How Buddhist Wisdom Can Help Us Stay Human in the Age of AI

In this reflective and heartfelt episode, host Poh Gan explores a question many modern therapists quietly hold: How do we stay grounded, wise, and spiritually aligned in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence?

As AI tools become woven into our clinical work, personal lives, and even our contemplative practice, Poh invites us to pause and consider what makes us uniquely human — our consciousness, our lived experience, our vulnerability, our capacity for awakening, and our shared journey through suffering and healing.

Drawing from Buddhist psychology, her own lived experience as a therapist with a busy, neurodivergent mind, and teachings from her master, Poh offers a compassionate inquiry into the promises and pitfalls of AI. She gently guides us back to the core human capacities that cannot be automated: presence, embodiment, attention, and deep wisdom that emerges only through lived experience.

This episode is a call to slow down, return to stillness, and reconnect with what truly matters — for ourselves, our clients, and our collective awakening.

In This Episode, We Explore:

• How AI tools are shaping the lives and workflows of therapists
• The illusion of productivity and why “fast output” isn’t the same as wisdom
• Why therapists may feel spiritually or emotionally “off” when relying heavily on AI
• How attention — our most precious spiritual resource — is being affected
• The difference between knowledge (which AI can provide) and wisdom (which it cannot)
• Why lived experience, embodiment, and awakening are uniquely human
• The psychological, existential, and spiritual questions arising in the AI era
• How community, co‑regulation, and shared practice protect us from isolation
• What it means to course‑correct and realign with our values
• Gentle, practical guidance for staying grounded amidst rapid technological change

Key Takeaways

• AI can enhance efficiency but cannot replace lived experience, consciousness, or awakening.
• Attention is your most sacred resource. Protect it fiercely.
• Slowness is a radical spiritual practice in an age of acceleration.
• Your imperfect human voice matters more than polished AI‑generated content.
• Community is medicine. Practising together supports wisdom, resilience, and connection.
• Wisdom emerges through direct experience, not from predictable AI patterns.
• Our spiritual work remains the same: understanding the mind, reducing suffering, and walking toward awakening.

Five Tips to Stay Grounded in the AI Era

1. Protect your attention — create boundaries with technology.
2. Reconnect with your body — regulate your nervous system daily.
3. Choose depth over speed — value process, not just output.
4. Stay anchored in community — gather with fellow practitioners.
5. Remember that AI does not have spiritual essence and consciousness and thus cannot have awakening like us. 

Connect With Poh

• Instagram: @the.blossoming.therapists
• Join the Bodhi Inner Path Circle
• www.blossomingtrueself.com.au

Bodhi Inner Path Circle is a contemplative membership community for therapists who long for a regular, supportive, spiritually grounded place to practise meditation, learn Buddha‑Dharma in reflective practice, and connect with dharma friends. It is currently open for enrolment! You're warmly invited to join us to start your cultivation and practice today! 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey, welcome to the Practitioner's Heart, offering practical Buddhist wisdom for therapists and healthcare workers. If you are keen to deepen your practice beyond the theoretical understanding of Buddhism, if you are finding it hard to calm your little active mind after therapy work, I welcome you to join me to dive a little deeper.

Each episode, I'll be sharing some common issues that therapists may face when integrating and practicing awareness, compassion within themselves, and also supporting clients. I'll be sprinkling some pearls of wisdom that I've learnt from my master and teachers that will be helpful as internal resources.

I'll also be [00:01:00] interviewing other therapists who are on this spiritual path together to share their experiences of how they practice wisdom and compassion in their daily lives. I want to let you know that you're not alone. You are part of a bigger community who aspire for greater soul alignment, growth, and awakening.

That we can strike a balance of juggling our busy modern life as therapists with a clear mind and an open heart. I hope to inspire more practitioners to explore deeper spiritual meaning and purpose on our path to enlightenment. I'm your host, Poh Gan, a psychologist, a Buddhist practitioner, a parent of two children, a fellow human being with an busy mind, but with a great inspired vision for collective awakening.[00:02:00]

Let's begin.

