Wisdom Dialogues: The Nature of Mind with Martin Ström

Transcript

In this Dialogue, Martin Ström, psychologist, trainer and author, discusses with Victoria Coleman, Executive Director of the Foundation for Developing Compassion and Wisdom how we can gradually train our mind for a more meaningful, loving and happier life….

Victoria: We're going to talk about the nature of the mind. So, I thought a good place to start might be to ask, What is mind?

Martin: That's a really good question. I have a master's degree in psychology and I'm a licensed psychologist. But through the five years or so of studies of psychology, we were never really encouraged to look at our own minds. It was more about other people's behaviour and psychological disorders, but there was never any encouragement to look at our own minds in any structured way.

Also, in psychology and neuroscience, you cannot find an agreed definition of what mind actually is. If you don't even have a definition for something, you won't even be looking for it.

My understanding about what the mind is comes from Buddhist psychology:

“that mind is clear and knowing. The clear aspect means that things arise in the mind. The mind illuminates things like perceptions, and thoughts and so things “pop up” in our mind. Then the knowing or cognizant aspect is that we become aware of these things. However, there's a lot of things going on in the mind that we are unaware of, and that's part of the reason why you want to start looking at your mind.”

We can view the mind as being like a stage in a theatre. You're sitting in the audience and there's this stage and actors and props appear, and these intricate stories unfold.

So, the mind is kind of like that. Consciousness is like the stage just like the space, the space of awareness, where things manifest.  We're never ever aware of anything outside of our own minds, which is also an interesting insight. All we have is what appears to our mind.

You can cultivate an ability to observe that space of mind that the theatre stage, and all the thoughts and emotions and impulses and perceptions that arise there. That's the most life changing skill that we can pick up. It's definitely something that we can train and cultivate.

Victoria: I've also heard the definition of mind being like the clear blue sky. Thoughts are like clouds that come across the clear sky, clouds change and dissolve and the blue sky appears again.

How can understanding the nature of our mind actually contribute to our long term happiness?

Martin: When I was young, I was I guess you could call it a materialist or even a bit of a hedonist. I actually had this saying If you think that money can’t buy you happiness, you simply don't know where to shop!

There was a really specific moment in my life when I was on a beach in Thailand with my wife, Maria, and she had bought a book called The Art of Happiness, where a psychologist interviews His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This book really changed a lot of how I viewed reality, and myself and other people.

The thing that really struck me when I read this book was that actually happiness is a state of mind. We run around and try to rearrange all the things in the outside; get the perfect career, get nice stuff, the best possible partner and yeah those things do bring happiness but it's a conditional happiness. It never lasts.

You get your iPhone and then suddenly the screen is scratched, or you have the iPhone 14 and then the iPhone 15 comes out and there goes that happiness because now you need to have the new one and so on. So, you can’t really become happy in any stable or in durable fashion by satisfying your senses.

But rather what you can do is you can develop inner qualities like contentment, patience or love and compassion towards yourself and towards others. By doing that you actually create the conditions for a more genuine happiness that is not conditional on specific outer circumstances.  A happiness that is stable and lasting.

I read about this Korean guy who was in real estate and then built like the tallest building in Seattle or something and then he was just so depressed. He walked up on top of it and jumped off. He had so much money, so much fame, so much adulation, everything. You read about people who lived in concentration camps (even now), like there's this famous book by author called Viktor Frankl and there are stories where Tibetan meditation masters have been in concentration camps and yet remained happy throughout these horrendous experiences.

So, there's nothing more important than cultivating awareness of the mind and these inner qualities because we all want to be happy.

I recently had this conversation with my daughter who’d been talking to her friends. It seems people also don't realize what happiness is and the extent to which happiness can be cultivated. How joyful and serene a human being actually can be if the mind is cultivated to its full potential. We can see someone like His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for example, who seems to be extremely joyful even though his country has been obliterated and he's been forced into exile. It's not that he lacks compassion. He will cry when he hears story of someone’s hardship but there's always this underlying sense of wellbeing that kind of encapsulates even these difficulties in life. So that's, what you can get out of truly cultivating the mind and understanding the mind.

Victoria:  That's really helpful. Thank you, I’m going to turn to a slightly different point now, which is about anxiety. I find myself more anxious than I used to be, say, few years ago before COVID. And I find it in people I meet and family members. There are rising levels of anxiety and more medications to help people deal with anxiety and stress. And so what I've been doing is trying to focus more on my breath, I read this book about breathing. And I sort of went to try to take it right back to basics and how was working with my breath. And I was breathing as a way to kind of slow down my constant stream of thoughts.

