I talk a lot about how we need to become our own therapist and someone asked me what this means. It’s actually paraphrasing Lama Yeshe, my first teacher.
Lama could see, when he met Western people, that everybody went to a psychotherapist, everybody had their own therapist. What he actually said was you need to be your own psychologist – the emphasis is on “your own.”
Of course, we do need to look somewhere else for the information about the mind – and here we’re discussing Buddha’s interpretation of the mind – and then we ourselves do the job of putting it into practice. And it’s a job every single human being on this planet should learn to do from the time they can remember: we should be learning about the mind from the very beginning of our lives. And this is not a joke – this is literally what the Buddhist approach is!
And this is because – and this is not how we think in our modern culture – that whatever goes on in our mind is the main source of our happiness and suffering. And given the very simple point that we all want happiness and don’t want suffering, then we are the person who has to learn to become happy and learn to stop suffering. This is a big surprise to us, you know?
The job of being your own therapist, the job of knowing your own mind intimately in a very specific, clear way so that you can do the radical job of changing your mind – meaning changing the way you think, changing your perception of the world, changing your interpretations of the world – that is the job of being a Buddhist. Big surprise! We thought it was watching your breath and being mindful. So clichéd. That’s the job of being a Buddhist!
On what basis then are we changing our mind? According to whose model of the mind?
If you say, “I’d like to learn to play the piano,” you’ve got to be precise. What kind of piano? Jazz piano? African piano? Bach’s piano? Which system of music? You need to learn a system. You just don’t go to the piano and start being intuitive and put your hands on the piano and hope music will come. That’s a bit ridiculous, it’s a bit kind of ignorant.
That’s like you’ve never heard of a law called botany, and then going to a ground and thinking, “Oh, well, there’s a few seeds over there and a few packets” – you don’t know what they are – and you chuck them in the ground, crossing your fingers, hoping you’ll get a nice garden. That’s just called “being idiotic,” it’s called “being ignorant.”
You need to learn the theories: you need to learn what kind of music, and what are the laws of that music, you need to learn the theories of that music, you need to learn the theories of that botany.
We call that intelligence, we call that science, but as soon as it comes to happiness and suffering, we become ridiculous – we have these ridiculous ideas, you know?
First of all, we think the chocolate cake and the boyfriend are the cause of happiness. Sorry, Buddha says, you’re wrong. They’re partially responsible, but they’re not the total cause. When we start to even hear that and have confidence that maybe chocolate cake and boyfriends can’t make me happy, when we start to listen seriously to what he says and look into our mind, then we don’t go far enough.
It’s not enough just to close your eyes and learn to concentrate. That’s like getting concentration and opening your eyes and looking at a garden without knowing any botany: you see all the shapes and sizes and all the different things growing, and you try to become mindful of them, you observe that shape and that color, but you don’t know any botany.
You can look for a thousand years at a garden, you can even replicate a garden because you’ve looked at it so often, but what good is that mindfulness? That’s, again, another way to be idiotic.
You need to conjoin that mindfulness with intelligence. That’s called “learning botany.” Then, when you learn to see the shapes and sizes, you go, “Aha, now I can see the difference between a weed and a herb.”
You’ve got to have the ability to look at your mind, which is called concentration – this brilliant technique invented by the Indians well before the Buddha – and you then need a proper model of the mind, a very clear presentation, and most Buddhists even don’t learn that.
We think, “Oh yeah, I know anger, I know jealousy.” Well, you do, but you only know the tip of the iceberg: you only know when your body is involved, you only know it when you’re shouting or despairing. That’s too late. You’re not looking at your mind at all. You’re looking at your body: you’re looking at the tears, you’re looking at the feelings in your body. That’s just too gross.
We need to go beyond the feelings. We need to hear the thoughts, which now are completely unedited and berserk. We’ve got to start to edit them and make sense of them and begin to distinguish which thought is what.
That’s the job of being your own therapist, and it’s an intensely difficult job because we’d rather look at the boyfriend than our own mind. We’d rather blame the mother than our own mind.
There are a lot of jobs we have to do first before we even begin the job of being our own therapist. Then the hard work starts. Then – because Buddha’s telling us that nothing is set in stone, and your thoughts are definitely not set in stone, that you can sort them out – you have to learn to edit them, clarify them, put them into reasonable sentences, coherent paragraphs – I’m not joking. Then you can start to understand.
The crucial job then is to learn to distinguish between the thoughts that are ridiculous – the thoughts that have no basis in reality, the thoughts that are leading us up a garden path, the thoughts that are causing us suffering – distinguish between those and the valid thoughts, the virtuous thoughts, the appropriate thoughts, the reasonable thoughts.
You stop believing in the first lot and you start to grow the second lot. That’s the job of being a Buddhist! That’s the job of being your own therapist!