So, first time I came here was two years ago, and I gave anybody here for that time. What did I talk about? So I, pure land Buddhism, and I said I wasn't using notes because when you use notes, you tend to look down and you lose contact with your audience, and I said, I don't know if you remember this. But the most important thing that we have contact, the talk is secondary. Yeah. So the most important thing is we're sanguine, we're here, we are together, and in a way we don't really need this talk, the fact that we've meditated together and we're having tea together and we're all here together, that's enough really, now the talk is a bonus. So the talk is called pain and suffering, and it must have been last November I think when Ariaka asked me for titles of everything I'm doing for these 12 days and blurbs, as we call them, texts, a little bit of information about each thing, so I was like, oh, what? So I had to think of things, so I thought I'm giving two talks, so it has to be a pair. One thing one week and a similar thing the next week, so in the end I came up with pain and pleasure. I thought that would be an interesting thing to look at, pain and pleasure, because pain and pleasure are the most basic experiences, they're absolutely basic. In fact, they're so basic that you can't even define them. I don't know if you ever try to define pain or pleasure. It's almost impossible, isn't it? They are just what they are. So the Buddhist words, I'm sure most of you know the Buddhist words, the Buddhist word for, I want to say the Buddhist word, I mean the ancient Pali language that the Pali sex come up in is Dukkha and Sukha, Christ, nice that isn't it, Dukkha and Sukha, Dukkha is pain, Sukha is pleasure, and there's another one, there are three, aren't there? And the other one is, Adukkha Sukha and Adukkha is not painful, so not painful, and as Sukha is not pleasant. So it's neither pleasant nor painful. So those are the three feelings that we have. And very often in English, Adukkha Sukha is translated as neutral, it's in between. And these three basic experiences are what in Buddhism, I'm going to use another pen because that one's not made good, it's called Vaidina, which is sometimes translated as feeling and sometimes as sensation, but it's basically what you feel. And you're all feeling Vaidina now, we're all experienced Vaidina, we experience physical Vaidina. As you sit here, you might be uncomfortable, you might be comfortable, part of you might be uncomfortable, another part of you is comfortable, you might have tense shoulders or tense back or you might have pain, one in seven adults in Europe suffer from chronic pain, so the chances are a few of you are in pain right now, physical pain. And then there's mental, or mental, come emotional, so that's some Vaidina too, so it includes everything. And Vaidina is the result of something that's happened before, it's either the result of something that you've done, or something that's been done to you, or just something that's happened that's nobody's fault. So if you're feeling quite happy at the moment, it might be because you've created very skillful action in the past, which is making you happy now, or it might be that someone's been really nice to you, and so it's them that's made you happy, or it might just be that spring is here at last, and we've had a lovely day, and you're feeling up about that. So no one's brought that about, that's the weather. And the same with that sucker, it's the same with dukkha you might be feeling really bad, it might be because of things that you've done in the past that have caused you to now feel bad, or it might be that someone's been really horrible to you, or it might be that you're coming down with a cold, or the flu, just when the spring comes, you get a cold. So dukkha, and sukha, and adukkha, sukha, are the results of things that happened previously. They're what you've got now, and you can do nothing about it, yeah. You can do nothing about your present vedna. You can act now for future, so what you do now will affect you in the future, you can become happier, you can become healthier, if you do certain things now for the future, but right now you've got what you've got. You've probably got a mixture of dukkha and sukha, I would say. I was doing a beginners class a few weeks ago, and we were doing dukkha and sukha, and I asked everyone, there weren't many of us there, so I asked everyone to put in on their present state of dukkha and sukha, and everyone was experienced dukkha at the time, everyone. That wasn't just old people like me who were getting a bit of my back-sirting and so on, quite young people as well, and it was both physical and mental. They also were experiencing sukha as well, but it's a very interesting thing to do, just to ask everyone, where do you stand with dukkha and sukha at the moment, and it made me realise there was quite a lot of pain in the room, quite a lot of suffering, unnoticed a lot of the time, an unsaid, unspoken suffering, which is exactly really what the Buddha said. The Buddha is famous for, well, well known anyway, maybe not famous for this, but well known, for talking about dukkha, isn't he? He's really well known for that, and it used to be years ago in Britain anyway, in England. Some people thought the Buddha was a pessimist, but he was down, he was down on pleasure because he said everything's suffering. He didn't actually say everything's suffering, but what he did say is that there is a lot of suffering, that life is shot through, as it were, with suffering. And then there's the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths are probably the most famous, or at least the most well known, of the Buddhist teachings, aren't they? The Four Noble Truths. One knows the Four Noble Truths. So what are they? First Noble Truth is, the Noble Truth of suffering, isn't it? First Noble Truth, the most famous of the Buddha's teachings, and the first thing he says is, there is, don't take my word for it, here's the Buddha, now this monks, he was speaking to monks at the time, is the Noble Truth of suffering. So now he sometimes really went into things in great detail, and he did here. Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, death is suffering, sorrow, lamentation, lamentation, that's an interesting English word isn't it, you know, lamentation means, it's sort of lamentation, lament, what is it, it's lament, glog, lamentation, pain, distress and despair are suffering, association with the unloved is suffering, separation from the loved is suffering, we know that. Not getting what you want is suffering, now he doesn't say it here but I've heard it in other places, getting what you don't want is suffering, and then a modern Buddhist teacher with a bit of humour added another one to this which is getting what you want and then realizing you didn't want it after all, it's suffering, that happens doesn't it, that should be here, because you strive and strive and strive for something and then you get there, you get it and you think, oh what am I doing here, I mean you don't want this. So he was very very particular and we know all these things already, in a way we don't need the Buddha to tell us this, we know all about this kind of suffering because we experience it, we've all experienced probably every one of those things, we haven't experienced our own death of course but we've experienced other people's deaths, that's the suffering because who knows if death itself is suffering but the death of others causes us to suffer. So that's a lot of suffering to consider but then there's the second noble truth, what's the second noble truth, the origin of suffering and what is the origin of suffering, no, craving, yeah tanhara, tanhara means thirst, wanting, wanting causes suffering, now I'm going to say quite a lot about this but we'll come back to it in a minute and then the third noble truth is the complete cessation of suffering, no suffering at all which is enlightenment, then the fourth noble truth is the path leading from where we are suffering to enlightenment which is not suffering, so I never teach the full noble truths and there's a definite reason for that, it's because the second noble truth is highly problematical, in fact I've never ever read a Buddhist book or heard a Buddhist teacher say what I'm just about to say but it seems completely obvious to me and when I do say it, when I'm in England in a Buddhist gathering and I say it, people always argue against me but it seems to me to be completely unarguable, not all suffering is caused by craving, is it, not all suffering is caused by craving but that seems to be what the Buddha says, the origin of suffering is craving and what is suffering, birth is suffering, aging is suffering, death is suffering, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress and despair are suffering, are these things caused by craving, people always argue for that, people always argue, yeah, so how does craving cause aging, cause what, aging we get old, we get old, that's, yeah, okay but that's not what the Buddha said, you could say, this is always the argument that people say, but you see, we don't want to get old and we don't want to die and we don't want to suffer pain and it's not wanting these things which is the craving but that still doesn't cause the old age, the death and the pain, yeah, so I would say the second noble truth is not true, not true, not in every way, so the only way the second noble truth makes any sense is if you believe in rebirth, the only way it can make sense, that's why I never teach the full noble truth to beginners because they're highly problematical if you don't believe in rebirth and many westerners don't believe in rebirth and it's a very, we're in a very interesting phase I think where westerners are taking up Buddhism but most, well many, anyway, westerners cannot believe in rebirth, so perhaps we're going to have a form of Buddhism in the west where we don't believe in rebirth and that leaves the four noble truths in a very difficult position because they don't make sense if you don't believe in rebirth, now I'm going to explain, I haven't explained yet but I'm going to, I'm going to, okay, so the origin of suffering is craving and it says the craving that makes further becoming, further becoming, what that means is more rebirth, craving causes rebirth, how does that happen, what happens is we like this life, we like the sunshine, we like eating food, we like or some people like, as we get older we don't like it so much but sex, some people like sex, we like things, we like falling in love, we like arts and music, we like all these things so we want to keep having them, we want to keep experiencing, re-experiencing and it's that craving for re-experiencing, everything, all the good things, all the sucker actually, this