The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Most Replayed Moment: Buddhist Monk Reveals How To Break Free From Pain and Anger!

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Gelong Thubten is a Buddhist monk, meditation teacher, and former actor who has spent over six years in silent retreat. In this moment, he explains how Buddhism offers a radically different way to relate to pain, and how we could be unknowingly feeding our own suffering. Drawing on his experiences of trauma, depression, and panic attacks, he shares an insightful approach to meeting grief, forgiveness, and emotional pain with compassion. Listen to the full episode here: Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/18yElRtyC0b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/f3r7jxByC0b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Gelong Thubten: https://www.gelongthubten.com/

Earlier on you said that in Buddhism they talk about an emptiness, which is kind of this realizing that life isn't so solid, and your identity is a mirage and all these kinds of things. It almost sounded like that's the opposite of like victimhood. Because when we think about victimhood, it is I create an identity for myself and then I create a story around that identity, which has suffered some kind of injustice, and then I kind of live out that injustice. How does Buddhism think about victimhood and identity and trauma, I guess?

So, of course, we identify incredibly strongly with our past. And we, in so many ways, are prisoners of what has happened to us in our past. And it's totally understandable, of course. But Buddhism brings in a whole fresh perspective, which is that you are not your past. I mean, even on a physical level, every cell in your body has changed and your mind has changed. You are right now in the present. The past is an illusion, as is the future. And we spend so much time in the past and future

or trying to manipulate the present. Whereas with meditation, you're learning to be in the now and not be... It doesn't mean you don't plan or don't remember, but you're learning to cling less to the past and future. And you're learning to cling less to or hold less to the idea that things are really as solid as you think they are. I mean, it's very scientific.

There's a Buddhist meditation, which literally is about a table. Like, you know, here we are with this table. And they say, if you take apart this table, you'll find it doesn't exist. Because the table, as it seems right now, is a top with legs. You take the bits apart.

And now where is your notion of table? You've got these bits of wood or metal or whatever it is. And you start kind of dissecting. that further and further and further. This is where Buddhism and particle physics become, you know, talking a lot. There's a lot of conversation there in that the smaller and smaller you go into these wood shavings and then particles. And can you find the smallest part that makes up all of reality?

And Buddhists would say no, because if it's a part, it has parts. There is no such thing as the partless particle because if it's a particle, it can be, further subdivided. So we can't find the smallest base that makes up all of matter. What we're experiencing is more like a dream or an illusion and the reality we live in. Of course, it feels very solid. You know, if I throw this cup at somebody, it's going to hit their head and hurt them. There's no point saying, well, it's all empty. Don't worry about it. But the idea behind this philosophy of understanding things not to be as solid as they are is that we can learn to suffer less. Because we spend so much of our energy, constantly reacting to things as if they're really solid and really real

and there's nothing that can be done about them, whether that be people or objects in the world around us or our mind itself. And if we can desolidify some of that, we could become more free. We all carry so many burdens in this regard. You know, it could be grief, it could be heartbreak, it could be a colleague at work that doesn't dislike us, a comment in our Instagram page of something someone said about us. How does one go about? How does one go about? How does one go alleviating ourselves from this kind of burden? Yeah. So for me, it's very much about dropping the story and looking at the feeling.

Okay. Explain that to me. So for me, this became a very, very important practice for me when I was in a long retreat. So I went into a very long retreat for four years. I became a monk for a year, and I stayed a bit longer, stayed a bit longer. It was after about four years that I decided to do this for life, and I took lifelong vows. And then I knew about these long, I did some short retreats, but I knew about these long retreats. But it wasn't until 12 years later that the opportunity came up to go into a long retreat, four years long,

where you were really just cut off from the world for that length of time. No, nobody goes in or out. and you are meditating many, many hours a day. And it was the most frightening experience in my life because I was in there alone with my own thoughts and emotions. It's not a completely solitary retreat. There are other monks there all doing their own meditation in their rooms. So there is a kind of group, but you are very much alone as well.

And for me, the whole thing was, for the first two years, was just horrific amounts of depression, misery, pain, anguish, anxiety that would build into panic attacks. I was really, really shocked by what happened to me in there. Because I think I thought I'd been a monk for 12 years and I'd already started to give a few talks about meditation and maybe I thought I was quite sorted, but I wasn't. And I got in there and really fell apart.

