Opening Up To Kindfulness 19 July 2021

BUDDHISM: DISCOVERING THE BASICS
opening up to
kindfulness
Ajahn Brahm
Copyright © Ajahn Brahmavamso 2021
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Contents
Foreword iv
Introduction vi
1 Kindfulness 1
2 Metta to the Past 10
3 Metta to the Future 27
4 Metta to the Present 42
5 Views and Intentions 54
6 Anicca—Nothing Lasts 70
7 Dukkha—Suffering 84
8 Anatta—Nobody There 97
9 Karma Without Belief 114
10 Total Listening 127
11 Dealing With Addictions 145
12 Lower Your Expectations 158

Foreword
Mindfulness, shmindfulness. It’s everywhere. In many countries,

large parts of the population have been exposed to this fashion-
able trend, sometimes to the point of weariness. More to the
point, while the benefits of mindfulness have been publicised
with much fanfare, are we really getting it right? Or could it
be that we are missing out on the full potential of this ancient
Buddhist practice?
The mindfulness movement has its roots in Buddhism. Early
advocates used the ancient Buddhist idea to establish their own
brand of mindfulness. In effect, they extracted one aspect of the
Buddhist teachings, repackaged it using modern terminology,
mixed it with contemporary psychology, and sold it as a tool to
enhance emotional well-being and cognitive abilities. To make it
more palatable to general society, they deliberately downplayed
the connection to Buddhism.
There are serious downsides to this approach. Perhaps the
most important of these is the loss of the context in which mind-
fulness appears in Buddhism. In Buddhism, mindfulness is just
one factor among many that lead to enhanced well-being. In fact,
mindfulness is not independent of the other aspects of mind
but is founded on other more basic qualities. It is these quali-
ties that give mindfulness its stability and power. Without them,
mindfulness has a very limited effect.
Enter Ajahn Brahm. Sometimes it takes someone special
to point out the obvious. Drawing on the Buddhist suttas—the
word of the Buddha—he has pointed out that true mindfulness
is always based on morality. Moreover, Buddhist morality is not
just a negative morality of avoiding what is bad, but a specific
positive morality of doing good. Only a good-hearted person will
enjoy truly strong and potentially life-changing mindfulness.
And by developing the good qualities of the heart, mindfulness
will continuously improve.
Yet the true genius of a powerful spiritual teacher is to come
up with new ways of expressing ancient wisdom. The word kind-
fulness combines a deep appreciation of the working of the Dharma
with a playful imagination, both of which are hallmarks of Ajahn
Brahm’s approach to Buddhism. Through profound understand-
ing and light-hearted delivery, he imparts these life-changing
teachings in an attractive manner to the world at large. Fun and
wisdom, wisdom and fun. They always go together. And they are
beautifully encapsulated in that innovative word: Kindfulness.
Happy birthday, Ajahn! For reasons not entirely selfless, we
wish you many more years as a creative, inspirational, and wise
Dharma teacher.
With the greatest respect and appreciation,
Ajahn Brahmali
1 July 2021
Introduction
Opening up to Kindfulness was compiled to celebrate the arrival of

a wise being who came into this world on the seventh of August
70 years ago.
Ajahn Brahm, an embodiment of kindness and compassion,
is internationally known for his practical and engaging style of
teaching that is easily understood in modern times, using anec-
dotes, humorous stories and jokes. He takes the essential ideas of
the Buddha, taught in Northern India over 2,500 years ago, and
redelivers them with his own personal, warm interpretation.
Ajahn Brahm is, for many, an inspiring teacher who speaks
directly to the heart, showing us the true meaning of wisdom
and compassion for ourselves and for others. The qualities he fo-
cuses on—love, mindfulness and kindness—are universal, going
beyond any one belief or religious tradition.
It is our hope that this book will draw you, dear reader, to the
clarity and compassion of the message Ajahn Brahm’s teachings
convey: freedom from suffering is as relevant today as it was in
India during the Buddha’s lifetime.
Every chapter of this book is an edited transcript of public
talks given by Ajahn Brahm in Western Australia and in Malaysia.
The book covers the basics of Buddhism as well as practical ap-
proaches to some of life’s issues.
We hope that you will enjoy the reading and see the meaning
in Ajahn Brahm’s message of ‘kindfulness’ for a happier life.
Wisdom and Wonders book project team
July 2021
1 Kindfulness
One thing which I keep trying to do is to promote the idea, espe-

cially in the science of Buddhism, of not just about mindfulness
but about compassion as well. So I’ve coined a new word, Kind-
fulness.
Sometimes the power of just one word is phenomenal as
it actually changes people’s understanding of Buddhism and
meditation.
There is a buzz term called mindfulness-based stress reduc-
tion therapy. This practice is so common that its acronym MBSR
is widely known. When I was in Kuala Lumpur recently, a very
wealthy guy came to see me. He had had some anxiety and de-
pression disorders. Being a wealthy guy, he went to the best place
in the United States, where film stars and multimillionaires go
for rehabilitation. When he came to see me, he said how stupid
he had been, flying all the way to the United States, spending all
that money, which was considerable, because all the therapists
there were just teaching what I teach here for free every Friday
night! 😄
Kindfulness. Have you heard that word before? I’m sure that
after about two or three years Kindfulness-based stress reduc-
2 🙒 opening up to kindfulness
tion will be the buzzword. 😁 Why? Because meditating monks

and nuns get to understand how this mind works: we have to
have Kindfulness, not just mindfulness. Without compassion
and softness, you get into big trouble.
What actually is Kindfulness? Let me give you some examples
of kindness without mindfulness.
Years and years ago there used to be the Boy Scouts, and they
had to do one good deed a day. One day a Boy Scout did his good
deed of the day by helping an old lady across the road—a classic
story I learnt in my youth of what you’re supposed to do if you’re
a Boy Scout. But the unfortunate thing was that the old lady did
not want to go! That was kindness without mindfulness.
How often is it that we think we’re being kind, but it really
isn’t kindness? Because we are not being aware of what is needed.
And the reason we’re not aware is that we’re not mindful of what
the situation really is. The trouble is if we haven’t got Kindfulness,
compassion together with mindfulness, we can make so many
mistakes in life.
One of the stories in my book Opening the Door of Your Heart
is of a young boy who was born deaf. He used to go to his doctor
every six months just for a check-up. At one of those check-ups,
the doctor mentioned that he’d just read in a medical journal
that there was a simple non-intrusive procedure which would
not cost very much but which was found to restore hearing to
10% of boys and girls who were born deaf. It probably wouldn’t
work for this boy as the chance was low, but why not give it a
try as there was nothing to lose? So the parents discussed it and
they agreed to give their son a chance of hearing.
kindfulness 🙔 3
And it turned out that he was one of the 10% whose hearing
was restored. What a wonderful thing that was, wasn’t it? No.
Because the kid really complained. He said: ‘You never asked me.
I don’t want to hear. All I’ve got now is this terrible noise. I’d
rather have an extra hand.” He said he learned the world through
feeling; he was so sensitive to touch. He added, “You made this
assumption that everybody wants to hear, and you never asked
me.”
I put this story in the book because it was an example of how
often it is we assume we know what a person needs, and out of
compassion we go and help them.
Many of you know that I like to cultivate a positive mind.
When I go overseas to different countries, I like to learn at least
one word in their language and the word I always try and re-
member is ‘very good’.
You can understand the power of a nice word like that. How
often in your life do you get criticised and put down? “This is
wrong. You should do it another way.” “You’ve been misbehaving.”
Because of the nature of this harsh speech, it is so hard to get any
respect. There are a lot of times we always feel we’re diminished,
we’re not good enough, whatever it is we do is never good enough.
Isn’t it nice when you come up to me and tell me what you’re
doing, and I say: ‘very good’? That is Kindfulness. That is an in-
gredient people probably need more than anything else. I’m just
affirming that there’s nothing terribly wrong with you. Just this
amount of kindness and respect could give you confidence and
energy to let go of the past, when you may have done something
unskilful.
Sometimes you’re not quite sure what it was you did, but it
must be something not so good because you’re suffering right
now. As a result, you’re feeling a lack of self-worth. Lack of self-
worth means that we can’t love ourselves. And when we can’t love
ourselves, we can’t love others, nor can we have a beautiful life.
Lack of self-worth is
a great problem in our modern world.
Do you know the word in Cantonese for very good? It’s ‘Ho ho
ho’. 😄 Now I understand that Santa Claus is Chinese; he doesn’t
come from the North Pole but from the Far East! 😁 ‘Ho ho ho’ is
an example of Kindfulness: being aware and giving kindness.
When I was in Hong Kong, I went to a very nice monastery
where many monks from China came to visit. I had a conversa-
tion with the monks there about how to have discipline. If you’re
going to go to university, you need to discipline yourself. If you’re
working, you need to have some sort of restraint to be able to do
things which are difficult to do. Everyone has to have some form
of discipline but how do you get that discipline?
With Kindfulness,
it’s so easy to have discipline.
Self-discipline—you can’t force it, but through Kindfulness,

everything just comes out naturally; you’re aware of what is
needed at this particular time and also have compassion to do
what you should do.
If you’re working, what does Kindfulness mean? When you
think ‘I don’t feel like working!’ and you know how you’re feeling,
kindfulness 🙔 5
that’s awareness. But kindness and compassion is what is needed

for you to do things for yourself, for the company in which you
work, for your family and everybody else. So out of Kindfulness,
you’re going to do this work.
If you are just aware without kindness, you get negative. In-
stead of having negativity, you are mindful that this thought is
not going to be productive at all for anybody; it is hurting your-
selves and others. So you’re aware of that, and you change it to
Kindfulness to think what a wonderful thing it is to help other
people, inspire people, solve problems and create a happier world.
That’s compassion. That’s kindness.
Kindfulness is
mindfulness and kindness coming together.
The last time I was in Indonesia, I gave eight talks in eight

days, and many people wanted to take photographs of me. One
day after about an hour and a half of signing books and being
photographed, I started getting negative. I thought to myself:
“What am I doing this for? I didn’t become a monk to sit here and
have people take photographs. Why do they want a photograph
of a monk? I’m over 60 years of age, and I’m not Brad Pitt! Why
on earth are they doing this?”
Then, I realised that as soon as I started having negativity,
I lost Kindfulness, and that created so much unhappiness. As
a monk we are always aware of what is happening. In this case,
I’m going on the wrong path, starting to get tense and even tired.
When we become negative, it drains so much energy out of us.
Seeing the problem, I changed my attitude and had beautiful
Kindfulness instead. “I don’t know why people like taking pho-

tographs of me, but if it makes them happy, then I’m happy.”
When I saw their happiness, I got my happiness back. That was
Kindfulness. 🤩
So whatever you’re doing in your life, if it’s something good
and positive and inspiring, which is making people happy and
which isn’t doing anybody any harm, please enjoy the moment.
That’s mindfulness and compassion all working together.
When you practice Kindfulness in ordinary matters of your
daily life, being aware and kind instead of being negative, you’ll
find it actually brings you into life. Without kindness, when
you’re negative, it’s very hard to be mindful, and you just want to
disappear. With negativity, people form addictions to things like
drugs and alcohol, or sex, movies, etc.—anything to get them out
of this moment.
“I hate ‘being here.’ I want to go somewhere else. Take me
off into some fantasy land in the movies. Take me off into some
weird drugged state. Get me drunk… Anything but being here.”
With mindfulness, you have to have kindness as well; other-
wise, you can’t stay here in this present moment.
With Kindfulness, you are happy to be here.
Why is it that people keep worrying about what happened in

the past? Or, why do they keep worrying and being anxious about
the future? I’ve often told different amazing ways of how to let
go of the past and the future, but unless you have Kindfulness to
the present moment and appreciate being here, of course you
will always want to go somewhere else.
kindfulness 🙔 7
Kindfulness also means being mindful of the truth and ac-

cepting it. When we go into the forest, we see that all the trees
are crooked: some leaning to the left and some to the right, some
with branches hanging off and some with all sorts of scars on the
bark. The forest is beautiful because it’s natural to be imperfect.
It’s natural to be damaged.
There is no person in this room who isn’t damaged goods.
It’s just that some people are more damaged than others. That’s
all.
We’re all damaged goods and crooked trees.

That’s why we’re beautiful.
Yeah, you’ve done some terrible stupid things in life. But we’re
all human. You are just another little crooked tree in the beautiful
forest. You’re welcome here. There’s no punishment here. There’s
no fear of being criticised or expelled. Isn’t it wonderful? You can
allow the truth to come up, and once it comes up, you’re kind to
it. Then, you realise that you’re just another crooked tree in this
beautiful forest.
So with Kindfulness, you’re aware and kind, and when the
awareness and kindness come into this moment, you are free.
You don’t need to run away and hide anymore.
If you try to hide things or get rid of things, that’s not kind-
ness. It means you’ll be racing away to somewhere else rather
than staying where the action is.
Kindfulness brings you into the moment

and relaxes you.
To be able to let go of the past and future, it’s not seeing

the negativity of the past or a waste of time thinking about the
future, but it’s actually appreciating the joy and the beauty and
the compassion of being right here right now. This is Kindfulness
of the present moment. When you’re kindful of where you are
right now, it means you’re here and you’re kind to this moment.
Appreciating the beauty of being here and now

is Kindfulness of the present.
What will happen if you are not kind to the present moment?
Imagine if someone comes into your house and they’re really
angry or in a bad mood, what does that do to you? That causes
physical and emotional stress though they haven’t done anything,
but just by being angry.
I remember one of the monks in Malaysia once told me that
he was in a house doing a ceremony when a man came into the
room, and he suddenly felt so tense. He was puzzled as he didn’t
know who this guy was, so why was he feeling so tense and almost
afraid? Later he learnt that that man was a public executioner.
The negativity surrounding that public executioner made him
feel tense. On the contrary, if the kindest, most compassionate
person comes into the room, straight away you’ll relax.
One of the great monks I used to know was a Thai monk
called Ajahn Tate. I went to see him in order to ask some deep
questions about meditation. But when I went into the room, I
felt he was one of the kindest monks I’d ever met! I sat down in
front of him and told myself I was going to stay there forever! I
felt so safe. I knew he wasn’t going to harm me or criticise me or
kindfulness 🙔 9
put me down. He totally accepted who I was. I felt that he had

this total unconditional acceptance. That was Kindfulness.
If you want to know what Buddhism is, it’s just the practice
of Kindfulness taken to the absolute limit. With Kindfulness, you
are so compassionate that you can open the door of your heart
to everything.
Kindfulness gives you

power, energy and wakefulness.
❦
2 Metta to the Past
Metta is awesome, Dharma is cool. 🤩

Metta or loving kindness is an incredible, powerful teaching
taught by the Buddha. Buddhism has gone into such great detail
on what metta means: this beautiful word of loving kindness,
of acceptance, of warmth, of learning to be with things, of em-
bracing things, for the growth and benefit of yourself and other
people…
The Buddha spent many years developing this concept so
that now we have this incredibly powerful and awesome way of
dealing with life. In fact, metta is so powerful that many people
can cure almost any psychological or even some physical prob-
lems with metta. Metta meditation is well-known for its great
benefits.
When I went to the United States, I heard from some of the
monks in California that if you can get a monk or a recognised
teacher to make a Statutory Declaration that you are a meditator,
you can claim a large rebate on your health insurance! This is be-
cause everybody knows that meditation works—it creates peace
and happiness, and with that happiness comes better health.
And not only that, if you have metta in your heart, you’ll find you
metta to the past 🙔 11
don’t have so many psychological problems. You can hold down a

relationship with your partner, you can do so much better in life.
Metta helps everybody. It is non-sectarian. It can go across
all religions; that’s why it’s so powerful. It is getting to the heart
of the problem, and the heart is where metta comes from. In
my life I’ve seen just how powerful and how deeply moving this
metta can be.
Metta touches the very essence of our life,

reforming it into something very beautiful.
In this series of talks on metta, I decided to split up the talks

into three time zones of Past, Future and Present. I will first talk
about how you can use metta towards the past, then towards the
future, and last of all and perhaps most importantly, towards
whatever’s happening to us now.
I will talk about metta in the three time zones because some-
times people think that metta must be only to human beings
or animals. But you can have metta to inanimate things as well,
including to situations in your life, to diseases in your body, or
to experiences, especially in your past.
And now I am going to introduce you to one of the stories
from my teacher, Ajahn Chah, about how to have metta towards
the past. This particular story, in the true tradition of my teacher,
was down to earth, amusing but so meaningful.
A long time ago, there were two chicken farmers in neigh-
bouring farms.
The first chicken farmer would get up very early in the morn-
ing, take the basket and go to the chicken shed to take the produce
of the previous night. He opened the door of the chicken shed,

went inside and collected all the chicken dung—all the little pel-
lets which the chickens had excreted the night before. He put
that into his basket and left all the eggs in the shed to rot. Now
that was a very dumb chicken farmer. 😁
The second chicken farmer went into the shed in the morning
with his basket. He collected all the eggs and left the chicken shit
to rot. That was a very clever chicken farmer because with the
chicken eggs he could make some omelet for his family and also
sell the remainder in the market.
The moral of that story is: whenever we think of the past,
when we collect the memories of what we ‘produced’ the previous
day, week or year, what do we collect? Do we collect the poo or
the eggs? I think many of you will associate with the first type of
chicken farmer whenever you think of what’s happened to you
today, last week or last year.
Why is it that we collect only smelly unpleasant stuff and
leave the eggs or the good stuff to rot? We forget about the good
stuff which has happened to us.
For example, we may come home from work, and your part-
ner might say, “Did you have a good day at work today?” What
do you remember? What do you bring home from work? “No.
My boss argued with me today.” Or, “The telephone was out of
order.” “The computer crashed.” Why is it that we always collect
the stinky, rotten stuff ?
Instead, we can be like the second chicken farmer when we
look at the past. We can collect the beautiful stuff and leave all
the rubbish back in the office to rot there. Why is it when we
come home from college, from work or even just from shopping,
we can’t just say, “Oh, I had a wonderful time today.”
The point is: as human beings, we have been taught to have
a fault-finding mind. So whenever we look at the past, we al-
ways remember what went wrong. We collect the dung. We don’t
collect the eggs.
Sometimes people say: “Oh, but Ajahn Brahm, if you don’t re-
member the bad stuff, you’ll probably repeat the mistakes of the
past. You can learn from your mistakes.” Any psychologist would
know something which the Buddha taught thousands of years
ago: you learn much more from your successes than you learn
from mistakes. So if we can remember all the wonderful things
which happened in the past, all the great achievements and suc-
cesses which we’ve been part of, not only does that encourage us
and lift up our happiness and energy, but it also makes us want
to repeat those successes.
When looking at the past,

pick out the good stuff,
and you’ll find
your happiness levels increase.
When I was young, I was told: “If you just recall all the good
things you’ve done, you’ll get a big head.” “Don’t praise yourself,
don’t remember the good things from the past, just remember
your faults. Work on those and become a better person.” BUT
you become a better person not by looking at your faults but by
remembering all the good things which happened. Also, you don’t
get a big head—you get a big heart. This is what we’re supposed
to be doing in life: to get big hearts.
In our academic institutions, we’re always taught to educate
our brains, to stuff so much information in there, but here in a
temple such as this, we’re educating our heart, getting a bigger
and bigger heart, so big that everybody is allowed in and that
every part of your past is embraced and nothing is kept out.
Only when you allow everything in,

with beautiful all-embracing metta,
can you find peace with yourself.
In my mind, the idea of metta comes from one of the most

meaningful stories of my life, which really stands out and which
has made me what I am. It was a teaching I got from my father.
That was the time when I was about 13 or 14 years of age, just
a young man entering adolescence with all the confusion, peer
pressure, danger of drugs and other things which were around
in London at that time. Born in Liverpool to poor parents, my
father was also sickly for most of his life. On this occasion, he
took me in his car and we parked on the side street in the poor
suburb of London where we lived. He then turned around to
me—I will never forget this—and said, “Whatever you do in your
life, son, always remember this: the door of my house will always
be open to you.”
Only 13 years old, I didn’t really understand what he meant.
All I knew was that it was important, and I kept it in mind. The
reason I didn’t understand was that his house was a small apart-
ment owned by the government with a subsidised rent. We were
so poor that we weren’t afraid of burglars; actually, we liked to

leave our door open, hoping a burglar might come in, take pity
on us and leave something. 😄 My father died a few years later
when I was 16.
Nevertheless, I remembered what he said. Later on, when I
became a monk, these things came back to me. I now had the
wisdom and clarity of the mind through meditation to under-
stand what he really meant. I realised that what he meant to say
was not the door of his house, but the door of his heart. That was
the house he was talking about:
“Son, whatever you do in your life,

wherever you go, however you turn out,
the door of my heart is always open to you.”
Here is what we call unconditional love—it’s metta with no

strings attached. He would love me and accept me, and I would
always be his son no matter whatever I did. It was the uncondi-
tional part of the love which meant so much to me. It was not I
love you if —it was I love you anyway no matter what.
I understood that was the meaning of metta. I will extend
this simile later on, especially when we talk about opening the
door of your heart to yourself. Here I am now encouraging you
to say:
“Whatever has happened to me in the past,

whatever I have done,
whatever has occurred,
the door of my heart is open to all of that.”
As you allow the past to come in and as you embrace ev-

erything which has ever happened to you, there is forgiveness.
There’s an old Australian story about this.
There were two soldiers in their sixties meeting together at
a reunion. Both had served in the Malay Peninsula during the
Second World War. When they were in Singapore, the Japanese
army captured that city and they were interned in a prisoner-of-
war camp and treated very badly. However, they were among the
few lucky ones who survived—but only just. They became great
friends because of the troubles they’d been through together.
At that reunion one said to the other, “Mate, have you forgiven
the Japanese yet for what they did to us in those camps during
the war?” His friend said, “Forgive? I can never forgive what
they did to us and the way they killed and tortured our friends.
Never! What about you?” His friend said, “I forgave them years
ago. You, my friend, are still in that prison camp.” That was such
a meaningful exchange. Until that old soldier could forgive, he
was still being tortured by the experience of his past.
Until you can forgive the past

you’re still being tortured by it.
This is one of the problems we have when we carry the ter-

rible burden and pain of the past. What metta does is to accept,
embrace, forgive and learn. When we say we forgive the past,
it doesn’t mean that we approve of the past. We are not saying,
“What a wonderful thing that was.” What we do is to embrace it.
We may not be able to understand why those soldiers were do-
ing horrible things, but it doesn’t help anybody to have this pain,
wanting revenge for what happened to you in the past. Whatever

that person did to hurt you, they’ve done bad karma, and that
bad karma will ripen sooner or later. People can’t get away from
the consequences of their actions. It’s a natural process of justice.
What this means is that you don’t need to be the punisher,
that you can forgive and that the whole process will work its way
out without you. So it’s important to have metta and forgiveness
of the past, to forgive your enemies and not to linger with anger.
One of the monks I knew in Thailand was always angry and
shouting at people. We thought that he was a bad character till
we found out that he suffered from terrible migraines. If I had
that terrible pain, I would have got grumpy with people as well.
It wasn’t really his fault. It was a physical ailment which he was
going through.
There’s an important story of a man who went to market to
get some eggs. One day he had the afternoon off work while his
wife was busy cooking dinner, so she asked him to buy some eggs
for her. He had never been to the market before.
As soon as he arrived, a young man came up to him and said,
“You’ve got a face like the back end of a camel! You also smell of
dog poo!” And the abuse kept coming.
The husband didn’t know this young man, so he said, “Why
are you saying these things? What have I done?” But to no avail.
That young man kept on scolding, abusing and criticising. Worst
of all, it was in a public place where everybody could hear. Would
you get embarrassed? He did. He turned around and went home.
As soon as he got in the door, his wife said, “You’re early, dear.
Did you get the eggs?” “No! And don’t send me to that stupid
market ever again. I don’t want to go. People are just so horrible
in that marketplace!”
Now the wife—wives know how to soothe their husbands
😄—soothed him down until he calmed down enough to come
to his senses.
He then told her what happened. “I don’t even know the fel-
low. Why did he carry on like that? I am so humiliated!”
The wife said, “What did he look like?”
When the man described his appearance, straightaway she
recognised him, “Oh, it’s him. The poor man had an accident
when he was young. He hit his head and suffered permanent
brain damage. The poor boy never went to school or had a job. Nor
will he ever find a wife to share his evenings with. We know he is
mentally deranged and brain damaged. When he gets into the
market, sometimes he curses me, sometimes he abuses someone
else. He’s just crazy.”
As soon as the husband understood the reason why the abuse
came—it was only from a crazy man—all his anger disappeared.
When the wife saw that, she took the opportunity and said, “I
still need those eggs, darling. Don’t mind that guy; he’s crazy.”
“Okay, I’ll go and get them.” He went back into the market
with the basket, and again the crazy guy came up to him.
“Hey, hold your noses, everybody. Here comes dog poo. Close
your eyes. Camel face is here.”
The husband went to the store and bought the eggs, while
being abused all the way. But it didn’t matter anymore. He knew
the young guy was crazy.
The moral of that story is this: if you come home and your
wife scolds you, don’t get upset. She’s probably hit her head that
day. 😁
All anger, according to the Buddha, is temporary insanity. So
when we understand the reason why people say or do things that
may harm us physically or verbally, it’s easy to forgive.
Metta is embracing
the diversity of human beings in this world.
Metta enables us to understand that we’re not perfect and

that we all suffer temporary insanity from time to time. We may
not hit our head, but we get bumped and bruised by some of
the experiences we have. Sometimes we take that out on other
people, especially those we love.
Whenever a person close to you, someone you love, gets angry
at you, never think that it’s your fault. It has nothing to do with
you; it’s everything to do with them. They are scolding you, not
because you’ve done something wrong, but because they’re not
feeling well or they’re hurt, and they’re taking it out on the ones
they love. It’s a way of releasing pent-up tension. Deep down they
think their partner will understand them.
If someone shouts at you, don’t get upset; just give that per-
son a big hug and say: “Never mind.” Don’t take it personally. This
is how we forgive the past.
Sometimes people say there are some things they can never
forgive, things that are just too cruel, hurtful and uncalled for.
But one of the most powerful statements of the Buddha was that
there is absolutely nothing you cannot forgive. There’s nothing

you can’t learn from, nothing you can’t grow from.
A couple of years ago, at a counselling session after a talk,
a woman came up to me and told me her problem—she’d been
raped. Those of you who are men, you can never understand what
it feels like. For those of you who are women and if you’ve been
sexually abused, strangely one of the things that goes through
your mind is guilt even though it’s not your fault! It was com-
pletely the other person’s doing; still, women feel guilty; they feel
they’ve contributed somehow.
Occasionally that does happen to a man, as well, but the fre-
quency is very little compared to women. I remember reading
an account in a journal of a young man who got raped by an-
other man. One of the things he said was that he knew what was
going on and he wasn’t consenting, but he froze. The fear and
the confusion sometimes get so strong that one can’t react at
all. It was a very good description which explains why a person
just can’t run even though they have legs, they can’t punch even
though they’ve got arms, and sometimes they can’t even scream
even though they’ve got a mouth. The psychological terror puts
one into a state of disconnected consciousness where you can’t
fully participate in what is going on; you’re just standing back
looking at this terrible thing happening to you, frozen, unable
to move. It’s one of the reasons why people feel such guilt.
On this occasion I did what I normally do whenever I do
counselling: the first few minutes, I really listen to everything
that is said without making any judgement. Basically, this is to
find out where they are and how spiritually advanced they are.
This woman was someone who was very advanced. So I looked

at her and told her that she’d been lucky to have been raped. I
can’t say that to many people. This was a teaching technique to
get very deep inside of her.
Straightaway she was shocked because no one had ever dared
to say such a thing to her before. With a mind open, I explained
what I meant. I said:
“Many people would be crippled emotionally by that experi-
ence, but for you, I think, you can understand this, learn from
this and transcend it, so that your task in the future will be to
help other women who have been through that experience in a
way which I, as a man, would never be able to do. You’ve been
there! And I think you will be able to get through this without any
emotional scars, but with an emotional richness which you will
be able to share with other women. Because you’ve been through
it and you know the way out of that black hole of former pain,
you can hold another girl’s hand and say, ‘I know.’ And you mean
it! And you also know the way out. This is your task in life. That’s
why I said you’re lucky. It’s a terrible experience but when you’re
through it, you will be able to help so many other beings. Even
with such a terrible experience like that, you can make use of it
for compassion, for wisdom, for serving and for growth.”
This is what we mean by metta: the door of my heart is open
to the past no matter what happened, even the very worst of
things. What I mean is that we embrace it. Like I said earlier
about those prisoners of war soldiers:
Only when you forgive can you be free.