is what we want, we want more of this so we come back to have more of it, unfortunately we come back for this and we get that too, you don't seem to be able to get this without having that, you have to get both, so that's the answer, that we want this life, we want a physical body and physical body comes with problems, big problems as you know, problems of pain and illness and aging and eventually death, so I just wanted to get that out of the way first because I think the Four Noble Truths can be very problematic for people, try and understand how a loved one has got cancer and they're going to die and the Buddha seems to be saying that's this craving that's caused that, but it's not directly, it's not directly craving that causes that kind of suffering, of course we do suffer a lot because of our craving, craving in itself is a state of dukkha, when we're craving we're in a state of dukkha, we don't always notice that but we are, and then of course we don't always get what we want and that causes another round of dukkha, so yes of course that quite a lot of our suffering is caused by craving but not all of it directly, but only indirectly, it's brought you back here and being here somebody said that rebirth is like a package holiday, that you get the sunshine and the sea but you also get the noisy neighbours and the drunks and everything, you get the whole lot, so you have to have the lot in a package, so it's a bit like when you come back to this world you have to take the whole lot, you have to accept everything, the sunshine and the beauty and the love but also all the difficulties that have come with it, so let's look a bit more at dukkha, something I've done recently, I looked it up on Wikipedia, I know you can't always trust Wikipedia, but they do seem, in this bit of the page, they were referring back to scholars, so I'm assuming this is correct, dukkha comes, dukkha comes from the word duska apparently, which means uneasy, I like that, uneasy, or it can come from a word duska, which means unsteady and disquieted, I've heard it said that duska comes from the word mean to stand uneasily, you can't, you know sometimes you're standing, you haven't quite got it right and you have to get into a better position, you're sort of a bit like this, to stand uneasily, you're not quite balanced, so is a whole lot of English words, translations of the word dukkha, suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness, sorrow, affliction, anxiety, dissatisfaction, discomfort, anguish, stress, misery, frustration, all these words are included with dukkha, so dukkha and dukkha are very interesting because they've got very, very wide meanings, very wide meanings, in fact I'm just trying to think whether there are any other words that mean pain and pleasure, because dukkha for instance doesn't just mean pleasure, it means happiness as well, and dukkha means all kinds of unpleasant vedana, it means everything from excruciating physical pain or the pain of loss, the loss of a loved one, right through to a very slight feeling of, hmm, I'm quite got enough, I don't quite feel I've got enough here, what's in the fridge, that kind of, that's caused by dukkha, that feeling of slight lack is, that is dukkha too, so everything, it's a very, very wide ranging term, now here's a nice little thing that I've found, the ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India were nomadics, they were nomads, and they were horse and cattle breeding people, and they travelled in horse drawn vehicles or oxen drawn vehicles, so they use wheels, and so is a positive prefix, which means good, and duk is a negative meaning bad, and then there's kha, K-H-A, kha, and kha means sky or space, and it originally came from the hole in the wheel, you know, you've got a wheel, you've got a hole in there to put the axle through, and that's kha, in the middle there, it's space, sky, and so the way it's sukha and dukkha came from this is that when that's a nice round hole, you get a nice ride, so it's sukha ride, suk, good ride, when it's a bit misshapen, you're bumping along, and it's a dukkha, it's a dukkha ride, it's really nice that isn't it, I love these kind of things, we could go on for ages about that, but this isn't really what I need to talk about this evening, so dukkha luckily for us, the Buddha had other things to say about dukkha, and the next thing I'm going to talk about is quite a well-known text, it's a sutta, which means a discourse of the Buddha, and it's called the salata, sutta, it's, I think it's a very important sutta actually, so I'll spell it just in case you want to say salata, and salata is an arrow or a dart, some of you may know this one already, but it's a very, very good sutta, what the Buddha says is everyone experiences dukkha, sukha, and a dukkha, sukha, everyone, so people that he calls untaught worldlings, pathaginas, people who are, and not wise, they haven't really been taught the dharma, they experienced dukkha, sukha, and a dukkha, sukha, but also wise people experience that too, enlightened beings experience dukkha, sukha, and a dukkha, sukha, everyone experiences it, it's common to everyone whether you're wise, whether you're enlightened, or whether you're completely ignorant, and then everything in between, we all experience that, but there's a difference, there is a difference between the wise person and the unwise person in how they respond to their dukkha, so