Thank you very much. OK, well, do come in. Bring some chairs in. Yes. OK, so we have three days. And in general, what I'd like to do is give you a flavor of how I work with Buddhist psychology. I'm from England, as you gather, and I work in an organization called Suriki Trust. And the main thing that I do there is to teach Buddhist psychology and train people as therapists working using a Buddhist approach. So for these three talks, what I would like to do in part is to give you some flavor of how Buddhism can be... not just something that we do sitting on a cushion, but also something that is done interpersonally in relationship and how I understand Buddhism as being something that transforms people's lives in many different ways.

[01:15]

But I would also like to do it, I thought that it would be quite interesting to do this by looking at a particular text this time. And what better text than the Satipatthana? Can I just know, how many people here know the Satipatthana? If I know. Or have read, know what it is. Okay, so some of you know it, some of you don't. How many people have heard of mindfulness? Yeah, a lot more. Okay, well, the Satipatthana is the text, or one of the texts, that deals with the process of mindfulness. So the reason why I would like to look at the Satipatthana is because it is, well, often the title is translated as the foundations of mindfulness. Now, there is some debate about the translation of the title, and that is not a particularly good translation. The fact that this text refers to the development of mindfulness and how one can work with mindfulness, I think is very important.

[02:23]

And I think that there is a lot in the Satipatthana that we don't find in the modern mindfulness movement. So if you're learning mindfulness in a mindfulness class, then it will be drawn from the teachings that you find in the Satipatthana, but... I think there is a lot more if you can go into the text and you can look at what it's about. And that's what I want to talk about over these three days. I thought just by way of introduction, I would just read the definition of mindfulness that comes from the mindfulness movement, particularly Jon Kabat-Zinn, who you've probably heard of. So... Mindfulness in that sense is defined as the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to the unfolding experience moment by moment. Okay, I'll read this again.

[03:25]

The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally to the unfolding experience moment by moment. So this is the definition of mindfulness as it is taught in the West. And the Western mindfulness movement has got very big. It's got very big over here. It's got very big over in England. And as somebody teaching and training people, as therapists, we can't ignore the mindfulness movement because everybody's out there doing it. And it's a very important underpinning to the process. And you can see how it's very much about... bringing the kinds of techniques, the kinds of awareness that we use in meditation, that just awareness in the present moment into everything that we do. So in the Buddhist sense, teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh have worked in a lot of depth with mindfulness.

[04:26]

In the secular mindfulness movement, mindfulness has become a way to achieve relaxation, de-stress. to work with pain, to work with concentration, and so on. So you have mindfulness for pain relief, you have mindfulness for, well, de-stressing, but you also have mindfulness for getting focused. So people are going out into business and teaching mindfulness. We've even got a mindfulness group happening in the Houses of Parliament in England. So, you know, it's becoming very widespread. So I'd like to look at the Satipatthana, and I'd like to start off just by reading you a little bit of the early part of the Satipatthana. And you might like to just close your eyes while I read this, because in a way it's an instruction for meditation. And how, monks, does the practitioner...

[05:35]

In regard to the body, abide contemplating the body. Here gone to the forest or to the root of a tree or to an empty hut, he sits down. Having folded his legs crosswise, set his body erect and established mindfulness in front of him. Mindful, he breathes in. Mindful, he breathes out. Breathing in long, he knows I am breathing in long. Breathing out long, he knows I am breathing out long. Breathing in short, he knows I breathe in short. Breathing out short, he knows I breathe out short. He trains thus. I shall breathe in, experiencing the whole body. He trains thus.

[06:36]

I shall breathe out, experiencing the whole body. He trains thus. I shall breathe in, calming the bodily formation. He trains thus. I shall breathe out, calming the bodily formation. Just as a skilled turner or his apprentice, when making a long turn knows, I make a long turn. Or when making a short turn knows, I make a short turn. So too, breathing in long, he knows I breathe in long. Okay. So this is instruction in very detailed observation of the breaths. And I think this image of the turner, the wood turner, shaving the wood, making a long turn with his plane as he does so.

