Buddhist Monk: Why You Feel Lost In Life & How To Reinvent Yourself | Gelong Thubten

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:00 You've been a monk for 30 years. If I look across society, what I see are a lot of people with low-grade addictions, things like alcohol, social media, pornography, online shopping, and it seems to me that the root cause of a lot of these addictions is distraction. In your latest book, you make the case that distraction or the pushing away of our feelings of pain, of discomfort is actually the cause of many of our problems. So I guess my first question is, do you agree that we are a society that seems to be addicted to distraction? And if you do, what's the underlying cause?

Gelong Thubten 0:51 I think we're definitely addicted to distraction, and of course, the, the way we use technology has really fed into that. So I, I went away, uh, into a four-year-long retreat in 2005, and when I came out of that retreat in 2009, everything had changed in the landscape of technology. So during those four years, the iPhone was launched, and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all of those things happened. So when I came out of that retreat, I was quite startled by how things had sped up because I'd been away from ordinary living, and now I'm back and seeing-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:28 ... the difference. And so just noticing how everybody's face is buried in a phone, and there's this sort of constant barrage, this invasive nature to information, um, advertising, social media, all of that, and so that's incredibly addictive. And so, yes, we are all drowning in addictions of various sorts, and they are all based on distraction. What is it we're trying to distract ourselves from? Is I think we don't really know how to face up to our own feelings-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:01 Mm

Gelong Thubten 2:01 ... so we use things to, food, phones, anything to kind of get away from ourselves.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:07 Yeah. There's a quote in the introduction of your book, um, Handbook for Hard Times, which is sublime, I, I genuinely mean that, which I'd love to read to you 'cause I think it really speaks to this. "In pushing away discomfort, we usually don't see how the discomfort lies in the pushing. It's our habit of chasing pleasure and running away from hardship that is the real problem. And as any habit simply proliferates, so we constantly chase more and push away more, reinforcing our sense of dissatisfaction."

Gelong Thubten 2:47 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:48 'Cause th-there's a certain irony there, where we're trying to use these activities, acquire these things, engage in these behaviors to avoid feeling what we're feeling-

Gelong Thubten 3:02 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:02 ... but you're sort of making the point that actually doing that makes the problem worse. So, so why is that? And also, just to play devil's advocate for a minute, what's wrong with people engaging in these behaviors?

Gelong Thubten 3:14 There's nothing wrong with anything per se, but is it making us suffer? That's the question. I-I-is it creating more suffering? And I think it is because the more you run after something, the more it seems elusive. We, we never actually get what we want, and that's because when we're engaged in running after that thing, we're just building more of a habit to run after something. So even if we get what we want, we then find we want something else or a better version of it. Uh, the wanting never seems to go away, and in a way, we're just feeding more wanting. So the mind wants more because it's creating a habit of wanting more. So is it, i-is it that we ever actually know what we want?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:58 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 3:59 Because we, we may get it, and then we think, "Oh, that wasn't what I wanted. I want something else." We never reach the end of it. So the wanting becomes an endless hunger. And then on the other side of the coin, the not wanting becomes an endless process, too, because the more we push away discomfort, the more we build a habit of needing to push away discomfort. Now, if you've got that habit running in your mind, there's going to always be something uncomfortable to be pushed away, even if you lock yourself in an ivory tower with no stress around you and everything just right. Because there's a habit of needing to push away discomfort, we'll find something uncomfortable.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:36 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 4:36 So we're sort of caught up in that chase, running after something, running away from something, and we never find any kind of peace there. So, so we are making the problem worse.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:46 Yeah. It's like what we practice, we get good at.

Gelong Thubten 4:50 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:51 So if we're practicing wanting-

Gelong Thubten 4:53 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:53 ... we're always going to want.

Gelong Thubten 4:55 Mm. We're experts at that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:57 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 4:57 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:57 And, and I guess if I think about this through the lens of reactivity towards other people and other things, if you practice being reactive and, um, feeling triggered by the comments of others-

Gelong Thubten 5:12 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:12 ... then that also becomes a habit.

Gelong Thubten 5:13 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:14 And if you change that habit and learn not to get triggered by the comments of others, create that space, understand that that may not be about you, it may be about someone else, or look at it with compassion, try and have acceptance, themes that you write about, which we're gonna discuss, then actually that very quickly becomes a habit as well, doesn't it?

Gelong Thubten 5:34 Yeah. Yeah, you, you, you can transform yourself in that way by, uh, instead of looking at the things outside yourself as the cause of your suffering or the cause of your happiness, you look at your own mind, and you start to work out what habits your-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:48 Mm

Gelong Thubten 5:48 ... your mind is running, a little bit like computer programs, and you can write new programs. You change the programming and through doing that, your, your life changes because you're starting to work with the mind itself rather than the objects around you or the people around you. You're working at your reactions.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:06 I guess one of the central tenets then of what you're saying is that we have a lot more control or certainly choice over how we perceive things and how we see the world, and until we realize that, we're kind of locked in a pattern, feeling that the world is happening to us.

Gelong Thubten 6:26 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:27 Is that what was happening to you in your early twenties-

Gelong Thubten 6:29 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:29 ... when you were in New York?

Gelong Thubten 6:30 Mm-hmm. That was definitely my experience. So I was an actor. I was living in London, then New York, and I was very ambitious. I wanted to have a big career, and I was just starting out as an actor, but what was tripping me up all the time was I had a lot of, um, depression and anxiety, and I didn't know how to deal with that. So what I did was I got as busy as possible, both in terms of work, but also in terms of parties. I became a real party animal. I became an expert at partying, but in a very sort of obsessive, kind of vigorous way, as if I was trying to run away from something in me, and the distractions became my only place of refuge, but the distractions were making me ill. So I reached a point where I just burnt out, burnt out very, very suddenly.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:25 I mean, you were very, very sick, weren't you?

Gelong Thubten 7:26 Extremely sick. I woke up i- in this apartment in, in, uh, Brooklyn with all the symptoms of a heart attack. I, I-- and I thought, "This is it." And I, I didn't have medical insurance. I didn't have much money. I found some guy who'd do an ECG for fifty dollars or whatever, and, and they said, "Yeah, yeah, your heart's really in trouble. For another thousand dollars, we can now [chuckles] give you another scan." I didn't know what to do, and I managed to get to my mom's place. She was living in, um, San Francisco at the time, and so I somehow managed to get on a plane, lying down on the plane. Somehow I ended up with three seats to myself. You know, you-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:05 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 8:05 ... you-- That happens, and then you lie down, and I got to her place, and I just collapsed, and I was in bed for a few months and, um, having palpitations all the time, heart palpitations, and any, any time I tried to get out of bed, my heart would just start racing. I was so ill, and it was very obvious to me that I'd had a complete total breakdown.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:29 You were diagnosed with burnout, weren't you?

Gelong Thubten 8:30 Yeah. Very, very severe burnout.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:33 Yeah, and how long would you say it took you to recover from that?

Gelong Thubten 8:37 So the recovery involved becoming a monk-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:40 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 8:40 ... because what happened was I, I was, um, um, at my mom's place, and I was reading books. She had books about meditation, and I started reading these books, and Buddhism had been there in the background as a f-- as a family, but I'd never really taken it seriously. But then I'm reading these books and reading about how you are more than your thoughts. You are not your pain. You are not your suffering. You are, you are bigger than that, and this, this message I found very compelling.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:13 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 9:14 And then at the same time, an old school friend told me about a monastery in Scotland where you can be a monk for a year.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:20 Right.

Gelong Thubten 9:20 And I thought, "Oh, I, I, I wanna do that." That could, that could be the kind of-- Well, it was like rehab. That's the kind of rehab I'm looking for. And I-- She was going there to be a nun. I went with her, and we both enrolled. I mean, four days after arriving at the monastery, I became a monk, but only for a year. That was the plan.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:38 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 9:40 And really quite soon, a-after a few weeks, my health really started to recover. Um, the, the, um, stress started to go down, and also the healthy living of being a monk was incredibly supportive.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:54 Yeah. So you say part of your recovery involved becoming a monk. Have you now recovered-

Gelong Thubten 10:03 Yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:03 ... or are you still in recovery?

Gelong Thubten 10:06 Well, there's this-- Th-Th-That's a huge question because in a way we're all in recovery from the suffering of life, you know? And I've definitely recovered from that burnout and that, and that, that happened quite quickly. But in terms of the bigger picture of the, the, the-- In Buddhism, we call it the suffering of samsara, the nature of existence and how tense and difficult it can be. We're all still in recovery, aren't we?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:33 Yeah. You said when you were recounting your life in your early twenties in New York, and I think to many people, certainly people who are teenagers, that sounds like you were living the dream. You're in one of the most happening cities in the world, right? There's a lot going on. There's people from all over the world. There's all kinds of opportunity. You're an actor in New York going to parties. I'm sure twelve-year-old Rangan would have looked at that going, "Wow, this guy's on it. He's made it. That's what, that's what I want when I'm older," right? As you were recounting that story, you said, "I was running away from something inside of me."

Gelong Thubten 11:15 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:16 What were you running away from?

Gelong Thubten 11:17 I thought I was having a fantastic time. I was the life and soul of the party. I was the one always going out, doing stuff. But there was something underneath that that I wasn't, I, I wasn't comfortable with and, and this was this sort of deep level of, of, of stress and a sort of suppressed feeling of depression, anxiety. I found it would come out at certain moments. So part of the acting training I was doing was method acting, where you really inhabit the role, but you also use parts of yourself-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:58 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 11:58 ... and your own experience to produce the, the performance. And I found that whenever I did that, I would start going into panic, and I would have palpitations because I was accessing parts of myself that I hadn't resolved and I wasn't- -facing, and when they would come out, I would get incredibly unwell, and then I would have to push that back down again and go out and have a drink and just forget about it. So I-- on the one level, I was having a great time. On ano- on another level, I was, I was very unhappy.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:26 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 12:27 And I, I think that's, that's the toxic mixture that created the burnout.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:36 'Cause in the moment, you are having a good time. In the moment at that party, let's say you've had a few drinks-

Gelong Thubten 12:42 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:42 ... and you're out with friends-

Gelong Thubten 12:43 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:43 ... and whatever else might be going on.

Gelong Thubten 12:45 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:45 We think in that moment we're having a good time, and I think this is really important because on the face of it, it can seem like, well, why does it matter if I just run away a little from my emotions and I spend two hours scrolling social media in the evening rather than dealing with my marriage or my feelings about myself or my depression or whatever an individual may be struggling with? But I think what you described about what happened to you in New York, having severe burnout, where you couldn't get pretty much off the-- off your mom's bed-

Gelong Thubten 13:20 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:20 ... for months.

Gelong Thubten 13:21 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:22 That's the kind of... In many ways, that's the inevitable end stage if you don't deal with this stuff, because it ain't going anywhere. You either deal with it... You, you can't really put those emotions in a cage, can you? They will come out at some point.

Gelong Thubten 13:37 And I'm grateful for that. I feel grateful. I, I feel grateful that I couldn't get away with it for much longer, the running, the running away. My body stopped me with this illness, and I, at the time, it was horrible and frightening, but looking back, I'm incredibly grateful that it didn't-- I didn't go on for much longer like that and had to stop and take a look at myself.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:59 But you're grateful now?