this sutta is about dukkha, so he says when an untaught worldling, when an unwise person is touched by a painful physical feeling, he worries and grieves, he laments, he beats his breast, do you have that, beats his breast, weeps, and is distraught upset, okay? So when what the Buddha is saying is, assuming that you're an untaught worldly person, I'm sure you're not, but I am, and so when I experience pain, that's more or less what happens, I don't just get the pain, I don't want the pain, and so I get upset that I've got the pain, oh why has this happened to me? That kind of feeling, he grieves, he laments, he beats his breast, he weeps and is distraught, now there's a famous scientist from Britain called, oh I can't remember his name, it'll come back to me later, but he spent his whole life researching into pain, and in a book called Pain, the science of suffering, he said that pain never comes on its own, pain never comes on its own, it comes with, and I think I'm quoting him here, it comes with a whole mass of human misery. So just think about that, that when you're, let's say you're running to get the bus or something, you trip over the curb and you fall over onto the hard ground and you really hurt your leg and you find it really hard to get up, your leg's hurting, but it's also an emotional thing happening, isn't it? You're now worrying about your future, I can't get up, what does this mean? So meaning has, pain has a meaning, so immediately you're thinking, what if I can't get up? Is there anyone around to help me, and even if there is and they help me get up, will I then be able to go to where I have to go somewhere? And will I be able to work, etc, etc, you get everything, human misery comes with suffering. So what the Buddha says is it's as if this man were pierced by an arrow or a dart, but then they don't just have the first dart, another one comes almost immediately after the first one, bang, and they're hit by two darts, two arrows. The first one is the actual arrow, and the second one is their emotional response to that first arrow. And that's the difference between an unwise person and a wise person because a wise person only gets hit by one arrow. When a wise person is in some kind of pain, they don't then get really upset about it, they just accept it, oh that really hurts, and that's it. That's all they've got, they've got the physical pain. But we, again making a big assumption here, we experience two pains, the physical pain and the emotional pain that goes with it. So then, the Buddha went in to the emotional pain that goes with physical pain, he's very good in this way, the body really goes into things. Even being touched by that painful feeling, he resists, and this translation says, "And resents it," is that a word you know? He resists and resents it, in another translation it says, "He resists and becomes obsessed," which I think is better actually. So basically, your emotional response to the pain is one of resistance. I don't want this to happen, I don't want this. And that causes extra suffering, and a lot of our suffering is caused by our resistance to simple dukkha, dukkha's happening a lot of the time, and we don't want it obviously. What we want is sukha, this is what we're aiming for isn't it? We want sukha loads and loads of it. But we don't seem to be able to get rid of dukkha, and when we do have dukkha, we resist it. Now, that's a very interesting process that happens, we resist our own suffering, because when you resist your own suffering, you cause yourself more suffering, let's see if there's anything else. Okay, so then what the Buddha says will come back to the resistance later. Then what the Buddha says is, when you're suffering, what do you next do, apart from resisting the suffering, is you start looking around for something to enjoy. You start looking around for some kind of pleasure that will outweigh the pain. So then you start craving, you start craving after things. So you've got this pain in trying to push it away that way, and on that way you're trying to bring pleasure towards you. So you've got this kind of movement. And that is a difficult place to be. There's a lot more he says, but I think we'll leave it there. Let's go back to the resistance, we resist our own pain. What is that resistance? How does it manifest itself? Now I think this is where I might, I'll say a few words about it. The resistance is a hardening. Do you know that in yourself? You know when you go into your interior life, when you meditate, let's say, we've just done the metaphor for now, and you have an experience of your inner life, and it has a feeling tone to it, doesn't it? And meta has a soft feeling tone to it, it's soft and soothing and warm. Resistance is a hardening. You know how you can resist another person, yeah? You resist another person's communication. You don't really want to communicate to that person. You know how that feels inside? There's a kind of hardening, like that. This is what we do to ourselves, to our own suffering. We resist, we harden against. We try to push it away, and we try to avoid it and pretend it's not happening. Now you all know what happens when you try to pretend so it's not happening, when it actually is happening. You become obsessed by that thing. There's a phrase in English, "What one resists persists?" Yeah, "What one resists, isn't that true?" But, let's say we were a party, and there was someone in