. Put those two together there so you're aware and you are kind. When you have those two together the kindness, compassion and the mindfulness. Then you see your husband doing something. You're kind to the guy, but you're only really aware, but you're so kind to yourself and see what's happening inside your own head. And when you actually pay attention to that, you can see the stupid things which are not really kind at all. Not kind to yourself, not kind to other people. And those are the things which create the psychological, emotional and social problems in your family, in your world, and also in your body. Causing ill health and cancers and all sorts of stuff. Because the stress does not come from the body, it comes from the mind. Just the way we react in a dysfunctional way to the experiences of life. You don't have to do that. Instead, when it's mindful enough to be kind and learn how to do something else, mindfulness breaks habits because you're aware of what you're doing and you know you can do something else. The awareness gives you alternatives. You don't always need to speak in the same way. You don't always need to react. You're not someone who has buttons. The reason we have buttons is an automatic response. I press that button and that's the response I get from you. That's why we call it buttons. Imagine if you've got your you underwire all your buttons. So when somebody calls you a pig, they call you idiot. They call you stupid, they call you ugly. Whatever they call you. You don't respond. You've unwired that button. It means they won't do that anymore. It's a waste of time. They don't get any response. Because of that, you are helping another human being now become a more compassionate, wise, civilized person and also helping yourself as you see your own mental processes. You have processes like grief. And why do we do that? We can actually see the whole process happening inside of you, or anger and disappointment. You can see the process as it occurs. Now, if you say as it occurs, you can catch it earlier and earlier and earlier and you can stop it. The kindness is why? Why get angry? What's the point of that? Is it really going to help me? Is it going to help the other person? Is it going to help society? And you find I don't know who you're going to vote for in a couple of weeks time, but some people are going to be upset. Some people can. They'll be happy. Who cares anyway? Instead of getting unhappy, can't control these things. Just leave it alone and just flow with it. Whatever happens. That's what happens, you know, in your family. What happens sometimes that people are so afraid of making choices because they are. If this happens, then everything will go wrong. You don't have to be afraid of choice. If you put all your mindfulness under the choices you make, it doesn't matter what choice you make. There's no such thing as a wrong choice. It's just a different choice. That's all it is. You have different opportunities in the future. But I don't like the idea of like, a wrong choice or a right choice. Whatever happens to in life, you can always learn to live with it. See what happens. That's why I find it very easy to make choices. You just make a choice in the monastery. Whatever happens, if you lay a brick the other way around, you can always sort of, uh, lay all the bits that way around and make it a different way of laying bricks. Whatever happens, you can always make something out of it so that I can see the way that mine works. Sometimes we do something, we say something, we think something, and we always tend to blame and be negative. You kind of see the whole process happening. There's a dysfunctional process. Once you can see it out of compassion, out of with your own wisdom. You don't need to be taught this. You can see it happening, which means you could, as they say, regulate your emotional world. You can be a happier, wiser, peaceful person, which is one of the reasons why now we have things like religion. Sometimes what you have religion for, and it's there to serve people, to make people happier, better individuals. So you can come here and you can go home a better wife, a better husband, a better father, a better child, more sort of happier, more at ease with yourself. You can go to work and you don't get so stressed out. So it could be more long lived and healthier. And there's heaps and heaps and heaps of studies who actually show the effects of this. And so this is actually what we really mean by the meditation for a better lifestyle. Not that hard to do. It just needs time. That's one of the reasons people think, oh, we've got no time. But these things are investment in time. Whenever you were at school, you'd always have playtime in the morning. Uh, recess in the afternoon if you went too late. And those gaps between your work periods were really important. Because no person's brain can just work continuously for all that time. Now I have my breaks. One of the things which I do for recreation is read comics. I come in and Hobbes is one of my favorite. If I get a newspaper, that's usually the first section I turn to. Now these are the comic strips. Little bit of recreation that you to stop the mind. Or if you really want to be still. Just go and