First of all, just say it's a real pleasure to be here. It's 25 years since I was lost in San Francisco and I wasn't at the Buddhist center there. I've not occasioned, so yeah, it's lovely to be here. So I'm going to talk a bit about mindfulness and various sort of health related issues. The short title is mindfulness for just about everything, which kind of sums it up. Certainly in the UK there's been a whole great surge of interest in mindfulness. Although I suspect actually we might be a bit behind the US because I think over here you've been a longer history of interest in mindfulness for health related issues. And in the UK it's been taken widely for stress, pain, anxiety, depression, personality disorder and for addiction. And we've been running courses at our center in London for the last two years. So what I wanted to do in this talk was really have a look at this phenomenon of mindfulness and how it's applied to various health related conditions. And particularly look at its relationship to the Buddhist tradition, in other words, where it comes out of how it relates to the Buddhist tradition. So over the weekend, if those of you coming on the weekend that'll be much more practical. So this is more of a conceptual background to mindfulness for health related conditions. And as I said, where it comes out of the Buddhist tradition. So I'm going to start with a bit of therapeutic history, as it were, of meditation and Buddhism. This is not comprehensive, but I just want to draw out a few strands. Starting with meditation. Meditation first became popular in the West in the 1960s when initially we've seen as something of a cure all. And people start doing studies in the '70s and '80s on meditation. And particularly in meditation with an emphasis on concentration and relaxation. Particularly a lot of transcendental meditation studies. And these early studies showed that TM was beneficial for anxiety, for high blood pressure, for cannabis and for general well-being. The worst and problem though with these early studies, which when you did a comparison, it showed actually wasn't much difference between just sitting quietly or other forms of relaxation. So in other words, although there was some benefit, it wasn't very specific to the meditation. Then there's another strand which looked at the Buddhist suitors and looked at how the Buddha behaved as a therapist. Somebody looked at how you could see him in the effects of doing behavior therapy. So there's a couple of stories to give you examples of this. So the story of the particular king and this king had a problem. He had a problem that he slept a lot and he couldn't get up. And eventually it got so bad that he, well, I was going to say, won't see the Buddha, but of course he couldn't go to see the Buddha couldn't get up. But he got, someone got the Buddha to come and see him. And the Buddha diagnosed his problem with overeating. Which of course, you know, was the modern epidemic of obesity or something, relevant today perhaps. Anyway, what the Buddha did is he gave a little prescription for the king. Which was that when he was served his food, he wasn't allowed to eat the last mouthful. And it was supervised by the prince. And when the prince was supervising this, just if the king was going to, you know, elbow in and get that last mouthful, the Buddha gave him a verse to remind him of why he was not to have that last mouthful. And so each day he had a little bit less food. And in time he of course became lean and healthy and he had no problems with sleep and he could get up. So it seemed from a modern point of view, that would be a bit of behavior therapy to do that. For example, the behavior diagnosed the behavioral problem and gave her a treatment. There's another one which probably had a better well-known story. This is a story of Kisa go to me. So Kisa go to me suffered from what we might think of today as a pathological grief reaction. She was a lady who had quite a difficult background. She became married and in those days in India, when you married, if you went to the husband's family and as a woman, you were kind of the bottom of the pile, you were a bit of a skippy he was pushed about. That is until you gave birth to a child and particularly if the child was a son, then your social status raised. So she gave birth to a son and she was very happy and of course very attached to her son. Unfortunately, when her son wasn't very old, he died. One account safely bitten by a snake. And she was grief-structured. She just couldn't believe that this had happened to her. And she went round, not believing that her baby was dead, asking people for medicine for her baby to make him well again. And eventually someone said, "Go and see the Buddha." And the Buddha said, "Yes, I can give you medicine for your baby." And the medicine is a mustard seed. However, the mustard seed must come from a house when nobody has died. So she's a goat who was very happy, she went rushing off and she went to house after house after house. Everywhere people were very happy to give her a mustard seed, but each house she came to, an uncle had died, a daughter had died, a husband had died, somebody had died. And eventually she realized of course that death happens. It's inevitable. And she realized her own son was of course dead. It couldn't be brought back to life. And she became a disciple of the Buddha and according to the tradition became enlightened. So again, just coming from our particular perspective, again, you can see that as a behavioral experiment, which in this case was very efficacious for Kisa go to me, understand what was going on. There's been a whole line of