Ajahn Brahm is one badass Buddhist monk. We went to see him speak at U of T a while back. One of my friends had seen him before and said he was wise and entertaining. He was in town on a retreat and lecturing at U of T to students about psychology, Buddhism and science.
At first it was a bit trippy to hear him parse Buddhist teachings in a London cockney accent. But that soon passed as he opened into his musings about how science should try to tear down Buddhism (and vice versa), his stories from Cambridge (he studied theoretical physics, and got drunk, with Nobel laureates in the late ‘60s), and his Buddhist jokes.
There was a ferocious noise one day just outside the spiritual centre that Ajahn Brahm runs in Australia. The monks ran out to see what was going on and found their beloved cat squished on the road. It lost its nine lives, one after another, when it was hit by the 10-wheeler.
Ajahn Brahm loves iconoclasts and was begging the students to question everything. Traditions, conventional thought, and mindless habits in particular. He asked them to hold everything to the same burden of proof, whether the ideas come from Buddhism or science.
He had three lessons for everyone that I thought I’d share with you.
Lesson #1
Don’t react to life with a canned response. You must react with your truth, no matter what others might expect of you. Something that’s difficult for most people may not be difficult for you. Or something that’s easy for most people may not be easy for you. He talked about the connection that was possible by approaching people he’s visited in hospitals and prisons in a lighthearted, joyful way. We all get tired of being treated as our outward circumstances and long for people to connect with us from our mind and heart.
Lesson #2
Mindfulness is great. But without compassion it is ineffective. Ajahn Brahm spent a little time “gloating” about how psychology is turning to Buddhism to look for answers to mental health. He noted the popularity of mindfulness these days – how it’s being touted as a cure for almost everything.
But mindfulness on its own is not really effective at working with our psychology. True mental health comes from welcoming difficult feelings with kindness, setting a place at the table for them and holding them closely with love.
Feelings show up in both our body and our mind. He talked about using mindfulness to see where the feeling was showing up in our body – your chest, solar plexus, or shoulders. Then soothe the area by rubbing or breathing into it with kindness and tenderness. When he’s used this with people they’ve found that the difficult feelings become much less frightening and easier to manage.
Lesson #3
You cannot know reality until the mind is as still as a lake, without the winds of anger and desire. I never understood why Buddhists were so keen on working with attachment. It seemed a bit dry to me. I’m very attached to the pleasure of a good meal, or a walk by the river, and I couldn’t understand why that would be discouraged. But what I saw through him is that if we run after things because we want them so badly, or we react with anger when they don’t come true then we’re not really experiencing real life. We’re just experiencing the winds of our mind.
Is there a place in your life to test some of these lessons for yourself?