Only when you embrace the past does the process of healing be-
gin. Only when you are truthful rather than hiding things away,
can there be a sense of integration, growth and then freedom.
Metta does lead to freedom. It doesn’t obliterate the past or ne-
glect it; it makes use of it to grow, and in that growth arises this
freedom and compassion.
There is a wonderful story from the reconciliation in South
Africa. At the African National Congress, a South African secu-
rity man who had tortured to death an African activist told the
congress, in front of the activist’s widow, about what had hap-
pened. The widow got up and approached the torturer and killer
of her husband and said, “I forgive you.”
It was one of the most moving times of that series of recon-
ciliation counsels—the woman whose own husband had been
unlawfully killed could forgive the torturer and killer. Both peo-
ple cried and sobbed. Only then was there healing, was there
growth. That’s what metta is. Metta can move to such incredible
depth and power.
Beyond reason,
metta comes from the heart.
And it heals.
If you could do that to the past and to the enemies who have
hurt you, why can’t you do that to yourself ?
In our modern world, people are just consumed by guilt; they
just cannot let go the mistakes of their past. The issue is not
that mistakes should just be obliterated and not be dealt with,
but that mistakes are dealt with in the wrong way: whenever we
make a mistake, we want to be punished.
Some years ago, one of the new entrants to my monk factory
was a young man who had been having a hard time but was
a good guy. One day he got into the kitchen in the afternoon
and sneaked some food and made himself a sandwich. He was
breaking one of the eight precepts, which you need to keep if you
are training to be a monk—not eating in the afternoon. So, being
a good guy, he came up and confessed to me, and I said: “Never
mind. Just learn next time not to do it. Everyone makes mistakes,
I’m not going to throw you out of the monastery because of that.
It’s not a capital offence, and I’m not going to call the police. So
just never do it again. Thanks for telling me.” But he was not
happy! He said, “Look! That’s not good enough. I need penance.
I need to be punished to stop me doing it again!”
Looking at him, I realised that he’s not going to be able to buy
just plain forgiveness. He needs to learn some forgiveness. So I
thought about the traditional punishment in Australia. Many of
you know that Australia started off as a penal colony. The British
sent all their felons to Australia where they were treated very
harshly and one of the punishments was whipping, which was
called ‘the cat of nine tails’, usually shortened as ‘the cat’. So I
said to this young man, “Well, then, we’ll give you 50 strokes of
‘the cat’.” And this young monk trainee went white. He thought
Ajahn Brahm was going to whip him! But then I explained to
him what 50 strokes of the cat really means in Buddhism. I said
that in our monastery we had a cat, and he needed to look for
that cat and stroke it 50 times! 😄 “Learn some compassion, for
goodness’ sake! Maybe stroking that cat 50 times will teach you
how to be kind, to be forgiving, to be soft and be sensitive, and
not so macho male!”
Why is it that we want to punish ourselves? Does it really
help at all? Punishing ourselves is what guilt is all about. Instead
of punishing ourselves, we have this metta and say: “The door of
my heart is open to me no matter what I’ve done.” Sometimes
you just made a mistake. That’s all.
We’re all allowed to make mistakes.
When I went to school, we all got caned when we made a mistake.

But all I learnt from that punishment was to make sure that I
never got caught again. That was the only thing I learnt—to be
cleverer the next time: not that I should not do wrong things,
but just to make sure I never got caught.
All that we actually learn from the punishments is to be clev-
erer so that we don’t get caught. We never realise why it’s wrong.
That’s why sometimes punishment doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s
much better to have understanding. Especially to yourself.
When we punish ourselves,

what we’re really doing is
denying ourselves happiness.
We think we don’t deserve to be happy. Many people experi-

ence this with dysfunctional relationships. When you get mar-
ried, you can’t have a good relationship with your partner because
basically you think you don’t deserve happiness; you seek pun-
ishment. Sometimes people bring on sicknesses and diseases as
they don’t think they deserve to be healthy. Many of the illnesses

which people have are guilt-related—something you’ve done in
the past which you’ve pushed deep under your mind so that you
can’t see it now but which is a cause for not allowing yourself to
be happy. It comes out in stress that causes diseases.
When you can say to yourself that you’re only a human being
who makes mistakes and the door of your heart is open to you
no matter what you’ve done in the past, then something changes
in your mind and even in your body. You become free.
Forgiveness leads to healing,

happiness,
and freedom.
So when you look into the past, you give it metta and compas-
sion. Whenever you tread in the dog poo, never wipe it off your
feet but always take it back to your house and dig it under your
mango tree. One year later your mangoes will be sweeter than
before. But when you taste that mango, you must remember that
what you’re really tasting is dog poo transformed. 😉
When you understand this simile, all of that poo from your
life, all of the terrible things you’ve done or which have been
done to you, they are just fertiliser or opportunities for growth.
It makes mangoes or your life sweeter. So don’t get negative but
give it metta, and the next time anything terrible happens to you,
you can say, “Whoopee! More fertiliser for my mango tree!”
If you are going to recall your past, forgive all the rotten
things which have happened and have metta towards yourself
so that you can get rid of all the guilt and suffering. And don’t
forget that if you need some punishment, go and find a cat or a

dog and stroke until you’ve got no guilt left. 😁
When you remember the past, remember all the wonder-
ful things which have happened to you. If you can do that, you
know how to have metta towards the past, and guilt or anger
will disappear and you can grow wonderfully well in inspiration,
repeating all the successes and the beautiful things which make
you a wonderful human being.
Through metta towards the past,

you embrace both the good and the bad of the past,
and wonderful things can happen.
❦
3 Metta to the Future
One of the biggest problems of human suffering is anxiety or

panic attacks about the future, which happens when we worry
about what is going to happen next. One of the advantages of
metta meditation is that we can apply loving kindness to our
future, as well, by saying:
“The door of my heart is open to the future

no matter what it brings.”
And that, by itself, will make us relax and be confident that

whatever happens to us next, we can always deal with it in a
positive way.
It works in the same way as when we look at the past and say:
“Whatever happens, I can always learn from that, I can always
grow from that”. In the same way we can look at the future and
say: “Whatever happens to me in the future, I can always make
something out of it.”
This positive attitude towards the future is

realistic, inspiring and empowering.
When I first became the abbot of the monastery in Australia,

I thought to myself: “Oh my goodness! What’s going to happen
to me as a leader, as a teacher, holding this responsibility of
inspiring other people?” Then, I said to myself: “It can only work
out one of two ways: either I become a great teacher and I can
help other people, providing leadership and encouragement to
show them the way—and what a wonderful thing that would
be, or I am a complete failure as a teacher, unable to teach at
all and every time I open my mouth, people would fall asleep or
they would walk out of the room—and that would be even better
because then I could be a hermit, which is what I had always
wanted to be. 😁
I thought that whatever happened it would be fine. It would
always be a win-win situation. That’s actually how you should
regard the future: whatever happens, you can always look upon
it in a positive way. You can always have loving kindness towards
the future.
The time when I first learnt to have a positive attitude to-
wards the future was when I was sick in the hospital in the north-
east of Thailand 30 years ago. That was very tough. The northeast
was the backwaters of this then third-world country. I had a fever
for about three to four weeks, but they didn’t know what that
was at that time, so they just injected me with antibiotics twice
a day. At that time, they did not have the disposable needles that
we have these days. They would recycle the needles: first, they
would use them in Bangkok, then they would send them to the
provinces, where they would use them in the main wards first,
and then they would reuse them for the monks because we were
metta to the future 🙔 29
supposed to be tough guys. 😢 But even tougher than me was the

nurse—she had to be because when she injected us, she stabbed!
Oh, that hurt! I must admit during those early days I had no
metta towards the nurse. 😁
There I was, suffering with a fever and my buttocks aching. I
felt so terrible—a Western monk a long way from home… I felt
so lonely, so depressed, so awful…
And one day my teacher Ajahn Chah walked in to see me.
This great monk came to visit me, a little monk! Straightaway I
was so uplifted! I was so honoured! I was so inspired but only
for a few seconds until Ajahn Chah opened his mouth. I always
remember what he said. “Brahmavamso, either you’ll get better,
or you’ll die.” And then he left!
The trouble with Ajahn Chah is that you can’t argue with him.
It was true. What he was saying was true. It didn’t matter what
happened, the fever wouldn’t last. Either I’d get better or I’d die.
Fortunately, I got better. 😀
So why worry about the future? Whatever happens it is not
going to last. This positive attitude towards the future has helped
me so many times. If you cultivate loving kindness: no matter
what happens, you’ll always be able to do something about it. If
you die young, you don’t have to worry about going to an old
people’s home. 😉
I have to fly a lot and one time the Australian government
actually put a warning out for Australians travelling to Indonesia
as there was a threat of terrorist activity. Some disciples of mine
asked me, “Ajahn Brahm, what if you get kidnapped?”
“That’d be wonderful. I can have a rest for a change. I don’t

have to speak.”
“But Ajahn Brahm, what if there is a terrorist on your plane?”
Why are people so afraid of getting blown up in mid-air? There
are three advantages of dying at 30,000 feet high. Advantage
number one: you get a free cremation on the spot; it’s all done
efficiently with no remains, so you don’t have to pay money to
have your remains stored expensively in a temple. And your re-
mains will be scattered, they will be spread over the world. Isn’t
that nice?
Advantage number two: usually for funerals you have to
spend a lot of money. If you die in an airplane explosion, the
aircraft company pays your family death insurance, so your fam-
ily really does well out of you.
And advantage number three: the best advantage of dying at
30,000 feet above is that you are already halfway to heaven! 😄
Why are we afraid?

Why do we look so negatively at the future?
It’s because we have fear.
I don’t know if you ever rode a bicycle when you were young
and can remember what it was like. I remember as an eleven-
year-old getting a bicycle for the first time. Getting on the bicycle
and trying to balance, I was so scared of falling off. I was so afraid
that I gripped the handlebars so tightly that my knuckles went
white, and my body was rigid. And because it wasn’t bending
round the curves, I kept falling off. It was only later that I realised
that if you’re going to ride a bicycle, you’ve got to relax, and not
tense up.
If you are not fearful,

you balance.
That’s the same with life. Whenever we’re afraid, we tense

up, and what we’re afraid of, it happens. We make it happen. So
instead of being afraid we should have metta towards the future.
Whatever happens, we can make use of it. If things go well, we
can enjoy our happiness. If things go wrong, we’ve got some
more dog poo to dig around our mango tree next year. When you
relax like that, it means you are more likely to be successful, to
be happy and to be healthy.
This is why we should develop loving kindness towards the
future. Whatever is going to happen to me, the door of my heart
is open to that. ‘I can take chances, I can make decisions, I am
not always worrying about what is going to happen next.’
The trouble is:

we worry too much.
I remember again when I was a kid I had to go to the den-

tist. Do you like going to the dentist? I never liked going to the
dentist in those days, and I worried so much I hardly slept the
night before. I was so tensed up and worried. Once, when I got
to the dentist’s rooms, I found out from the secretary that my ap-
pointment had been cancelled. I had worried myself sick about
something which never even happened. So these days I have
learnt to have loving kindness towards the future.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next,

but I know
metta will always pull me through.
As a monk I haven’t had any professional training in things

like marriage counselling or helping people with psychological
difficulties. I just go in there, not knowing what’s going to hap-
pen next, but I make sure I have lots and lots of metta. And I find
that whatever you do, if you give this beautiful energy of metta
towards the moment, towards the future, you will be successful.
I’ve been teaching this for some time now, and I’ve got lots of
stories about people who have used metta in difficult situations
with incredible results.
One disciple who lived in Sydney was importing designer
clothes and she was very successful in her business. Last year
she went to London to a very big company for what would be a
very lucrative contract. It was worthwhile travelling from Sydney
to London just for one day to see if she could close this contract.
When she arrived at the office, jet lagged and tired, the directors
told her, “You’ve wasted your time. You’ve come on a journey
which is not going to be successful. The CEO is in a bad mood this
morning. He’s usually in a terrible mood anyway, but today it’s
even worse. He’s been shouting and swearing at us all morning.
You’ve got no hope of success.”
Imagine that was you, travelling all that way for a contract,
then getting told by those who are closest to the one who’s go-
ing to sign it that you’ve got no chance. Anyway, because she’s
a disciple of mine, she decided to sit in a corner and do metta
meditation. ‘It doesn’t matter what happens, whether the con-

tract gets signed or not, I will not be afraid. I will just make my
mind positive with kindness towards all beings, including my
future.”
Just as she was doing this, they interrupted her; the CEO
was coming down. And as soon as he came into the room, when
she looked at him, words spontaneously just came out of her
mouth: “Wow! You’ve got such beautiful blue eyes just like my
baby daughter.” The very harsh, very tough CEO suddenly melted
before her eyes, smiling. A few minutes later the contract was
signed. She told me that as soon as the CEO went out of the room,
all the other directors who were standing around rushed to ask
her: “How did you do that? Teach us!” 😁
This is one of the beautiful examples of how metta can melt
the negativity in somebody else. But if you had been afraid that
you were not going to get your contract, you would have been so
tensed up and would never have been able to be so spontaneous.
The spontaneity comes with confidence and the confidence is
having metta towards the future. It doesn’t matter what happens,
you’ll always be able to deal with it somehow or other.
It’s like me: whenever I give a talk or an interview, I never
prepare anything. I don’t know what I’m going to say and that’s
a wonderful way of teaching because it means you can be intu-
itive and make the talk appropriate to the audience and you can
respond appropriately. With too much time spent on planning
things ahead, we get stuck in those plans and we can’t make any
alternative plans, which means we can’t be open to what is going
to happen next.
Metta towards the future

is one way of overcoming
fear and negativity towards the future.
I’ve read in many medical journals that sometimes people go

for a medical check-up and find that they have had a tumor for
many years without showing any symptoms. However, as soon
as they know about the tumor, they get sick very quickly. It seems
that fear is what makes the illness worse.
Life is like a mystery play

where you’re cast in the central role.
I know that some Chinese people like to go to fortune tellers.

😁 We try to predict the future because we think that when we
know what will happen, it’s going to be safer, but it actually makes
it worse if you try and predict the future. The point is that it
doesn’t get rid of the fear if we know what’s going to happen
next. The only way to overcome that fear is this wonderful wise
metta or loving kindness which tells us that whatever happens
next, the door of our heart is open to it—we can handle anything
no matter what happens.
So if you go with that attitude to a job interview, you come
across as easygoing, intuitive and confident because you’ve got
no fear. When you’ve got no fear, then you usually get the job.
That confidence is one of the powerful attributes of a human
being as it pushes them through to success. Just confidence. And
all that confidence is, is this wonderful metta, which accepts
yourself as who you are and that gives you this positive attitude
and gratitude towards the future.
I know that many people have a lot of fear about committing
themselves to relationships, to getting married, to setting them-
selves up with a partner, or changing their jobs. I spend a lot of
time counselling people who are wondering: Should I marry this
guy? Should I set up with this woman? should I change my job? I
keep saying to them: ‘Stop worrying about it. Just do it.’ 😀
If you found out that you married the wrong person, you’d
learn a lot from that mistake. It’s all learning experience. It’s
not the end of the world. There’s no such thing as the end of the
world. Life keeps on going.
I know there are some supposedly religious groups which
try to make you afraid; they hate the talks on loving kindness
towards the future. They want to make you fear that something
terrible is going to happen or the end of the world is coming. Do
you remember the year 2000? At that time, some people were
saying that it was the end of the world. But the world never ends.
When I was a young person, people were generally more
confident, and they weren’t so afraid and didn’t get these things
called panic attacks. Many people these days get panic attacks
where they freeze up and can’t do anything. Sometimes in the
most inopportune moments they tense up so much that they
can’t even scream. How can we stop these things, these intense
fears which paralyse our lives?
How do you deal with raw fear and panic attacks when they’re
upon you? What I’ve said so far is great in theory, but what can
we actually do when it happens?
One of the wonderful tricks which we learn in Buddhism is

a simple meditation using body awareness. Whenever you are
afraid, you’ll find that it has a corresponding feeling somewhere
in your body. Your body could be shaking or your knees trembling,
or you’ve got tension in your gut. You can always associate fear
and panic with a physical feeling.
I taught this technique to a young girl who was suffering
from panic attacks. I asked her: “Whenever you feel such fear or
panic, what do you feel in your body?” For her it was her stomach
tensing up. So I told her: “When you have that fear, forget about
the emotional part and go to the physical part. This is because it’s
much easier to relax your body than your mind. Just be mindful
of the effect of that physical emotion and go to that part of the
body and relax it.”
So she massaged her stomach, giving it some attention and
relaxed it for about 15 minutes. I then said, “After you’ve relaxed
your body, go back to your mind.” As soon as she went back to
her mind, she found the emotional part had eased considerably.
This is a great way of dealing with emotional problems: by
going to the physical manifestations and dealing with them on a
physical level by relaxing that part of the body, which is not that
hard to do. When you go back to the mind, you find the emotional
part has also lessened. It’s a feedback mechanism: mind to body
and body to mind.
So if you are a person who is always afraid, when you’re going
to an interview or an examination or going to propose to your
girlfriend, whatever it is, look at your body: what’s tensing up,
then relax that part. If you’re relaxed and at ease, you will feel
confident and thus you are increasing your chances of success

considerably. It is the fear of the future that things might go
wrong which causes things to go wrong.
There is a Western martial art TV show I watched as a young
man called “Kung Fu”. It was a story of a young man from the
United States who went over to China to learn the art of Kung
Fu. One episode which I remember was about fear.
The episode started with this little young novice monk called
Grasshopper being taken by his blind master into a very dark,
scary room. In temples there are some rooms which are always
kept locked and out of bounds, and this was one of them. For
the first time, little Grasshopper was taken into this dark, scary,
forbidden, mysterious room. After he entered the room, it took
a minute or two for his eyes to get accustomed to darkness. The
master asked him, “Grasshopper, what can you see?” Grasshop-
per said, “I see a pool of water, Master.” “Grasshopper,” said his
Master, “Don’t go close to the edge. That’s not water! It’s acid—
concentrated, sulphuric acid.”
The master said, “Go a bit closer but not too close. Be careful.
What do you see at the bottom of that pool?”
The little Grasshopper looked and said, “I see bones, Master.
Leg bones and a skull there. I see human bones!”
“Yes,” said the Master, “They are bones of little novices like
you who failed the test.”
“Do you see that plank?”
“Yes, Master.”
There was a plank going from one side of the pool of burning
acid to the other side. The master said, “In seven days’ time, little
Grasshopper, you will have to walk across that plank. You will
have to overcome your fear and keep your balance because if you
fall in, I won’t be able to save you. Your bones will add to those
who already fell in.”
Poor little Grasshopper was so terrified.
The master took little Grasshopper out of that very dark room
into the temple courtyard, where there was a piece of wood of
exactly the same size as the plank in the dark room. The wood
was supported by two bricks on either end on the ground of the
courtyard. “Grasshopper,” the Master said, “For the next seven
days all you need to do is to learn how to balance. Learn how to
walk on that plank because in seven days’ time you will take the
test of walking over the acid.”
So the next seven days, Grasshopper learnt how to balance.
It was easy to do as the plank was quite wide and thick. Anyone
could do it blindfolded and backwards.
After seven days came the real test. Grasshopper was taken
once more into this usually locked room in the back of the temple
which everybody kept well clear off. In the room, where there was
the plank over the acid and the bones at the bottom, the master
said, “Grasshopper, get on the end of the plank.”
Even with seven days of training, Grasshopper did not want
to go. Eventually with great reluctance, poor little Grasshopper
stood on the end of the plank. Then, he looked back at this master,
pleading for some compassion. His eyes said: “Master, please
don’t make me walk!”
“Walk!” said the Master.
There was no choice; little Grasshopper had to walk over the

plank above the concentrated acid, looking at all the bones of
little novices at the bottom. The plank of the same size over the
stone in the courtyard was not as long or as thin as the plank
over the pool of acid!
The poor little Grasshopper was trembling. By the time he
was gone half-way, his body was wobbly. He looked like he was
going to fall in, and he started to sway, and I got really excited!
Then, the show stopped for the commercials!! 😄
Once the adverts were finished, we were back in the temple,
where Little Grasshopper started to wobble and to sway… Then,
he fell in! Poor little Grasshopper fell into the acid! But the master,
the supposedly most compassionate man, started laughing! How
could he do that? Little Grasshopper was splashing in the pool,
but he wasn’t burning. It was only water. And the bones? The
master just tossed those in for what we now call special effects.
😁
As little Grasshopper was splashing and wondering what was
going on, the Master said: “Grasshopper, why did you fall in? I’ll
tell you why you fell in. Fear pushed you in, little Grasshopper.
Fear made you fall.”
And that was the whole purpose of the exercise, the mes-
sage of that whole thing. If he’d been told that it was only water,
he would never have fallen in, but once he was afraid, once he
thought it was acid, his fear pushed him in.
It’s the fear of failure

which creates the failure.
It’s the fear of something going wrong

which makes it go wrong.
So when we have fear—women may feel a hard part in their

breast or men may have difficulty urinating: “Oh, my goodness!
This is cancer!”—it’s likely to happen. When you’re afraid, the
tension and the stress very often bring it about. People who are
afraid of their partner leaving them will become controlling. The
husband or wife then gets so afraid that they may be looking at
somebody else. The fear destroys their marriage. When you’re
married to someone, please make trust the most important thing.
If you’re afraid, you control, and you create the causes for the
relationship to break down.
So the only thing you should really be afraid of is fear itself.
And the way to overcome that fear of our future is to have compas-
sion for the future. Whatever happens, it’s okay. In the same way
as when you were a child and you were afraid, and your mother
said, “You’ll be alright… You’ll be alright.” And then it was alright.
Your mother’s loving kindness for the future is what pulled you
through. Now that you haven’t got a mother to do that, and I can’t
do that for you, being by your bedside and stroking your hair:
“It will be alright… It will be alright…” What you can do is using
loving kindness: “This beautiful door of my heart is open to the
future. Whatever happens, I’ll be able to do something. Never
mind. It’ll be okay. The world is not going to end.”
Things don’t go wrong, nor do they go right.