thought, as I said like this, in terms of looking at the suitors, in terms of the Buddha acting of the behavior therapist. And it's been suggested that particularly if you're working with people from an ethnic Buddhist background, that could be quite useful. I haven't seen anybody who's then actually really though applied it in a other way to Westerners. But it's an interesting line of thought. Then another line, which more is the topic that we're looking at today is mindfulness. And mindfulness is particularly taken up first of all by Cabot Zinn in Massachusetts. And he set up a stress clinic, it was called, but what he predominantly took was people with chronic pain. So he took people who had pain that Western doctors couldn't do anything for anymore, any sort of pain. So in a way, they didn't have anything to lose by going to see Cabot Zinn. And what he set up was an eight week mindfulness meditation course with some yoga exercises in and a one day retreat during the course of it. And what he found was that two thirds of the people benefited from this. And even more remarkably, four years later when it did a follow up, people were still benefiting from it, particularly if they'd continued with the meditation or even if they'd continued with informal practice, which I'll refer to later. He also did work with anxiety and then later other conditions like psoriasis. And this became called mindfulness-based stress reduction. So in a way, Cabot Zinn started this off. And then mindfulness started being used much more in other things. So it started being used as part of other sorts of therapy. So it's used in acceptance and commitment therapy, which is being developed by some called Stephen Hayes in Utah, I think. And he's found that helpful for depression and anxiety and for some other conditions. It's also been used in something called dialectical behavior therapy, DBT, which is particularly developed for my martial line, for working with people with borderline personality disorder, although it's also been adapted for use in substance use. Then these things, mindfulness is just like one component of the therapy. And then more recently, there's something called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is for recurrent depression. And this really built on Cabot Zinn's work and has shown to be effective for people who've had more than three episodes of depression. So people with recurrent depression. And in Britain, we have these things called the nice guidelines, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence, which says what are the effective treatments? And recently, MBCT has been put into the nice guidelines for treatment of recurrent depression. So that's MBCT. And then this MBRP, which is mindfulness-based relapse prevention, which is using, again, the same sort of stuff before preventing relapse into addictive disorders. And as regards that, there's been some theoretical papers written about it. And here and there, I think people are starting to do work with this. I started running courses on it at the center where I teach and in the health service where I work as well. But basically, adapting the mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for addiction. So in a way, what's come out of all this-- which is a sort of bit of an overview of Buddhism and meditation used therapeutically-- is that mindfulness, in particular, seems to have come out as being something that's very important or very useful as the therapeutic tool. And it seems to be more specific than just meditation in general, which might have a sort of calming or relaxing effect. If we now turn to the Buddhist tradition and have a look at mindfulness there, we find that mindfulness is very important in the Buddhist tradition. So you get it as one in a noble eightfold path. It's one of the seven factors of enlightenment-- the Buddhist-like lists, as many of you I'm sure will know. It's one of the five spiritual faculties. So it's the central one of those, the one that, in a way, harmonizes the others. And it particularly occurs in something called the Satipatana Sutra, which is the kind of central sutra that really talks a lot about mindfulness, and which I'll be referring to quite a bit. There's been two very good commentaries that came out in 2003, won by Sangarachita called Living with Awareness, which is probably in your bookshop, and won by Iku Analeo, which, again, is very good commentary on it, which might also be in the bookshop. So I just say a few words about this sutra. Quite often in Buddhist sutures, you have a whole story before you get onto the main teaching. In this one, the Buddha kind of just goes straight to the point. He gets, in this case, the monk's attention, and then he fades to them. Monks-- this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of nibbana, namely, the four foundations of mindfulness. So actually, the Buddha's making a very big claim here. He's saying it's the direct way. Other translations translate it as the only way, although probably-- anyway, Analeo, so yes, that probably isn't correct. It's more that it takes you straight there. In this case, straight to enlightenment, rather than being the exclusive way of getting there. So let's have a look at what mindfulness is. There are two main words to use to translate mindfulness. And they use a bit synonymously, but it has slightly different meanings. One is sati in the other is sampajanya. So sati is particularly refers to awareness of the present moment, or bear awareness. It's sometimes talked about. But it also has a meaning of recollection or memory. In other words, it's kind of like you understand what's going on in the