But it was an amazing thing that happened to me because that falling apart forced me after a while. to learn how to engage with what I'm talking about, which is looking at the suffering and working with that with meditation. Looking at the suffering. So for me, during those first two years of the retreat, I was completely obsessed with the story

because I was experiencing these horrendous feelings of heartbreak and feelings of depression, anxiety, just kind of a whole... mass of suffering inside myself. And I was trying to almost do therapy on myself and think, okay, let's, you know, memories were coming up from the past and thinking about things that had happened in my past and is this why I'm suffering now and how do I resolve that? And the more I went down that road, the worse it got. And I found myself really disconnected from Buddhism. And it was a really frightening experience because I'm there in a four-year retreat. I'm a monk.

and I was feeling completely alienated from the whole thing. I kind of wanted to just get away from it. I wanted to run away. And things only changed when I hit rock bottom, like, hugely, in that I actually climbed over the wall of the retreat to run away. I couldn't take it anymore. At one morning I had the most immense panic attack I've ever had, and I just saw red and just ran.

I legged it out of the retreat, which is unthinkable, you know, in a four-year retreat. You're not supposed to leave, but I jumped over the wall and tried to escape. I say tried to escape as if I was in some kind of, you know, prison or cult. It's not like that. People do leave retreats, but for me it was this kind of dramatic get out of there and run away. And I remember, like, freaking out and running and running and running down this road in the rain. This was on a very remote area of a Scottish island and then just stopping and thinking,

what are you doing? What has happened to you? And I just stopped and then went back. And I asked the leaders of the retreat if I could be let back in and they said, well, no, you've left. But I really begged them because I had such clarity in that moment I wanted to go back in.

And they said, okay, the abbot of my monastery said, okay, stay in a little caravan on the edge of the retreat boundary for a week for seven days and think about what you're doing, and then we'll see if you will let you back in. And during that time, I thought really deeply, and I really knew I wanted to go back in, because there was at that moment a thought of,

shall I give up being a monk, shall I give up the whole thing? I can't do this, it's made me so miserable, but I really knew in that moment what my purpose was. I knew I wanted to go back in and carry on. But I also knew I'd been tormenting myself with my past, and that I hadn't worked out how to heal myself. I'd been sinking so badly. And if I was to go back in there, I would have to try a completely new approach.

Why did you choose to go back in? Because I really strongly believed that it was what I want to do with my life. And a part of me thought, don't give something up when you're freaking out, because you will regret it. if you're going to give this thing up, give it up from a place of clarity knowing that there's something better for you out there. Don't give up because you're having a panic attack

and you can't take it. That's the wrong kind of timing to make a life change because I really do believe in what I'm doing. This is the life I've chosen for myself and I want to do it. But it got so difficult, I couldn't take it anymore. Why did you want to do it?

If something is painful and causing you anxiety attacks. Because I felt that this pain I'm going through, the methods are there. I just need to know how to use them. And I could learn to conquer this. This pain could be the breakthrough. Most people in their lives, when they think about the things that give them anxiety or pain or fear, you know, we live as sort of discomfort avoiding humans. So we try and run to comfort or pleasure.

Exactly. So life is hard, let's run from it. Exactly. Let's get on a plane, fly to another country, and try and just set up a new life somewhere else. It doesn't work. Because you go to your new life, and the thing that has been haunting you like a shadow goes with you,

you can't run from yourself. You can run to the end of the earth, and that thing that has been tormenting you is part of you. And until you learn to integrate that, it will always trip you up. And so I went back into that retreat knowing okay this is your last chance if you don't if you if you mess this up again that that's it

you know forget it so it was a real like make or break situation and I went back in and I I um everything changed because I found I had to find a new a different way of dealing with that suffering what was that okay so I'm back in there and it's coming up again the depression the anxiety the pain. That to me it felt like

it felt like something that was piercing me. It felt like a, it felt like there was like a knife constantly twisting, twisting and turning in my heart, like in the middle of me. It was really painful. And what I'd been doing up until that point was just trying to get that knife out

and also thinking, why is it there? Is it because of what happened to me when I was 14? Is it what happened to me when I was 17? Is it this, is it that, is it my family? What is it? That's the story. I say story, I'm not belittling people's stories. I'm just saying it's the narrative, isn't it?

