A Buddhist Monk's Honest Advice On Letting Go & Finding Inner Peace

The Modern Buddhism Podcast - The Modern Buddhism Podcast

A Buddhist monk shares practical insights on letting go, mindfulness, and inner peace through personal stories and teachings from meditation and Dharma practice.

Key takeaways

• Anxiety worsens problems instead of solving them

Transcript preview

Anxiety is pointless completely, isn't it? And anxious about things. You know, if you've got a problem and you get stressed or anxious, it's not going to make it easier to deal with the problem. Whenever you're upset, you freeze it in time, all you have to do is let go of it. So what we need to do is to learn to let go of things. And as you let go more and more this, you just start feeling. That happiness was there all along. Thank you for coming today. Yeah, hi Agnes. And now I know that you are from Wales, right? Yes, but don't hold that against you. No, no, not against you. But how did you get into Darma? This is quite a funny story. I decided I wanted to study something where I were exams. This is backfired quite badly. So I started going to night classes and I started going to the first one was poetry, which was okay. philosophy I didn't like. Then I was coming home drunk eating a kebab and it was raining so I sheltered in a butcher shop doorway and there was a flyer for dama classes. So I thought well I don't know anything about Buddhism. Another nine weeks of this be quite nice and I went to the first class and the teacher said if you don't develop patience you'll never be happy and I thought poor that's true, and the second week he said if you like people they make you happy if you dislike people they make you unhappy if you love people they make you very happy and if you hate people they make you very unhappy and I thought why hasn't anyone told me this and then I kept going to classes for a bit and I was still going out drinking and eating kebabs so I thought this has got to change somehow so I moved to Tara center and I came under the care of Genra Kenrab That's fantastic. Yeah. How many years ago that was? 29. Yeah. 29. And how did you? So it's a bit longer than nine weeks. 29 years later you're still here. What kept you going? You know, I think one of the things that I found is you watch your friends going down different routes and you watch their lives being really unsatisfying and fallen apart. You know, I think one of the things that I found is you watch your friends going down different routes and you watch their lives being really unsatisfying and with successful children, but then they all got stressed, that nervous breakdowns and marriages fell apart and finally he said to me I think you made a good decision. But you look around the world, you know on the surface it looks like there's a lot of things but gradually you just watch it all fall apart and I watched all these young people with wonderful careers and then you watch them getting old and sick and you think there's nothing out there. and you don't believe him. You have to find out from your own experience. You have to mix your own life with what Buddha's saying. Just like in the play, Buddha's father's cross and when he gets old he realizes the Buddha was right. My father is the same. And what would I was right about? That there's nothing out there in this world that's going to make you happy. And also you have to meditate, isn't that. I found that there's lots and lots of things blocking your happiness. One is all the time, which we're doing all the time, getting irritated. And as you let go more and more this, you just start feeling that happiness was there all along. They just couldn't see it. But it's very, very alluring, isn't it? You see, if you've got, you've just come out to the university, you've got a good job. It's very easy to get pulled into this. So for years, I struggled with this because I liked my career and giving it up. And then I did something which was really useful. I meditated. I'm really useful. I'm really like rather than what I was imagining and I lost my attachment. What do you mean? Well you start thinking, oh, it'll be great, it'd be fantastic, I'll enjoy myself so much. Then you start thinking, no I want, I'd be waking up thinking, I've got to go to work. And you'd be sitting in a room with some people you don't particularly like eating your sandwiches and it's just very mundane and boring. And it's just very mundane and boring. In your imagination, these bad boring things don't happen. So you have to, again, again, again, again, from Canada he said to me, attachment doesn't see consequences. And when he said that I was so chilled by that I thought I have to put consequences in my mind. So what you do is you sit there and you think if I do this this will be the consequence and most people don't they think oh I'll be great. It's never worked for anyone else but it'll work for me. So you have to sit and think and when you look at the consequences it's often quite easy you just think I'm not going to do that because it's not going to make me happy. at that my mind it doesn't really want to see this yeah it just wants everything to end happily but how how did you make a connection with those consequences was it like natural for you that you just receive this instruction and all of a sudden you are doing this or when should have said this it just chilled me I didn't just know is the power of his speech I think the way he said it but I had been struggling thinking I never struggled with the idea me in ordain but I struggled with let them go my career I started thinking about what he was really like, it was easy. You just start thinking if you start living in reality, things are quite easy, but we live in fantasy world most of the time. And it doesn't help, does it? Deny in the truth, doesn't help, because it's still there. It doesn't go away because you don't believe in it. So you mean that we are living in a contrast of what we would like our life to be, creating the fantasy versus what the reality is. I mean the classic one is people thinking that they're going to find something that's going to make you happy like I'm really miserable now but never mind in three months time I'm gonna upgrade my phone and everything's gonna be fine then and it's not and the biggest one is relationship isn't there you're gonna meet someone and all these problems are gonna go away and they're not even if you meet the person you like you're still gonna quarrel you're still gonna get fed up all my friends that married have got to a point where the marriage is almost broken and then later on they've settled down into a happy marriage but if you want to enjoy yourself you've got to meditate and train your mind. Where is that? Because your mind's in a mess and what it's doing is projecting a lot of nonsense onto the world and you believe in it. So what we have to do really is understand that if we meet that you know that first teacher I was telling but on patience the teacher said you see some and if you weren't there I'd be happy. But one of the things I learned is there's lots and lots of things that can provoke me. It's not just that one person and what's happening is my sensitivity of my mind. So the most sensitive I am, the more upset I'm going to get. But people don't realize this. They think that I'm normal and you are behaving unreasonably. So we have to realize that it's our mind that's causing it. And some people, someone said to me before, I'm not sure who I'm not sure very angry you can't see this you can't see that you've got a problem all you can see is horrible awkward people whereas if if you got a little bit of patience you might start thinking well maybe I'm contributing to the situation of it and as you get more patient you realize this is true it's only when you start shedding things you actually see just so much damage it was doing to your happiness and peace and how our mind is doing this which are distorted ways of thinking and the delusion sits there until something triggers it and it can be a person or a situation something we don't like and then we give it too much attention. He called it inappropriate attention. So you know you sit there. There was a wonderful story by Chekhov about a man sitting opposite someone on a long boat journey and because the boat journey was so unpleasant, he was getting to hate this man more and more. He didn't know anything about this man. He was just getting very, very irritated and thinking it's you, it's your fault. And that's what we do. If our mind's unpeaceful, we find something to blame, or we find something we think that's going to rescue us. We think, oh yeah, like this thing about the phone, isn't it? People really do think that when they upgrade their phone, everything's going to be fine. It's just a bit of plastic. But it's inappropriate attention, isn't it's thinking that our phone, that our phone, that our phone can't that our phone can't than it can and also when we see some that annoys us we think this person is evil but the person's just maybe done something they've been irritating. Your mind's filled in a lot of this. But you know we hear the teaching then it's quite good if you can see it in your own life. Yeah I thought because when I heard that teaching I was a student and I watched all these professors shouting and screaming all day and I thought this is what I heard in the Buddhist class last night. supposed to be clever and I'm supposed to be modeling myself on these people but no they don't know how to make themselves happy I think yes just says that isn't people don't know how to make themselves happy so that's a lot what meditations about is learning what's caught what's making you unhappy what and what you can do about it so how our mind works. Oh,