so to make it nice and peaceful during the talk can we all cough in unison at the beginning

[laughter] and have it all done away. So communal coughing first of all please.

[many coughs and laughter]

Thank you.

[more laughter]

Okay now be quiet. And of course there is no way to control these things so if you have

to cough just make peace with the coughing and let it happen. But the title of this evening's

talk is going to be on dealing with your emotions. Somebody asked me, a couple of people asked

me for subjects to talk about this evening and I wanted to focus on the big subject of

your emotions and how we deal with them, especially in Buddhism. Because this will cover a couple

of requests which people have given for the Friday night talk. And you may notice that

quite often when I give these talks on a Friday evening I don't really spend too much time

talking about the theory of Buddhism and the intellectual part which is just really the

realm of thought. Of course that's part of Buddhism and you can read about that in books

and sometimes I do go into those more intellectual and ephemeral parts of philosophy of Buddhist

life. But what's more important I've found in practice is this emotional world and how

to deal with life as we face it in our modern age. And especially how we deal with emotions

which have a huge effect upon on our physical and mental wellbeing. And those emotions range

from despair to raw anger to inspiration to love to compassion and all those emotions

are a very important part of our life. And sometimes the theories and intellectual abstractions,

sometimes they don't address the reality of our emotional world.

And I want to talk about that this evening - how we deal you know with those emotions

- how we identify them and make sense out of them and learn to move forward with those

emotions, because I do and also the Buddha identified a distinction between emotions,

there are some things which we do call the negative emotions which are problematical,

there are things such like you know grief, being angry, being afraid, wanting revenge,

having a broken heart. Whatever else those negative emotions are

we realise they do impinge upon our happiness and our success in life, they do hold us back

from progress. So those are the negative emotions and there is many more you can include in

that category. There is also what we call the positive emotions, things like inspiration,

things like compassion. And one of the great positive emotions which too many people often

forget about is a positive emotion of peace. And I put that in the realm of emotions because

that's something that's solid which empowers and motivates you; I'll be talking about that

towards the end of the talk - usually we have to start with negative emotions first of all.

And of course I have to deal with that a lot, people usually come and ring me up, or come

and send me emails or come and talk about their negative emotions. Very rarely do they

come up and say, "Ajahn Brahm, I'm so happy! I'm having a wonderful time! Everything is

going well in my life! I'm just having so much joy!"

[laughter]

They say nooo..I've just broken up with my boyfriend, ah just my husband has run away

with my best friend, I just got the sack from work, I've got cancer, someone has died, that's

what, the stock market has gone down or the Eagles have lost, or whatever it is. People

they're always complaining about the negative part of their life - so that's what you have

to deal with first of all. And even sometimes in my monastery people actually ring me up

for counselling - we call that Dial-a-Monk service [laughter].

But you get so busy sometimes, I made this suggestion to have one of these answering

machine services - you know like you get in these government - like press 1 for something.

Because it has happened that sometimes people sometimes their dog has died or someone says

can you do some chanting for me over the phone. Can you do some Buddhist prayers, they ask

for. I've done that sometimes, in the middle of the night, to the opposite side of the

world - their dog is sick so I've done the chanting over the phone.. sometimes I'm too

compassionate. [laughter]. But.. so I've decided actually to actually, uh, so if you want..we

can record these chants and have them on the recorder so if you want a prayer you can just

press number 1. [laughter]. Why not, that's very easy. And then if you want to speak to

Ajahn Brahm you haven't got a prayer so press number 1 anyway. So that way I get rid of

everybody and have a nice easy time.

But you have to deal with people, and that's only a joke. You have to deal with..it's much

nicer to be accessible to people, even though you're tired, I'd rather be accessible then

be sort-of somehow separated from the people who support you, and feed you, and clothe

you, and look after you and your friends. So even though it's a lot of work I enjoy

doing it. But when you're dealing with people's emotions, sometimes you have to let people

understand, number one, that those emotions are real, they have a place in life, but also

where they come from. Because it's great when you have an emotion in your heart, to find

out why is that there, where did it originate from. Because it's great when you track it

back, you can see how emotions arise, how they build up. I don't know how many of you

have been to movies, but you can actually see that the trick of the movie is to start

with the music. You know the different musics that get your emotions going and just how

even the lighting starts to change. If you want to get people afraid, you turn the lights

down.. and the music is very very soft.. apumbabambumbum bumbumbum.. And it gets people, because actually

your heart beats. When you get excited you heart beat goes at that level. And if the

music or whatever else. the beat gets that, it actually encourages your heart beat to

sort-of get very very very strong. And you can even use your speech to say that..something..is..coming.....and

make people afraaaaaid.. But you can see how emotions can be generated, just in movies

especially by the music by the way that speech is actually said, and also by the lighting.

One of the first times when I saw this, how people can play your emotions is actually

when we started our nun's monastery down in Gingegannup because that was before Sister

Vayama was here, and we were looking for a nice piece of land, we found this nice piece

of land over in Reen Road but it was on auction. And so I went there for the auction, with

- I don't know if he's here this evening - Eddy Fernando was our bidder. But when the auctioneer

started the auction he was very calm, saying about this beautiful block of land, wonderful

place for retreat, lovely forests and the river and then he started mentioning the figures..

And he said, I think this is worth so much, I think we should start for at least a million

dollars. And straight away I thought, "oh no". And then he bids for one million, and

of course no one bid, any bids for five hundred thousand, four hundred, three hundred.. Let's

start two-fifty. Someone put their hand up - two-fifty. And that's when he started - two-fifty

two-fifty, we've got two-seventy-five, two-seventy-five, two-seventy-five, anyone two-seventy-five!