And it reminded me a quote from His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, who said, If we create space, the mind can relax. This is important, because when the mind is anxious and restless, we can't use our intelligence clearly. So, the solution is to work on creating a deeper sense of peace within yourself. Can you say a little bit more about anxiety? And meditation?

Martin: There's really several parts to that question.

One really obvious thing is that we live in a world where our attention is always being challenged and pulled in a million different directions. During COVID some people were working in their beds with their computer in their lap. And they're not just working, they have probably few social media and a little YouTube going. Your mobile phone is there with notifications and it’s just this constant onslaught. And so the very first thing that we can do is to start to cultivate the mind’s ability to be just truly focused and stable. That is the first step.

The second step is to start to observe the mind and understand what's actually going on. Don't identify so strongly with every single thing that pops into our head. You know, there's a scary thought and then immediately there's anxiety. But that's just because we buy into that scary thought we identify with it, we believe in it.

If we just watch it, as a cloud passing through the sky, then it doesn't even have to affect us because I mean 95% of what just pops into our mind is useless garbage. At least that's true for my mind!!!

In order to be able to start to observe of our minds, we need to first calm our minds and make it a bit more stable. So that we can gain that clarity, become more relaxed, so we're more comfortable in that neighborhood of our own minds. The function of mindfulness meditation is to cultivate the faculties of attention and focus, but in a way that's really relaxed and stable and, that brings clarity.

There's a third really interesting facet to anxiety. One of the best ways of working with anxiety is actually to face the things that we fear. If you are thrown off the horse, you need to get back onto the horse, otherwise you become more and more afraid of horses.

I think this happened with a lot of people during COVID when they didn’t have a lot of social interactions. I met so many people with anxiety who stopped doing things, they avoided things. And when you do that, your fear will increase, and then you avoid it even more, and then you get more fear.

So to face anxiety we need to do both: engage with things in the external world, but also engage with the scary things in your own mind and not try to suppress them or avoid them or run from them. That's, that's also very important. Specifically, when it comes to anxiety.

Victoria: It strikes me that this is a gradual process, because we're really trying to change our mental habits. For example, a habit of being anxious or having feelings of depression. It's not like we're going to change that overnight. It's a gradual process of reducing or de-identifying with those feelings. And that takes time. And as you said, it takes patience.

It's making me think of Lama Yeshe who first had the vision for FDCW and Universal Education. He said:-

 Be wise. Treat yourself and your mind sympathetically, with loving kindness. If you're gentle with yourself, you will become gentle with others, Don't push yourself.

I love that quote, because I feel I'm hard on myself and I think if I am being hard on myself, I'm going to be hard on other people. Do you find people are too hard on themselves? And why is that unhelpful?

Martin: It's like the decease of the Western mind. I've never lived in say, Tibetan community or traditional, any Eastern culture, but they don't seem to have what we have, which is this. This like deep-seated self-hatred and tendency to be so harsh with ourselves.

And perfectionism; we feel that we need to perform. We need to be better and faster, all those things. And also, we think we need to do it by being hard on ourselves. If you try to train a dog by yelling at it, threatening it, beating it, I mean, you can get the dog to kind of do what you want. But, the most efficient way is actually to care for the dog and show the dog love and affection and try to engage the dog's curiosity and playfulness and get it to work with you without force or coercion.

So the mind is a bit like that.

“If we try to beat the mind into submission and tell ourselves I'm so bad, I shouldn't do this, I shouldn't do that. Then that's a really poor strategy. But if we can treat ourselves with more kindness and caring concern, and try to engage our enthusiasm and curiosity, that's going to be a much better way.”

Even if you want to be the best performer at anything, that's still a better strategy than perfectionism, self-loathing and beating yourself up all the time.

Victoria: I once heard Thupten Jinpa during a compassion course saying Westerners find it really hard to be compassionate towards themselves. Sending ourselves loving thoughts feels just wrong. That actually, we should be giving our compassion and our love to others. But if I give it to myself, that's wrong. Can you say a little bit about when those feelings come up? What advice you have around that?

