Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:14 Welcome to my Bob Thurman podcast. I'm so grateful and some good friends enabled me to present them to you. If you enjoy them and find them useful, please think of becoming a member of Tibet house us to help preserve Tibetan culture. If that house is the control center in America, all best wishes. Have a great day.
Speaker 1 00:00:48 This is episode 262 happiness and the Dalai Lama.
Speaker 2 00:01:13 First thing we have to get over in the issue of happiness is not only are we should be able, should we be allowed to pursue happiness life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as, as Jefferson road, but we should be allowed to enjoy happiness. And in fact, happiness should be our birthright as human sensitive human beings. And we should have kind of trust in reality, let's say it's wonderful to be able to address you remotely. And I'm sorry, due to the Corona apocalypse, that we're not all physically together, but anyway, you are concerned about my favorite topic, which is the topic of happiness. I'm very proud of the American declaration of independence. That's probably the first such document where people are at least allowed to pursue happiness. I'm not sure they are allowed to catch up with it in fact, but at least allowed to pursue it.
Speaker 2 00:02:17 The reason I mentioned that is that one of the biggest problems about people and happiness, which our industry, the industry of spa and wellness and retreats and resorts and getaways, et cetera, is addressing is the fact that happiness in most industrial countries. And before that militarized, aristocratic and hierarchical countries, most of them happiness was more or less illegal. You know, if you, if you report the, or you have a burst of feeling inside your heart and you feel completely delighted with life, if you report that to your roommate, your spouse, or your parent, or your child to spontaneously, I'm just so happy, they will probably consider you have lost your mind. So let's say that, let's just imagine for a moment that happiness is our birthright, and we can have skill in happiness as humans, and we can cultivate a higher degree of having happiness.
Speaker 2 00:03:20 And then that isn't that what we were about organic spa, organic food, organic food means to take care of the soil. Don't put poison cancerous chemicals in the soil and expect not to catch cancer from eating them, eating, whatever it produces, clean up soil, make it work in its own natural way that we've evolved to work with it live with, be thankful to your plants, that they give us back oxygen and receive our carbon. If we don't admit too much of it just by X exhale out of China, coal-fired power plants. And so, so in other words, if we could find a new balance and a new connection to this beautiful environment that we have evolved within to be the most pleasure enjoying species to enjoy it. And if we don't wreck it, we can have planetary happiest. Absolutely. In fact, the source of wealth skill invention, creativity is actually happiness.
Speaker 2 00:04:23 And the source of love, actually the true log is actually happiness. This is something we don't realize. We always think happiness. We shouldn't really aim for it because it would be selfish. You get that idea, but actually in a way it is, but it also altruistic in other words, because when you really happy, you naturally want those around you to be happy because even for further, self-interest in the sense that if they're really miserable, they will definitely manage to bring you down. As we say, since the sixties, if they have bad vibes so unhappy, they will definitely dim your light. Yeah. And Irene on your parade or whatever all our expressions are, you know, definitely. And even of course, one of the secrets mom was always good at our patron. You hear it Amandla. He has a wonderful thing. He says, he says, if you want to be successfully selfish, in other words, and act yourself interest and be happy yourself, then be a wise selfish.
Speaker 2 00:05:28 He speaks a little bit on grammatically there, but it's quite wonderful. Be a wise selfish and be compassionate, do things for others, be generous, you know, and meet what he means by that is that actually to fulfill your self interest through key, his thing is to help others with fulfills their self-interest and to be compassionate to them, meaning feel that their suffering is just as important to get rid of as your suffering. And there's more of them. So that gives you more suffering to get out and you help them to do it. And like, if you are the true calling and vocation and proficient of a healer, a doctor, a medical person, a nurse, you know, caregiver, then you help a lot of people to overcome their pain. And this gives you great happiness actually, and fulfills your thing. So it's this sort of wonderful, ironic paradox that when you, when you help others, you're the first one who gets happy when you have the motive to help others.
