BITESIZE | A Monk’s Guide To Finding Happiness & Thriving in Hard Times | Gelong Thubten #678

Rangan Chatterjee (0:01)

Welcome to Feel Better, Live More, Bitesize, your weekly dose of inspiration, insights, and practical ideas to help you live well and thrive. Each episode brings you some of my favorite moments, useful tools, and inspiring ideas from the many incredible conversations I've had on my podcast. Today's Bitesize is from episode 387 of the podcast, with Gelong Thubten, Buddhist monk, meditation teacher, and author of the fantastic book, A Handbook for Hard Times, A Monk's Guide to Fearless Living. Thubten explains that when we distract ourselves with low-grade addictions, we're pushing away emotional pain or discomfort. But if we can learn instead to sit with what's making us uncomfortable, those emotions can start to transform.

If I look across society, what I see are a lot of people with low-grade addictions. Things like alcohol, social media, pornography, online shopping. And it seems to me that the root cause of a lot of these addictions is distraction. You make the case that distraction or the pushing away of our feelings of pain, of discomfort, is actually the cause of many of our problems.

Do you agree that we are a society that seems to be addicted to distraction? And if you do, what's the underlying cause?

Gelong Thubten (1:43)

I think we're definitely addicted to distraction. And of course, the way we use technology has really fed into that. I went away into a four-year-long retreat in 2005

And when I came out of that retreat in 2009, everything had changed in the landscape of technology. So during those four years, the iPhone was launched, and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all of those things happened. So when I came out of that retreat, I was quite startled by how things had sped up.

And so just noticing how everybody's face is buried in a phone, and there's this sort of constant barrage, this invasive nature to information, advertising, social media, all of that. And so that's incredibly addictive. And so, yes, we are all drowning in addictions of various sorts, and they are all based on distraction. What is it we're trying to distract ourselves from? Is I think we don't really know how to face up to our own feelings, so we use things to food, phones, anything, to kind of get away from ourselves.

Rangan Chatterjee (2:50)

Yeah. There's a quote in the introduction of your book, which I'd love to read to you, because I think it really speaks to this.

In pushing away discomfort, we usually don't see how the discomfort lies in the pushing. It's our habit of chasing pleasure and running away from hardship that is the real problem. And as any habit simply proliferates, so we constantly chase more and push away more, reinforcing our sense of dissatisfaction.

Gelong Thubten (3:22)

Yeah.

Rangan Chatterjee (3:24)

There's a certain irony there where we're trying to use these activities, acquire these things, engage in these behaviours to avoid feeling what we're feeling.

But you're sort of making the point that actually doing that makes the problem worse. So why is that? And also, just to play devil's advocate for a minute, what's wrong with people engaging in these behaviours?

Gelong Thubten (3:49)

There's nothing wrong with anything per se, but is it making us suffer? That's the question. Is it creating more suffering? And I think it is because the more you run after something, the more it seems elusive.

We never actually get what we want. And that's because when we're engaged in running after that thing, we're just building more of a habit to run after something. So even if we get what we want, we then find we want something else or a better version of it, the wanting never seems to go away. And in a way, we're just feeding more wanting. So the mind wants more because it's creating a habit of wanting more. So the wanting becomes an endless hunger. And then on the other side of the coin, the not wanting becomes an endless process too, because the more we push away discomfort, the more we build a habit of needing to push away discomfort. Now, if you've got that habit running in your mind, there's going to always be something uncomfortable to be pushed away. Even if you lock yourself in an ivory tower with no stress around you and everything just right, because there's a habit of needing to push away discomfort, we'll find something uncomfortable. So we're sort of caught up in that chase, running after something, running away from something, and we never find any kind of peace there.

Instead of looking at the things outside yourself as the cause of your suffering or the cause of your happiness, you look at your own mind and you start to work out what habits your mind is running, a little bit like computer programs. And you can write new programs, you change the programming, and through doing that, your life changes because you're starting to work with the mind itself rather than the objects around you or the people around you. You're working at your reactions.