present, partly because you're able to recollect the past. And particularly, you understand the ethical significance of what you're about. And then the sampajanya, which means mindfulness of purpose or clear comprehension. And this is more, if you like, future regarding, and particularly, it's mindfulness with respect to what you're trying to do, what your goal is, which might be to getting enlightenment, for example. And sometimes, the two are put together. They're on the sati patanas, which are quite a bit of sati sampajanya, which is usually translated as mindfulness and clear knowledge. In other words, it's knowing what you're doing and why you're doing it. So you're completely and fully and utterly present. But you also know where you're about, what you're off to. And you also deeply understand the significance of what you're doing. Very rich word. In the sutas, you get various analogies for sati or mindfulness. And I'll talk you through a few of those. So one is, it's like climbing a tower. So you get this idea, you've got this tower. And you get perspective. You can sort of see, like climbing half down or something like that as an Yosemite yesterday. So it's like you get it really high and you just see a long way. There's also a sense of detachment as well, I think inherent to nut phenology. And there's the idea of the surgeon's probe. So the surgeon's probe, it's like going into things to gather information, to find out is that a cyst or is that a hard tumor or what's going on there. Then there's a couple more to do with the idea of balance. So one's a skill chariot here. And one is carrying a bowl of oil on your head beside you, or if not spilling a drop of this perfectly full, you're probably walking on a tight road to the wall. Then another one is a gatekeeper of a town. So the idea of the gatekeeper is that they allow bona fide citizens in that they keep out unwanted individuals. So the idea of this is in a way of guarding the mind and having a bit of an overview of the mind. And then finally, there's another analogy is having wild animals tied to a strong post. So it's this idea that it has a stabilizing effect or an unshakeability, unshakeable effect. So again, lots of sort of rich associations with this idea of mindfulness. So if we look at the Sati Bhattana Sutra, it covers mindfulness in four main areas usually referred to as foundations, which are body feeling in the sense of whether something's pleasurable or unpleasurable, mental states like anger, jealousy, love. And mindfulness of doctrinal formulations refer to as dharma, such things as the four noble truths. And in a way, particularly applying those doctrinal formulations to your mind. And it was using them as a guide to get a sense of what's going on in your mind. And after each bit of description of these foundations, the Buddha says this, in this way, in regard to the body or the feeling which I've already seen, he abides contemplating the body internally, externally, both internally and externally. He abides contemplating the nature of a rising, of passing away, of both arising and passing away in the body. Mindfulness that there is a body is established in him to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindfulness. And he abides independent, not clinging to anything in the world. That is how, in regard to the body, he abides contemplating the body. There's quite a few little bits there, which I'll run through. So first of all, he contemplates it internally, externally, or both. So in other words, when we're passing mindfulness, we're aware of ourselves, or also aware of other people. So we're internally and externally. And perhaps the latter's a bit of this not being explored so much in contemporary, dharmic practice. And then, the advice is to contemplate the nature of arising, passing away, and both. In other words, it's looking at what brings thing into being and what leads to things to go away. So how come something comes into our experience? How come it goes away from our experience? And then there's awareness just for the sake of knowledge and continued mindfulness. So I think what this is getting at is about not getting lost in lots of associations, which, again, I'll come back to you later. And then finally, abiding independently, not clinging to anything in the world. And the way this is where it all leads to from the Buddhist point of view, the eventual state of complete detachment and freedom, whereas in a way the first three are methods of how to get there. OK, so that's a bit of a background on mindfulness from the Buddhist tradition. So what I now want to move on is look at how this is useful therapeutically. And basically, I think you can think of it in terms of being four main areas or four aspects of mindfulness that are helpful. And these four are, firstly, clocking what's going on, secondly, staying with experience, thirdly, having a biggest perspective and fourthly, choice. So we'll look at those in two. The first thing is just clocking what's happening. So when we're doing mindfulness meditation, it takes you away from teaching mindfulness for depression or addiction. The instruction is each time you get distracted, because, of course, the mind wanders off all the time, just to gently note where the mind has gone to, and then bring it back to whatever the object of the meditation is, whether that's the body or the breath. So in doing that, it's like just noting where the mind's gone. So you start getting a hang of where your mind habitually goes off to. But then each time you come back to whatever is the breath or the body, you are just stepping out, you're just getting caught up in whatever is