Speaker 2 00:06:29 Just having that motive makes you sort of open your heart more. And the minute you open your heart, the more you connect to the reality of the world around you, the more you connect to the reality of the world around you, you see what are the silver linings in that world? And you find sources of pleasure in that world. And that is the secret to happiness. Actually counting your blessings of course is part of it. But once you actually feel better, then you naturally your better feeling overflows to others. And for example, love, we say, what is true love? True love is defined in all intelligent, our cultures, as the wish for the happiness of the thing that you love, the beloved, it is not associated with greed and wanting something for herself. That is, we use the word I love about that. I liked that.
Speaker 2 00:07:20 I want it for myself, but we are not. We know from experience that by always wanting more things, we are always dissatisfied. So if we think, if we wrongly think that love is getting more things, that things that we like, we then realize that love itself to bleeding because the more you get, the more dissatisfied you are, you will cause you always want more because it's the motive. I get it for me that then never ends juicy. Whereas in here of true love, which is you wish others to be happy, whatever they want, you want them to have it. And there's so many of them and that wish then becomes like a, like a river, a flow of wellbeing within yourself. And so anyway, we were in the business of making people, helping them to be happy. Unfortunately, you can't make someone else happy. You can only provide them with the resources with which they make themselves happy.
Speaker 2 00:08:16 They're one of our specialties here also at Mandalong spa resort and retreat center is that we attended to the mental level of them being happy because we are queued by the culture of the Tibetans of how to do that. And that includes meditation and learning and meditation going along with a kind of learning about their own nature and cultivating their skills. I'd be more happy, be more mindful finding the silver lining of their own embodiment. Yoga is one of those things that is very much grows from this kind of vision rising out of India, but there's the yoga of mind as well as body. And that we're very good at. And we're specialists. We were teaching something online lately because of COVID, we've been teaching very much online, all of our different things. And I know also we realized that you can't, you know, the spa industry should also reach out beyond its own confines, into sharing things with the larger society, because the more people have happiness in the larger society, the more they will want to go, the more they will take advantage of spas will be seen as a kind of more moral and psychological and therapy therapy type of therapeutic type of places where people can heal themselves from the disease of stress of like get more money, get more status, get more fame, you know, succeed, succeed, succeed, compete, compete, compete, compete, et cetera, dominate, dominate, dominate.
Speaker 2 00:09:56 They, there are mental ways of things that you learn that help you overcome that. And one of the great things, even for example, you, you will take a great interest in teaching people to die well, and you understand what is death and not to fear death. And to realize that death is a way of opening into better lives and so forth, which fits with the current hospice movement that people, they, you know, it doesn't necessarily inflict on everyone that a view that they definitely are having such and such a future life like religions do, but it opens them to the possibility that they do and tries to help them have cultivate things like lucid, dreaming, dream, yoga, sleep, yoga, where they learn to sleep creatively and spiritually, and perhaps become conscious in dreams and learn things spiritually in dreams, escape, stress, reshape their environment and their life patterns to be avoid stress and so forth.
Speaker 2 00:10:54 All of these kinds of things, which are all wonderful arts and skills and sciences coming from the Indian ancient Indian and Tibetan cultures that we are trying to be a doorway to share. I think happiness is the natural state of life. I think that in the sense that, I mean, I'm not quite sure in a way, because I'm not enlightened myself, but someone who I think was enlightened, namely Shakira, Monique, the Buddha in our history, there are many borders, but that particular one, he, that was his discovery that the nature of life itself is bliss, bliss, energy. Because somehow, you know, we say, I guess we, in our modern culture, we look out at night and the night sky, but if we see little points of light and we think of them as giant Inferno, flaming sons, you know, like the stars, you know, but blazing, suns bigger than our sun and really hot.
Speaker 2 00:12:00 And therefore actually rather painful than we've imagined them. You know, you couldn't possibly be near them. They would bring your twin. And then between that old darkness, and then we have a model Adam in our mind that there's a little nuclear, send some electronic or something and some weird particles that the quantum people talk about mostly at dark space. So we think of sort of the, the final state of reality is a kind of dark nothingness. I think they were taught to do that as being realistic. On the other hand, light shoots was those dark spaces and cosmic rays that they detect Cohen, salt, mines and things. So it's actually full of energies actually that so-called dark space. It's not really. And the Buddhist view is that there is a plane of energy that is beyond it's that dark energy and has that light energy it's transparent energy.