Poh Gan: Maybe I'm not the only one. Whether we chose consciously or not, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude have started to become part of our everyday lives. When we use Google now, an AI chatbot often appears with quick answers, inviting us with endless conversation to quench our thirst for knowledge, predictability, and control.

So like many therapists, I started to use Novo Note and AI scribing tools. I'm also aware that mental health has become one of the main reasons that people are using AI chatbots, and I've heard from some of my clients and my [00:03:00] friends who consulted AI for their interpersonal conflicts and relationship concerns, or to brainstorm business ideas.

I recently watched Oprah Winfrey's interview with Claude AI founder Dalio and his sister, which fascinated me. And I guess with great care, strong ethics and wise guidance, perhaps artificial intelligence can help advance cancer research, contribute to genetics breakthroughs, reduce the disparities and gap for communities who have historically been left behind.

AI can support accessibility and provide accommodations, translation, making things more accessible for us all. All of these genuinely matter. [00:04:00] But today, I wanted to talk about something slightly different. How do we stay grounded, wise, and spiritually connected and uniquely human in a time where AI is accelerating faster than ever, probably faster than what our nervous system can cope at this rate?

I think it's a question that all of us, to some extent, have been contemplating in our minds. It is a psychological question as well as a spiritual question and an existential question. There was a period of time that I was using AI a lot in my side hustle project, the Blossoming Therapists community.

I noticed that I was under the delusion or illusion that I was being very productive and creating a lot of content and things like [00:05:00] I was very efficient. And it was like a false sense of being productive and efficient because something felt off. It doesn't sound like me. And I started to depend on it and wanted to check in and ask AI to proofread my blog and my writing.

There's definitely pros and cons for someone like me, having English as second language and with a busy brain, ADHD. And sometimes it takes some of the obstacles away, the initial obstacles away, and allow me to feel more confident and empowered to start writing. But sometimes it just does not, seemed aligned deep down.

I'm sure you all will share this experience where sometimes when I scroll through the Instagram feed, I started to see [00:06:00] similar phrases and wordings and pattern of words that are more AI-generated. It feels like overall our Instagram feed started to have more noises in that digital environment, and that is one of the reasons that when I came back from my retreat in April, that I realized that this is not it.

Why are we spending so much time creating content that sounds so similar to each other? And I felt like I was going sideway, and it is not bringing me closer to why I started all of these side hustles to begin with. So, like what I share with, clients, that we should continue to reflect and course correct at all times so that we can continue to stay [00:07:00] aligned with our values.

We can continue to stay, and we can continue to track and see whether what we're doing is actually working for us. So, that's the time where I started to course correct. I have to say that I still use AI to some extent, and, at the same time, I started to trust a little bit more of my imperfect voice and just write and just post, like what I used to.

I'm allowing more mistakes and more simplicity. And one important thing is I want to take back my attention span . And that is perhaps the most important commodity at this day and age. Did you see that at a recent statistics showing that the average Britain will [00:08:00] spend five years of their lifetime doom scrolling?

Five years. And they often feel worse off after the doom scrolling, and probably out of habit and how we've all been trained to check and check and refresh and consume hours and hours, day after day. I don't know. That five years of my lifetime just really struck me in a different way. My master, um, shared with me before that our original nature, our original capacity and essence to become enlightened is the same as all Buddhas and bodhisattvas.

But why are we not awakened? Why were there so many practitioners become awakened and enlightened in the [00:09:00] past, whereas, we're now in a modern digital era where everything is more advanced, but there were actually fewer and fewer practitioners who become enlightened and awakened. And my master pointed out that our biggest obstacles are our reliance and addiction to our phones, and she was not wrong. It is something that I am guilty of as well. At the same time, this is something that we need to be more aware of and make some values-based choices here. Because AI is not stopping, AI is moving faster than ever.