They just evolve into new opportunities,
lessons to be learnt,
or obstacles to make us stronger.
Whatever happens will be learning possibilities or growing

pains. In that way, nothing stands in the way of our success.
Whatever happens, we can always learn and grow, and become
better people. That is how we have metta towards the future.
Without fear,
we’re confident and can find success.
And our happiness levels rise and rise.
❦
4 Metta to the Present
So many of the stories that I tell are about how loving kindness
can save people from great injury. One of the stories in my book
Opening the Door of Your Heart, on the power of loving kindness, is
about a monk who many years ago was meditating in a forest
when a big king cobra came to visit him. I don’t know if any
of you’ve ever seen a king cobra. I’ve only seen one when I was
in Thailand. The villagers there had a name for it in the local
dialect: ‘one-step snake’. When I asked them: “Why do you call
it the one-step snake?” “Because once it bites you, that’s all you
have to live—one step!”
One day while this monk, together with many disciples, was
meditating in the evening, a king cobra came and slithered right
up to him, raised its head, opened its hood, and hissed ‘Sssss…’
What would you do? It’s a waste of time running—those snakes
run faster than you! What this monk did was to raise his hand,
patting the king cobra on the head and saying, “Thank you so
much for visiting me.” What he discovered was that the king
cobra liked his head patted! 😄
The power of metta or loving kindness is so strong that even
king cobras do not harm or hurt such a person. The animals look
metta to the present 🙔 43
to him as a refuge, as someone to protect them. Metta is your

greatest insurance.
A story I’ve read recently is of a burglar who broke into a
temple in the middle of the night. He knew the donation box
held a lot of money. When he broke in the abbot of the temple
was disturbed. He went to check out what the noise was.
The burglar took out a gun, “Open the box, or I’ll shoot you.”
The abbot had no choice, saying, “Certainly, sir.”
He opened the box and said, “You can have all the money you
want, sir. But may I ask you when you’ve last eaten? There’s some
food and some drink over there. Please take it before you go.”
“Yeah!” said the burglar suspiciously. He quickly opened the
box, but he was fumbling as he was scared.
“I’ll open it for you,” said the monk, “Go get yourself some-
thing to eat.”
The burglar took some food to eat while the abbot opened
the box. Then, the burglar took the money and ran off. He was
caught sometime later for other crimes and jailed. When he was
released from jail, he came back to that monastery, to that abbot.
“Do you remember me? Many years ago I came into your
temple to rob the donation box, but I’ve realised I took the wrong
thing. What I really wanted was your compassion and kindness.
Now, I’ve come to steal that from you. Please ordain me as your
monk and teach me how to be kind like you were to me.”
Of course, what people really need is kindness and compas-
sion because it will not only give you friends but also solve prob-
lems in your daily life. Whenever you meet someone and give
them compassion, it’s always so powerful.
You should cultivate compassion not only for others but also
for yourself. You can give loving kindness to your own body when
there’s sickness or pain. I have done this many times. When I
have an ache or a pain which sometimes drives me crazy, I’ll say.
“Pain, the door of my heart is open to you. Come in.” Most of pain
is wanting to get rid of something, something which is a part
of nature. If you practise strong loving kindness in the moment,
you can even do that to the pain in your own body, and you’ll be
amazed at how that pain can vanish in a short period of time.
The first time I did this was when I was a young monk in
Thailand. I got a toothache in the middle of the night. At that
time there were no aspirins or Panadol or any painkillers in our
monastery, nor was there any phone—not even a landline, let
alone mobile phones. We were in a remote monastery. We were
supposed to be forest monks who could endure no matter what
happened. 😢 I was trying to endure, but it was driving me crazy. I
tried to meditate my way out of that pain. I sat down, crossed my
legs, and focused on my breath… It was too painful! I could not
get rid of this exploding pain in my jaw. When sitting meditation
didn’t work, I tried walking meditation, but I had to stop that
because I wasn’t walking—I was running! When you’re in pain,
you can’t do anything slowly. The next thing I tried was to do
some Buddhist chanting to get rid of this pain as people say that
sometimes chanting has magical power. Though I didn’t really
believe it, I was desperate and would try anything. Then, I had to
stop the chanting because I realised if I had carried on, I would
be shouting it so loud that I’d wake up everybody including the
villagers two kilometres away! 😄
There are a few times in your life that you may come across
this phenomenon when you feel stranded with nowhere to go.
All your strategies have been exhausted, and you just can’t stand
the pain a moment longer. So the only thing you can do in such a
situation, instead of getting rid of the pain, is to accept it and let
it be. “Pain, the door of my heart is open to you. I’m not trying to
get rid of you anymore. I’ll just be with you and be kind to you.”
When I did that, the most amazing happened—the pain dis-
appeared. It vanished! And in its place was happiness and peace.
The most unexpected experience I could ever imagine. I medi-
tated most peacefully and had a short sleep for one or two hours.
When I woke up, I had a very slight toothache.
What I learnt from that experience was that so much pain
was mental, not physical. “I don’t want this! Why should I suffer
this? This isn’t fair!” This pain is countered by loving kindness. In-
stead of fighting, dismissing, and trying to get rid of the painful
contents of your day, you embrace it, allow it to be, make peace
with it and give it loving kindness. You have metta to the moment.
By developing such strong loving kindness, you will find how,
amazingly, it can be applied to anything unpleasant which you
have to deal with in life.
Metta can be applied

to all unpleasant experiences in life.
Another story in my book Opening the Door of Your Heart, which

was adapted from a teaching of the Buddha himself, was a story
of the anger-eating demon.
There was an emperor who was away from his palace. While
he was away, a terrible, ugly, stinking demon came in. As he
walked into the palace, he was so terrifying that all the soldiers
guarding the palace froze in terror, allowing the monster to go
right onto the emperor’s chair, onto the throne and sit there.
As soon as the monster sat in the emperor’s chair, the minis-
ters and soldiers all woke up and said, “Get out of here! Who do
you think you are? That’s our emperor’s chair. You don’t belong
there. Get out!” With those few angry words thrown at him, the
monster grew an inch bigger, uglier, smellier and the language
coming out of his mouth got worse. That made the ministers
even more upset, and some soldiers got out their swords, some
threatened him with clubs, others shook their fists. But every un-
kind word, every unkind deed, even unkind thought just made
the monster grow bigger, uglier, smellier, and his language got
more crude.
This had been going on for some time when the emperor
came back. By this time the demon was so big that it took up half
of the throne room and it was so ugly and terrifying that even
Hollywood couldn’t imagine anything so ugly. And the stench
coming off his body would even make a maggot sick! The lan-
guage coming from his mouth was worse than what you’d hear
when Australia lost a cricket match.
The reason why this guy was the emperor was that he was
smarter than anyone else. He saw this ugly, terrifying demon
and he knew what to do straightaway. He said, “Welcome. Thank
you for coming to visit me. Why have you taken so long to pop
in? Has anyone got you anything to drink yet? We have ginseng
tea, we have earl grey, we have orange juice… What would you
like?”
With those few kind words, the demon grew an inch smaller,
less ugly, less offensive. Everybody in the palace now realised
their mistake. They then started being kind to the monster. Some-
one took hold of his feet and gave him a foot massage. Some-
one asked, “Do you want something to eat? How about a pizza,
monster-sized?” Every kind word the demon heard made him
grow smaller and less offensive.
In a very short time, he was back to the size when he first
came in, but they didn’t stop there. The palace staff carried on
with kindness until the demon was so tiny, and finally with one
last act of kindness the demon vanished completely away. That’s
how they got rid of the demon that entered the emperor’s palace.
When the Buddha told the story, he said that we called that
monster an anger-eating demon. If you give it anger, it just gets
bigger and more offensive. There are many anger-eating demons
in this world. For some of you, that might be your husband. 😉
You get angry with him, he gets bigger, uglier, and the language
certainly gets worse. Your wife could be an anger-eating demon,
too. So you realise that if you give those anger-eating demons
anger, the problem gets worse.
Anger-eating demons are not just people. Cancers are noto-
rious anger-eating demons. When they are in your body, you say,
“Get out! You don’t belong in here!” When you feel such anger
or such stress, it produces a growth in negativity. What do you
expect? It gets bigger, uglier, and more dangerous.
Anger-eating demons could be a state of mind. Some people

who get depressed would say, “I don’t want to be depressed!”
If you feed negativity to your depression,

you’ll usually get depressed about being depressed.
And then you get depressed
about being depressed about being depressed…
Those of you who know depression, know that you go in a spi-

ral ever downwards of depression. For those of you who are not
in deep depression—I’m not talking about clinical depression,
just mild depression—how about saying to yourself: “Depres-
sion, welcome! The door of my heart is open to you. Come on,
I could be your friend.” You know for a start that when you are
giving such positive energy to the depression, it will get less and
less because depression feeds on negativity. Instead of negativity,
we can give it compassion.
Metta towards the moment is so powerful

it can heal so many things.
I’m not talking about saving you from bullets or patting a

snake’s head; I’m talking about other problems in your life. If
you can’t solve them, be kind to them, and you’ll find that metta
will work so powerfully well.
However, there are some situations in your life where you
could be in a bind as sometimes you could be helping other peo-
ple but forgetting about yourself.
Metta has got to go to oneself

as well as others.
It’s not just sacrificing yourself for other people, nor is it

sacrificing other people and being selfish. The important part
about loving kindness in the moment is to include yourself as
well. As I said earlier, sometimes people think there are two types
of Buddhism: Mahayana and Hinayana (a pejorative term for the
Theravada tradition). Hinayana is to forget about other people
and be concerned about your own enlightenment or your own
happiness. Mahayana is to forget about yourself and think only
about others. Both are wrong!
If you just think about yourself and

have no compassion for others,
it does not work.
If you think about others and
have no compassion for yourself,
you get burnt out and sick.
You can recognise this problem in many marriages. In mar-

riages, often one of the partners is Hinayana and the other one
is Mahayana. One partner is thinking about him/herself all the
time and the other is always thinking about their partner. Both
are dysfunctional. So please keep it in mind that you think nei-
ther about the other nor about yourself—it’s about us. Kindness
and compassion should be directed into the correct place.
Please be kind towards us.

Please understand that you are also included. When we do

our metta practice, we say, “The door of our heart is open to all
beings. May all beings be happy and well.” Have you ever noticed
that when you say ‘May all beings be well,’ you forget about one
being: you? So the metta has to go towards you, as well. Some-
times I need time out and rest to look after myself. Why? So that
I can be of greater use to other people.
I need to look after myself

so that I can be of greater use to other people.
Recently I’ve been talking about this to businesses because

sometimes the reason why companies fail is not that they don’t
work long enough hours but that they are inefficient. By that, I
mean after you work for so long, your brain is not clear and you
make too many mistakes, which you have to fix up the following
morning. There comes a time when you realise the best thing for
yourself and for others is to rest and to have compassion for a
moment.
Someone sent me a cutting from an engineering journal
from the UK. A company called Farrelly Facilities and Engineer-
ing, which specialises in building maintenance, has just won
awards from bodies such as the Best Engineering Services Tech-
nology and Small Business Achievers as they doubled their turnover
and tripled their profits over a two-year period. What they did
was to ban overtime. That’s all they needed to do. And the em-
ployees described themselves as ‘among the happiest on this
planet’.
If you are stressing out your workers, they’ll just want to

leave and go to another company. They just can’t stand it. And
you know just how long it takes to train another worker. When
someone’s there for a long time, they build up relationships with
their clients, they know exactly what their job is. One of the trou-
bles with some companies is that they spend too much time
training people because once well trained, a person goes some-
where else when they get no job satisfaction. Problem number
two is that people are so negative about what they’re doing that
they don’t really have their heart in their work. Number three,
they work such long hours that at the end of the day their brain
is so stuffed that they are not thinking clearly and thus make
mistakes.
This British company saw that and used compassion instead.
Their wisdom doubled their turnover and tripled their profits.
I hope you can understand that. If the place where you work is
caring about you, then you care about them, you want to do the
right thing and you want to work hard to make that company
more prosperous. So compassion is also part of modern business.
Without that compassion, you just don’t get your contracts.
If you are in a position of authority in your company, then you
have to be careful when sometimes someone in your community
is a troublemaker. In my case, I’m an abbot or CEO of my monk
factory 😁, people said to me, “Ajahn Brahm, you are so kind to
that troublemaker by not kicking him out. But by being kind to
him, you’re being uncompassionate to the rest of us!” So please
remember that compassion has to be balanced. Everybody in
the equation counts. Sometimes our compassion is lopsided—it
goes to one person at the expense of other people. When people

say to me that they’ve got someone working for them who is not
doing the job, but they can’t sack that person, and that this gives
them such a hard time, I’d say, “Listen, it’s a compassionate thing
to sack that person because it’s compassionate to everybody else,
including you.”
You’ve got to have balance and see the big picture. When
you see the big picture, you’ll understand that you have to make
the tough decision to hurt one person, but it helps many others.
Compassion has to be that way; it has to be with wisdom.
Compassion has to be with wisdom.
So when we have loving kindness, loving kindness towards

the moment or towards what you have to experience, please make
it wise so that everybody is taken into account. This means that
whatever you have to do in this life, when you give it loving kind-
ness, you always have energy, care and joy. As in the Buddhist
saying, loving kindness is as a mother loves her only child. What-
ever you care for, you pay attention to it, you look after it and it
prospers. This is why loving kindness is the key to prosperity.
Loving kindness is the key to prosperity.
I don’t do that just for babies, for king cobras or for people
in my monastery. I practise loving kindness to whatever I do
in my life. Whether it is taking a funeral service or counselling
someone, I will say, “The door of my heart is open to whatever I
have to do now.” I give metta to this moment. I embrace it and
enjoy it because this is the only moment I’ll ever have.
Life is what is happening now.
This is the only life you have. So what should we do with this
moment called ‘now’? Please care for it. Have loving kindness to
this moment.
The door of my heart is open to

whatever life is teaching me now.
I endure everything: painful, not so painful, what I like, what

I don’t like. It doesn’t matter. We can’t change the world. We can’t
change what we have to experience. But what we can change is
our attitude to life. That is in our power. You can’t change the
people that you meet but you can certainly change your attitude
to them.
We can’t change the world,

but we can change our attitude towards it.
So we change our attitude and make it one of loving kindness.

Whatever comes into my life, whatever I have to do, whatever
experience arises, I will give that kindness.
Life, the door of my heart is open to you,

whatever you are,
or however you feel…
That is the key to happiness.
❦
5 Views and Intentions
Every religion has a view, and they all think their view is the
right one and everyone else’s is the wrong one. What happens in
religions becomes just like husbands and wives, always arguing
who is right and who is wrong.
The Buddha gave a wonderful teaching on what Right View is:
whatever teachings which lead to a state of peace, stillness and
harmony, which lead to the disappearance of the problems of life,
which lead to ceasing, which lead to enlightenment (Nirvana in
Sanskrit)—these are the teachings of the Buddha. That is Right
View.
In other words, what tells you what right view is, is not by
whether it is in accordance with some discourses, some texts or
any authority, but by what it actually does in your life, in other
people’s lives and in society.
You can understand what right view is

by its effect.
It is wonderful that there is a teaching which can cut across

people’s arguments about whether certain ideas and opinions
are right view.
views and intentions 🙔 55
“Does this view create peace and harmony in your world? Or,
does it create the opposite?” Once you get the answer to those
questions quite clear in your head, then your intentions will
become pure.
If you have Wrong View,

intentions start to go all wrong.
I always emphasise that there are three right intentions in

Buddhism: the intention to let go (renunciation), the intention to
be kind (no ill-will), and the intention to be gentle (no violence).
This is the second of the eight-fold path to enlightenment in
Buddhism.
When you’ve created these beautiful intentions of letting go,
being kind and being gentle, that is what we mean by Right View.
Right View leads to Right Intentions.
Before I discuss what Right View in Buddhism is, I am going
to talk about a particular topic which needs to be addressed.
I’ve read in the newspapers that right now there are national-
istic Buddhist monks in some countries doing terrible things by
destroying other religions’ places of worship and driving people
out of their homes and even killing them. That has nothing to do
with the teachings of the Buddha at all. Violence and Buddhism
don’t go together.
Two centuries after the Buddha, there was a very famous Bud-
dhist emperor of India called Asoka. As a leader and an authority
figure, he actually carved on stones wise thoughts, called Asoka
pillars, which remain until this day. One of the wise thoughts
written on a pillar reads:
“Anyone who even criticises another person’s religion,

let alone destroying that person’s temple of worship,
only succeeds in demeaning his or her own faith.”
Anyone who destroys another person’s temple is destroying

their own religion, taking away its credibility and its meaning.
Spirituality and religion should always be about peace, kindness
and harmony. Whatever creates such conditions is Right View.
So please, even if it’s a monk or a nun, you must always ques-
tion. If you know something is wrong, you should take away your
support for that monk or nun, or even call the police. Destructive
acts are not Buddhism. When people are overly respectful of
clergy or afraid of their authority, they let a lot of abuse happen.
Please make sure that you understand Right View, question-
ing and not taking any teachings or actions just on faith when
they obviously can’t be right.
Even regarding what is right and wrong in daily life, some
people ask me this question: “When you’ve got a difficult decision
to make in life, how do you know whether this is the right path
to go on or not?” At times, you can have theories, “This is what
you should do,” and “This is what you shouldn’t do.” But the best
way of finding the answer is having enough awareness to find
out in your own heart whether it feels right or wrong.
Often in life you know it feels wrong, and you can trust that.
Usually that is a much better indicator of ethical truth. People
can read about ethics in a book, and yet they can still twist ethical
guidelines around.
The best way of getting a wholesome answer is

to find out in your own heart
if it feels right or wrong.
When I first went to Thailand, I saw people catching fish,

and I said: “You are breaking your five precepts, you are killing
fish.” And this is how people twisted things around: “No, we’re
not killing the fish. We’re just taking them out of the water, and
they die by themselves.” You can see how easy it is to twist things
around with words, documents and legal systems, but when you
feel it inside your heart, you know it’s wrong.
So what actually is Right View? Is it being aware or mindful
inside of you—this thing you call intuition or wisdom? You know
exactly what’s right or wrong. And you know that demeaning
another person’s faith is not the way to create peace and harmony
in this world, let alone destroying their property and chasing
them out because they do not share the same belief or the same
part of that religion as you.
Demeaning another person’s faith

is not the way
to create peace and harmony.
Dividing everybody into sects is not Right View, either. Even

in Buddhism, we have Mahayana, Theravada, Vajrayana. Which
is the right one? Which is the best?
Why is it that we can’t get together and have some peace and
harmony? Right View creates harmony. If we can’t have harmony
within our own religion, how can we have harmony with other
religions? We have this terrible violence in the world, and that

has nothing to do with wisdom.
You know what wisdom does? It leads to peace and harmony.
It leads to three beautiful Right Intentions.
The first one is the ability to let go. When we can actually have
a bit of letting go—letting go of our views and preferences, we
can have peace with other people. Whenever there is disharmony
and even violence, something is very wrong.
One of the problems is that disharmony happens with human
beings. We have our nationalism, our tribalism, and our religions.
“I am an Eagles supporter, and you are a Dockers supporter.”
(Eagles and Dockers are two big Australian football teams in
Perth.) It’s alright to just have a bit of fun on the football fields
or on the stands. But when you come home, please don’t go and
fight over that.
Sometimes people say a country can be religious. Countries
aren’t religious; people are. There’s no such thing as a Buddhist
country. If you can understand that, maybe we can have some
harmony and peace.
When Right View is cultivated,

we have harmony and peace.
Sometimes people say that this sounds like a great theory

and makes a lot of sense, but why is there so much violence in
the world? Can’t we do something about it? One way of doing
something about it which I love teaching again and again is to
do away with religious schools, which actually divide society.
Imagine someone who went to a Buddhist primary school

and a Buddhist university, then went to work for a Buddhist
company, and married a Buddhist person. They would spend
all their time with Buddhist people, and they didn’t really get to
make friends with people across their Buddhist divide.
I want a person to be able to make friends across the whole
divide so that we can have a harmonious integrated society. It is
a tough thing to do but what a wonderful world this would be if
your Buddhist kid’s best friend was from another religion, and
they loved to go out and have fun together. What a wonderful
world that would be when we can integrate! And all these suspi-
cions which we have against each other will not actually come
to such extremes and there would be no violence against other
people or destruction of their property.
Now comes the question of which religion is the right reli-
gion. My answer is whichever religion that produces harmony,
freedom and a beautiful sense of love is the right religion. If you
think you are a Buddhist and you’re creating violence, you are
not practicing the right religion—I don’t care who you are even
if you are wearing brown robes (namely, you are monks). If you
create or promote violence, you’ve got it wrong as that’s not what
the Buddha teaches or supports.
You also have to keep it in perspective because sometimes
when we have so many problems in our world, that’s all we ever
see. Here is a simile which I like very much.
How big is my hand? (Ajahn Brahm puts his hand in front of
his eyes.) My hand is now so big that I can’t see any of you! All I
can see in the whole world is my hand. Is it my hand’s fault? Or,
is it my perspective? It is MY perspective.
When I hold my hand where it belongs, which is at the end of
my arm, the hand hasn’t got smaller, but now I’ve got perspective.
I can see my hand and I can see every one of you as well.
This is one of the problems of perspective, which causes prob-
lems in our world. Sometimes we hold something so close to us
that we can’t see anything else. We’ve lost our perspective. We
then get deceived and deluded.
Another thing about Right View is an issue on organ dona-
tion. Here in Australia, there are fewer organs donated than the
number of people who need them. In Buddhism, there’s nothing
wrong with being an organ donor. I’m happy to donate all of my
organs. 😀
But why are people afraid of doing that? Some people, even
some Buddhist traditions, say that if you give your eye to some-
body, when you go to heaven, you will have only one eye. That’s
really crazy.
You should know what it feels like inside when you give some-
thing. How do you feel when you give something to someone
who really needs it? When you share, when you give some food,
when you give a donation, when you just give someone a lift,
when you just give someone time, how do you feel? It always
makes you happy! It’s good karma. It’s love. It’s charity. In all
religions we know, that’s a wonderful thing to do. So you don’t
have to be afraid that you’re going to lose out.
Also, you don’t need those organs anymore when you are
dead. As monks, we haven’t had any alcohol for many years, so
our livers are pristine. It’s good to give to others! I know my

organs can help other people live a healthy life.
This is a little something we can do with kindness and com-
passion to help our world. You don’t lose out on this. Even if they
harvest your organs just before you die, you won’t feel any pain or
discomfort. You feel a beautiful sense of kindness. If you do feel
any pain or discomfort, it will be just the same pain or discom-
fort as when you have an injection or when you go to the dentist.
But the pain is hardly anything at all. So you don’t need to worry
about that. And you are dying anyway, and you are making that
extra good karma at the end. Isn’t it wonderful? You’ll surely go
to a nice place, have a good rebirth afterwards. Why not bump it
up at the very end just to make sure? You’ve got nothing to lose.
😉
There is a story about a monk—I won’t say his name as he
was quite famous. He was a blood and organ donor.
One day they found he had a match for a person who des-
perately needed a kidney. The doctor had to rush it, “This is the
match! Your kidney will fit into this guy whose kidneys have all
gone. He’s in big trouble. Would you donate your kidney?”
At that time the monk, still in his thirties or forties, said, “Yes,
sure, no worries.” Then, he asked “What is the problem?”
The doctor replied, “You are a Buddhist, and this man who
wants your kidney is a monk of another religion, going around
Sri Lanka converting Buddhists to his religion. Are you still okay
with this?”
The monk said, “No problem at all. You can have my kidney.”
So he had the operation, and his kidney was taken out and
put inside a man who was theoretically his opposition. What a
beautiful and inspiring thing that is! This is true spirituality.
True spirituality is
being kind and non-judgmental.
It is nice to talk about inspiring stories, not about monks

destroying monks. Don’t just focus on the problems. It’s best that
you find beautiful acts rather than miserable acts. I’ve lived in a
monastery, but when I get out and about, there are more kind
people in this world than angry people. There are more people
who will help you, rather than people who will hurt you.
A great way of looking at our world is to see that for every
two bad bricks in the wall, there are always a thousand good
bricks. (You can read the story of The Two Bad Bricks from my
book Opening the Door of Your Heart.) So don’t get so afraid or
depressed when you look at the news. It is wrong view to look
only at a part of life, looking just at the hand. Please put the
hand where it belongs—at the end of your arm—to get a good
perspective of life.
Another thing which I want to talk about is relationships
because this comes up again and again. First, have the right view
when you start a relationship: everything is impermanent.
Whenever a relationship starts out, one day it must end.
Sometimes it ends early. It’s just been going a few years or a
few weeks, and then it ends. Sometimes it lasts for life, but even-
tually it ends when one of the partners dies.
Please remember from the time you first go out together,

especially when you get married, that this is a temporary re-
lationship. Yes, a loving relationship ‘This is a marriage made in
heaven. We’ll be married forever.’ sounds romantic.
However, you should understand that marriages and rela-
tionships will always end; a problem is when they end fast. The
obvious reason for such an end is that if we think our relationship
is going to last forever, we don’t put any effort into keeping the
relationship going. We take the relationship for granted. That’s
the problem.
Ajahn Chah gave a simile to demonstrate why we should not
take anything for granted by holding up a glass and asked, “Can
you see the crack in the glass?”
I looked. “That’s a perfectly good glass; there’s no crack in
there.”
He said, “There’s a crack in there, and it’s microscopic. That’s
why you don’t see it. But one day someone’s going to drop this
glass, or they knock it, and that crack is going to open up and
the glass is going to crack. This is nature. It’s never going to last
forever.”
He then added, “If this was a plastic glass, you could kick
it, you could drop it, you could do whatever with it, and it was
unbreakable. It was going to last forever. That’s the difference
between a real glass and a plastic glass.”
He concluded, “All relationships are glass. They’ve got a crack
in there. One day it’s going to break and because you know one
day it’s going to break, you look after it and care for it.”
All relationships are glass.