Gelong Thubten 14:01 Now. At the time, no.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:03 And that speaks to the entire book, right? Um, or the theme of the book, A Handbook for Hard Times. How would you contrast this book with your last book, which was on happiness? Because this is also really about happiness, but coming at it from maybe a slightly different angle.

Gelong Thubten 14:21 This book sort of does, um, build on the last one because the last book w-was about the nature of happiness and very much about how we seek happiness outside and that the searching leads to more searching and how meditation can really get us in touch with our inner happiness and our, our sense of inner peace. But I did end the last book by saying, "Actually, it's only when you learn what to do with your unhappiness that you can really break through and find stable happiness." So then this book builds on that message-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:55 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 14:56 ... is the unhappiness is the key to a doorway.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:01 Yeah. There's this lovely quotes of yours and, and again, in the introduction, "Our unhappiness is the most fertile grounds for the cultivation of inner strength, resilience, and compassion." So although in the moment of that burnout, you weren't grateful for it, you now are because it led you on this different path. And is that a theme you want us all to kind of take away when we're going through tough times, as hard as they may be? Is that the goal to understand that they're ultimately what are gonna lead to enlightenment and true happiness?

Gelong Thubten 15:39 I think the goal is to, is to change, uh, change how we think about hard times and to start to see them as, as I said, fertile ground or something that can, um, benefit us in some way in terms of growing our compassion, resilience, strength, et cetera. But what we really need is methods that we can apply in the moment, because otherwise the hard times become toxic and destructive. But i-I try to provide in the book, um, ways of thinking, but also ways of meditating in the hard times that can help you to w-work with a sense of transformation in the moment.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:19 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 16:19 Otherwise, it's always that you find out later that you are grateful. You, you have a terrible time, and later on you can think-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:24 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 16:25 ... "Okay, that was good for me. I look back with gratitude." Which is good, but wouldn't it be even more powerful to know what to do in the middle of the storm? How-- When you are in the storm, how to work with it. So obviously, when, when I had that burnout when I was twenty-one, I didn't know about meditation. I found out later. But now, when I go through hard times, I have tools that I can apply in the moment, and the hard times are still hard times, but-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:51 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 16:51 ... there are ways of working with it as it's happening.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:56 Let's say someone is listening or watching right now, and they're in the middle of a really difficult time. What's one of the tools you'd recommend for them?

Gelong Thubten 17:08 So what I, what I recommend is that we start to work with the sensations in our body rather than the thoughts. And if we're going through a difficult time, there is the information about that difficulty. I, I lost my job. I, I, I lost a relationship or whatever, whatever the thing is that, that is troubling us. Those are the thoughts, the storyline, wh-which is valid, of course.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:32 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 17:33 I'm not saying it's sort of, um, pointless or anything. I'm just suggesting that we go beneath the story and work with the sensations in our body right now. So i-i-in your body, there is a discomfort, there's a feeling of tightness, a feeling of, um, turbulence, and you can use that as meditation. The problem is that the mind just then flies back into the story, jumps into the story and gets lost in that, "He said this, she did that. Why me? Why this? Why that?" And you've got to kind of keep going beneath the story into the sensation. And when you can work with those physical sensations through meditation, they start to transform. So you start to create a kind of alchemy inside yourself, where the, the, the misery becomes, um, kind- a doorway into a, a deeper kind of peace because you're-- when you meditate on your suffering, not the information, but the feeling, the suffering has to change.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:34 Now, I'm on board with this, but what if someone is thinking, "Okay, I get that. I've just lost my job. I'm really stressed about it. I've got bills to pay. I don't know if I can find another job. I keep hearing these stories on the news, which make me think I'm not gonna get another job, and you're asking me to sit there and feel where is this emotion in my body?" Sure. And let's say they do that, and they find it's in their stomach, and their stomach feels tight, and maybe their gut's growling, whatever it might be. It doesn't change the fact, does it, that they've lost their job?

Gelong Thubten 19:13 What it changes is their feeling about the situation. So the more they do this meditation, the more they can a-accept the suffering and be okay with the suffering, and then they develop a kind of strength, and from that place of strength, they can start to find solutions.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:29 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 19:30 They can start to, to, to find ways out of the, the situation they're in or ways of changing their environment, but from a place of strength rather than a place of panic and misery.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:42 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 19:42 So I'm not suggesting a kind of passivity where you just kind of go away and sit and meditate and just let your life fall apart. I'm suggesting that you reframe the suffering as an opportunity and then doors open-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:56 Yeah

Gelong Thubten 19:56 ... to things you can do.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:58 Yeah, I love that because it doesn't necessarily change the situation, but it changes how you view the situation, and it changes how you relate to that situation. And

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:11 I guess one of the phrases that for me has been transformative over the last, uh, maybe five, six years now, and it kind of speaks to a subject of one of the chapters in your book, which is one of compassion, which we'll come to it shortly. The phrase is, "If I was that other person, I'd be doing exactly the same as them." It was really interesting. I wrote about it in my last book. I've, I've gone on stage and spoken about how transformative this phrase is for me because it, it makes you lead with compassion. If you think, "Hey, listen, if I was that person with their upbringing, their childhood, the bullying they had, um, the toxic first boss they had, I'd also view the world in the same way as they do. I'd be acting in exactly the same way as they are." And one of the common things that will come up for people is go, "Yeah. W-what-- Does that mean I just need to let people walk over me?" And I will say very similar to what you just said, which is, "No." But if you, if you have compassion as the energy behind it, you're not getting emotionally triggered. You're not going into stress states. You're more open to possibility. You're better able to change that situation because of your state. So it's not as if, if someone's behaving badly to you, that you're necessarily gonna tolerate it or accept it or put up with it. But if you can actually change your energy in a much calmer and more rational way, you can actually deal with the situation.

Gelong Thubten 21:36 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:37 Is that similar to what you're talking about?

Gelong Thubten 21:40 Definitely. You, you, you are, um, not allowing people to abuse you. You are not allowing people to walk all over you, and of course, there are some situations where you, y-you should speak up or some situations where you have to get away from that person or the situation because it's toxic and dangerous. But what is going on inside yourself in terms of blame, upset, anger? Can that be transformed through forgiveness, through compassion? Because then eventually you can have a, a different relationship with that person or the situation-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:17 Mm

Gelong Thubten 22:17 ... or your feelings about that situation by, yeah, sometimes putting yourself in the other person's shoes, and I think meditation helps you do that-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:25 Mm

Gelong Thubten 22:25 ... because it helps you to see the human condition, how it is. E-everybody has minds that are, um, somehow, um, influenced by habits and negativity that we don't seem to know what to do with, and so when we see that about ourselves and others, it creates more of a compassionate acceptance.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:46 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:49 Going from burnout in New York to joining a monastery in Scotland and then still being a monk 30 years later seems to be quite an extreme way to deal with burnout. So would you say, looking back on your life, you have had a tendency to extremes, like being the party animal in New York and then a few months later being a monk in a-- in remote Scotland? And if so, could we say that these extremes are potentially problematic in how we interact with life?

Gelong Thubten 23:24 That's a very good question, and many of my friends said to me, "Well, here we go again. He's totally extreme. He's now joined a monastery." Some of them thought I'd joined a cult, and should they come and rescue me? And then they researched it and found out it's not a cult. But yeah, I would say that there was this going from one extreme to the other. I, I'm a party animal, then I'm a monk, and y-yes, that, that is a very extreme way to deal with burnout. But what changed for me was once the burnout had been addressed in some way and I started to feel healthier and more calm, there then was the question of, should I now finish my year and then go back to New York and carry on with the life that I was living? Um, but then I decided to try another year. I thought, "I'll just, I'll just-- I'll, I'll take vows for a second year." And during my second year as a monk, I went into a solitary meditation retreat for several months. I think it was nine months. And it was during that retreat that I started to really think about what Buddhism meant to me and what being a monk meant to me. And this, the philosophy of Buddhism was, especially the compassion part, the philosophy of compassion, was starting to really get under my skin in, in a very good way. And then the decision to stay a monk came from a very different place. The decision to become a monk came from a desperate, broken place. The decision to then carry on and eventually take life vows came from a place of feeling this, this philosophy and this way of living really resonates for me at a very deep level, at a cellular level. And if I stay and do this long-term, I really got a feeling that this would help me and also give me the chance to help others.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:09 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 25:09 So I think my motivation for what I was doing started to come from a deeper place, and then it didn't feel extreme at all.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:16 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 25:16 And, and being a monk doesn't feel remotely extreme. And pe- people when they meet me and they say, "Oh, you're a monk," they often want to know, what are you not allowed to do? Be- because their, their, their, their fascination is, here's somebody who's chosen a life of celibacy, for example, um, and also I don't drink or smoke or anything. And so maybe that's all they see at first. Oh, he's not allowed to do certain things. What maybe they don't understand and then they discover when they, when they talk to me more is that it's a life that I find incredibly relaxing and freeing and, uh, healthy for myself-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:51 Mm

Gelong Thubten 25:51 ... but also it's given me a way to communicate with others. I've always been a communicator. I've always wanted to share some kind of message, and here's a message I can share now. So it doesn't feel remotely extreme.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:03 Yeah. And it's so interesting that the energy that got you to become a monk in the first place is different from the energy that got you to continue.

Gelong Thubten 26:11 Definitely.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:11 And I, I think a lot about human behavior initially through the lens of my patients. You know, why is it that people struggle to make change? Is a behavior, let's say, I don't know, alcohol for example, always bad? Is scrolling on social media always bad? Like, where I've got to in my view on human behavior is that it's not necessarily the behavior where we can determine if it's problematic or not, it's the energy underlying the behavior. And, and even saying problematic is possibly not the best word to describe it, but I think the energy behind it, for example, like alcohol, if, if the energy behind you having a half glass of red wine is to connect you with your friends that you haven't seen for a long time and i- in that setting, I think that's a very different situation than if you're using half a bottle of wine every night to numb the loneliness and frustration with your life. I actually think that the effects on you is gonna be very, very different. And so it's really interesting that maybe you needed that kind of running away energy to get you into the monastery, but that wasn't gonna keep you there. You had to change that.

Gelong Thubten 27:30 And also my, my relationship with intoxicants, uh, I started to look at it at a more subtle level, which is through giving up all intoxicants, um, I s- I started to work with the idea that if you are using alcohol, for example, just to help you relax, there's something in you loses the ability to do it for yourself. It's too easy to, to, to give the power of relaxation away to an external substance.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:02 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 28:02 And when you give all of that up, you start to dis- discover more power in yourself. You just-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:06 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 28:07 ... start to discover places you can go to internally fr- and from there you can-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:11 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 28:12 ... you can feel relaxed and happy. So it gives you more autonomy and more, more strength.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:17 What other intoxicants did you have to give up?

Gelong Thubten 28:22 Many.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:22 [laughs] What, caffeine?

Gelong Thubten 28:25 Oh, no, I, I, I, I do enjoy coffee. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:28 'Cause that's an intoxicant, isn't it? That's a, in some ways... Well, it is a, technically, it's a psychoactive stimulant.