[07:49]

You know, I think this is a very nice image for working with the breath, because it's like when you breathe, you feel the breath go all the way, turns round, comes all the way back again, and it's like that. attention to detail, this is the foundation of mindfulness, this attention to detail, this observing, this keeping the calm mind, keeping presence, keeping awareness with it, and staying with what arises moment by moment by moment, non-selectively, non-judgmentally, to go back to Kabat-Zinn. So, so far... You know, this is very much a description of what is being talked about. It's the bringing attention on purpose to the present moment, not judging, just following, being with, staying with. Okay.

[08:53]

But the Satipatthana is quite a long sutta. There's a lot more of it. And that's what I'd like to go on to. I would like, incidentally, to recommend this book. If you want to go into this text in detail, this book is excellent. Anyone seen it? Anelayo. Yeah. It's in the library. Good. Well, it's very thorough. So, you know, you'll find Anelayo goes into each of the terms in the text. in a lot of detail. I'm not going to do that today. Yeah. It's called Satipatthana, the direct path to realization. And I like it. Okay. What I'd like to do is I've got a handout here and I'd like to pass it around. I don't know. I think I've probably more or less got enough.

[09:58]

I've done 30. So can I give these to you to pass it around? Okay. We're getting around the back there now. Okay, I wanted to give you this. Can everybody see a copy? Anybody not see a copy? No. Okay, good. You will see on the... On this side, there is a diagram. And this is basically the structure of the text. And I read you the first section on the body, which is the section on breathing. This is where people often start with mindfulness, and often it's where they also stop. But, in fact, the... The text goes on and it goes through a number of stages.

[11:01]

The first thing to notice about it is that the text is in four parts. The first part relates to mindfulness of the body. The second part to mindfulness of Vedana. Vedana is often translated as feeling. I like to translate it as reaction. Okay. I can talk about that some more in a minute. The third section is a section on citta. This is the mind. And the fourth section is a section on dhammas. You'll notice these are spelt in Pali rather than Sanskrit because it is a Pali text which incidentally occurs both in the and in the Digni Kaya. It's a text and I think we get some indication of how important this is in terms of Buddhist text because it occurs twice in the suttas.

[12:09]

It's the only text I think that does. So basically the sutta starts off with a definition and an introduction and this basically tells us that mindfulness is the direct path to enlightenment. It's the most important practice in terms of achieving enlightenment. The text then goes on and it talks about, first of all, bringing mindfulness to the body. Then it talks about being aware of different postures. And in the section on postures, we look at walking, we look at standing, we look at sitting, we look at lying down. So when a monk is walking, he knows I'm walking. When he's standing, he knows I'm standing. When he's sitting, he knows he's sitting. When he's lying down, he knows he's lying down, and so on.

[13:14]

So it's like we started off just by sitting, bringing our awareness to sitting in the present state with the breath. And then we move into So we're taking mindfulness already from the sitting in the meditation hall, wherever you are, into movement into life. So it's, in a way, the mindfulness is being moved from just an awareness in the present moment to a continuous awareness. We're starting to get a progression from that simple moment of the breath into... a moment of movement. And I think it's very interesting here that we start off with the body because, as I said, I work with psychotherapy, psychology, and I think there's a very strong parallel here because therapeutic work, we often start with an awareness of the body's sense.

[14:15]

You know, there's research which has been done by particularly a method called focusing developed by somebody called Eugene Gendlin, focuses particularly on the idea that the client in therapy who is in touch with the body experience does much better than the person who is not in touch with the body experience. And this particular method, what they do is they teach the person to be aware of the felt sense and to work with the felt sense therapeutically. And I think in the same way, with mindfulness, we start off with that awareness of the breathing. We start off coming into the core of the body, And then we take that awareness from the core of the body into starting to move, starting to go into action in daily life. And then we go on from that into activities in which the monk is doing things. So he acts with...