the crowd who I was trying to avoid. I'm sure you've been in that situation, you're a party, and you think, "Oh, no, not him!" So what do you do? You turn round, don't you? You see them coming, you turn round immediately, "Ah, now what am I going to do?" So then you start talking to someone, "Ah, get into an animated conversation," so it'd be rude for them to come over and talk to you, but you can't keep that up for very long, so then you look round and they're still there, so you get out of there. I bet you've done this, haven't you? And you can spend a lot of time doing that, and are you enjoying yourself? You're not enjoying yourself, you're trying to enjoy yourself, "Oh, how are you?" All the time, you're thinking of that person who you don't want to meet, so you've gone to this party and you have a thoroughly rotten time, "Why bother?" What would be a better thing to do? If they've come in, you think, "Oh, no, I think, "Ah, I can just go and say hello to them." Just go and say, "Hello, shake your hand. Hello, how are you? Nice to see you, yeah." Anyway, you know, at least you said hello, you've acknowledged their presence, and now you don't have to keep avoiding them, because they're not going to come and say hello to you again now, because you've said hello to them. So, but this is what we do with our own suffering, yeah. We don't want to face it. I remember when I was maybe one or two years ago now, and I had to go from Manchester to a place right out in the countryside to a bank, the co-op bank, who were doing a well-being day, and I was going to go and do meditation for people. So I had to go to the station, railway station and get a train, and I was there early in the morning, so there's a lot of people around, lots of people. And this particular platform, I'll tell you now, just in case you go to Manchester and pick a daily station, it's platform 13 and 14, it's hell. It's the only platform where trains go through, right through, and it's just one after another, train goes, another train comes, it's just one, one, one, and the TV screen, it's one train and then another, and then another, and anyway, it's half a state in the morning, and then I got on a train that said where I'm going, on the TV screen, and I was sitting on the train for about half an hour, feeling more and more uneasy, uneasy, duster, dukkha, as time is going on, and the reason I was uneasy, because the train now I was getting should have been a local train, stopping every now and then, and this one was flashing through the country, I really, really fast, for about half an hour, and I thought, I must be on the wrong train, no, I'm not, no, I looked at the TV screen, I'm not on the wrong train, this is the right train, but more and more I was becoming, and I noticed that I simply didn't want to ask the guard if I was on the right train, it had to be the right train. Eventually, I had to ask, because we were really going a long, long way, and no, I'm the wrong train, we're going to Glasgow, and so then, I had to get off in Lancaster, and then, I phoned up the co-op bank to say, look, I've got on the wrong train, I'm in Lancaster, and I'd found out it's going to take me a long time to get to this place from there, I had to get a train to somewhere, and then another train to somewhere else, and it would take me about two hours, and I was hoping he'd say, oh, well, forget it, but he didn't, he said, oh no, please come, please come, I had two hours on trainers, and then I got to this place called Wigan, and there were two railway stations in Wigan, I got off at one, I had to walk across town to the other, by then it was raining, there I was in Wigan, it was raining, I just missed another train, I went to a cafe opposite the station, it was one of those, in England you get these what are called greasy cafes, and I got a white bread sandwich with grated cheese dry, and a really, really strong cup of English tea, and they were playing Radio 1 on the radio, it was like hell, it was hell, and I was still resisting what was happening, there was a part of me saying, no, this doesn't happen to me, I should be on the well-being day with croissants and brioche, and salad and coffee, and people should be listening to me, but here I am, no one is listening to me live, I have got Radio 1 going on, and I just noticed, now I am playing this up, but there is something important here, which was, I noticed suddenly that I was just not accepting the situation I was in, I realised that it was as if I had two lives going on at the same time, there was my actual life, there I was in Wigan, a greasy cafe with whole tea, this is the life I should be having, this is where I should be, and I realised I lived the whole of my life like this, there is my ideal life, this is what should be happening, this is what actually happening, and I am always resisting the actual real life that I am having, and of course if you are resisting the actual life you are having, where does that leave you, where does that leave you, so what we try to do, let's say this is a pool, and this is another pool, and we are in this one, we try to jump into that one all the time, but this is actual where we are at, well that is where I was at, dukkha, and if I try to jump into that, I am trying to get away from the dukkha, and that leaves me nowhere, I can't jump from there to there, it is not possible, so I do jump, but I jump into nowhere, and so what