So I decided to use the knife as the meditation to actually meditate on it. And the whole thing starts to change when you do that. Because until that point you've been trying to get rid of of your suffering or get rid of your pain. But if you turn your pain into your meditation, you're moving towards it. And how can it hurt you if you've decided to move towards it? You've made that choice. So what I started to do was just focus on the pain, but try to bypass the judgments. I don't like this. This is so terrible. Why am I depressed? Why am I

anxious? And just feel the feeling. And it's a sensation in the way. It's a sensation in the body because one of the key instructions in meditation is when you focus your mind you focus it with less judgment this is good this is bad you just focus so you're focusing on that feeling without pushing it away without saying why do I feel like this but just the feeling and it you start it starts to change it starts to change because you're accepting it my teachers had always said to me, they'd always go on and on about acceptance and I just wanted to hit them when they said it because it sounded so grim. You know, you've got to accept yourself or you've got to accept your suffering. To me, that sounded like you're going to, for the rest of your life,

be dragging this bag of rocks up a hill. You know, acceptance is so miserable and so boring. I didn't realize that what they meant was compassion and self-acceptance at a very, very deep level. So I was focusing on that feeling in my body. and trying not to go into the stories about it or the hatred of it and just move towards it and kind of become one with that pain. And then you relax and something kind of releases. And I mean, I think it works on a chemical level because basically when you're trying to push pain away,

you're creating enormous amounts of cortisol in your body, stress hormone. When you relax, the endorphins arise, you start to feel happy. I mean, it's quite bizarre that the thing that has hurt you so much starts to turn into a kind of joyful feeling and you start to think, oh, wow, okay, so happiness is nothing to do with somebody being nice to me or this object or that thing.

Happiness is about being okay with your suffering and not just being okay with it, but actually sending love into the place in yourself that you hated so much. So for me, what started to change was from having a feeling like a knife twisting inside me and hurting me and wanting to get rid of it, I found ways to hold that with love.

And I started to have this image in my head as if I had found a frightened rabbit or a bird with a broken wing and I'm holding that in my hand with tenderness. I'd never been able to do that for myself. I had never ever been able to be kind to myself everything in my life up until that point had been so harsh

and so self-hating and I think you know in my teenage years when I was trying to become a successful actor I think that was the drive was I hate myself so I better get loads of people to love me instead because I can't do it

I'm not saying all actors are like that that by no means, but there is a kind of actor who is like that. We know that, and that was me. And then, you know, even as a monk and you become celibate and you're, you know, having this kind of more like looking after yourself, lifestyle, I'd develop all these incredibly strong attachments with friends where I'd want them to be nice to me and I didn't want to be alone with myself. I couldn't spend time alone with myself. And then in the first two years of that retreat, I'm hating myself and hating my pain and jumping over the wall and anything to, kind of jump out of my own skin. And when I learned how to do this kind of practice with

sending compassion into that part of myself that I'd hated so much, it was really transformative. You said it felt like holding a scared rabbit or a bird with a broken wing. How did you come to feel about that bird? I felt love for that part of myself. And for me that's only possible when you stop getting so distracted by all the history and the details of your past but you're just relating to the feeling in your body right now and i don't know if it's like this for everybody but for me feeling it in the body is a really easy way to start because yeah it's depression it's anxiety it's trauma whatever it is that's quite kind of

nebulous how do you find it and for me it was so physical It was like this twisting of a knife in the heart or a sinking feeling in the chest. And just to relate to that sensation with kindness taught me how to love myself, but in an accepting way. It's not about becoming an egomaniac. I love myself. It's more have kindness for yourself. How does this translate to things like grief? Because grief is one of the hardest things to get to acceptance on,

the sort of finality of life, losing someone you. love. You've been through this yourself. You had, I think, a best friend of yours who was... Well, my teacher. Oh, your teacher? Well, he was my best friend as well as my teacher. He was murdered. So 11 years ago, my teacher, Akon Rinpoche, who had been my everything for all those years. You know, he was my teacher, my closest friend. He, I also, I spent a lot of time with him. I became his kind of assistant. So when he would travel, I was with him all the time. So we very close. He was Tibetan and he was in charge of our monastery in Scotland and part of his work was he would run a charity called Rockpa which has, oh that's him, he would go to Tibet every year and

look after projects there feeding orphans, looking after schools, hospitals, etc. He was on his way to Tibet one year and he was in Chengdu in China and he was in Chengdu in China and he was was basically ambushed and stabbed, killed. And, I mean, this completely rocked the Buddhist world. It's like, you know, horrendous news. But on a personal level for me, I was one of the first people who found out. I'd been on the phone to him every day until then. I was his assistant and working very closely with him.

