From: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0cr0T4jCtF8

Context: Throughout this transcript, Bhante Vimalaramsi is the speaker unless otherwise indicated.

hello

because i'm a buddhist monk i'm going to

give you a buddhist perspective

but it's not really going to be much

different from what you already know

one of the things that the buddha did

was he taught

very much in depth how mind works

and the talk that we heard this morning

was great very good

talk and i would only add one thing to

that

and that is when the hawaiian family was

all together

and they finally worked out the problem

the healing factor that happened for the

child

was the joy of the release

of that attachment

and what i want to talk to you today is

about today is

how to develop joy all the time

i've been in the healing arts for

probably 40 years and

20 years ago i had to make a decision on

which path i wanted to follow for the

healing

whether i wanted to be a hands-on healer

or i wanted to do the next level

of healing and i decided that i wanted

to do the spiritual healing

so i became a buddhist monk and i

studied very hard and i practiced a lot

of meditation

i hear people that are teaching

meditation now and they said oh i did

one three-month retreat and it was

really

something and now i can teach and i've

done

12 or 15 of those

and i did an eight month retreat in

burma

very intensive getting up to three

o'clock in the morning

meditating until 11 o'clock at night

the last three months i was there i was

going to bed at midnight getting up at

two

so i've

done a lot of very intensive meditation

what i found out later after i

got out of burma i also did a two-year

retreat which was about as intensive

intensive means i didn't talk to anybody

but the teacher

and all i did was sitting meditation

walking meditation and i did that for

hours and hours on the end

i went through what they said was

the final result and i was not satisfied

with that so i left burma

and i came back and i did an

eight-month fairly intensive

this was only about 12 hours a day so

it's

but i did it with loving-kindness

meditation

not with the vipassana or the

one-pointed kind of concentration

that is generally being taught in the

world today

when i got done with that i was invited

to start up a monastery

in a suburb of

kuala lumpur and they asked me to start

teaching

loving-kindness meditation

almost everybody in malaysia that was

practicing meditation they were

practicing a form of meditation called

vipassana

when you practice vipassana mind has a

tendency to get a little bit

critical a little bit hard a little bit

judgmental

i'm right i don't care what your

experience is i know what the experience

is things like that and when they

would get done with a vipassana retreat

they would say things and do things that

were very

harsh to other people they're hurting

other people's feelings and they'd come

running to me

and they'd say i have to do a retreat

with you when's your next retreat

and i was giving one-week retreats with

loving kindness

now when you practice loving kindness

meditation

it is a smiling meditation

and this is incredibly important

there was a study done in the university

of minnesota

i think i can't remember it's been so

long ago

on the corners of your mouth when the

corners of your mouth

go down your mental state goes down

when the corners of your mouth go up

your mental state goes up

so i said okay

that's a key to having joy

arise you've got to smile

and these people would come and they'd

say okay i'll do the meditation with you

and they would come after the first day

and they say this is a phony smile and i

would say i don't care whether it's

phony or not

kate's smiling the more you smile the

more it

uplifted your mind becomes as

you start to have more and more uplifted

mind you're naturally

starting to develop

joy when you have

joy in your mind your mind is very alert

your mind is very bright and it's real

easy to see when there's not any joy in

your mind it's real easy to see

when you have

one of the emotional things that arise

whenever

something unhap unpleasant happens

sadness depression anxiety stress

whatever the catch of the day happens to

be it's real easy to see

that you're caught by that when you

notice you don't have joy

so what did i tell people to do

i told them they had to smile

and the more you smile the easier it

gets

the more uplifted your mind begins

and the more actual healing

there is that takes place

joy is the real healer

and it just so happens in buddhism there

are these things called

seven factors of enlightenment

and the first factor is mindfulness

the next one is investigation of your

experience the next one is

energy the next one is joy

that's right in the middle of the

enlightenment factors

after that there's uh tranquility

there's collectedness and then there's

equanimity

but for our purposes here we want to

focus on joy

why is joy right in the middle of that

mess

because that is the balancing factor

between putting too much energy into

trying to control things and not enough

energy

into trying to control things the more

you see joy arise in your daily

activities

the more magic you can you can manifest

why you're going to worry about

something

do you have joy in your mind no room

i i was we have a chat group

for uh meditation basically

and there was a man from australia that

wrote and he said he'd been practicing

meditation for six years very

intensively and he thought he was

missing something

so he asked me to help him

and i told him okay what kind of

practice were you doing and he was doing

a breathing

meditation now when i teach breathing

meditation it's a little bit different

because i follow what the buddha was

