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Um, I hope you're not afraid to suffer.
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And I thought, that's a pretty weird greeting.
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And he just laughed and he said, there's two kinds of suffering, the kind you run away from that follows you everywhere and the kind that you face and that's the gateway to freedom.
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If you're interested, come in. Let's jump right in.
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You trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, Burma.
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What was the experience like and what memories stand out?
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I went there right after university.
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I'd graduated from Dartmouth College and it was during the Vietnam War and I didn't want to go in the military. It was still the draft.
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I didn't either want to kill people or get killed.
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So, I asked to go in the Peace Corps to a Buddhist country cuz I'd been studying all of that.
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They sent me to Thailand.
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I learned to speak Thai and Lao and I found this great teacher.
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Um and I said, can I come and be learn from you?
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And he said, sure, you want to come as a monk? And I said, all right.
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Uh so, it was a wild forest on the border of Thailand and Laos, pretty far out in the middle of what was still then quite unmodernized world.
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And um I went in and I'd been there a few times as a layperson and got some teachings and he said, okay, now you're coming as a monk.
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Um, I hope you're not afraid to suffer.
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And I thought, that's a pretty weird greeting.
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And he just laughed and he said, there's two kinds of suffering, the kind you run away from that follows you everywhere and the kind that you face and that's the gateway to freedom.
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If you're interested, come in.
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So, we lived a It was an ascetic forest monastery.
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We lived a quite um scheduled in a certain way and very rigorous training of the kind you might read about as Zen monasteries well.
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The bell in the forest would ring at 3:00 or 3:30 a. m.
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and we'd walk these narrow paths.
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In one of the forest monasteries, we would use these little sticks to tap the paths so this the cobras and snakes would hear you coming and move off the trail.
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Um, then we'd sit in meditation for a time um and then get prepared before just before dawn to go out with our arms bowls and walk 5 or 10 miles barefoot back and forth to one of the villages nearby and the villagers would wait and put food in in the bowls and we'd come back and eat that and clean up and then do a day of meditation or of um community work of sewing robes or things like that.
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Um, so it was quite disciplined and then at least once a week we'd sit up all night in meditation.
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Uh, full moon, quarter moon.
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So, the experience was very different than anything I'd ever had before.
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And I had a um, I was on the cover of Dartmouth magazine some years ago.
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They did a feature on weird alumni and I guess I fit that category.
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Um um I talked about how what I'd learned in an Ivy League education was half of what I needed in my education.
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I learned philosophy and his- history.
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I done did some mathematics and I was doing pre-med for a while, so science things.
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I said, but nobody taught me what to do with my anger and rage at my violent father.
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Um, it was all stored inside.
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Nobody taught me how to have a kind relationship or to listen with some compassion.
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No one taught me what to do with uh the kind of fears and anxieties that come up for all of us as human beings or even how to be with myself in a deep way in my own body and heart and mind.
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I said, so it's as if I had half of the curriculum of a wise education and I needed the second half.
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And that's what I got there.
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I got training in forgiveness and compassion and steadiness and unshakable awareness and so forth.
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It sounds like I'm being a kind of advertiser for these things, but it was I went I went originally in the monastery uh more than 50 years ago. It's hard to believe.
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Um, but it's still very, very much with me.
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There's so much I want to dive into there.
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Uh, I think what let's start with I mean, were there moments you wanted to quit?
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We all have moments when we want to quit where it seems like it's just impossible to keep going and I'm sure you had many of those moments. How did you keep going? Oh, well, oh, I did.
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you keep going? Oh, well, oh, I did. Um, I remember I got malaria which was reasonably common in those forests and I was lying on the floor of my hut which is you know, it was about 6 ft by 7 ft or something, tiny little
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hut in the forest with a tin roof and um quite wretched and one of the monks nearby had gone to tell the the teacher and he came to visit me and he he he he he spoke in mostly in the Lao language which is very kind of laconic and straightforward and he looked at me and he said um kai ba? Which means, you Which means, you sick? I said, yes. He said tok ba?
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Um, is it hard or are you suffering? I said, yes.
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And he smiled and he said, yeah.
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He said uh this is suffering, all right. Um we've all had it.
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It's looks like it's probably malaria. I said, yeah.
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Then he looked at me, he said, makes you want to go home and see your mother, doesn't it? I said, yes.
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And then he looked at me, he said, you know, you know how to do this.
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We all have gone through this.
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Um, I'll send the medicine monk but this part of your training and um uh and you can do it.
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And he smiled and I just felt this transmission of somebody who'd lived in the jungle for years with you know, ill malaria and tigers and things like that saying, hey, yeah, that's all right and you know, go for it.
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I want to dive into some of the emotions that you you were talking about earlier in terms of anger and rage that you felt with your father.
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I mean, we all we all have a lot of very strong emotions and what help what skills sort of help us deal with our emotions?
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My father was uh was a somewhat brilliant scientist.
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He was a biophysicist who helped design some of the first artificial hearts and lungs.
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He taught in medical school for a bit.
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He worked on space medicine.
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Um, did all kinds of wild stuff.
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Um, but he was also uh paranoid and periodically rageful and violent and very abusive to my mother.
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He would, you know, throw her down the stairs.
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She hid bottles behind curtains so that when he came at her, she could reach for a bottle to defend herself.
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She had four boys and um we didn't know any week he came home which father we would get, the the terrifying one or the kind of norm- sort of normal one.
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So, my strategy, each of us brothers had our survival strategy.
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Mine was to be the peacemaker in the family.
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Try and calm things down.
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Um, I still do that for a living.
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That's a whole other story.
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But anyway, um and so when I got to the monastery, I considered myself a very peaceful person.
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And there I was sitting in meditation for quite a few hours a day in this remote place and being in a community and I started to get irritated by folks around and then I started to get angry and it was an anger out of proportion to what was happening.
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And I started to get quite angry.
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And I realized, wait, I thought I was a peaceful person.
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So, I went to the teacher and I said to Ajahn Chah, my teacher, I said you know, I'm starting to feel really angry at stuff that's happening around. What should I do?
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And he smiled, he said, good.
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I said, what do you mean?
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He said, listen, go back to your hut.
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It was a hot season, tin roof.
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He said, close the door and the two windows.
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Wrap yourself in in your all your robes and if you're going to be angry, do it right.
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And just sit there until you know anger, until you can hear the story it tells, the many stories, until you can feel the energy of it, you know, pulsing through your body, um until you can find a way to actually be with it and not run away from it.
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So, that was the beginning of the training of dealing in this case with that with with that particular emotion.
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To answer more generally cuz that was your question.
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What helps is to begin to trust our capacity um to be present for the emotions that we have because a lot of us grew up either suppressing them or being afraid of them.
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That's on one extreme or getting volatile cuz they sweep in and take us over.
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And one of the great gifts of mindful awareness or even mindful loving awareness cuz it's got kindness in it is that as you train and sit and it doesn't take a lot in meditation for your emotions to show themselves you learn to the neuroscientist call you learn to expand the window of tolerance.
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So the first step is to recognize what emotion is there and we were actually taught to begin to name them.
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Anger, rage, fear, longing, love, delight, joy, um tenderness, uh anxiety, amusement.
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I mean, I've got a list of 500 emotions.
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Um to begin to recognize them, to feel as I did in that hut where you where I feel them in my body, what stories they tell.
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To make space for them so that they become like visitors rather than catching us up.
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And this takes a bit of training.
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Like anything, if you want to learn to play guitar or code computer you know, or anything of that requires you to learn, um you can do this and it really changes your relationship inside so that sadness comes and first you can recognize it, oh here's sadness.
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You name it, sad sad, you give it space, you see its story it tells it'll always be this way and you know, why this happened and so forth.
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And you become the mindful witness of it.
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The kind witness that says, oh this is sadness and then something really wonderful also begins to happen.
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You don't take it so personally.
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At first it's all about you and who did you wrong or right or who left you or you know, what loss there is which is genuine. We have our grief.
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But then as you learn with mindfulness to be present for emotions um you realize that they're not just yours, they're ours.
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Um that this is part of the grief of the world or the joy of the world or the uh longing of the world and that you share in that with humanity.
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And it gives a kind of spacious perspective um and a greater ease or even graciousness with emotion.
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Is the moment when you sort of witness them, is is that almost like perspective taking?
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Where where you're sort of like stepping outside of yourself and you can see it through a different frame? Well put. Yes, it is.
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The only thing I would add is that um sometimes perspective taking is more mental.
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You sort of tell yourself a story, okay, this is, you know loss or grief, lots of people have it.
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Um but the perspective taking can also include this is what the body feels like when grief sweeps over.
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You know, this is what the heart feels like so that it's a it's an embodied uh attention as well as the um mental perspective.
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That's fascinating because I I I have a theory that the way that we talk to ourselves matters, right?
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That inner voice we all have and I know it's just trying to protect us.
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But that narrative that you know, it often goes into the drama triangle or these these patterns that are not helping us.
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How do you think about that?