sit down cross-legged and make the mind really, really peaceful if you've got more time. What that actually does is it stops you, energizes you, see what's going on, which means you can handle whatever happens in this world. Even go to Sydney. Last weekend, once again my aircraft was delayed and there's are three times this year flying with, I don't mind saying Qantas three times this year the plane has been delayed for three hours this time. The last time was 24 hours. It was delayed. Yeah, Telstra doesn't fly planes, otherwise there will be this. But I don't know. I don't know much about Telstra. But anyway, even though these things are delayed, people can get really angry. Sometimes you see people just jumping up and down, getting angry and angry and angry. But as I've always noticed, this is three times this happened. Never once, never once. When you get angry, does it make the plane come faster? Well, I do notice. It makes you sort of live shorter lives. You know, as you get sort of more and more upset. So even simply, why do people have dysfunctional reactions to some of the things which happens in life? This is what happens in life. Sometimes things do not go according to your plan. So instead of having very, very solid and hard plans set in concrete, wouldn't it be wonderful just to be more adaptable? And how do we become more adaptable? By spending less time in the future and more time in the present. By being more aware and mindful, there's all sorts of different options which can happen. I remember this guy years ago. He came to see me and the thing which changed his life and made him far more spiritual. He was in India. He was in Bombay at that time, still Bombay, before his change to Mumbai. And he got in a in a taxi to take him to the airport. He was flying back to Europe on a plane. Taxi got lost and the time was ticking away. You didn't know where he was going to make his plane or not. In the end, he was just hoping there was a delay in the, uh, takeoff of the plane because it was going into the time of takeoff. And as he actually managed to find the airport, Bombay airport, he actually saw his plane take off. And so his cursing the driver, and they missed his plane. He left the city and plenty of time, but the stupid taxi driver got lost, and he was so upset. And then he saw the plane fall down and crash with. I don't know, most people dead, I'd imagine. And then he was taking the taxi driver. Thank you so much. And they were telling that story. And that so changed his life because his expectations of what would happen. And now my plane has been delayed. Obviously, that was an extreme. That's never happened to me missing a plane. But you can see what happens that sometimes when things so-called go wrong, it just makes another opportunity for you so you don't get negative. You see the way the mind works. And you start that sort of that dysfunctional way of looking at the mind while looking at life. You can actually use a different approach, but mindfulness sees a bigger picture. And by seeing a bigger picture and adding the compassion that you can be kinder to life, you can be kinder to yourself and be kinder to your body and kind of the people you live with. And though sometimes it was just so, so negative to each other and to ourselves, we're always fighting for, that's one of the big things. We start with mindfulness. We start default fighting mind, which is always saying what's wrong in life. And that's actually the business mind, because that's what we have to do in business. The idea of business is actually see the faults and manage it and fix it. We know we're all janitors are ourselves, which obviously we janitors of our husband are our wife as well. See the mistakes and fix them up. Instead of doing that, it's the other way is using mindfulness actually to see what's right in the mind? This is one of the early experiences I had of living in the monastery down at serpentine. That was the main builder there for many years. I've delegated that now to Agent Marley. But whenever I was a builder and just managing the the infrastructure of the monastery, he had worked so hard from Monday to Friday and on the weekends come up to here. It's so tiring. Whenever I go back out after Sunday, you go walking around the monastery. You see all the things which were wrong, which need to be fixed up, the gutters, which needs to be cleaned. You know, the bricks which needed to be stacked up properly, and all the paths which needed to be swept. And I realized I was just getting more and more tired, simply because everything I'd ever do was to see the mistakes and start planning how I was going to fix them up. That's why that one day I saw what I was doing using the mindfulness scene the way my mind was working. I think that's not the way to spend a Monday morning. So from that time on, for many years afterwards, I've gone to walk around my monastery Monday morning looking for what was right, looking for what had been done, looking for what had been finished was perfect and wonderful. And that's actually when I started appreciating my monastery, in which I lived. All his other people like yourselves would come down. Oh, what a beautiful monastery you have! Are you joking? It's a mess. Because