Speaker 2 00:12:54 So it doesn't look like it's there, but it is a kind of invented energy. So he proposed as a physical scientific model that the most, the deepest plane of reality you could say was we called the clear light. The energy was with some, we call it sometimes clear light of the void or clear light of emptiness. And that that energy is infinite. And the reason that it seems to be just stillness is that being infinite from its point of view, it's not a person. So I think there wasn't really a habit point of view, but just where you can we say from its point of view, there's nothing more needs to be done because it's infinite. So, but yet, if there's any, any entity that is made of it, actually, because it is sort of the substance of everything, the invisible or the clear, the transparent substance of everything, anything that's made of it itself feels like it needs energy. It needs something it's it's can infinitely draw from it and it never exhausts it. So in that sense, did the deep nature of the Nirvana reality as he would call it is a reality of complete abundance, not nothingness, but in a way it's sort of almost it's like nothing is because it doesn't do anything by itself.
Speaker 2 00:14:18 But if you lie in it, you, you are that infinity. So you don't need anything. If you, if you are be aware enough to actually be able to lie in it. So that's what, that's what the Buddha's discovered, the inner science of the Buddhas, but his cultures have continued to rediscover that they have repeated that discovery again and again, and the Bruton all different ways of approaching it. On the other hand, they've always said saying it that it's so doesn't necessarily help a person to realize that. And so, but the pathway to realizing it has to do with investigating what you do think is there. And what'd, you can see and examining it. That's why the Buddhist loves science. And you know, they love quantum physicists, particularly who analyze and take apart. Even Adams much, let's take a park like the floor or something. What's the word is made out of, you know, the causation process of thinking and the substance, uh, structure of things.
Speaker 2 00:15:17 And of course our quantum people have discovered that when you take everything apart, you can't pinpoint any particular thing, but you're not lost. You know, you're still, you know, you, you're still somewhere. You have discovered that any particular thing you've tried to seize as that's, that's an indivisible particle, it dissolves under your analysis, but you never find that nothing. In other words, either. So they're sort of in an area of openness, let's call it. You know, they haven't necessarily discovered Nirvana themselves because they're trapped by the dogma of materialism, but, but they're close to it. I think Einstein was pretty cheerful fellow. He never came up with a final theory, which would have predicted he wouldn't, he, you know, if he had known about Einstein, he would have his, his prediction is that there is no final theory because the discovery of Nirvana is the discovery that only by attending to your own experience and fully experiencing your experience, so to speak, you come to that reality because you're made of it, but you can no description of it will be adequate of it.
Speaker 2 00:16:25 So therefore there's no sort of dogmatic final theory about it. And he critiqued the idea of personifying the creation of the universe, that it was done by somebody with an intention. Because if you do that, then when there are difficulties, if people experience difficulties, then they will blame that on that person inevitably. And that, but there is no such percentage, but the reality itself, in a way, we'll, co-create our different realities based in this infinite abundant energy that we live in. That's a view. So in that view that the ultimate nature is bliss, but relatively we can have difficulties. But the lucky thing in relation to recognizing the ultimate nature of bliss is that the suffering that we undergo has to do with our inability to recognize the ultimate nature so we can heal it. In other words, that's the positive thing. And actually the human form in particular is particularly adept at doing that.
Speaker 2 00:17:32 And if we, if we really do what human, if we really find out that the purpose of human life is infinite education, you could say, we have the capability and this amazing supercomputer we carry around in our body, not in our very much in our head, but also in all the body up and down the spine and every nerve. Um, we will discover that blissful reality, they predict, you know, and I think many even others who didn't have that full, had that in the form of a full scientific theory, but they had it as a religious belief and became and went into what's called the mystical aspect of it. They also discovered that because it's the reality. It isn't like there's a particular theory that does it. So, so, so that's why I would say it's a little bit complicated answer. I'm sorry, but in other words, you don't want to say, well, we don't want to blame Debo for not experiencing blaze.
