Meditation Tools For When You Can't Control What Happens Next
5/2/202644 min
n today's episode, Kadam Mick Marcon explores one of the biggest challenges in life - how to cope with uncertainty. Drawing on his own experience of losing his mother, witnessing a stranger's fear on a turbulent flight, and years of practising and teaching within the New Kadampa Tradition, he reveals why our struggle with uncertainty runs far deeper than the unpredictable events of the outside world. He explains how unrealistic expectations - the wish for things to be permanent in a world defined by impermanence - are at the very root of our suffering, and why no amount of...
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMick Marcon· Guest0:00
Why do you want to hold onto a painful past? It's a bit silly if we understand that by holding onto it in this way, we're just hurting ourself. What I personally find helpful is to cut through all the political stuff and question really deeply what's the fundamental reason why people suffer, because the answers to the world's problems do not lie externally.
Speaker 1· Host0:21
[gentle music] Mick, thanks for dropping into the podcast today.
Mick Marcon· Guest0:29
Thank you.
Speaker 1· Host0:30
So one of the questions I wanted to begin to explore with you is we all struggle to cope with uncertainty in our life at various different levels.
Mick Marcon· Guest0:39
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1· Host0:39
It's a very normal human response.
Mick Marcon· Guest0:41
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1· Host0:42
But at the same time, what is it that lies at the heart of that struggle, do you think, to cope with uncertainty?
Mick Marcon· Guest0:48
I think in general it seems like, uh, a- an inability to accept the fundamental nature of our human life, that, um, in truth we live in an existence full of uncertainty, but we, we struggle to accept that fact, that things are that way. So we sort of... It's almost as if we live in almost like in a parallel universe in which we want everything to be right, everything to go our way. But we, uh, when we open our eyes, we see things that we don't want to happen. Last year my mum passed away. The year leading up to that, she, um, she had a fall which sort of, um, started like a sequence of events in which she ended up in hospital and then later in a nursing home, and then passed