ONLINE TRAININGS BY THE DALAI LAMA GLOBAL VISION SUMMIT PRESENTERS
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” -Dalai Lama
BOOKS BY THE DALAI LAMA GLOBAL VISION SUMMIT PRESENTERS
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” -Dalai Lama
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
“The true hero is one who conquers his own anger and hatred.” -Dalai Lama
Intro
Welcome to the Female Flex. I’m your host, Staci Nichols, owner of SpiritualVirago.com. Today, I’m going to be doing a review of the Dalai Lama’s second annual Global Vision Summit: the Power of Compassion. This event is completely virtual. It was hosted by Lion’s Roar. It was October 14th through 19th, 2021, and the event was completely free. According to Lion’s Roar, the first annual Dalai Lama Global Vision Summit, last year in 2020, had 20,000 attendees, I’m sorry, 90,000 attendees. So it looks like this is an annual event. I thought I would do a review so people can decide if they want to sign up for next year. Again, it’s free. You don’t really, I mean, there’s nothing to lose here, but our time is important, and this is an investment of our time.
Just to kind of give an overall layout of the way the event went down, I thought the panel of speakers was pretty diverse, pretty evenly split between men and women and people of all different backgrounds. There were scientists, there were religious leaders, there was a mayor. So it was a good group of speakers. Some of the highlights would be, I think, Tara Brock, author of Radical Compassion, Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, and Greg Fisher, the mayor of the city of Louisville, Kentucky.
Basically it’s just a series of videos that they will give you access to each day. This year, in 2021, you had until two days after the seminar to see all the videos. If you wanted lifetime access to the videos, you did have to pay for that. There wasn’t really a host or anyone that really introduced the presenters, and a lot of the presenters didn’t bother to introduce themselves. It just kind of felt like you sort of jumped in without any context. And, yes, there was a written bio below each video of the speaker, but I’m just listening to this on my desk while I’m doing other stuff. You know what I mean? I’m not watching. So I think that could be an improvement.
Feedback
About half of their presenters just read their presentations. Like they just wrote a report about compassion then read it to a video camera, and, I mean, some of them read better than others. One lady in particular, her reading was just so fake, I couldn’t listen to it. It was so bad. I had to just turn off the video and move on to the next one.
Of the 20ish presenters, maybe only two of them actually had slides. I feel like Microsoft PowerPoint is pretty much a standard at any sort of public presentation for the last like two decades. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that people presented, you know, organized presentations with visual accompaniment. That’s pretty much what people are used to anymore, but the majority of the speakers literally just sat in front of the camera and talked–that’s it (or read as the case would be).
There wasn’t any place for comments or chatting. I understand that would mean they have to monitor that and so on. But it would have been nice to maybe at least have a Facebook group or something where people that attended could connect with each other.
Also, I did like that the majority of presenters had a guided meditation after their seminars, which was very cool. So you would kind of get their take on compassion and then you’d spend maybe 10-20 minutes doing a meditation with them from their perspective, which was very cool.
They also included a sneak peek of a new documentary coming out with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. The documentary is basically just interviews with these two guys, but it was really cool. They showed about a five minute clip of that. There were also a lot of older pre-recorded videos from the Dalai Lama. They just showed little clips, and I did enjoy those a lot. Those were pretty impactful.
Motherly Compassion
So let’s talk about the actual content of this Global Vision Summit. One of the things that I heard over and over and over again was that we get sort of an imprint of compassion from our mothers as they take care of us when we’re young children, babies–that is really the root of all the compassion that we will be able to know and experience as human beings in this lifetime. A lot of different presenters touched on that idea. And you hear the Dalai Lama talk about this a lot. In fact, in one of his videos from the summit, he said, we received “maximum affection” from our parents. It would have been really, really nice if at least one of the presenters had really gone in depth on what if you didn’t get that compassion from your mother!? I didn’t. My mom was an abusive alcoholic, and my first memory of her is her ignoring me. I think there’s a little bit of an oversimplification of the issue that people are just choosing not to be compassionate or whatever. I think a lot of people are programmed because they didn’t get that experience with their mother. And I think of this star-studded panel, at least one of these people could have touched on that in depth. How can I be more compassionate if I didn’t get that compassion imprint from a loving mother…if I didn’t get “maximum affection.”
Compassion Fatigue
Another concept that was discussed quite a bit was compassion fatigue. Basically, this is just where people really kind of hit the wall emotionally where they’re giving compassion all day long. At the end of the day, they just burn out. They don’t have anything left in the tank. There was a social worker at the end of the summit who spoke almost his entire presentation about this, but a lot of the other speakers touched on it. Sharon Salzberg, for example, she said if you type “compassion” in Google you get those pre-populated answers or whatever. She said, you type in “compassion,” and the first thing that will pop up is “compassion fatigue.” So clearly this is something affecting a lot of people–one of the top search terms when we’re talking about compassion. I know from my experience as a volunteer crisis response counselor for a sexual assault advocacy group where we would do these 12 hour shifts overnight. The volunteers would be in charge of answering phone calls from the crisis hotline. We would get these kind of like drunk homeless people calling at two or three in the morning, talking about how they own nunchucks, and therefore they’re licensed as a deadly weapon and so forth. You’re like, “I’m going to be half-speed at work all day tomorrow. I’m here to be helping rape victims. And I got people contacting me, literally just running off at the mouth about something that has nothing to do with what our hotline is for.” While you want to be compassionate–and clearly this person is in need of some compassion–but that’s not what we’re doing here. There’s somebody else who’s trained in helping you, and it’s not me. It’s hard, it’s really hard. Definitely, uh, appreciative of all the speakers that touched on that topic.