Speaker 2 00:18:29 You just want to say it has to do with the failure to fully understand your experience. And that leaves open the door, that they can come to understand their experience. You know, sometimes everyone has had an experience where they were so thrilled about something like maybe they were in a roller coaster where they, they went to a fear thing, but then they got all excited because they felt transported. They kind of rapture of being pushed around in the thing. And then maybe they bang their elbow or something while they were rocking around in the chair. And then when they got there, they had like a bump on the elbow and felt a little soreness, but they completely ignored the bump when they were all excited because you couldn't, because you're going to have an overwhelming, joyful feeling and ignore something a little bit irritating during that time.
Speaker 2 00:19:19 So the idea is the more you learn to focus on that positive one, you can then ignore the negative one. My feeling about the COVID is it is mother nature, whether it's in the form of some sort of bat molecule or something from a bat or whatever it is. But basically it's mother nature trying to call the attention of the elite of all the cultures in our society, not just American, Chinese, American, whatever, all the modern culture and the politicians and the scientists and people that we are not living in a positive, healthy way in relation to our environment. And it's basically teaching us that all our vaunted technologies and our nuclear weapons and our, at our industrial productions and our entertainments and all of them are too stressful to ourselves and the world and the world that supports us because we are our environment and our environment is us.
Speaker 2 00:20:22 So we're all interlock tenant with all the animals. And they're all part of us too. And we've been too harsh against them to plant also, and this is warning us that it will be much, much worse if we continue in this vein. So I am actually, I'm very sorry, people to die. I'm sorry. People have lost jobs. Talk about spa. Minnie's paws have closed. And we went bankrupt. And I don't know how many hundreds of every yoga centers are kind of small and there's many of them have closed around the world. They can't make the rent that people can't assemble. So that's been very, very hard and we've been put back on to kind of retreat. But on the other hand, we have learned our vulnerability and we have learned, we have had to find silver linings in things, and we have managed to get now a new movement in the society, which has produced a new government that is now putting its effort into making our lifestyle more livable and more sustainable.
Speaker 2 00:21:22 And there is a, there are jerking forces, of course, but those were the same forces that were ruling outs in chairing us in the absolutely wrong and destructive direction. So naturally they're resisting, they're being, they're being stubborn and resisting, moving back in a positive direction. And we have to actually recognize that and we have to adapt to that. And we have to, we have to be helped them out of their stupid posture, which we will because eventually, although they will feel they're being pushed at first, when they see things, when they feel better themselves, they will, then they will actually change their mind. We think we're coming out of it now and we get ready to come out of it, but we adapt and everyone should adapt. That's what we should do now. So that those are all silver lining. So dear friend of mine and former student, the wonderful director nominee cademy award MultiCare, multicam time, David Russell, he did a wonderful movie, but really even just the title I love is called the silver linings playbook.
Speaker 2 00:22:29 I don't take any credit for it, but accepted himself as the positive person later, then that's what we should have as a silver linings playbook to deal with all these difficult things. You know, and people, when they're dying, people should be looking for the silver line and realize that they should read up on near death experience literature and realize that once people get past the body, they go through this tunnel of light and they meet Jesus with him. He bought out or they meet whoever they're expecting to meet and reality sends them help and they have great times. And unless they're so paranoid that they automatically don't even recognize that any friendly person and then they, they meet, but they fear, which is a sort of violent nightmarish type of thing. And that, that could happen too, if they've lived that way, that way. And they shouldn't, they should start whether they're alive to live more openly and happily.
Speaker 2 00:23:23 I think that the reason we have had these wars and horrible, nasty things, and we have them still is that the most people are pretty kind and nice. Actually I was once asked when I wrote my inner revolution book, one of my, my first trade book, like, or non-academic book for the general audience as I book toured that, cause you did that in those days, a mere 30 years ago, people said, well, cause I had a theory. There are what I call cool heroism of heroes, sheroes heroes, and sheroes, where people are, can be forceful without violence. And they can't be in a gentle way, but they can still stand up for what it is that they are, what they think should be should happen. But without any violence and like martial arts almost, let's say of ma making the good emerge. And they said, well, where are all these cool heroes?