[15:19]

He acts with knowing. When he's wearing his robe, when he's carrying his bowl, when he's eating, drinking, consuming food, tasting, he acts with clear knowing. When defecating, urinating, he acts clearly with knowing. When walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking, keeping silent, he acts with clear knowing. So again, we have a movement from the simple just walking, standing, sitting. We've developed that awareness and we start going into more complex actions. And so it's like we're building one on the other on the other. We're gradually going into more awareness. And then the next part of the Sutta goes into looking at the body in parts. So you start to look at the... Sorry, I'm just losing it. He becomes aware of, from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, enclosed by skin, he's aware of head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, diaphragm, spleen, and so on and so forth.

[16:36]

There's a whole list of all the body parts. And so he works from that... In a way, what we're seeing here is we're starting to bring in some knowledge. You know, we've worked from the direct experience of the breath through action, through movement and complex actions and doing things into an inner experience of the body which relies on some knowledge of the body, some kind of experiencing of what's inside the body. And... So we're moving from a sort of direct experience into a slightly more kind of distanced experience, but something that can still be observed. You know, we can observe the effects of the stomach. We can observe the effects of the kidneys and so on, but we have to also have some knowledge of how the body is constructed in order to know those things. So we're again kind of moving into slight remove.

[17:37]

And then we come into... The next stage is the elements meditation. This is a very classic meditation. And interestingly, this is one that is said to have been done by the nuns in the early Buddhist sangha, particularly, in which one is looking at the experience of all of the... The elements in the body. So starting off with the earth element, which is like the solidity in the body and the solidity outside of the body. So experiencing in the world, in the body and in the world. Then going on through the other elements, the water element, the fire element, the air element and the element of emptiness. And... You know, again, with this progression, we're working through from something that is very immediate to something that is more universal.

[18:41]

And finally, we end up with the exploration of the corpse in decay. And this is a channel ground meditation, which is one of the other kind of very well-known meditations that was done particularly by the monks in the early Songha. So you've got, actually contained with this first section of the body, you've got... All the major contemplations that are used in meditation are all brought into this first part of the Satipatthana and are all about the body sense. But I think what you can see in it is that there's actually a progression here. That what we start with is that immediate experience, but we go into a much broader kind of experience and what it is to be human, what it is to be alive, what it is to be part of the process of... birth and decay. And I think that one of the things that you find in this text is that actually, I think although the mindfulness can be experienced very much as a kind of immediate experience in the present moment, it's also something that's built on at all sorts of levels in this text in a kind of sequential way.

[19:57]

what you find is that mindfulness is actually presented in this text as a kind of progression and as a kind of, in a way, a spiritual path that you follow. You start off with one thing, you move on to the next thing, you move on to the next thing, you move on to the next thing. And so the text on the body, it takes us from this kind of immediate experiencing of the breath. We just sit here, we're aware of the breath, through all of these... different stages until we get to this point where we're sitting here contemplating our own mortality and the way that this body that is breathing at this moment actually is also the same body as will go through these processes of decay that we see in the eternal grounds. And this movement between the two, it's like we actually see this replicated through the whole text.

[20:58]

So again, the first section on the body goes through this sequencing, but we also get a similar sequencing going through the four stages in the text. So we start off with the body. And if we start to think about this in terms of what happens psychologically, you know, I sit and I'm aware of some kind of experiencing in my body, what do I notice? Well, probably I actually notice the reactions that happen in my body. So as soon as I start to become aware of my sitting with my breath, what do I notice? I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, oh, I wish that fly would stop buzzing around, or, oh, I'm getting too hot here, or why is that person rustling over there? Or, oh, this is rather nice, I'm enjoying sitting here on this nice sunny afternoon.

