Notes on Jigme Khyentse Rinpoche’s talk on Hotel Me, Barcelona, on March 27th 2026.
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Those are personal notes taken at a talk. There might be mistakes, misinterpretations or involuntary reflections or distortions on the material itself.
Before coming to the talk I was confused by seeing “unbearable” and “tenderness” together in the title. As Rinpoche went on talking it beautifully cleared the confusion around theoxymoron.
unbearable — We first start to analyze “What is unbearable”: aging is unbearable, death is unbearable, and so forth… “Something I shouldn’t have” is unbearable. But to what degree or how much of “I shouldn’t have” we don’t even know, as in when a doctor asks us “From 0 to 10 how painful is it?”.
How we react to “unbearable” changes over time. And it’s conditioned by layers of delusion added on top: anger, fear, feeling of vulnerability and so forth. It’s less “unbearable” once we start removing the number of layers.
At the core there’s something unprotected, tender, raw that produces a reaction of wanting to protect it — it’s so tender! We grow up learning how to protect it very hard, we don't want to relate to it in different ways.
“As long as you keep the bandage it’s going to stay soft; overprotecting tenderness makes it become unbearable”
The purpose of the bandage makes sense. But not the way in which we overuse it. Overprotecting produces a feeling of weakness, it produces unreadiness as opposed to the feeling akin to seeing a very cute being — a puppy, a baby — heartfelt joy.
“Unbearable” is determined by how do I relate this “tenderness” with the environment.
Anatomically (on body tissues) tenderness is seen as positive — not stiffness.
Covering up tenderness with layers is akin to anaesthetic. And problems with anaesthesia is that we develop tolerance for it and every time will need more. Many people use work — their jobs — as an anaesthetic. Meditation isn't positive when only used as an anaesthetic; meditation must not be an escape from daily situations. Meditate with no attachment. “While meditating this [discomfort] will go away” yields bad results.
In Buddhism the 4 seals are used to identify when some argument or philosophy is buddhist or not. The first of these seals is that if something depends on another thing it must be impermanent — anicca “All compound things are impermanent”. Going against this seal produces unbearableness, because we want to control things, and impermanence shakes that off. The way to relate to it is by exposing; “to be” is that way to expose without wanting to protect at all cost.
Meditation in Tibetan means “getting used to”. Getting used to can be very boring.
Rinpoche when was at school he did many years with the same schoolmates, same space and even same teachers. It can easily become boring. When he came to the west he was fascinated when studying because classes would last 45 minutes and they would move to another room with another teacher, and they would change schedules regularly!
Anything you can do without distraction is a very positive ability, we could call it meditation! In the Tibetan tradition we say that you are skilled if you can hold your attention into an object during the time it takes to walk half the distance of an arrow shot. Usually an arrow travels 400m, so that would be 200m, so around 2-3 minutes.
The problem is that we can’t even focus attention on even a YouTube media or social media content, the attention span is decreasing more and more. We can see it by correlating it to the length of videos nowadays. Now there’s YouTube Shorts. And now it’s common to be on TikTok while watching a YouTube video!