Martin: Just think about how we would treat a really good friend who told us they’d screwed up and are feeling really horrible. Or that a terrible thing happened to them. We would treat that friend with kindness. We would listen to them. We would be loving towards them. But when it’s ourself experiencing these things, suddenly, being compassionate towards ourselves is not okay.  We don't treat ourselves like we would treat our friend. We can be our own best friend and really generate that love and care and compassion towards ourselves.

If you have a frightened child, you don't yell at that child, you don't try to, you know, subdue it or hit it and tell it to be quiet. Well, if you do, you're a really horrible person. Any normal person would try to soothe and caress the child and tell them, It's okay and, and really help them to calm down.

Our mind is sometimes like that freaked out, frantic child. We need to metaphorically put our mind in our lap like that child and soothe it. It's okay. You're alright. We can choose to be soothing and calming and caring and compassionate towards ourselves.

Victoria: If you understand your mind more deeply, does that help you be more compassionate to yourself and to others? Recently, I was in a hospital with a close family friend, who I was really worried about. We were both really quite upset. And then I started looking around the hospital and saw other people experiencing the same or perhaps even worse than me and thinking about them actually helped. Sort of like it’s not just my problem, there are others who are experiencing the same.

Martin: If we start to understand our own minds more deeply, then we can, we can start to see the true causes of our suffering. If our minds are dominated by greed and hatred and jealousy and aversion, then that's a really terrible state to be in it is the true cause of so much suffering.

And also these states will control our behaviour. We all have said things in anger then one second later we regret saying them. If we were calm and collected, we wouldn't have said them. From a neuro physiological perspective, that's like the fight/flight response of the reptilian brain. Neuroscientists would say that our frontal cortex is just not in the game, because we're driven by these rather, base impulses, and then we really mess up and we create suffering for ourselves and others.

So when we start to see those mechanisms, and also start to see that, okay, if I understand anger, I can be less of a hostage of it. Anger might still arise, but we can create some space around it, and maybe over time, cultivate more, more patience and so on. But then, you know, if we see that in ourselves, then we see also that when other people are behaving badly, it's not because they're in our bad person. It's not like, No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, Oh, what am I going to do today? Yes, I'm going to be a real pain in the butt for as many people as possible and, you know, really be mean and terrible. No. It's because they're kidnapped by anger, and jealousy, and so on, in their minds.

If we see that, then we can understand better what's going on. And we can empathize more with their situation. We can also understand that, the pain that I see in my mind when I'm suffering, that's exactly the same pain that this person is experiencing.

“So the deeper we understand our own mind and how it functions, the deeper we can also understand other people's minds and become more tolerant and forgiving and compassionate towards them.”

Victoria: We can actually expand our compassion as we become aware of our own suffering and the suffering of others.

Martin: There's a direct correlation between wisdom and compassion. Wisdom, in this regard, means truly understanding at a deep level, how the mind functions. The deeper your wisdom is, the deeper your compassion will be for yourself, as well as for others.

Victoria: You've also spent a lot of time working in corporate environment. Can you talk a little bit about how the power of the mind can be best harnessed and used in a leadership?

Martin: As a leader, it’s even more important to understand your own mind. That also means understanding the full range of things that motivate you, whatever impulses that drive your behaviour and all these mechanisms that I just talked about, because as a leader, you really need to be aware of how you're perceived by others and how you act towards others.

Ideally, you need to make sure that your motivation is as selfless as possible so that you act in the best interest of the person you have in front of you, or your team or your organization. I mean, as a leader, you're there, for those people, for that organization. It's not about you.

You need to be able to develop that type of authenticity and selflessness. Also, you're going to be a better leader to the extent that you can develop those inner qualities of compassion and kindness. As a leader, you have a huge impact on others so if a leader's mind is controlled by fear and greed and anger and delusion, then they can really mess things up. There's a war going on in Ukraine because someone has too much greed in their mind and too little selflessness and compassion.

Whatever you're the leader of if you don't understand your mind, you just create suffering for yourself and others. And it's just amplified when you have a lot of power over other people.

Victoria: How important is it to be a good listener when you're leading? , I am not a good listener. I'm constantly reminding myself to listen to my team, and not just project my ideas and my views.

Martin: I was coaching a leader and we were discussing what sometimes called beginner's mind, or, you know, the importance of cultivating this ability to see things as they truly are, you know, like a child or beginner will see when they see something, they, they see it for the first time, and then they're paying attention, and they're seeing what's really there.