happens is you deny your own life, you resist your own actual life, and this of course is somewhat tragic isn't it, that we don't accept our own actual life, so as I came across a really good little, kind of a poem in the Pali Canon, it was called the guest house, some of you may have heard of poem by Rumi called the guest house, which I will read in a minute, but I thought I would read this first, because this is very interesting, because monks, suppose there is a guest house, people come from the east, west, north and south, and lodge there, and then he mentions the forecast in India, cuttias, brimings, vases and suders, so we could say rich people, poor people, solicitors, road sweepers, shop keepers, poor sorts of people, come there, so too various feelings arise in the body, pleasant feelings arise, painful feelings arise, neither painful nor pleasant feelings arise, carnal pleasant feelings arise, that's physical bodily, pleasant feelings arise, physical, painful feelings arise, physical, neither pleasant nor painful feelings arise, spiritual, pleasant feelings arise, painful, spiritual feelings arise, spiritual, neither pleasant nor unpleasant feelings arise, I think that's very nice, isn't it, that we should try and see each other, understand ourselves as a guest house, and lots and lots of people come and stay here, and so now I read the rumi poem, which is quite a popular poem in the F.W.O., so I'm sure you've heard it on our side, who we've just found out that you can do double sided on his princess, so he's doing loads of double sided things at the moment, he's really pleased about it, the guest house, this being human is a guest house, every morning a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor, welcome and entertain them all, even if there are crowd of solos who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honourably, he may be clearing you out for some new delight, the dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in, be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Now that isn't strictly a Buddhist poem, because he talks about the dark thought, the malice, meet them at the door and invite them in, a Buddhist wouldn't say that, you wouldn't invite malice in, because malice is not a vedena, malice is karma, it's what you do, Duca and Sukha are just pleasant, unpleasant, but it's a similar kind of idea, so how much time we've got, I need now to go on to the last part of my talk, which is to talk about my work with breathworks, because I run courses for people with chronic long term physical pain and other long term health conditions, so I just want to say a few words about that, because we teach them, more or less what I've told you this evening, although we don't put it in Buddhist terms, so we teach them about the two hours, but we don't call it the two hours and we don't refer to Buddhists and we call it primary and secondary suffering, primary suffering is what we call the given, so for people coming along to a course, they've got some kind of physical problem which will not go away, and by the time they come to us they've tried everything, usually they've had their condition for many, many years, and they've been from one doctor to another, they've been to consultants, they might have had surgery, and then after that they tried all the complementary therapies, acupuncture, homeopathy, osteopathy, aromatherapy, everything, they've tried everything, and when they come to us, there's a certain amount of work they've already done, they've accepted to a certain extent their condition, and we say to them, before they even come, that this isn't a course to help you get rid of your pain, this is a course to help you live with your pain, and so they know that, and even though they know that, when we say it on the course, they find it difficult, it's a very difficult thing for them, and on the first day of a course we'll sit in a circle 10, 12 people, and each one will say why they've come, and they'll describe their condition, and usually somebody cries, usually, at least one person cries, in fact one day there's a young woman with a problem with her shoulder, and she began to tell us about the pain she was in, and she began to cry, which was not a new thing, but she carried on crying, this is right at the beginning of a two and a half hour long class, and she carried on crying, and then other people were reporting in, and she carried on crying, and then we began teaching, and she carried on crying, then we had a tea break, and she cried all the way through the tea break, and then we came back up, and we carried on, and she cried right to the end of the class, two and a half hours of crying, and she came back the next week, and she thanked us, she said that was so good, and why did she cry, because we were the first people to listen to her, the first people to really listen, of course people have sort of listened, but to really there was a group of people really listening, and what often happens is that it's a very intense situation that first week, because people are describing a lot of suffering, so you get, like half an hour, maybe not that long, 20 minutes of suffering, and you realize that the room is full, absolutely full of suffering, and then you move on, but one of the interesting things about our courses is, there is a lot of laughter, we don't try to make people laugh, we don't come with jokes and things, but what happens