Speaker 2 00:24:23 You know? And they were thinking of where they all Exondys in the Dalai Lama and the Pope Francis is, and whoever it is. And I sort of went in that direction, where are the sort of outstanding persons, you know, as opposed to the change is constant, it hits orders and then whatever. And that's where I was thinking that way. And then the sudden, but then likely I would say, and I realize, I thought of my own family where I grew up and I realized that the woman in the family is the cool hero and the males are, the brothers are about to beat each other up. And son and father will fight and uncles. And you know, the males will all get in brawls that they'll drink even end up in a Christmas party or a new year's party or a Passover party or Thanksgiving dinner.
Speaker 2 00:25:07 And they'll end up in a big argument and quarrel and practically come to blows. And the people who go in the middle between them and say, no, no, you didn't mean that uncle Joe, don't say that to your nephew. And your note, take it back. Don't say talk like that. You don't really mean it. You know, you're going to be sorry later, and then sometimes get hit in the middle in between or the women. So then I had a perfect answer for that person. I said the coolest heroes, but I didn't have the word Shiro at that time heroin, which has the other pleasant connotation of addictive drug. So is sheroes. I think it's wonderful if you get that in a dictionary. So the cool sheroes are the women and that's half of humanity and they are basically more gentle because they have the experience of another being, being in their own body.
Speaker 2 00:25:50 Or if they don't physically have it in a particular life, they, they know about it anyway, biologically and they therefore, they are less UN unrealistic about correctness between people and beings and therefore they, they don't, they're against war as a whole. There are so many works of literature to worry. Why are you taking my son off to be killed in a war with the Germans or the French or the Italians is Napoleon or whoever you are, you know, it's, you know, the women lamenting this nonsense, you know, by the men bashing each other over their head. So I think humanity has been like that, but they're because they're more gentle. And then a small few nasty ones can manipulate them into huge mechanisms of destruction. And for example, the communist dictatorships, they took over the more gentle societies, I think like the Russian, the pre Russian, but of course they had their czar and there were silly things, but even count Tolstoy road, war in peace.
Speaker 2 00:26:54 And as all days, you went around to be a Saint gave away all his things and became a vegetarian. And the Russians, you know, they were, they were really strong Christians and they're really trying to be Christ-like, you know, and they're Russian thing. So, so they failed for the marks is saying that we should all share everything. And the one, they didn't recognize the one stupid thing of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And then they put the KGB S role group, clique of people who of course were got to that position, the Bolsheviks by being more violent than the other people. So they ended up being controlled by a very, very island, small clique into becoming an old military. That's our culture, but they're really the more gentle people. The, we Americans are rougher, you know, cause of our, all the violent people left Europe, the Viking type of people.
Speaker 2 00:27:44 And they went over and genocided the native people and brought a bunch of blacks and enslaved them. So we were more rough, so we didn't fall for that, but we bought weed now. And then we do fall for it, stupid type of imperialist dictatorship type of president on off, we do. And we are slave owners, you know, in the old days. And we never really escape from older slave owners. They've been a faction, a minority faction, but it was affection in our, in our, as we've been waking up to, I have a better society. I think of the wellness industry as helping humans in societies, where it can flourish, where it's allowed to flourish, rediscover their own gentleness and their own blissfulness and their own happiness. And then trying to develop a way of living outside of the wellness institutions in a way where they bring that to the larger society.
Speaker 2 00:28:36 So it's a very critical and crucial industry. It seems to me, it's part of the healing on one side, as part of the healing industry and the downside is part of the educational industry. And those industries are the two most important industries in the planet. Healing educate him. The greatness of it is, is that people are treated as a whole being and their spiritual, mental and ethical levels have to do with their health and have to do with their life force. And if they are living unethically and then they just go and get a massage, they're not, that's not going to undo the harm they're doing to themselves by living in a stressful way with the world. Because when you're unethical, you're harming the people who have to fund them off and write them down. And then you can't have fruit. You don't really have friends and you cause you're in a state of conflict with everybody.