Where Does Compassion Come From
A quote I really liked from Sharon Salzberg was that compassion is born out of the way we pay attention. Again, I think that ties back into the imprint of compassion that you received from your mother. If your mom paid a lot of attention to you, you probably learned the ability to likewise pay attention to other people and their own needs and stuff. This is good. What you pay attention to is relevant to, the education that you received, what you are reading about, for example, gender inequality and sexism, then you’re going to be paying attention to it. That’s going to be on your radar–you will pay attention to them, be compassionate to that. If you’re not putting priority to that, for example, you’re not going to have the same level of compassion towards it because you’re going to be stuck in a place of ignorance.
Women in Buddhism
I’m not sure of his role, but someone from Lion’s Roar who hosted the event, did an interview with the Dalai Lama specifically for the Global Vision Summit. It was great. Clearly, the interviewer was starstruck to be sitting there in Dharamsala–I think that’s how you pronounce it–where the Dalai Lama lives talking to this guy. One of the most poignant moments of the summit for me was when that interviewer asked the Dalai Lama pointblank about the role of women in Buddhism. He said specifically that women, like Buddhist nuns, get less attention and less education. He was really trying to pin the Dalai Lama down as far as what can we do to fix this problem and to show compassion to change this old system of not valuing women. I really was not happy with the way that the Dalai Lama handled this issue. I’ve heard the Dalai Lama speak on other issues regarding gender equality and sexism before. And I didn’t like what I heard then either. I understand these answers are coming from an 80-year-old man, but, at the same time, if the Dalai Lama wants to educate himself about global warming, he does that. I don’t get the feeling that he’s educated himself about sexism and gender equality. I mean, the discrimination of women/patriarchy is the foundation of literally every form of hate that there is. So I don’t understand how he is not more stalwart, fierce, forceful in his firmness on fixing those type of issues. So the Dalai Lama’s response to the interviewer when asked about the role of women in Buddhism? He said that he thinks women need to take a more active role in Buddhism. The interviewer clearly was not satisfied with that answer, as I also was not. The interviewer rephrased the question, asked him again, and basically got the same dismissive answer. For me, it was disappointing. OK, now I know the Dalai Lama is literally one of the, if not the, most well-liked person in the world. But, with all due respect, sir, your Holiness, you need to do a better job when it comes to advocating for the rights of women.
Emotional Hygiene
A concept from the Dalai Lama that I do appreciate is something that he referred to during the summit as “emotional hygiene.” If you think about that, I mean, physical hygiene is something that’s just pounded into us from the time you’re able to lift a toothbrush or a comb. Multiple times per day, you take care of your body, you cleanse your physical vehicle here. If I’m outside pulling weeds or something and I get sweaty, when I come back inside, maybe I need more deodorant or a quick rinse in the shower. It’s not just like, “Oh, I brush my teeth every morning,” but there’s really this ongoing ritual, this routine that people have. I can see that my body has gotten dirty in a particular way, now I cleanse that. If you think about what he’s saying, “emotional hygiene” really is doing the same thing that we do for our physical body but for our mental health. You know, if someone cuts me off on the road, maybe I need to vent about that over the phone to a friend, or maybe I need to shake it off by putting my favorite song on after it happens, an emotional reset. That’s sort of the emotional equivalent of putting on more deodorant after you get stinky out in your garden, right? Anyway, I think this is just a really valuable idea about “emotional hygiene.” After every meal, do I have something in my teeth? Do I need to gargle? If we could bring that kind of attention and discipline to our emotional health, as much as our physical health, that would really be great. Imagine waking up each day and be these new, fresh slates, ready to go be compassionate, human beings out in the world.
Spiritual Bypass
I also really appreciated in Christian Howard’s seminar, he made quite a few references to John Welwood, who was a Buddhist psychotherapist, I believe. He talked about this term “spiritual bypass,” which for me was very insightful. Basically, this term is that you’re down here dealing with all your traumas of life, your suffering, your pain, your fear, and a lot of people reach for enlightenment via spirituality in order to bypass having to get into the muck, muddiness, and mess of dealing with the traumas, the pains, the emotions. But any real form of spirituality is born from dealing with those issues, from facing the traumas, going through the pain. There is no way to bypass that just because, you’ve started meditating or you’ve started reading all the Deepak Chopra books. A quote from John Welwood in Christian Howard’s seminar that I really appreciated: “We are not humans trying to be Buddhas. We are Buddhas trying to be human.”
