A Buddhist Monk's Honest Advice On Letting Go & Finding Inner Peace
5/9/202638 min
In today's episode, Gen Kelsang Chökyong - a Buddhist monk from Wales - shares the story of how he stumbled into a Dharma class while sheltering from the rain with a kebab, and never left. Drawing on nearly thirty years of practice and teaching within the New Kadampa Tradition, he explores why the mind - not external circumstances - is the true source of all our happiness and suffering. He explains the Buddhist concept of self-grasping ignorance and how this single delusion drives everything from daily irritation and relationship problems to the world's largest conflicts.
Gen Chökyong highlights how meditation and compassion gradually erode this grasping, revealing a natural peace that was always there. He shares life-changing insights into the nature of feelings - pointing out that most of what torments us is just a feeling, and feelings always pass. He concludes with a very helpful approach to making mistakes. Instead of turning on ourself, we can realize that without making mistakes it’s unlikely that we’ll learn and improve. Warm, funny, and deeply practical, this episode is a masterclass in how Buddhist wisdom applies directly to modern anxiety, relationships, and the art of letting go.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Finding Dharma
05:00 Seeing Through the Fantasy of Worldly Life
09:20 How the Mind Creates Its Own Suffering
15:00 Buddhism's Relevance for Modern Life and Young People
22:40 Confidence, Self-Image, and Letting Go of Comparison
27:20 Working with Difficulties
28:45 Feelings and the Power of Letting Go
33:55 Compassion and Learning from Mistakes
Book References
In this episode Gen Chökyong references:
How to Solve our Human Problems - https://kadampa.org/book/how-to-solve-our-human-problems
How to Transform Your Life - https://howtotyl.com/
Gen Chökyong is a senior teacher within the New Kadampa Tradition, an international Buddhist tradition with over a thousand meditation centers worldwide.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsGen Kelsang Chökyong· Guest0:00
Anxiety is pointless completely, isn't it? Getting anxious about things. You know, if you've got a problem, and you get stressed or anxious, it's not gonna make it easier to deal with the problem. Whenever you're upset, you freeze it in time, don't you? All you have to do is let go of it. So what we need to do is to learn to let go of things, and as you let go more and more of this, you just start feeling that happiness was there all along.
Agnes· Host0:23
[gentle music] Welcome, Gen Jho Khyung. Thank you for coming today.
Gen Kelsang Chökyong· Guest0:31
[laughs] Mm. Yeah. Hi, Agnes.
Agnes· Host0:33
And now I know that you're from Wales, right?
Gen Kelsang Chökyong· Guest0:36
Yes, but don't hold that against me.
Agnes· Host0:38
[laughs] No, no, not against you.
Gen Kelsang Chökyong· Guest0:39
Mm.
Agnes· Host0:39
But, uh, how did you get into Dharma in...
Gen Kelsang Chökyong· Guest0:41
[laughs] Ah, this is quite a funny story. I, uh, I decided I wanted [laughs] to, uh, study something without exams. [laughs] This has backfired quite badly. [laughs] So I s- I started going to night classes, and, um, the first one was poetry, which was okay. Philosophy, I didn't like. Then I was coming home drunk, um, eating a kebab, and it was raining, so I sheltered in a butcher shop doorway, and there was a flyer for Dharma classes.
Agnes· Host1:12
No way.
Gen Kelsang Chökyong· Guest1:13
So I thought, "Well, I don't know anything about Buddhism. Another nine weeks of this, be quite nice." And, uh, I went to the first class, and the teacher said, "If you don't develop patience, you'll never be happy."
Agnes· Host1:26
Mm.
Gen Kelsang Chökyong· Guest1:26
And I thought, "Oh, that's true. Just get angry."