So it completely, like, blew me apart. I mean, it blew me to pieces. I cannot describe how badly it blew me to pieces. But the meditation I've described to you saw me through. Because at some point during that grieving process, I remembered what to do. At first I didn't, because you know when you're really in it, in it, you can't think.

But then... So there was the whole aftermath. You know, he was killed and it was in all the press. And then as his assistant, I was the one dealing with the media. And in a way, that's staying busy when you're grieving. It kind of helps you to, you know, stay focused. But then the nights, the night time was when it started to hurt. Because at night I would just be tossing and turning and feeling like I was on fire.

Because I had a mixture of grief, anger, despair. there was a whole mixture of things. We knew the killer. The person who murdered him had been a monk, a Tibetan. He had been a monk in our monastery. We knew him. He actually had the same name as me. And we knew him quite well.

So there was all of that mixed in with what an earth happened to this person, that he did this thing. So all of that is consuming me at night, and I'm just tossing and turning, feeling like I'm in flames. And then at some point it kicked in. the meditation. It just happened because I'd done it in retreat. It had seen me through it. It had really, really helped me. And at some point, I just had to lie there and send love into the flames in me. You know, I had to send that kindness into the place I was in despair. I'm not saying

that I then just became all right. No, but it absolutely calmed things, absolutely. And it is, it is, it is, It's all about love. It really is. You are sending love into the pain you are experiencing. And this helped me through the grief. It helped me also with forgiveness, with the guy we knew who did it. It helped me on so many levels. And I'm not saying that it, you know, it's all okay. But I have, I've made peace with his death. And, I mean, he taught me this practice. He taught me how to do that. And then he died. And I have. to do it. I think of it is his last gift to me. And I'm, you know, I will be forever grateful. When you talk about sending love into the flames, what is the actual practice there? Is it

certain sentences you're saying? No. I'm glad you ask this because it is so much about going beyond the words and going into an experience of oneness. So to make it really practical, you know, you're feeling incredible trauma in your body. Finding it physically is the easiest way to do it. Like your body's in flames or you've got like a feeling of a knife twisting in your heart, whatever it is. There's this feeling in the body. And first of all, you just focus on that feeling. So anybody who meditates knows how to to focus on their breathing. It's the same thing.

It's just where you're focusing. So you're feeling the feeling, and you're trying to bypass the thoughts of this is uncomfortable. I want this to go away. Why did he die? What happened? You're just feeling the feeling. And then you pay attention to that feeling in a loving way.

You flood it with love. And the reason this is possible, I mean, this is touching upon a major belief in Buddhist faith. philosophy, which is that our minds are naturally compassionate. We are not these fight or flight killing machines that some people like to think the human being is. We are, our natural state is to be kind. It is who we are naturally deep down. So when you clear away all the words and the ideas and you just sit with the feeling and you send love into that feeling with your mind, you're just loving that feeling, holding it with compassion, as if you were with a friend who was grieving,

if you were sitting with a friend who was freaking out or grieving or whatever, you're not going to slap them around the face and say, snap out of it. You will hold their hand. And we all know how to do that. The question is, can you do it for yourself? And for me, that was a huge challenge because I hated myself so much for so many years. I was my worst enemy. So to hold my own hand internally in that sense,

that's what I mean by sending love into the feeling. And what happens then is the feeling starts to change. It starts to melt. The sharpness, the sharp edges of it start to melt, and you start to be okay with being not okay. And it's almost as if a kind of happiness starts to arise, but it's not like a, it's a kind of happiness you haven't tasted before. for. It's a happiness of I can be okay with this. It makes you immensely strong.

