This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Journey to Bhutan - Culture of Kindness ~ Maria Straatman. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Maria Straatmann at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
My name is Maria Straatman. I am here for Diana tonight, and it’s really a joy to see you all here. This is really delightful. I am recently returned from Bhutan. I’ve been back about a week from a trip that was amazing, and that’s what I’d like to talk to you about tonight.
My impressions of this place, which is a small country sandwiched between India and China, and it is a Buddhist country through and through. Its laws are Buddhist, its attitude is Buddhist, its culture is Buddhist, its way of life is Buddhist. And it is a culture with which I am totally unfamiliar. It was quite astounding to visit these people. The one thing that I found most remarkable about these people was their attitude of kindness. Kindness as a value, as a way of being, in the way that we think of individualism. You know, here, it’s not that we’re opposed to kindness; we value kindness. But for us, the rugged individual is pretty important. For them, kindness is really important, and it comes out almost immediately. Just immediately, people are kind. I was so struck by that. It was an incredible experience, just an incredible experience for me.
There are about 780,000 people in the whole country, which is about the size of San Francisco. The country itself is the highest country in the world. We actually stayed for a couple of days at about 4,000 feet; that’s about as low as we got. But most of the time, it was 7, 8, 9, 10,000 feet that we were operating. While I’d wanted to go to Bhutan for, I don’t know, 25 years or so, I’d sort of written it off as, “I’m never going to be able to go there because I’m too old, I have trouble with altitude, I’m in pretty bad physical shape. It’s not something I’m going to be able to do.”
And I went, and I was scared. “What am I doing?” And rightfully so. It was tough. It was tough. I have a knee that’s due to be replaced, and pretty much everything is a hike up. We visited monasteries and nunneries all over the country, and everything is up. They live at a high level, and then you climb up to the monasteries. I’m not quite sure what the reasoning is, but everything is up to the monasteries. Well, you know, they have to go up there and isolate themselves, and the monks and the nuns, that’s what they do. We actually visited two nunneries, which is unusual for tour groups; they usually are limited to the monasteries.
These buildings are hundreds of years old, and the iconography inside, the walls are all covered with depictions of various Buddhas and Buddhist lives, all painted in murals on mud walls. They’re periodically refurbished and redone, and they have schools where they train people to do this. They have to be of a certain skill before they’re allowed to perform these refurbishments.
So the second day we were there, we climbed from 8,000 feet to 9,500 feet. It just about killed me. And that’s when I first became aware of kindness. The number of people who helped me get up that mountain, who urged me on, took my backpack from me, insisted, and told me I didn’t need to carry that backpack, that I could just get myself up the hill and that would be fine.
And I learned another part of kindness: not only the attitude of caring about somebody else, but the willingness to accept kindness is also a part of kindness, a really important part. If you can’t accept kindness, you can also not be kind. And so I had to learn how to accept kindness. You know, I am kind of a “I don’t need help” sort of person, but I needed help. I needed quite a bit of help. So that involved a certain amount of humility.
The interesting thing was, I made it. I made it to the top, and I was there. It was great. The monastery was astounding. We sat in this ancient monastery, and the monks served us tea, and we heard the stories about what occurred at that particular monastery. We watched the troop of monkeys, and we looked at the rebuilding of part of the monastery. And I didn’t feel a sense of accomplishment; I felt an amazing sense of joy. Just overwhelming joy. Just, wow.
Being around people who are kind, being able to accept kindness, elicits a feeling in the heart of such freedom, such ease that we are simply not used to. We’re not familiar with, at least I haven’t been. It was lovely, just lovely. Quite remarkable.
It’s part of their national identity. Now, I’ve kind of lost track of all the days. We went to many monasteries, but one night we had a speaker who was in the education department. They provide education for everybody as long as they want to go to school; it’s free. As long as they’re studying, if they’re not studying, then they can’t go to school anymore. But this guy was studying how to teach kindness to grade school kids because they teach kindness to elementary school kids. That’s how important it is to them. And he found the most important thing was to model it. That seemed to be the best way to teach it, was to model kindness. Okay, that sounds good to me. That’s the way you spread kindness.
So on that walk that I told you about that went up to the Tego monastery, which means something like “horse head,” they had signs to encourage you partway up. And one of the signs said, “If you want to know who you were in the past, look at who you are today. If you want to know who you’re going to be tomorrow, look at your mind today.” That inculcating kindness as an attitude of mind determines who you’re going to be, determines how you’re going to be in the world, whether you want to be a person who is a caring person or not. It’s a habit of mind, this caring, this being kind.