Gelong Thubten 28:34 And I'm aware of this because when I went into a long retreat, I was drinking coffee every morning, and I started to... Because when you're in retreat, you, you become much more aware of your, your, your physical and mental state.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:48 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 28:48 And I started to see how a cup of coffee made my meditation better. I thought, "Okay, this is a, the, it, the c- caffeine is, is a stimulant, but also it's, it, it concentrates the mind, and now my meditation is better because I've had a cup of coffee," and I didn't want that, so I gave up coffee-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:08 Mm

Gelong Thubten 29:08 ... during the retreat because I thought, "I wanna do this for myself. I don't want anything like a crutch to, to do it for me because I, I want to find that concentration and stability without needing anything."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:20 And, and, and that's the kind of, for me, that's one of the real points of this work a- and your teachings. You know, I started off this conversation asking you about these low-grade addictions that many of us are struggling with, and it, it's about, it's about outsourcing our own inner wellbeing and our ability to be happy and calm to these externalities that's the problem. Because then we're dependent on them if they are not present, right? If they, if they go... Look, I, I had a patient once, honestly, who would get stressed out. She, she told me this, um, this story once about, you know, she, she got into walking. She'd always listen to music or a podcast, and then one day her, I think her Bluetooth headphones weren't working, and it stressed her out because she could no longer enjoy her walk listening to music or podcasts or whatever it might be. And I understand that because if you're used to that, if that's your norm and you're dependent on that external input into your ears to enjoy that walk- I can see why someone would become anxious and worried. But if you stand back and go, "Wow, this is quite incredible that 100 years ago, 50 years ago, this technology didn't even exist," where you can actually listen with earbuds to anything, even, you know, pre-Sony Walkman, right? Whereas now by having that, we're now, many of us are dependent on it to feel good. We- we're overly reliant on these things. So I feel that one of the reasons why too much of these low-grade addictions, alcohol, social media, pornography, online shopping, whatever it might be, is problematic is because we give up our own personal strength, our power, our sovereignty. To make sure you're taking action after watching this video, I've created a free guide to help you build healthy habits. We can all make short-term change, but can those changes become a fundamental part of our life? Often they don't, and that's why in this free guide, I share with you the six crucial steps you need to take. They're really, really effective. If you wanna get hold of that free guide right now, all you have to do is click the link in the description box below. And actually, as you have discovered, yes, caffeine was enhancing your meditation on that retreat, but it's like, yeah, but I need that. What if the coffee delivery doesn't come? What if I'm out, right? Then does that mean you can no longer access that? Well, no, because you gave it up, and I guess you found a way to access that same level without the caffeine.

Gelong Thubten 32:01 I like what you say about outsourcing. It-- We, we do seem to outsource our wellbeing, and we lose our own power. We give the power away to, to the external things. And I think there's another level that goes on too, which is that, um, the way we are influenced by, um, advertising, uh, by the messaging we receive through our phones, through, through the media, et cetera, telling us to, to, to have certain products in our life, telling us, "You need this. You need that." There's a s- there's an undercurrent there of a message to the consumer that, "You, you are not enough unle- until you have this product."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:44 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 32:45 "Your, your life is incomplete unless you buy my product." I mean, that's a very crude way of advertising things, and obviously it can be dressed up to make it seem more subtle, but that's the driving force-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:56 [laughs] That's what's going on

Gelong Thubten 32:56 ... is, "You are incomplete without my product. You need my product." So this has become more invasive, of course, because it's in our phones now, and it, it's just everywhere. So we're going through life feeling there is something missing all the time. So the more we want external things, the more we rely on them for our happiness, the more we're also telling ourselves, "I lack something. I lack wellbeing. I lack happiness. I lack a sense of completeness. I am incomplete." And this becomes very pernicious, this underlying message of, "You are not enough." And so I found that when I went into those retreats, that deep sense of inadequacy and incompleteness really started to, to erupt into quite strong internal voices of self-disgust, self-loathing. In my, in my first retreats, I would just sit there listening to this voice in my head saying, "You are terrible. You're no good."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:00 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 34:00 "You're rubbish." And I can see how that's part of my psychology but also fed from, by the environment around us.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:08 Yeah. A lot of this, I think, is driven by society, and you could really make the case, I think, that a capitalist society requires us all to have a sense of incompleteness for it to survive and it to thrive.

Gelong Thubten 34:25 That's what keeps the wheel turning.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:26 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 34:27 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:27 Because without that, you know, we wouldn't be buying as many products, consuming as many things, right? And really [laughs] , I guess, you know, if you wanna talk about the environment or the climate, like really the way to solve it or the way to address living in a more sustainable way is, first of all, to address ourselves. You know, why do we have a desire in the first place for so much? You know, one of the, one of the most amazing things I discover every summer when I, I go off social media for six weeks or so, and I stop this podcast for six weeks, and again, I always say may not work for everyone. Certainly works for me. I, I've-- It, it certainly works in the context of my life and what it is today. One of the powerful things I realize, Thubten, is just how much we're constantly influenced by the world around us. When you stop, if you can have a few weeks and you're not going online, and I know that may seem an outrageous thought these days, and I appreciate some people won't be able to do that for work or whatever it might be. It is incredible how much you start to tune into yourself again. You went on retreat, right? I've not done that. I was with my wife and my children, but I still found a, a heightened sense of calm and contentedness, thinking I've, I, I've literally got everything in my life that I want. I, I don't want anything. There's nothing more I need. And when you truly realize that, or certainly speaking from my experience, when I really realized that a few years ago, I realized that it's all there. I have enough. I don't need more. And it's very easy, though, to fall back into those tendencies once you start exposing yourself again. And so I'm very, very intentional with what I consume, how often I consume it. You know, my wife for many years will not watch negative documentaries or things that she perceives as negative. I think I said this on a podcast recently that a few years ago, I loved the Netflix show House of Cards. I thought it was amazing. She said, "I'm not watching it. It's dark energy." And you know what? She's right, because if you infiltrate your mind with that stuff, I feel that a lot of our, our thoughts and ideas are downstream of the content we're consuming.

Gelong Thubten 37:02 And you say consume, and that's a very important word, isn't it? So I'm not here to bash technology. I mean, it, it has many uses. We're, we're using it right now. But there needs to be some sort of discipline there. It's a little bit like food. You can't just constantly eat sugar all day. It'll make you ill. But sometimes I feel we use our phones a bit like somebody constantly eating sugar.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:28 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 37:28 We don't, we don't seem to feel there needs to be any control. It's just endless. So wouldn't it be better to use technology in the same way as we use food, as nutrition, but in the right way, in a balanced way, in a way that will be healthy for us?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:45 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 37:45 I think the connection needs to be made between the two things.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:49 Yeah. And again, I'm not against people enjoying their favorite documentaries on Netflix or wherever they might wanna do that.

Gelong Thubten 37:55 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:55 That's not the point of what I'm trying to say or what I don't think what you're trying to say.

Gelong Thubten 37:59 No.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:59 It's, it's to be a bit more intentional about these things and, you know. For my wife, for example, she was just like, "I don't want that in my life anymore."

Gelong Thubten 38:06 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:06 "I don't want that." Great. Someone else may be able to consume that now and again in the evening and go, "Yeah, it's fine. I get it. It's fictional. It's just a bit of switch off, like a bit of sugar."

Gelong Thubten 38:17 Sure.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:18 You know, a- and I get that and-

Gelong Thubten 38:19 With balance. With balance.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:20 With, with balance.

Gelong Thubten 38:21 And, and, and again, this word consume, so you mentioned the environment earlier, and I think th- this is, this is the problem, is that we are constantly addicted to consuming. We need to consume things all the time because maybe we don't really know how to find happiness inside ourselves, so we take it from outside. And our, our environment, the planet, it's not inexhaustible. Our desire seems to be inexhaustible, and the, the things we want are limited, uh, in their, in their nature. They are impermanent, and they, they have limits. So the planet can't support our l- limitless desire. So, so I think that the, the sustainability conversation needs to have a, a sense of what is sustainable happiness. Can we recycle our own internal happiness rather than just needing-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:16 Yeah

Gelong Thubten 39:16 ... more and more from outside.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:17 Because otherwise, the trap we'll fall into is we'll look at what we're missing out on. Oh, people are saying now because of the climate, "I can't do this. I can't buy that." Right? A bit like people ask you when you first become a monk, "Oh, what can't you do?"

Gelong Thubten 39:37 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:37 You know, "What have you had to give up?"

Gelong Thubten 39:38 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:38 Right? So we're not looking at what you're gaining-

Gelong Thubten 39:41 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:41 ... we're looking at what you can no longer do.

Gelong Thubten 39:45 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:45 And you can look at the environment a bit like that as well, I think.

Gelong Thubten 39:48 Mm-hmm. Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:48 But even that whole concept, that whole idea that people will look at you go, "Oh, you can't do this anymore"-

Gelong Thubten 39:53 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:53 ... it's quite interesting because if you take a 30,000-foot view and go, "Let's look at society today," the rates of mental health dysfunction are outrageously high now, and they're getting higher. Yet we're okay with calling that normal. Th- this is normal, you know. We can do anything we want. Whenever we want, we can consume what we want with whoever we want, right?

Gelong Thubten 40:18 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:18 That's normal. So you going to a monastery and becoming a monk's like, "Oh, man. What, you can't do this. You can't have alcohol."

Gelong Thubten 40:25 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:25 You know? "You have to be celibate."

Gelong Thubten 40:27 It's sort of offensive to people.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:28 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 40:28 Like, "Oh, you've given up all these things. How dare you?" [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:31 You've given up all these things that are making so many of us unhappy. [laughs]

Gelong Thubten 40:35 And how dare, how dare you? And, and i- it's, it's, it's challenging to, to think that you could find happiness from inside your mind and not need so much externally because that really is quite rebellious, isn't it? It's incredibly rebellious to say, "Well, I, I'm gonna find it within myself rather than from a product or a person or a place."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:55 Mm-hmm. Well, it's a revolutionary act in the current world, I would say, in the current capitalist world in which we live. But maybe it wasn't 1,000, 2,000 years ago. I don't know, you know. I wasn't around then, so I, [laughs] I can't speak to that.

Gelong Thubten 41:10 Sure. And also, I'm, I'm not telling people, "Oh, everyone should be a monk." It... For me, being a monk, living in a monastery is a, is a, ha- that, that's an important step I took for myself. It suits me, but the beauty of these meditation techniques is that anybody can practice them in any situation. It's not so much about whether you're a monk or not a monk or in retreat or not in retreat. It's about what you do with your mind moment to moment, and I r- I, I really like to share with people the encouragement that they can meditate even with very busy lives.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:46 What are the main obstacles for people when they think about meditation?

Gelong Thubten 41:50 The biggest obstacle is that many people have an assumption about meditation that's absolutely not true, which is they, they seem to feel you're supposed to clear your mind. I hear this phrase a lot, "clear your mind," and it's quite a damaging phrase. Damaging because when the person sits down to meditate and they try to clear their mind, they can't. The more you try to-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:16 Mm

Gelong Thubten 42:16 ... shut the mind down, the louder it shouts. So then you feel really frustrated. Many people give up meditation because they sit there trying to silence their thoughts, and the thoughts just get louder. So there's sort of, um, a feeling of, um, being at war with yourself. So, so I find that, um, the, the struggle comes from, um, a misconception about what meditation is- So it's not about clearing the mind, but it's about changing the dynamic, changing the relationship between yourself and your thoughts, which doesn't mean getting rid of them at all. It means changing how you relate to them.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:53 Yeah. I wanna get really specific on meditation because I think it is a very helpful but very misunderstood practice. Before we do that, though, one thing that was really interesting to me in your book was, I think it was in the chapter on acceptance, and you were talking about this deep retreat you went into where you felt a lot of shame because I think you said in that section you were a senior monk, yet you were really, really struggling. So I wonder if you just walk us through the timeline. So you leave, you leave America, and you go to a monastery in Scotland. So I'm interested in quite a lot about this, this whole journey. First of all, what's your first day like as a monk? And then I, I'd love to really understand what happened in that first year, because presumably you were finding it helpful. You achieved a certain level of calm and contentedness, but then when you go into a deeper retreat, other stuff comes up, which starts to lead you to feelings of shame. So perhaps you could talk me through that a little bit, help me understand.