So you should look after them.
Anything which is very valuable, you care for it. You look
after it only when you realise it can be broken very easily. So
when you realise that relationships are impermanent, they’re like
glass, having a crack, they can finish very easily, you’ll look after
them and put effort into them. Just because your sweetheart says,
“We’re going to get married and I’m going to love you forever,
darling,” it doesn’t mean it’s going to be true. Of course, everyone
says that. But don’t believe it.
A relationship is fragile, which means you really have to care
for it, put effort into it, and then when it does break in the end,
you will say, “Yeah, I expected that.” When you know that this is
part of nature, it means that at the end of the relationship, you
don’t have a terrible surprise: “Why did he do that? Why did he
run out?”
It happens to so many other couples, and you think it won’t
happen to you? You think that you’re somehow special? That
you’ve got this special, unique relationship, not like other people?
We like to think like that, don’t we? That’s called conceit.
But when we realise that our relationship, like others’, is
fragile, we’ll put more effort into looking after it and we will care
for each other. And how do we do that? Right View. Let go, be
kind and be gentle—the three Right Intentions. Can’t we do that
in our relationship? Your husband has said something stupid,
he called you a pig. Let it go. How many of you hold on to it year
after year?
There is one way of letting it go that I witness every year. This

weekend we’re having a new year celebration—it’s the Indian
New Year, which is also celebrated in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand
and Cambodia. In the west, people usually get drunk on the new
year.
And do you know what people in Cambodia and Thailand
do? People, especially in the north and northeast areas of Thai-
land, bring a little bag of sand to the monastery. The reason
they bring the sand is that they think: we’re coming into this
monastery all year and when we walk away, some of the soil of
the monastery sticks to our sandals and our shoes—we’ve taken
away the monastery’s sand and soil. It was as if we had stolen
the soil. So now is the time we’re bringing back what we’ve taken
from the monastery.
It’s a very cute way of saying: on this day we want to make
sure we have no debts, and we have no bad feelings.
They also do a forgiveness ceremony. It is where the water
festival comes from. Do you know that water symbolically washes
away the past? In Thailand, they throw water over people, but
what they really mean is to give forgiveness to each other.
At every marriage that I conduct, I always ask those two peo-
ple, starting to have a serious relationship together, to have a
forgiveness ceremony on their anniversary every year.
This is what I would like you all to do—on the anniversary
of your marriage, just get a little token gift—nothing really ex-
pensive, and present it to your partner and tell them, “If there’s
anything which I have done by body, speech or mind which may
have hurt you, either on purpose or just by accident, and if there
are things that I didn’t do which I should have done, I’m sorry.
Please forgive me. I really want this relationship to carry on. I
love you.”
No matter what a person’s done, if they ask for forgiveness
with sincerity, in this Buddhist tradition, you have to give them
that forgiveness. Then, the other person does the same. So once a
year, on your anniversary or whenever you choose, do this beau-
tiful little ceremony with your partner. Let go of the past with a
forgiveness ceremony.
It does not have to be about people relationships only. In the
last 12 months if you’ve done something really bad and you’re
really hurting because of it, just come up to a Buddha statue or
a place which represents peace and kindness to you and do a
little forgiveness ceremony. “Whatever I’ve done over the past 12
months by body, speech or mind, intentional or unintentional,
I felt I was between a rock and a hard place, and I didn’t really
have much of a choice, but I feel bad about it anyway, so please
forgive me.”
What a beautiful right view that is—to let go of the pain
of the past instead of carrying it around with us. The pain you
carry around with you gives you depression and stops you from
enjoying life and having a good relationship.
Forgiveness is a very important part of Right View. It’s called
‘letting go’ and ‘being kind’.
Forgiveness
is letting go and being kind.
If you’ve had a relationship and it’s ended, please be kind

and let your partner go. It’s a most important time to be kind,
not blaming. I don’t know how many people blame their partner.
“She is so selfish.” “He’s so conceited.” Please stop blaming other
people. They’re just human beings, not perfect.
But worst of all, many people—both men and women—when
they go through these separations, they blame themselves and
get into such a big guilt trip. “Oh, no! I should not have done
that!” “I should have come home earlier.” “I should have been
kind.” “I should have…” That creates such great pain.
To many people, when a relationship finishes, it feels like a
death. Why can’t we celebrate the time we had together, celebrat-
ing the relationship rather than mourning the death of a wrong
partnership?
Why is it that we can’t celebrate a life

when somebody dies?
It’s amazing that over the last 20 or 30 years the modern way
to perform funeral services has changed. No more wearing black
and tearing your hair out. It has become about celebrating a life.
You go there and you hear all the beautiful tales about what that
person did, even some of the stupid things they did.
I remember one funeral service where a best friend of the
guy who died said how he made some sort of a bomb and blew
up a toilet on a construction site when he was about 14 years
of age. Just kids being kids. This made the whole thing human.
They were celebrating a wonderful life with all the stupid and
wonderful things a person did in their life.
If we can do that at funeral services, can’t we do that at a

divorce, as well? Have a divorce, come together and celebrate the
wonderful times you had together. It would be a radical thing to
do. Why not? Celebrate the end of a relationship—we had a won-
derful time together, but it’s finished now, and we have to move
on. Can’t we celebrate the wonderful time we had together? I like
saying things like this because it gives you another doorway to
go through so that you don’t have all this pain when you separate
from your loved ones.
This is actually part of letting go and being kind to yourself.
You know you did your very best though you could have done
better. You’re not perfect. We all could always do better. I could
always tell better jokes. 😄 But you can always be kind and more
forgiving.
A lot of times people say if you think it’s going to last forever,
you’re being positive and then you’re going to make it; and if
you think it’s going to break, it will break. That’s not exactly how
psychology works.
If you think it’s going to break,

you will look after it
and care for it.
When you remember that everything in life is fragile and

know as truth that relationships don’t last forever and that one
day you’re going to die, you don’t need to be afraid. This attitude
will save many relationships as you will put more effort and care
into them.
When you care for your relationship like it’s your most price-
less possession, you will not drop it, you will not knock it, and
then it will last a long time. And when it does bust up after you’ve
given your best, you don’t blame anybody and you don’t feel
guilty or angry. You don’t think there’s something wrong with
you. You’re just like everybody else.
Glasses will break. If you look after them, they’ll last longer.
And when they break, you know that it’s part of life. Is this a
Buddhist or atheist teaching? I don’t know, but it’s just truth,
isn’t it? It’s common sense.
So please be kind, be generous, let go and share. Those are
the Buddhist Right Intentions, which you will have when you
have Right View.
There is Right View according to the books, but the Right
View which I’ve talked about here is the Right View which goes
across all faiths or no faiths, and all cultures. It creates a lot
of peace and harmony. It breaks barriers whether it’s between
people, races, genders, or sexual orientations. We live in a small
world now. We have to learn to live together, and this is the way
to do it.
Right View goes across all faiths and cultures,

creating peace and harmony,
breaking barriers between people.
❦
6 Anicca—Nothing Lasts
My teacher Ajahn Chah said that food for the body was not
enough. So the most important meal is happening now because
this talk is food for the heart. 😉
Just like any food, sometimes we have junk food and some-
times we have healthy food. It’s the same with the things you
put in your mind. Sometimes it’s junk food you put in the mind.
Do you know what junk food for the mind is? TV! And what’s
healthy food for the mind? Dharma!
For this series of talks on the three basic facts of existence,
I would like to start with anicca, which is often translated as
impermanence, but actually it’s more than impermanence.
You must have noticed at lunch just how fast things disap-
pear… from your plate. 😄 You also notice the joy of the taste lasts
for a moment and then it’s gone. Sometimes the expectation is
the most delicious. For many people, anticipation is the happy
part. As soon as you get it, the happiness or the wonderful taste
goes away so quickly.
When I was young monk, after seven years in Thailand, I
went back to England to visit my mother and I thought: ‘At last, I
can get some English food. Maybe I’ll get some chips!’ Finally, I
anicca—nothing lasts 🙔 71
did get some chips. A Thai man gave them to me. They did not
taste as nice as I had dreamt. Oh, what a let down!
Trouble with desires:

As soon as we have them,
we don’t want them anymore.
Even our desires are impermanent, unreliable. So it’s great

to be able to contemplate just how these things come and go. It
is a waste of time giving them more importance than we really
need to.
One of my disciples lived in a rented apartment and had
ordinary clothes. The only thing of value he owned was a classic
Harley Davidson motorcycle.
One day he went shopping and parked his expensive bike in
the shopping centre car park. When he came back, it was gone.
Someone had stolen it! He was devastated. Then, he remembered
all the teachings of Buddhism on anicca. So he let it go. As soon as
he let it go, he felt so much happiness. He’d really understood the
dharma! Then, he noticed that he was on the wrong level of the
car park building. When he went down to the next level, there
was his Harley Davidson. Anyway, that was a great experience
for him. He was tested out and he won.
Why worry? Possessions come and go. This is just life. When
we understand what impermanence is—that things are always
changing, then we can adapt to the reality of life and we don’t
suffer so much.
Suffering arises
when we don’t understand reality,
when we have unrealistic expectations of life.
So it’s great to know that things pass, that we have our loved
ones come into our life and then they leave again.
Look at your children, where do they come from? It is like
inviting someone into your house for 18 or 19 years from the
street. You don’t know where they’re from or who they are. That’s
what you are doing with your children. They come with their
own karma from their previous places, and they stay with you for
a while, and they leave again. So you should understand from the
beginning that your job is just to nurture them for 19-20 years
and once they get their degree, you should say goodbye. But how
many of you can do that?
Can’t you be like the birds? They are so wise—they look after
their young, sitting on their eggs for such a long time, and after
they hatch, the parents fly around to find worms for them. Then,
they teach their young how to fly. Once their little chicks have
learnt to fly, they say goodbye to them. Wouldn’t it be wonderful
to be like that?
But you need to realise that your children don’t belong to you.
They’re impermanent. They go according to their karma. We go
according to our karma. If we can only realise that eventually our
children will leave and that things change, then we will be free.
I was telling a lady who was in trouble last night that no
matter how she is feeling now, things will change. There’s a story
of the emperor’s ring. It’s a wonderful story which helps heal
many people’s pain and suffering in this world.
A long time ago, there was a young man who took over a
kingdom. Being a young man, he wasn’t all that skillful in run-
ning the business of a kingdom. So every time the kingdom was
going well, and people were happy, he would hold celebrations
and parties.
Because he was spending so much money in celebrations
and spending so much time enjoying himself, allowing other
people to enjoy themselves, the good economic times didn’t last
very long. When there were problems in the country, and unhap-
piness among the people, the king was so upset himself that he
was spending so much time in his room sulking and getting mis-
erable and depressed. And because of that the bad times seemed
to last longer.
No, he was not a very good ruler, but the ministers and his
advisers were very sharp, so they came up with a plan—they
asked a jeweler to make a special gold ring with words engraved
on the outside ‘This too will pass.’ Then, they presented the ring to
the ruler and asked him to wear it on all occasions. And because
he wore it all the time, he kept looking at it. When there were
problems in the kingdom or when there were so many things
to do, he would look at the ring and remember that this too will
pass. He would also look at the ring in the good times as well,
and realise that the time of prosperity, of health and comfort
would pass, as well.
What that meant was that during the bad times, he would
never get so upset or depressed that he couldn’t do any work. The
bad times never lasted so long, either.
During good times, he realised that this was also imperma-
nent. So even in the good times, he would work and would not
rest. That way the good times lasted so long, and the bad times
were so short that he became a very successful ruler, loved by
everybody.
‘This too will pass’ gave him hope.

And hope gave him inspiration
to work
and to endeavour.
This is the simile of our lives. We are the ruler of our body,
our family and our surroundings. Sometimes we experience
difficulties and suffering. What do some people do? They get
depressed and sulk. As they don’t do anything, it means the bad
times last longer than they should.
So whenever there’s any difficulty, always remember that this
too will pass. But when things are going well, always remember
this too will pass. Remembering that fact of life, you can put all
the energy you can into this moment because this moment is
valuable, and you won’t let it pass without enjoying it. If things
get difficult, it doesn’t matter—this too will pass.
‘This too will pass’ gives us hope, gives us energy, gives us a
way of looking forward. The truth of the fact is:
Whatever is happening now will not last.
Sometimes I wonder about the happiest moments in peo-

ple’s lives. For some the happiest moment is when they get mar-
ried. Why is that? Then, I’ve noticed that the wedding day is the
pause between two kinds of suffering. Trying to get a partner

and arranging the wedding is a lot of suffering, then you have the
marriage ceremony, then you have the suffering which comes
afterwards. 😄
An example of the happiest time I witnessed was 20 years
ago, I think, after the Iranian revolution. I was meeting someone
in the airport in Perth when I saw some Baha’i refugees com-
ing through the gate. After being persecuted and driven from
their country, seeing many of their family members killed or tor-
tured, then staying in refugee camps, they finally got resettled in
Australia. After the immigration and customs procedures, they
came through the gate, they punched the air! “Yeah!” They made
it. Now, they had the freedom to practice their religion and hope
for future prosperity.
I started to reflect afterwards. Why were they so happy? And
then I realised that the degree of happiness was the reflection of
the suffering they’d gone through.
Their happiness is a measure of the suffering

they have gone through before.
When you look at the happiness and sufferings of life, isn’t

that what you take to be happiness just a pause from some form
of suffering.
Happiness is a pause
between two moments of suffering.
And suffering is a pause
between two moments of happiness.
I sometimes reflect on the concept of a heaven. How can

you have a heaven realm if it is always beautiful and nice? You
wouldn’t notice it anymore because the nature of our conscious-
ness is always to compare. If you have beautiful food every day,
you won’t notice it. If you have air-conditioning every day, it is
only when it doesn’t work that you notice it. Even if you’re in
heaven, after a while it would not be much happiness anymore.
You’ll take it for granted.
I’ve read somewhere (I could be wrong) that there was a
Christian theologian in the Middle Ages who said that in heaven,
one day every year you get taken to hell; otherwise, you would
not appreciate what heaven is like. It’s a wonderful way of un-
derstanding what happiness and suffering really is. Otherwise,
we would not know what beauty is, what ugliness is, what hap-
piness is, what suffering is. By its very nature, heaven has to be
impermanent and by its very nature, hell has to be impermanent;
otherwise, you would get used to it.
I remember reading a very moving book called “Prisoner With-
out a Name,Cell Without a Number.” It was the story of a well-known
journalist in Argentina during the time of the military junta,
when many activist journalists disappeared in the middle of the
night and were killed or tortured. One night the secret police
came for this outspoken champion of human rights and put him
away in an underground cell where he was tortured.
Afterwards he wrote a personal chronicle of his experience.
The most interesting part was that he said the worst pain was
when the guards handed over a letter from his wife. He had
got used to pain and to being in prison, so a letter from his
wife brought the contrast. He remembered his warm and loving

family and thus had something to compare his torment with.
You find that within happiness and pain, it is the contrast
which is important. Even in pain or in hell you don’t notice it
until every now and again there is some happiness. The point of
that story is this:
Without comparison,
you would not understand
what happiness and pain truly is.
Once we understand the impermanence of things, it helps us

understand the reality of life and learn how to deal with things.
We can enjoy things as long as we understand that pleasure is
here now, but it is not going to be here forever.
When my teacher Ajahn Chah would hold up a glass and ask:
“Do you see a crack in this glass?” I thought he was crazy as there
was no crack in that glass.
He said, “There is one there, but it’s microscopic. You can’t
see it yet but it’s there. One day someone will drop this glass
or kick it over, the crack will expand, and the glass will break.
Because it’s got a crack in it and glass is subject to breaking, you
know it’s impermanent and that’s why you care. If a cup is made
out of some unbreakable plastic which would survive a nuclear
explosion, you wouldn’t have to care about it. You could kick it,
you could throw it around, it wouldn’t break.”
Then, Ajahn Chah pointed to me, “You see that monk over
there? He’s got a crack in him as well. You may not see it yet but
one day the crack will open up and he’ll die.” You, your children
and your loved ones all have got a crack in them, and one day it
will open up and everyone will die, so you should care for them.
People who contemplate anicca this way don’t become cold and
heartless. They become kind and caring.
The more you contemplate

the ephemeral nature of all things,
the more compassionate you become.
I learned that lesson when my father cracked. He died when

I was only 16 and I felt very guilty. It’s natural for young men
growing up to compete with their father. I was competing with
my father, too. He liked Frank Sinatra, but I liked Jimmy Hendrix.
When he put on Frank Sinatra records, I’d put on my Jimmy
Hendrix records, which were much louder than Frank Sinatra.
So I won. When he died, I felt guilty. What did I do that for? I
loved my father and I cared for him. Why did I do such a stupid
idiotic thing to stop his enjoyment of the music he liked. Now it
was too late. My father had died. That taught me a lesson.
You can’t afford to hurt anybody, especially the people in your
family as you don’t know how long they’re going to be there. If
you’ve hurt them, you shouldn’t wait until tomorrow to say sorry.
You have to say how much you care for them now
because things change and opportunities pass.
There’s a story of a friend of mine who was a very successful

businessman in Sydney. Just a few days after his annual medical
checkup, he received a phone call from his doctor, who was also
a personal friend. The first words of the doctor were: “Is your
wife at home?” Why would he say that? There must be something
wrong. So straightaway he responded, “What’s wrong? Actually,
my wife is here.” “Sorry to report that you’ve got a rare type of
blood cancer. It’s untreatable and terminal.”
This man thought he was in the best of health, but like most
people, when they get a shock from their doctor, he asked, “How
long have I got to live?” The doctor told him two months, or three
if he was lucky.
What happened when he realised the impermanence of his
life? He changed the priorities of his life. He’d always promised
his family to take them to Europe. Now, he had to go. There was
no time to dither. He then sold his business. He bought tickets
for him and his family and booked the best hotels. This was the
last time for him and his family to enjoy each other’s company.
He was holding the tickets in his hand, so the story goes,
when the phone rang again. It was his doctor. “I don’t know how
to tell you this,” said the doctor, “I mixed up two of my patients
with the same name. I gave you the wrong results. You are per-
fectly healthy.”
You may have heard stories like this. Even in medicine some-
times mistakes happen. However, this man never sued his doctor;
he never got angry at him. He went on holiday with his fam-
ily, had a good time, and some money left over to start a new
business, which became quite successful. But this time he didn’t
work so hard because that experience made him realise that time
passes so quickly and what’s really important is not his wealth
or his business success. What’s most important is his family, his
enjoyment. That was what impermanence taught him.
Because some day we are going to die,

the most important thing to do is
to care.
The importance of the teaching of anicca is for us to realise

it is necessary not to waste time. Whatever you need to do, do it
now. Do the most important things first; otherwise, you will not
have time to do them. If you love your family, you should care for
them now, knowing that they could be gone any day. What more
could you have done? You’re only sad when they die if you’ve
wasted your time. That’s the only sadness in life. Wasting time.
Anicca teaches us how to care when we have things we enjoy
and how to let them go when they crack, and not with grief or
too many tears.
Part of my life is to counsel people who lose their loved ones.
A reason why they cry is that they never understood anicca when
their loved ones were alive. They’d thought that their loved ones
would always be there for them, but now they’re gone, they’re
disappointed. They had unrealistic expectations.
That’s why husbands and wives should not argue with each
other. You don’t know how long you have, so say sorry and en-
joy each other’s company now. Understand that your spouse is
cracked and going to die one day.
When my father died, I didn’t cry. I had no grief, and it took
me a long time to understand how I felt. The way I felt is well
explained in the simile of a concert. As a young man, I loved
music and used to go to many concerts in London. At the end of
a concert, everyone stood up and shouted for more. And it is the

custom for the band or the orchestra to continue for another 5 or
10 minutes. But after those 5 or 10 minutes, they have to stop to
go home. So did I. Every time I walked out of those concert halls
or pubs, it was always raining, dark and cold. It was miserable
outside, and I knew I’d probably never hear such an orchestra
or band again. But never once did I feel sad at the end of a great
concert. Instead, I felt so privileged and blessed for being there
at that time. And that’s how I felt when my father died. It was the
end of a great life, though a short one, but it was a privilege for
me to be there. What a wonderful performance that was. How
lucky I was to have been there at that time! This simile shows you
that understanding impermanence makes you enjoy life more.
That’s a wonderful positive way of looking at death. How
many of you have cried when your loved ones have died? Can’t
you enjoy the very fact that you’ve known them for such a long
time, that you’ve had such happy moments together? Can’t you
feel joy? At least we can celebrate life and how lucky we are to
have known them.
This is a different way of understanding anicca; all things
disappear and fade away. All our possessions will be gone. Great
monuments in this world or monasteries which we’ve built are
only bricks or concrete and steel, and they will fade away. What
doesn’t fade away is our karma, our goodness, our kindness, …
That’s why one of my favourite sayings is:
People are much more important than things.

Do you know the English word ‘church’? That was never

meant to describe a building. The meaning of church was a con-
gregation, a group of people who would meet together. Church
meant the people. In Europe and the United States, people have
built enormous, impressive buildings which are so cold and
lonely inside, and they call them churches. The buildings have
become more important than the people who sit inside. They re-
ally missed the point. You can have an old, wrecked-up building
with happy people. That’s more important.
It’s important to understand what is important in life. You
understand that buildings just come and go. Even your body
comes and goes, and all the Botox in the world won’t stop that
impermanence. I don’t know why people are afraid of growing
old. The point is: we will all get old, but we can get old gracefully
by letting everything go. Eventually there comes a time when you
have to let your body go. I’ve seen too many people at the time of
their death struggling to live. Please don’t keep struggling in an
old body to keep on going. You’ve had enough. Your old body is
worn out like an old car. When it’s time to go, remember anicca:
it’s all passing away and it doesn’t belong to us. We only rent this
body for so many years. You aren’t your body. I’ll talk about that
in the talk on anatta (non-self). So just allow everything to pass
away.
When I learned Pali, there was something that was the oppo-
site of anicca. It was nicca. In the Buddhist monastic law, there’s
something called ‘nicca food’. What it means is that somebody
would go to the monastery on a certain day every week, giving a
regular supply of food. That’s nicca food. Nicca here means ‘reg-
ular’: something that is always there, something stable, constant

or repeated. So anicca means when something which is regular
or always there suddenly disappears.
It is like when you’re watching the waves of the ocean, you
see the waves go up and go down and you think the rise and fall
is what impermanence means. But that’s only superficial imper-
manence. The real impermanence is: one day you’re watching
the ocean, seeing waves go up and down, and suddenly without
warning and beyond all expectations, the ocean disappears, to-
gether with the land mass that surrounds you. All has vanished.
It’s not supposed to have happened, but it has. Only then will
you realise that impermanence is not just rising and falling but
that it means:
Something which was always there

has now disappeared.
❦
7 Dukkha—Suffering
When I was about 19 or 20, I started to question what all this

happiness business really was. All I knew was suffering—having
to study really hard with the stress of examinations. I started to
look at people who had finished university—were they happy?
I saw that some of my friends who were a few years older
than me had finished university and were now working hard to
buy a car, and they thought when they had got enough money
to buy a car, they would be happy. But once they had got their
car, they had to buy a little apartment for themselves, or they
were looking for a wife. They said, “Oh, when I find a wife and
get married, then I’ll be happy.” That’s a big joke, isn’t it?
One of my favourite sayings is from a guy who’s just got
married: “I didn’t know what happiness was until I got married,
and then it was too late!” These are only jokes. 😁 Marriage can
be happy and fulfilling.
Anyway, I saw that some of the people I knew who were mar-
ried still weren’t happy. So there’s something wrong with this
business about having found a partner in life, then we’ll be happy.
When you get married, you’ve got to work hard to find a house or
a place to live, and it’s really expensive. Sometimes you’ve got to
dukkha—suffering 🙔 85
take a second job. A lot of people think that after they’ve bought
a house and paid off their bank debt, then they’ll be happy. In
the meantime, they have kids. As soon as they have kids, the first
couple of months are okay, but after a while, they think that when
their kids grow up and leave home, then they’ll be free and then
they will be happy. But when the kids leave home, they’re not
happy because they’re getting close to retirement. They think
when they retire, then they will be happy. However, when they
retire, that is the time when people start going to temples and
churches. Do you know why they go to temples and churches
when they are old? Because they think if they go to the temple
and make a lot of good karma, when they die, they’ll be happy!
I’ve noticed that most of my life, and most of other people’s
lives, the idea is when I get this then I will be happy. When I
win the lottery, when I get rid of my husband, or when I get
enlightened, then I will be happy. I’ve realised that we are missing
the point there.
Suffering is thinking:
when I get something else,
I’ll be happy.
It’s called craving. It’s called desire. When you want some-
thing, it means you are not with what you want, so there is a
tension there. I want, but I haven’t got it yet. This means you have to
work hard, you have to struggle. You’re not content with what you
are or what you have. This is what the Buddha called suffering.
That word suffering needs to be understood because when I
realised that the Buddha said everything is suffering, I got quite
depressed. So it was wonderful when I went to see some monks

who were enlightened. I saw that they were very happy. How can
you be happy when everything is suffering? The reason is because
though there is suffering, there is also an end to suffering. There
is freedom from suffering.
There is suffering, but

there is also freedom from suffering.
I wanted some proof that such a thing as enlightenment