Every few days, there will be a new evolution of models that we can use, there will be new updates and new functions and capabilities. It is really shaping [00:10:00] how we perceive and how we process information, how we relate to one another, and how we relate to ourselves. While it helps to accelerate and predict, automate, and optimize our workflows, our outputs, somehow it has weakened our ability to contemplate, to stay with uncertainty, and being with the process that sometimes things take time

and the whole journey is the reason why sometimes we create art, sometimes we create music. That experience, that process is what makes it valuable. But in this AI time, because everything [00:11:00] is fast and we crave for instant output, it becomes more and more that we lose sight of what is important and, but favor fast output.

I think these are some of the reasons that we need to really slow down and ask some of these deeper questions.

What does it mean to be humans? Can AI replace humans? Is AI sentient and conscious? From what I know, while AI can now mimic certain forms of intelligence, like language and pattern recognition, and [00:12:00] sometimes even really close to empathy, but it has no inner subjective experience.

It does not have a soul consciousness. It does not have the same capacity for awakening to our true nature, just like all sentient beings do. As much as it sounded like humans, they are not humans. And this experience, this realization and awakening of our true nature is beyond words, language and concepts, so this requires direct and embodied experience.

And these are what makes human consciousness, the soul, having this human experience precious and irreplaceable. So yes, as much as I [00:13:00] enjoy some of the benefits and accommodations that AI has brought me and allow me to be more efficient in my work, but I think it is important to pause and reflect on what makes us human and what makes our connections and our relationships meaningful, and most importantly, how we can alleviate human suffering collectively.

While we may know more and accelerate knowledge acquisition, we need to lean in more in connection and shared humanity. We need more compassion, presence, attunement, shared reflection and ethical dialogue, and having community practicing together. A-AI [00:14:00] cannot imitate all of these They can imitate, can sound like it, but they are not it, right?

So when practitioners gather, we co-regulate, we meditate, and we ask questions, we share our lived experience, we steady each other. This collective energy is something AI cannot replicate. And hopefully, with this type of shared experience, it's something that will guide us back when we drift and get sucked into this busy, chaotic matrix of weakened attention, and losing our direction and depth as human beings.

Especially when our external world is experiencing so many crises in multiple fronts. I think [00:15:00]we need to really lean in and back into what it means for us to be humans. And I think these are some of the reasons why I wanted to start Bodhi inner Path Circle. It is out of this need that I realized that we are all going faster and faster. There's just no time. No time for us to be slow and intentional, practicing together, having this space to have deliberate practice of meditation, to strengthen our inner stillness, to deepen our understanding of dharma towards awakening, so that we have this capacity to continue to make values-based choices in our day-to-day [00:16:00] lives.

In this age of infinite information, our social media reels are filled with AI knowledge and how-to reels, and sometimes it feel very hollow. So just as I'm reflecting this, I realize that, one thing that my master said, that whatever that we learn from other people, they are simply knowledge. They are theoretical knowledge. Yes, it is something that intelligence can give us. But it is only when we start practicing and applying what we have learned from other people into our day-to-day context, our life, that it becomes our own lived experience and our own journey, that we have direct realization.

And this is unique to all human [00:17:00] beings with complex flow of encounters every day that make us, us, right? That makes you, you. Because my lived experience and my own realization through my own encounter will be uniquely different from yours and from other people, and that will not be able to be replicated.

So when we are interacting with AI, it may give us that false perception of control and knowledge. You know, we're very head heavy. Like, oh, it makes us feel like we know a lot of things, and we can just check online. We can just Google, like, you know, some of those questions.

But what is wisdom? Wisdom is more than that, right? Wisdom accumulates over time with lived [00:18:00] experience. Unfortunately, or fortunately, humanoids or, and robots can't really experience birth, aging, sickness, and death. They can't really experience what it feels like to fall in love, or being rejected by someone that you love, having to say goodbye to loved ones on the deathbed, or grieving for the loss of loved ones.