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It's true and deep what you say, how we talk to ourself.
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Because most of us have a whole running commentary going on.
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Um and one of the beautiful things is that in learning mindfulness you start to actually become conscious of that rather than just repeating the patterns of it.
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And as you become conscious then another interesting possibility opens which is you can see which of these thoughts are healthy and helpful and which of them are unhealthy or destructive.
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And you get a chance to then with that spaciousness you go, oh there's that pattern.
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I've since a teenager I felt shitty about myself cuz I didn't think I there we go.
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That my hair wasn't thick enough.
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I'm looking at you on the screen and you're we're both guys without much hair on our head, you know, and you have that whole story and then you hear I hear that story and I go, oh yeah, I know that story. Is that a helpful story?
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Um that there's something wrong with me, you know, is it is it is it even true?
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Um and I see it and I say, okay, thank you uh for the story.
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I'm not going to go there.
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Um not exactly like that.
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You said something also really important in your comment.
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Because our thoughts try to keep us safe in all kinds of ways.
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Try to keep us safe from pain, from, you know, difficulty, from humiliation, from loss and so forth.
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And try to help us get everything around us that will keep protect us and keep us safe, whether it's money or place or something.
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So even when I see or especially maybe when I see what seem to be unhealthy thoughts instead of adding judgment on top of it I can say, thank you for trying to protect me or thank you for trying to keep me safe. I'm okay. You can relax.
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And then I go about, you know, planting better seeds than that in my heart and mind.
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Is there a way to go about planting those seeds where we can acknowledge or recognize our story, we we can sort of see the impact it's having on us, we can even witness it, but then how do we go about substituting one story for another?
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Maybe a destructive story for a more productive story.
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So there are there's several different key practices that help people um once you recognize patterns that are repeated and are unhealthy or destructive in some way.
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So the first step of course is just to recognize them.
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And then to tune in a little bit to the fear or the pain that's behind them.
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So you drop from the story down into the emotion that keeps it going. And to acknowledge that.
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Oh, there's worry or fear or grasping or confusion or those kind of states.
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And you bring a kind attention to that and you say, okay, almost as if to pay respects, thank you for trying to take care of me. Um I'm okay for now. Um you can relax.
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Then the next step um is so that's sort of the mindfulness response where you step out of it or you become bigger than that.
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You become a field of awareness of loving awareness.
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Then the next step comes from a complimentary practice which is loving compassion.
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And that's a training in which you practice regularly um envisioning one at a time, starting wherever it's the easiest, people that you care about and wishing them well.
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And you picture, you know, one of your children or your partner or wherever it's not so conflicted to start with where where the love is natural.
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And there's a series of kind of training phrases one would get in the monastery, may you be safe and well, may you be um healthy and healed, may you be uh happy and peaceful at ease, may you be held in love.
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And you do that for a while for one person, you pick another, another.
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And as you practice it it becomes a kind of response that you can draw on.
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So there you see the unhealthy thoughts, you're recognizing them, you say, thank you.
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And then you can do that toward yourself.
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There's a whole training in mindful self compassion.
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In which you realize that um you share a common humanity of struggle with everybody. We all have it.
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You know, we all get frightened, we all get caught up in things.
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So first you say you know let me hold this with compassion, feel the suffering of it.
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And then wish yourself well.
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And this well wishing, it's not At first it feels mechanical which is totally fine.
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When you practice piano it feels mechanical for a while or, you know, learn coding or whatever you're doing.
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But after a while it becomes easier and you have it as a as a not just as a resource but almost as a default, as a place that you can um call on and and and rest in.
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Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who is this great Vietnamese Zen master that died recently talked about it this way.
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He said, in the heart and mind there all kinds of seeds.
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There's seeds of joy and love, of connection, of creativity, of peace and well being um uh of of caring, of strength, but there's also a whole set of seeds of fear and anxiety, of anger or rage, of um greed or grasping and so forth.
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He said, "How you live depends on which seeds you water.
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If you water and tend those healthy seeds by both recognizing that they're there and then either watering them or heading your mind in that direction, those are what will grow in you.
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And those become who you are in your response to the world.
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So, it's not by accident, if you will, as much as cuz we have we all have our history and our sufferings and our, you know, struggles and our good parts.
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But now, who will you be?"
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And the Buddhist texts start with some of them with this beautiful phrase, "Oh nobly born, oh you who are the sons and daughters of the awakened ones, of the great compassionate ones, remember who you are. This is your birthright.
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And there's a kind of uplifting of human possibility from the beginning that we can choose no matter what.
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We can choose our spirit.
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And you see it when Nelson Mandela walks out of 27 years in Robben Island prison and it wasn't all easy if you read his autobiography.
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He went through all kinds of difficulties.
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But he came up with such magnanimity and graciousness that he not only changed South Africa, but he changed the imagination of the world that it's possible for us even in tremendously difficult circumstances to carry a spirit of dignity and steadiness, clarity and and and compassion. Um and to embody that.
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Seems like it's a lot easier to feed those negative seeds than to feed the positive ones.
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And and I was as you were talking, one of the things that I was thinking about is often, and maybe it's just me and other people don't feel this way, but sometimes I feel undeserving of positive emotions for some reason.
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So, that's a delicate and really helpful thing for you to acknowledge.
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Undeserving is one is you know, you're saying it's your perspective on it, but actually it sort of snuck up behind and tells you, "Yeah, this is really the truth."
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When in fact, it's one of those unhealthy thoughts.
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It's actually all that it is. I'm I'm I'm unworthy.
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Um and the sense of both unworthiness and self criticism and self-hatred is really pretty pervasive in our culture, sadly.
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And I remember being in a teacher meeting that we helped to organize with the Dalai Lama decades ago.
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There was a group of us who were Western meditation teachers.
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And at one point, we said, "So, what do you suggest we do about all the self-hatred that comes up for many students?"
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So, this is taking your question, you know, even one step further. And he got confused. He said, "Self-hatred?"
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And he went back and forth with his translator.
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He said, "How many of you have experienced this?"
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And almost every hand in the room went up.
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Um and then he said, "You know, we don't even have a word for that in Tibetan."
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We don't We don't get taught that taught that.
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And so, we had this whole conversation about compassion and self-compassion.
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He said, "People might think self-compassion is a weakness."
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He said, "But in fact, when you hold your humanity with a tender heart, with a genuine compassion, um then you can also hold others that way and you become a force for what's beneficial in the world, but you need to be able to do it in yourself as well."
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Is self-compassion acceptance?
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Self-compassion has several parts to it. It is acceptance.
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And there's some beautiful trainings.
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Uh Chris Germer at Harvard and Kristin Neff have a whole whole beautiful training you can find online on mindful self-compassion. Um and it has steps.
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First of all, to really listen to those voices that you talked about that play so often and notice how often and how many or what stories they tell that are judgmental.
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And then, of course, you could say, "Stop that.
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I hate all that judgment. Go away. How do I get rid of it?" But what's that?
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It's more judgment, right?
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So, instead, you turn almost as if to acknowledge it and say, "All right, I see you."
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Um and I see the fear or the struggle or the pain behind it.
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And already, that acknowledgement and the kindness starts to allow it to change.
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Then there's a reflection on common humanity.
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That you realize not only all are you and I the only guys who are bald, but in fact, uh um this happens to, you know, tens of millions of people.
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And it's not something you did wrong.
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It's just part of this is the human species.
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We have fur in some places and not in others and that's how it works.
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And you start to see, "Oh, this isn't about me.
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This is just about the fact that we all go through stuff."
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And it becomes way less personal.
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And then you bring in the cultivation of compassion for everybody who's lost in self-judgment.
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Um and in this process, it starts to shift the interior It starts to shift the way you hold yourself.
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And a kind of confidence grows that's different than sort of brash confidence.
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I mean, I have a lot of confidence.
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I'm That was one of the things I inherited from my father that was good.
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I don't want to paint him as all bad because nobody's all bad in that way.
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Um but you get a growing confidence that's not so much about "Look how great I am."
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But um there's a kind of dignity again, that nobility from the from that Buddhist phrase or text that says, "Yeah, I am who I am."
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And and you feel a certain kind of respect, self-respect or worthiness in it.
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And it's a beautiful thing to shift from self-judgment to a sense of self-presence and love.
27:07
I want to come back to something you said earlier, which was emotion uh keeps your story going.
27:15
Does the strength of our emotions reveal anything about what we're feeling?
27:20
When you ask that, what do you mean when you use the word emotion and feeling as two separate things?
27:26
I I don't I'd like to understand how you're experiencing it.
27:33
Well, I think maybe that they're the same thing and I just use them interchangeably and casually without thinking. Mhm.
27:38
Are they the same thing, emotions and feelings?
27:40
This is more a question of how a person uses language rather than whether they're the same. So, I get you.
27:48
You're We're in the same territory.
27:50
So, then the then the question is, "Does the strength of the emotion what?"
27:57
Does it reveal anything about what you're feeling?