existed. I wanted to see some happy and peaceful monks. So it
was wonderful to actually live with a monk like Ajahn Chah, to
see he was genuinely happy. There was an end to suffering, and
you could actually see that.
I looked at Ajahn Chah and saw how he worked and how he
behaved. There was a man who didn’t want anything, who was
happy no matter what happened, but also who worked very hard,
teaching and helping other people. And he taught me exactly
what this suffering truly was and the way to end suffering.
Sometimes we wonder how we can get happiness in this
world and why there is so much suffering. A lot of times the
suffering, as the Buddha said, is because of desire and craving.
You think: ‘When I get this, I’ll be happy.’ ‘When I change this,
things will be different. When I change my job, change my part-
ner, change the country where I live, …’ Whatever it is you’re
changing, you think then you’ll be happy, that’s when I come to
this story.
Here is a story of two sisters who came to our monastery for
counselling. “What is your trouble, madam?” I said to the first
lady. Her trouble was that she was married and was having a hard
time, a lot of difficulty, a lot of trouble and she was wondering
whether she and her husband were suitable or compatible. I said,
“Look, when you are married to someone, sure it can be suffering,
but it can be a lot of fulfilment as well, so you should really put
more energy and effort in to make it work.”
I then gave her a few tips on how to make her marriage work.
I’m not against marriage; I was just having fun making jokes
about marriages. 😁
Life will be much better if you get your priorities right. If you
are in a marriage, your love for each other is more important
than being right. So remember why you married that person and
make that person important in your eyes. It happens very often
in a marriage that oftentimes we think our partner takes us for
granted and we’re not important to them anymore. We feel that
we want to talk to them but they’re not listening. There’s a lack
of communication. So it’s not hard to get the marriage back on
track.
You should always practice the philosophy from Tolstoy’s “The
Three Questions” with your partner: When is the most important
time? Now. Who is the most important person? The one you’re
with. What is the most important thing to do? To care.
Now is the most important time, so it doesn’t matter how
long you’ve been married. Now is the most important time to
tell your partner how much you love them and how much you
appreciate them and how much you care for them. If you’ve done
something wrong or said a stupid thing, now is the most im-
portant time to say sorry. Saying sorry costs so little, and you
get so much in return. It shows that you care, and that’s what a
woman or man wants in marriage—to be given importance and
to know the other person cares for them. You now have a very
simple formula for a successful and intimate marriage.
If your partner is doing the same thing to you, when you
are with them, when you are talking, when you are together, you
realise in this moment you are the most important person to your
partner. That’s called love, that’s called togetherness. They are
valuing you and you are valuing them, and then the relationship
just grows from that.
To care—how does care happen or how is it expressed? Care
happens in many different ways. When you care, you’re coming
from the right place, it always works incredibly well.
After teaching the elder sister, I turned to the younger one.
“What’s your problem, madam?” She hadn’t got a husband and
she wanted one desperately!
I told her, “You’ve got a single woman’s suffering. And if you
get a partner in life, you won’t have single woman’s suffering
anymore, but you will have husband suffering instead.”
Then, I turned to the elder sister, “If you left your husband,
you wouldn’t have husband suffering anymore, but you would
have a single woman’s suffering.”
Changing the situation you are in

is not overcoming suffering.
It’s just changing one form of suffering for another.
When I was at school, I thought that when I left school and

went to university, I would be happy. What I was doing was chang-
ing school suffering for university suffering. When I was very

young, I couldn’t wait to be old and to have my freedom. Now
that I’m old, I realise what I’ve wasted being young. When you
are young, you have a young person’s suffering, when you are
middle-aged, you have a middle-aged person’s suffering, and
when you are old, you have an old person’s suffering.
The point is not getting rid of suffering by changing the
situation you are in. Are you happy or do you want something
else? What are your dreams in life? What do you really want in
life? Sometimes people want to be rich. If you are rich, you don’t
get rid of suffering. You have a rich person’s suffering.
I know this because as a monk I mix with all levels of society.
Monks can go through doors which other people can’t go through.
Every now and again we see people who’ve got so much money.
I remember on this one occasion I had to do a house blessing
in Perth for a very, very wealthy lady. When we went to her house
for the morning meal, we sat down and drank tea while the meal
was being finished. I asked to go to the toilet. She had to draw me
a map of how to negotiate all these rooms in her mansion to get
to the toilet! Afterwards I was just chatting with her and asked
her how many people lived there. “Only me.” This poor woman
had a huge mansion, so much wealth, but she was incredibly
lonely. She had no one to share her evenings with, to share her
joys and pains. I asked her why. She said she’s afraid her relatives
will ask her for some money and as for friends, she didn’t know
if they were friends because they liked her or because they just
wanted money.
That is rich people’s suffering. Rich people are very lonely
because sometimes they can’t trust their friends and relations.

So if you want to be rich because you think that’s going to bring
you happiness, it won’t.
Why is there so much suffering in life? It’s because we don’t
realise what is important and what is necessary for happiness
in life.
In the West they have a tradition of eulogies—relations or
someone will say something about the life of the person who just
died. Never once have I heard people say how much money the
deceased had in the bank or how big a house they had. When a
person dies, what we remember is just how kind, how selfless,
how generous they were. Those things are what really count
because they are what makes happiness.
Only at a person’s death do we remember

what’s truly important in life:
kindness, generosity, friendliness,
and service to the community.
So what we should be aspiring to is not to be the richest

person in the world but to be the kindest, not to have the biggest
house but to have the biggest heart, not to be the person who
is the most aggressive goal-getter but to be the one who’s most
loving, not the one who gets the most but the one who gives the
most. Those are the secrets of ending suffering.
Sometimes things go wrong, we think, when people die trag-
ically or when we lose our job. It’s unfair, we think. “I’ve done all
the right things! What have I done wrong?” Why me? Why did
this happen?
I remember the story of a man who came to see my teacher

Ajahn Chah. He had been conscripted into the Thai army, and
then he got shot and quite severely wounded. He came to com-
plain to Ajahn Chah, “Why me? What sort of karma did I do that
I took a bullet?” Ajahn Chah looked at him and said, “You’re a
soldier. What do you think happens to soldiers? You’re shooting
at other people. What do you expect? Other people are going to
shoot bullets at you, and some of those bullets are going to hit.
It’s to be expected. When you joined the army, you should have
read the small print that you’re expected to take a bullet, to be
wounded. The karma which caused that to happen is joining the
army.”
Then, Ajahn Chah expanded upon that. He said some people
die young, some die of a heart attack, some die in a car crash,
some die from a lightning strike, some die in a tsunami, and
some just drop dead. He said, “Why does that happen? Didn’t
you read the small print before you took birth in this human
realm? It was there in the small print: you can die at any time
from any cause. That is being a human being.”
The reason we suffer is that we have expectations. We ask
something of life that can never be given. We ask something of
our husbands or wives or parents or our children which they can
never supply. The secret of overcoming suffering is just realising
the truth of life. We should make our desires realistic. Husbands
are like this, and wives are like that. Children are like that. They
will not all become doctors and marry the person we’d like them
to marry. Nor will they always live next door so we can mother
them for the rest of their lives. 😁
Unrealistic expectation causes suffering.
So when we understand the meaning of life, what life can

give us, and what it can’t give us, we then realise that the best
thing we can do is to care and to be kind. We can’t expect to
be appreciated for our generosity. We should give, expecting
nothing in return.
We also have to realise that happiness does not lie in some
mystical place in the future. Craving says: once I get this, then I
will be happy. So we sometimes miss the point:
Our real happiness is right here, right now.
I’ll finish off this part with one of the secrets to end craving.
This again is a story from my book Open the Door of Your Heart.
It’s the story of a monk who went to prison to teach prisoners.
After many weeks the prisoners invited him to stay behind for tea.
They started to ask him what it was like in a forest monastery—
how we have to get up very early at 4 o’clock, how we have to work
very hard, and there’s no sex, no sports, no television, no radio,
no music. We meditate all day, sleep on the floor, eat one meal a
day all in the same bowl. We don’t get what we want.
The prisoners were actually very surprised that prison is
so much easier than in a forest monastery. Physically it’s more
comfortable being in jail than being a monk. The monastery
is more austere and physically harder. So one of the prisoners,
out of misplaced compassion for their monk friend who they
had got to love and not thinking about what he was saying, said,
“It’s so terrible, so hard in your monastery! Why don’t you come
here and stay with us instead?” The prisoner invited the monk
to stay in jail! When he realised what he was saying, he burst out
laughing. 😄
Why is it that there is a waiting list of people trying to join an
ascetic monastery but that there’s a waiting list of people trying
to get out of jail? The point is: people who are in the monastery
want to be there, but in a prison, people don’t want to be there.
That is the main difference. From that story, I realised that life
has many prisons for you.
Any place you don’t want to be

is your prison.
If you are in a marriage and you don’t want to be there, then

your marriage is a prison for you. If you are a monk but you’d
rather be somewhere else, then being a monk is a prison for you.
If you’re sick with cancer and you don’t want to be sick, then your
body becomes a prison for you.
The Buddha understood that, and he talked about how to
escape from the prisons of life. You don’t need to change your
job, to change your partner, or change your body. That is not
how you escape from prison. The only way to escape prison is
changing your attitude: from ‘not wanting to be here’ to ‘wanting
to be here’. When you want to be here, you are ending craving.
If you want to be here ‘This is good enough’, then you’ll find
contentment, the secret to the end of suffering.
Contentment
is the secret to the end of suffering.
You may think that if only you get that promotion, then you’ll
be happy, but if you get that promotion with more responsibility,
you’ll have to work harder and you’ll get more stress.
So whatever you’ve got is good enough. “Okay, I’m not getting
the best salary, but this is good enough.” “I haven’t got the most
beautiful body in the world, but this is good enough.” “I haven’t
got the best kids in the world, but this is good enough.” When you
have this beautiful ‘good enough’ attitude, then you are content.
It doesn’t mean you’re lazy and don’t work hard.
You don’t work hard to get something; you work hard to
give. That’s the difference. Too many people work hard to get
something back, but real effort, real love is not to get but to give.
How can I help the company? How can I help my family? How
can I help my society? This is the meaning of life.
Real love is to give.
This kind of craving becomes impersonal, and it does not

lead to suffering. When you want to get something, thinking
that you will then become happy, that is suffering. When you
work very hard, expecting nothing back, that’s happiness.
Sometimes I work really hard as a monk, but I get a lot of
happiness. Why is that? Because when I work hard, I don’t work
to get anything; I work hard to give. And I’ve found the secret to
happiness.
When you work to get something, you’re going to suffer.
You’re probably not going to get it. Or, if you do get it, it’s not what
you thought it was. That’s why Oscar Wilde once said: “There are
only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and
the other is getting it.” The first cause of suffering is not getting
what you want, and the second cause of suffering is getting what
you want because you’ll find it’s not what you expected, and it
disappoints you.
All desires are unfaithful to you.

They promise you happiness.
But once you get what you desire,
it doesn’t give you happiness after all.
It’s strange how marketing works. One of the stories was

from a time when I was a young student. I saw an advertisement
on TV for St. Bruno Tobacco. It was a great advertisement. 😁
There was this ordinary looking guy walking down the street
alone; he didn’t have a girlfriend, and no one ever cared about
him. But then he put St. Bruno Tobacco in his pipe and lit it. (This
was the days before we knew smoking causes cancer.)
The aroma started spreading down the street. Then, an in-
credibly gorgeous girl in the bank smelt this St. Bruno Tobacco
and she was smitten. She jumped over the counter, following
this guy, captivated. Then, a beautiful red head in the news agent
jumped over the counter too and followed this guy with the St.
Bruno Tobacco. And another beautiful young girl in the grocery
store also got smitten.
In about one minute, there was a long line of incredibly gor-
geous women following this ordinary-looking guy because St.
Bruno Tobacco captivated women. Stupid, wasn’t it? Do you be-
lieve that? I did. I bought some St. Bruno Tobacco. 😄 No, it didn’t
work for me. Nobody followed me down the street. 😢
Why is it that we have these fantasies and dreams about what

life can give us and we get sucked in? We always think things
could be better. But really whatever you have is good enough. So
be happy with it. 😀
In the meantime, see how you can contribute to your family,
your friends, and society because that is the secret to happiness.
If you want something out of it, you just get suffering. If it’s for
others, for the good of the society or community, then there’s no
suffering at all. Just beautiful joy!
When I look back upon my life, my happiest moments were
the times when I gave the most or the times when I saw great
acts of kindness and generosity. What’s the happiest time of your
life?
❦
8 Anatta—Nobody There
This is the last session of our series of talks on the three basic
facts of existence in Buddhism. It is about a very big issue: ‘Who
are you?’ or ‘Are you there at all?’
Here, we are going to go to the deepest question to life. This
person inside of you, who came here today, who goes from life to
life—what is it really all about? It’s a strange thing when we talk
about who we are because the more we have a solid sense of self,
the bigger the ego we have, the more problems we cause in life.
A person with a big ego

creates lots of problems in this world.
It’s having a big ego that causes pride. Are you a proud person,
too proud to admit you make mistakes sometimes? How many
people here have never made a mistake? Put your hand up if
you’ve never made a mistake. 😉 Proud people never think they’ve
made a mistake. Or, they try to hide it under the carpet and
pretend that nobody’s noticed.
There are wonderful stories about a character called Nasrud-
din. (Note: Mullah Nasruddin Khodja is recorded as a famous
wise man living in Anatolia, today’s Turkey, in the second half of

the 13th century. His stories have been told for centuries almost
everywhere in the world.)
One story reads that one day after a meditation retreat, as a
surprise, this wise guru let his disciples follow him to a fair. As
he was going to the fair, he saw one of these booths where you
could fire an arrow at a target and if you hit the target, you’d get
a prize.
The Sufi cleric Nasruddin went there and said, “I’ll have a
go.”
His disciples asked him if he’d fired a bow and arrow in his
life, and he said, “No.”
“Don’t do it! You’re a religious leader. You’ll make a fool of
yourself. Everyone will laugh at us.”
He said, “I don’t care.”
So he bought three arrows and lined up the first shot. He
shot it and it went about only halfway to the target before it fell
on the ground. He was hopeless. The disciples started getting
embarrassed as the people saw this religious leader starting to
make a fool of himself. But for Nasruddin, he just turned around
and said, “That was the shot of a hasty man.”
He put a second arrow to the bow. This time he took more
time. He lined up the target and shot. This time it made the
distance, but it went a mile to the left, almost hitting a spectator.
People started to giggle. But Nasruddin said, “Now, that was a
shot of a proud man.”
His disciples said, “Leave it now. You’re just making a fool of
yourself.”
anatta—nobody there 🙔 99
He said, “No. I’ve got one arrow left.”

This time he lined up and shot, and it went right in the middle
of the bull’s eye! He got his prize, silencing all his critics.
The disciples said, “The first shot was the shot of a hasty man,
and the second shot was the shot of a proud man. What was the
third shot?”
Nasruddin said, “Oh, that? That was me.”
That’s the trouble sometimes when people are proud. 😁 Why
are people proud? It’s because they are attached to their idea of
who they are. Sometimes, if you’re a teacher, it’s very easy to
attach to the idea that you are a teacher. Sometimes you get it
wrong and make a mistake. When you make a mistake, it’s better
to admit it. I make mistakes sometimes. I remember a story of a
monk who made a mistake a long time ago.
All of the things in our monastery come as donations from
people such as you, who give a dollar here, a dollar there. Espe-
cially in the earlier years of our monastery we were quite poor.
When I became the abbot, I was very insistent that my monks
didn’t waste anything. Our donors aren’t rich people; some of
them are ordinary people who sometimes are out of work, but
they would still bring food to feed the monks.
So imagine what it was like when one day I was walking in
the grounds of the monastery, and I saw a hammer left out in
the rain and getting rusty. It must have been left out there for
over a week by some careless monk!
I called a meeting of the monks. You may think I am a soft
monk—very kind and gentle. But sometimes you’ve got to be
fierce. I was fierce that day! I gave a sermon about looking after
the gifts which people gave you.
“You never bought that hammer. It’s the gift of kind people. If
they saw that hammer left out there rusty, what would they think?
You’re spoiling their faith. They’d think what’s the purpose of
giving these things to monks who are so careless. They don’t even
bother to put the tools away after they’ve used them! This is not
on. This is bad karma. You should not do these things!”
Sometimes when you give a talk, people are lounging this
way and that way. But that day all the monks were sitting up
straight. I really hammered them this time. I really gave them
a fire and brimstone sermon. Not one of them confessed. And
that was the most disappointing. But maybe it was because they
were all scared. I must admit I was a bit tough. I really did go a
bit over the top with my fierceness.
I was very disappointed. At least, if you’ve done something
wrong, admit it. But no one admitted. When I went out of the
hall after that, I felt really disappointed with the monks under my
training. Why can’t they say sorry? I would have forgiven them.
As I walked out, I understood… I had an insight… I understood
now why no one would confess. I remembered who had left that
hammer out! It was me! And I had forgotten all about it until
after I had scolded all the monks! 😅
It was one of the most embarrassing times of my life as a
monk. If I had remembered first, it would have been much less
embarrassing. What did I do? I had to go back into the dharma
hall and say, “Sit down, everybody. I’ve found out who left the
hammer out.”
As my penance, I tell that story often. 😁 I wrote it in my book

Opening the Door of Your Heart, as well. The point is that we all
make mistakes, and it’s the ego that stops us from admitting
that we are at fault, and it’s the ego that stops us from asking for
forgiveness.
The ego stops us from solving the problem with

a simple “I’m sorry”.
If any of you have misbehaved… If you men have had a mis-

tress, please tell your wife and say sorry. It’s not a disaster. The
disaster has already happened when you started having that
mistress. Saying sorry is solving that disaster and asking for
forgiveness. It’s a wonderful thing if you ask with real sincerity.
And if someone says sorry to you, please forgive them as long as
they are sincere, as long as they are acknowledging, admitting
and learning not to do that again.
Here is an old Somerset Maugham story I remember reading
as a young man. It’s about a man, his wife, and his best friend
who was helping him on his coconut plantation. One day the
best friend had a tragic accident. As soon as a worker came to the
plantation to tell the husband that his best friend had died, his
wife fainted. It was a dead giveaway—his wife had been having
an affair with his best friend! So she had to confess.
The husband wanted to divorce her. But it was his neighbour,
an Englishman who ran the next plantation, who came to him
and said, “Don’t do that. Forgive her. I had a wife, and she had
an affair with someone else, so I divorced her. I never gave her
a second chance even though she pleaded for one. For the rest
of my years, I have been so lonely. Forgive. Because if you can

forgive, the other person will live up to that forgiveness, and
there is healing.”
Don’t be so proud.
Say sorry.
A lot of the time it’s pride which does things. It’s the ego
which asks, “How can I tell my friends? How can I live this down?”
Don’t worry what your friends think. It’s your feelings and your
future that are more important.
Forgiveness is much easier

when you have a small ego.
People with big ego
find it difficult to forgive.
The more we understand the teachings of non-self, the easier

it is to forgive others as well as ourselves and to have a much
happier life. The egos make us worry about what others think
about us.
There is an old joke I like. When you are in your twenties as
a young person, you are very, very concerned about what other
people think of you. That’s why young girls have to dress up
and have to keep up with the fashion. They have a lot of peer
pressure on them to be fashionable. Young men have to know all
the modern words. They have to have an iPod in their ears all the
time even though their mother is talking.
I remember as a young man myself, going to dances and
parties. Sometimes I saw a nice girl and wanted to talk to her,
but I got nervous. Why was I nervous? It was because I was scared
about what she would think of me.
When you get to your forties, as the saying goes, you get
what we call self-confidence. Most people at this stage, in general,
don’t care what other people think of them, they just go and do
it anyway. You are yourself. You can ask silly questions and don’t
care what other people think of you. But the best time comes in
your sixties…
In your twenties, you care what other people think of you. In
your forties, you don’t care what other people think of you. In your
sixties, you finally discover that people are not thinking about
you anyway. Everybody is thinking about themselves! Everybody
is concerned about themselves.
You don’t have to worry what people think of you. Just be
yourself—whatever that happens to be. When you don’t have to
be concerned what other people think of you, you don’t have to
defend your ego and yourself. And who are you anyway?
When you haven’t got a fixed idea about who you are,
you can be anyone you want to be.
Sometimes I say the wisest things, which even inspire myself!

“Where did that one come from?” 😄 At other times, I say dumb
things so that I get into trouble for it afterwards. But which one
is the right Ajahn Brahm? None of them are. It’s just that you’re
always changing to suit circumstances.
When Ajahn Chah went to the West, we asked him what it
was like in the West. He said, “When you go to England, you have
to smile. But if I go to Japan, I have to be severe.” He said that
wherever you go, you have to fit in to the culture of that place.
That’s why you can actually change and adapt to different people.
That’s the sign of a great monk. You could never pin him down to
what he was or who he was because he was no one at all—he was
empty. When you understand the teaching of non-self, when you
know there’s no one in here, no fixed entity, you are always able
to change.
When you know there’s no one in here,

you are always able to change.
I don’t know if you ever did well at school. If you thought you
were no good, you would be no good. As a schoolteacher, I was
very careful never to think that someone was bad at anything.
That was actually creating a self.
I once experimented with one child in my class who had come
bottom in mathematics the year before. Knowing he came bot-
tom, I wanted to do an experiment to see whether it was because
he was a self who just couldn’t do maths, or it was something
else. So for one whole year I gave him special attention and en-
couragement. At the end of the year, he came top in maths. It
surprised me and everyone else. It surprised him the most. It
was unfair on all the other children, I admit that. Nevertheless,
it proved an important thing to me: there is no one who can’t do
maths. There is no one who can’t do sports. There is no one who
can’t do meditation.
There’s no one who can’t reach enlightenment.

All you need is extra special attention.
Some of you need heaps of special attention. What non-self

means is that you are malleable and able to do whatever you
want if you have the confidence to do it. So the teaching of non-
self is an opportunity—you are not stuck in your past. It doesn’t
matter that you’ve failed or you’re only failing now, you can still
do whatever you like in the future.
If you had a self which was solid and imperfect,

there’s nothing you can do about it
because you would be stuck with it.
But you’re not! It’s always changing. As you understand this

more and more, it means that you don’t need to be stuck in the
past. It doesn’t matter who you think you are, there’s no such a
thing as intelligent or unintelligent. Everything is open when
there is no fixed ‘I’. As you understand this better, it means every
opportunity is open to you.
There’s no door which is closed to you

when you have a malleable self.
And that’s why when you see highly attained monks or nuns,
it’s amazing how they can do different things. This is simply
because they’ve got a plastic, malleable, changeable self, which
can be bent and changed into whatever they want it to be. I
saw Ajahn Chah doing that so often. He could be a very, very
kind counsellor in one moment and the next moment he could
be a fierce master, and the next he could be laying bricks with
everybody else and sharing jokes.
The less the self, the happier you are.
This is because whatever people say about you, it doesn’t

matter. How can we take any criticism when there’s no ‘me’?
When you understand the teaching of non-self, it gives you a lot
of freedom. But the problem is: how can we actually penetrate
that teaching and see how the conditioning happens?
There are two parts of the self or the thing you call ‘you’. The
first part of the self is the one in charge, the will, which I call the
doer. We go to school to make sure our will gets more effective,
so we can achieve more things in life. The second part of the self
is what we call the one who knows, the knower or consciousness.
The first is the active part of the mind, the second is the passive
part. Now when you investigate deeper: what is this will or this
doer?
Many years ago, I gave a simile of the driverless bus, which
goes like this.
Life is like a bus journey.
Sometimes on your journey through life, you have a won-

derful time. You have a wonderful, lovely family, you experience
good health, happiness, prosperity. Though you want it to last
forever, sometimes it doesn’t last as long as you hope. Things go
wrong. It is like going on a bus journey and you go through some
beautiful scenic countryside with rolling hills, flowers and lakes,
so you tell the bus driver “Slow down. Stop. I want to enjoy the
beauty surrounding me now.” Too often when you are having a
good time, the bus driver speeds up. The good time doesn’t seem
to last as long as it should because the driver, the will, does not
know its job.
And other times your bus journey passes through some very
ugly, distressing territory or what we call the toxic waste dumps
of life—when you’re having a lot of pain, difficulty, distressing
experiences in life. So you tell the bus driver to speed up out of
there. It is similar to when you try to tell your will: “Please find a
way to solve this problem. Please get out of this pain as soon as
possible.” But very often when life is difficult, the bus driver slows
down or even stops sometimes. The terrible suffering times thus
last longer than they should.
What do you do when you have suffering? The trouble is that
you have to find that bus driver—the will—to teach them how to
drive the bus better, to slow down in the happy times and to rush
on in the painful times. You have to find out who is in control,
where they are and then you can teach this controller who drives
your life to experience more happiness and less pain.
Where do you think your will resides? It resides deep inside
of you. When we do meditation, we always go inside, deep into
the moment, into the body, into the silence, into the mind. You
then see deep inside yourself until you come to the bus driver’s
seat. You see the source of your will. In this deep meditation,
you get one of those powerful deep insights which changes your
whole life.
Deep in your meditation

you find that
the bus driver’s seat is empty.
It’s also like flying on an aircraft. Sometimes when I had

many things to do or was in a hurry, I thought of going up to the
pilot’s cabin and telling them, “Pilot, can you hurry up, please?” Of
course, no pilot will do that. In fact, when you are in an aircraft, it
is all completely out of your control. So what do you do when you
are in an aircraft? You sit in your seat and just enjoy the ‘insight’
service. The ‘insight’, not the inflight. That’s what you do in life.
You sit down and enjoy the insight service.
What I mean is: when you see no self, you stop complaining.
We always think that if we can control things a bit more or if we
can get this self in line so that it’s wise, then we won’t need to
suffer anymore.
One of the most meaningful experiments which I saw was
when I was a student at Cambridge University. The Psychic Re-
search Society of Cambridge used to have unusual people come
to give a talk, including a hypnotist.
Because we were young students, everyone would volunteer.
Some people can be hypnotised easily, and some can’t, but there
was always one student who was a great subject. So once the
hypnotist hypnotised a student and made him do stupid things.
It was absolutely entertaining! (We were really mean and nasty
in those days. 😄)
One of the things which the hypnotist did was telling this
young student, “After I take you out of hypnosis, I’m going to
touch my left earlobe. And after I do, you’ll stand up and sing
the British national anthem in full voice. When you come out
of hypnosis, you won’t remember that, but you will sing when I
touch my left ear.”
So, after finishing making this student do all sorts of em-

barrassing things, the hypnotist took him out of hypnosis and
sent him to sit down. During the next 20 minutes, being a great
entertainer, every now and again he’d move his finger to his ear
and scratch his nose. He had us all at the edge of our seats. Fi-
nally, he touched his ear. And this poor student stood up and
started singing in full voice “God save the Queen!” He sang the
whole national anthem, and we were almost wetting ourselves
with laughter. When he finished, the hypnotist asked him, “Why
did you do that?” And the young man gave what was to him an
apparently excellent reason.
It was quite clear to everybody in that audience that the
young man thought he had freely decided to sing the national
anthem out of a moment of patriotism, when we all knew he had
no choice at all—he had been completely brainwashed. What you
think is ‘free will’ may not be free will after all.
When you go to the shops to buy some cornflakes, do you
really have free will when you decide which brand to buy or are
you conditioned by the advertisements which you have seen on
television or in magazines? You would be surprised how easy it
is to condition you. Sometimes the will which we think is free
is actually just the process of conditioning, the process of cause
and effect.
Your will is conditioned.