Politics
Let’s talk about Mayor Greg Fisher. He’s the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky. Despite the fact that he did read his entire presentation, he was one of the better readers. Some people were very bad in hiding it–you can like literally see the paper they’re reading off of. Anyway, I started listening, and I was really impressed, quite frankly, with a lot of what he said. I thought he was very insightful. He clearly was well-studied on the Dalai Lama and compassion. The city of Louisville was given the title of “City of Compassion.” Apparently, there are certain cities worldwide that have earned this title–they have signed a charter or whatever agreeing to meet certain conditions and so forth in order to become a “City of Compassion.” Anyway, I thought this guy was really insightful. He’s talking about how Thomas Merton and Mohammad Ali are both from Louisville. This is really cool, you know, and, honestly, the most impactful moment easily of the entire summit for me was the story he told him. I had to stop the video and run for a box of Kleenex. In fact, even just thinking about talking about it now, I get like a little misty, but this is the story shared by Louisville mayor Greg Fisher.
He said in 2015, a mosque in Louisville was vandalized with hateful graffiti and a thousand residents of Louisville showed up to clean it. He said the amount of graffiti was just like repainting and replacing a lamp. He said it could have been cleaned up by like two people in a few hours, but a thousand people showed up to show their support and say, “Hey, not in my city.” I would’ve really appreciated quite frankly, if the other speakers had included more stories like these–kind of compassion wins (versus so many of them, session after session, saying how humanity lacks compassion, how we need to work on growing our compassion). Clearly there are people out there every day doing things like this and being compassionate, and it would have been really inspiring to hear more of that at the summit.
Okay. So Mayor Greg Fisher’s talking, tells us that story, I get the Kleenex, I come back to my computer, I put the video back on, and then I am reminded of the fact that Louisville is where Brianna Taylor was murdered. And it makes me feel like the entire earlier part of his presentation was not genuine, that it was a sort of political rebuttal. I have an oogy feeling, you know, and he talks about how tragic her murder was. He talked about how the city of Louisville–with him spearheading it–tried to get her family like a $13 million settlement as soon as possible by agreeing to a settlement rather than fighting it out in court. They just wanted to get them the money as soon as possible. I’m like,”OK, I mean, this is all good.” I thought, “Maybe something’s changed and I didn’t catch it.” So I’m googling, “Did Breonna Taylor’s murderers ever get prosecuted?” Uh, still no. It was really interesting to hear his perspective, and it doesn’t take away from the earlier things that he said. I still really appreciated everything that Greg Fisher said, but the Breonna Taylor thing really made his presentation seem like I was listening to a politician.
Anger
OK, final quote, to wrap it up…this was from Wilson Hurley’s presentation. He’s a social worker, and he talked almost his entire seminar about compassion fatigue. One of the quotes he used in his seminar was, “Anger is a good messenger, but a terrible manager.” I just thought this was really smart because what he was basically saying is that, in the tradition of Buddhism, anger is seen as just universally bad. It’s very black and white, whatever perspective, you know, anger is just always bad. Clearly, in Western culture, we feel that anger is a valuable tool for pushing people to fight for social reform and, on a personal level, for people to put their finger on something that’s abusive–have a healthy, normal reaction of anger to that and decide “Never again! I’m going to put up these healthy boundaries now, and I’m not going to allow someone to take advantage of me or to violate me.” So it’s an interesting quote to sort of merge together that Eastern and Western philosophy. So, apparently–east and west–the twain shall meet…through this quote: “Anger is a good messenger, but allows the manager.” It’s basically just saying, “It’s fine to allow anger to alert you to the fact that you’ve been mistreated or that people around you are being mistreated, but you don’t want to let anger be the thing that’s managing you.” You know, you want to be that Gandhi or that Martin Luther King coming from the point of view of a peaceful protest–nothing against Malcolm X. I think he was right too. Anyway, I really appreciate this quote from Wilson Hurley, “Anger is a good messenger, but a lousy manager.” This has been the Female Flex. I’m your host, Staci Nichols, owner of SpiritualVirago.com. Please do give a ‘like’ and a ‘subscribe.’ I sincerely appreciate it. Also, all of the quotes squares and the books from the presenters are available here on this page.
GLOBAL VISION SUMMIT QUOTES: POST & SHARE
“The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds.” -Dalai Lama
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S.N. is the founder of Spiritual Virago. She is a vegetarian 🥕 + bonafied geek 📚 + mama bear 👨👧 + investor 📈. This former NCAA Track & Field All-American 🏃♀️ enjoys line dancing & is addicted to Burt's Bees chapstick 💄Read her inspiring story. She offers spiritual coaching, trauma mastery coaching, & business coaching. S.N. is also a celebrated speaker and author. Her personal motto: "It's not the size of the woman in the fight. It's the size of the fight in the woman." 💪💯
