Religion? | Shantum Seth | TEDxYouth@DoonSchool
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HB5bKvuduI Video ID: 9HB5bKvuduI ============================================================ cool 45 years after leaving school I'm finding that a number of us who were in school are really reconnecting in quite a deep way and it's that common ground a shared experience of being at dune which is allowing us to do that and but when I reflect back on the young boy of six five and a half six four joined welcome boys through to the boy who left doing it about 16 I actually have quite a lot of compassion for him I look at him and I think yes there were happy moments but there were a lot of dark moments there was a lot of loneliness feelings of isolation sometimes bullying stress and when I look back on that young boy I think he didn't know how to handle his emotions in fact this sort of boys boarding school had in some ways made him suppress his emotions in a way so dumb down his emotions even mute his emotions and now many years later I am interesting these things and I find that I found techniques or methods to look at my emotions handle them and care for myself have compassion for myself and I think this is something which should be taught in all schools but I thought I'll share one of those practices that may be helpful to you I don't know you know school now forty years later is slightly different but still those issues of how to handle emotions how to not be stressed I know there's a lot of stress nowadays on young people trying to apply for colleges of the future careers will be so how do we lessen that stress how do we lessen that emotional angst so what I've learnt is really to come back to the present moment this is something which I've got from my Zen training I find that the way to come back to my to my self in this moment is really to come back to my breath my body is here with my mind maybe going all over the place so as soon as I make my mind a breathing mind I can help my help my body and mind come back into the present and when I come back into the present then I have some control of how to respond to anything that may be happening outside of me or inside of me whether it's an emotional rising or whether it's somebody saying something hurtful to me I actually can breathe and actually absorb to some degree or created is a gap between the external stimuli and my reaction or response and I use something like a bell and this Bell I call a bell of mindfulness so I'm going to so I'm going to I'm gonna sound this Bell and I use this Bell every day for my meditation and I come back to myself using the sound of the Bell so when I invite the sound of the Bell just you can close your eyes if you want and I would suggest that you just follow just three breaths so wherever you're sitting just relax your shoulders sit comfortably in your seats and just listen to the sound of the Bell and just come back to your in-breath and the out-breath in-breath and out-breath [Music] [Music] and this sort of invitation to the Bell can be done in many ways you don't always need a bell in fact my telephone every time my telephone rings I call a telephone meditation I let my bell my phone ring at least three times and with the first ring I stopped I stopped I'm doing I stop I try and stop my thinking and then with the second Bell I'd come back to my breath which helps me come back into the present moment and with the third ring I smile and the zombie's ringing me my wife's ringing my children are ringing me my friends are ringing me I'm much more present for them with that phone and also the phone has helped me to come back into that present moment so it's not just a tool of communication which is a great but is deafening out of it's not irritation for me if a phone rings right now in the audience I just smile it's my practice in a bit like a Pavlovian dog you know it's I just when I hear a bell I stop but it was interesting when I was in school the Bell had a very different conversation when I heard the Bell I was anxious I would rung I was late for school I was something and the Bell became actually a bit of a terror for me rather than was something which was aiding me and now coming back as a as an old boy of the school I find then of the bell rings I find it so pleasant I stop and I become attentive to the trees to the wonderful surroundings that I never touched as a student so I think just shifting your and every our little class that at least hear the sound of the bell come back to yourself and and know you're rushing and you're present with that but many bells ring when you're just sitting just pause and just come back to yourself in that moment you can really touch the miracle or whatever's around you whatever is happening in you and also understand how your emotions are how to let that start working through you in a in a sort of compassionate way but I thought I'd just share some sort of wake up moments in the last few years of my life and how they've really affected me where I am today so I'm 60 so I left school 40th more than 40 years ago but I remember in school there was a man who came he came to our physics class and he gave a talk and he said you know he used to buy amplifiers in a musical amplifiers which you come in boxes and he'd open them up and make sculptures out of them I said wow that's really literally out-of-the-box thinking and I thought you can make a living through doing something quite counterintuitive in a sort of way it was a small wake up moment but the bigger wake up moments and you know fast forward to and I'm 23 I'm in England have a job corporate job fortunately I there was a lot of luck on my side Atlanta very good job as earning more than my parents put together after working all their lives fancy house and then driving a sports car in mg sports car my girlfriend all the right trappings and the last thing I remember is the speedometer 110 miles an hour which is about a hundred seventy seven kilometers an hour and I'm gone and this car smashed the next thing I remember is I'm getting up in hospital and when I'm waking up in hospital I actually I had this thing I'm alive I'm actually alive it sort of got a basic thinking but you know I didn't probably expect it and the preciousness of life hit me and I also realized a few things while I was reflecting in the next few days in bed it was that my main motivation for my work will not be money which it had become it was actually that my motor was very much make a lot of money quick and I said that is not my deal and I'd like to make my career based on my ideal of compassion and lead a much simpler life and it was interesting good I'd already suffered myself and I'd seen suffering but I hadn't done much about it and I thought I just died I died so