[22:01]

Or whatever it is. But we start to get these, as soon as we pay attention to our body, we start to recognize that there is pleasant or unpleasant reaction going on in our bodies. And so the body stage takes us into the Vedana stage. As we start to become more focused on the body experience, we naturally go into Vedana. We start to notice the pleasant, the unpleasant, or the neutral reactions and feelings in the body. And so again, we're working with a kind of sequence of awareness here. We're working with the body moving into and experiencing of a reaction to... And on the basis of that, we start to notice, if we stay with that observation, we start to notice the mind states arising. We start to realize that the mind is having thoughts, that it's having reactions, that it's getting caught up in these states that are listed here, the lustful, the angry, the deluded, the distracted states.

[23:08]

Or maybe the positive mind states the great, the unsurpassable, the concentrated, the liberated. But quite often it's the first four that I experience, certainly. But we're basically, again, being led through a sequence here. We're being shown how we start off with the body sense. Then we go into the experience of pleasant, unpleasant, and so on. And then that takes us into the... different emotional states that are based on this. And we then end up looking at the fourth section. And the fourth section is very interesting because actually when we look at this fourth section, we see that it contains a number of the key teachings of Buddhism. We've got the hindrances, we've got the aggregates the skanders we've got the senses we've got the factors of awakening and we've got the four noble truths and i'm going to talk some more about these uh on the other days but basically that what we are seeing here is that you start off with the awareness of the breathing you start to observe that the there are reactions there are uh responses to that

[24:31]

that out of those mind states arise, reactions arise, and that by being aware of those, we can come to an understanding of these various teachings that are core to Buddhist understanding. And so one way of looking at the Satipatthana, and I mean, if you come to Anilayo's interpretation, then he says, he will actually say that there are a number of different ways of taking it. But one of the ways that you can look at this is to see the whole sutta as being a sequential text in which one is led from one realization to the next, to the next, to the next. And you're taken from that basic present moment awareness into a series of stages. And as I said, I think this actually goes through... it goes through the whole sutta in a number of different levels.

[25:32]

You get this kind of sequential path model happening on different levels. And I wanted to particularly look here at the refrain, which I've given you on this handout, because this part actually comes through the text again and again and again, and I think it's very interesting to look at it in a bit of detail, because it's repeated actually after each of the sections that you see when you look at the diagram on this side, after each of these sections, this refrain is repeated in one way or another. I mean, obviously, it doesn't refer to the body in each of them, but it refers to the body or reaction or whatever it is. Okay, so it says, and following on from the part that I read earlier on the breathing, In this way, the monk remains focused internally on the body in and of itself or externally on the body in or of itself, or both internally and externally on the body in and of itself.

[26:38]

Or he remains focused on the phenomenon of origination with regard to the body, on the phenomenon of passing away with regard to the body, or on the phenomenon of origination and passing away with regard to the body. Or his mindfulness that there is a body is maintained to the extent of knowledge and remembrance. And he remains independent, unsustained by, not clinging to, anything in the world. This is how a monk remains focused on the body in and of itself. Okay, so... I think that this... This repeating refrain that we see going right through the text is also very interesting to look at because in a way in microcosm it contains a number of the points that I've already been referring to. So it starts off by talking about the focus being on the body internally and externally.

[27:50]

I think what we're seeing here is that there is an observation on one's own experience. You know, what do I feel in my own body? And there is also, externally, what do I observe in the bodies of others? Now, I think this is actually a really important aspect of the text because it's like we... we tend to make ourselves into a special case. You know, the basic premise of Buddhist psychology is that human beings create a sense of identity which gives them a sense of I am me and I'm different from everybody else and I'm special in some way. And I think what's being suggested here is that by doing the mindfulness practice, what one is doing is one breaking down that self-other divide. And one's actually creating a situation in which one is seeing both one's own personal experience and what one observes in others in a more equalized way.