going on. So a lot of the time we run around on automatic pilot. I don't know if you've had the experience of driving home, and you're going to stop at the supermarket, and you find yourself already gone past the supermarket, because you went on the habitual home, or you walk into the sitting room and you can't remember what on earth it was. You were going to very importantly get there. I mean, if you've only had one or two nods there. So, I mean, in a sense, it's great, isn't it? We can do things on the automatic pilot. It's fantastic. I mean, if you imagine trying to remember what it says, you could drive when you first learned to drive, it was just like, I felt a bit like that only a few days ago when I was pulling out of the car higher in downtown San Francisco, trying to navigate by myself and driving on the wrong side of the road in the car, but I couldn't work out how it worked. It was a complete, scary monster. Anyway, but you know, a couple of days later, I was driving around, like I've lived here on my life. So it's really good that we can do automatic pilots. But it can be a real nuisance as well. So, for example, sometimes there might be something that's just niggling away at you. And in a way, you just don't clock it. And it might be during a bit of a bad mood. But actually, because you've not clocked it and not really faced it, then it can control you because we get pushed around by our mental states if we're not aware of them. In particular, if you suffer from or prone to depression, what can happen is maybe your mood's just gone down a bit for some reason or other. And then that can start triggering negative thoughts. And then that can lead to the mood going down a bit and it gets into a downward spiral. And that can very quickly escalate in a way out of control if it's not caught, but just, you know, if it's just been going on an automatic pilot and then you can find yourself in a really depressed day and not quite understood why. Similarly with addiction, there might be something that's distressing you. And that can trigger thoughts of, I really need a drink to cope with this. We can sort of go on again a bit out of awareness. And then before you know it, you're simply having really strong urges to have a drink which are very difficult to find. Or seemingly, another sort of one is sometimes called in the trade, seemingly irrelevant decisions. Seemingly relevant decisions where a series of apparently innocent decisions in themselves. Like, it's a beautiful evening today. It'd be lovely to go out for a walk with a dog. God hasn't been out for a walk. I must see the death bills in the park 'cause it's springtime and they're so beautiful. And guess what? The side of the park is an off-licensed and before you know you've got a bottle. So, yeah, that's the same sort of thing. It just sort of goes on a bit outside awareness. So automatic pilot, which is very habitual way of being. And actually we need it to operate, but it can also be quite dangerous if you're, well, actually for everyone, but particularly if you're prone to things like depression and addiction. Whereas if it can be caught early, I could change and move like that. They're much, much easier to deal with than when you've really spiraled down. And also, this is just a thing of clocking what's going on. Starting to learn the links. For example, you might discover that you're particularly prone to negative thoughts if you're tired or pre-menstrual or something like that. So in other words, this thing about noting the nature of arising. So under what conditions do these unhelpful thoughts particularly arise? And therefore you particularly need to be on the ball. So that's all part of clocking our experience and really noticing what's going on. The second thing is staying with experience and particularly staying with negative experience. And the way we can see this a bit like both the surgeons probe this sort of investigation what's going on. And this idea of climbing the tower being a bit detached from our experience in the sense of not being caught up in it. So what we're trying to do and we're trying to stay with our experiences, we're not trying to change the experience. That's very important, not trying to change it. If anything, we're trying to deepen into the experience. So avoiding the extreme device or reacting to it or pushing it away so that I'm suppressing it. Basically, trying to push the things away doesn't work. It's the don't think about a pink elephant or a pink elephant. So when we try and do that like don't, I've got a negative thought, don't, don't think it. Or, you know, I need a fix, don't think about it. Push it away, just brings it, rebounds it back into awareness. So suppression is very unhelpful. But equal, other habitual reactions may also be unhelpful. So the instruction instead, when we had noticed something difficult arising, is to try and open up to it, to try and soften towards it, to try and develop or try and have it as best as we kind of sense of acceptance. It's very nice roomy poem which gives a bit of flavor of this. That's called the guest house, I'll just read that for you. So it goes, "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 they're a crowd of sorrows "who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, "still, treat each guest honorably. "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." So, just accept it as best as we can, whatever it is, whatever, whatever is happening. And also, with kindness, again, as best as we're able to, because it's important to try and find a flavor of mindfulness that isn't cold. I think mindfulness, when it's fully there, it's not cold, so