Speaker A
In a human life, there's pain. And a certain amount of pain is inevitable.
Pema Chödrön teaches how to cultivate compassion and feel at home in your mind and body by embracing pain and practicing mindfulness.
Key Takeaways
- Pain is unavoidable, and struggling against it is counterproductive.
- Compassion begins with unconditional self-friendship (maitri).
- Meditation helps develop a closer, more accepting relationship with oneself.
- True well-being arises from embracing both joy and suffering.
- External validation is insufficient for lasting self-acceptance.
What the video covers
- Pain is an inevitable part of human life, including aging, illness, and loss.
- The Buddha's teaching encourages not struggling against pain but developing a compassionate relationship with it.
- Compassion is often misunderstood as idealistic, but true compassion arises from openness to one's own pain.
- Maitri, a Sanskrit term meaning unconditional friendship with oneself, is foundational to compassion.
- Many people struggle with self-acceptance and seek validation from external sources.
- True friendship with oneself involves relaxing into both comfort and discomfort within the mind and body.
- Meditation, including mindfulness and tonglen, is a tool to cultivate intimacy with all aspects of experience.
- Embracing pain and difficulty leads to greater well-being and a sense of being at home in oneself.
- The talk invites viewers to explore inward practices to find their own path to happiness and compassion.
- Sounds True offers on-demand videos and live classes to support this inward journey.
Chapters
- 00:00The Inevitability of Pain in Life
- 00:25Misunderstandings About Compassion
- 01:16Learning Compassion Through Pain
- 01:53Introduction to Maitri and Meditation
- 02:25Understanding Maitri: Unconditional Self-Friendship
- 03:24Seeking Validation Outside Oneself
- 04:07Affirmations and Self-Relationship
- 04:58Where Does Self-Friendship Come From?
- 05:31Relationship with Pain and Difficulty
- 06:08Examples of Life’s Inevitable Pain
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
The fundamental teaching of the Buddha was not to struggle against the pain in our life.
Speaker A
There's a lot of misunderstandings about compassion. I think people think of it generally speaking when you hear the word, it has a lot of very idealistic connotations.
Speaker A
Maybe it reminds people of Hallmark cards. But my experience of compassion is that it has to do with our relationship with pain.
Speaker A
That we learn true compassion as we begin to have a more open-hearted and open-minded relationship with our own pain.
Speaker A
So, there are various words that I would like to refer to in this talk. And one word is maitri.
Speaker A
Another word is mindfulness, awareness meditation. And another is tonglen meditation. So first is maitri.
Speaker A
Maitri is the basis of compassion. So I want to talk about that first.
Speaker A
It's a Sanskrit word that is often translated as unconditional friendship with oneself. And this is very hard to come by, unconditional acceptance, you could say, of yourself.
Speaker A
Unconditional friendship with oneself. It was much more common that we disapprove of ourselves and that we denigrate ourselves. Like I saw a cartoon recently and there's this man kneeling by his bed looking upward with his hands grasped in prayer and
Speaker A
he's saying, "I asked you as nicely as I could to make me a better person.
Speaker A
But apparently you couldn't be bothered." So maitri is about beginning to make friends with oneself, not really thinking that it's going to come from the outside anymore.
Speaker A
And as you know, we all look to the outside, to other people, to spiritual practice, meditation, jogging.
Speaker A
We look all over the place to try to make ourselves feel good about ourselves.
Speaker A
And you know, affirmations are all about that. You sort of proclaim, "I am smart.
Speaker A
I am good-looking. I am worthy of being loved." You sort of scream it, you know, and all the time something in you is saying, "Yes, you are."
Speaker A
So, where does this friendship, a kind of being able to relax with yourself, that's really what maitri is, feeling at home with your own mind and your own body, where does that come from?
Speaker A
That's a very important question. Because not only is it the basis of compassion, it's the basis of—it's like the seed of happiness or well-being or glad to be alive.
Speaker A
So, where does it come from? And I think my opening statement was that all of this has a lot to do with our relationship with pain, our relationship with difficulty.
Speaker A
So, the Buddha had very revolutionary teaching. And one of the fundamental things that he said was in a human life there's pain.
Speaker A
And a certain amount of pain is inevitable. Such as growing old, such as dying, that's the most inevitable one.
Speaker A
Such as illness, such as the more that you love and really loving is something that brings tremendous sense of well-being to all of us, to actually love somebody and feel loved, but the stronger that is, then the more sadness and grief
Speaker A
there is at the loss of that person. And such as if you put your hand in fire, it burns.
Speaker A
So there's a lot of discomfort in life. And the fundamental teaching of the Buddha was not to struggle against the pain in our life.
Speaker A
And that is not the kind of news that we really like to hear.
Speaker A
But it turns out to be an extremely important thing to contemplate. Is it really true that not struggling any longer with the discomfort of our life,
Speaker A
say the embarrassment of being oneself, not struggling with that, but instead, beginning using meditation as a tool to move closer to oneself.
Speaker A
That means becoming intimate with comfort and discomfort. With pleasure and pain. With grief and with joy. With embarrassment and a feeling of success.
Speaker A
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Topics:Pema Chödröncompassionmaitrimindfulnessmeditationpainself-acceptanceBuddha teachingstonglen meditationSounds True