for me, I could see all the things which were wrong. And you guys would come up and say, oh, what a wonderful monastery! How peaceful it is. Peaceful. I have to work so hard in this monastery. And that's how I saw it wasn't you. You were wrong. It's me. Was wrong. So I wasn't seeing the monastery in an objective way. I was seeing it as a manager sees things. A manager sees the faults and tries to fix them up. So I actually changed my attitude to sometimes when you are the manager, you put your manager mind on because this is what you have to do to find the force. But I could take that manager hat off. The mindfulness could actually see my monastery, which I lived in another way. And it's wonderful to build it because it is a beautiful monastery, living in the bush in the hills, and we put a lot of effort and time into making that monastery look nice. And it does look nice, and I really appreciate it. And I think it's more happiness to live in this place. What's your house like? Is it a mess? Do you always have to think? Fix things up? How many of you can go home tomorrow and sit in your house and do absolutely nothing and just enjoy, you know, your house, which you paid a lot of money for? Maybe not finished yet, but you know you've paid a lot for this and go in the garden or anywhere and just enjoy and do nothing. Very hard for people to do that because they sometimes they feel guilty. I should be doing something that's a manager again. Well, meditation says you don't need to feel guilty. You deserve time out. You deserve peace. You deserve just to relax. You deserve to stop and enjoy yourself. Instead of always feeling guilty, enjoying herself or thinking, I have to get everything out of the way first of all, before you can enjoy yourself. One of the key stories in the book. Open the door of your heart. It's a wonderful story to introduce here. This was the great monk in the south of time, and Buddha does so, building a hall in his monastery as he was building this hall in his monastery. Came to the start of the Raines retreat. When we do lots of meditation amongst this study, and so he sent all the builders home and said he can come back in three months time. When we finished our tree. So they all went away. And one day a man came to visit and they saw the hall and said quite innocently, when is your hall going to be finished? And the monk said, it is finished. And I said, what? There's some bags on the floor. There's no glass in the windows. There's nothing on the roof yet. Are you going to leave it like this is some sort of Buddhist modern art? What do you mean, it's finished? And the monk said, sir, what's done is finished. And he went away to meditate. There's a very powerful statement that because when is your house ever going to be all the job's done, so you can take a rest? When is your life going to be complete so you can take time out? When are you going to get everything out of the way so you can rest? The answer is if you don't understand that. Similarly, never. People work themselves to the grave. They become the richest people in the cemetery. The only place they can rest in peace is six feet under. Unless we understand just the way that we look at our mind and change the way that we look at our life. With a bit of mindfulness and compassion, we find that taking time out is actually an investment of time. He found by taking a bit of a break. You find you have more energy later on and find you just have more clarity. You make better decisions. You become healthier, more positive. So much time is wasted in our life. Wasted as silly arguments wasted in. Know some of the stuff we have to do with our health. And we waste so much time. You can only spend a little bit of time resting from moment to moment. You know, do a little bit of meditation, a little bit of mindfulness, but it's still a little bit of quiet time if we're going to invest. I don't even like 15 minutes every day doing this. We'd make up those 15 minutes very quickly in greater productivity. The sort of stuff which Mr. Costello would love to hear more productivity, simply because we're using our brains more efficiently, because we know how to rest. Because we know how to increase our mindfulness to have more attention. How many of you have worked so late in front of your computer screen? Now your eyes are open but your brain is closed. Just to waste of time. Instead of you just rest a little bit, do a bit of meditation, and then when you sort of do your job, you find you're far more alert, more clear, and you are more happy, which means the quality of life improves enormously, which means that the anger, the problems which you have in the family decrease, the divorce rate will go down, depression will vaporize, people's health will improve, and many other parts of our society. Because the anger, the depression, the frustrations would also tend to disappear. The thing it was one of the great philosophers once said, the reason is Pascal. So all the problems of mankind and womankind to all come from not knowing how to sit still. About 300 years ago, he said there. And people weren't moving around that much, though, that fast in those days. It's amazing what happens when you just sit, stir and allow the mind to