must say everyone shall gramberg here welcome to another episode of positive energy bringing you and lightning television for your evolving soul human beings are hard wired for kindness in other words we're all born with the innate desire to express kindness to others yet it seems there isn't enough consistent kindness in the world around us on this show i'm joined by andre hallow zen teacher and from the buddhist perspective we're going to explore meditation and other ways you can cultivate more kindness and compassion take a deep breath and stay where you are as positive energy starts right now andre welcomes a positive energy thank you very much for having me and glad that you could be here so what led you to the buddhist path i was not raised buddhist my mother was protestant my father is muslim but i was raised i guess you would say nondenominational christian when i read  siddartha in high school that book spoke to me and i love teaching of a high school english teacher and so i always have a yearning for that kind of contemplative introspection that is found inside the book and then i as suffering although dis ease just a general sense of malays or dissatisfaction things weren't right and i think a lot of people can relate to that in modern culture perhaps  given where the baby the dissatisfied with where the circumstances in their life or psychologically so there's a lot of different the term covers a lot of ground and so when i when i started to read about buddhism i reflected on those four noble truths the first of which is that life when lived a certain way is dissatisfying and i started to really tell you related to that absolutely it sounds like it's a really pessimistic or negative statement but i think it's very realistic about awareness and and truth about the human you know condition the human condition we all have some of that so it was out of your suffering that you were seeking and picked  siddartha now well i had read siddartha in my senior english i was an englishman oh oh they read it in college and high school yeah and then i thought i think i'd read it over again in high school in college and then so that kind of prompt or primed me for just this this notion that there were different ways of living your life other than maybe there's a way that is traditionally lived in the west i love it and so then when i when i started looking through literature and there's so so much literature that abounds about buddhism now that's available to two english speakers when i read it and then that first noble truth really struck a chord with me and i said well let me let me look more deeply into this  it sounds like and this happens to so many people on the path you had some moment of awakening you know some moment of realization and that has you recognize that this is the direction that you want to go say a little bit more for people who are in any way confused about what a buddhist is what in your terms what a buddhist so being a buddhist i always come back to the root of the term buddha and when so the story goes that after the buddha reach however we're going to define that he was walking and the first person he encountered interesting we enough was not a monk but was a lay person who was dressed in ordinary clothes and said wow you really look like you've got your stuff together and  person inquired are you were god are you an angel or are you a saint and the buddha said no i'm awake and so that would have been a term as is translated now into into what we will eventually have in english now we would call it in layman but originally he was referring to a state of awakening and so it means about living your life with intention and awareness yeah conscious looking at the being observe the observer in your life not being asleep not being unconscious in your life and so there isn't that that that again that's part of the human condition that we're asleep moving towards being awake and so the buddha said that is the path for all of us so we're all yes buddhists we  have right it's our birthright we just don't we just are not aware of it yet and i think that given mass media the the way that we live our lives today it's very easy to forget that and to fall into habits of inattention mindlessness and just be preoccupied with other the past what has happened or the future where we think things are going to go rather than dwelling inside of the present which is where everything is actually occurring so for me being a buddhist means staying present my high school students love it when they find out the buddhist they'll say oh so you meditate and i said yes i'm doing right now  mean and i said well that's what it means means to be attentive to the present moment regardless of the circumstances yeah yeah that's beautiful and so you can make it relatable for everyone so that you can take try to if people need you to you can make it sort of take the buddha out of the practices because the practices are absolutely universe song and apical it seems like more would have been more popular than ever and more mainstream or almost like a but buzzword maybe that's because we need it we need those practices more than ever in our rat race so talk about zen as it relates to buddhism zen buddhism in general make that distinction for us the term zen probably is more of a western academic term than that and practitioners would have actually called it twelve hundred years ago in china which is where chon buddhism began china being the chinese form of zen so then china made its way to korea saun buddhism and then eventually made its way to japan in around eleven hundred around thereabouts so the the term refers to a practice of being centered inside of the present moments and of