Speaker 2 00:29:29 And so therefore you will be unhealthy inevitably, and you could have a little reprieve and even that maybe we'll get through, do you and your dense conflict oriented competitive mode, that, that there is a better way of living and that health industry is there to help you learn it. But there's something to be learned there as well as a, to be enjoyed in other words. So when we think of it only as a spa of giving you physical pleasure, then that's not a complete spa. There is an educational level to the spot. That's why we are, we are, we are raising capital to build an educational kitchen where you can learn to eat better and cook better and understand the whole process of food, eating food, and living, which then to carry it back out to a living, you know, and we want all the greatest cooks in the world to come and teach there.
Speaker 2 00:30:20 And one of the greatest is going to help us design that moment, get the money. And I refuse to put some dinky little thing and say, we did it. One of the things that we do here that we're doing in our educational teachings is we are connecting the sort of meditative tradition of the, sort of the Buddhist tradition, being a grand literate, you know, urbanized society product with the literal huge literature and so on, and very, very literate. And with accumulative literature of science, as well as story and so on, it has the way that it understands reality. The non-literate societies, the oral societies, it does very much connect to them. And in a way, the symbolic archetype of the Buddha's life, you know, he was born, his mother was leaning against the tree when he was born by sort of miracles has Arion without any, without incision, just melting through the skin like Filipinos psychic surgery.
Speaker 2 00:31:29 And he was, he was enlightened sitting under a tree and he passed away sitting between two trees. And the shaman's symbol is always connected to trees in cultures that are oral cultures because the tree has its roots in the earth and its branches in the sky. And so it's a connection of heaven and earth, a tree, and this and the tree is also like the human nervous system, the central channel, the spine, you know, the brain and so forth and the root and the root life chakras and so on. And so, and then, uh, the interconnectedness of all life was what was Buddha's basic discover in his teaching and that that interconnectedness revealed the goodness of life and the abundance of life and the livability of life, if you will. So sustainability sustainability really means livability in a way really sustainability is maybe not the right word, but livability is the right word.
Speaker 2 00:32:30 And so therefore naturally the rediscovery of shamonic wisdom from the oral cultures, even though they were intermediate technology cultures, we're not quote, you know, hi metallic technology cultures, cause they were more respective of earth and ores and metals and they didn't, they didn't dredge them up and then create some huge artificial things as much. So shamanic journeying can be very valuable. For example, I believe people who do former life regression therapy, which is very important for people to then realize that did this life, what they do will have consequences in future lives in order to really concretely feel that so that they will restrain themselves in this life in order to not create bad effects in future life, just because they think they can get away with it in this life, they won't do it cause they won't in the future. Get away with it.
Speaker 2 00:33:20 In other words, have different level of internalizing and ethical way of relating to, and a gentle way of relating to reality. So is it your journey like right visualization and lecture MADEC journey into thinking of themselves as being different and then coming out of their imagination will be memories from previous lives often. And you know, there's a common thing in the past life regression where you go and you walk down a path and then you look down and see what sort of shoes you were wearing. And then you cross a bridge and what sort of place to come to. And then people will start remembering, oh, now I'm in Sri Lanka or something. You know, people, people have that experience sort of light hypnosis level where then deep, deeper memories from the subtle mind can be retrieved. Let me give you an example.
Speaker 2 00:34:10 I'm going to take off my shoes and I'm going to sit cross legged in this chair and put my hands like that. It's a thumb tip, stitching tip touching, and the palms slapped against them. And then straight keep my back, have the, my, my butt a little higher than my knees. So that I'm little tips forward. That's important. And then back has kind of straight chin is a little taught, although talking I'll forget about them. And I was sort of looking to not cross out at the tip of the nose, but sort of at a point in front of it with them, half lidded is ideal, but you could close or if you weren't sleepy or you could, there are some traditions where you just keep them open, but the half open is considered the best and then just breathe.