rest and get energy and clarity and mindfulness and add compassion. It's a huge what you can do for yourself and for the people who have to put up with you. So this is actually how we can use our mindfulness. And so I was talking all weekend last weekend about this in seminars, in workshops, in lectures and just how powerful it is. And that's one thing which we can give to the world. If you can learn how to be quiet, a little bit of meditation, a bit of mindfulness and compassion, you can help your kids and the people you live with. You can make a better world. And even if George Bush never comes to our retreat center. At least many of your friends can. And that way you can create a better Western Australia. Thank you for listening. So any questions about mindfulness, compassion and its power? Certainly I never mentioned the physical health benefits of that. If any of you ever got any sicknesses, pains, injuries or just no wounds from an operation so powerful, putting your mindfulness down and just sending some kind energy. Caring attention is very, very healing and powerful. Yes. It's very good. Yes. Because, uh, the question was that, uh, you work in the mental health field, and though many people know these truths, but you were struck by the fact that many of the people who were up telling other people about the importance of meditation said that they couldn't really do it much themselves. They weren't the best meditators. And again, it's I think one of the reasons is, you know, that much of their samples were actually done on new meditators. There are people off the street who hadn't done much meditation before. And usually when it's something new, though, it's actually there is a certain enjoyment of the novelty of it. And so usually when people start meditating, it's usually they have some good experiences for the first few times because they don't know what to do. And that's a plus. When you start meditating, you don't know what to do, means you don't do anything, which means you get quite peaceful. The trouble is, when you become a seasoned meditator and when you think you know what you're doing and you try and control the whole process. I wish it were that that meditation doesn't work. The old, similarly returned cave over there to the mostly Tibetan Buddhist over in Sydney who went the carpets, the glass of water. How can you hold a glass of water still? And those in the front row will see that it's still moving. It's still vibrating slightly. And so the usual response is to try and hold it more still, to concentrate more, use more willpower. The more willpower you use, just the more it shakes. And so people get frustrated. After a while they think they can't meditate. They can't get their minds to you doing it the wrong way. It's very easy to keep a glass of water absolutely. Still, all you need to do is just put it there it is, put it there. First of all, when you put things down, it moves more. It shakes a bit more like when you first let go. You don't do things. The mind actually gets more agitated. Your job just to wait for a while. You just wait and rest. No water. Now those in the front row can see there is far more still than I can ever hold it. Matthew. That is how we made it. We just got to get the trick, first of all. Once you get the trick right, just letting things go, leaving things alone, you'd be the observer, not the doer. You don't meditate, you get out of the way and meditation happens. And with that stillness, that's when the mind starts to wake up and become very sharp and very alert. It rests. One of Arjan Shah's my teacher's sayings to get a healthy body, you have to exercise it, move it. To get a strong mind, you have to keep it still. Still so you don't do anything. All the doing agitate, stir things up, put it down and just watch. It becomes very still, just like the simile of her legs. When it's still on the surface, it can reflect the forest around it, or the hills or the, the the sky. When it's waves on the surface, everything gets distorted. You don't see clearly. In the stillness is the pure reflection. So when the mind becomes still, the marvel has become very sharp. You see very deeply in folks. You start to see what you're up to. Think I'm stupid? What am I doing that for? Why am I getting angry at the woman I love? I'm not saying these things to him. Just stop. Especially why am I saying all these stupid things to myself? You're kinder, less judging, and more peaceful from much sane. A person much more effective in your work. Put your work you do able to do more and do it better and do it quicker. So to someone just a few minutes ago studying, if you learn how to meditate, you can get higher grades with less work and more time to party. It's a great mark, a great marketing slogan for people at university in schools, and it works as well. It's true. Any other comments or questions. Okay, great. So may all be mindful still and quiet. Notice mindfulness. Stillness makes mindfulness and with kindness as well. You got the very powerful combination for life. You. Are a handsome, awesome Buddha are the good on Bhagawan the happy one day me. So I can't abide a what are the more the monomer Swami. Sir. Paddy power or a water or a sun. Go sun. Panama me.