Gelong Thubten 44:05 So I joined the monastery when I was 21 and immediately got into a daily schedule of meditation and study, and also we all did a bit of work around the monastery to keep the place running. And then it was in my second year that I wanted to go deeper, so I went into a, um, a long, a longish retreat. It was nine months long on my own, and that was quite difficult because th- now I'm, I'm, I'm sitting with myself with no distractions, nobody to talk to, and it was actually during those nine months that that decision to, to stay a monk for life started to germinate.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:50 Help me understand this. So the first year you're helping the running of the monastery. You're doing what? Group meditations-

Gelong Thubten 44:57 Group meditation-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:58 ... was-

Gelong Thubten 44:58 ... study, reading about Buddhist philosophy, attending lectures, and I had-- my job was to, uh, cl- do cleaning, making beds, uh, very simple work just around the place. Um, so the daily schedule was quite varied, and we also had each other.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:13 Got it.

Gelong Thubten 45:13 There, there were a lot of monks and nuns, and we're all quite young, and it was like a family feeling, and y-within that you can also be quite distracted, so you're still slightly running away from yourself until you really go deep into the meditation.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:27 And presumably there are other people there who have also joined to run away from themselves and their lives.

Gelong Thubten 45:33 There was a hu- a huge influx of young people who'd kind of burned out, somewhat-- some from, like, rave scene and parties-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:40 Really?

Gelong Thubten 45:40 ... and some from careers that had just plummeted or whatever. There's people... Or it's not always, you know, damaged people coming-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:47 No

Gelong Thubten 45:47 ... to a monastery. There's also people who are seeking something, seeking something spiritual. But there was definitely a group of people who'd been through stuff in their lives and now come to this monastery to meditate and get to grips with their minds. And we talked to each other a lot-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:04 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 46:04 ... and there was a real family environment. And then when I went alone into a, a retreat, the, the horror began [laughs] in that I was then backed into a corner with myself and my own thoughts and my own feelings. And in that first retreat, the, the overriding, um, feeling was a sense of self-disgust. There was this constant voice inside me, "You're no good. You're terrible. There's something wrong with you." And it, it-- my meditation was like a battleground, and I definitely had that misconception arou-around meditation. I, I thought, "You have to silence that voice. You have to get rid of your thoughts."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:48 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 46:48 "You have to focus, focus, focus and have nothing going on." And I, I was trying to... I became really tense. I was sitting in this retreat completely tense because I was just trying to push everything away-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:01 Mm

Gelong Thubten 47:02 ... and really focus. I remember staring at a spot on the carpet in front of me and just holding onto it for dear life. For hours on end, I would do these long sessions, four, five, six hours, just to try and still the mind, and the more I tried to do it, the worse it got. But it was a very, very creative and, um, productive time because I was starting to discover how to meditate and als- also how not-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:28 Yeah

Gelong Thubten 47:28 ... to meditate. And also the questions were coming up, "What am I doing with my life? Shall I stay a monk? I, I, I'm finding it difficult. I want to run away, but actually I know it's good for me." All of this conflict began and, and I stayed a monk. I-- after that retreat is when I decided to really, um, go deep and take lifelong vows.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:49 Many people, I think these days, struggle with the big decisions in life. They, they may hear a podcast or a cute Instagram meme about purpose and whatever it might be, and then I feel a lot of people get paralyzed, and they don't know what to do. Is one of the reasons that people struggle to make these big decisions, this addiction to distraction? The, the, the, the kind of fact that when we are feeling or dealing with uncomfortable questions, let's say, instead of training ourselves to sit with those questions and see what comes up, it's just much easier, isn't it, to open up an app or, or watch something or pour yourself a glass of wine? I-is that one of the things-- Because it s- it seems to me that you did this one year, which was incredible, with people. You know, you have a routine. Everything's variable. You've got people to chat to and hang out with. So it takes you to- Let's say level one. But then when you have this nine-month solo retreat, a- as you beautifully put in the book, it could be seen as an escape, but it's actually quite the opposite. You can't run away. There's no more running away, and there's quite a poignant part in the book where you said, "I realized how much I dislike myself."

Gelong Thubten 49:08 Hmm. I, I started to see how so much of what I'd been doing was coming from a place of self-dislike. Being an actor was coming from a place of wanting other people to approve of me or love me or somehow, um, I couldn't love myself, so I needed love on a large scale from an audience. And then here I am alone in a retreat, and it's just me, and it was agony, that first retreat, because I, I didn't like myself at all, and I couldn't bear this voice in my head that was so negative and so violent and aggressive. But I'm really glad I went through that because that's when the questions started to arise. What shall I do? Shall I stay a monk? Shall I not? And as you say, we find it really paralyzing to make these decisions because we're s- so distracted and so busy and there's so many choices. For me, I was very lucky that I had that still, quiet place from within which to make that decision and then it became-- After that retreat, it became really obvious to me that that's what I wanted. And then when I took the vows for life, it's a ceremony you go through where you decide to be a lifelong monk. I, I felt completely right in myself. I felt all the cells in my body felt like they were in the right place. Do you know what I mean? Like, everything clicked into place. I'm not saying it was plain sailing from then on. I still struggled, but it just felt right. I felt I'd right-- made the right decision.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:42 At what point did you have to cut your hair off?

Gelong Thubten 50:45 Oh, you cut your hair when you become a monk the first time, so-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:48 The first time-

Gelong Thubten 50:48 Yes, yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:48 ... in year one.

Gelong Thubten 50:49 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:49 And what's the thinking behind that?

Gelong Thubten 50:52 Oh, it's, it's all about renunciation, letting go of your old way of life, letting go of also looking a certain way, dressing a certain way. Uh, I mean, I was very fashionable, and I had nice haircut and clothes and all of that. You get rid of all of that, and you just become this-- You become a monk, and you put the monk's robes on. You shave your head. Everybody looks the same. You're sort of giving up that, that, uh, need to, hmm, have an image of a certain kind. I mean, I suppose you could say this is an image. You, you, you, you-- [chuckles] I look quite different, but-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:22 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 51:22 ... within Buddhism, this is just a, a uniform for you're a monk.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:27 Yeah, it's really interesting because how, how many of us get a sense of identity from our looks or our clothes or what people are gonna say about us or our hairstyle, right? You know, so many, [chuckles] so many men really struggle, uh, when they start losing their hair because a huge part of who they are or who they perceive themselves to be is dependent on them having a full head of hair. Um, I was at a mate's wedding recently, and, you know, one of, one of my old friends who I haven't seen in ages has just had to shave his hair off. But he said, "Mate, I couldn't, I couldn't hold off any longer. I kept trying to hide it, but I just had to do it." So that was out of-- The energy behind that was one of, I guess, desperation. "I'm, I'm-- I can't hide the fact that I'm balding for much longer. I've just had to do it." But this is quite different, isn't it? This has been done out of choice to make it easier to go within because actually you're removing a lot of the externalities.

Gelong Thubten 52:30 Yeah. You're, you're removing the things that-- Y- you're taking away the building blocks that you normally use in order to, um, bolster your, your sense of who you are, so you have to really strip that down into you and your mind and your thoughts and your, your psychology. You're taking away all of these externals.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:50 So what's the practical take-home for someone who doesn't want to be a monk, at least not yet, and they go, "Yeah. Well, you know, my appearance is a big part of who I am"?

Gelong Thubten 53:01 And that's fine. That's absolutely fine.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:02 Oh, that's fine?

Gelong Thubten 53:03 Of course. Everything's fine. It's all about, is this making you suffer? Is this not making you suffer, and how can you change that? So as I say, I'm not here to try and persuade everybody to become monks. It's just one way of doing it. But I really want to persuade everybody to meditate, even if that is only for ten or fifteen minutes a day. Because the more you meditate, the more you start to find an inner sense of happiness and strength, and these external things become-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:33 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 53:33 ... secondary rather than primary.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:36 What is it about meditation that helps us to realize this, do you think?

Gelong Thubten 53:42 Is that you, you, you start to, um, become less controlled by negative thoughts and feelings, and you start to discover how you can cultivate positive thoughts and feelings. So you, you start to free yourself, and you start to, um, tap into a inner happiness that you never knew was there. You always thought it was outside. So you, you-- We got so obsessed with the externals, and then you discover something inside yourself that's a deep kind of peace and contentment. And the more you can tap into that, the more, um, free you become, the more happy you become, and also the more you can give to others. So your relationship with others-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:24 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 54:24 ... starts to change, and that's where compassion starts to enter the picture.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:29 Many people say, "Tried meditation. It's not for me. My running is my meditation. My surfing is my meditation. My, you know, fill in the blank is my meditation." What's your perspective on that?

Gelong Thubten 54:43 I do have this, um, come up a lot when I'm explaining meditation, and sometimes people say, "Oh, what you've explained is exactly what happens to me when I'm in the gym." Or when I'm doing yoga or running, so why do you need me to now do something different? And my answer to that would be, well, that definitely gives you a taste maybe of what meditation could feel like, but you can't take that with you everywhere. If, if you are running or in the gym or doing something and that sends you into that kind of calm-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:14 Mm

Gelong Thubten 55:14 ... balanced state, you can't then get the treadmill out in the middle of a meeting at work when you're stressed. You, you-- if you need the equipment-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:22 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 55:23 ... then your meditation is, is dependent on those situations. Meditation is something you take with you anywhere, uh, wherever you go, without needing to be, uh, doing particularly thing, physical things. So it's, it's much more, um, it's portable. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:41 Yeah. If I reflect on my own life, I probably a few years ago may have also felt like, yeah, but this other activity is meditative for me, but I, but I really do think there's something quite special and uniquely powerful about the practice of meditation once you get over some of these humps or misconceptions and you can experience this kind of... The way I put it, and I'm, I'm not a monk like you, I've not had the years of experience meditating as you have. In my limited experience comparatively to yours, when I am meditating regularly, I feel the way I interact with the world is different. It's calmer, it's more intentional. As you say, you put that real distance between you and the thoughts, and you know you don't have to buy into them, and they can come and go. But it's not always that easy for people to get to that point, is it?