You talked about forgiveness. Did you forgive the man that murdered your friend and teacher? Yes, quite quickly. I mean, in a way, it was made easier because it became really clear that he was psychotic. And of course, that's no excuse or condoning or anything like that, but somebody who is really unable to control themselves. I mean, how can you hate them or whatever? You know, it's... But that's an extreme case, but there are...

The practice of forgiveness is a hard one, isn't it? Because... We've all got people in our lives that we think might have wronged us or done something to us which has caused us pain. Constantly. And almost the way that we create our own perception of justice

is by holding the grudge. Yeah, now, why do we do that? That's my... That's the question is, Do we think that if we let go of the grudge, we have let the other person get away with it? That's how it kind of feels, right? Wouldn't you say that by holding the grudge they've got away with it?

Because you're the one suffering. They've really won. They're winning in each moment. Because you're holding on to it. In Buddhism there's a teaching that says it's like holding on to a piece of hot metal or holding a hot coal in your hand. and it's just burning you. So if I'm holding the grudge, they have absolutely got away with it because they are the thing they did, which was one thing, maybe, I am now constantly hurting,

and they're absolutely the winner. So I wonder if we assume, I think we do assume that forgiveness is a kind of giving up, even the word forgive, the give in the word. So it sounds like we're taking a weaker position, we're giving up, we're sort of surrendering. But I think forgiveness is a strength or a power, and it's actually nothing to do with the other person. You're not going to necessarily write them a letter and say, I've forgiven you, but you're freeing yourself, you're dropping your burden. Because that rage is toxic, and that hurt is toxic. It's so hard to let go of it.

And people can say let go, and you just want to slap them in the face, because, what, okay, is it that easy? I'm just going to let go. You know, it's not that easy. It's bloody hard. But meditation gives you the tools. Partly because meditation anyway is helping to loosen up that kind of glue that we have in our minds, where we're glued into those feelings.

Even just a simple meditation, like coming back to the breath, is helping you to be less glued into those thoughts and reactions and feelings. So the feeling of rage can start to be less heavy for you. You've been through several sort of traumatic incidents. You talked about being 14, being 17, sexual abuse, parental divorce, a little bit of neglect it sounds like as well. Have you forgiven all of those people in your life? I don't know. I don't know if forgiveness is a big, huge, massive moment or if it's a process.

I'm friends with all those people. Very close friends with all those people. And I think, here's what I think. I think I've learned how to forgive the feelings that those incidents gave rise to. That to me is much more important than forgiving the people. And I think what's also happened to me is I've started to find that the suffering that I experience has some use because it is the thing that you're using for your mental transformation. Rimpershey always used to say suffering is like compost

compost is made of rotten vegetables people chuck it away or they know how to make the field grow and I think it's like that so with forgiveness I would say yeah meditation but I would say also thinking deeply about the situation you know what's really helped me

with my dad and with other people is to think about the suffering they were going through that kind of like propelled them to behave the way they've behaved. There's always something, isn't there, in somebody that has made them behave the way they behave? And there's a part of us that gets very indignant and thinks, how dare they? They should know better. Whereas the Buddhist's answer would be, well, what do you mean they should know better?

They know what they know. They are driven by their own confusion and their own pain. Why do you think they were out to get you? Why do you think they were deliberately out to maliciously get you? Weren't they just caught in their own suffering and you were there? But it's not so much about you. And I think that starts to lighten the burden a bit when you start to think about, you know, there's a meditation I sometimes do where you swap places with the other person in your mind.

You sit and you think about being them and looking at the world out of their eyes. The person that had you. Yeah. So many people will be thinking about that person in their life as you speak and there'll be the challenge I guess they'll face is they'll continually come back to this idea that this person is an asshole. Yeah. They, you know, it almost...

We all are, though. We are too. We all. I am. We're all. Because we're all just confused. We're all at the mercy of our own minds. If you meditate regularly, you realize how out of control you are.

Because you're trying to sit there with your breathing and all you're thinking about is, shopping lists, and you think, wow, the human mind is really pretty messed up. We can't make it do anything we want it to do. So this person that you think they're so evil and so terrible and how dare they do the thing they've done, I'm not saying that we're condoning it and saying, yeah, you can do what you want. I'm just saying lighten up a bit because people are just doing their best, and sometimes their best is really bad. What you just listened to was a most played moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.