27:59
So, like sometimes you can feel uh slighted and it doesn't affect you, but sometimes you'll feel slighted in a particular way and it almost like hits at a part of your identity or a part of how you see yourself.
28:12
And then you have a stronger reaction to it. Beautiful.
28:15
Yeah, and that has to do with um the conditioning from your past.
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Somebody might say, "Hey, you know," and say something that's a bit of a slight and you know it's not even true and it just it just rolls through you.
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And someone else says something, as you say, and it's something that reminds you, even unconsciously, of um pain you experienced before, years before, something like that.
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And, you know, you react.
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So, it's a it's a signal that that pattern is there in you, that trauma or the the past um and and that strength of the reaction, as just as you point out, kind of shows that.
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It doesn't mean it's bad or good.
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Just says, "Okay, that's something that's there."
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And if you're not conscious about it, um then you realize it continues to play out. I want to read a poem.
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Um very short, you know, like seven or eight lines, but it's a little bit related to what you were what we're talking about.
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And it's from a poet named Juan Ramón Jiménez.
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Uh and he writes, "Yo no soy yo. I am not I.
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I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit and at other times I forget.
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The one who remains silent when I talk.
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The one who forgives sweet when I hate.
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The one who takes a walk when I am indoors.
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The one who will remain standing when I die.
30:05
And what he's talking about is something that everybody knows is a capacity.
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There's part of us that already is witnessing our life from a you called it perspective of her mindful place that says, "Oh, yeah, I'm really caught in that this one again, aren't I?"
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You know, whether it's around food, whether it's around addiction, or whether it's around fear, or whether it's around you know, certain kinds of patterns or needs or things.
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Um, but there's another part of us that can see it.
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And gradually as we as we learn, can even be a little bit bemused, like, "Oh, yeah, caught in that one again." Or there we are.
30:45
Um, and what the invitation of inner training is is to shift our identity. You talked about it.
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From being the one who's always just reactive by habit.
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And able to step back and see, "Oh, yeah, there's that habit and that's not who I really am."
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And we we already know this in some deep way.
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Um, but it gets it's beautiful.
31:13
Um, that we can train the heart and mind.
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We can practice this so that it it begins to liberate us in ways.
31:29
And less frequently do we get caught in the patterns that are that are unhealthy. It's it's interesting.
31:36
As you said that, I was thinking um, often our days spiral because of one of these events, right?
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Somebody slights us in a meeting, or somebody cuts us off driving to work, and uh, you know, that inner sort of road rage comes on.
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And then what happens is um, the rest of the day we don't react the way that we want to.
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We're not present in the way that we want to.
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And so it seems like almost all of our problems come from our inner state.
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And if we get out of balance, putting that back in balance really quickly is key.
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Because if our inner state is calm and fulfilled, we don't sort of pick fights, or create drama, or keep score. Well put.
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So, in a practical way, for a few decades, I also worked as a therapist.
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And one of the things that I did was have people sit quietly with me for 5 minutes before we launched into our therapeutic conversation.
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And it wasn't like, "Okay, I'll be the meditation teacher now, and you'll close your eyes, and you have this state or something."
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I just wanted them to get quiet.
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Because if they came in and somebody had cut them off, and they were filled with the road rage, um, they could hardly listen at that point to themselves or to me.
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They were just caught up in it.
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And it didn't mean we couldn't deal with the road rage, or how it reminded them them of whatever, their father, I might say, since I have that.
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Um, but it allowed them to quiet down a little bit.
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Whatever Wherever they came from.
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Usually it's just a busy day, or getting the kids off to or or or meeting with the boss or the employees.
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It allowed them to quiet down a little bit, and we could have a conversation that was much deeper.
33:28
That would not start with just the superficial what happened, you know, um, this morning.
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The there's a great gift in this for those who are listening.
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The language we use is a mindful pause.
33:45
It's just what you described.
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That when you find yourself being reactive or set off or triggered, different kinds of languages, you can learn to take a pause.
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To step back, or even step away.
33:58
Excuse me, just a moment.
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I've got to, you know, got to do something, go to the bathroom, whatever, or just take a few breaths.
34:07
And we know this capacity.
34:10
And as you point out, it serves us really well, cuz without it unprocessed in some way, it'll flavor our whole morning, and we'll snap at people, or we'll judge ourselves, or things will look more dire than they need to because that's coloring our experience.
34:28
And the the the great thing is that it doesn't take very long.
34:33
A mindful pause can be a, you know, a few breaths or a few minutes.
34:36
Um, but it it transforms us in a way.
34:43
One thing that came to mind when you said that is often what gets us in trouble is we react without reasoning. Right? We are animals. We are instinctive.
34:51
We have these biological tendencies and impulses.
34:55
And learning to pause creates a space for reason to come in.
34:58
And it also puts things in the proper perspective, or it seems to put things in the, you know, it's not the end of the world, uh, that I got a parking ticket, or um, but we carry these things with us if we don't consciously do that pause.
35:11
Is is in your experience, are there ways that we can create the habit of that reflective pause, so that we don't bring the weight of whatever we've experienced during the day with us forward?
35:26
That's a beautiful question.
35:29
And, you know, I'll amplify the question just a tiny bit.
35:31
What if it's an unjust parking ticket?
35:34
Hey, you know, Those are the worst. Exactly. It's not fair.
35:37
But then you don't want to go to court, cuz it takes like 3 days out of your life, and you might not whatever.
35:44
But anyway, so there you are.
35:46
And it's This is not a huge deal. Um, yes, there are.
35:50
And in a way, again, you're pointing back to the capacity to train the heart and mind.
36:00
Um, I was invited to the first White House Buddhist Leadership Gathering, um, toward the end of um, Barack Obama's presidency.
36:12
There was about a hundred of us, and part of it was, you know, talking about serving community.
36:18
So, any of these teachers in communities were working with the homeless, or, you know, feeding people, or working with kids who didn't have the support they needed, or doing all kinds of beautiful stuff.
36:33
But they were also teaching meditation in most cases.
36:38
And I was invited to be one of the last speakers to kind of sum up what had happened.
36:48
Um, and I talked about the wisdom what in Buddhist tradition is called a wise society.
36:56
Goes back, you know, thousands of years.
36:58
And in a wise society, people treat one another respectfully, and they listen to each other with respect.
37:05
Um, they care for the vulnerable.
37:08
They take care of the environment.
37:09
These are things that are part of this ancient text.
37:11
I said, "But it's not just Buddhist.
37:13
You can find it from Lao Tzu and the Confucians.
37:15
And you can find it from the Iroquois nation and the indigenous people, the elders of Africa or Latin America.
37:22
You can find it in the best, you know, teachings in the Torah, or, you know, Christian, or or Sufi.
37:34
I said, "But here's what I would like to say.
37:39
Um, the the specialty the of the Buddhist teachings, or I call it Buddhist psychology, is that there are ways to develop this.
37:53
This is This is This is what we want.
37:55
It's a it's a vision of of what a wise or beautiful society might be.
38:02
And then your question is, "All right, how do we do it?"
38:05
And it has to start in ourselves. It's also collective.
38:08
There are a lot of things we need to do collectively.
38:11
But the anybody who looks can see that no amount of computers and artificial intelligence and space technology and nanotechnology and biotechnology and all that is going to stop continuing warfare, stop racism, stop climate destruction, um, you know, or economic injustice.
38:36
Because those are born in the human heart.
38:39
And so if we want to change the world for the better, which we can, and I believe struggle that we do, that that many, many of us want to, um, it starts with these inner capacities that you're talking about.
38:56
You know, that that we as human beings also have to change our change our relationship to our emotions and our fears.
39:03
Um, and to shift from living a life of of fear and more living a life of connection and compassion.
39:15
And that inner and and the outer then, as you work to change the world, it comes from a really different place.
39:24
Um, and it's and and it's that um, that changes, you know, the movement toward war, or the the the incredible suffering of racism, or things like that.
39:39
So then your question is, "Well, how do you do it?"
39:40
Cuz you've been asking that all along.
39:42
And I've sort of been talking about it.
39:44
All right, you take time to quiet, you have a mindful pause, you practice loving kindness or compassion meditation until it becomes a little more easy.
39:56
And then it becomes very easy.
39:56
And I notice when I go out to the market or I'm driving or something, and somebody, whether they cut me off or they slow me down cuz I'm a little bit of a speed freak even though I'm supposed to be Mr.
40:10
Mindfulness, but I I actually move pretty quickly, you know, and then when somebody gets in my way, there's that little moment like, "Hey, you know, I'm trying to get somewhere, whatever."
40:20
Um that's just my temperament. And I notice it.
40:24
And instantly I wish them well.
40:30
Not because I'm like some great noble saintly whatever, um but because I practiced it.
40:36
And it feels great, you know, or there's that person shuffling along and I might I might feel a little pity for them or I might, you know, think about the society that doesn't feed homeless people or something.
40:51
But instead, just because I've been practicing a lot, I look and the compassion just comes up.
40:57
Oh, they they've really got a tough life, haven't they? And I feel that.