is, there's another poem by Mary Oliver that some of you may know called "Wild Geese" and it begins, you do not have to be good, you do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles in the desert, repenting, you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine, meanwhile the world goes on and there's a beautiful section about rain and trees and prairies and so on, very very lovely, but those first lines I think are very important, you do not have to be good, and if you're not good, you not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles in the desert, repenting, so what are you supposed to do, you just have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, now this is very difficult to do if you're in pain, because where do you feel your pain, you feel it in the body, so you don't actually want to go there, so when people come to us they've spent years trying to get away, they're doing exactly what the Buddha said, which is they're resisting their pain and so what happens is very often when people come they look very tired, they haven't got much colour in their face, they're quite often not good but grey and pale, they're tired, pale and they look very unhappy, and then as the course goes on they start to look happier, and in fact over the weeks you can see quite big changes in people and it usually occurs in the eyes, something happens with people's eyes, probably it's true to say on the first week their eyes are quite dull, and then on the third or the fourth week usually sometimes it's the fifth week, and if it doesn't happen to the fifth week I start getting worried, I've been known to say at the end of the class on the fourth week to my team, it's not working, they're not getting it, but they always get it by the fifth week and there's one woman, a young woman who had an accident and she was in a lot of pain and she was very angry about it because it was really affecting her life, she couldn't even work properly anymore, she was a single parent, she had a really really hard time with it and she was angry and I think it's the fourth, it could be the third or fourth week I can't remember, we ask people for homework to move towards their suffering because what they've been trying to do is get away from it, that's the way they've been trying to deal with it and we say to them does it work and of course it doesn't work, it's like being at the party and you're trying to get away from that person, it doesn't work, they know that, so we say okay what we want you to do this week is move towards your suffering and this gets mixed responses and this particular woman got quite angry and it's okay for you, you spiritual people, you can do this but I can't do this, so just listen to me, anyway she came next week and I noticed there was soon she came into the room, she looked different, in fact she was teasing somebody, she was laughing and teasing someone and she looked different and I said to her you looked different this week and she said yeah I tried that thing, moving towards my pain and it was okay and it made a big difference to her, so last week, just keeping an eye on the time here, last week I did the last of an eight week course, the last week of an eight week course in Wigan back to Wigan, Wigan seems to be calling me, I might as well just move there I think, but I've been running courses in Wigan, we've got some funding to run course in Wigan in a very, very deprived area, very poor area, they've got a lot of money from Europe because it's such a poor area and we've been running courses there and this is my second course and the first course I ran there was easily the best course I've ever run, not because I did better than ever before, but because the people on it, they just lapped it up, they loved it, they loved it and three or four of them wanted to carry on, so they're now supporting this next course, they're here helping me on this next course, so we had the last week of the course and so in the last week we all report in, just like the first week reporting, the last week everyone says what they got from the course and usually there are tears, so this time, one, two, three, four, I think it was the second person started crying as she was saying how grateful she was for the course and that set the next person and the next person, it was just this massive crying over that end of the room and one of them, and this is the woman who, one of the women who came on the first course and at the end of that course she said something which I've heard many times now, she said I've got my life back, got my life back and I'm going to say a bit about that in a moment, but this time she said I've got my life back, but it's more than that, my family have got me back, my family have got me back and I thought that's when she started crying, she really started crying and she was saying that she's very close to her brother and her brother phones her every week and I can say her name because you'll never meet her, Cheryl, she is in a lot of pain, really a lot of pain and every week her brother would ask her how she was and she wouldn't tell him, but at the end of the course we talk about communication and I always say what do you say when somebody says how are you and you're in a lot of pain, you know what do you say, it must be difficult isn't it if you're in pain all the time and somebody says how are you, do you say well actually, my neck is really really