course no certain sex of buddhist buddhism  claim to have personified or exemplify the buddhist teaching and so what zen is a marriage of indian buddhism meets chinese taoism and you two together and it gives you this unique east asian flavor for pointing directly to the experience of right here right now so invent we use several different techniques to abruptly awaken somebody to the present moment and so the of the underlying teaching is that all beings are already in light and there are buddha as as you've referred to earlier but it's we get clouded over with all all these conceptual overlays these these habits and all emotions and so those those that original pristine nature is obscured that is about returning to your original clarity and it's so it's nothing special it's not about achieving any sort of mystical state it's about recognising that white here right now is fully recognizing that tomorrow i have the mother long perhaps or when i get home i have to cook dinner so it's not about just being dwelling in the present only but it's recognizing that all of our choices occur in this present moment that's the fertile ground that allows us to make healthy compassionate choices for the future so as where segue into talking more about compassion and kindness because i really wanted the theme of the show and the focus on that today because it's just so important and we need to have a great dialogue about that so what is a bodhisattva and how does that relate to compassion so as a as i referred to before developed about a thousand eleven hundred years after the buddha died in india and it occurred inside of china and so we see all these later developments you see tibet and buddhism or just once a japanese or korean buddhism and they're called which is referring to the great vehicle the commitment for a person to dedicate his or her life to reaching enlightenment for other people and so the bodhisattva is central to zen buddhism in that and i'm away from my family my mind is going to be running through guilt and all sorts of worries and doubts one of my children doing right now i wish i were there i'm a terrible father and but when i ground myself inside the the real the recognition that i practice and i sit in meditation for them and you're extending peace in all directions that's the motivation for your practice of some somebody might ask well why do you brush your teeth well if i brush my teeth for myself that's good but if i brush my teeth for all beings that means that i'll have better teeth so i can speak better and help other people or maybe i won't have is as much mourning breath and be offensive to people that i come to close to them in the morning so if everything that we do is prompted by this this universal compassion is not just for humans but for all all sentient life and that includes birds and worms and even the yes little creepy crawlies that we usually want to pretend don't matter but they actually do in modern science reveals that yeah so again it goes back to intention now intention shapes everything so  it makes the ordinary extraordinary it makes everything sacred and i really love that idea because i was going to ask you what can the average person the non practitioner of then the non practitioner of buddhism do and would you say that that's a great place to start to frame and intentionally come from a higher decision about the next action that you take or someone asked a zen master once he said ok can you sum up the buddhist fact i'm kind of wary when people ask me you know oh you're a buddhist that's not necessarily term i want to identify with because it becomes than just a label and one in opposition so that means that i'm not open to christian views or muslim views  jewish views instead if i say well i practice buddhadharma it's something that i do why because it resonates well with me and that means that all the world traditions virtual traditions have something to offer us because they all overlap and many of them acknowledge the simple basis of zen buddhism which is that careful mindful attention to what is here right now is the way to live your life free from all the mental and emotional clutter that buddhism is just try to be as attentive and his presence as possible yeah be aware so let's talk a little bit about meditation even though as you're saying life is a meditation it's doing everything you know mindfully and in the present moment and with intention on so relate mindfulness to meditation how it looks when one practices i suppose ok so my great grand dharma teacher who came to united states in the one thousand nine hundred sixty s he he taught one thing and when he was asked well what do you do what is your heart of your teaching and he said i teach don't know don't know means letting go of our needs to contain reality inside of a thought somebody walks in the room and i get upset with him or her maybe i have a past history with them i think that person's bad or good and those are just labels that i that i apply to them and i fall in love with those on to reality and use so if we can return to that don't know mind then we're practicing meditation every single moment so meditation can occur on a chair like this on the bus on the train on the airplane or like i said when i'm sitting in front of a class full of students and maybe there being a rule and i get frustrated my wariness of my frustration is my practice at that present moment so rather than trying to trying to carpet the entire world you can learn to just put on shoes and that's kind of what meditation is ok it's you learning to equip yourself with the skills and flexibility to accept life on its circumstances and its terms while simultaneously trying to change it i mean