They can't experience what it is like to be trapped in our mind when our mind is being critical, and dark, and filled with shame and guilt. So all of these human experiences are uniquely ours. And so how are the AI [00:19:00] chatbots able to share their wisdom or their lived experience with us? How are they then able to regulate us when they don't have, nervous systems or souls?

So what they are essentially doing are they are replicating large language data and models and predict the best course of actions and replies. They can problem solve, but they can't really get the nuances of our sentient souls having these human experiences on Earth, and thus can never be awakened or need to be awakened.

So here are my tips, for staying grounded in this AI age as therapists and helping professionals. Number one, protect your attention. [00:20:00] Algorithms reward speed, instant output, and gratification. But our attention is also significant in our own understanding of the mind and our true nature. It is actually very, very important foundation of our awakening. So don't be manipulated and get consumed by these constant streams of information. Step back, find time and space to return to stillness, to go slow, and reflect. Go out in nature to experience that awe and wonder of this planet that we are in.

Appreciate that spaciousness of nature. This Mother Earth does not reject any plants or any beings on them. It just [00:21:00] allows all things to take place. So let's see if we can lean in and practice being this open, spacious awareness in our mind too.

Number two, return to the body and support regulation of our nervous system. So with these large amount of information overload, we tend to stay in the head and get more disconnected to our bodies. See if you can practice being more present by anchoring yourself on your breath, and ground yourself on what you can see, hear, touch, taste, smell.

This helps us to stay grounded and be here and now. Okay?

Number three, choose depth over speed. [00:22:00] Choose process over output And sometimes it is very tempting to chase the speed and the output. But and see if you can lean into your values and take time to really digest and go slow.

Take time to meditate, and let your mind settle down. Read a book instead of a AI summary of a book. Create art and learn skills slowly. Number four: Stay anchored and connected in a community. As we're going through this era of significant evolution, everything becomes easier and accessible.

Somehow we become more isolated and disconnected. Like, we don't really need to ask colleagues anymore, because I can go search it up, and everything [00:23:00] is at my fingertips. We actually, more likely to go digital and reduce opportunities to meet up with our friends and colleagues. So find community, find your people, protect that intention to connect socially. This will protect us from cynicism and isolation.

Number five: most importantly, remember that while AI can reduce workload, many things, are easier for us. AI imitate intelligence and some level of problem-solving, but it does not have the same spiritual essence, consciousness that we have as human beings.

It cannot have realization, awakening like us. Over thousand of years of evolution, our human [00:24:00] mind is still complex. We can be easily deluded by the content of our mind, our preferences, our attachments, and clinging. Yes, time has changed. We, as human beings, have evolved over millions and millions of years. And yes, we are at this junction, at this intersection of, like, another phase of evolution. It can feel fast and we feel the inertia of like, we don't want to change. But I think regardless whether how situations have changed we still have an issue that we need to resolve and that is our mind. And, as long as we still have this mind that trick [00:25:00] us sometimes, we will continue to reincarnate. As long as we have this mind that we will continue to have suffering. On the flip side, our mind is also capable of great things and great potential, great awakening.

So if you are in the middle of a dark patch and feel a little doom and gloom by all of this acceleration of AI, and feel like your nervous system cannot cope with all this fast, ever-changing landscape and bad news around the world, look up. Look up and look around you. Surround yourself with like-minded [00:26:00] practitioners, and do not lose hope.

Thank you so much for sharing this time with me. May your mind be steady. May your heart be open. May you navigate this ever-changing world with clarity and compassion.

As we close our practice for today, I want to thank you for sharing this time. If this episode resonated with you, the most meaningful way to support the podcast is to share it. Share it with a colleague or leave a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps our community to reach other people who need it.

Until next time, keep your heart open, keep your mind clear and steady. Go be your amazing self as you awaken yourself and [00:27:00] others. See you next time.

Just a gentle reminder that our conversation today is for inspiration and education only. It is not a substitute for therapy or clinical supervision, and our time together doesn't constitute a therapeutic relationship.