talking about directly in the suit

when you do your breathing meditation

you

hello

because i'm a buddhist monk i'm going to

give you a buddhist perspective

but it's not really going to be much

different from what you already know

one of the things that the buddha did

was he taught

very much in depth how mind works

and the talk that we heard this morning

was great very good

talk and i would only add one thing to

that

and that is when the hawaiian family was

all together

and they finally worked out the problem

the healing factor that happened for the

child

was the joy of the release

of that attachment

and what i want to talk to you today is

about today is

how to develop joy all the time

i've been in the healing arts for

probably 40 years and

20 years ago i had to make a decision on

which path i wanted to follow for the

healing

whether i wanted to be a hands-on healer

or i wanted to do the next level

of healing and i decided that i wanted

to do the spiritual healing

so i became a buddhist monk and i

studied very hard and i practiced a lot

of meditation

i hear people that are teaching

meditation now and they said oh i did

one three-month retreat and it was

really

something and now i can teach and i've

done

12 or 15 of those

and i did an eight month retreat in

burma

very intensive getting up to three

o'clock in the morning

meditating until 11 o'clock at night

the last three months i was there i was

going to bed at midnight getting up at

two

so i've

done a lot of very intensive meditation

what i found out later after i

got out of burma i also did a two-year

retreat which was about as intensive

intensive means i didn't talk to anybody

but the teacher

and all i did was sitting meditation

walking meditation and i did that for

hours and hours on the end

i went through what they said was

the final result and i was not satisfied

with that so i left burma

and i came back and i did an

eight-month fairly intensive

this was only about 12 hours a day so

it's

but i did it with loving-kindness

meditation

not with the vipassana or the

one-pointed kind of concentration

that is generally being taught in the

world today

when i got done with that i was invited

to start up a monastery

in a suburb of

kuala lumpur and they asked me to start

teaching

loving-kindness meditation

almost everybody in malaysia that was

practicing meditation they were

practicing a form of meditation called

vipassana

when you practice vipassana mind has a

tendency to get a little bit

critical a little bit hard a little bit

judgmental

i'm right i don't care what your

experience is i know what the experience

is things like that and when they

would get done with a vipassana retreat

they would say things and do things that

were very

harsh to other people they're hurting

other people's feelings and they'd come

running to me

and they'd say i have to do a retreat

with you when's your next retreat

and i was giving one-week retreats with

loving kindness

now when you practice loving kindness

meditation

it is a smiling meditation

and this is incredibly important

there was a study done in the university

of minnesota

i think i can't remember it's been so

long ago

on the corners of your mouth when the

corners of your mouth

go down your mental state goes down

when the corners of your mouth go up

your mental state goes up

so i said okay

that's a key to having joy

arise you've got to smile

and these people would come and they'd

say okay i'll do the meditation with you

and they would come after the first day

and they say this is a phony smile and i

would say i don't care whether it's

phony or not

kate's smiling the more you smile the

more it

uplifted your mind becomes as

you start to have more and more uplifted

mind you're naturally

starting to develop

joy when you have

joy in your mind your mind is very alert

your mind is very bright and it's real

easy to see when there's not any joy in

your mind it's real easy to see

when you have

one of the emotional things that arise

whenever

something unhap unpleasant happens

sadness depression anxiety stress

whatever the catch of the day happens to

be it's real easy to see

that you're caught by that when you

notice you don't have joy

so what did i tell people to do

i told them they had to smile

and the more you smile the easier it

gets

the more uplifted your mind begins

and the more actual healing

there is that takes place

joy is the real healer

and it just so happens in buddhism there

are these things called

seven factors of enlightenment

and the first factor is mindfulness

the next one is investigation of your

experience the next one is

energy the next one is joy

that's right in the middle of the

enlightenment factors

after that there's uh tranquility

there's collectedness and then there's

equanimity

but for our purposes here we want to

focus on joy

why is joy right in the middle of that

mess

because that is the balancing factor

between putting too much energy into

trying to control things and not enough

energy

into trying to control things the more

you see joy arise in your daily

activities

the more magic you can you can manifest

why you're going to worry about

something

do you have joy in your mind no room

i i was we have a chat group

for uh meditation basically

and there was a man from australia that

wrote and he said he'd been practicing

meditation for six years very

intensively and he thought he was

missing something

so he asked me to help him

and i told him okay what kind of

practice were you doing and he was doing

a breathing

meditation now when i teach breathing

meditation it's a little bit different

because i follow what the buddha was

talking about directly in the suit

when you do your breathing meditation

you