People actually would stop and listen to you. “Can I help you? What do you need? Did you get what you wanted?” And they didn’t ask casually. They really wanted to know, “Did you get what you needed? Did you get what you wanted? Is there anything else you need here?” It was quite phenomenal. The being present, just being present, stopping. You know, when somebody would give you your hotel room key, they would look at you and they’d hand your key over like this, and you’d have to look them in the eye to take the key. It’s not, “Oh, here’s your key,” and go on to something else. It was, “Here’s your key,” with a certain amount of expectation behind it. “Yeah, your key, right? Let us know if you need anything. Do we need any more water?”
And in the rooms, instead of a Bible, there was a book that said, “What makes you think you’re not Buddhist?” which I didn’t actually read because I didn’t have time, but I thought that was interesting. And if you said that you weren’t happy with something, the face would just fall. It was just catastrophic.
I had a roommate that I didn’t know very well, and when you’re tired, it’s easier to be irritated about things. We got very tired after some of our treks, and one night, nothing in our room seemed to be right. When she couldn’t turn on the light and couldn’t get her adapter to plug in, she just went, “Ah!” And so somebody made the mistake of asking how we liked our room, and she said, “Well…” And so they decided to move us because they couldn’t stand the fact that we didn’t like the room. It wasn’t that bad. They were so accommodating. It wasn’t individuals; it was everybody that did that.
The last day that we were there, five of us from our tour group went up to the last nunnery. If they’d told me what we were going to do, I probably would have said no, but since I didn’t know what we were going to do, we ended up doing this walk up a very narrow, steep trail to 11,825 feet elevation. It was about a 20-minute hike up, so it wasn’t very long, but it was high. And there were 21 nuns at this nunnery maintaining this 8th-century monastery. They didn’t have a teacher anymore because there wasn’t one that would come there.
This nun had been there for seven years, and because she’d fulfilled her seven-year obligation, she could now go and do what she wanted to do as a nun, which was enter into a three-year silent meditation period. Her only requirement was that she could go somewhere warm. It was pretty cold up there, and this is spring, pretty warm for Bhutan, and she was just tired of being cold. And so she was asked, “Why, after seven years in the nunnery, do you now want to go do three years of silent meditation somewhere?” And she said, “Oh, I’m so worried about the world. I’m so worried about the world, and so I need to go settle my mind because I have to settle my mind first.” What a way to think. What a way to be. In order to create peace in the world, I first have to create peace in my own mind.
It was quite inspirational. And she was so taken that we had come up there. They can’t grow their food up there; everything is brought up to them. At that altitude, they can’t really grow anything, so all their food is brought up on somebody’s back up this narrow trail. So they mostly eat rice, and the government supports them. So each nun gets the equivalent of $20 a month, and that buys their food and their fuel. They burn wood in a wood fireplace, and they light butter lamps to remember people. So I got to light a butter lamp for my brother, and they promised to pray for him. It was a really moving experience to be among these people who were so profound, for whom their religion was their life. It wasn’t something added on; it was the way they lived.
People would… there are prayer wheels everywhere, and you’re probably all familiar with prayer wheels. The form of Buddhism they practice is a Vajrayana1 Buddhism, which is like Tibetan. If you think in terms of Tibetan Buddhism, it’s similar to that. It’s a sect of Vajrayana Buddhism that they practice. And so there are these giant prayer wheels everywhere and stupas2, and people are walking around them all the time. And in their daily practice, everyone does. That’s just what they do. They don’t know any other way of being. They stop, they listen, they pay attention, they care. And it’s an attitude that they carry around with them.
Now, the country has problems. We heard a lot about their economic problems, and bringing them into the 21st century is not a trivial activity for them. Their number one source of income is hydroelectric plants, and they sell their electricity to India. They don’t actually see any money from that because it goes to paying off their debt to India for building the hydroelectric plants. So their second source of income is tourism. And they tried to limit that.
They have a policy that 60% of their country has to remain in its native state. They’re the only country in the world that is actually not carbon neutral but carbon negative. They plant more trees than they cut down. And you may have heard, they’re the country that, instead of talking about gross national product, they talk about gross national happiness. So they’re going to build a new city, which is called a mindful city, in southern Bhutan that they think is going to bring them into the 21st century. And it’s not at all clear to me how that’s going to work, but that’s not the topic for this conversation.
So I don’t want to create the idea that it’s a utopian place, but I found the character of the people quite remarkable and the ease with which they go through their day quite remarkable. It was just stunning. And to be in the presence of kindness as an attitude was truly delightful.