It is dependently originated.
Once you understand that, you’ll understand why you go to

dharma centres: so that you can have your will reconditioned to
be kind, to be compassionate, to be generous.
So it’s important, as the Buddha says, to associate with good
people, kind people, and wise people because ‘your will’ will get
conditioned by them. You’ll find you too become kind, generous
and happy simply because you get brainwashed. And it’s a good
thing to be conditioned this way.
But there’s another part of the self: the knower. That too is
empty, just a process. Let me tell you a great story about my
teacher Ajahn Chah.
In the last year of Ajahn Chah’s teaching career just before
he got sick, we knew he was getting sick as he complained about
dizzy spells. So to care for our teacher, we built him a sauna in
our monastery, Wat Pah Nanachat. (In the old texts, we found
out that in the time of the Buddha there were saunas in the
monasteries.) So we invited Ajahn Chah to come over once a
week to have his sauna. When he came over, he’d always give us a
Dharma talk first and then we’d take him over to the sauna and
help him.
One day after he gave such an inspiring talk, I was so uplifted
I just wanted to meditate. As there were so many monks there,
I thought I’d let others look after him like washing his bathing
cloth or massaging his back. So I went to the back of the hall
and went into very deep, joyful meditation. I don’t know how
long I was meditating. When I came out afterwards, I thought
that there might still be time to serve my teacher. So I got up and
walked towards the sauna, but it was too late. Ajahn Chah had
finished.
Accompanied by two Thai laymen, he was coming along the
path in the opposite direction. He was on his way back to the
car to go back to his monastery. As I came up to him, he looked
straight through me—like only powerful masters can do, to check
me out. He’d seen from the smile on my face that I had just
emerged from a state of deep meditation, so he decided to try to
enlighten me. He looked at me, and he barked, “Brahmavamso!”
to get my attention, and then he asked the question: “Why?”
There was the opportunity for seeing the depth of all things.
It was a fast way to enlightenment. But I was stupid, and all I
could think of saying was: “I don’t know.”
Ajahn Chah did what he always did when we were absolutely
dumb—he just laughed his head off. Then, he controlled his fea-
tures and looked straight into my eyes once more.“Brahmavamso,
I will tell you the answer. If anybody asks that question ‘Why?’
again. This is the answer: Mai mee arai.” Mai mee arai is Thai, mean-
ing ‘There is nothing’. Then, he looked at me and asked, “Do you
understand?” And I said, “Yes.” He shook his head and said, “No,
you don’t.” 😄
That’s one of the best teachings of non-self. The answers to
the questions ‘Why?’, ‘Where does this all come from?’, ‘Who is
this in there?’, or ‘What is this knower or doer mind that you take
to be you?’ The answer to the question is: there’s nothing.
Once you see that there’s no one there,

you will be free.
Where is the self ? If you see it as something that belongs

to you, then there’ll be ownership, and thus craving and attach-
ment. Whenever I was attached to something, I’d put it down
and stop attaching, but then I’d pick up something else. It was
so hard to let go of attachments. You drop one thing, and you
grasp something else.
Why is it so hard to get rid of attachments? I’ve realised the
answer with a simile ‘Whenever you have a hand, it will always
pick things up. That’s what a hand does. It’s the nature of the
hand to grasp.’
Likewise, it’s the nature of a self to grasp—that’s what a self
does. When there is a self, there’ll always be possessions and
grasping. The only way to stop picking up my cup or picking up
something else is to cut off my hand. So the only way to stop
attaching to and grasping things in this world is to cut off the
thing that does the grasping: the self.
The only way to be free is to undermine

the illusion of self.
It’s tough to do, but it’s the only way. You can’t understand
this, just by thinking. But one day when you’re meditating very
deeply, you’ll see the source of ‘will’ and you’ll see it disappear.
You’ll see the source of knowing, and you’ll see that it vanishes, as
well. You’ll understand that in the heart of all things is emptiness.
There’s no one in here. It’s like a rainbow or a cloud in the sky.
When you rise high, you’ll see that it’s just mist, nothing solid.
When you can see that there’s no one in there, then all grasp-
ing finishes. Then, you can be whoever you are or no one at all.
Then, you are free. Who is Ajahn Brahm? It’s just an illusion with
no solid core.
Only when we realise that there’s no one there

do we find freedom at last.
❦
9 Karma Without Belief
The subject of this talk is the Buddhist idea of karma. How can
we understand that idea, not just with belief, but through some
experience or some deeper understanding?
The problem with modern life is that we are asked to believe
in so many things and sometimes in something that doesn’t
make much sense. You may say the same with the law of karma.
If it’s something you just have to believe in, then you’re not going
to get involved in such a thing because beliefs are uncertain. But
can we really understand karma in a much deeper way without
the need to rely upon belief ?
The first thing I always like to impress upon people is that
this law of karma is not about the common simplistic idea that
karma means if you punched your mother when you were young,
you’re going to have hay fever in your nose for the rest of your
life. 😁 Or, whatever you’re experiencing now is because you’ve
done something similar to somebody else in the past. That idea
of action and punishment is something which has never made
sense to me at all. It is far too naive and simplistic.
When you try to find out ‘Why is this happening to me? Is this
because of some bad karma I did in the past?’ it’s not very helpful
karma without belief 🙔 115
because you can’t work out why these things are happening to
you. It happens. Thinking that it’s happened because you did
something bad in the past is very negative, and it gets you into a
guilt trip. This is something which I’ve tried to encourage you to
get rid of.
About 30 years ago, I went to see a doctor here in Byford, and
while waiting for the doctor to call me in, somebody who knew
me came into the doctor’s surgery. He saw me and said, “I never
expected to see you in here.”
I felt really guilty! I’m a monk who meditates and leads a
nice peaceful lifestyle and doesn’t get involved in the stresses of
normal life, so I’m supposed to be healthy, living a good lifestyle.
He made me feel guilty about being in a doctor’s surgery.
But what’s wrong with being ill? Imagine that all these years
you’ve lived as a human being, and you have never had a day of
sickness in your life, you would be weird! You’d be so strange
that the medical establishment would want to get you into their
universities and do all sorts of tests on you. The point is: sickness
is natural.
There’s nothing wrong with being sick.

There’s nothing wrong with having problems in life.
Don’t think that there’s something wrong, that we’re being

punished for a bad thing we did in the past, and that it was
karma. No, it is not. This is part of a human life. You’ll still get
sick sometimes even if you eat brown rice and vegetables and
exercise every day. Even if you’re a really good wife, doing all
the right things, still your husband argues with you. That’s what
marriage is like. What we’re doing there is accepting that those

things are part of life.
When we say there’s something wrong when our marriage
is broken up, what happens? Guilt. Anger. Blame. Those are the
things which I’m trying to dismantle from life. So please have
no guilt or anger and say: “What is happening to me right now
is part of life.”
This is taking the law of karma to see it in a far deeper, much
better way. We aren’t blaming ourselves, saying that it was be-
cause of something bad we did in the past. Yes, it’s got its causes,
but the point is when we say: “There’s nothing wrong with me
that I’m having a problem in my life,” it takes away the guilt and
the anger. And why is it right to think that way?
Because it gives you the opportunity

to embrace it,
to learn from it,
and to grow from it.
Also, when you’re having a good time, enjoy it. There’s noth-
ing wrong with enjoying yourself and being happy.
Some years ago, I was counselling a person who was having
a very good time but was feeling guilty about it. So I typed out a
letter and signed it, telling that person that it was a happiness
license. “I, Ajahn Brahm, spiritual director of the Buddhist So-
ciety of Western Australia, hereby grant you permission to be
happy.” I signed it for them so that they could put it on their wall
and remind themselves that there is nothing wrong with being
happy and they don’t need to feel guilty about it.
If you can enjoy your happiness, then perhaps you may be

able to say the same thing about giving yourself permission to
have a problem, as well.
Both happiness and problems

are part of this thing called life.
When you’re happy, great! When you’re having difficulty,

learn from it, grow from it. It’s a great fertiliser for your garden.
We have a big compost pile in our monastery with all the excess
food and some manure from the prison farm up the road. People
love compost because they know that it’s going to make their
gardens beautiful.
That was the whole point of my truckload-of-dung simile.
(Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung? is a story in Opening the Door
of My Heart and the title of the book published in the United
States). When unpleasant things happen in life, accept them
and grow from them instead of blaming yourself and saying
‘Oh! It’s my karma. I’ve done a terrible thing, stupid me! Why
did I do this?!’ then getting depressed, getting angry or bitter.
‘It’s his fault. It’s the government’s fault.’ No, that’s not part of
Buddhism.
Instead of getting angry at yourself or at others, which is
the cause of a lot of violence in this world, we accept it. The real
law of karma is the one which you don’t have to have faith in but
which you can try out.
Once you embrace both problems and happiness—you enjoy
the happiness and work with the difficulties—you’ll find that it’s
during the difficulties and problems in life when you really grow
and become an incredibly powerfully wise compassionate being,

not only for others but also for yourself. So the law of karma
means ‘What am I doing with what I’ve got?’
It’s the manure that fertilises the flowers

and gives sweetness to the fruit.
Another nice thing about the law of karma is ‘Where is karma

made?’ The whole idea of karma is cause-and-effect, so it gives
you a sense of control, especially control of the future. You can’t
do much about your past—it’s done, but your future lies ahead
of you, and you’ve got whole vistas of possibilities.
Some of you may think: “Oh, not me. I’ve stuffed up all my
life, and I’m going to stuff up again.” That kind of thinking is
not the law of karma. The law of karma means you can make
anything out of what you’ve got.
Out of the manure you can make a garden.

Out of happiness
you can make so many other people happy.
Whatever you have to deal with, the future is totally open to

you. We are not restricted or limited at all.
The possibilities of your life

are totally open and free.
The law of karma means all options are open, and you can
do anything with what you’ve got right now. There’s no such
thing as hopelessness. That’s why you should do the very best
you can. Some people, worrying about the future, go to fortune

tellers to try to predict the future, but while they’re being anxious,
they’re not doing anything about their future. That’s why they
keep stuffing up. And where do you make your karma? Right
now!
Now is the place

where your future is being made.
What I understand about the law of karma is: karma is what

I am doing right now about my future. If I’m being negative now,
blaming and being angry at people, and keep moaning ‘Why
me?’ or looking at the future with dark glasses, I’m ruining the
present moment and creating a terrible future for myself.
Why am I going to destroy my future by carrying around the
pain of the past? I’m not going to do that. Now is the only time
I’ve got, so I’m going to let go of the past and forgive so as to be
free and happy. If I want to have a happy weekend, the weekend
starts right now in this very moment. So I’m going to be peaceful,
kind, caring and compassionate.
Compassion is a beautiful thing because, like wildfires, it
takes off with just one little spark. With an act of kindness in a
society, a bushfire of compassion will be spreading.
Karma means making things happen. You don’t make things
happen tomorrow or next week. You make it happen now. Un-
derstanding the power of that, you realise this is the time to
transform, this is the time you let go, this is the time you’re free.
And once you walk out of the jail of the past, you’re free forever.
So get out of jail right now. 😉
When you learn how to do this, your future gets happier and
happier. When a problem comes or whatever happens in your life,
instead of saying there’s something wrong and getting negative,
please think: “This is great! Let’s learn from this.”
Another issue is about making mistakes. How many of you
have never made a mistake? What happens when you make a
mistake? Do you feel embarrassed? No, you shouldn’t. You’re just
a human being. Isn’t it great that we’re allowed to make mistakes?
This thinking takes away a lot of guilt and, more importantly,
fear. Out in the world, if you make a mistake, you get told off
or you lose your job. Not in Bodhinyana monastery where I live.
When people here make a mistake, “Well done. You’re human.”
That’s why the place is a mess. 😁 No, it’s not a mess; it’s a very
happy place.
The thing which I’m most proud of about our monastery is
that people feel welcome. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t
have to sit in the correct posture. If you don’t want to bow, don’t
bow and don’t feel guilty about it.
One time at Dhammaloka, our city centre, a lady sitting in the
corner over there fell asleep during my talk and started snoring.
Was there something wrong about that? No. The mistake was
when somebody tried to wake her up! I told them afterwards that
the woman had told me that she was one of those unfortunate
victims of domestic abuse and she was so afraid and so tense
in her house that she was not sleeping well. But here is the first
place in weeks where she felt safe. It’s the atmosphere you create
here that’s even more important than all the talks that are given.
The fact that she felt so safe that she could lie down and actually
fall asleep made me think, ‘Wow! What a great achievement of

the Buddhist Society of Western Australia! We could give that
feeling of safety and kindness so that she could fall asleep.’
Sometimes you make what people call mistakes, and how
many times have you been told off ? You think, ‘What did I do
wrong? I just made an error, made a slip.’ Wouldn’t it be nice to
be accepted and loved, and to know that there’s nothing wrong
with making a mistake?
So number one: we don’t hide our mistakes; we face up to
them and learn from them. The psychology of this attitude is
that people actually make fewer mistakes when they’re allowed
to. When you’re so terrified of making mistakes—we call it walk-
ing on eggshells—you’re not relaxed, you can’t perform to your
highest level, and that is why you make so many mistakes.
If you are going out with someone, please tell your girlfriend
or boyfriend that they’re allowed to make mistakes. Tell them
that from the beginning so that they can relax. When you relax
and can be yourself, you have a much better time together. And
when you get married, tell your partner, “Darling, you’re allowed
to make mistakes.”
Trust that people are trying to do their best.

Most people are like that.
Getting angry, getting guilty, and blaming is bad karma. Ac-

cepting, embracing, compassion, and learning is good karma. I
don’t think you need to have faith in that. You can try it out your-
self. Always remember that it’s not what you’re experiencing—
no matter whether it’s a problem or happiness, it’s how you’re
experiencing it that is the source of karma. That is where karma

lives.
It’s not what you’re experiencing.

It’s how you’re experiencing it!
Suppose you’re going through a divorce. That’s part of life; it

happens. How are you doing this? With anger? With guilt? No.
This is part of life; there is nothing wrong with this. So please
learn from it, grow from it, and become a better person. Going
through a problem in life, a cancer or a divorce, is not bad karma,
but if you really get into grief about it, into denial, into anger,
looking for somebody to blame, that’s bad karma.
Karma is the way you relate to life,

not life itself.
Guilt, anger, denial, or blaming is bad karma, a cause for

most of the misery in this life. When people think something
is bad, they’re afraid. That’s why people often get into denial
when someone they love is close to death, or they themselves
have developed a fatal tumour. ‘Why me?’ That’s actually what
we all say, isn’t it, if we don’t really understand the law of karma?
Karma is happening right now. You are making your future
right now by the attitude you have towards what’s happening
in your life. Good karma is when you say, ‘How can I learn from
this?’ with what is happening now.
A very beautiful old Chinese saying ‘It’s better to light a can-
dle than curse the darkness’ encapsulates all that I’ve taught this
evening. So whenever you want to complain about something

in life—your partner or your job, instead of complaining, please
light a candle. There are always many candles around to light.
There’s always something positive you can do—sometimes it is
just to embrace and learn.
Sometimes people ask: ‘What is the meaning of life?’ A simple
answer to a very deep question is to learn.
Life is work in progress.
So how are you growing? I don’t mean growing in size or

growing your bank account; I’m talking about growing your
wisdom, your compassion, your understanding of life. In the past
year how much have you learnt? How much wiser and kinder
have you become? That’s the meaning of life.
To become wiser and kinder—

That’s the meaning of life.
So how do you become wise and kind? Right now is where

you do this, as well as building happiness and health. Now is
where karma is made.
Now you know not only the meaning of life but also the secret
of life. People look for the secret of life in the future with all their
plans and expectations and what they’re going to achieve. But
you never find anything in the future. Sometimes people look
for the secret in the past, searching over all the things which
have happened to try to find the meaning from the mistakes
of the past. But you never find anything except anger, guilt and
negativity.
You only find the meaning of life right now.
The secret is in this moment, absolutely for free. Truth is like

air—no one can own it; we all share it. You can pollute the air,
and people can pollute truth, still there’s enough truth out there,
and you just need to breathe in. 😀
Question: How do you motivate people who have no will to
live?
Ajahn Brahm: Instead of having the will to live, just have the
will to be compassionate, to be kind.
Losing the will to live is the fear of the future. They feel they’ve
had enough when they can’t see any positivity or any hope. Hope-
fully the talk I’ve given this evening, which is actually saying
there’s nothing wrong with life, will give them some understand-
ing. The world never changes, and life has always been like this.
So please see if we can change our attitude towards our life.
The will to live is

the will to be kind.
Just take away the will to live, the will to die or the will to go
anywhere, and just be. 😀
Question: How can animals improve their karma?
Ajahn Brahm: One of my friends, a doctor in Melbourne, got
a big Labrador. She gave it the name ‘Chemo’. That’s a really weird
name, isn’t it? Why did she name it Chemo?
She said, “Because I’m training this dog to be one of the dogs
that go into wards with people who are very sick so that the
patients can pet and stroke that dog.”
The compassion which a beautiful soft animal generates has

a very strong positive effect on people’s recovery—they actually
get better. Having a beautiful dog to play with in the ward spikes
up serotonin and endorphin and all other beautiful healthy things
in our body.
That’s why she called her dog Chemo, shortened for chemo-
therapy, as a joke. So Chemo the dog went into so many hospital
wards in its life, healing and helping people. That dog must have
made a huge amount of good karma just by generating happiness
in other beings. That is one example of how animals make good
karma: by being kind, loving and trusting. When you see these
beautiful qualities in a little dog or a cat, you are reminded how
to be kind.
So that’s how animals can make good karma—teaching about
kindness, about love, about trust.
Question: What is some basic daily practice that a lay person
should do?
Ajahn Brahm: The daily practice is to start now—be kind, be
compassionate. It doesn’t matter what you do; how you do it is
really important. You may be just driving to work in the morning,
but how are you driving to work? Are you listening to the radio
and getting yourself all upset because the traffic is bad? When
you’re on the way to work, is your mind already at work?
A daily practice to try when you drive to work is: every time
you get to the stop sign, please think that the Buddha is teaching
you to stop, be peaceful, and come into the present moment. All
the stop signs which you see around the cities of the world are
the dharma to remind you to stop and be here rather than always
moving. That’s one of the nice daily practices.

Another daily practice is about the emperor’s three questions
from one of Tolstoy’s stories: now is always the most important
time, the person in front of you is always the most important
person, and the only thing to do is to care.
It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. If you’re at home by
yourself, you are the most important person because that’s the
one you’re with, and care for yourself and care for life. When you
are with other people, you care for them.
What really does work is developing the right attitude to
whatever you have to do in life. That should be your daily practice.
Developing the attitude to be kind and caring

should be our daily practice.
❦
10 Total Listening
Listening is such an important part of learning to live in harmony

with other people as well as in understanding oneself.
An ability to listen can be improved when one learns how
to be mindful and aware. As awareness gets stronger, one can
listen much more attentively and fully—one literally hears and
understands more. Then, one learns how to listen to the world
rather than always talking back at the world; especially, one will
learn to listen to oneself and one’s own mind.
It’s part of our training as monks that we learn how to sit
still for hours without talking. With nine years of training in
Thailand in how to sit quietly as senior monks gave talks, when I
first came to Australia, I would sit quietly while the senior monk
gave talks on Friday nights. Even afterwards when people would
ask questions, they’d ask questions of him, and I would just sit
there.
About four months after I arrived, the senior monk went to
Thailand for a break, so I had to give the talks. As soon as I started
speaking, a young girl came up to me and said, “That’s amazing—
you can talk! I thought you were brain-damaged.” Just because I
didn’t talk, she thought I was somehow mentally deficient. 😄
Isn’t it a shame that we don’t respect silence, that we only re-

spect talking? It’s one of the reasons why we aren’t good listeners,
but we’re good talkers. We have developed the ability to express
ourselves as we learn that in school and in many other parts of
life to express, to present, to convey our feelings to others. But
can we receive what others convey to us? Can we really listen?
We respect talking, but

can we really listen?
Too busy to listen
Often when somebody is talking to you, you’re only half listening

and probably paying more attention to the conversation going
on inside of you, the inner chatter, so much so that you don’t pick
up what other people are trying to tell you.
We miss so much in life

when we’re too busy talking
and not listening.
It’s like the old thing between husbands and wives; one starts
to talk and the other starts thinking: “Here we go again. Why
does he/she keep saying the same old thing? I’ve had enough of
this. Doesn’t he/she know that I’m tired too? I don’t need this
now!” Our partner has just started talking, and there’s already a
conversation going on between our ears to which we pay much
more attention than what our partner’s saying. We just can’t
listen.
total listening 🙔 129
People are also fantasising or dreaming because their fantasy

world is much more fun than listening. That’s why you have to
tell jokes every now and again to keep people’s attention. 😉
Relationships with other people could cause so much strife
but they could also bring so much happiness. Why is it that peo-
ple keep telling me that they can’t communicate? You need two
people to communicate—one person to do the talking, which is
easy to find, and the other one to do the listening, which is hard
to find!
A story which I love repeating is when we first moved to Ser-
pentine. I was walking past the monastery kitchen just before
lunch and happened to look through the window and saw six
women cooking our meal for the day (a beautiful custom of mak-
ing good karma). But I noticed that every one of those six had
their mouth open, talking at the same time. So I started contem-
plating: ‘If six people are talking and there are only six people
in that room, who’s left to do the listening?’ Obviously, no one!
That represents our modern life: everybody’s doing the talking
and very few are doing the listening.
Compassionate listener
If you really want to be wise and get on this spiritual path—

in other words, to become more compassionate and more un-
derstanding of what’s going on—it’s much more important to
be a listener than to be a talker. We start in an ordinary way of
learning how to listen to each other.
Talking, we can get into arguments.

Listening, we become wise.
When you’re listening, you’re absorbing all this beautiful in-

formation. You’re able to hear not only the words but also what’s
between those words as well as the body language. Whenever
somebody is communicating with you, it’s not just through their
words; there are so many other channels of communication hap-
pening, even at the mind-to-mind level.
If anybody thinks that monks or nuns have psychic powers
and are able to read minds, it’s nothing supernatural. It’s just
about us being aware enough, silent enough, with our mind
empty enough to pick up more information than other people
usually do, and then we can really understand what a person is
saying. When somebody starts speaking to me, I don’t prepare
what I’m going say next and I don’t judge them or what they are
saying.
As a monk, we learn how to listen. We train in how to keep a
quiet mind so that we can truly listen with all our senses. I call
that ‘Total Listening’.
An amazing thing happens when we absorb all this informa-
tion and allow it to be processed through our brain, through our
mind: an answer comes out.
Playing the violin
A counsellor from Sydney once told a story at a Buddhist confer-

ence about a client who had flown all the way from the United
States. This client had so many disorders, including anxiety, de-

pression and a few terminal cancers. She was in a physical and
mental mess, and no one had managed to help her. She was a
very wealthy woman and had heard of this counsellor over in
Sydney, so as a last resort she made an appointment and came
all the way from the States.
Informed of this client’s background, the counsellor, who
was a meditator, knew that all the usual ways of dealing with this
lady’s problem wouldn’t work; they’d already been tried. So she
decided to do ‘Total Listening’.
When the woman came into the room the counsellor just
went very peaceful and very quiet—no thoughts. She threw away
all of her learning because that would just create more static
between the ears. She listened to this person for a few minutes,
and when it was the counsellor’s turn to speak, these words came
out of her mouth—she didn’t know from where: “I think it’s about
time you started playing the violin again.”
It was a comment which had no connection to what had been
physically said but which caused this woman to burst out crying.
And her catharsis began from that point. It turned out that when
she was young, her mother said that a girl of her social position
should not waste her time playing music, even though that was
something she loved, and that she should do something more
important. It was the beginning of her mother controlling her
life, stopping her from doing what she really wanted to do. Just
the statement: “You should start playing the violin again” gave
permission to this elderly woman, who was suffering so much
from cancers and other disorders, to be free and to follow what
she really wanted to do, to unwind, to un-control and just to be.