this was really a second chance for me I do work in the shoe industry I'd gone back to working in English company clark's as to buy shoes from from Agra I'd see the you know the job developed shoe workers earning working really with it with the skill of an eye doctor on the shoe making and earning less than what I was spend and they turned in a week less than what I spend in a hotel room for one night in fact I moved out of my hotel room started staying with them just to understand their lives and then when I went to England also I'd I got beaten up three times somebody spat in my face somebody beat me up to my color and that all sort of suffering that I had actually was helpful to me to empathize with the economic and other sort of discrimination that the Dallas were feeling and then I decided that I really need to make some changes I left my job I want to understand why poor people poor why rich countries rich what is the relationship and I went back to University to study Development Studies and political economics and I became a political activist and I became real halal activist worked with very good people but really confronting the police confronting the Army in the case in in England and going to jail organising Haruna's you know this is a sort of activist politics and one day I remember in the midst of one of our programs I sort of just burnt out I really I broke down and I went to a friend's room and I lay down on the ground and I've had it I really didn't know how to look after myself here I was trying to make the world a better place but really not knowing how to look after myself and so I sort of realized that I was part of the problem my aggression my anger was part of the problem and so I realized I better become piso be peace rather than just fight for peace and that was a long journey party I carried on my work with social development with artisans volunteers the UN and the World Bank but on the other side my parts took me on a spiritual journey and I went to many many traditions Sufis Quakers and surly I found that I was getting more interest in Buddhism it was actually a Sutra read called the calamus Sutra where the Kalama is at the tribe which comes to Buddha and says this teacher says this this teacher says this this teacher says this what is the right teaching and witnesses don't believe teachers don't believe me you don't believe your elders your texts but you try try the practice and if it gives you a sense of well-being it gives well-being to others around you then it is a good practice if it doesn't cause suffering to you and others it is not a good practice that's eminently sensible practice and this this sort of I got more and more interesting Buddhism I started meeting teachers from Burma from Korea Japan and then I was at a retreat where there was a teacher called picnic hang who was leading a retreat for artists and on the second day of the retreat he was teaching walking meditation and it is it's another one was wonderful techniques where you just walk but you're really attentive to where you're walking and you're you're walking to walk not to get somewhere and so this practice of just breathing in and really imprinted your peacefulness on the earth and then pausing looking at the beautiful you know this is in the lost fatherís Mountains in California so I was looking out of the mountains there and what struck me at that moment that sort of wake up moment for me was I really touched peace for the first time of my life I really experienced peace not as a concept not as an idea but viscerally in my body I mean it is one of those sort of moments where you lose the sense of yourself and the identification of yourself and this is combinations of intense happiness contentment as a rapture in a sort of way but in a very calm way and I realize I could do this and this same teacher technolon who then became my teacher after that asked he asked me to organize a pilgrimage for him to the sites associate with the Buddha in India in Bihar and you pee so I did that the next year with him and it was very nice because I went walking with him literally and he heard me by the hand and he brought alive the Buddha is a human being and you know for me being drawn up in India to Buddhist I need a fake slightly superhuman type guy and suddenly I realized this man had the same angst he could have gone to any career anything could've done anything and he chose a career of awakening a career of enlightenment a career of compassion that he could help others and that really had a strong effect of me and then dick Nathon said why did you lose pilgrimage every year so for the last 30 years I go and pretty much every year and I learn the life of this man and how he would have made decisions and how he really built a community to help this this type of collective awakening I think what I've also found in the last few years and this comes back to the whole problem of handling emotions when I was when we were when I was young is to try and bring what I call mindfulness into school education I think since your school audience I felt this is something which now is being recognized as something which is important for mime training even for things like you know cognitive awareness emotional intelligence but there are basic techniques of how to really understand your mind calm your mind and so in fact the first workshop of this was done with the dual school in the world by this by this community in 2008 and we've done well um boys at Woodstock and I feel that this is a sort of and sometimes say in the peoples of why is it not taught and we said because the teachers don't know how to do it the teachers were never taught to do this but now more and more we are realizing that these sort of softer skills of understanding our mind and this inner my inner I'm saying in a heart and mind is very important not just for happiness and peace but actually for creating good community in schools and schools are places where we can build community and build a family and these sort of practices allow us when somebody does walking meditation for example he is a bell of mindfulness or she is a bell of mindfulness for everyone else when you eat in mindfulness with that full awareness that this food you're eating is a gift of the cosmos you allow that to happen to other people too so these sort of wake up moments that have happened the the sort of thinking out of the box the feeling of taking compassion is my ideal the ideal of compassion is my as my career option living more simply realizing that pieces apart pieces away and also realizing that enlightenment can be a great practice and a Great Awakening and I feel that as we go into this to look at this as the potential of a collective awakening rather than just an individual awakening