«Дар освобождения», курс 40 «Магия пустотных медитаций и тонглен», занятие 4

[Говорящий 1]
First, I'd like you to follow your breath. Focus on the exhale first, and then on the inhale. We'll take about 30 breaths.

Just relax. Relax your face, very important. Especially your mouth and your eyelids.

Tighten your abdomen slightly, especially the lower part, but not too tight. Keep your hands soft, and push back your shoulders. Stay very aware of the exhales.

Now on the exhale, I'd like you to exhale from your right nostril. So that's the beginning of the breath. At the start of your breath, you exhale from the right nostril, and then the air circles around and comes into your left nostril.

So I'd like you to take 30 breaths, exhaling from your right nostril and inhaling from your left nostril. 30 breaths. If one of your nostrils is blocked, just imagine that the breath is going that way.

If both of your nostrils are blocked, you can breathe through your mouth, but just imagine that the breath is exhaling from your right nostril and coming into your left nostril. Very long exhales until the lower abdomen tightens on the exhale. So you might have to almost exhale twice, push out a second more conscious exhale from the right nostril.

Personally, I like to keep my gaze of my eyes, even though my eyes are closed, I like to keep the gaze up at the horizon, so my eyes are looking slightly over the horizon, even though my eyelids are closed. And then that keeps your head from nodding down when you're watching your breath. Now I'd like you to think of one interaction you had yesterday or this morning with another person.

When did you meet someone? When did you talk to someone yesterday? Or if you didn't meet anyone yesterday, then the day before.

One interaction you had with another person. Then I'd like you to recall, why did you meet them? What were you meeting them for?

Why did you meet the other person? What were you hoping to achieve? Maybe it was just a few minutes talk or catch up with them.

Why did you interact with another person? By the way, it could be online also, or on your phone. And then I'd like you to think about why did they meet with you?

What were they trying to get out of interacting with you when they spoke to you? There must be some need or something they want out of talking to me. What was it that they wanted?

What was their hope for that interaction? And lastly, how did they see you if you put yourself in their body and remember that interaction you had, how do you think you look to them? I don't mean your appearance necessarily.

I mean the way you were acting and the way you were speaking, the feeling they got about how you are thinking about them. If you go from the mountain of your body and cross over to the mountain of their body and look back at your mountain, how do you look to them? How kind were you?

How thoughtful were you in the interaction? How did you feel to them? Actually pretend you're looking at you yesterday from their eyes.

And then please come back to your breath. Again, exhales from the right nostril and inhales through the left nostril, even if it's only imaginary. Keep your gaze on the horizon even though your eyes are closed.

And then please open your eyes and take a stretch, drink something, especially if you're at Diamond Mountain. Keep drinking, okay? You guys were supposed to meditate yesterday about people who are your bosses and people who are your colleagues and people who are your employees or report to you.

Would anybody like to share how it felt or any observations? Yeah. Oh, and specifically, what emotion did you feel in the three cases?

Was there a pattern where you tend to feel the same emotion for your boss and then you tend to feel the same typical emotion for somebody who works for you?

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah? Okay. I loved this one.

This is amazing. Just because I felt like the applications to this particular practice, not just personally but professionally, just are so remarkable. And I thought about this all night, how when we're a team, we're attempting to have a common goal.

And so oftentimes in leadership, for example, you're trying to get your team on board. And so for me to put myself in my colleagues' shoes... What?

Oh, sorry. My colleagues' shoes. It allowed me to sort of look at, like, for example, my colleagues are beginning to change and so how can I help them?

I guess, you know, when they were looking at, I guess, me, I'm... It's hard to explain, I guess, but I'm in my colleagues' shoes looking at me.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah.

[Говорящий 2]
And so it made me shift how I could help them, I guess. You know, and it put me into a... more of a state of service, like mentally.

Like, how can I take away something off of their plate in order to sort of have the bigger picture of being successful? And so in each case, I found myself kind of looking at, like, as a person, how can I look at me? So confusing.

Like, for example, when I did the boss last night, the difference or the flavor between the colleague and the boss were slightly different. In the colleague's sense, I was, how can I take a little bit off of their plate? And then in the boss's sense, the feeling was more like, how can I help similar?

How can I act a little bit better in order... I don't know, it was almost like just relax a little bit. You know, like I found myself trying to sort of, like, how do I...

Not trying so hard with the boss, I guess, was the harder one, because I found myself trying to, like, relax a little bit in order to serve them, really is what it came down to. And then in the lower one, for example, how can I sort of help them? How can I see the world from their point of view and maybe make them relax a little bit?

So, it was really beautiful. I just enjoyed it a lot.

[Говорящий 1]
Somebody else? By the way, when you're translating Shantideva, this section, it's extremely difficult. And what I ended up doing was me as the boss, me as me, me as the employee.

So, you have to use as to make clear which me you're talking about. It gets confusing in the translation. And by the way, I think Shantideva does it on purpose because it gets very confusing who's me.

And so, it's helpful in your own mind to say me as the boss, looking at me as me. How does that feel? So, that's something you might want to try when you're meditating on it, or when you're describing it to your friends.

Okay, Ala'ili. Talk loud. Every time you breathe, pause.

[Говорящий 2]
I have done this meditation like four years ago, so I had some experience with it. And the first thing I've realized is that a lot has changed since the first time that I've done these meditations and now. One of my conclusions in the past was that envy feels like hatred when you are on the other side.