From that point on, her recovery started.
It was one of those examples where you listen rather than
think. Your intuitive powers become amazing, and you can say
and do things which you cannot predict, which may not make
sense, but which really work.
Listen deeply
A lot of times when we think too much, we don’t really listen.

And when we don’t listen, we don’t understand and mess many
things up. So in life, please see if you can calm that thinking mind
down enough so that you become a great listener. How do you
become quiet, stop speaking so much, and especially calm down
that inner voice?
Meditation is
where you learn how to listen deeply.
In meditation, we learn how to be quiet
so that we hear and understand much more of life.
When meditating, we realise that this inner chatter is what

causes us to be unable to listen. There are little techniques for
how to be quiet.
Present moment awareness is very important because in the
present moment there’s nothing much to talk about. If you really
get into the present moment, much of the busyness of life is
taken away from you, which means it’s much easier to be silent.
Another technique which people find very effective is using

a mantra. There are many mantras and whilst I’m a Theravada
monk, I can recommend the Tibetan mantra of ‘Om mani padme
hum’. You chant that to yourself to block out thoughts, which
sometimes become incessant. Once you start that chant, you then
introduce spaces between the words. Not just ‘Om mani padme
hum,’ but ‘Om... mani... padme... hum...’ Then, you lengthen the
spaces between words as you go on. If you find thoughts come in
those spaces, then close those spaces down until one word follows
the other with almost no space at all. But as you become quieter,
let those spaces get longer and longer, and in those spaces, you
have the silent mind.
Pausing gives you the opportunity to listen.
That is a very powerful way to communicate with and under-

stand other people, no matter who: people you live with, your
co-workers, your clients, etc. When you learn the communication
skill of listening through a silent mind, it’s amazing just how
well you will do in your career no matter what it happens to be.
Listening to the body and mind
What we’re doing in meditation is learning how to listen, espe-

cially to our body and all its feelings at the beginning. Once you
get this great ability to listen, it’s not just to understand other
people but also to learn about yourself.
When I teach a meditation retreat, I often tell people that
when they get up in the morning, they should ask their body
and their mind: “Body, what do you want to do today? Mind,

what do you want to do right now?” It’s a crazy thing to do, but
this is how you’re learning to listen to your body and mind to
find out what they need. Your body sometimes needs a glass of
water, sometimes it needs something to eat, sometimes it needs
to rest, sometimes it needs exercise. It’s amazing what you find
out about your body.
When I have a day off, I ask my body: “What do you want to
do?” Sometimes it says: “I want to go to bed.” I used to say: “No!
You can’t go to bed; it’s only 9 o’clock in the morning!” But now I
say, “Okay. If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine by me.” I listen
to my body and just have a nap, and when I get up afterwards, I
feel really good, like I’ve had a really good rest. Sometimes you
sleep out of habit and when you get up at a certain time you feel
tired. There’s something wrong there because you’re not working
with your body.
There are other times, it’s one or two o’clock in the morning
and my body says it doesn’t want to go to sleep but it wants to
meditate. Fine. 😁
I listen to my body,
and then my body becomes a friend.
You may have a partner who doesn’t listen to you; how diffi-
cult is it to live with him/her? Now you can understand why your
body sometimes gets sick. It’s throwing a tantrum. It wants to
teach you a lesson. As the old joke goes: “Death is nature’s way of
telling you to slow down.”
Often when people get sick, it’s not that they suddenly get
cancer or heart disease, but that the illness has been growing
over many months, maybe years. The body often tells us that it
needs us to relax, rest or do exercise, but a lot of times we’re too
busy to listen. Only when you learn how to be quiet instead of
having inner chatter can you actually listen to the body and feel
its sensations. And if something’s wrong, you know it straight
away and thus can take a course of action to look after it.
Listen to your mind as well. When you listen to the mind, it’s
amazing what you’ll learn. Sometimes, it says: “I really need to
work a problem out.” Sometimes it says: “No, I’ve had enough. I
just want to rest.” What the mind wants most of the time is just a
bit of respect: to be listened to and appreciated rather than being
treated as a slave. Just like you would love some respect from
your boss. You’re trying your very best, but how often is it that
your boss gives you extra work and tells you off ? Similarly, your
body is saying: “I’m trying my best. Why do you keep pushing
me around?” Or, the mind is saying: “I’m trying my best to be
peaceful and happy. Just give me a break!”
What the mind wants most of the time

is just a bit of respect.
You get a lot of benefits when you listen to your body and
your mind, and act accordingly. You trust that the body and the
mind know much better than you.
Kindness
The most important rule in a Buddhist monastery is compassion

and kindness. With compassion and kindness, you will know how
to listen to the world and to respond in a skillful and wholesome
way.
When you listen to kindness,
health, peace, wisdom
all come.
End-of-life care
Another important aspect of total listening is that it can solve

problems that most of us face from time to time, especially when
our loved one is on their death bed. When your mother or father
is in hospital and on life support, and the doctor asks: “Can I
have permission to turn off the life support?” what do you do?
There’s a simple solution: you sit next to your parent’s bed and
just listen. You listen to see if your parent is still there, to see
what your parent wants to do. Your parent may not be able to
hear your words, but they will know your thoughts if they’re still
there, and you’ll know their thoughts.
So you ask: “Mum, have you had too much? Do you want to
keep going, or do you want to die? It’s your call, mum.” It isn’t the
daughter or son’s job to terminate anybody’s life; it’s the mum’s
choice. So you ask that question and listen. If you’ve done a little
bit of meditation, if you’ve learned how to listen, you can ‘hear’
the answer clearly.
That’s what we mean by total listening. It can be applied with

your pets. If the vet says your cat or dog has cancer and it needs
to be put down. Are you going to kill that animal? It’s one of
those quandaries people have with Buddhists because we’re not
supposed to kill anybody or anything. What should you do? And
the answer, again, is to ask your pet that question. It’s not your
call; it’s their call. So you take your pet to a corner of the room
and ask it: “Have you had enough? Do you want to go, or do you
want to carry on?”
A few years ago, a long-term supporter of mine told me that
her little dog fell sick with cancer. She took it to her vet and the
vet said, “There’s no possibility of it surviving. It’s in pain, and
I’ve got to put it down.” But she followed my advice; she took
that dog to a corner of the surgery and asked the dog. While
listening carefully to her dog’s response, she felt its message
very clearly: “No! I don’t want to go. I don’t want to die.” So she
went back to the vet and said: “I’m taking the dog home.” And
the vet got very angry and said, “You are cruel—that dog is in
pain. You Buddhists are so stupid. Just following your precepts
and rules blindly, you’re not kind!” She was heavily scolded. Six
months later her dog made a full recovery. She took it back, and
the vet examined it: “This is amazing! You Buddhists are very
wise.” That’s how you totally listen. It’s your dog’s call.
Whoever is in that hospital bed,

it’s their call.
Please listen.
For those of you who are doctors, sometimes you have to treat
somebody who can’t explain what’s going on. “How do you feel?”
“It hurts.” “How does it hurt? Where does it hurt?” “Mmmm...
around here somewhere.” It can be hard to describe. What does a
doctor do? If you want to be a smart doctor or nurse, you should
do ‘total listening’. Totally listen so that you go very peaceful, very
quiet, with no thoughts nor ideas of what this person is going to
say. You just feel what they are really saying deep inside, and then
you’ll get some incredibly intuitive solutions to the problems.
With total listening,

you understand what someone really wants to say
which they can’t verbally express.
That’s one of the difficulties in life: trying to express yourself.

Sometimes we just don’t have the words or we’re too scared to say
what we really want to say, or we’re not quite sure how the other
person will take it. Sometimes it takes a lot from the listener to
understand people. Don’t just expect people to tell you; you’ve
got to be a really good listener, being quiet and peaceful.
The hindrances
There’s something in Buddhism which we call the hindrances.

The first two are ‘wanting’ and ‘not wanting’ or desire and ill-will.
Those are the things which bend the truth, especially what’s be-
ing said before it actually gets into your brain. Much of the time,
we hear what we want to hear and we block out what we don’t
like to hear. This desire bends the truth, and it’s not in anybody’s
interests. When we get very still, we can let go of those move-

ments of the mind, which filter and bend, which block out the
things we don’t like, and which try to emphasise and embellish
what we want to hear.
It’s amazing that while we think that we filter out negative
things in life, we actually filter out positive stuff. It’s weird that
people these days are quick to hear what we usually don’t like
hearing. That’s why we have negativity, anger, guilt, depression
and a lack of self-esteem. Whatever is beautiful, we somehow
block it out. A psychologist in Sydney told me some years ago
that there were experiments proving that it takes 15 seconds for
a person to hear praise but it takes one second to hear criticism!
A sentence like “You’re stupid” goes in straightaway, but “You’re
so kind. That’s a marvelous thing you’ve done” doesn’t get heard,
or we tend to think that the speaker is up to something, or “It
can’t be me.”
Why does that happen to us? At the very least we should
respect the person who’s speaking to us. If they’re being kind
to us or praising us, please accept that. If you’re going to filter
anything, filter out the bad stuff, the negative stuff, the angry
stuff. Actually… don’t really do that, please take both. When you
take both, you become very wise in life, you’re actually listening
to what is really true.
When we’re still,

we can let go of desire and ill will,
which bend the truth.
Listening to life
We should listen not only to people and our body and mind, but
also to life.
A very beautiful way of relaxing is to go into a forest or to the
beach and listen to the sounds of the waves and the birds. There’s
always something happening in a forest and the wonderful thing
is: it’s happening now! 🤩 There are no echoes in forests. There
are no echoes on the beach. Whatever sound is occurring is right
in this present moment. It takes away all the busyness of the past
and the future.
You’re here, and that total listening gives you a sense of peace.
You’re listening to life as it’s happening, rather than a recording
or a preview. It’s real, and you realise: “This is where wisdom
comes from.” It gives you not only a lot of peace but also a lot of
wisdom. You’re listening not just to the birds but also to what’s
going on inside of you. You’re listening to peace, the inner peace
inside you. You’re getting to understand how this mind of yours
actually works.
Total listening to the present

gives you peace and wisdom.
We call that experience the ‘reflective mindfulness of medita-

tion’. You’re not just in the present moment, you’re not just inside,
you’re not just watching your breath, but you’re also watching
the inner reaction you have to these things; you’re listening to
you.
Listening to how you react to things is where you sometimes

get the greatest wisdom. Because of what we think should be and
shouldn’t be, we often reject some things and accept other things,
instead of just accepting the whole lot, which I call ‘opening the
door of our heart to life’. Open our heart to the whole of life, not
just the stuff we like. That’s where listening merges with loving.
To love
is to listen very deeply.
If you love your child, you can listen to them saying stupid
things, without judging them but allowing everything in.
Then, you totally listen to yourself. Though you may say stupid
things (I say a heap of stupid things 😁), you’re listening and lov-
ing and accepting, as well as listening to the reaction which hap-
pens inside you. At last, you’ll find some peace, some self-respect,
some acceptance of yourself.
When you listen to yourself, you’ll find out just how all judg-
ments and criticisms of yourself, which go on and on, are just
irrelevant so that they stop. Now you can listen to the peace in-
side your own heart, which has always been there but has been
disturbed.
Some people who come to our monasteries for the first time,
which are very quiet, speak louder than is necessary. At first,
I couldn’t figure out why. Now I understand that it’s because
they’re afraid of silence. Listen to silence, and it will soon comfort
you.
What you’re listening to is peace and contentment—the sound
of freedom. Don’t be afraid of it. Embrace it. It might be hard
at first because you’re not used to silence; you’re used to talking

and doing things. Try and you will see.
Silence is the sound

of peace, contentment, and freedom.
I’ll finish off this talk with a wonderful story of Taoist master
Lao Tzu to sum up how, through listening, you understand very
deeply and enjoy so much of what you’ve previously missed.
Lao Tzu would go on a walk with his disciples every evening.
There was a golden rule: no one was allowed to speak during a
walk with the master. On one occasion he chose a new student
and as they were walking through the forest, they came to a ridge
in the mountains at sunset. It was such a glorious sunset that
the student forgot the rule and said, “Wow! What a beautiful
sunset.”
The master turned around, went back to the monastery, and
said that young man was not allowed to go on a walk with him
again. The other students said, “That’s a bit strict. It was only
a few words. Please give him a break. Anyway, what’s so wrong
about talking?”
The master replied, “When that student said, ‘What a beau-
tiful sunset,’ he wasn’t watching the sunset anymore, he was
watching the words ‘What a beautiful sunset.’ ”
If you understand the meaning of what Lao Tzu said, you
understand the power of silence. Every time you think: “Wow!
That’s a beautiful forest,” you’re not seeing the forest, you’re see-
ing the words. Every time you say, “What am I?” you’re not seeing
yourself, you’re seeing the question.
When you learn how to listen totally,

you understand
the power of silence.
Question: How can we deal with criticisms? How can I not

be disturbed by complaints and criticism?
Ajahn Brahm: People only complain and criticise because
they’re crazy! Who in their right mind would complain and crit-
icise when they don’t know what they’re talking about? They
don’t know you, so how can they judge you? Sometimes people
criticise me, but it wasn’t me who did it. And sometimes people
praise me, but I didn’t do it. So I decided to let it be like water off
a duck’s back. 😁
It’s hard enough to praise or criticise oneself. You’ve got to
be incredibly mindful and do a lot of listening to know who
you are and why you do things. So instead of complaining and
criticising others, please give them the benefit of the doubt. If
they do something stupid, just think: “Oh! They must have had a
terrible day. Maybe they didn’t really mean that.” You don’t get
angry back. People may complain or criticise you, but you don’t
need to react.
Never allow anyone to control your happiness.
Your happiness is your business; it’s not the business of the

people who dislike you. Your happiness is totally in your power
and control. Other people can call you whatever they like.
I decided I’m going to take control of my happiness, so you
can call me the fattest, most stupid monk you’ve ever seen, and I
will not get angry. I’m going to be happy no matter what people
say. 😀
They can complain, they can criticise, they can praise me, but
I’m not going to be happy just because people have praised me.
They just haven’t got a clue what I’m up to. I’m going to be happy
myself. I know what I’m doing or why I did it, no one else does.
So this way other people’s complaints and criticisms are just like
hot air washing over you.
If that doesn’t work, you can imagine yourself to be what
the Buddha said: a lotus. The beautiful lotus flower is one of the
symbols of Buddhism. People can pour smelly water on a lotus,
but the water will just roll off, leaving no residual smell. People
can pour perfume over a lotus, but it too will just roll off and
leave no residue.
Just like on a lotus,

praise and blame leave no residue on a wise heart.
❦
11 Dealing With Addictions
The first step to deal with addictions is to realise that there is a

problem. You don’t need a doctor or a psychiatrist to tell you that
you’re addicted to certain things; it should be obvious to you.
But let’s take the stigma away from these things. You don’t
need to blame yourself. You’re not inferior because you get ad-
dicted to things. It just happens to some people. One of the nice
things which I have learnt is not to judge people, not to think
that you are superior because you’re free of all these things and
other people are just lesser beings. This is a part of our world,
and we should look upon addiction as just any other illness.
Record it
You may have someone in your family or a friend who’s addicted

to something. What can you do? If they won’t admit their prob-
lem, one of the things you could do is to get out your mobile
phone and video them. People who are drunk aren’t aware if they
are misbehaving. When people are addicted to something like
anger, which is a form of emotional drunkenness, they also don’t
know what they’re doing.
When they’re sober or when their anger relaxes, show them

the video. Very often that is a big eye-opener for them because
they don’t know what they look like or how they behave when they
are drunk or angry. When they see it on a screen that shows them
objectively how they behave, it’s like a mindfulness exercise.
Give it up temporarily
Once we realise it’s a problem, we can try to overcome it just tem-

porarily—say, for a week. This is because people with addictions
usually think: ‘I’m in control. I can give it up any time. I just don’t
want to.’ So if you really think you’re in control, try giving it up
just for a short period of time. That shows you whether you’re
addicted to something and it also gives you an idea of how strong
the addiction is.
Giving it up totally is too scary sometimes. So try it just for
a week and then see what happens. It’s a psychological trick; if
you plan to give it up for a week, you know there’s a way out if
it’s too hard for you. So you’re more likely to try.
Empowerment
When you give up an addiction, you feel free. You feel good about
yourself as you’ve done something difficult. You feel empowered!
That degree of happiness and freedom is what often counteracts
you taking up that addiction again.
dealing with addictions 🙔 147
Happiness and freedom empower you

against addiction.
That’s what I did when I was a young man. I became a Bud-

dhist, but I loved beer. My teacher encouraged me to quit, so I
tried. As soon as I tried it, I felt this great sense of power inside
of me. I had the choice, and I was exercising the choice. I could
take it or leave it. I was proving to myself that I could leave it. I
could go to a party, still enjoy myself, and actually I found it was
more fun when I was sober. Which meant ‘what’s the point of
going back to alcohol?’ 😉
What’s it like to be free of those addictions? What’s it like
not to have to go to the casino? What’s it like to go seven days
without watching any porn on the internet?
It means you’ve got a bit of control. Then, you can exert more
control. You feel really empowered. You feel good. You feel free.
Once you have that perspective of being free, you realise that
it’s the porn or the drug that was controlling you. You were in
a prison. You had to have that pleasure of some kind of drug.
You can see that only when you’re free. The wisdom from that
experience makes it pretty easy to stop afterwards.
Program your mindfulness
When you’ve stopped, there’s always a big danger of going back

again. ‘Oh. I’ll just try it a bit, just for old time’s sake.’ We have
all sorts of excuses. The problem is that it’s easy to get off an
addiction but it’s hard to keep off it for a long period of time.
But there’s something we learn, especially in meditation. It

is called ‘programming your mindfulness’.
A smoker said to me, “I’d given up smoking for a week, but
then, suddenly, there’s a cigarette in my mouth! I don’t know
how it happened. I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m smoking
again.” It is because a lot of addictions are habits, and a habit is
something you’re not really aware of. Just like driving—you can
be driving and talking to somebody; driving is so automatic that
you don’t really think about it. Or, like breathing—it becomes
an autonomous physical process which you don’t have to think
about; you just do it, but your attention is somewhere else.
Addiction is a habit.
You do it without being aware of doing it.
What we need to do is get mindfulness to come in. So I told

the smoker: “Now what I want you to do is when you’re calm
and peaceful, when you’re feeling happy, when you’ve got some
mindfulness and energy, make a resolution. Say ‘I will not pick up
that first cigarette’ three times to yourself and pay full attention
to what you’re saying. And then forget it.”
It’s incredible how this technique works. It’s like self-hypnosis
or auto-conditioning, or whatever you call it, but I call it ‘pro-
gramming your mindfulness’. When the guy was about to pick
up a cigarette, usually he would not be aware of that at all un-
til it was in his mouth already lit with smoke coming out. But
because he put that suggestion in, he then became aware as he
was about to pick up that first cigarette. It’s like an antivirus you
put into your computer. That’s why I call it ‘programming your

mindfulness’.
If you don’t believe that this technique works, there’s a simple
exercise I ask that you do tonight. Let’s say you usually get up
at 8:30 a.m., set your alarm clock for 8:35, just to give yourself
some security that if this doesn’t work, you’re only going to lose
five minutes. As you go to bed tonight, when you’re tucked in,
nice and comfortable, on your pillow, eyes shut, say to yourself: ‘I
will wake up at 8:30 a.m.’ Say that to yourself three times in your
own words, pay full attention to it, and go to sleep. You will be
surprised. If you do this according to the instructions, tomorrow
when your eyes open up and you look at the clock, it’ll be one or
two minutes either side of 8:30. It’s so effective.
Once you start doing that, you’ll understand how you can
program your mind for almost anything. I often do that. Say,
tomorrow I must give somebody a call, I don’t need to put it in
a diary; I just close my eyes and say: ‘I must remember to ring
up the president of the Buddhist Society at half past nine.’ And
it’s incredible. I’m doing something else, like reading, and then
the thought just comes up by itself: ‘Oh, I’ve got to ring up the
president today.’
I trust in that now, and it makes life so much easier. You
can program things into your mind, and it works so well. For
a married person, you don’t have to keep worrying about your
partner’s birthday. Just tell yourself: ‘I must remember tomorrow
to get my partner a present.’ It saves a lot of suffering! 😉
Whatever your addiction problem is, program your mind-
fulness with something like ‘I won’t open up the first bottle of
beer’. Just tell yourself that. This is meant to break the habit. The
programming arouses mindfulness at the coalface of addiction
the first time you’re about to break. Otherwise, it becomes so
hard. A heroin addict told me: “I have to say no a thousand times
a day to keep off the heroin. I only have to say yes once, and I’m
back on it again.” He said it’s almost impossible. But you don’t
have to do it that way. All you need to do is to program your mind-
fulness; you don’t always have to be alert. Say to yourself: “I won’t
pick up that first piece of heroin,” and then go about your daily
business, not stressed, not tense, and you’ll find that when you
need the instruction, it will be there for you. That is how we get
our mindfulness to work on important parts of our life.
Addiction to bad speech
It’s not just addictions to things like drugs and gambling and
pornography and other bad stuff we have in life, but also one
of the things we get addicted to that is such a great shame is
bad speech. Husbands and wives or partners speak badly to each
other. People can get into this terrible habit of being nasty to
each other. Your partner says something bad, you say bad things
back. Two people who love each other and really care for each
other, but they just have a habit of using bad speech towards one
another.
It’s a habit which gets established by living with someone for
a long time and of course, sometimes we’re in a bad mood, we
say something bad to them, and they give bad back, and then we
give it worse back. It’s tit-for-tat. It gets worse and worse. And it
becomes a bad habit.
So how do we overcome this bad habit, this addiction to bad
speech? When your partner is not with you and you’re resting and
peaceful, you say to yourself: ‘When my partner says something
bad to me, I will say something nice back.’ In your own words,
instruct your mind and then forget about it. You don’t need to be
tense, walking on eggshells with your partner. You’ll be amazed
how it works.
When your partner says something really uncalled for, you’re
about to follow the old habit of saying bad things back, but the
‘program mindfulness’ will come in and you will become aware
that there’s another possibility: to say something nice. You break
the habit. So if your partner says: ‘You’re late again,’ you can say:
‘Yes, but I was missing you all the time, and I was just looking
forward to this moment…’ That breaks the bad habit of tit-for-tat.
You can change the way you talk to one another.
If there’s something not so pleasant to say to your partner,
don’t talk to them when they’ve just come home from work, all
tired and stressed. They’ve just had enough already. Take them
out to dinner at their favourite restaurant, and at the last course
you can tell your partner anything. They’ll have been so softened
up that whatever is said will actually go in—they’ll listen.
Addiction to fault-finding
We’ve also got bad habits of thought. That’s actually the core of
all addictions. One of the worst habits or addictions is having
the fault-finding mind. This is a mind which gets addicted to

finding faults in things.
Many years ago, during a visit to my mother in London, while
I was just walking from her apartment to a temple to give a talk,
I passed two young men waiting for a bus. They were sitting on
a wall. Unfortunately, the wall was not flat; it had round bricks
on the top. These young men were complaining: “They should
not allow walls to be built like this.” My goodness, people can
complain about anything! At least, you don’t have to stand. It
may not be flat, but it’s good enough. People can always find
some fault or other, and that becomes a bad habit.
We get so negative, finding fault with our partner, with our
kids, … Please be mindful. How often do you praise them and
how often do you tell them off ? How often do you find fault with
them? How often do you complain about them?
Listen to how you speak to your kids. Listen to how you speak
to your partner. Listen to how your boss speaks to the workers.
You can understand why there’s so much unhappiness and stress
in the world.
Give people a little bit of praise,

instead of fault-finding.
Get off that addiction to finding fault, and much of the de-
pression and anger will disappear in this world.
The rusty hammer
When I first came to Australia, another monk was the head monk
for the first 10 years. When he left, I became the boss. We tend to
be a bit of a control freak when we first start as a boss. 😁
About six months after taking over the job, I was walking
through the grounds of our monastery and found that some
stupid careless monk had left a hammer out in the grounds, and
it was getting rusty!
And you know that everything we have here at Bodhinyana
Monastery is from your generosity, your donations. That’s how
we live. And some senseless monk thought that this was just a
stupid old hammer and left it out in the bush to get rusty. He
wasn’t caring for your donations! If you found out that we didn’t
look after what you gave us, you’d be rightfully upset. Why give
charity if it’s not respected?
So I thought this was a very good opportunity to give a talk to
all my monks. I had a special meeting in the hall. This time there
was not one joke. This was serious. ☹ I blasted them: ‘Look, we
live on charity, and you’ve got to respect charity. Who knows who
gave this hammer—it might have been somebody on a pension,
somebody who saved up for that because they like the monks,
they like having a monastery, they love Buddhism, and they
wanted to help out. And now somebody has left this hammer out
in the bush to get rusty! That is not on. You can’t do that! That’s
improper!’
I was really fierce. After about 45 minutes of that, all of the
monks were sitting up straight, not one of them was sleepy. After
I finished the talk, I was waiting. I waited for about three or four
minutes for the offender to put their hand up to confess. I would
have forgiven them. But not one monk put their hand up. No
one! And that was the worst part of the whole thing. I thought
maybe I’d gone a bit over the top, scaring them too much. But
as long as you confess and say you’ve done something wrong,
you’re forgiven.
I left that hall, so disappointed and sad that the monks didn’t
have enough guts to confess. But as I was walking out the hall,
I realised why they hadn’t confessed. Because it suddenly came
back to me who had left the hammer out there. It was me! And
I’d forgotten all about it. And it was only after I told all the monks
off that I remembered! 😅
That was one of the most embarrassing moments in my life! I
went back in the hall and said to the monks: “Could you all please
sit down? I’ve got an announcement to make. It was me.” Have
you ever done that? In public? It’s very embarrassing, but at least
I admitted it. And everyone laughed. That’s what happens when
you’re fault-finding.
Negativity and fault-finding

leads to anger and depression.
If you live in a fault-finding world, soon it comes back at

you. Do you want to live in a world like that? Always finding
fault and being negative? If you do, you’ll get a lot of anger and
depression. You get angry at everybody until you get to the point
‘no one is good enough’. You don’t allow your partner to make
mistakes. Then, you get so fault-finding that you can’t even live
with yourself. That’s called depression. And that also sometimes

causes suicide. The fault-finding has become so addictive that
you can see nothing good in you, or in anyone, or in life. That is
the addiction I’m focusing on this evening. But it’s not difficult
to overcome.
First of all, notice that it is an addiction—a mental addic-
tion to negativity. Once you realise it’s an addiction and want
to overcome it, you just try to have half an hour of no negativ-
ity. Just try it out temporarily by sitting down and meditating.
You can always go back to your fault-finding mind afterwards.
😉 Remember meditation is about being at peace with yourself,
including your stupid mind. Your mind can go all over the place
or be absolutely ridiculous, or you can fall asleep, but you don’t
find fault.
If you can stop fault finding for a while, then you can under-
stand why people do the things they do. Sometimes your husband
is negative towards you because he’s had a really difficult day
at work. It’s not him, it’s just the stress of life. So please, let it
go and forgive him. Sometimes managers, politicians, monks,
whoever it is, have difficulties in life, they’re tired sometimes. So
give people the benefit of the doubt. Even if it’s very difficult to
see any benefit of any doubt whatsoever, go to a higher level and
give that person forgiveness.
When you stop fault-finding,

you can understand and can forgive.
Don’t be fault-finding, be forgiving. With that type of positive

mind, you’ll find you have far more fun and happiness in life.
Instead of seeing the faults in life, you see how beautiful this
world is. You don’t just see the lump of litter on the ground, you
see all the grass around it, which is beautiful. And you can actually
pick the litter up and put it in the bin instead of complaining
about it. The same with your partner in life. Your partner may
not be the best, but, quite frankly, they’re pretty good. And you—
you’re not the best, but you are pretty good. When you look at
yourself like that, you can have a happy life.
Be forgiving,
then you can be appreciative
rather than trying to find faults.
We’ve spent hundreds of years trying to make a better world.