[29:02]

So I think this is basically a teaching of non-self. I think what this is training is, this is training in, this is my experience, this is your experience, and actually we both have bodies, we both breathe, we both move, we both breathe. So I think what's being referred to here is a repetition again and again through the whole text of I need to observe everything that is going on here in another focused way. I see it all as other. Okay. The next little couplet is... talks about the phenomenon of origination with regard to the body and the phenomenon of passing away with regard to the body. And I think this is interesting because this is being said with regard to the breath.

[30:03]

So it's like in the breath we have this awareness of the arising of the breath and we have the awareness of the passing away of the breath. In many ways this is repeated when you've got the elements meditation and you've got the corpse meditation which come in this section on the body. So you're noticing these two core teachings of Buddhism here in this section. So here we have dependent origination. The breath comes into being dependent on conditions. The body comes into being dependent on elements. You know, things are composed of non-self elements everything comes into being dependent on conditions and in this repeating refrain we have that that core truth there just in this this short phrase that is then put much more fully in the meditation on the elements later on but even in just being aware of the breath we're aware that this breath is originated

[31:19]

Even this breath is not something that exists of itself. It's something that comes into being dependent on conditions. And we're aware that this breath is also impermanent. The breath fades away. The breath comes to an end. The body comes to an end. The body decomposes. All things are subject to conditions. All things decompose. And this... This core truth of dependent origination and of impermanence. You know, again, this is the roots of Buddhism found within this sutta experientially. You know, it's like from the beginning of this text, we start off with something that is manageable, something that is small in terms of just observing a breath. And yet it takes us into something that is huge. And out of this realization, we then find that we have this description that mindfulness, that there is a body, is maintained to the knowledge and remembrance.

[32:34]

So when we have achieved this awareness of the impermanence and the origination of the breath or the body or whatever it is that we are observing, At that point, we're able to hold a clean observation of what's going on. You know, this is what's being talked about here, that awareness of the body at this point is about simply being aware to the extent that it exists. It's not building all sorts of stories and attachments around that awareness. It's simply being aware of it in a clean way, holding it. And I think the... The remembrance is interesting here. I mean, it's not altogether clear what's implied by the remembrance, but often what's meant by remembrance in Buddhist texts is, in a way, an element of faith. You know, remembrance is like a remembrance of the particularity of the thing that we are observing.

[33:45]

And it can... it can have a sort of connotation of remembrance of Buddha. So it's like in observing the body, we have a clean experience of observing the body, but we also have an experience through that clean observation of it, of something of that kind of Buddha quality of it. So it's like I think there's a kind of implication of this, of when we can get to that clean attention where we're not building stories around it, where we're simply in that moment of... observation in that moment it's like there is some kind of a breakthrough there is some kind of a remembrance of the enlightened nature of the body okay and in that way the monk remains independent unsustained by or not clinging to anything in the world so when we reach that state at that moment that is the moment of non-attachment

[34:48]

Okay, so I think what we've got here is we've got these kind of four statements which are all basically describing what Buddhism is about in that pure experience of observing the breath or whatever it is that we're doing. It's like what we're being told is that even in that moment of doing a practice that is as simple as watching the breath, in that moment we can actually... reach that depth of understanding. And so I think in the Satipatthana, we're being given like a big scale picture of a process that we can go through of doing a whole series of meditations that build one on the other. But we're also being shown that how in each one of them, we can get to something that will take us actually into the core of the whole thing. So it's like, I think about this as kind of almost like a hologram. It's like in that moment of observation, you can see through that simple experience of the breathing into the whole of the Buddhist teachings.

[36:00]

But you can also, by going through the series of steps that are being outlined, you can actually work your way through the whole thing and it will take you through a whole series of steps and progressions which will, in a way, fill them out in a different way. You know, I think that the whole text gives us again and again these core teachings but built up in different ways. So there are different points of access which are useful for different people. So anyway, I said that I wanted to talk a little bit about this in terms of psychology and psychotherapy because, you see, the... I think that this is presented, obviously, as an experience of meditation and observation. But actually, when one is working with personal issues, then I think that very similar principles are still very much the case.