it's got a kindly aspect or a metaphor aspect to it. And so, we just keep practicing, again and again, being with difficult experience, so that we're increasingly able to tolerate difficult experience, so that increasingly, we feel confident of being able to handle whatever comes our way. As opposed to a more habitual reaction, which might be a sense of, "I can't cope with this." So, when we have that thought, "I can't cope with this," that immediately sets off anxiety, depression, it just increases the distress, or it can lead to substance use as a way of avoiding it, or if we think in terms of actual physical pain, you think, "I can't cope with this," then the automatic view tense up around the pain, which actually makes the pain worse. So, that sort of can't cope reaction, sort of spirals it in a way. So, if you remember in that there was part of that refrain that the Buddha was describing, where he says, "Mindfulness, that there is a body, is established in him, to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindfulness." And so, what I was alluding to earlier, and the way it's very relevant here, is in other words, so there isn't a whole mental proliferation. So, your mind doesn't just go off an often ex-hole chain reaction, depending on what's just happened. So, to do that, body awareness is particularly helpful to try and really investigate exactly what's going on, to find out just exactly what is happening, to really explore pain, rather than just putting a label of, "This is pain, I can't bear it," to just what is that whole myriad of changing sensations, and even to become interested in whatever's going on. So, in that way, we don't fall into the getting anxious about being anxious, or getting depressed about being depressed, or getting angry about being depressed, and so on. So, it's like cutting through, this sort of staying with our experience, enables us to cut through a lot of this proliferation. And the way I think particularly this staying with, is like the really central key to making a change to things like anxiety, and depression, and relaxing prediction. So, the third area is perspective. So, if you look at mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, for depression, which is perhaps the thing I'm most familiar with, we're set up originally to find a way of using CBT to help prevent relapse, but that could be delivered in a group format. And what you get in cognitive therapy, CBT, is you get people to change their negative thoughts. So, for example, there might be a scenario where someone is walking down the road, and they recognise someone over the cross to the side of the road, and they wave at them, and the person doesn't respond. And someone who's prone to depression might immediately fall into, "Oh, what have I done?" They obviously hate me, as an interpretation of that. So, what you're doing CBT, if you notice, you write all that down, I believe, that they hate me, and then you look for alternatives like, maybe they didn't see me, maybe they were in the bad mood, and well, if that's the way they treat me, do I want them to remember my friend anyway? They do hate me. So, there might be all these alternative ways of thinking about it. What happens in CBT, if it's successful, is you keep doing these diaries, and you keep challenging these beliefs. And what eventually happens is you get a change on an implicit level where, basically, if you don't take the thought so seriously. So, you might still have this thought of she hates me, 'cause she didn't wave at me, but you think, "Oh, well." You just don't take it. You see it much more as provisional. So, what is implicit in CBT is made explicit, particularly in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, in MBCT. So, the people who developed MBCT, as I said, they were cognitive therapies. They set out to develop this way of, you know, group version of CBT. They got interested in Kabat Zins' words. Oh, mindfulness, that could be quite useful. Let's try and put a bit of mindfulness into our CBT. But actually, what they ended up with was really a mindfulness training with a bit of CBT thrown in, in the end. And what's key part of this is making this very explicit, what is implicit in CBT. So, thoughts are just seen as thoughts rather than necessarily as facts. It's so easy to leave what goes on in our mind. It's so easy to get caught up in it, you know. We have a thought, "I'm rubbish." And we think, "Oh." Or, "She did that because I'm a terrible person." And again, it has that sinking of feeling. It's amazing how sticky our thoughts are, how we just hold onto them and get caught up in them. Again, for those of you who've meditated, which I imagine many of you have done, they're so easy, isn't it? To just get caught up on a train of thoughts before you know it, you're gone off somewhere. So, what we train to do in NBCT is really to see thoughts just as passing phenomena. We just recognise in a way that we've all got lots of garbage in our head. We just, you know, "I don't need it." Put the pads on the table, let's face it. (audience laughing) It's true for me. I sometimes think, "I can't believe I'm thinking of that again." Anyway. (audience laughing) We just recognise, that's what the mind just sort of throws up this sometimes rather tedious, repetitive, and very, very occasionally interesting stuff. Yet, we so easily get caught up in. So, what we do is, we just see it, as I said, as passing phenomena. So, we just see thoughts, they just arise, they're passed away, we don't need to take them seriously. And again, that's a real key learning if we cannot take our thinking so seriously. So, each time we return