41:00
And it's a moment that somehow softens my heart and my life.
41:06
And it comes relatively often.
41:09
So, this is the fruit of practicing.
41:12
The other practice or training which we're talking about is the kind attention or mindful awareness.
41:20
And there are all kinds of wonderful programs to learn it. And it's not that hard.
41:26
Where we started when I said, well, you know, I got an Ivy League education, but nobody taught me all this.
41:31
Nobody taught me about how to practice forgiveness and how it could free me from the past.
41:38
Nobody taught me how to deal with my anger and not just believe it and get completely caught up in it.
41:44
Um so, I have and and I'm not on your show to advertise things exactly, but I have from my website jackkornfield.
41:51
com, there's a free 40-day course called Mindfulness Daily that's 15 minutes a day.
42:01
And in the 15 minutes, you get a little bit of a teaching of how to do stuff and then you practice together.
42:08
And you learn how to be with your breath and your body, how to quiet yourself.
42:13
You learn how to make a field of mindful attention that feels natural and receptive.
42:19
And then you learn how to work with physical pains in the body or strong strong physical energy, how to work with emotions or the different thoughts that come and so forth.
42:29
And these are skills and they um they can change your life.
42:36
It's also fun to watch because we have a number of retreat centers and this is much more not what you would do in daily life, but people might take a week or 10 days and really dive into this.
42:50
And um there's something that we call the retreat facelift, which is that people will come and they're they're you know, a little bit haggard from the busyness of their life and stressed and you can see it on their face and in their body and how their shoulders are um And you see them at the end of the week and admittedly you could go on a vacation maybe and it would help some, but it seems more so.
43:17
It's more It's more extreme.
43:21
At the end their eyes are bright and their forehead is relaxed.
43:26
And it's as if they've had this profound reset because not only have they been quiet, but they've actually been tending to themselves with this spacious attention and all kinds of things start to unravel inside.
43:39
All the stories and he said and she said and I should do and you make space for it to unravel and you come back ah to a place of ah, I'm just here and and and and there's a sense of presence um and awareness that's just beautiful.
43:56
So, you can do it in a moment or you can practice 15 minutes a day and it gives you lots of tools.
44:01
Um or you can, you know, you can go further with it.
44:04
Seems like we're constantly uh maybe this is the wrong metaphor, but constantly at war with ourselves, right?
44:10
You're walking down the sidewalk, somebody's walking slower, you instinctively, without consciously, have this thought about like move out of my way.
44:20
And maybe that's just cuz both both you and I are like honorary New Yorkers and we just want people to move out of our way and get going.
44:26
But but we have this thought or we have this emotion, right?
44:30
Or we have these triggers or we have these feelings and our job is to sort of recognize those feelings, pause, and and sort of give them the space they need so that they don't grow, but we don't want to suppress them because if we suppress them, they're going to come out in a different way.
44:47
And if we overly feel them, then they're going to come out too extreme.
44:51
And so, we have this constant tension.
44:53
How do we get out of this tension?
44:55
I I I'll use an image from my friend Ram Dass who I've learned a lot from over the years.
45:02
And he he talks about he he learned to view his personality like his pet, right?
45:08
You don't want to beat beat the puppy.
45:10
The puppy doesn't like it and you don't feel that good about it either.
45:13
So, you know, we have temperaments, speedy or slow or introverted or extroverted or whatever. And you see it.
45:20
And you get a body and it's for this human incarnation and you're born with a certain kind of personality and then it gets shaped further.
45:28
So, you see it and there's a certain bemusement like, "Oh, yeah, here's here's Jack speeding along good New Yorker style and you know, maybe judging people getting in his way."
45:39
And so, it's not suppressing it.
45:42
It's also not getting lost in it.
45:42
It's a sense of, "Oh, yeah, a kind bemusement.
45:47
Um there's the pet and it's fine."
45:51
And this is really still in that in some way in that same terrain of mindful self-compassion.
46:01
Because otherwise, you either try to get rid of it as you said or run away from it or suppress it or or something like that.
46:07
And we can treat ourselves more graciously in the same way we treat others.
46:14
And forgiveness is another part of this.
46:17
There's a whole training um that is so healthy and helpful for us as human beings um to to learn the art of forgiveness.
46:29
And there's some critical things about it.
46:35
First of all, forgiveness doesn't mean forgive and forget and it doesn't condone what happened.
46:39
Um you really need to see what happened clearly, feel the suffering of it in whatever way this happened to you or somebody else.
46:47
And then resolve to do whatever you can to stop that suffering.
46:56
You know, that you will stand up or you will do whatever it takes so that the so that the suffering doesn't continue.
47:03
So, it's not like rolling over in any way.
47:07
But then forgiveness is about what you carry in yourself.
47:13
And without it we're lost.
47:16
Without it you have the Hutus and the Tutsis or the Bosnians and the Serbs or the Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants saying, "Your people marched through our neighborhood, you know, 89 or 200 years ago and we're not going to let this stop and we'll do that."
47:31
And you just keep the cycle going.
47:33
At some point it has to stop with someone.
47:38
Someone has to say it stops here.
47:40
Um I remember a woman who I was working with who was in the middle of a terrible divorce um and the the guy that she'd married was a pretty a kind of uh successful uh type A lawyer um and he was trying to keep all the money and also get custody of the children and spinning stories about her as a bad mother and all of that um when it was actually he who had had the series of affairs.
48:20
But he was putting it all on her.
48:23
So, we talked about how incredibly painful this was for her.
48:28
Um working with that grief and also I said, "Get yourself a kick-ass lawyer.
48:33
You know, you have to protect yourself."
48:35
So, anyway, at some point she came in to me.
48:38
She said, "You know, um my ex is doing these things, telling our children these stories and trying to turn them against me. He's been doing that."
48:52
And she said, "I I've I've been sitting with this."
48:54
She was had learned to meditate some.
48:58
And she said, "I I've come to a revelation.
49:02
I will not bequeath a legacy of bitterness to my children about their father.
49:10
I will not say a bad word about him no matter what he does."
49:15
And when she said that, I um I was so moved.
49:21
Not because she wouldn't protect her children and get a good lawyer and do what she could, but she was saying, "I'm not going to play this game. It stops with me.
49:30
I will be big enough, if you will, to say that the long-term benefit for us as humanity is not to carry the suffering from the past.
49:38
It's like the two ex-prisoners of war who met 25 years later and they'd been tortured and all kinds of things.
49:47
And one said to the other, um have you forgiven our captors yet?
49:52
And the second one said, "No, never."
49:56
And the first one said, "Well, then they they still have you in prison, don't they?"
50:01
And so in the end, forgiveness actually isn't for somebody else cuz they may not change. And it's not quick. You can't paper it over.
50:09
It can be a long process.
50:12
But in the end, it's actually for the benefit of your own heart.
50:15
How do you want to live as a human being?
50:17
Do you want to carry that suffering and the bitterness?
50:22
Or can you forgive yourself cuz we also have a lot to forgive in our own lives or others even though it wasn't right and even though it wasn't fair?
50:35
It's simply to not carry the the hatred in your heart.
50:38
To see clearly and realize that who I am is bigger than that.
50:42
Like we talked about Nelson Mandela walking out and showing what's possible.
50:47
And by doing so, he influenced millions of people in in his case.
50:53
Um so these are some of the kinds of trainings that are possible for us.
50:58
We're we're all prisoners in our own mind in some way or another.
51:00
When you're telling me that story about the the woman and the divorce, there's one aspect of that that was stopping saying it to your kids.
51:09
That doesn't mean she's stopping thinking it.
51:15
But I'm wondering if that is the first step to forgiving those thoughts and acknowledging them is like, "Okay, I'm not going to pass this on to my kids."
51:23
It doesn't change that I'm thinking it.
51:25
But by not passing it on, I'm not feeding it as much. Well put. Well put.
51:32
with the same sort of strength that it would have grown before. Yes, very well put. Exactly.
51:37
And they kind of work together hand in hand, the thoughts and then the actions.
51:45
The actions can reinforce the thoughts if you know, if you talk about it and fuel it.
51:49
And the thoughts can fuel the action or you can dial it down and you can step out of it and say, "Yeah, I see this and this will cause a legacy of pain."
51:59
Which which again goes to a perspective thing, right?
52:01
So it's you're taking your I find this fascinating and maybe I'm I'm off on a wild goose chase here, but you you sort of take yourself out of this moment and what you have in this moment is all I can see.
52:15
And what you're doing is you're shifting the perspective to a broader perspective.
52:20
And now you're seeing, "Well, this moment in the context of that perspective doesn't matter."
52:23
And I'm thinking about this in the context of, you know, a lot of bad behavior gets eliminated if you assume that you're going to be in a relationship with this person for the next 30 years.
52:34
You're going to handle this moment a lot differently than if you don't assume that.
52:38
But that's just a framing thing.
52:39
It's a perspective thing.
52:39
Um that's a beautiful and it's one of the ways that work.