Speaker 2 00:35:10 And you might try this just for a minute. I know I'm supposed to be giving a lecture and I have been talking, but just try to only rejoice and enjoy breathing and just inhale and exhale. And the one thing I love, especially in this climate sensitive age as Richard, we should righteously be climate sensitive realized as you draw in the oxygen, you are receiving the generosity of the plant kingdom because a lot of our oxygen comes from the leaves and the trees and the grasses and the flowers and the plants. And then when you exhale, you realize your carbon is going to them and it is producing the greenness in the leaf and it is producing the root and stem of the bushes and trees. So your breathing is an act of interaction with nature and especially with the plant kingdom. And so as you enjoy the breath and you know, if you think, well, I just breathe in or I don't enjoy it. Well, the point is you can, it's something you can immediately enjoy here. You don't have to go down and buy something at a restaurant. You don't have to go and find that water fountain, you just breathe. And it's so accessible to you that you do it without even thinking about it or appreciating it.
Speaker 2 00:36:50 And you're not testing your concentration right away. You're simply enjoying that you're breathing. And when you turn your attention to do that at first, maybe you will take a little bit slower and deeper breaths, although you you're going to also do it, trying not to intervene with your breathing and letting it just go as it normally does, but it's hard too, because when you focus on it, you're automatically, you tend to draw deeper breaths. And as you enjoy, you think about how your chest expands, you know, your two lungs, wonderful kind friendly lungs that you have. They are getting this charge of oxygen. And those special little alveoli selves are transmitting that oxygen through verifying membrane into the bloodstream and energizing your heart pump that circulates it around.
Speaker 2 00:38:10 And so you breathe more deeply when you focus on the breathing because you're getting something from it and you're getting the gift of the plant kingdom and you're feeling grateful to the plants. And the next time you walk outside, you might look a little bit differently at the bushes or at the leaves that's in spring time here in the Catskills, beautiful mountain valley we're in and the grass is beginning to be a bit green. And if I spend a few minutes enjoying breathing and feeling appreciative, grateful to the plant kingdom, I might look more attentively at grass is beginning to be green and feel grateful to it. Sure. We're looking at a screen now, listening to this, don't bother to do that. Just enjoy breathing and appreciate breathing. I appreciate your knowledge of your interwoven with the plant kingdom and all of its gifts to you.
Speaker 2 00:39:29 And then as you feel that gratitude, you will feel like an inner smile and then you will feel welling up from within your self, but from the heart center, from the, you know, the abdomen where the seams it expands, when you inhale deeply as if you were sending the air, even to other places beyond the lungs, squishy and direct, you are though the bloodstream helped you with and the problem, wonderful heart pump on the liver. It was a great healer called Anthony William, who I love a great deal of the medium. And who says that we must always think our other organs, especially the liver and be appreciative of them because they all feel a little jealous. Cause we fuss about our heart a lot.
Speaker 2 00:40:32 If it was so hot and so grateful to heart for BP, because of course we have to have our politics, right? But the other organs do a tremendously vital and useful and wonderful things to us. So we should make a point of thanking them and, and sending them our appreciativeness and our gratefulness. Thank you, liver. Liver does use and kidneys or the detox work they have to do. And the kidney has the kidneys connect to the adrenal glands that are dealing with all the stress that unnecessarily impose upon ourselves. So here's, here's our message to you from men, Ladera spa and men, spousal retreat is you have your own body as a spa. You, you stress out offering your spa offerings to clients to get them John's stress. If you're too stressed doing it, you won't do it. Well, you should be using your own body as your own unstressing machine.
Speaker 2 00:41:51 And the way of doing that is turn your mind to see the silver lining of your body. I have a pain in my knee. I have an old pain in my shoulder. I'm an elderly person. I don't show happy. I can grieve. And it feels so good. And to joy in that oxygen, <inaudible> the Japanese have a wonderful thing. We also do here. Although Tibet culture is our mainstream, but we love all the Asian cultures and Western Ms. <inaudible> the teach, the beauty of nature and the Japanese. We adapt from the Japanese or wonderful thing called forest bathing. And there's a wonderful guy in Japan who was an academic total failure until he met a mentor teacher who told him since he loved being in the woods, he should make a study out of it and get a PhD in the biochemistry of being in nature. And he started as a completely Maverick thing and he got that PhD and some sort of program and one of the Japanese universities and then the Japanese government eventually made him a national treasure and gave him huge grants because he found out that serotonin uptake and dip dopamine and all kinds of things, they were neuroscientifically arising.