Gelong Thubten 56:47 Yeah. And it's, it-- again, it's back to this problem of thinking, "I've got to clear my mind, and so now I'm sitting down to meditate, and then all these thoughts are coming up, and I want to get rid of them, and I'm terrible at meditation, and I'm a failure, and I'm gonna go and try something else." That, that's the pattern that often people go through. Whereas if you really start to understand that it's not about clearing the mind, but changing the way you relate to the thoughts, then the work can start to become quite interesting. So what you start to do is you, you meditate using-- at first, you, you, you use something as a focus, such as your breathing. I- in some traditions they use mantra or they use all kinds of things, but breathing is the most common. So you're focusing on your breathing and then thoughts come, and that doesn't mean you failed, it means now you have a chance to work with the thoughts. So what happens is you're focusing on your breathing and then your mind wanders into distraction. It's really interesting that you don't notice the mind wandering.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:48 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 57:48 You find out later.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:49 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 57:50 It's not that you, you see your mind leave the breath and go for a walk. It's more that you kind of wake up five minutes later in your head somewhere else. You're, you're suddenly planning a menu or thinking of something you saw on TV yesterday or you're skiing in the mountains or whatever, you know. You're somewhere else and you, y- you realize you've got lost. That is meditation, is noticing that you got distracted, so you're now back in the awareness. You're, you're aware.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:19 So can we say that the distraction is actually good because it helps you build the muscle?

Gelong Thubten 58:24 Yes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:25 So if you weren't getting distracted, you would have no weight on the machine, as it were. You wouldn't have, um... Is the-- Okay, you've been meditating for what? Thirty years. Do you still get distracted during meditation?

Gelong Thubten 58:44 Yes. Yes. Yes, and distraction is good because-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:48 Distraction is good

Gelong Thubten 58:49 ... because distraction is what makes you stronger. So your mind wanders, you realize your mind has wandered. It could be a while before you realize, you know, five, 10 minutes even, and then you suddenly, "Oh, where was I?" But then you gently come back to the breath, and that's what builds strength. Every time you come back to the breath, you are gaining power over your thoughts because you're making a decision to, to gently bring yourself back to the present moment. So the thought that took you away is precisely what brings you back.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:24 So instead of considering that a failure, "Oh, meditation's not for me. I'm not doing it right. My mind's not clear. I'm thinking about my to-do list," it's even reframing that and going, "No, this is good 'cause I've just noticed that I'm no longer on my breath, I'm on my to-do list. Let me bring it back. Let me lift the weight in my mind back to the present moment, back to my breath. And the more often I do that, the better I train myself to be more focused-

Gelong Thubten 59:53 Exactly

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:53 ... and more present."

Gelong Thubten 59:54 It's just like lifting weights. You, you, you-- every time you come back, you are developing muscle. So if coming back to the breath is what makes you strong, you have to have somewhere to come back from.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:08 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:00:08 So the thought that took you away is good because it's the thing you come back from.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:14 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 1:00:14 So this is very subtle and very powerful. To, to understand this means that you no longer feel that you're at war with your own mind-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:22 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:00:22 ... when you meditate. The thoughts and distractions that keep taking you away are part of the process. And when somebody, uh, discovers this, their whole relationship with meditation changes.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:33 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:00:33 They no longer feel like a failure for having a wandering mind. I hear so many people say, "Oh, I tried meditation, but my mind was too busy. I was, I was rubbish at it." And I, I want to take those people and say, "No, that's not what it's about." The, the busier, the better in a way.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:48 It's almo- it's almost like you had a better workout. "Oh, no, I was, I was lifting really heavy weights today 'cause all I could think about was my to-do list and my emails and-" Because as you say, it's interesting, we don't, we don't realize when we leave the breath because otherwise we would be present and know that we were leaving the breath. But we do realize at some point that-- In fact, there's a really nice meditation in the book. Is it the breath counting one where you say start off so you can get to seven-

Gelong Thubten 1:01:13 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:13 ... and then over time build it up? Could you just talk us through that? Because I think that's a really nice practical exercise that I think anyone listening or watching this, if they were so inspired to do so, could probably give this a go later on [chuckles] today or even tomorrow morning.

Gelong Thubten 1:01:28 Yeah. Yeah. You, you, you are focusing on your breathing without changing the breathing. You're not trying to breathe deeply or slowly or anything, just breathe normally, and you can mentally count the cycles of breath. So in and out is one, in and out is two, and you will get distracted, and you will lose count, but you-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:01:50 You will. And you know what? I was in bed this morning, and because I've been reading your book, and I'm, you know, I knew you'd be coming to the studio. I was in bed this morning when I woke up and, you know, I know some people say you shouldn't do this lying down, but I was lying down. I thought, "I'm gonna do this breath counting." And I [chuckles] I thought I wouldn't get distracted and somehow after five I did get distracted, and I was really trying to concentrate and stay focused. So it is incredible how much you do get distracted, and that's why even trying to get to seven, it, it sounds quite easy, but, you know, we may be surprised how quickly our minds get distracted.

Gelong Thubten 1:02:28 Yeah. It's, it's amazing. And, and the whole point is just to keep coming back to the breath and start the numbers again. And y-you, you start to get better at it, and you start to get more focused, but you're not feeling like a failure because the mind wandered. The wandering mind is part of the thing that makes you strong because every time you come back to that focus, you are gaining strength, and you're gaining authority over your thoughts. And it's not just an exercise for the sake of m-mental gymnastics. You know, I can count up to seven or ten or whatever. The, the deeper benefit is that you're learning how not to suffer because suffering comes through our mind getting locked into a suffering state. Wh-whatever is going on outside of us i-is secondary. What's primary is how our mind reacts to that. So stuff is going wrong in my life, and I'm caught up in misery about it. I'm caught up in a sense of, um, uh, despair, and my mind is locked into that despair. I don't know how to get out of it, so I'm suffering. So if I meditate every day, I'm learning how to get myself out of the thought and back to the present moment, thought or emotion. I'm learning how not to let that thought or emotion swamp me or control me too much. So then I'm going to start to suffer less. It means that when I get locked into the suffering, I can learn how to, how to not be so, um, glued into it. But also meditation teaches you how to work creatively with the suffering, and it's not always about just let go and come back to the breath. It's also about how to develop a relationship with your own pain and, and that, for me, has been a, a key learning in my life and what I've tried to also express in this book is how the, the, the horror that we sometimes go through emotionally can be incredibly transformative if you learn how to work with it differently. And, and that's what started to, um, become the main theme of my second retreat. So I talked about that first retreat, which was a few, nine months long, and then y-years later, I went into a much longer retreat. Um, so, so what happened to me was I became a lifelong monk and, um, carried on living at the monastery. But then I started to, um, the, the, the, um, teachers who r-run the monastery started to ask me to give simple classes in meditation and Buddhist philosophy. I started to become more, uh, busy in that sense, going around teaching a bit. I even started to work in, in hospitals and schools and prisons and all kinds of environments where I was taking kind of meditation teachings into those spaces. Um, but there was als-always a sense in me that I wasn't really going deeply enough into my own training, and I wanted to do more retreat. So the opportunity came up to then disengage from all of that and go back into retreat, um, twelve years into being a monk, and the opportunity came up to do a four-year-long meditation retreat, uh, in a group. It-it's in a group, but you're very much alone.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:53 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 1:05:53 So twenty monks, twenty-one, I think. We went into a kind of farmhouse which had been converted into a retreat center on an island off the coast of Scotland, and you each have your own room, and you're, you're meditating all day in that room, and you only meet at meal times or there's some group meditations.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:09 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 1:06:09 But it is a very solitary experience, and it was during that retreat that, um, I started to really suffer a lot and then start to learn how to work with that suffering.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:21 Yeah. So fascinating. As you were describing this sort of solitary retreat, I remembered in my mind a conversation I had maybe three years ago now on the podcast with a chap called John McAvoy, who, you know, he has a, he has a fascinating story, but essentially he was one of Britain's most wanted men maybe ten years ago. He was convicted with two life sentences. He was in, locked up in one of Britain's, one of Europe's highest security prisons, and I'm not necessarily saying this i-is a, is a good thing- But I remember one point he put himself into a solitary prison cell for a year 'cause he wouldn't comply. In his mind, he wasn't gonna give in to the prison guards and the system. So according to his framework, the framework through which he and his wider family saw life, he wasn't gonna play that game. So even in the midst of solitary confinement, he had control over his mind. He would-- He wasn't allowed outside or in the gym, so he did a prison workout every day in his prison cell because I think he read in the Nelson Mandela book that Nelson Mandela when he was in jail, would run on the spot for forty-five minutes. And I-I'm slightly going off topic, but the point I guess I'm trying to make is even though then John transformed himself and is now free and now inspiring children and people all over the world with his incredible story, it was amazing hearing from him. Even in solitary confinement, if he could get his mind right, he was still able to thrive according to what his definition of thriving was back then. So it's not necessarily a punishment for us if we can get our minds right. Does that make sense? I mean, you've been there and done this. I haven't. I wasn't in John's prison cell. I've certainly not done these sort of deep retreats.

Gelong Thubten 1:08:21 It's interesting because before I went into my four-year retreat, I was teaching meditation in a prison in Cardiff.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:08:28 Right.

Gelong Thubten 1:08:29 And I was going into the-- this prison and giving, uh, spending whole, whole days there doing classes, and it felt to me like a retreat. It had the same kind of atmosphere, and I said to the prisoners, "How long are you in here for?" And some of them said, "One year, two years, three years, four." I said, "Well, I'm actually about to voluntarily incarcerate myself for four years." [laughs] And they laughed their heads off, and they thought I was completely crazy. But then I explained longer, more, and I said, "I'm, I'm doing this because it will help my meditation practice, and it will help me to learn more about the mind so that I can eventually, hopefully, help others. Could you see your prison sentence as a meditation retreat? Could you take it that way? W-You're in here anyway. You may as well reframe the-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:17 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:09:18 ... the, the, the thinking about it." And some of them were quite interested in that concept, and we talked more deeply about it, that they could use the environment to enhance their meditation. And one of the main things-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:29 Wow

Gelong Thubten 1:09:29 ... I noticed in the prison was how noisy it was. So in one sense, it's like a retreat in that it's very enclosed of course, and you're in one place, but there's this constant noise of metal clanging against metal with the doors that, that-- there's all electric doors now, n-no keys, and so there's constant shutting of doors. And I said to them, "That could be your meditation. Every time you hear the, the sound of-- harsh sound of metal, use that as a mindful moment," and then you're reframing how you view the oppress-oppressive nature of that sound. It becomes your meditation. So anything can become a meditation retreat in that sense.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:10 Yeah, I love that. The power of reframing.

Gelong Thubten 1:10:13 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:14 I think yesterday I was watching a video on YouTube of you maybe at Google, and you were recounting a story that perhaps you could share here. If you can remember, I think you'd just flown back overnight from America. You hadn't slept. You were tired. You were in London. You were in the Underground, and it was hot and sweaty, and you had, you had pain in your shoulder and... Do you remember that story?

Gelong Thubten 1:10:37 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:38 Because that is another powerful example of reframing.

Gelong Thubten 1:10:41 Mm. Yeah, I, I was on the Tube in London, and I was tired, and I was feeling grumpy and feeling stressed and-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:47 So monks are allowed to feel grumpy and stressed?

Gelong Thubten 1:10:50 Oh, yeah. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I caught myself in that moment feeling like that, and I thought, "Why don't you meditate right now?" And so I took a decision to be mindful in that moment, and I decided to time it from stop to stop on the Tube. So from one stop to the next, I would try and be mindful. Then I would just let go and let my mind wander, and then I'd alternate with the next stop. Mindfulness-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:16 And what does that mean, be mindful?

Gelong Thubten 1:11:18 Feel the ground under your feet, relax your shoulders, be aware of your body.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:21 And, and how does... Just simple, basic question, but how does that help someone to do that? Why, why should they think about being mindful when on the Tube?