So I am here to proselytize in favor of kindness and to encourage you to think about how you too can engage in kindness and make it part of your life. And finally, there is gratitude. So I have this little book called The Power of Kindness, and it’s written by Piero Ferrucci. I don’t know if it’s still in print; I’ve had it for, I don’t know, 15 years or so. And since I came back, I’ve been rereading it. So it’s on the subject of kindness, but he has a little thing here I want to read you.
“To be kind without being grateful is dangerous, perhaps impossible. People who do not know how to receive and do not feel thankful for what they’ve been given are in trouble when they try to be kind. They think they’re being great benefactors and everyone should be indebted to them. Maybe they even remind others of their own good deeds, expecting gratitude. They become condescending. Also, it’s harder for them to appreciate subtle, seemingly insignificant aspects, for example, a smile, half an hour in someone’s company, a witty remark. They value only concrete and measurable gifts, such as a watch or a fountain pen. But kindness does not fit onto a balance sheet.”
So one of the feelings that I had when I was experiencing all this kindness was the feeling of gratitude. I think it’s impossible to be in the presence of kindness and not experience gratitude. And practicing gratitude is part of practicing kindness. And I don’t mean you have to go around thinking up things to be thankful for, but rather notice things. Like when I came in, I noticed the dogwoods are in bloom. I love dogwoods. So I stopped and was just silently grateful for dogwoods. It’s the stopping and just paying attention to a moment of, “Isn’t that great? I’m glad I saw that. I’m glad I experienced that. I’m glad I got to hear that. I’m glad I got to see you.” Just that amount of gratitude, that’s the other half of kindness. It’s a very important part of kindness.
So through my whole trip in Bhutan, mostly what I felt… I’ve told the story about how I’d wanted to go to Bhutan for 25 years and I’d written it off. “I’m not going to go, I’m too old, it’s not going to happen.” And then I went. Not once did I have a feeling of accomplishment. I’d call my husband, I’d say, “Here’s what I did today.” And, “Wow, Maria, you did that.” Not once did I have a feeling of accomplishment, but always I felt like every step was a blessing, a blessing, a blessing. Don’t fail to notice all the blessings in your life. Just a blessing. Because you never know. You never know how great a blessing will just drop on you out of nowhere. So be in the habit of noticing it so that you don’t miss it.
One of the greatest experiences of Bhutan was, in fact, the occasional feeling of being overwhelmed by a sense of joy. I listened to one of Gil’s talks on the third Jhana3, which he’s been going through the samadhi4, and he talked about happiness and the feeling of happiness. And I thought, “Yep, that’s just what it was. Just happiness for no reason.” Not that you can point at and say, “This caused happiness,” but just, wow. Notice when it arises in your life. It’s there. Don’t let it pass you by.
One of the people who talked to us was a Khenpo5, who was a teacher at the Buddhist University in Thimphu, which is the largest city in Bhutan. And I went up and talked to him after he gave us this talk, and I did a little, you know, “May you know peace and happiness” for him. And he said, “You must smile like this every day.” And I didn’t know whether it was a blessing or an instruction. And I’ve decided it was both. So smile every day. Let it be both a blessing and an instruction. Thank you.
Questioner 1: This is very new to me, kind of almost confusing. I grew up in the 50s, and my parents never talked about kindness and mindfulness and everything that I hear constantly on television. I’m a TV watcher at my age. So it’s just… well, I don’t know what to make of it. I’ve just never thought that way.
Maria Straatman: Yeah, yeah. It’s possible, you know, to just wonder what’s going on with the other person. What’s going on with you? How does it feel to be you?
Questioner 1: Well, this seems to be a buzzword, mindfulness. I don’t remember my parents ever talked about anything like that. I was raised Episcopalian, and I did some TM and Nam Myoho Renge Kyo6. I’ve done different forms of religion, and this is nice because I just like sitting here and it’s quiet and there’s nothing, there’s no cat jumping on my lap, and you know, it’s just very peaceful. So I really love it. But it’s just, I don’t know, mindfulness. When did that come to… is this a thing five years ago, 10 years ago? All of a sudden, where…
Maria Straatman: Well, I think mindfulness has entered into the everyday lexicon, and it means a lot of things to different people. So let me just talk a minute about what it means to me. Mindfulness means that you’re aware of some object. There’s an object and there’s knowing the object, but mindfulness is knowing you know the object. So what I mean by that is, you know, I know I’m sitting here, but until I say, “I’m sitting here and I’m aware of my bum on this cushion,” I don’t really know I’m sitting here. It’s all in my head. But I’m mindful of sitting when I notice I’m sitting. So there’s an awareness component to mindfulness.