52:45
To have that perspective cuz as you talked about, you're kind of shifting then from the more primitive parts of the brain, if you will, that are just our reactive parts, um to a a part that can hold and see over space and time and have a whole different, you know, philosophical or perspective view.
53:07
Um Sometimes it also works not so much with that perspective, but just simply how do I want to live right now in this moment?
53:17
With my heart closed or open?
53:20
With feeling, you know, in the grip of bitterness or do I want to soften and hold this moment and everything I have with compassion or respect for it? Um and not feed it.
53:35
So all of those all of those can help.
53:40
And here's another thing, I guess just to tell a different kind of story.
53:41
Um I worked for a number of years with some colleagues, Michael Meade who is one of the great mythologists of the world in the tradition of Joseph Campbell, and Luis Rodriguez, a a Latino a great Latino poet and activist.
54:00
He was the poet laureate of Los Angeles a couple years ago.
54:04
Um and Malidoma Somé, a West African shaman and medicine man who had a couple of PhDs from the Sorbonne and Michigan or something like that.
54:13
But anyway, and we had we did a series of retreats for kids coming out of street gangs in Los Angeles and Oakland and Chicago.
54:24
Um And I remember one particular class or group that we had.
54:30
And here we are in this room and there's, you know, 40, 50 young men there.
54:36
We also work with young women some, but this is mostly young men in here.
54:43
Um and we're there and we're sort of set up to work with them.
54:46
They were brought by mentors or something.
54:48
And they're sitting there with their hoods up and their hats, you know, on backward and kind of like, you know, "What you got?
54:56
You're going to read us some damn poems?
54:58
You know, you got some stupid meditation.
55:00
I mean, we're out on the street with 9 mm.
55:02
People are shooting at us.
55:04
You got to give us something better than that."
55:05
So we said, "You know, um we can't even start to have to talk about what what what we came here for cuz there's too many people in this room who haven't been honored.
55:27
Who've gone through so much.
55:30
We took a candle, put it in the center of a table, just a simple table in front, lit it, and said, "Would you go out in the parking lot and pick up a stone for every young person that you know who's been killed and place it by the candle and say their name out loud so we know what we're dealing with."
55:52
And some of these kids came back with their hands full of stones.
55:56
Shane, no young person should know that many dead people.
56:01
And they say, "This is for RJ and this is for Tito and this is for homegirl, you know, and this is for Devon."
56:06
And all of a sudden there's this pile of stones there.
56:12
And the hats come off and the hoods come off and it's like, "Okay, we can get real here."
56:19
And I remember going into um Google to work with the top, you know, vice presidents of who helped run the company.
56:29
And there were in this white I mean, in this glass cubicle cuz it's sort of open floor plan, but you kind of sit and close some doors so it's not not as noisy.
56:40
And we sit down and um I pull out a candle and put it in the middle of the table and lit it and I said, "We have things to talk about, but let me light this candle."
56:49
I didn't say what it was for. And let's just be quiet.
56:53
Sit quietly for a minute or two.
56:56
Um And then we can talk about what's happening, what you're struggling with as a company, with one another, with and so forth.
57:05
And these were just very simple jet ritual gestures.
57:07
Rituals is ancient language of, you know, lighting a candle or pouring water over earth or water or, you know, things like that of a handshake or bow.
57:22
But it's a it's an ex- human expression, a language to say, "Let's meet in a different way."
57:27
Or let's hold what we're dealing with in a different way.
57:33
And in a couple of minutes, things can change.
57:38
So this is also, you know, a different way.
57:41
You talked about perspective.
57:41
Um this is a different way of creating perspective.
57:47
You used the word ritual there, which I think is incredibly important.
57:54
I'm wondering if that's a conscious choice of wording on your part and what that means in terms of counterbalancing, acting as a force of nature almost to counterbalance these things that we're naturally experiencing in our own mind.
58:11
Ritual is probably our oldest human language.
58:15
You know, some ritual of meeting another being and signaling in some ritual way that you're not going to harm them.
58:22
Or maybe that you are going to harm them and they better, you know, they better take note of that.
58:27
Or signaling in some way our connection to one another.
58:32
And rituals are elemental.
58:32
So I used the the image of a candle, which is fire. All right?
58:39
And just lighting a candle and all of a sudden it changes the the environment and how we're relating.
58:44
Um air is really language and words.
58:47
I can invoke I can say a poem or I can make a three-sentence prayer.
58:56
You know, may we come together for the benefit of those that we, you know, that we serve even though we're in conflict or something.
59:04
And that that prayer I make a prayer now.
59:05
May all who hold us with goodness help us to come together in a better way.
59:14
And those three lines of a prayer change everything.
59:18
Um or um again, that ritual I described with the kids was using a stone.
59:24
Go find a stone and place it there to represent something that you care about.
59:30
and that the element from the earth um you know, fire water, whatever it happens to be.
59:39
Water you can say, "Let's raise a toast even before we start."
59:44
Um pick up your glass and you know, let's toast the fact that we succeeded at this or this person is whatever has led us in a good way even before we start.
59:57
So, um I'm inviting this sense of ritual first of all, to again, to make it conscious.
1:00:08
But also so that those who are listening can hear just as we can make a mindful pause or shift to compassion in a moment.
1:00:15
We can shift our collective energy by taking a pause with the smallest gestures if the inner intention is also there with it.
1:00:27
And then, you know, I'll see what you want to say, but I'd love to talk about intention at some point, too.
1:00:31
Yeah, yeah, let's go to that next, but I I just want to comment first on rituals where it's a powerful way to get out of what's happened.
1:00:40
Like if you can insert a ritual to pause before responding, to take a breath before responding, you often respond differently.
1:00:45
And if you watch elite athletes they have the same ritual.
1:00:50
Lewis Hamilton gets in the same side of the car.
1:00:54
Roger Federer bounces the ball the same number of times before he serves it.
1:00:59
Uh NBA players bounce the ball the same number of times. They take the same shot.
1:01:03
LeBron James before a game puts the the the powder on his hands and throws it in the air as a an honor to Michael Jordan, I think.
1:01:11
And And so, we all have these rituals that help us leave something behind, whether it's being slighted or the last play, whether it was positive or negative, it's not always uh a negative play.
1:01:25
You you might have just had the best play in your life, but you need to focus now on the present moment.
1:01:32
And so, rituals bring us into that moment. Um thank you for that. That's really beautiful.
1:01:37
And I have a colleague and good friend named George Mumford who wrote a book called The Mindful Athlete.
1:01:42
You may know him um because he was the mindfulness coach for the Chicago Bulls and the LA Lakers when they won all their championships.
1:01:51
So, he he worked he's of him.
1:01:54
he's worked with all these guys and this is part of what he was also teaching them.
1:02:00
So, you're you're exactly you're exactly on point with that. So interesting.
1:02:04
Okay, let's switch gears to intentions.
1:02:07
Talk to me about intentions.
1:02:10
Intention is incredibly powerful for us.
1:02:15
And it's said in the Buddhist teachings that intention is also um the basis of um karma or cause and effect that um the state behind your action matters as well as the action itself.
1:02:35
So, I'll give an example.
1:02:38
You know, suppose you pull out of your driveway and you drive through the fence of the house next door, crash through it and, you know, into their living room.
1:02:54
Now, suppose it happened that that was the neighbor who cut down all the trees you loved on the property line, you know, and shot at your dog and did a whole bunch of horrible things and you just were so enraged that one morning you they did one more thing and you couldn't take it and you just crashed your car through.
1:03:12
That will make a certain karma and the blue lights will come and you'll have to deal with all of the you know, legal and consequences of what you did.
1:03:25
Suppose instead your accelerator pedal stuck.
1:03:29
So, the exact same thing happens.
1:03:29
You get in your car you pull out and then crashes through the fence into the house.
1:03:34
So, from the outside no one could see anything different, right?
1:03:39
But your intention was entirely different. It was an accident.
1:03:43
You know, and the person comes out furious and you say, "My accelerator pedal stuck."
1:03:47
And they might still be furious and you have to deal with insurance and things.
1:03:52
But there will be entirely different consequences because the intention was different.
1:03:58
So, it becomes really powerful to start to pay attention to our intentions and setting our intentions deliberately.
1:04:09
And also, of course, it's important then to notice the the impact or the consequences cuz you can have good intentions and still out of them there can be a bad impact, so you need to notice that.
1:04:23
Um and that will shift your intentions often.
1:04:26
But one of the beautiful things that mindfulness training invites is the setting of deliberate intention.
1:04:37
And it can be inwardly or it can be outwardly.
1:04:40
You know, in a meeting with people um before you know, whether it's before an athletic game as you were talking about or whether it's a business meeting or it's you know, in education, whatever it happens to be.
1:04:53
Um what's our what's our intention?
1:04:57
Um and setting intentions starts to steer everything.
1:05:02
Um there's something in that's quite traditional in the kind of training that I did uh in which you set these long-term vows.
1:05:12
Sometimes they're called Bodhisattva vows.
