Secret Buddhist Practice To Stop Self Hate & Overthinking!
Gelong Thubten (guest), Steven Bartlett (host)
In this episode of The Diary of a CEO, featuring Gelong Thubten and Steven Bartlett, Secret Buddhist Practice To Stop Self Hate & Overthinking! explores buddhist Monk Reveals Meditation Method To End Self-Hate And Fear Buddhist monk Gelong Thubten shares how extreme suffering, burnout, and unresolved childhood trauma led him to monastic life and a four‑year meditation retreat where he nearly broke down, then learned to transform self‑hatred into deep self‑compassion.
Buddhist Monk Reveals Meditation Method To End Self-Hate And Fear
Buddhist monk Gelong Thubten shares how extreme suffering, burnout, and unresolved childhood trauma led him to monastic life and a four‑year meditation retreat where he nearly broke down, then learned to transform self‑hatred into deep self‑compassion.
He explains why modern life’s speed, technology, and consumerism have created unprecedented material comfort but emotional emptiness, driving anxiety, addiction, purposelessness, and rising suicide rates.
Thubten reframes meditation as a practical ‘mind gym’ and deep medicine: not clearing thoughts, but changing our relationship to them, learning to become the ‘sky’ rather than the ‘clouds’ of emotion, and to generate happiness and freedom from within.
He offers specific techniques for daily practice, micro‑moments of mindfulness, working with pain, grief, and forgiveness, and shows how this inner work can make people more effective, compassionate, and fearless in a fear‑driven world.
Key Takeaways
Meditation is not about emptying your mind; it’s about changing your relationship with thoughts.
Thubten dismantles the common misconception that success in meditation means having no thoughts. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Happiness largely comes from freedom from wanting, not from getting what you want.
He explains how consumer culture trains us to believe happiness is always in the next achievement or purchase. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Pain, trauma, and grief can become objects of meditation rather than enemies to escape.
In his four‑year retreat, Thubten was overwhelmed by depression, panic, and old trauma until he hit rock bottom and literally tried to run away. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Self‑compassion is a skill: learn to treat your inner pain like a frightened animal you’re caring for.
He uses the image of holding a terrified rabbit or a bird with a broken wing: instead of hating or rejecting the wounded part of you, you learn to cradle it with tenderness. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Micro‑moments of mindfulness in daily life rewire your responses to stress and fear.
Beyond formal 10‑minute sits, he recommends tiny practices in queues, traffic, or airports: feel your feet on the ground, notice your shoulders dropping, attend to your breathing for a few seconds. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Forgiveness is primarily about freeing yourself from the toxicity of resentment, not excusing others.
Using the murder of his own teacher as an example, Thubten describes forgiveness as putting down a hot coal that’s burning you. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
A simple, consistent meditation plan can measurably change your brain and behavior.
His starter protocol: meditate 10 minutes every morning, before checking your phone. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Notable Quotes
“We are materially more comfortable than ever, and yet emotionally more uncomfortable, so something hasn’t added up.”
— Gelong Thubten
“The deepest addiction we all have is the addiction to our own thoughts.”
— Gelong Thubten
“If I am observing myself being unhappy, is the observer unhappy?”
— Gelong Thubten
“You can run to the end of the earth, and that thing that has been tormenting you is part of you, and until you learn to integrate that, it will always trip you up.”
— Gelong Thubten
“I’m still a mess, but I’m okay with being a mess. That is a huge difference.”
— Gelong Thubten
Questions Answered in This Episode
When you decided to ‘make the pain the meditation’ during your four‑year retreat, what were the very first sessions like—did anything specific happen in your body or mind that signaled you were on a different path?
Buddhist monk Gelong Thubten shares how extreme suffering, burnout, and unresolved childhood trauma led him to monastic life and a four‑year meditation retreat where he nearly broke down, then learned to transform self‑hatred into deep self‑compassion.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
For someone with complex trauma who finds it overwhelming to feel into the body, how would you adapt your ‘sending love into the pain’ practice so it doesn’t retraumatize them?
He explains why modern life’s speed, technology, and consumerism have created unprecedented material comfort but emotional emptiness, driving anxiety, addiction, purposelessness, and rising suicide rates.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You argue that our natural state is compassion, not fight‑or‑flight—what evidence or specific experiences in your teaching work have most convinced you of that, especially when working with people who’ve committed serious harm?
Thubten reframes meditation as a practical ‘mind gym’ and deep medicine: not clearing thoughts, but changing our relationship to them, learning to become the ‘sky’ rather than the ‘clouds’ of emotion, and to generate happiness and freedom from within.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Can you walk through a real‑world example where a CEO or high‑pressure leader used meditation in the exact moment of a crisis to choose a different response than they normally would have?
He offers specific techniques for daily practice, micro‑moments of mindfulness, working with pain, grief, and forgiveness, and shows how this inner work can make people more effective, compassionate, and fearless in a fear‑driven world.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Buddhism teaches that self, objects, and even trauma are ‘not as solid as they seem.’ How do you stop that insight from sliding into nihilism or dismissing genuine injustice—for example in cases of systemic abuse or violence?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
We're all at the mercy of our own minds. But the problem is, is that in modern life, we're constantly made to feel we're not good enough. Something's always missing, and I will be happy or unhappy if this or that happens to me. So, we become prisoners of life.
You went and missed the hard way?
Yes. When I was in a long retreat, cut off from the world for four years. And memories were coming up from the past that would build into horrific amounts of depression, anxiety, pain, and I jumped over the wall and tried to escape because of what happened to me when I was 14.
Are you comfortable talking about this? Gelong Thubten is a Buddhist monk.
Who spent over 30 years helping Hollywood stars, CEOs, and corporations-
Stay in control within a world overloaded with stress, addiction, anxiety, and burnout.
Here we go. I became controlled by distraction, controlled by negative thinking. What is life gonna do to me next? How will I handle it? And things only changed when I hit rock bottom. I had spent so much effort trying to push that suffering away because it's so disgusting and so shameful, but it was just making it worse.
So many of us run away from pain though-
But the reality is, you can run to the end of the earth and that thing that has been tormenting you will always trip you up. And so I went back into that retreat knowing the methods are there. I just need to know how to use them and I could learn to conquer this. And that's where meditation comes in.
Do you think you can teach me? Because I very much feel like I'm on the receiving end of life.
First of all, chuck all those things away. There's a lot of spiritual tat, isn't there? (laughs)
I mean, you said it.
I actually hated meditation when I first did it because there's a lot of misconceptions and actually all you're doing is these three things to be less controlled by negative thinking. And the beauty of this is that they can show in brain scans, there'll be visible changes in your brain. So, let's try this. (instrumental music plays)
Gelong Thubten, why is your work more important now than ever before? Why is your message more important now than ever before?
I think, uh, because we're now living in times where we need meditation more than ever because of the, the speeding up of life, obviously with technology and the way we live. And also, I think because meditation has become more widespread, there are loads of misconceptions about it, so I do try to put some effort into kind of clarifying some of those misconceptions.
When you look out into the world, and you perform your sort of own analysis on what the world, the Western world, is getting right and getting wrong, what are some of your sort of big picture feelings, thoughts, and concerns?
Install uListen to search the full transcript and get AI-powered insights
Get Full TranscriptGet more from every podcast
AI summaries, searchable transcripts, and fact-checking. Free forever.
Add to Chrome