Ep.6 – Using our mind and body as a laboratory for positive change

In this episode Geshe Tashi reads and discusses His Holiness’s Daily Inspiration for the 9th April:“Taking your own body and mind as the laboratory, engage in some thoroughgoing research on your own mental functioning, and examine the possibility of making some positive changes within yourself.”Geshe Tashi expands on this, noting how, using our body and mind as a laboratory, we can come to understand the Buddhist teachings of impermanence, interdependence, the nature of life and of reality.He points out that to make long term changes it is not good enough to merely examine our body and mind, we need a strategy, we need to know what to nurture, what to enhance and what to let go of.  The small amount we can do may seem insignificant.  But if we have consistency and a continued practice with a good strategy, then in the long term we will gain the very noticeable positive changes that His Holiness speaks about here.Once again, Geshe Tashi urges us, if possible, to help others, and to try to do so without self-interest, negative pride or arrogance, but as genuinely as possible, with love and compassion.https://geshetashi.org/https://foundationsofbuddhistthought.org/

In this episode Geshe Tashi reads and discusses His Holiness’s Daily Inspiration for the 27th March. In the light of the current worldwide Coronavirus outbreak, Geshe Tashi has chosen a quotation from His Holiness the Dalai Lama emphasising the “need for a clear awareness of the interdependent nature of nations, of humans and animals and the world.”  Drawing on his own experience of trying to care for the Sera Mey monks and their families at this time, he skilfully encourages us to use this teaching on interdependence to try and gain some perspective around the feelings of fear and confusion many of us are experiencing.https://geshetashi.org/https://foundationsofbuddhistthought.org/

In this episode Geshe Tashi reads and discusses His Holiness’s Daily Inspiration for the 9th March.  Once again he speaks from his own experience as he tells us of his struggles to maintain a simple life in the face of his public responsibilities as Abbot of a large Buddhist monastery.  He gives us his thoughts on the practicalities of abandoning faulty states of mind as well as cultivating helpful ones, and discusses what these words might actually mean.

In this episode, in the light of his own experience as abbot of a Buddhist monastery, Geshe Tashi discusses His Holiness’s Daily Inspiration for the 27th February: can we make a difference in the wider world, and if so, how do we go about this without getting discouraged? 

In this episode, Geshe Tashi chooses the Daily Inspiration for the 2nd February, and discusses whether we can find happiness in external things, such as money or technology? 

In this series of A Buddhist Life, Khen Rinpoche Geshe Tashi Tsering, in his typically humorous, warm-hearted and accessible style, chooses topics from His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Daily Inspirations for discussion and reflection.  In this first episode, Geshe Tashi introduces the series.