Gelong Thubten 1:11:30 Because you, you are then, um, changing your relationship with stress. So I was tired. I think I was late for an appointment. I ha-had aching shoulders. But through being mindful, I started to enjoy the moment. So the feeling of the strap of the bag on my shoulder became like a feeling of massage, pulling the shoulder down and relaxing me. The, there's the stress i-in my stomach. The kind of knotted up stomach started to relax. I feel the ground under my feet. I become aware of my breathing, and I got off the Tube feeling younger, feeling more refreshed. I literally felt ten years younger when I got off that train.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:08 Just from changing your attitude?

Gelong Thubten 1:12:10 Yes. Yes, because the, the, the situation I was in that was so automatically making me more tired and more stressed now becomes something positive.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:21 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 1:12:22 It becomes a training opportunity, and then you start to look forward to traffic jams and being stuck on trains and standing in queues because they become training opportunities. This is a very powerful way of using mindfulness in stressful situations so that you start to change how you view the stress. It becomes quite interesting to you. It becomes something that makes you grow-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:46 Yeah

Gelong Thubten 1:12:46 ... rather than shuts you down.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:48 Yeah, I really love that, and I think in that talk you also said how, you know, on the Tube you're hot and you're sweaty. Yet loads of people pay good money to have a sauna in their house or go to a sauna for that experience. [laughs]

Gelong Thubten 1:12:59 Exactly. How you see it is how it is.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:02 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 1:13:02 Are you hot because you're in a sauna, or are you hot because you're in the Tube in rush hour? Heat is heat. What is your relationship with that heat? And you can change that

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:11 Or, or, yeah, or you're intentionally going into a deep four-year retreat where you can't do this, and you can't do that, and you're gonna be stuck in one room, and you can't talk. Or not out of choice because of something you've done which society deems unacceptable, you're in a prison cell. And I, I really don't think this is as far-fetched as some people may initially perceive it to be. Our perception is everything.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:42 And you mentioned the word stress. I'm very interested in how you view stress because I've-- my feeling on stress is that is anything inherently stressful? Well, you could make the case that it's only really stressful if we choose to look at it as stress. Do you know what I mean? A lot of it is created in- inside our minds. Not-- maybe not all of it, but maybe all of it on, on its very, very deepest level, stress is internally generated by our response to the situation, I think.

Gelong Thubten 1:14:18 Yeah. I would say stress is resistance. There's a resistance to the, the, the situation. There's a feeling of, "I want this to go away. I don't like this."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:28 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 1:14:29 And, and the resistance creates more resistance because it's a habit that feeds itself. And if you learn to, um, sort of, um, dismantle the resistance, then where, where is the stress? You can start to be in conventionally stressful situations, but be okay. And then, of course, the fear comes up, "Well, would that make me passive? Would I become a doormat? Will people walk all over me?" I don't think so because I think you will start to make conscious, healthy choices in terms of what you do with your life and what you do with your time. But when stress comes at you and you, you-- there's nothing you can do about it, you can change your mental attitude to it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:10 Yeah. And I think meditation teaches us that, doesn't it?

Gelong Thubten 1:15:12 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:12 It cha-- As you say, it helps change our relationship with our thoughts. But it's not just for that ten-minute meditation. Is it you want that principle then to underpin the rest of your life?

Gelong Thubten 1:15:26 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:27 Right?

Gelong Thubten 1:15:27 It- it's like exercise. You-- If you go to the gym for half an hour, you're, you're building muscle. You-- The muscle doesn't just deflate when you walk out of the gym door. It goes with you-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:37 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:15:38 ... especially if you're doing training every day. So you do meditation every day, and the idea is that it carries over into your daily life. The strength that you build in med- meditation becomes the strength you experience throughout your daily life.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:53 If stress is resistance, then it seems like the opposite of stress may be acceptance.

Gelong Thubten 1:16:01 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:03 You've written a whole chapter on acceptance in the new book. What is acceptance?

Gelong Thubten 1:16:11 So I always used to think acceptance was something incredibly grim and depressing. My teachers constantly used to tell me, "You need to learn how to accept. You need to accept yourself, accept your emotions, accept your pain and suffering." And I thought what they were trying to tell me was, "You've gotta put up with it."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:28 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:16:29 I thought acceptance was a kinda grim resignation, or you just kind of miserably carry this burden forever, and you just face it. And then I started to discover, actually during that long four-year retreat, that acceptance is much more to do with, um, embracing the situation with compassion, loving kindness, and a sense of openness, and then your relationship with pain starts to change. The thing that you're pushing away and disliking and, and finding oppressive, you start to welcome it. You kinda move into it and be- and become very much, um, okay with it. Uh, it's a positive experience. Acceptance is an active rather than a passive state of mind.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:22 Why do people struggle with acceptance?

Gelong Thubten 1:17:25 Because of our in-- deeply ingrained habit of resistance. Resistant-- Resisting pain, resisting suffering, which of course is, is, is a natural part of the human biology is to resist pain and suffering. But it- it's become much more elaborate in modern life, and I think it's because partly, you know, we live in a culture that constantly promises us comfort all the time. Uh, all the products we buy, all the things we've created are to increase our levels of comfort, and that's made us more, um, uh, unable to accept discomfort. So we, we've got the temperature control just right in our house. We've got the food just right. We've got everything just how we like it, and that's made us less resilient.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:08 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:18:08 So any small amount of discomfort that comes along, we find really, uh, repulsive, and we wanna get rid of it, and it's made us, um, more vulnerable.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:19 You mentioned the word suffering quite a lot in this conversation, and that is a word that many of us associate with Buddhism, the idea that life is suffering. You sort of raised the question in your book as to whether suffering is the best word because that wasn't the word that the Buddha used, was it? Could you just, uh, help us understand when you talk about suffering, which could be seen as quite a negative word, like what exactly do you mean?

Gelong Thubten 1:18:50 This is always something that's sort of misunderstood about Buddhism, is that you re- you read a Buddhist book, and it says, "Life is suffering," and then you put the book down thinking, "Well, that-- I don't really wanna read that. Buddhism sounds incredibly pessimistic. Uh, oh, there, there-- that's the, the religion that believes everything is suffering." That's not really true. That's not how the Buddha described it. The Buddha obviously didn't use the word suffering. It's been translated from the words he used. The more accurate term would be, um, there, there is always something missing or is always a sense of in- incompleteness about everything we experience. We're always looking for something and never quite finding it. There's a sense of dissatisfaction, a sense of, um, discontentment, uh, not enough, things aren't enough, and that we're sort of driven by that feeling that we're always looking for something, and all the things we do seem to make us keep looking for more. And then, then of course, we can have suffering, which really feels like suffering. There's, there's physical pain, emotional pain, terrible things can happen in our life. So there are many levels to suffering. There's, there's the more manifest suffering and the more subtle dis- dis- dissatisfaction that sort of bubbles away underneath everything. And the Buddha simply said, "This is something very inevitable in our lives, but we don't have to suffer about it. We don't have to, we don't have to, um... We, we can sink or swim. We can learn to work with it rather than be oppressed by it."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:18 Is it possible to transcend that?

Gelong Thubten 1:20:21 That's the whole idea of Buddhism, is that you start to work towards your own freedom and work towards helping other people find freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from that sense of constant limitation, constant sense of, uh, um, unease, um, uncertainty, anything could go wrong. Our, our life is like a house of cards. If one card is taken away, the whole thing might collapse. That vulnerability, we can learn to transcend that through discovering the, the beauty of our own minds, the, the, the strength of our own minds.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:57 Have you transcended it?

Gelong Thubten 1:20:59 No. No, no. I'm still on the path.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:01 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:21:01 I'm still on the path. I'm still very much on the journey. I'm very much about day to day, you know, uh, each day trying to just work on myself, work on my mind. The main thing is to try to become more compassionate to myself and to others and to try to be of help, be of service. It's an ever-evolving thing.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:25 How does someone like you, who it sounds as though many years ago, in your early twenties, were driven by external validation, that feeling of lack inside led you to engage in all kinds of different activities, and there was probably a lot of ego involved, um, that may- maybe showed up in many different ways. Now, what, twenty, thirty years on, you have your second book out. You're being celebrated, right? The book, people are writing rave reviews about your book. You have some very famous people who have given beautiful testimonials, and I can see why, 'cause it is a fabulous read. It really is. So there could be a trap here whereby you went off to a monastery to make peace with things and work on your mind, and you've been doing that for a number of years. How do you stop falling into the trap that many humans do around book promotion?

Gelong Thubten 1:22:32 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:32 And let's say your book charts really well-

Gelong Thubten 1:22:34 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:35 ... and reaches a lot of people, and you go on TV and you talk about it. These things can be very, very seductive-

Gelong Thubten 1:22:41 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:41 ... and they can feed the human ego.

Gelong Thubten 1:22:44 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:45 Are you aware of this as you go into book promotion period? Is it something that's come up, or do you feel you're sort of beyond that now?

Gelong Thubten 1:22:53 I'm not beyond that. I'm, I, I'm a human being, and of course there's ego, and of course there's, there's, uh... You, you, you, you get a buzz when you, when things are going well, and you just have to be aware of that. You just have to notice that in yourself and... You know, if I, if I just wanted to be famous, I wouldn't write books about meditation. There are much- [laughs] much easier ways to do it. Um, my, my subject matter is, is very much about trying to help people, and so the aim of the book is to give benefit to people.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:28 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 1:23:28 And what really, really excites me is when people tell me, "Oh, I read something in your book that has really helped me as a person to, to meditate or to suffer less." I, I get enormous pleasure from that.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:43 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 1:23:43 Sometimes people run across the street and say, "Oh, I've read your book," or whatever, "and, and it's really helped me," and that's really, really a beautiful experience.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:51 Yeah. I can... I, I get that, and you can see from how many scribbles I've got all over your new book how much this one connected with me.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:00 One of the bits that I've been thinking about a lot, and I was actually discussing with my ten-year-old daughter over dinner last night, was the chapter on emotions. So I'd first like you to explain, how do you see emotions? You know, what is an emotion? And then the idea that really has consumed my thoughts over the last twenty-four hours is this idea in Buddhism that you write about that there are only three real emotions, fear, anger, and desire. Now, that is incredibly interesting to me, so I'd love to talk about that.

Gelong Thubten 1:24:36 So emotions are, um... We sort of lump them together in terms of meditation, thoughts or em- thoughts and emotions. You know, wh- when we're practicing meditation, our mind might get distracted by a thought or a feeling or an emotion. They're all just part of the same package, which is the, the distractions in our mind that the m- that, that we get locked into and we g- we get caught up in-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:02 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:25:02 ... and the stories and all of that. Um, but e- emotions are sort of thoughts with more energy, with more, with more power to them, and we often get locked into those states, those emotional states. Um, traditionally in Buddhism, we do talk about these three basic emotions which are, um- Fear, uh, wanting and not wanting, fear, desire, and anger. Um, out of those come many other ones. You know, they sort of, um, they branch out into many-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:33 Jealousy, hatred-

Gelong Thubten 1:25:34 All of that

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:34 ... resentment.

Gelong Thubten 1:25:34 All, yeah

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:34 They're sort of downstream, aren't they?

Gelong Thubten 1:25:36 Yeah. They, they all kind of arise out of these three basic energies and, um-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:41 Could, could we even make the case though on those that fear really is the root emotion, that anger and desire sort of... This is what, what I was chatting with about with my daughter last night, was this, you know, are they not all underpinned by the energy of fear?