Speaker 2 00:43:15 You just from being in a forest in a natural city or standing nearby a waterfall, taking a short walk in the woods, or like up a mountain or something, not just heavy exercise necessarily, but it's just being there or sitting there. And it affects our biology and it really positive way.
Speaker 2 00:43:36 So the messages just help people to find contentment in their breathing. And the reality of why it is they do breathe in Canterbury and who gives them dogs. Okay. And then discover that they have a capacity in themselves and relaxing and looking and minding their own inner well of contentment in the simplest, just being, don't have to call it, give and fence it meditating, just grit, bathing in air and breathing and feeling grateful about it, lowering stress and replacing it with bliss. <inaudible> so move some of your, when you do that might make you feel sleepy and that's good own feels something wrong with you because it means that as you relax away from stress and move toward bliss and your inner bliss, you don't require any external thing for it. And you move in towards your inner bliss and sort of deep tiredness from your constant exposure to stress. And our very, very highly competitive society might be just telling on you. And it's telling you, you're finding your own body's request to you to sleep, to rest. <inaudible>
Speaker 2 00:45:32 two, because sleeping is a wonderful thing where you temporarily give up your boundary. When you let go of your consciousness of your surroundings and yourself, and let yourself slide into unconsciousness, you're also giving up your defense perimeter, so to speak. I mean, you feel safe doing it because you have the door closed and you haven't hit heater on and you have the windows closed. They're open depending on the season. And you have screens inside of her. You know, when you have a nice blanket and pillow and blah, blah, blah. So you create a defense perimeter, but within that, you then release your head's parameter. And then that's such tremendous relief because we're overstressed and over scared or over frightened by our waiver taught to perceive our environment and construct our experience of our environment. So sleep is a big, huge relief. And what it does is by when we come open like that, the positive energy in the universe just seeps into ourself and renews their energy, which is a kind of from which we can Nick and we can infer the basic and evelence of reality, which is a really important thing to become aware of.
Speaker 2 00:47:09 So, uh, thank you, uh, organic spa devotees for inviting me to speak with you and meditate with you and ask you and give you a gift of some kind of meditating and enjoying your breathing. I hope you go out of this and join your breathing more, really more than necessarily remembering any particular thing. I'd say, although I hope you also could remember to demand your right birthright as a human being, to be happy. That's really key. And also the most important takeaway of all is to which the breeding is just a doorway to is too big, be trusting of reality. You know, the great Erik Erikson who was a wonderful psychologist and psychiatrist in the past and a great writer. He wrote that one of the seven things that make a mature adult and the stages of childhood coming from the babies relating to the mother's breast, actually in a positive way or some version of it was to develop a sense of basic trust in life.
Speaker 2 00:48:08 And without that, it's very difficult to have a happy life. That's a very, very key thing. So it's not even a religious thing or any big, huge discovery. And everybody knows that. So there has to be, yes, you will be cautious still about some being run over by a truck and eating a bad poisonous food, or some sort of antidotes doing something that's bad for you or some addictive thing. They will harm you. But to have a deep seated sense of that, the deeper level you can trust reality itself is absolutely critical to it. De-stressing your life. And that is your business is helping people to distress. And I think it is the greatest business on the planet actually. And so we're very happy to participate with you here at Mandela, Tibet houses, men LA Dayla spa, which is a little bit offering an invitation by the Dalai Lama, because this is a dilemmas cultural institution to two beings to try to learn, to enjoy themselves a bit more, be a bit happier and a bit more kind. And that's really what, what he hopes for hopes for humanity feels is possible for us. In fact,
Speaker 1 00:49:38 The Bob Thurman podcast is brought to the generous support of the Tibet house, us Menlo membership, community, and listeners like you, and it's distributed. You're a creative commons, new derivatives license, please feel free to share like, and post on your favorite social media platform. And thanks for tuning in.