to the breath, each time we return to the body, it's like we step out of taking our thoughts as seriously. So, again, it's a bit like this idea of declining the tower, as mentioned, and in the refrain, this idea of things arising, passing away, and both. In other words, seeing that things are impermanent. We can increasingly recognise that things will pass. So, negative thoughts, though they arise, they're sometimes, they can feel absolutely torrential, they will pass. Similarly, urges to engage in unhelpful behaviour may be very, very strong, they will pass. And the more we can see that, the more confidence we can have in that. And again, the refrain talks about internally and externally. So, we can just reflect on how it happens to other people as well. It doesn't just happen to me that actually, in a way, these sort of thoughts, with stuff, it's just an impersonal process, in a way, depending on conditions, our particular thoughts will to do with our own personal conditions, which may be our childhood, it may be our recent events, it may just simply be that we just creep thinking, you know, in that way. Again, if you sort of look at addiction, for example, why often there may be particular early events that have led someone towards, say, using drink. But then, once it gets established, then, actually, you suddenly find you need to drink 'cause you're depressed, because you're anxious, because you've had a row, 'cause you're watching the television, 'cause you're celebrating the World Cup, and it's sort of like, you know, you always need to drink sort of every situation, it just gets associated with more and more things. So that's perspective. So now they're particularly changing our perspective on our thoughts and the other phenomena that are happening in our minds. And the final one is choice. And really, that follows on from the other things, that actually, once we've clocked what's going on, once we've learned to be with difficult experience, rather than to flee from it, psychically, or to get rid of it by reaching for a substance, we're then in a much better position to decide what is the best thing to do. And this, in a way, is mindfulness of purpose. And, in a way, meditation, again, can be very useful from that point of view, 'cause it can sometimes create a space of what sometimes people talk of as wise minds to arise. So if we can just sit with something, then sometimes a solution, a helpful solution, will just manifest, will just arise. So, what I'm suggesting is there are four useful things to help with various health conditions, which is, first of all, clocking what's going on, learning to be with our experience, if you difficult experience, changing our perspective on what's going on, and allowing wiser choice, and choosing wisely, depending on that. So they're really useful skills. They can help with recurrent depression, with anxiety, with pain, with preventing relapse into addiction. But they can also be very useful for life in general, because all of us at times get anxious, feel depressed, avoid our experience when perhaps that's not the most helpful thing to do. And, in a way, it's an investigation of our experience, a way of being with our experience, so it can just go deeper and deeper. It's said that after the Buddha gained enlightenment, that he continued practicing Satya Pitana, he continued deepening his understanding, and he enjoyed it, so that's why he did it. So, for whatever reason, in a way where we can deepen our awareness, again, returning to this refrain, noticing things arising, passing away, if we can notice more and more, just how things change. And so we're really getting our bones, this sense of impermanence in ourselves, and in other people, that we can see more and more fully. And now, as I said, more and more fully, how we are in a flux, how we are a set of processes, and can even in a way just more and more enjoy that sense of play of how things just arise and pass away. So that the more we can then do that, then in a way, the less will actually hold tightly to our experience, and we then won't be so pulled around by it. We won't be so controlled by it. We won't be so fooled by it. We can see it for what it is. So, Satya Sampajanya, mindfulness and clear knowledge, basically, from a Buddhist perspective, leads to just vision and knowledge of things as they are, in a way, it's another way of saying the same thing. In other words, it eventually leads to freedom, because, as I said, you're just not controlled by your experience in the same way. So, as the Buddhist said, this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of Nibhana. Namely, the four foundations of mindfulness. So, in other words, in a way, what you get from the Buddha is an invitation to take this path as far as we want, whether that's disamount, particular sorrows of recurring depression or anxiety, or to help overcome, help deal with physical pain, or whether it's to move towards complete awakening, until eventually one is abiding, independent, and no longer clinging to anything in the world. Well, there's lots of places in the suitors, you can get a bit of sense of that, but when I was writing this talk, it reminded me of sometimes of the songs of realizations you get where people, when they gain enlightenment, they give these little verse, which just expresses their sense of freedom. So, I thought I'd just end with one of those. So, this is by Kottita and his song of realization was this. Dead to the world and its troubles, he recites mantras, mind unruffled, shaking destructions away, like the wind gods scatters a few forest leaves. (audience applauds) (audience applauding) (clapping)