1:05:13
A Bodhisattva is simply somebody who's committed to the well-being of everyone.
1:05:20
Um the Dalai Lama wakes up in the morning and says this prayer, "May I be uh food for the hungry and medicine for the sick.
1:05:29
May I be a resting place for the weary and a lamp um for those in darkness.
1:05:35
May I be a boat, a bridge, a raft for those to cross the flood.
1:05:39
And may I do so to benefit all beings for as long as time and space exists."
1:05:46
Some some little pesky little intention like that, right?
1:05:49
Actually kind of magnificent.
1:05:51
Um and um you're invited to quiet your mind and to set your own best intention.
1:06:02
If you were it's like setting the compass of the heart.
1:06:03
If you were to set an intention um of what really matters to you most.
1:06:13
Uh this is called long-term intention, almost like a vow.
1:06:16
This is what matters and this is how I want to live.
1:06:21
Um uh it becomes a touchstone for you.
1:06:26
I mean, it can be as simple as I vow to be kind or I vow to live with more wakefulness and attentiveness to myself and others or with more respect. It can be that simple.
1:06:37
And then when you get to place of struggle, things are confusing you take a pause and you say, "What's my best intention? What was that?"
1:06:46
And it shines a light and it gives you a new direction.
1:06:52
Or if you're in conflict in a conversation, there you are talking with your spouse.
1:06:57
I'm here with my beloved Trudy who is my wife and partner and um an amazing, wonderful woman, but it could happen on occasion that we have a little conflict.
1:07:12
Given the fact that we're meditation teachers and all of that, it still could happen. And so, there we are.
1:07:20
And if I take a pause a breath like that mindful pause I can also ask myself, "What's my best intention or my highest intention?"
1:07:34
And then consciousness changes.
1:07:37
And instead of proving how right I was, which I certainly enjoy doing in certain moments, you know, being right or them wrong or making my point or getting over on or or you know, or whatever it happens to be or just being upset and angry in some way my I remember, "What's my best intention?"
1:07:58
Well, my intention fundamentally is an intention to connect, to be kind, to you know, that we live with love respect. And I feel that.
1:08:09
What's my best intention?
1:08:11
And my whole tone of voice changes.
1:08:16
Cuz I could say, "What did you mean?"
1:08:18
And it you know, it fuels an argument.
1:08:21
Or I could say, "What did you mean? I want to understand."
1:08:24
And that That same phrase but it shifts from blaming to interest and care.
1:08:33
So, the quality of mindfulness um or this capacity allows us also to tune into our intentions and to use them as a support for the for the life that we most deeply want to live.
1:08:49
Is that what it means to set an intention?
1:08:51
This is what matters and uh this is the way that I want to live.
1:08:58
And then how often should we consciously evoke those intentions when we're not in a in a moment?
1:09:05
Like should we just wake up and think these?
1:09:10
Should we We We used to in the monasteries, we used to every morning as part of our morning chanting and practice and things we would review our intentions.
1:09:20
So, there can be a daily one.
1:09:23
I mean, it would I don't want to make people even think that there's some kind of cookie cutter spiritual okay you should do your yoga and eat tofu and set the tension good intention every hour and stuff. It's not like that.
1:09:35
You you point to it quite beautifully.
1:09:40
In moments of difficulty or conflict, taking a pause and asking what's my best or highest intention shifts your state of consciousness.
1:09:49
Periodically, whether it's the start of the day or a week or some new venture or some new adventure, um it can be helpful to reflect on you know what's your best intention.
1:09:58
But it's really organic and it's in a way what I want to say is what works for you. Mhm.
1:10:08
We're sort of part of this always-on go go go culture.
1:10:13
In what ways does that striving help us and in what ways does it hurt us?
1:10:17
So Thomas Merton who is a great Christian Christian mystic said "To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone is itself to succumb to the violence of our times." So let me ask you again.
1:10:43
Now we're now we're back on the basketball court, you know, where you want to win the game or now we're in the terrain of running a business or um teaching a class or something like that.
1:11:01
Um Have you had the experience of being quite engaged so that you're devoted to something and putting your best energy in it without the energy of tension of grasping and striving as much as being engaged um in the present for its own sake?
1:11:25
And if you have, what did that feel like?
1:11:28
I mean it feels great, right?
1:11:28
Because it it feels like this feels like this conversation, right?
1:11:31
One of the reasons that we book 3 hours um is because then there's no time pressure.
1:11:37
There's no you're not thinking about oh I only have an hour I got to fit all this in and so it's just I am here in this moment for this length of time and it it all it never goes 3 hours or very rarely, but I find that that frees me to be more focused in the moment where if it's an hour it actually is detrimental to me being in that moment and being present.
1:12:01
All right, so here you are in the supermarket. You got your list. Yeah.
1:12:06
You know, and not only is it your list, but there's other people that you're close to that put their on the list right?
1:12:14
And you have to get the right kind of laundry soap and the right kind of ice cream or whatever for the kids or whatever.
1:12:21
I don't know who makes your list, but there you are.
1:12:26
You have a time constraint cuz you have to get back.
1:12:28
There's something, you know.
1:12:32
How are you going to do it?
1:12:32
You could do it like careening through the aisles like a good New Yorker, grabbing things pretty quickly and trying to get through, you know, and at the same time think about all the other stuff that you have to get done when you get home and all of that.
1:12:49
That's but one way you could do it.
1:12:53
The other other you could actually enjoy Wait, I personally like shopping.
1:12:55
It's a it's a great thing in my marriage cuz my wife doesn't, so I'm I'm I'm I'm glad to do it.
1:13:02
Grocery shopping or other kind.
1:13:04
Um but you could do it and have fun.
1:13:08
You could do it and I bet you have at certain points and say, you know, now I'm shopping let me enjoy this.
1:13:16
And it doesn't mean you're going to be much slower.
1:13:17
You're not going to be the speed freak, you you know.
1:13:18
But uh yeah, let let me let me feel my steps and enjoy and be present and not try to work everything else out in my life.
1:13:28
I'll I'll just you know, um in what there's one Zen saying that says, you know, when you sit just sit and when you eat just eat, you know, to just be where you are.
1:13:43
And you can practice this and you start to pay attention to what it's like when you do it in a gracious way.
1:13:48
Um and it doesn't mean you can't set a goal and it doesn't mean you can't give it your very best and that there's certain moments you need to really throw yourself into something, but even that you can do it with a good spirit and with fun rather than being afraid of how it's going to turn out.
1:14:05
So this Zen teacher Seung Sahn Sunim, a Korean Roshi that or Zen master that I studied with.
1:14:10
So he was sitting in his Zen center in Providence one morning um eating his breakfast and reading the morning paper.
1:14:22
And one of the students as as as we are up in these students that we get said, "Hey, wait a second.
1:14:27
Didn't you say when you sit just sit and when you eat just eat?
1:14:32
What is this thing about eating and reading the paper?"
1:14:36
And he looked up and he said, "When you eat and read, just eat and read."
1:14:42
And you know, it was it was kind of a fun dialogue.
1:14:44
Um but the idea of it is still an invitation to bring this quality of mindful presence to actually be where you are more fully because honestly 90% of your thoughts are repeats.
1:15:06
Maybe more than that when you sit in meditation and you kind of notice what's going on in your mind and it's a little bit like being stuck in Motel 6 at night with the shopping channel on or whatever or some other channel.
1:15:20
It could be, you know, whatever your favorite channel is, but it it it they're they're not new.
1:15:29
Um and it's it's the brain and the mind reciting certain things and you can say, "Thank you. I appreciate it. That's what minds do."
1:15:37
Um and then you can tune into a deeper quality of being present.
1:15:40
There you are in the supermarket.
1:15:42
And say, "All right, let me be here.
1:15:44
I'm not going to try and solve the problems of my life right now.
1:15:48
I'll I'll take my time to do it."
1:15:51
And then of course once in a while as you don't pay attention to your thinking, some good new intuition comes.
1:15:57
I don't want to put it down.
1:15:57
Thought is a is a great servant.
1:16:01
It's just not a good master.
1:16:04
You don't want to let it run your life.
1:16:06
You want the quality of presence and compassion to run your life and thoughts to serve that.
1:16:14
Something you said there just struck me as really interesting, which is 90% of our thoughts are repeat thoughts.
1:16:21
It's like we have the same playlist going over and over again in our head.
1:16:26
And if if we think about people say that you're the the sum of the five people that you hang around the most.
1:16:34
But in fact, there's also this unconscious playlist going on in the back of your mind, these stories, not only the thoughts that we're telling ourselves, but the stories.
1:16:46
I'm thinking that they they impact our habits, our behaviors, our um actions. Very much so. Just what you say.
1:16:55
And they impact us much more when they're not conscious, when we don't really recognize them.
1:17:02
So one of the first things that happens when you sit in meditation, the idea isn't that you stop your mind thinking.
1:17:09
There are ways to do that for periods of time, but it's not really the goal at all and it doesn't last that long.