Gelong Thubten 1:25:56 That's the point I try to make in the book-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:58 Yeah

Gelong Thubten 1:25:58 ... is that it's all coming from fear. We have this basic fear of not getting what we want or getting what we don't want, and that drives us. Pretty much everything we do is based on I need to get something, I need to get away from something, and that's a kind of fear, isn't it? If I take a sip from this water, from th- from this cup of water, I'm experiencing wanting the water and wanting to get away from my thirst.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:29 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:26:30 And I'm, I'm... There's a fear there. There's a fear of the thirst. I can't just sit with the thirst. Of course, we need to drink water. I'm not suggesting don't drink water-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:37 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:26:37 ... and just sit, sit with your fear. You'd die if you did that. But it's an interesting, uh, metaphor for-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:44 Yeah

Gelong Thubten 1:26:44 ... the, everything we do in life is coming from a place of I, I'm afraid I won't get what I want, or I'm afraid I might get what I don't want. And from there comes all of our different emotions. And the point I try to make in the book is that emotions aren't... There's nothing wrong with them. Uh, sometimes people think, oh, Buddhism means you're supposed to just get rid of all your emotions and become this kind of blank canvas. When I first became a monk, I remember running to a phone box. In those days, there were no mobile phones. Running to a phone box and phoning my aunt and saying, "I've joined this monastery, and I'm a bit worried that they're gonna take all my emotions away [laughs] and I'm gonna become this kind of automaton, this kind of robot."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:27 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 1:27:27 I thought that's what you, what you become if you meditate too much. And she said, "Don't worry, you'll always have emotions." A- and it was, as I carried on practicing, it became really obvious to me that we're not here to get rid of our emotions. There's nothing wrong with them. Um, but we do want to be less negatively influenced by them.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:49 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:27:49 If we're so driven by fear or driven by wanting or driven by anger, we're going to suffer. Then at a deeper level, I would say that the, the, the Buddhist approach to emotions is to understand that they are... They're masking something deeper. Emotions are some- uh, we use the word obscurations or, uh, veils. They're like veils hiding something, and they're, they're, they are distracting us from our true nature, that when we're caught up in, in desire, anger, fear, et cetera, we're sort of distracted by some story, and we can go beneath the emotion into our essence and discover peace and happiness inside. The emotions are almost helping us get there.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:36 Is that essentially one of the things that we realize through meditation, that actually underneath it all, we are already calm and happy and peaceful? To make sure you're taking action after watching this video, I've created a free Breathing Guide that's gonna help you reduce stress, calm your mind, and boost your energy. In this guide, I share with you six really simple breathing practices that work immediately. Even just one minute a day will start to make a big difference. To receive your free guide, all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below. What is the, th- these things sort of float on the top, and if we don't get too attached to those emotions and think that we are our thoughts and our emotions, if we can sit behind it in meditation and see it and bring ourselves back to ourselves away from that emotion or that thought, is that how meditation helps us here, by, by putting that distance there?

Gelong Thubten 1:29:38 It can be, but I, I'm wary of the word distance because it sounds a little bit like denial, doesn't it?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:43 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:29:44 And, and we could get that wrong. We could start to think, "I need to distance myself from my emotions and be sort of dispassionate-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:50 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:29:50 ... and just be the observer." Could the person then get stuck in denial, suppression? I, I think it's possible.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:57 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:29:57 So I think we have to really be, be careful about that and understand that sometimes you've got to use the emotion as your meditation, and through doing that, you will go beyond it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:12 So as you said earlier on, feel and experience where is this-

Gelong Thubten 1:30:17 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:18 ... emotion-

Gelong Thubten 1:30:18 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:18 ... in my body-

Gelong Thubten 1:30:19 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:19 ... and then what let's, you know, and then, then over time, as you say, it's gonna transform.

Gelong Thubten 1:30:24 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:24 It's gonna dissipate.

Gelong Thubten 1:30:25 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:26 And I guess that's how you realize what it really is.

Gelong Thubten 1:30:29 Well, that's, that's definitely been a major part and still is a major part of my own practice, is that when I'm experiencing painful emotions, um, if I, if I learn to work with them very directly, they become transformative. But on- only when we can do that, and there are times we can do that and times we can't do that. And in, in my very long retreat, I, I spent two years unable to do that and suffered like crazy, and then things started to change when I learned how to kind of move into the emotion rather than push it away.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:07 You've been on a very deep and long journey with meditation. For someone who's not interested in being a monk, who's just struggling a little bit with their life and maybe has some of these low-grade addictions that we've been talking about- How quickly can 10 minutes of meditation a day start to make a difference for them?

Gelong Thubten 1:31:31 What I found very exciting was to hear from neuroscientists that when they do, uh, MRI scans on people who meditate, they notice visible changes in the brain even after a few days of somebody doing 10 minutes of meditation a day.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:48 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:31:48 When I heard that, I thought that's incredibly valuable information because it gives us a lot of hope and encouragement. If you do 10 minutes of meditation a day, after four or five days, you're not necessarily gonna feel different, but to know that in a brain scan your brain will look healthier-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:02 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:32:02 ... is very encouraging. It's a little bit like exercise. If you go to the gym or if you eat the right food, you're not gonna immediately lose weight or-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:10 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:32:10 ... build muscle, but you know it works because the science is there to back it. It's the same with meditation. So if you meditate every day, it's not after four or five days, but after a while, you, you will start to feel more calm, less stressed, more happy. You start to find there's a place within yourself that you can go to where you can find the answers, you can find the, the peace and happiness that you were looking for, and the more you connect in with that place, the happier you become, and also the more compassionate you become. This is not just a kind of self-serving, um, exercise. It's so that you can also open your heart to others, and when you start to live from a place of compassion, you start to feel your meditation has been worth it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:57 Anger is one of these three core emotions, and anger is something that we see a lot of around us in society. You say in the book that we can only feel anger if we already have the potential for it inside of us, and anger leads to more anger. Can you expand a little bit?

Gelong Thubten 1:33:20 So in the book when I talk about anger, the point I'm trying to make is that we often feel angry with somebody or about something, and what's very important is to look at the anger itself rather than the thing or the person we're angry with or about. Because until we do that, anger is just a habit that kind of proliferates and feeds into more and more anger. And when I say anger, I'm talking about a whole range of experiences, anger, dislike, hatred, but also just mild irritation, and it can be with a person, it can be with a thing, it can be with a physical sensation in the body, just a sense of dislike, and it just creates more of itself, and we never seem to find freedom from it until we look at the anger itself. So when I say we can only feel anger if we have the potential for it, I mean there's the, there's the capacity in us to feel anger, and it's bubbling away, and then things come along that kind of spark it or, or, or, or wake it up. Looking at the anger itself through meditation is where you take away the story, "I'm angry because he did this, she did that," and you meditate on the feeling in your mind, which is often physical as well.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:36 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:34:36 You feel a kind of rage and a burning inside you or a coldness inside you, and when you meditate on that through focusing on it without trying to tell stories about it, without trying to push it away, but you just feel it as it is, it will start to transform and start to dismantle, start to melt, start to move, and that's how you find freedom within the anger.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:05 Some people will say that I have every right to feel angry because that person did this.

Gelong Thubten 1:35:11 Sure. But then who's suffering? The person has gone away. They did what they did, and yeah, I could say I'm justified in feeling anger, but now who's suffering? I'm suffering. Every time my mind sinks into the anger, I'm re-traumatizing myself. So forgiveness is not actually about the other person. You, you're not giving them forgiveness. Forgiveness is you dropping the burden. The Buddha described it as like holding a hot coal in your hand. You just hold it and it burns you, but if you put the coal down, you won't be burnt. So when you can let go of your anger, it doesn't mean you've lost the battle or they've won or you've allowed them to abuse you. It means that you're freeing yourself from, from that rage or that blame or that sense of, uh, despair or why me? It, it's li- it's liberating yourself from suffering.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:03 Whenever I feel a heavy emotion come up, let's say anger, for example, I've trained myself to look at these things as opportunities, which I think very much speaks to the content in the book, that these are all opportunities for us to transform ourselves. Like had you not experienced that anger, well, there could be two things going on. One, you could be super zen and calm and have trained yourself to reframe everything, which I do believe is possible for some people. I, I, I really feel in my own life I've trained myself to, to the point where lots of events that were triggering five, 10 years ago are no longer through consistent practice and, and seeing these as opportunities. So that's one, uh, potential reason for that. But it could also be that, "Oh, wow, there's something I didn't know I had inside me-

Gelong Thubten 1:37:03 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:03 ... that this situation now has brought up." Okay, great. I don't like it necessarily, but this situation that's come up, this social friction, has given me a chance now to go, "Oh, what is this anger? Where has it come from? What is underpinning it?" Do you see it in a similar way?

Gelong Thubten 1:37:22 That is really the message of my book, is that the, the hard times we go through are opportunities because they show us something about ourself that we can work on. And- The things that make us suffer in life, we, we step back and see it's our emotion, our reaction, how we feel that's making us suffer, and if we can learn to work with that, we might feel a sense of gratitude that this thing that has happened has been awful, but now I'm learning to work with it, so the thing was quite useful.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:55 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 1:37:55 You feel grateful for life's difficulties, and that sounds like a very sort of idealistic, uh, notion, but it's a moment-to-moment thing in terms of meditation and kinda leaning into the pain, leaning into the discomfort. Y-your, your attitude towards it changes. It becomes something highly useful.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:16 It's also a more empowering way to live because it means then that you have a huge sense of agency over your life 'cause the alternative is that you're a victim to life, right? That your emotions, the way you feel is dependent on everything going a certain way-

Gelong Thubten 1:38:35 Mm-hmm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:35 ... everyone treating you a certain way.

Gelong Thubten 1:38:37 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:38 And that's a pretty vulnerable place to be, I think.

Gelong Thubten 1:38:40 Incredibly vulnerable, and I think many of us live in that place of hoping things go our way and trying to manipulate life so it will go our way. It's much more liberating and powerful to think, "Well, whatever happens, I'm gonna work with it. I'm gonna u- I'm gonna use this in meditation." Uh, in the book, I use the example of compost. Compost makes your garden grow, but what's compost made from? It's made from rotten vegetables, all the things you'd normally chuck away. You can use it as fertilizer for your field-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:10 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 1:39:10 ... or your garden. So all the things in your life that normally you would think, "I, I just gotta get rid of this," bring them together and use them as part of your meditation path. That's how you grow through suffering and pain.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:23 Yeah. That's a beautiful metaphor.

Gelong Thubten 1:39:26 I definitely feel grateful for difficulties I've had because they, they've really, really helped me to grow e-even when at the time it was just horrific. You, you-- when you use meditation in those moments, the thing changes, and then you look back and realize that that was your greatest strength, was the, the thing-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:49 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 1:39:50 ... that feel, felt like your deepest weakness. And I found this very much when I went into that long four-year retreat, is that 10 days into the retreat, I crashed, and that was a very shocking experience for me because I'd signed up for this four-year retreat. I was already-- I'd been a monk already for 12 years. I was a bit more senior than the other people in there, and then suddenly after 10 days, I'm just totally falling apart. I mean, just crying all the time, going into panic, going into deep anxiety. Then it kinda shifted into a, a, a really horrible depression that went on for couple of years. I mean, the two-- first two years of the retreat, I was really not handling it at all and, and at one point I thought I would have to leave. I just couldn't take it anymore. But what shifted for me was when it really reached rock bottom and there was nowhere else to go b-but up, I found ways to stop fighting the suffering because I started to think, "This is the thing that has always tormented me, is this fear and this, uh, de-- habits of depression that were coming up again and again during my life." It, it's what had been tormenting me as an actor and what led to the burnout. Then you become a monk. You maybe suppress it a little bit, but then you're in retreat and it comes up. So I had to work with it, and what really changed for me was when I learned how to give compassion to those feelings because at first there was a terrible sense of shame. "I shouldn't be depressed. I'm a monk. I've already been teaching meditation. Here I'm-- here I am depressed."