We've got two-seventy-five!! Three-hundred, three-hundred, wawawawawawa..!! [laughter].

And even I was a monk, even I started getting excited. [laughter].

And you can see just how they do this, just the way they speak, they suddenly raise their

voice and started speaking very quickly, and you do get excited. And how emotions can be

generated, when you see how those emotions can be generated, you can actually sometimes

be in power over other people's emotions. Just by acting slowly, and by speaking softly

you can calm people down. One of the first times I saw this and it was very impressive

was the former abbot and Spiritual Director of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia

Ajahn Jagaro. I was with him when he was a monk just learning his trade in Thailand.

Because we do learn a trade - this is a training which we go through. And we were having our

morning meal when a Thai lady ran into our dining hall. She ran in, and she's obviously

very upset, because they don't usually do this - interfering in a monk's meal. And she

was saying something in Thai, and I actually caught it after a while, she said "Suchin

is dead! Suchin is dead! She shot herself! She's committed suicide!".

And I got really quite excited too because I knew that lady, she had cancer, we've been

going to see her, talking to her, counselling her. She was a close disciple of the monastery.

And that morning she had shot herself, and this was her best friend who found her body.

She came in to the monastery just straight away, completely distraught having found her

best friend committed suicide. You can understand what she felt like. And I understood that,

and I looked to Ajahn Jagaro who was the head monk at that time to see what he would do.

He understood what she'd said and he put his head down and carried on eating. And this

lady - "She shot herself! She killed herself!" - and the monk just carried on eating as if

nothing had happened. And after about one or two minutes she stopped moving her arms

up and down, she stopped shouting, and at that point Ajahn Jagaro put down his spoon,

put aside his bowl, and said "what happened?" I thought it was a beautiful piece of psychological

calming a person's emotions down. Because he was not responding with anxiety to her

great distress, he was just calming her down just by his actions and by his softness, she

too calmed down in the space of one or two minutes. It was the most brilliant counselling

I'd seen for years. He was giving her a sense of perspective about what had happened. So

by having someone who was calm, was not being agitated, she could calm down too and see

the bigger picture. Which is what happens sometimes, when we see this is my boyfriend

that's left me, this is my child that's died, this is my job which someone else has taken,

these are my shares which have just all disappeared, it's my team the Dockers have lost - I'm being

fair because I've mentioned the Eagles first now I'm mentioning the Dockers.

Sometimes that we when lose perspective we can actually get emotionally distraught and

that was a very beautiful way that he dealt with that by calming her down to see a bigger

picture. Not negating her feelings but acknowledging them, but calming them down. Because you see

just how these emotions can get built up, what actually builds them up and how they're

created. I just was at a funeral service this afternoon - and I enjoy taking funerals because

at a funeral service you do have a group of people who are emotionally raw. They've just

lost a close member of their family or their friend and it's, I've seen many many times

just how grief can be created or how that feeling of grief can be calmed down to get

a different emotion coming up. I can actually see that I remember even when my own father

died that obviously I knew my mother so well but when my father died she knew he was going

to die, you know he came very close many times, when he actually did die she was at ease,

at peace with it. It was only when a cousin came in to the house and opened up her arms

to my mother and said, "oh you poor thing", and of course that meant the floodgates of

my mother's tears started coming. And I knew that if that cousin hadn't said that stupid

thing my mother would be much more at peace with the death of her husband and my father.

It was as if that there was a social trigger there, that you've lost your husband that

you must cry, and that was pressed by this cousin when, before that happened she did

not need to go on that path of grief. And I've seen so often that our social conditioning

creates these emotions. And one of the things which I love doing if you're teaching at a

funeral is to actually give people other triggers. Trigger not to actually generate these emotions

in the same old ways, but look at them in a different way. To give different triggers

to different emotions.

And let's look at another sort-of emotion, the emotion of anger. Where does that anger

come from? You know the old story, that someone calls you a pig, I don't know if anyone's

called you a pig today, but now I'm going to call you a pig. And what happens when somebody

calls you a pig? You think - "they have no right to call me a pig! Who does he think

he is to call me a pig!? I am not a pig! He shouldn't call me a pig." And every time you

remember that I've called you a pig, you allow me to call you a pig one more time. Every

time you remember that I'm calling you a pig again. Why do we do such things? Why can't

we just say "he called me a pig" and then forget about it. Instead of allowing us to

trigger that emotion of anger, ill-will whatever else it is. The anger that comes up in you,

you actually you allow it to happen. There is no reason for it at all, you don't have

to follow that path. If you trace anger back, where did you get angry from, you can actually

see a series of irritations which you dwell upon, you think about, and you create the

fire. Anger is like a blaze, like a forest fire, but all forest fires they start just

with a small spark. And even that small spark it starts just with a small little fire in

the twigs or in the leaves. If you catch it quickly it's just so easy to put out.

But a lot of times we don't notice it that easily, until it gets so big, so big it's

a forest fire. Living in the bush, and having experienced major bushfires, I know just how

difficult they are to put out once they are fully alight. It's much better to catch them

earlier. If you can catch these negative emotions earlier, through you mindfulness, through

your awareness, through your mental training, it's not that hard to actually to transcend

emotions such as anger, or fear, or grief. If we really want to, we can train ourselves.

And it's not like a training of willpower, it's always a training of wisdom power, to

see where these things come from, to see their cause, how they're built up and catch them