[37:04]

I mean, of course, you can work with mindfulness as a way of bringing space and calm into your life, and that is going to be therapeutic. But I think also that what it gives you is a sense that Actually, by looking at the detail of experience, we see we have a window into the whole of how we are. And you find this often with people. You see, people often think that when they come to see a therapist that they need to talk about the worst things in their life. They need to tell their whole life story and so on and so forth. But actually, I think it can be just as useful to work with people with the details of everyday things. And so if somebody comes to see me and we're talking about their life, then often it's just as productive to talk about what's happened over the past week as it is to talk about childhood experience. And this is because largely we tend to run along patterns of behavior and patterns of thinking, and those patterns play out in big scale and they play out in small scale.

[38:11]

And working with something that's in the immediate and the small scales and sometimes be actually more helpful than looking at something that's happened 50 years ago in childhood that's huge which is not so that you don't go into that and you don't at some stage look at that but often actually for the sort of day-to-day work of therapy to look at and how are you dealing with current relationships you know what happens when you go to work How do you relate to the other people in your office? Or how are you relating to your children or your parents and so on? These kinds of things are likely to be playing out those same patterns as you're playing out in terms of earlier experiences. And so I think, again, you've got this idea that you can work with something quite small and immediate, and that will actually take you into the same material as if you go into the...

[39:13]

big-scale life story events that people are talking about. So I think these principles of small-scale, big-scale are relevant in both cases. Okay, I'm going to pause now because I've been talking for quite a long time and I said I'd like to give some space for discussion and feedback. And I've said quite a lot about this text. So I'd be interested in... any sharing or thoughts or questions that anyone has. Let's take it from there. Yes. So, this may be a little beyond the topic, but it's This is my last day.

[40:14]

Yeah. Go for it. Saripatana is tune our consciousness to unconsciousness. So kind of psychology called the whole that I'm unconscious. Or otherwise, the Western psychology divide our mind to consciousness and unconsciousness. Yes. I think it's quite complicated to talk about this because I mean, in a sense, Buddhism suggests that we're always in a state of unconsciousness. We're always in a state of avidya, of not seeing. And we're acting on a whole lot of automatic reactions and so on.

[41:18]

And so I think, yes, in a way, this text is about bringing to consciousness things that are unconscious. I think you're right. Yes. There might be no unconsciousness. Well, yes. Yes. Yes. So you think the Buddha, the Gautama, was beyond the work or lightened the whole unconsciousness? I think it's an interesting question. Yes. I mean, I think, yes, basically that the Buddha would... The teaching would be that the Buddha would not have unconscious process, that it would all be conscious. Yes. Well, I think, you see, I think unconsciousness is basically a conditioned process that we're not aware of.

[42:38]

So it's part of the conditioned mind. And we're all, as far as I know, we all have conditioned minds, so we all have unconscious process. I think we can bring things to consciousness. Yes. But I'm not sure that we get to the bottom of the unconscious. You know, I think there will always be more. But I think it's an interesting question. Yeah. I don't feel very qualified to answer on behalf of the Buddha in terms of psychology. Yeah. So in light of that, enlightenment would be, you may have said this, enlightenment would then be no unconscious. I think that could be a way of thinking about it. But as I say, I'm no expert on enlightenment. Which is going to be

[43:40]

Well, I think the idea that enlightenment is beyond having unconscious process is probably as good as you're going to get. It's about as good as I can give you anyway. Thank you. Yes. Larissa. Thank you, guys. To rewind a little bit to the beginning, when you're still talking about the body, you mentioned, you know, breathing, posture, activities, and then you went to elements. Can you be a little bit more specific about that?