When I was going down those hills, I was extremely mindful because my knee is so bad. Part of the time it was slick downhill, and part of the time it was stairs. Well, neither is good when you’ve got a bad knee and you’re going downhill. So what I would have to do is decide… I have a partially torn ACL, so that means that twisting the knee is bad. But because I have no cartilage and a shredded meniscus in my knee, I have bone on bone. So when I step down off a step, that hurts. So with every step, I had to decide, “Am I just going to take it straight on and take the pain that way, or am I going to go sideways and twist it and take the pain that way?” And every step, I paid attention to how I was putting my foot down. That’s mindfulness. When you’re paying attention with every step. Now, when I’m walking down the street, I don’t pay attention to every step; I’m paying attention to something else. But walking down that hill, I was extremely mindful with every step. I was also the last person off the hill all the time. Well, no, there was one guy who’s three years older than me that was sometimes later than me.
So mindfulness is, what are you aware of? What do you know when you’re aware of something?
Questioner 1: I think I’m too aware of everything all the time.
Maria Straatman: Well, maybe. You know, if your mind is off wandering around and you’re lost in a fantasy, you’re not aware. But if you are aware you’re thinking of something, you’re aware, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking, thinking, planning, planning,” I know that’s what’s happening. That’s mindfulness. The point of mindfulness is to be in the present and not lost. It’s to actually be living your life, to be totally present for your life. That’s the point of mindfulness.
Questioner 1: Well, maybe I am mindful, just didn’t realize I was.
Maria Straatman: There you go.
Questioner 1: I mean, I’m becoming more aware that I need to be nicer to people, polite when I’m driving. Well, I usually am, but just say nice things to people because I’m very critical of people and myself.
Maria Straatman: Yeah. So it might be useful to make a distinction between being nice and being kind. We can be nice. We’re polite, we’re socially adept, and we put out the tea, but it’s just automatic. But being kind is being present for someone and doing something that they want, and not something just because we think it’ll make them happy. What I noticed in the hotels, in particular, is that I never had the impression that somebody was doing something so I’d give them a tip. You can tell, you know, when somebody’s… [Laughter] or when they’re really trying to help you. The difference between being nice and being kind, and that’s worth sort of thinking through for yourself. You know, am I being kind to someone? And that can be, am I using someone’s time appropriately? Am I being considerate of this person?
Questioner 2: Thank you very much. It was nice to hear about your experience. I’m curious about a couple of things. One is your thoughts about kindness and gratitude in relation to emotions like anger and self-protection, and what your observations in Bhutan were of how people are able to set boundaries for themselves.
Maria Straatman: Okay, that’s very appropriate. So I can’t speak on behalf of people in Bhutan, so let me speak on my own behalf. Often in discussions with my husband—we’ve been together for 40 years—we have things that each of us does that irritates the other, and it comes up, right? So you can be in the middle of a conversation, you can feel it heating up. And I notice it’s heating up here, and I can pause and say, “It’s my intention to be kind to my husband.” Yeah, but I’m right. Yeah, but it’s my intention to be kind. So is this conversation important because I need to be right, or is it because the consequences of my being right are important for somebody’s health? If it’s just that I want to be right, that’s not important compared to wanting to be kind, and I can tamp it down. But I have to be able to pause to do that. So I have to be mindful of what’s going on in order to do that.
In a previous marriage, I won every battle and lost the war because I’d always give in in the end. This was not healthy, and the marriage ended. So you have to know, you have to also be able to discern when to say, “Okay, I can’t have this conversation when I’m heated because we’re going to say things that are unhealthy to one another, but we have to come back to this when I’m not emotionally overwrought and can’t say things from a reasonable place.” So you manage it based on being mindful of whether you’re emotionally stable or not. You don’t have to walk away from what you believe or what is important to you or advocating for what’s right, but acting out of anger is almost always negative. Does that answer your question?
I will also say that on the final morning that I was in Bhutan, I had a very long conversation with the hotel owner who was bemoaning the fact that it was very difficult to find trained personnel to work in his hotel. They have a school where they train people, and people get trained and then they go off to Australia or Canada where they can make more money and live a different life. So they have a very hard time retaining their young people. We were talking about that circumstance, and he said some of the people here believe so much in work-life balance that they only want to work four-hour shifts. And he says, “I need people that are going to work eight-hour shifts.” And he’ll say to them, “I need you to work an eight-hour shift.” And they’ll say, “Well, I’ll just go live at my uncle’s place for a while. He’ll take care of me,” because he will. So wise effort is also required. The gross national happiness has its overextension problem in Bhutan.
Questioner 3: Thank you for sharing your story. I loved it. I’ve done a lot of solo traveling myself and experienced the anticipatory fear and everything that sounds like you had also.