if we encounter things in life that are unfair unjust we want to change those and we should but how well are we dealing with it internally so so much of this practice is both internal what about recognising absolutely it's i mean it's simply not just simply but it's simply showing up right in the moment and observing and being aware in that way yes so and don't know mind we as westerners tend to think well i don't know something i'm at a disadvantage but not knowing means spaciousness as it's being open and receptive to whatever somebody is telling you or it allows us to be active listeners which is an enormous norm's we valuable skill i think in any in any profession or in any relationship is actually listening without imposing our own views on things so don't know means it's like being the sky and allowing whatever clouds events  thoughts emotions to just pass quietly by because that's what they're going to do and that's the nature of reality so shifting we can't pin it down we don't realize how much we live in our heads of course of korea and we're judging and we're assuming and we're really living into that so this is really zooming out and sitting back and observing in that way so would you say that sort of the biggest misconception about what meditation is because it's sort of does turn meditation a little bit into a different work here for me meditations extremely active it's not about sitting passively by i mean of course we cultivate it and the most easily and commonly cultivated on the meditation cushion but that's frack that's like going to the gym so to speak and then when you go outside of the gym vic and the contained arena for practice then how do you cultivate that when you're on the fly yeah when you're in otherwise there's a disconnect absolutely if you can apply it if you don't apply to if it's not you know practical in that way then there's a disconnect right then you're even more frustrated and there's the human the human mind is capable of so many different us the the answer which is we completely portable and applies to all situations which is don't know so i don't know i can let go and stop thinking that i need to know in then i can engage it engage life on its terms i love it i love it good i hope people are really getting a lot from that and understanding the concept and as well as how it applies for them so it's just making me think about the dalai lama and mick not high on all those wonderful leaders and authors that are out there and sharing this kind of wisdom and we can do that as well as on the air and we can embody that so i want to ask you what does the buddha eat for breakfast before i alluded to the some of the techniques that zen teachers use and one of them is popularized in japanese it's called the come on or in korean it's the kong on or and originally it came from china it's called the going on and what that means it's the it's a public case so it's a way for the teacher and the students minds to mirror one another and so what the teacher will do is ask a question that seems nonsense that appears to be nonsensical because the rational mind we'd like but we can't find our way into it and what the heart of mahayana buddhism is zen buddhism to about buddhism is the recognition that all beings are ready in mind and it's the police office job to  a wake up and then be help other people wake up so the question what does a buddha eat for breakfast throw some people into a tangle because they assume somewhere meditating for dozens of year and fasting yeah right so what what the that particular question does is it forces us to re evaluate why can't i be a buddha people and then the answer sometimes a little disappointing but there's a very important teaching there which is fundamentally you are it's we're not blacking anything we're not incomplete we have everything and all we have to do is that we censor ourselves with that awareness i love that i hope that that triggers that for people not within their subconscious mind if that feels right there's a reason for that we really are buddhas already we really are awaken so can you and with a buddhist prayer but my daughter help me revise it slightly so what we would do is we put our hands together and it's about stating your intention which is so central to the blues i'm so we would say the first portion is for the three treasures and that's the buddha the dharma the sound of the second is for our teachers and parents and children the third is for all nations in all beings thus we eat this food with everyone we eat to stop all harming to practice serving and to accomplish the awakened way  beautiful so that's a beautiful prayer a beautiful practice and you can do that for any meal and you can do that for really anything and it's the same thing that we can if we can turn that same attention to whatever with it we're doing so if you're changing your oil newspaper knuckles you get angry well why am i change my oil so this way i can go to work and provide for my family why my breathing so this way i can help those people who are closest to me and try to leave as positive an imprint on this world as it as i can so  it doesn't only apply to sitting down having a formal meal it could be a breath of fresh air or drink cold water i'm glad you're here to offer this also to the young people all of these ideas and practices it's so great that you're or wrapping up another enlightening show one final thought remember that kindness to others always starts with kindness toward yourself and i challenge you to go out today and do one random act of kindness remember to contact me if you want to learn more about meditation private instruction and group classes thank you for watching and join me next time o