One of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism is that there's no self or soul.

We were ascetics, renunciants, people who had so-called given up the world.

I really couldn't stand Christians, if I'm honest.

Occasionally we'd have interfaith meetings and I love to sit and lecture them.

God and Nirvana were the same. And they would just sit there

and go more and more pale and kind of long to just get out of my presence. Welcome, everybody.

This is Simon Gilbo with Inspired. It's so good to be back for another week of encouragement.

If you're new to us, I'm sick to death

of being relentlessly bombarded by negativity, a narrative in the press that just induces fear

and cynicism and anxiety and what we need is a dollops of encouragement of hearing great

stories of what's happening around the world in different contexts with friends of mine and I'm excited because this, by my counting,

is about the 195th podcast we've recorded.

It's the first Buddhist story that we've had.

And so I'm really thrilled to have with us Esther Baker.

Welcome, Esther. Thank you so much. Good to be with you, Simon. Yeah, thrilled to have with us, Esther Baker. Welcome, Esther.

Thank you so much. Good to be with you, Simon. Yeah, wonderful to have you. So Esther, I mean,

well, I've read her book. It's, well, she's written a couple of, I once was a Buddhist nun.

We're going to obviously get into that. And then she ended up working with Jackie Pullinger,

and then she ended up for 20 years in

Thailand and very sort of interesting checkered story so let's just get into it esther I'm really

thrilled to have you so you had an interesting challenging background didn't you go for it yes

I was born near Liverpool and grew up actually most of my childhood in Colchester

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