For those of you who don't quite understand that, this is a person who, after their early practice in Buddhism, obviously started telling everybody, "You should do meditation, you should do meditation." And of course the other people got angry, they didn't want to listen and there was lots of Dukkha. So this person now feels quite hesitant to talk with people interested in Dhamma because of all this difficulty they created when they first tried to give Dhamma to people. I'm a person who has years of experience in the Dhamma, I'm a teacher, I get lots of chances to talk with lots of people about the Dhamma. When I'm back in the West, I'm quiet. I don't offer my Dhamma to people who are brand new, only to people who've actually done a retreat or are interested in Buddhism. I don't offer it, I'm very slow in discussing it with others. Somebody asks me what I do in Thailand, I say, I teach. That's it. I never say what I teach, I say, I teach. And you know what, fifty percent of all people never ask me another question, because Thailand itself is too weird for them. So that's okay, that fifty percent drops off. The next question is, of course, what do you teach. I say I teach meditation. That then ends fifty percent more. I'm slow, I'm very slow in giving out any information. But the minute they want it, I pick up a little, but I try to ask them questions first. I try to find out their background first to see if they are truly interested.
I was just home last month. There was a dinner, and I was sitting talking with a woman a couple years older than me, a friend from my childhood. I hadn't talked with her personally probably since my childhood, maybe once, twice over the years. Actually she was one of my brother's friends, not really mine, but we sat next to each other at dinner. We had a long conversation. Now, as much as she was asking me questions about myself, I was trying to make sure of her level of interest about what she was asking me. I didn't get too involved in explaining too much, yet she had a lot of faith in what I was doing. But as she was from a very strong Christian background, it wasn't appropriate to give her a lot of my understanding. You have to be careful.
So when we're talking with other people, it does help to ask them a bunch of questions before they ask you a bunch. Then you understand more of their background. I saw a cousin of mind some years ago at a reunion, I hadn't seen her for 35 years, and she's a psychotherapist. That was easy, I sat with her during dinner and we had a long conversation. I was able to cover a lot because she could interpret it, she understood that meditation was kind of what you do when you do psychotherapy. It really comes from Buddhism in a deeper sense. So we could relate, I could give her more information. I even gave her a book at the end of the night. Yet I never heard from her again, that was now 8 years ago. Maybe something went in. Because of her background, I could give her more. So that's very important when you're talking with other people.