What has love got to do with it? Love and compassion is what drives most people to a spiritual path, but it is in fact more advanced. If you look at the Lamrim, the packaging of Buddha's teachings, they're in a nice orderly way, according to the capacity of the disciple. I prefer to call it - junior school, high school, and university. Love and compassion are taught in university. That's a big surprise to us.

There's the wisdom wing and the compassion wing, a bird needs two wings. The wisdom wing, which is all about you, is like self compassion, self love. Buddha doesn't talk like that, but it's how we talk in the west, it's how you take care of yourself. So of course if you hear about self love, you hear about having a relax and a nice massage, you can do that too, but that's not Buddha's approach.

If you don't start working on your mind, then you can never change, you'll never get happy. The Buddha's first teachings - the four noble truths - he's telling us exactly what to do if we want to be happy. Guess what! - it's not to get someone else to make us happy, or to get the nice cake or vacation - but to work on our own mind! That means we have to understand what he means. What he means is that in the mind we have a bunch of neuroses, the voices of ego, attachment, anger, and the rest. Surprisingly to us, they don't come from outside, they're triggered by the outside, but the cause of them is in our own mind. These tendencies are the source of our suffering. So self love for the Buddha is getting rid of these, working on your mind, that's how you get happy. That's how you take care of yourself. Very surprising!

Then when you've done that, to the degree that you've done it, is the degree to which you open your eyes and realise we're all in the same boat. So then you're able to understand others, and now you can help them, by giving them love and compassion, kindness and patience. It's very logical.

Why is it difficult to have love and compassion for others? If we haven't worked on our own minds, this is the problem, we leap in and make a mess half of the time, because we haven't sorted out our own minds. We haven't identified attachment, we haven't identified the source of our own pain.

So we rush out and try to be kind and loving to others and then wonder why things go wrong. Or why you're out there helping others and you feel like you're being abused and misused for being a nice person. Or you help others during difficult times and you get dragged down and depressed by the amount of suffering. So we assume that being kind to others is why we're suffering. No - you are not suffering because you are kind to others, you are suffering because you have attachment.

We have to work on the wisdom wing first, really work on our own minds, mind our own business, work on our body, speech, and mind. Buddha's teachings on the four noble truths are addressed to us, this is the inner job, like retreat mode. This is absolutely vital, it's the starting point for practice. On the basis of success at this, you can see others, and now you can begin to be of benefit to others, without making a mess.

Questions include - what does His Holiness mean when he says no enemy inside - no enemy outside, compassion for the person who harms another, getting angry at our self, how do we transform love for family into love without attachment, 'good enough dear' by Lama Yeshe, 'this is a pretty cup' is an opinion but is 'this is a cup' also an opinion, sensory and mental consciousness, can a person believe in a creator and also Buddha's teachings, is forgiveness a step on the path or is it just about the I, and techniques to work with strong aversion?

Valentine's Day 2024 teaching and Q & A at Tse Chen Ling Center for Tibetan Buddhist Studies in San Francisco.