[44:43]

The elements meditation? Yes. Well, this is awareness of each of the elements in the body and outside of the body. And so this is a very specific practice in which you start off being aware of the earth element in the body. So the earth element is like everything that is solid in the body. So you're aware of teeth and bones and feces. And these are all the sort of solid things in the body. And you're aware of the earth element outside of the body. So being aware of the earth, of solid things like wooden tables and all that kind of thing. And then you work with the water element. in the body, outside of the body, and so on. So this is listed as one of the practices of the Satipatthana. Okay, and then when you move down to corpse and decay, awareness of birth and decay, is it like bringing awareness to the decay of your body as well as the regeneration of something that's recomposing?

[45:48]

The corpse, the charnel ground meditations, they're, well, they're quite good to read. I mean, it's basically about sitting, watching the body in various stages of decomposition. And so you watch the new corpse and you watch the three-day-old corpse and the ten-day-old corpse. Okay, not your own. No, no, this is literally the, they would go and they would sit in the charnel grounds and they would look at corpses in stages of decay. But obviously there is that kind of, and this is going to be me, as you look at it. But these are two very traditional meditations. They occur a lot of other places in the text, and they are done as meditations. Are they still practiced in India? I think they are, yeah. Yes. I wish they were practiced here. Yes, well, I've certainly worked with the elements meditation quite a lot myself on occasions, and, you know, I'd recommend it.

[46:51]

And you can certainly, I mean, were you going to... I would say this came up in a practice period years ago where the teacher mentioned that contemporary teachers, I think, in Southeast Asia have actually permitted their... students to put them in a glass box and the students contemplated their morphs as it decayed. And the teacher said we could do that with him. Well, I've certainly, I mean, one of the things that we do is we run a course program in ecotherapy and We're basically training people to work out of doors as a therapeutic medium. And certainly going and looking at, you know, you often find dead animals and birds around the place. And sitting and watching those, in a way, is a kind of... It's not a human body, but you can still observe them in decomposition.

[47:56]

Actually, if you go onto YouTube, you can find some speeded-up videos of mouse corpses and things that are in states of decay. But there's... So contemplating death and decay is certainly something that one can do and one can work with. Yeah. I don't really feel informed enough to ask this question, so I'm going to try. So in your cynical therapeutic fashion, what form of Buddhism does this match with? Because if we're sort of... Zen and our practice is just to sit. And we don't, we're not doing mantras, we're not scanning our body, etc. So do you have that type of correlation in regards to what practice, what methods, what lineage would work best with this? And which ones would almost be encompassing?

[48:57]

Well, I don't feel I can advise you in terms of Zen practice, but this text is from the Pali Canon, which is, I think, respected by all schools of Buddhism. Yes, I mean, you might draw on different aspects of it. You don't have to do all the meditations in it, but I think... you can still use a text as information to inform your practice even if you don't actually practice all of the meditations that are recommended in it and so the people that are coming into your school that they are licensed within a certain structure outside of Buddhism or is this totally like a certified purification of Buddhism type of study well what I would be doing is training therapists So I'm not training people in Buddhist training. They do their Buddhist training elsewhere, and they come from a variety of different schools of Buddhism. But, I mean, here I'm basically talking about this text at this stage.

[50:05]

I'm not particularly talking, I'm not aiming to train you as therapists. Right. I'm not informed enough to question that. That's the question that is in my... Right. Where it fits with... Yes. Your curriculum would be designed to differentiate between one school versus another school. Yes. Well, it wouldn't particularly. No. I mean, we draw on a number of different Buddhist... principles and so on. But I think because we're drawing on mostly on Pali Canon material in terms of our informing theory and on Western therapy theory, I think it's compatible with any school of Buddhism. But obviously, if you're taking it into your practice, then you need to kind of look at how does this match with my... It becomes...

[51:08]

The application is different than the school that lives in Europe, and it could be a conflict. Well, I think it's not a conflict because people will still have their own practice. I don't think there's a need for it to be in conflict. But, you know, obviously if people feel it is, then they need to talk to the teachers in their particular school. if they feel there's conflict. But I'm not aware of it being a problem particularly because it is very much about therapeutic method rather than about Buddhist practice method. Caroline, it might be worth saying as well that the Buddhism isn't implicit. No, it isn't explicit in therapy. So people go as a client... necessarily go to a Buddhist therapist. A therapist is using the Buddhist psychology to kind of inform the way they work, but Buddhism might never be mentioned.