1:17:18
But to step outside of it or to make space and then you begin to recognize, all right, what's the playlist?
1:17:23
You know, what what's happening? What are these stories?
1:17:28
Um and you start to see the repeats of them and you can see again, okay, these ones, all right, these are healthy.
1:17:34
I want to water these ones.
1:17:36
These ones I just let them pass, let them go.
1:17:40
Um and you're quite right, more than the five people it's the five patterns.
1:17:45
One of the meditation techniques or tricks that I teach people is to actually number the top 10 tunes.
1:17:56
If they come on a meditation retreat and they're going to sit for a week or 10 days and they'll start to watch here's the top 10 tunes.
1:18:03
Or I had a friend who was a who was a disc jockey and he had literally had the playlist.
1:18:08
He said, "I didn't ask it."
1:18:10
And then, you know, all the all the tunes would start playing.
1:18:13
But anyway, so you number them.
1:18:13
The top number one is, you know, what's happening with my daughter or number two is uh what's happening with my stock portfolio or number three, you know, often they're worries or number three is I've got this whole creative project.
1:18:28
How can I figure it out and make this film or theater or build this thing and so forth.
1:18:34
And then you're sitting there and they come on you say, "Oh, number three. Thank you."
1:18:39
Um thank you for, you know, coming along. I'm okay.
1:18:43
Um and it just helps you step out of them a little bit and recognize, "Oh, that's just what the mind does." Yeah.
1:18:52
And then there's a space around it where you can walk out the door and see the pine trees, you know, or smell the air in a way that you wouldn't cuz you're or you know, or see the people walking by in ways that you you would have totally missed cuz you were just lost in thought.
1:19:11
Why does nature seem to have such a profound effect on our thoughts?
1:19:16
I generally speaking don't know how to answer why questions very well.
1:19:21
Um cuz everything is so multi-determined.
1:19:25
But as I hear that from you, um you're acknowledging a truth for many, many people that walking into the forest or going by the seashore or up in the mountains and so forth. Um it changes us.
1:19:44
It steps us out of that modern, constant thinking, moving to a different dimension of our being.
1:19:54
And it can change us even more deeply.
1:19:57
Um there's a reality that we know about that we forget, like that poem from Juan Ramón Jiménez.
1:20:05
Um Who you are is not your body.
1:20:10
You rent it from Hertz or something.
1:20:10
You get it for a certain number of years and you have to give it up.
1:20:14
And I've had the remarkable experiences, many of us have, of sitting with people as they're dying.
1:20:22
And there's that moment, especially if it's a kind of conscious where the person is more or less conscious as they die, uh when they're there and then they are not.
1:20:35
And it's silent like a falling star, this amazing moment where spirit leaves the body.
1:20:42
And it does, we can talk about that and how consciousness leaves the body cuz I've had a lot of out-of-body experiences in meditation and past life regressions and things so.
1:20:51
But anyway, but in that moment the body just becomes meat, basically, the corpse, because it's not who you are.
1:21:04
You consciousness uses this body.
1:21:07
You're also not your emotions.
1:21:10
If you were, you'd be really in trouble. They come.
1:21:15
But if that's who you are, then each one would throw you around into a different universe for that emotional time.
1:21:19
And it can if you're not so conscious, but that's not who you are.
1:21:25
And Lord knows you're not your thoughts.
1:21:28
You know, if we could put a little speaker on the heads of everyone sitting in a room together, um at a meeting, not to speak of it at quiet meditation, you know, there would be a din.
1:21:43
So then, who are you is the question.
1:21:46
And I don't mean it philosophically to think about it.
1:21:50
Um but when you get quiet, you can realize that even now, as you're listening, that there are these words, Shane's words, my words, and so forth.
1:22:03
And there's an awareness out of them.
1:22:07
They're two different things. You are that awareness.
1:22:12
That is consciousness itself.
1:22:16
You are You are awareness.
1:22:18
And that awareness is timeless.
1:22:23
It wasn't It's not limited by your body.
1:22:27
It was born into your body.
1:22:27
And we know this This goes back to your question about time and nature.
1:22:32
I'm going to circle back.
1:22:33
Um because walking in the high mountains or making love or going to an amazing cathedral or hearing extraordinary piece of music, you know, or taking some kind of sacred medicine, um or being there at the birth of a child, or the mysterious moment of death, um the gates between the worlds open in some way.
1:23:02
And you we remember, oh, this mystery.
1:23:05
What I am actually is part of the I'm consciousness experiencing this mystery of life.
1:23:14
And that's part of what nature can do for us.
1:23:20
Is it opens that gateway again. I like that.
1:23:23
I I think I mentioned nature cuz you mentioned pine trees instinctively as the first thing when you you were talking.
1:23:30
And then I was like, oh, there's something soothing about nature.
1:23:33
I know, like when I pull into nature, I go for a walk in nature, I instantly feel like a weight off my shoulders.
1:23:41
You know, um Shane, um I'm listening to you and we haven't ever talked before and I didn't really know you.
1:23:51
And I looked up a little bit online, okay, who's this guy?
1:23:53
As you probably looked me up or something like that.
1:23:54
And then I saw, oh, in your, you know, PR and stuff, all these people listen in, the Wall Street people, and, you know, they like you and things like that.
1:24:06
And um my experience in talking to you um is that you have a a lovely kind of measured and um gracious way of talking.
1:24:24
Um and a great deal of space in your listening.
1:24:29
You're not saying so much.
1:24:29
You could I mean, I'm on to blab, so I guess that's my job for today, plus as a teacher, that just happens, sorry to say.
1:24:38
Um but the kind of things that we're talking about, I find your presence to carry some of this.
1:24:44
And maybe you know it, I hope so.
1:24:47
That is got graciousness and spaciousness, both, and a kind of warmth in it.
1:24:54
And it's different than, you know, I've been on lots of other podcasts.
1:24:57
We, you know, those of us in the industry, so to speak, have have this experience.
1:25:03
And it's There's a sweetness to it.
1:25:06
And it a sweetness and at the same time a real interest or clarity to the sweetness doesn't take away your, you know, your ability to listen and and discover.
1:25:23
Um so, how how does that land for you? Thank you.
1:25:28
That's incredibly kind and generous of you.
1:25:30
Um uh a little bit nervous, actually.
1:25:33
I'm not very good at sort of um taking compliments or or acknowledging them.
1:25:41
I always wanted to deflect.
1:25:41
So, my instinct is naturally to sort of Yeah, that that's true for lots of us.
1:25:47
It's For me, it's been a practice I've had to learn to do it, especially in the teacher kind of, you know, I'm in the role with all the lamas and mamas and swamis and gurus and things.
1:25:59
And so, people throw a lot of that.
1:26:01
And and I tried to deflect it a long time.
1:26:05
And then I realized, no, it's fine.
1:26:09
It's okay to let it come in and wash through and go away.
1:26:11
It's It's, you know, so even now, as you say that, I appreciate that you were honest in saying it and also that you can bring a kind of humor to it and say, yeah, you know, for us, it's hard to take it in.
1:26:28
Um and so, you can just acknowledge that, too. Yeah, thank you.
1:26:30
And then you become mindful with a with kindness to it. Yeah, sure. We do.
1:26:36
It's a little embarrassing, like, well, if it's true, yeah, and what if it's not true?
1:26:43
Well, it's it's, you know, it's it's also um I definitely think that It's when somebody gives me a gift, I would always rather be the person giving a gift to somebody else than receiving.
1:26:55
Cuz then I become self-conscious in that moment about, what am I supposed to say?
1:26:59
What's the right thing to say?
1:26:59
How do I And it's not even about the gift, it's just all me in my own mind.
1:27:07
Well, it it's also because that In that position, you're more vulnerable. Yeah. Quite honestly.
1:27:13
And again, going back to my dear friend Ram Dass, who um as a as a teacher, he also started something called Seva Foundation, which was was still is doing um surgeries to restore sight for blind people uh around the world.
1:27:33
Um and he got a whole group of really great people to do it, his, you know, musician friends like the Grateful Dead to su- give them tons of money and various other people. And so forth.
1:27:45
And they've now restored sight to 5 and 1/2 million blind people.
1:27:50
And he did all these other really beautiful things.
1:27:52
And then he had a major stroke in which he lost his um ability to move almost half his body and he couldn't speak well. He had aphasia.
1:28:03
And he has to mostly be in a wheelchair.
1:28:08
And he said, you know, um going around the world as a teacher and going around with these projects, trying to do conscious business and trying to cure blindness or help with polio or all these other things that I've devoted myself to, he said, that was nowhere near as hard as being in a wheelchair and having people have to pick me up and wipe my butt. Yeah.
1:28:37
He said, that's a way harder than, you know, trying to cure blindness in some country.
1:28:42
Um because we get vulnerable.
1:28:42
And yet, um I think part of what makes your work, and I'm just reflecting it, trustworthy to people.
1:28:56
I mean, there's all kinds of ways.