Maria Straatman: I’m sorry, I’m having a little trouble hearing you.
Questioner 3: Oh, sorry. I’m a fellow traveler myself, a solo traveler. So I relate to a lot of the things that you said, and I also have had five surgeries on my knee, so I understand needing to ask for help to get up difficult hills and have people carry bags for me. So I wanted to ask two questions. One, the woman that needed to quiet her mind for three years, how does she know that the world is not well if she’s just up on a mountain meditating for seven years? Are they reading the news there? Are they watching social media?
Maria Straatman: She’s not unaware of the world. She’s not in silent meditation now. She’s at a nunnery, so people are visiting her all the time. The people who bring food, they talk about the condition of the world. They’re not in silence in these monasteries. They have to go to separate places where they do silent meditation. So she’s aware that there are troubles in the world.
Questioner 3: My other question is, I wonder if the joy that you experience is actually bigger than the joy that they experience because yours is comparing to life in America.
Maria Straatman: Well, you know, my life in America is not terrible. I think of kindness, joy… my times of joy were not directly related to, “This person is kind to me, and now I’m feeling joy.” I just was experiencing joy at unrelated times. I just noticed, “Oh my goodness, there’s this ecstatic joy that I’m experiencing at this moment.” And one time it was at a breakfast table, one time it was coming out of a monastery. It was at various times. I think that because I was traveling and out of my normal circumstances and vulnerable, that it was more accessible to me. So in that sense, traveling certainly impacted that freedom that I was experiencing. I think that’s certainly true.
Questioner 3: That makes sense.
Maria Straatman: I think that’s one of the joys of traveling, if you allow yourself to experience the raw experience without coloring it with the rest of your life. That’s one of the great joys of life. So I’m really, really grateful that I was able to take that trip.
Questioner 4: You mentioned they want to come into the, quote, “21st century,” and that that was a concern and an issue, and building the city. I’m wondering if anyone’s thinking about how much of this emphasis on kindness might be different, like what coming into the 21st century means exactly. And I see the possibility that that kindness might be shifted by that in ways. So I just wonder if anyone’s thinking about that.
Maria Straatman: Oh, believe me, they’re thinking about that. The first afternoon we were there, we met the CEO of DHI, which is Druk Holding and Investments7, which is the investment arm of the Royal Family. And they own the airline and they own the big companies of Bhutan. And they outlined the strategy of building this city in southern Bhutan, which is Gelephu Mindfulness City8. The idea is that it should be something like Hong Kong or Singapore after 20 or 30 years, and that it will be independent of the rest of the country, and then eventually they will merge the two. I see big problems with that, but what they want to do is protect their culture. They really want to protect their culture, and they know that if they don’t do anything, they will be absorbed by either India or China. And they want to protect themselves from that as well. So they’re doing what they can. The king was educated at Harvard, and he is trying to mastermind this.
Questioner 4: By absorbed, you mean they might take over?
Maria Straatman: Yeah, yeah. Right now, Bhutan forms a diplomatic buffer between the two very often. Although there was a report in The Economist last week that Bhutan had a disagreement with China over some portion of land, and India stepped in, and Bhutan was really pissed that India stepped in because they don’t want to be seen as a vassal of India, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, they have real concerns. All of this is not Buddhist in nature, but it’s related to how do you maintain a way of life and an attitude of life in a world that is very different. And it’s a very real concern. Thank you.
So thank you for your attention. May you know smiles, may you know kindness, may you know joy, may you be happy.
Vajrayana: One of the three main branches of Buddhism, prominent in Tibet and Bhutan. It incorporates specialized practices, such as mantras and visualizations, as a path to enlightenment. ↩
Stupas: Dome-shaped structures containing Buddhist relics, typically the ashes of Buddhist monks, used by Buddhists as a place of meditation. ↩
Jhana: A state of deep meditative absorption. There are traditionally eight stages of jhana, each representing a deeper level of concentration and tranquility. ↩
Samadhi: A state of meditative concentration or one-pointedness of mind. It is a key component of the Buddhist path to enlightenment. ↩
Khenpo: A spiritual degree for a senior monk or nun in Tibetan Buddhism, equivalent to a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy. ↩
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo: The central mantra chanted in Nichiren Buddhism. The transcript said “nami huro,” which has been corrected based on the context of mentioning various spiritual practices. ↩
Druk Holding and Investments: The commercial and investment arm of the Royal Government of Bhutan. The transcript said “Droldolding Industries.” ↩
Gelephu Mindfulness City: The official name of the special administrative region and economic hub being developed in southern Bhutan. The transcript mentioned “GMC.” ↩