hurting it's like somebody's going like that and then down, you don't do you, you just sound fine thanks, so I said and she said always sound fine and I said why don't you experiment and say you're not fine, why don't you say I'm in a lot of pain actually, so she did, her brother phoned up and he asked her how she was and he said and she told him exactly how she was and he said I am so glad you told me, I am so glad you told me and he told her that for the past few years at the end of the phone call every week he would be in tears why was he in tears because she wasn't telling him how she was and he knew, he knew but she was keeping something back from him, what was she keeping back from him, she was keeping herself back from him and he found that very very painful, so she got her life back but all her loved ones got her back too, I think this is really important because it's again, it's this whole thing of you don't want that occur, you don't want to be there so you try to get out of it, the first thing you do is you try to get away from your own body, that doesn't work but in doing that you're getting away from everything, what kind of life are you living if you're not really in your body, when you try to not have the pain, when you try to harden, resist, when you resist the pain, you resist everything, and the man who started this kind of work, John Campbell, he said that what we're trying to bring about in people with pain is a profound transformation of view, a profound transformation of view, a new and profound coming to terms with our problems and our sufferings, it's a perceptual shift away from fragmentation and isolation to wholeness and connectedness and sometimes that's very dramatic, sometimes it happens, one person in third week, very unhappy, drawn, tired, fed up, miserable, next week they come back and you can see immediately as soon as they come in there's been a change, you can see it in their eyes, something has happened, what's happened, there's been a shift, there's been a shift and they're in the same situation, they've got exactly the same amount of pain, they're unable to work, they can't play with their children, they're on low income, everything is the same, except inside themselves has changed, there's been a change from resistance to acceptance and this is really, really big, I'll read you another poem because of course they're not just dealing with pain, they're dealing with profound loss as well, can you imagine? The kind of loss that people experience, it's the loss of health but then usually with that comes the loss of the ability to play with children, sometimes the loss of relationship that young woman who cried all the way through that first class, after the course she had an operation and she got her shoulder fixed, sometime after her partner left her, she couldn't stand it any longer, very, very difficult for a partner to look at that kind of thing, so there's a lot of loss and I've lost, a poem, where are you? Yeah, here we are, okay, two poems, can you stand this? The Well of Grief by Debbie White, those who are not slipped beneath the still surface on the Well of Grief, turning downwards through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, we'll never know the source from which we drink, the secret water cold and clear, nor finding the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else, so as well as dealing with the pain, people have to deal with their own sense of loss and of course we don't want that either, so we should finish now, I think we're supposed to finish it now, aren't we? Yeah, so finish with this poem, this is a really just quite wonderful poem, before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth, what you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness, how you ride and ride, thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever, before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white's poncho lies dead by the side of the road, you must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive, before you know kindness is the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing, you must wake up with sorrow, you must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth, then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend, so just to finish, sometimes it's easy to get the impression that Buddhism is all about trying to get away from Dukkha into Sukhha, but that doesn't work, what we're trying to do is find freedom, a sense of inner freedom within Dukkha and Sukhha, and when we do that, do you need to go, you can say, when we do that, when we face our own suffering, when we turn and move towards that which we do not want, then we find something else, we don't get what we want, it's the rolling stones isn't it, you can't always get what you want, you can try sometime, you just might find, you get something else, what you get is not pleasure, maybe not even happiness, but a deep sense of wisdom which is in itself deep sense of kindness, so when people come along and they want us to get rid of their suffering we can't do that, we can't do that, what we can do is say move towards it, be with it, soften around it, tweet it like a child who's just fallen over and gassed then on the pavement, what do you do, you pick them up and you hold them, knees still hurts, but somehow it's held within a sense of care and love. 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