1:28:58
But it is that I actually feel that you are present and that you're that you're willing to be vulnerable somewhat, including talking about how hard it is to receive things. It's hard for all of us.
1:29:10
Um and that just talks about the tenderness of human relations.
1:29:14
That as we get close to one another we're trying to figure out how do we be with this person so that we're safe and they're safe and that there's a a kind of mutual connection rather than you know in some way each person getting hurt or something happening like that.
1:29:33
You make it really easy to feel safe and sort of reveal things cuz I don't feel like there'll be any judgement. Which is super powerful.
1:29:44
Like we're always judging. We're judging ourselves.
1:29:47
We're judging other people.
1:29:47
Well, there's two words for it.
1:29:49
One is judgement and the other is discernment.
1:29:56
And the judgement has a kind of negativity.
1:29:58
You shouldn't think that and you shouldn't have said that and that's bad and this is good and so forth.
1:30:01
And we all learn those kind of things growing up as kids and the society reinforces it in spades.
1:30:11
Um instead of the judgement which has that negative valence um if we use the beautiful quality of discernment to see this is valuable, this is not, this wants more inquiry, that doesn't.
1:30:29
Um this doesn't look like it serves.
1:30:29
It allows that same capacity that we have to see clearly um to be marshaled in the service of real connection to others or even to ourself rather than judging them or rather than judging ourselves cuz a lot of us are so judgemental.
1:30:52
When you really sit in meditation see how many judgements there are, they wouldn't hire you on the bench in a civilized country. You know.
1:31:00
Before we come to consciousness there there's which is super recent for me.
1:31:07
I I want to when I struggle and I assume other people are like this too.
1:31:13
I have a tendency not to ask people for help.
1:31:18
And I think it's because I don't want to inconvenience them and the result is that I tend to isolate myself or withdraw. Withdraw.
1:31:26
Is is struggling something we should do alone or with others?
1:31:33
And of course the answer to these kind of koans is always yes.
1:31:40
You know cuz part of it is an inner job that you have to do, right?
1:31:46
But it's not healthy to do all that in yourself.
1:31:50
And that's why we have one another to talk to and learn.
1:31:52
And in every spiritual tradition you know, there's the sangha, the community, the satsang, the Jewish minyan, the in Christianity whenever two or more are gathered in his name, there's you know, there's an understanding um that we help each other to be more fully the best we can were human.
1:32:16
I mean, we can also misguide each other and that happens in all kinds of war and political and so forth.
1:32:24
But for the work that we're talking about to become a uh a mensch, a gracious, wise, you know, um human being we need each other.
1:32:40
And we learn from one another.
1:32:40
It is so interesting to hear you say that and I and I agree with that.
1:32:45
I feel like we're also missing that today more. Oh, so much so. Yeah.
1:32:52
Our channels are very thin and we don't have the kind of communion that you know, COVID made it way way worse, but we don't have that kind of communion.
1:33:00
It's one of the things that makes something like AA so powerful.
1:33:05
Because when you're there people get real with one another.
1:33:10
Get honest and you feel like oh, okay, I'm not alone in this in my struggle.
1:33:15
And that's a huge healing part of it.
1:33:15
I I want to read a story and it you know, it'll take a minute or two.
1:33:19
Um and I just because I'm a storyteller and I'm just going to throw it into the conversation and see where it takes you and us.
1:33:32
During my first year of teaching a girl named Shay was assigned to a seventh grade my seventh grade class.
1:33:39
She was a desperately unhappy child and rebelled against the most basic rules such as staying in your seat, raise your hand to speak.
1:33:48
Shay and I battled for control of the classroom.
1:33:50
I tried every technique I knew.
1:33:54
Behavior contracts, praise, reprimands. None of them worked.
1:33:58
I tried calling Shay's home every week, but almost always no one answered.
1:34:04
She lived with an older sister and I just don't know what had happened to her and her family.
1:34:13
I went to the school counselor who said I'd done my duty and offered to transfer Shay to another classroom. I declined.
1:34:19
Shay was my student and I wasn't going to pass her on to someone else.
1:34:25
In the faculty lounge the older teachers patted me on the back thankful they didn't have Shay in their classroom. June finally came.
1:34:32
On the last day of school Shay was quick to head out the door.
1:34:38
As I sat contemplating my failure with her, she walked back in.
1:34:43
Oh great, I thought, one last act of terrorism.
1:34:47
In Shay's hand was a small bowl, the kind that students made in ceramics class.
1:34:54
She thrust it into my grasp.
1:34:54
Here, she said, it's the only thing I could think of to give you.
1:35:02
I turned the bowl over and saw Shay's initials etched on the bottom.
1:35:08
Thanks for trying to like me, she said.
1:35:11
And before I could speak, she turned and left.
1:35:17
After several more years of teaching, I went on to become a school principal and now I'm the district superintendent.
1:35:24
Shay's bowl has never left my desk.
1:35:28
I think it's a powerful story.
1:35:32
And there's a lot of things interwoven there, right?
1:35:34
There's stubbornness um and the persistence of the the teacher.
1:35:41
There's the my initial I have a grade seven my initial sort of thinking is like what's going on in that person's lives for them to act like that.
1:35:51
Yes, which I'm sure the teacher also thought about exactly what kind of suffering at home did she have to armor herself that way? Yeah.
1:35:58
And then also what was interesting about the story and and just the story obviously, but like um when Shay came in the last day of school it was and her thinking even at that point was one last act of terrorism. Yes. Right?
1:36:15
So we we become predisposed to see the narrative that we've formed in our head about other people and once we've seen it, it's almost impossible to change it.
1:36:26
And what was really powerful about that story for me is that the narrative changed in that moment.
1:36:30
Even though she had seen this the story one way for a whole school year, so September through June, in that one moment she was able to see that whole story and that person in a different way.
1:36:44
Yeah, thank you for that.
1:36:46
That's that's a beautiful perspective on it.
1:36:49
You know, in India um people who go to see these famous gurus and so forth, sometimes something special happens, sometimes nothing special happens or something, you know, whatever, but there's something that's interesting that's described called the glance of mercy.
1:37:11
Um and what it describes is that once in a while you can go see somebody um who looks at you and really gets you, sees who you are deeply.
1:37:25
And we know there are people who can really see into someone somehow or other and I don't yeah, sometimes it might seem mystical.
1:37:34
Some of it's just intuitive, but you know those kind of folks.
1:37:41
And in this case somebody who can see you so deeply and looks at you with the eyes of love.
1:37:49
As I see you, I see all of you. And I love you.
1:37:55
I accept you and you're worthy of love.
1:37:57
And it's said that that kind of glance of mercy um can change a person's life.
1:38:07
Because all the things that they were ashamed of or Mhm.
1:38:10
struggle with or didn't all the things that were part of their humanity um that they didn't accept and then all of a sudden that shock of turning everything around like you described so well at the end of the story can change everything.
1:38:28
Yeah, and it probably I mean changed how it probably made that narrative a lot slower to form with other kids in the future as well, right?
1:38:37
So it had a profound effect. Yes.
1:38:39
Yeah, and it and it and it and it redoubled that teacher's commitment to actually be there for kids now, you know, for obviously many years later with the bowl still sitting on her, you know, her desk.
1:38:53
But that's also important, right?
1:38:55
The visual I don't there's a word for it.
1:38:59
I just don't remember what it is, but the token, the sort of like visual reminder of something that you want to keep coming back to is super powerful as well.
1:39:10
It just centers you and unconsciously it centers you because you've associated that with a certain thing.
1:39:16
And so it doesn't even have to be a conscious thing.
1:39:18
It's like the presence of it alone is speaking to your unconscious. Yes. Yeah.
1:39:27
Is there a different or what is the difference I guess between compassion and empathy?
1:39:31
Yeah, so let me give an image.
1:39:35
Suppose you're on the edge of a schoolyard and there's a kid who's being bullied um by a bully and some other kids around him being taunted or, you know, hit or whatever it is.
1:39:52
Empathy arises when you feel for that kid.
1:39:58
And maybe maybe even when you feel for whatever the other kids, the bully had to go through to become that bully. Mhm.
1:40:05
So there's this kind of recognition.
1:40:08
Um and you get it in yourself.
1:40:12
Uh it's like, you know, neuroscientists talk all about mirror neurons.
1:40:17
And if you put a violin on a table and then take another violin in your hand and bow it strongly, the strings on the violin on the table will resonate with the strings of the violin in your hand and that's how we're tuned to one another. So that part is empathy. Compassion is a verb.
1:40:40
When you empathize, then and you feel compassion, it also moves you to either walk over if that's the right thing or go talk to the teacher or the principal or something and say, "Hey, you know, there's this suffering.
1:40:55
Let's Let's do something to make this better."
1:41:02
And so compassion is combines empathy with the heart's response to alleviate suffering.
1:41:09
So compassion, is it fair to say that compassion leads to action? Yes.
1:41:15
Whereas empathy is more understanding and being Yes. and non-judgmental.
1:41:21
Yeah, being with being with being with in some deep way. Yeah.