Have we achieved it yet? Or, have we made an angrier world?
Rather than fault-finding, always pointing out “You’re late,” please
say: “Thank you for coming at all.” Show appreciation. That means
that we have fun in life instead of being negative. We can get
off our addiction to this negative fault-finding, which we see
so often in the world, which destroys people, their health, and
everything.
Question: Can a feeling of pain become an addiction, like
addiction to thinking over and over about the pain?
Ajahn Brahm: That’s a very interesting idea. I once went
to a grief-and-loss conference, where I gave a talk on how to
overcome grief. And then a woman came up to me. She was the
mother of a victim of a serial killer. So she was going to all these
grief-and-loss conferences throughout Australia.
When I gave her an opportunity to let go of her grief, she

came up to me almost nose-to-nose and said: “What right have
you got to take away my grief ?!”
It was an eye-opener to me—she was addicted to her grief.
That was who she was. That gave her a lot of compassion from
other people. She’d become the grieving mother of a victim of
an infamous serial killer. Taking away that pain from her was
taking away much of who she thought she was, including all the
privileges which came with the suffering.
Question: Could stopping an addiction such as alcoholism
make you addicted to being a control freak? Can there be addic-
tion to freedom?
Ajahn Brahm: Sometimes people say to me: “You’re just ad-
dicted to being a monk, Ajahn Brahm. Come on, try being a
layperson for three months.”
No, this is not addiction. This is letting go. Being free of
alcohol, you are free of the addiction to alcohol. So please don’t
try to mess around with words and think that freedom is an
addiction.
The alcohol controlled you, but now you can let go of alco-
holism. If you want to drink at Christmas, you can take one drink,
and then you’re fine. You don’t feel the need to take the second
drink. When you let go of addictions, you’re free! This is what
freedom feels like. It’s not being a control freak. It’s actually quite
the opposite. It’s being a wise person.
Freedom is the opposite of addiction.

12 Lower Your Expectations
Many years ago, a gentleman came up to me and said, “I hear

you are a very wise monk, so can you teach me what Buddhism
is? I’ve only got about a minute because I have to go to work.” 😄
Instead of saying that was impossible, I liked to challenge myself.
What I came up with is:
Suffering is asking from life

what it can’t give you.
You’ve got to learn the limitations of what life gives you and
make some plans, but if it doesn’t work out as you’ve expected,
you’ve got to let go, make peace with it, and just adapt as things
happen.
I remember this little anecdote from when I was going to
Indonesia to give a talk. When I turned up at the airport, there
was a big sign saying: ‘Flight cancelled.’ Not delayed but totally
cancelled! I had lots of people expecting me to turn up and give
a talk. I didn’t have any money, a mobile phone or a credit card,
so I was stuck with nowhere to go, nowhere to fly, no one to take
me back to the monastery.
lower your expectations 🙔 159
I saw many people getting very angry at this poor person

on the Garuda information counter. They were banging on the
counter: “You’ve got to get me a flight! You’ve got to get me a
flight!” All they got was sore hands. The flight never turned up.
They were just hurting themselves even more by getting angry.
And as for me, I asked very calmly for help, and somebody gave
me a phone to call someone to pick me up, and I also rang the
people who had invited me. They said, “People will be very dis-
appointed that you can’t come.” I asked them not to blame the
airline; it’s not their fault. It’s Garuda—a bird. That was the time
they had bird flu in Indonesia, so I said the flight had to be can-
celled because the aircraft got bird flu. 😄
This anecdote tells us that there’s this thing called uncer-
tainty. We have to live within the confines, restraints, the truth
of what life can give us and what it can’t. Sometimes people don’t
turn up, sometimes things happen. But we don’t get angry at
such things. Why get angry at things which you can’t do any-
thing about? All you get is a sore hand banging on the counter.
It doesn’t make the flight come any earlier.
A lot of people get frustrated and really upset and stress them-
selves out simply because they don’t know this basic teaching of
life: we can’t always expect to have things going our way. When
you ask from life something it can’t give you, that’s called suffer-
ing. So what is the solution? Understand what life can give you.
Understand that things go wrong. Understand that things don’t
always work the way you want them to. Work within those pa-
rameters, and you’re happy and at peace. In other words, lessen
your wanting, craving and expectations.
Lessen your craving and expectations,

then you’re happy and at peace.
If you don’t ask from this world something it can’t give you,
if you lower your expectations to the truth of life and don’t get
upset, embarrassed or angry, then you will have a far happier
life.
Generosity
There’s joy when you see someone do a beautiful act of kindness,

forgiveness, or generosity. Generosity is not just by giving dona-
tions, but by giving a little bit of space to somebody. Sometimes
people make mistakes. Sometimes they snore during meditation.
When they do that, please open the door of your heart to them.
I still recall many years ago there was a lady who came here
and lay down and fell asleep during meditation, pointing her
feet towards the Buddha. According to the traditions, we’re not
supposed to point our feet to the Buddha statue; it’s disrespectful.
Two, you’re not supposed to lie down while other people are
sitting. And also, you’re not supposed to fall asleep and start
snoring when other people are trying to meditate! ☹
So a couple of people woke her up and told her off. I had to
take those people aside afterwards and tell them not to do that
again because the truth of the matter was that the poor lady had
talked to me beforehand and she was suffering quite horrendous
domestic abuse. She was terrified all the time, and she hadn’t
slept for days. She came here because it was a peaceful place
and it was the first place where she felt safe in days; even the
atmosphere was reassuring, kind and soft. Feeling safe, she lay
down and fell fast asleep.
What a wonderful gift it was that we could give her just half
an hour of sleeping here. Forget about the snoring, forget about
the feet pointing at the Buddha. She was not doing it out of
disrespect—she just needed a place of safety where she could
catch up on sleep, and we could offer that to her.
Ideas like that show the whole meaning behind what we call
spirituality: kindness. The ability just to open up and allow things
to be even though they might be a little bit against the rules. But
what are the rules for anyway? What is their purpose? What does
that Buddha statue behind me stand for?
Generosity is not just donations,

but giving kindness and forgiveness.
Virtue
Sometimes people forget why we do rituals and ceremonies such

as bowing. Some people say they don’t know what we bow for. Is
it a religious rite? It could be if you don’t understand why you
are doing it.
When I bow,
I bow to what the Buddha represents for me.
To me the first bow is always for virtue, for goodness, for

ethics. Because when you are a good person, a kind person, a
trustworthy person, it makes life so peaceful and so safe. It’s one

of the reasons why that woman could fall asleep here: she felt
that no one was going to attack her or steal her bag. She knew
this was an ethical place where you can trust people.
I always remember one of my oldest friends coming to visit
me in Thailand many years ago. I settled him in to his room
and said one of the wonderful things to experience in northeast
Thailand was the alms round in the morning. Monks get up really
early and just as it gets light, the monks take their bowl and walk
silently and mindfully through the village. Kind and generous
people get up early to put some rice in the monks’ bowls. They
say the sight of peaceful, calm and quiet people walking through
the village remind them of their spirituality.
I told my friend that this was one of the best times of morn-
ing, so he had to come. And he said, “I’m so tired. I get so stressed
at work there’s no way I can wake up at that time in the morning.”
I said, “You don’t have to worry at all. I’ll come to your room and
knock on your door 15 minutes before we go, so you have time to
get ready.” And I did that.
As we were walking back, he thanked me for a great spiritual
experience, but then he added, “It was really weird when I went
to sleep last night. I knew that you’ll be there in the morning to
wake me up. I knew I could trust you.” In London where he lived,
many times people promised to do something, but they never
did. “You can’t trust people in the world, but here I could trust
you 100%. And it is such a unique experience,” he said.
When some people say they’re going to do something for
you, can you totally trust them? It’s rotten, isn’t it? It causes so
much anxiety when you don’t have beautiful ethics. Living in a

monastery or living with people with ethics is such a brilliant
privilege.
Just having trust

makes it a privilege to live with spiritual people.
Ethics solves so many problems about stress. I don’t have to

watch my back. You don’t need to fear anything or be worried
about what other people are saying or doing. You don’t need to
lie, you don’t need to deceive people, you can trust people. And
that is such a beautiful part of human life. That’s why I worship
virtue, I bow to virtue, because I really see its importance.
Peace
The second bow is to peace. Peace comes from virtue as you don’t
need to argue with one another to get your own way. You can relax
and find some peace in this world by lowering your expectations
of what life is. You’re not fighting but making peace, being kind,
being gentle with yourself and with others. By lowering your
expectations, you’d see that what people think is perfection is
actually just not attainable, and little mistakes which you make
give you this beautiful humanity and lovability.
Little mistakes give you

beautiful humanity and lovability.
When I came to Australia from Thailand decades ago, my

Thai was fluent, but because I haven’t practiced it so much here,
my Thai and Laotian language skills get a bit strange.
After being here for about 10 years, a big group of Thai people
from Bangkok came to visit the monastery and they wanted me
to give a teaching in Thai. So I did as best I could. A little dharma
talk for 50 minutes in Thai. After the talk, they said that it was
amazing as it was the first time that they’d heard a monk give a
talk in Pali (the language of the ancient Buddhist texts). It wasn’t
Pali, it was Thai! 😄
So I said I’d better brush up on my Thai. But they said, “Don’t.
This is good enough. It’s cute when you make mistakes. It’s fun
when you pronounce the words wrong.” And they added, “Don’t
be perfect. Lower your expectations. We love you as you are.” And
I really took that on board.
Perfection is not attainable.
Beauty
You don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to say the right things
in the right way, because that’s not the way nature is. You see
weeds growing in the grass, you see trees bending over, and they
all are making things surprisingly beautiful. You see clouds and
dust over the horizon in the evening, and those little imperfec-
tions are what causes the beautiful golds and reds and crimsons
that we see in the sky.
Without a little dust or a few clouds,

there would not be a beautiful sunset.
So please celebrate and respect imperfections. I don’t look

at them as imperfections anymore—it’s beauty, it’s character.
You make peace with them instead of trying to fix them. When
we try to fix all these problems, we just get stressed out and the
problems are still there the next day. We try to make them a little
bit better but sometimes I wonder if all that effort to fix up the
problems of life is making more problems.
So I make peace with things, and I love it when we respect
people for who they are and don’t try to change them. We learn
how to embrace them instead of challenging them, fighting them,
and getting rid of them.
Emotional intelligence
When I was at Cambridge, a very good friend of mine said that he

had just volunteered to do some social work at a hospital where
people with Down’s syndrome were institutionalised. I was busy,
but if my friend went, I had to! It was pride. 😁 That’s all it was.
But in the end, I felt thankful to my friend for getting me to go
there because I helped there for two years, and it was not service
at all. I went there because I enjoyed it! 🤩 I looked forward to
those Thursday afternoons because I valued being taught and
inspired by people who were locked away by the society. (This
was in 1960s, 1970s.)
One story which really stands out to me was the day after I
broke up with my girlfriend. As I was walking towards this ward,
one of the men came running towards me and threw his arms
around me and gave me a big hug.
I asked, “What are you doing this for?”
He said, “You’re upset, aren’t you?”
He saw my heartache straight away!
How on Earth did he know that? But these people were so
emotionally sensitive that they could look at us and know that
we were sad, upset, or angry. I was just amazed that though
they weren’t intellectually able to go to university, they had huge
amounts of emotional intelligence. They were so warm, so sen-
sitive, and so nice to be around. They were wiser than me in so
many areas.
With this amazing experience, I realised there’s more to life
than just studying. Peace is an emotion; it’s a feeling that you
can’t write down in a book or analyse, but you can know it in your
heart.
When you feel peace inside,

it’s amazing and wonderful.
The car park
Another story is about a building surveyor in Serpentine many

years ago. He came to see me at Bodhinyana Monastery after
lunch one day. He introduced himself as I didn’t know who he
was. “I’m your local building surveyor. I have done many of your
plans. I’ve just come to say thank you.”
“Thank you for giving you work?” I felt puzzled.
“No. Thank you for your car park.”

I was more puzzled! He then smiled and told me that his job
was sometimes so stressful that he would get in his car and drive
to Bodhinyana Monastery, park his car in the car park and just
sit there. He never came in to talk to me, never got out of his car
even, just parking and staying there until he got enough of the
peaceful energy of the place that his stress disappeared. Then, he
would drive back to work. A peaceful atmosphere can destress
you.
Just going to a calm place where you feel safe, where people
aren’t trying to convert you, where no one is shoving donation
envelopes in your face, where you’re just accepted and respected,
and can just sit however long you want—that gives you peace
and freedom. And this is such a beautiful gift.
A beautiful gift is giving people
an opportunity to find peace.
Sometimes when we have problems, all we need is a place
where we could go just to chill out, to be left alone, or to reconcile
ourselves with what has happened that upset us. A peaceful place,
a safe place, a kind place just to sit down. We don’t need to be
told what to do as sometimes that just makes us more stressed.
We just need a place to literally unwind and to be embraced in
our own calm space.
A lot of times all we really need is
a peaceful place,
a safe place,
a kind place.
How big is my hand?
An old simile is: when you put your hand right in front of your
face, it’s so big. Just like when I’m obsessed with a problem, it
stays right in front of my face, I can’t see anything else but the
problem—and it’s huge. When you’re peaceful, it goes out to
where it belongs, at the end of your arm. The hand hasn’t di-
minished in size, the problem is exactly the same, but now with
perspective it’s not such a big deal anymore. You’ve found some
peace in your life. And peace is not what people tell you or force
you to do. Peace is what happens when you relax, let things be,
and have some kindness.
With perspective,
a small problem remains small and
you can be at peace.
The pyramids
As a young man in 1969, I went to Central America because I saw

a book about the ancient Mayan pyramids, which were supposed
to be spiritual centres, but no one knew what they meant. Having
hardly any money, I had to travel on buses and fishing boats and
that was quite a great adventure. When I got to these pyramids
in the middle of the jungle, there were no guides, there were no
tourists at all. I was left to all these pyramids by myself.
So what did I do? I climbed one of the pyramids just to see
what was on top, not really knowing what I was doing. 😄 When
I got to the top, it was obvious that this place was a place of spiri-
tuality. Because the top of the pyramid was above the tree line,
and for the first time in weeks I could see the horizon in all di-
rections—nothing was between me and infinity! This incredible
emptiness and space embraced everything, and it was peace.
Sometimes we disturb peace by giving it a name, by trying to
put it in a bottle and make it into a dogma, or by writing it in a
book and fighting over who has the right book. But spirituality
is something else.
Spirituality is feeling the peace.
That’s what those pyramids were for: to see forever in all

directions. But there was nothing there. Emptiness in all direc-
tions—beautiful. This is the peace I always see as an important
part of spirituality.
Emptiness is peace.
Space
We can find peace in the space between people. Do you ever

notice a room is mostly empty? When we just see people and
not space, then we always see girls, boys, bottles of water, Ajahn
Brahm. But imagine just seeing what is around all the things
in a room, which is far greater. There is always more space than
there are things. Unfortunately, we have always been trained to
perceive things rather than what’s between things.
Change your perception. The distance between people is not

what separates them, but this lovely emptiness actually joins
them together. The space which embraces everybody is peace. So
don’t look at things, look at what’s between things. This is how
we learn how to appreciate peace rather than things.
The emptiness which embraces everything

is peace.
Wisdom
The last bow is to wisdom, to kindness. Wisdom is not something

you write in books or argue about. That’s what my teacher Ajahn
Chah always said when he saw people arguing. He looked at one
monk and said, “You’re right but not correct” then looked at the
other monk and said, “you’re correct but not right.” It’s a very
beautiful little statement, not preferring one person to another
but saying you’re both wrong because you’re arguing.
Real wisdom is something which settles arguments, calms
people down. It finds common ground, connections between
people, things which everybody can agree upon, and love and
respect. Things like compassion and kindness, things like truth.
Even the Buddha used to say: “You can know it’s the truth, it’s
the dharma, if it leads to peace, freedom, and enlightenment.”
Real wisdom settles arguments

and connects people.
Spirituality
Years ago I was invited to give a talk at the morning assembly at

a school with one of my mates who was a chaplain. As we were
waiting for the schoolkids to settle down, the principal, who was
a very devout Christian, said, “Welcome to our school. When we
go inside, the chaplain and I will bow to the statue of Jesus Christ,
but because you’re a Buddhist, you don’t need to.”
I’m a cheeky monk sometimes. 😉 So I said to the principal,
“No. I demand my right to bow to your statue of Jesus.” I remem-
ber his face. He must have thought: “What mad monk have I let
into my school?” 😵 So I explained to him, “Yes, I’m a Buddhist,
but I can still see something worthwhile and wonderful in the im-
age of Jesus Christ which I will bow to.” He got it straightaway. By
making a bow I’m not saying I’m a Christian; I’m saying there’s
something there which I respect and find value in.
As a result of that, two weeks later, kids from that school
came on a trip to Bodhinyana Monastery. When we went into the
main hall, both the principal and I bowed in front of the Buddha
statue. The principal saw something of value there. Now, that is
real spirituality.
Real spirituality is
where we can find some common ground,
respect, and peace.
So we’re taking spirituality to a deeper level. Real spirituality

does not create problems in our world but solves them. It en-
hances what you feel inside your heart: ethics, trust, goodness,
forgiveness, inclusion, and love. It’s wonderful.
That’s one of the reasons why when a person says: “I am better
than you,” it means that person is too stuck on the spiritual path
rather than following the path to find the truth and feeling what
the path really means, and then having trust and courage to
follow the heart rather than the dogma.
Never let the dogma stand in the way of truth.
If spirituality is to last, it needs to have a meaning for people

so that people know peace, love, kindness, freedom, and deep
stillness. When they can feel it, it makes sense to them, and it
fulfils their hope of a peaceful world where there can be harmony.
A world where they can have less stress and less fear. A world
where one can find the path forward.
That is the meaning of my three bows to the Buddha—I bow
to virtue, peace and compassion. This is what inspires me. This
is where we find meaning in life.
Virtue, peace and compassion—

That is where we find meaning in life.
Question: How do you lower your expectations when the

whole world tells you to do the opposite, such as chasing a goal?
Ajahn Brahm: The whole world tells you to do all sorts of
stupid things. But how about following your heart and associat-
ing with good and kind people? When you associate with wise
and kind people, you don’t get into so many problems.
Question: If I lower my expectations, how can I achieve my

goals?
Ajahn Brahm: There was a lady here who told me, “I’m re-
ally suffering. This is where I should be in life, in my earning
potential, my assets and all my achievements. BUT I’m down
here somewhere. It’s just so hard, so much stress and suffering,
trying to work hard to get up to where I know I should be in life.”
I said to her, “That’s not how you get peace in life. If you think
you are not where you should be, how about lowering where you
think you should be to where you are? Then you’re at peace.” She got
it. 😀
The problem is:

we have unrealistic expectations of ourselves.
Question: How can I be kind when I’m depressed and upset?

Ajahn Brahm: One of the reasons you get depressed and
upset is because you’ve been trying to achieve too many goals
in your life. When you haven’t reached them, you think: “Oh my
goodness, I’m a failure. Everybody else is happy but not me.”
So first of all, please know that depression will pass after
a while. (Here I’m not talking about clinical depression.) De-
pression never lasts. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Also,
sometimes you’re depressed, sad and upset because you’re ex-
hausted, mentally exhausted. So please rest and don’t fight that
depression. Be kind to yourself.
You could try being happy with all the moods of your life, be
it tiredness or sickness. You should accept them and embrace
them. It’s part of life. That’s how you’re kind. You open the door
of your heart to life, to disappointment, to not getting what you

want.
This is how to be kind. Don’t fight too much. Don’t fight
battles which you can never win. You’ll have your depressed times,
but they will pass. There’s nothing wrong with that. 🤩
Don’t expect from life

what it can never give you.

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BUDDHISM: DISCOVERING THE BASICS

2 Metta to the Past 10

3 Metta to the Future 27

4 Metta to the Present 42

5 Views and Intentions 54

9 Karma Without Belief 114

10 Total Listening 127

11 Dealing With Addictions 145

12 Lower Your Expectations 158

Mindfulness, shmindfulness. It’s everywhere. In many countries,

Opening up to Kindfulness was compiled to celebrate the arrival of

One thing which I keep trying to do is to promote the idea, espe-

tion will be the buzzword. 😁 Why? Because meditating monks

Self-discipline—you can’t force it, but through Kindfulness,

that’s awareness. But kindness and compassion is what is needed

The last time I was in Indonesia, I gave eight talks in eight

Kindfulness instead. “I don’t know why people like taking pho-

With Kindfulness, you are happy to be here.

Why is it that people keep worrying about what happened in

Kindfulness also means being mindful of the truth and ac-

We’re all damaged goods and crooked trees.

Kindfulness brings you into the moment

To be able to let go of the past and future, it’s not seeing

Appreciating the beauty of being here and now

put me down. He totally accepted who I was. I felt that he had

Kindfulness gives you

Metta is awesome, Dharma is cool. 🤩

don’t have so many psychological problems. You can hold down a

Metta touches the very essence of our life,

In this series of talks on metta, I decided to split up the talks

of the previous night. He opened the door of the chicken shed,

When looking at the past,

Only when you allow everything in,

In my mind, the idea of metta comes from one of the most

so poor that we weren’t afraid of burglars; actually, we liked to

“Son, whatever you do in your life,

Here is what we call unconditional love—it’s metta with no

“Whatever has happened to me in the past,

As you allow the past to come in and as you embrace ev-

Until you can forgive the past

This is one of the problems we have when we carry the ter-

wanting revenge for what happened to you in the past. Whatever

Metta enables us to understand that we’re not perfect and

there is absolutely nothing you cannot forgive. There’s nothing

This woman was someone who was very advanced. So I looked

Only when you forgive can you be free.

We’re all allowed to make mistakes.

When I went to school, we all got caned when we made a mistake.

When we punish ourselves,

We think we don’t deserve to be happy. Many people experi-

they don’t think they deserve to be healthy. Many of the illnesses

Forgiveness leads to healing,

forget that if you need some punishment, go and find a cat or a

Through metta towards the past,

One of the biggest problems of human suffering is anxiety or

“The door of my heart is open to the future

And that, by itself, will make us relax and be confident that

This positive attitude towards the future is

When I first became the abbot of the monastery in Australia,

supposed to be tough guys. 😢 But even tougher than me was the

“That’d be wonderful. I can have a rest for a change. I don’t

Why are we afraid?

If you are not fearful,