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:41:30 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 1:41:30 "How shocking, how shameful." I mean, this is a cultural thing as well, isn't it?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:41:34 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 1:41:34 We have this terrible culture around shame around mental health. There's something wrong with us, and we shouldn't feel this way. So there I am in retreat, depressed and feeling ashamed about the depression. But then when I learned how to give a sense of compassion and love to those feelings, it really started to shift. And so what I would do is I would sit there on my meditation cushion, and I would start to feel this, this darkness arise in me, this, like, a darkness, the, the d-depression, and it was mixed with anxiety, this darkness mixed with panic. I would start to feel it, and it was a very physical feeling, and I would lear-- I, I learned how to move, move closer to it with, with a sense of compassion, to give compassion to that part of myself that I'd hated so much. And the more I did that, the more it started to shift and change and relax and open up.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:42:32 Mm-hmm.

Gelong Thubten 1:42:32 And this awful feeling inside me started to melt. It's like the, the pain starts to melt, and then you start to feel that this is the work you're doing and th- and this, this misery, this pain is, is like compost-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:42:49 Mm-hmm

Gelong Thubten 1:42:49 ... that's making your field grow, and the thing that you've always hated about yourself becomes your strongest ally. And so now I look back at those times of all those panic attacks, and I think, gosh, they were, they were like a, a, an amazing opportunity, and I'm s- I'm grateful. I am incredibly grateful for all of that suffering. It's helped me so much, and hopefully it's giving me, uh, knowledge and information that I can then pass on to others through, through these books.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:43:22 Could any part of that be seen as off-putting? And, and, and what I mean by that, Thubten, is- You had already been a monk for so long at that point, yet you still went into this inner world full of torment. So is that off-putting in the sense that, wow, I'm better off just scrolling on social media and having a bottle of wine every evening because if, if it took you that long, you left to be a monk, you did all that meditation, and then you're still struggling, is there any hope that I will get to that point?

Gelong Thubten 1:44:10 Everybody's different.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:11 That's one thing.

Gelong Thubten 1:44:11 Everybody's different, and I'm a very extreme case. [laughs]

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:15 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 1:44:15 In that I, I really have had a lot of mental torment in my life that has been knocking on the door inside me to, to be addressed. And I had to, for myself, go into these very long, intensive retreats to work out how to address it, but that's not the way for everybody. I have many friends who, who have very busy lives. They have families, they have jobs, and they meditate every day within their own schedule for half an hour, twenty minutes, whatever, and they're also evolving in their way. It- it's not that one way is better than another or, or it's more that you find the way that's useful for you.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:52 Mm.

Gelong Thubten 1:44:53 And I feel that my, um, my biggest habit has always been to run away, and so in my kind of wild party days, I was running away. Then I became a monk, and I found a way to run away within that by just kind of skimming the surface. And then when I went into retreat, I couldn't run away, and I needed to re-retreat to learn how not to run away. But other people-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:45:18 Mm

Gelong Thubten 1:45:18 ... don't have that kind of problem, or they can, they can develop in, uh, i- using different tools.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:45:25 If we meditate regularly, if we use a lot of the meditation practices that you outline in your book, and we start to transform ourselves, we transform our minds, and we get to a place where we're not as reliant anymore on externalities. We don't need to buy things, acquire things, acquire status, have people treat us a certain way in order for us to feel content. If and when you get to that point where you don't need things from outside to make you feel good, how does that fit alongside the fact that we're social animals, that we can't really live and exist and survive just by ourselves, that we've always relied on others, our tribe, our community, our family? Are those two ideas mutually exclusive, or can they sit alongside each other?

Gelong Thubten 1:46:24 I think they support each other because I think the more strong we become inside-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:29 Yeah

Gelong Thubten 1:46:29 ... ourselves and the more, the more we can get in touch with our own minds, the more we can express compassion. And then our need for community, for tribe, for being a social animal becomes the, the, the, the ground in which we can practice compassion. We can connect to others with a, with a deep wish-

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:53 Yeah

Gelong Thubten 1:46:53 ... to benefit them and to help them learn how not to suffer.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:57 Yeah.

Gelong Thubten 1:46:57 Because compassion is not only about feeling sorry for people or picking them up when they fall down. It's about really trying to understand what makes somebody tick and how to help them to develop themselves, how to help them find ways out of their own pain and suffering. So compassion is the, the, the, the key element in all of this. Otherwise, it becomes just a kind of selfish exercise of, well, I'm gonna free myself, and I don't care about everybody else. That would be dreadful, wouldn't it?

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:47:23 Yeah. No, I love that. I completely agree. It's something you talk about in the book, this idea that you're meditating for yourself and for the people and the world around you. It's not actually separate. And the way I see those two things, I-- as I say, I agree they're not mutually exclusive at all. It's something I've been pondering for a few months now. It's something I'm writing about actually at the moment, and I also look at it in the, in the view of how do we best contribute to our tribe, to the people around us? Well, we do it when we're stable and secure in ourselves, when we're less needy, right? When we don't need them to always prop us up and give us something 'cause we're lacking something inside. So I kind of feel that we can become minimally reliant ourselves on externalities, but that then enables us to have other people rely on us.

Gelong Thubten 1:48:21 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:48:21 And we also are better able to rely on others-

Gelong Thubten 1:48:26 Mm

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:48:27 ... when we actually become more complete in ourselves.

Gelong Thubten 1:48:31 I would say that if you change your relationship with yourself and, and improve that and transform that, that becomes the source for improved relationships with others. The, the compassion for yourself and compassion for others work together as a, as a unity.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:48:50 Yeah. There was also this section in the book where you were talking about love. I think it was when we were talking about all these emotions, and that if you love, you have the capacity for hate. That was really, really interesting to me. But that's not all forms of love, is it?

Gelong Thubten 1:49:07 No. I was talking about conditional love, and there's such a difference between unconditional love and conditional love. I mean, the closest example we, we have to unconditional love is the love between parents and children. When you, when you're a parent and you, you love your child unconditionally no matter what, you know, it's not that you would stop loving them, um, at a certain point. You-- There, there's that pure love of not wanting something back. But so often we get into love relationships where- I love you because, I love you if, I love you when. Um, there's the expectation that you need, you need to love me back. Uh, or, or if you, if you break the rules in some way, I will stop loving you. And, and that kind of love turns to hate so easily. It kind of oscillates between love and hate all the time, where, uh, if my expectations are not being met, I'm going to feel angry, and I'm going to feel that the love-- "I've done so much for you, and what have I got back?" And that kind of almost like a business transaction. And I think the unconditional love that people experience between parents and children could become a-- almost like a model for the love we could try to develop for all beings. In Buddhism, we always say mother sentient beings, which is to say that all beings have been our mother life after life after life, or in, in this life now, we could try to see that the same way we would do anything for our own mother, could we also have that relationship with other beings, animals, humans, anywhere? So that becomes the, the sort of source for developing deeper and deeper compassion, using unconditional love as, as the, as the tool.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:50:55 Yeah, it's so beautiful. My wife and I were, were talking last weekend about love for children, love for our children, and we both said that we, we cannot imagine or fathom any situation at all where we would not still, with all our hearts, love our children.

Gelong Thubten 1:51:16 Yeah.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:51:17 And I think many parents-

Gelong Thubten 1:51:18 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:51:18 -hopefully all parents, but I think many parents know that feeling. I'm not saying it's exclusive to parents.

Gelong Thubten 1:51:24 No.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:51:24 Uh, I-I accept that many people these days choose not to be parents for a whole variety of different reasons and potentially can experience that love in, in a different way. I-I, I think that's absolutely possible. But it would be nice, wouldn't it, if we could extend that and apply that to everyone, so it's no longer, oh, just for our children.

Gelong Thubten 1:51:46 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:51:46 Could we, could we approach everyone with that?

Gelong Thubten 1:51:51 Mm.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:51:51 I mean, that seems like pie in the sky from where we currently are in society. I think it's a noble aim, but it's also something that we could argue is an achievable aim.

Gelong Thubten 1:52:05 I think it's, uh, step by step. I think we can use that feeling, uh, that we have for close relatives and then expand it out. So in, in my book, I give, uh, meditation techniques where you start by thinking of your parent or your child or your pet or somebody you would do anything for, somebody where if you think of that person, your heart just melts and opens. You, you have unconditional love. You start by thinking of them, and then once the, the feeling of love is just naturally flowing, you start to think of other people and send the love to them as well, and eventually to strangers and even people you don't like or people you have difficulties with. So you're-- you have the feeling of love anyway as your potential because you experience it to cer-- towards certain people, and then you expand it out, you build on it.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:52:56 Compassion for everything and everyone.

Gelong Thubten 1:52:59 That's, that's really the whole point of, of meditation.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:53:03 I love everything you're talking about, everything you're writing about. I think it's so, so important. I want to finish off with another one of your quotes from the book, which is, "The most courageous and compassionate thing we can ever do is to learn how to be with ourselves." Now, I know we've already touched on this, but I really want to highlight this point. Many people want to meditate, but they try, and they give up. You explained on multiple occasions in this podcast and in many other interviews I've seen you give online why you believe meditation can be transformative, I think, for everyone. So given that it's one of the most courageous and compassionate things we can do, what are some of your words or thoughts for that person who's a bit skeptical or who has tried before and failed? How would you convince them or maybe I'll say inspire them to try again?

Gelong Thubten 1:54:10 You can't fail at meditation because meditation is, is where you just do nothing. I mean, you are literally sitting there doing nothing. And that's the beauty of it, is that you're not doing something in order to become a better person. You're doing nothing, and you're undoing all the things you normally do to run away from yourself. And through doing nothing, you get closer to your essence, and you discover happiness. So you're literally relaxing into what you already are. So it's very hard to fail at that because you're just being you. The sense of failure comes from thinking you need to do something and thinking you need to meditate in a very kind of aggressive manner, clearing the mind, pushing the thoughts away. That's the sort of doing. It's all about undoing. And I think that's the key message, is just sit with your mind and just let it be. Don't try to make it different. Don't try to, uh, uh, chase it away. Just let it be. And this is a sense of true compassion in the moment.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:55:21 Tsen, I love it. I love your work. I absolutely adore this latest book, Handbook for Hard Times: A Monk's Guide to Fearless Living. Thanks for coming on the show.

Gelong Thubten 1:55:34 Thank you so much.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:55:35 [upbeat music] For more life-changing wisdom, check out this conversation I had with Sadhguru.

Speaker 1:55:41 You think you have a job, you think you have money, you think you have wealth, you think you have family. No. The only thing that you have is life. You're just alive for a brief time. So this brief time, if you're still alive today-