And this meditation yesterday, it was about, for me, it was about jealousy at the same level with the colleagues. And when I exchanged myself with the other person, I felt like I'm surrounded by thieves. So, jealousy is being felt like you are surrounded by thieves.

By thieves that want to grab what you have.

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, wow, okay. So, the emotion was jealousy. Yeah, this is my...

I'm interested in the emotion. Anybody else? Don't be shy.

This is a fantastic meditation. As we're learning to love everyone equally, gosh, what a wonderful perspective to be looking at myself through their heart and checking in with how they're feeling, standing in front of me, exchanging with me. So, it opens my eyes and I felt I want to stay in that state all day just so I can help them feel safe in my presence and supported and filling their needs based on what I'm looking at right now as I look at me.

And, I don't know, I think it's a very profound meditation and thank you for sharing this with us. Thanks, Shantideva. Okay.

And then, after you... Can you hear me okay? A little louder.

Okay. Thank you, Geshe Michael, for giving us this meditation. I also have done it before.

This time I was focusing on a colleague and jealousy. This colleague has shared with me that she's felt jealous before of me. And I hadn't thought too much about that when I put myself in her shoes, me as my colleague, and looked back at me as me.

I saw an arrogant person and it was pretty uncomfortable. So, I get the chance to look at jealousy and pride together, which is up for me. So, thank you.

Yeah, nice. Ratchana. Thank you for these wonderful teachings.

I unfortunately have a question, which is that I was doing my boss and I'm in a very strange situation at the moment in my job where everybody thinks my boss is unqualified for his position and it looks like they might let him go soon. It's to that extent. I'm the only person who treats him well and he believes that I think he's qualified.

And so, when I put myself in his shoes, looking back at me, it was almost like, and you, Brutus, you also think I'm unqualified? But then when I put myself in my shoes, again, then I'm like, then how am I supposed to, am I supposed to change what I think of? Like, I'm nice to him, but I kind of also don't think, so should I think he's qualified when I kind of don't think he's qualified?

But you're not talking about me, right? Okay. I'll give a short answer.

I spent 19 years in a corporation in Manhattan, in a large company. I know the politics and I know the interactions. And I think what happened with me was I started to realize, I started to think about, what do you call it?

A group delusion? A group hallucination? So there's this feeling when you're in a group that if everyone agrees with you that the boss is incompetent, then the boss is incompetent.

You know what I mean? So if you can just get someone else to agree with you that someone is a problem, then they're really a problem. So the more people who vote for you and your opinion, then the more true it is that your opinion is true.

But then if you're a Buddhist logician, I mean, technically everyone can be wrong. And just because more people support a viewpoint in a group doesn't mean it's correct. So I think you have to be, there's a tendency to try to walk around the company and get support for your opinion of somebody.

And if you can get two or three friends to say, yeah, that person's really an asshole, then you feel like, yeah, then I'm right and they're wrong. So I think that's one tendency. But I think your question is different.

If I put myself in your shoes, what you're really asking is, if you really do believe they're incompetent, but you're kind of like the last person that they're hanging on to get support from, what's the Buddhist thing to do? And I think it's that put yourself in their shoes and do your best to find a solution, a phung sumpa. So I'd like everyone, if you don't take anything else home from this week, take home the idea of phung sumpa.

Phung sumpa means a third option. There's what they want. There's what you want.

And then I would like you to get used to thinking of third options. And again, that's, I think, the essence of innovation. Innovation in a company or in a project, in a nonprofit organization, I think innovation is mainly with people.

It's okay to innovate a process. Like I innovated x-rays of diamonds. You can detect a fake diamond out of 100,000 diamonds with x-rays.

And no one ever used it before for that. So that's a technical innovation. But I think most innovations are between people, are in your interactions with other people.

So I encourage you to think of a phung sumpa. So phung sumpa means, do I pretend to support them? And do I pretend to, do I pretend to espouse the opinion that they are not incompetent?

Or do I express my real opinion? And then what you've done is you've set yourself up for a dichotomy or two choices, yes or no. And I think a great leader and a great employee, a great follower has to learn to phung sumpa.

You have to find a solution which makes both people happy. And that's the great result of practicing tonglen and dak shen nyam je over a long period of time is the realization that a solution has to serve both people. And it's similar to the principle in negotiation, in a business negotiation.

The perfect negotiation ends with both people getting more than they thought they wanted. And interactions with other people should result in both parties getting more happiness than they expected. So how you do that with your boss, that's up to you.

By the way, it's not Buddhism to never fire somebody. I fired a lot of people. The first one was hard.

The second one was less hard. But we used to clean out the company every December because Christmas is 60% of the diamond business. So you build up the workforce.

You add about an extra half, 50% extra people, and then you have a purge in January because nobody buys diamond rings in January after Christmas, nobody. So then you just clean out the company. And if you don't, the company fails and everybody's family suffers.

So I'm not saying, it's not a Buddhist thing to lose money and ruin a company. If there's someone who's acting up or somebody has a problem or a boss is incompetent, then it's not a Buddhist thing to keep an incompetent boss who's hurting everybody. That's not a Buddhist practice.

But a Buddhist practice would be to find them a job that's even more interesting for them where they serve other people happily. You see what I mean? Like that.

So that would be a Buddhist practice.