But then, you know, after a while, we stopped seeing the actual things, and we just see our own projections. So, this leader had a person that would come into their office and just complain all the time. And they felt that they were just going on about the same old things all the time, just nagging, blah, blah. So, I encouraged that person to instead, meet this person as if for the first time, and then truly just listen and pay attention and see what they're actually saying.

Because they weren't relating to the actual person in front of them, just their own stereotypical, biased idea of the person they knew. So, when they did that, the whole situation just changed like that. Because there were some valid points in there, and they hadn't been listened to. When he started to really pay attention, then this person could relax and open up and then this really wonderful dialogue could unfold.

If we're not aware that most of the time we're just relating to our own projections, then we're not being curious. We're not listening, we're not paying attention. It's like we're walking around in our own Matrix, with no outside input sometimes. And that's not very helpful.

Victoria: And also makes you more isolated. Because I feel like loneliness is an issue for more of us these days. Maybe due to the conditions of COVID, living in lockdown, and then just not getting out again. We see ourselves as separate from the world around us and from other people, and even from our planet. How do we start to deconstruct these mistaken perceptions? How do we see more interdependence or connection between one another?

Martin: That's actually a really, really deep thing. Because, one of the most fundamental things that we're missing about reality is that everything is interconnected. Everything is affecting everything else. Everything that we are is arising from different causes and conditions and I can see it at so many levels.

I'm obviously the result of generations of human beings and of the culture I grew up in. And all my actions influence others and I'm deeply influenced by the actions of others

On a very practical level, we are completely interdependent. But we never see that. We see ourselves as separate and like these concrete, separate things that have nothing to do with other people or the rest of the world. We feel like we can really separate ourselves. But, in reality we're just this conglomeration of causes and conditions.

You could do this as kind of a meditation.  Just observe, for example, something like a sound. If you watch this sound, is that sound an external thing? Is it happening outside? Or is it an internal thing? Is it something that's arising in my mind. Is the sound in me? Or is it outside of me? Or is it somewhere in between? Is both or neither?

If you start to look for the border between inside and outside, you can't really find it. There is no border. So, this very notion of what's inside me and what's outside, that, in itself is just a projection. That kind of meditation can really start to soften the borders between what's in here and what's out there. So that's maybe one way of loosening that strong sense of being an independent, separate thing in the world.

Victoria: Maybe opening up more and having the courage to open our hearts a little bit more to other people. Becoming more courageous of heart and having more closer connection and having affection and caring for one another. I think that's what's going to make a difference in our world. I know that's what His Holiness the Dalai Lama advocates for all the time.

Question from audience:  I would like to ask about anger. Do we need anger in order to understand what is important if something is done unjustly and we want to correct it. On the other hand, it's not good to be angry. Is it good to get rid of anger completely?

Martin: Thank you. That's a really good question. There is certain anger which is just really bad. When it's malice and hatred and like this liquid anger that’s never going to be helpful. It's just toxic. But then, like you said, there's the anger that arises when we see injustices. If you have that kind of anger, if you were to look at what is happening and go deeper, you would see that, at the bottom, there's actually this discerning wisdom that can tell right from wrong. And there's this sharpness and clarity to that anger, which is really very helpful. And it's actually a good thing I would say.

And then there's also there's energy to anger that, you know, can help us act or things like that. But His Holiness, the Dalai Lama often says anger is very tricky. So it's sometimes helpful, and sometimes it can kind of backfire on us.

What I think though is super important is that whatever the emotion is that arises, the first thing is to be aware of it. Because if we're unaware, then anger or any emotion can take us into really unfortunate places and situations.

If anger arises and we don't want to then there's two extremes. One extreme is to suppress it, pretend is not there. And I'm, you know, I'm such a holy person, I don't get angry, blah, blah, blah, then it just going to pop up somewhere else. Suppression is not good.

But also acting out triggered by anger. That's also not often helpful. If we can just see the anger and be aware of it. Okay, here it is, and then listen to it. And if we say that, yeah, this actually makes sense. And I need to speak up for myself or I need to put my foot down. And, you know, I need to be strong and forceful, then we go ahead and be forceful. We might even yell at someone or whatever.

But seeing clearly and bringing awareness to our anger. I think that's the most important thing. And definitely any anger that's afflicted by malice, hatred, pettiness, those things, I think we can transform over time, because they're definitely not useful. So we should cultivate love and compassion and kindness to kind of try to counteract those aspects.