[52:14]

Right, like it's choosing what kind of therapy, if you're Freudian, that's meant to the person. Yes, yes, yes, yes, that's right, yes, thanks, yes, yes. Hello. Hi. So, following off, I suppose, from what's been said in a way, I'm thinking about also about how Buddha's and Buddha's practice fits with different santi-therapeutic modalities. So, something like mindfulness is about meeting one's own experience. My own experience of using focusing is kind of a facilitation of somebody else meeting their experience as it is embodied. So he's, to me, feels a bit like facilitating mindfulness in a way, but it's still very much about what they're experiencing about imposition of anything. Yes, yes. But then as I sit here now, I think about other therapies, so cognitive behavioural therapies, which kind of purport that there are sort of wrong thoughts or things that need to be corrected, which is obviously more acceptance.

[53:29]

Mm-hmm. And then things like, I was thinking about psychedelic therapies, which are about use of the therapist's unconscious, Dr. Joe's comments. Does that make them ableists and in their positions of Buddhism? Or is there still something that arises between people in the meeting, the therapeutic space, which is still of value? Yes. Well, yes, I mean, I think these things are very complex. And, you know, I think all of these methods can have some integration with a Buddhist method, but on the other hand, they can also be in conflict, as you suggest. And a lot does depend on the actual person who is using them, who's practicing them, and how they integrate them. I mean, I think, for me, one of the things that I like about... buddhist approaches to therapy um which in a way is incidental is the fact that it does bridge the um the sort of world of the cognitive behavioral and the world of the psychodynamic because we are looking at conditioned mind the conditioning has a history to it so it's got that sort of psychodynamics to it and it's also something that's being reproduced all the time in somebody's thoughts and feelings so

[54:56]

If you work in a fairly phenomenological way and you're following the person in their process, then I think it can be done in a very Buddhist way. On the other hand, if you're trying to impose something and trying to, in a way, put a particular Western framework on it, and particularly if you're in the business of kind of building... self-esteem and identity and so on, then that can be at odds with a Buddhist approach. Which makes a bit of a mockery of a lot of psychological theory. It feels like that's kind of clinging to something certain rather than risking the uncertainty of what might arise. Well, not knowing and uncertainty are quite important to me. Yeah. Yes, yes. Thank you. Yes, I'm smiling because some of our people from our organization have just produced a book called The Wisdom of Not Knowing. Yes, you were?

[56:01]

Can you offer another phrasing for what you meant when just a couple of times there was this like rhetorical kind of thing. We were giving a quote originally about like When the monk breathes out, he knows he's breathing out. When the practitioner breathes out, he knows that he's breathing out. When he's breathing in, he knows that he's breathing in. Yeah. Well, I think what's being described here is mindfulness, which is the process of observation of it. There's quite an interesting image of mindfulness that Anelayo quotes, which is the suggestion that mindfulness is like climbing to the top of a tall tower and looking out over the land.

[57:05]

And so I think the kind of when the monk's breathing out and he knows that he's breathing out, it's... I have this image of it's like you've got to this place where you're just watching the breath as if you're watching it from a bird's eye view and you're watching it all the way out and you're watching it all the way in again. And this kind of just noticing it and so on. I think this is what's being implied in the text. Yeah, I think it's the opposite to just doing it in an unmindful way and just kind of, well, most of the time we're walking around breathing and not even thinking about it. So it's bringing consciousness, bringing awareness to it, bringing our focus of attention to it as an exercise. You know, I think it's not suggesting that all of the time we should just go around being aware and watching our breathing, because if we were doing that, then obviously we wouldn't be aware of anything else. But as a meditation exercise, it's a meditation exercise, bringing awareness to the breath all the way in, all the way out.

[58:10]

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