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Episode: #751: Elizabeth Gilbert and Jack Kornfield

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 03:08:14

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode

features segments from episode #430 "Elizabeth Gilbert’s Creative Path: Saying No, Trusting Your Intuition, Index Cards, Integrity Checks, Grief, Awe, and Much More" and episode #300 "Jack Kornfield — Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy in the Present."Please enjoy!Sponsors:AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://helixsleep.com/tim (25–30% off all mattress orders and two free pillows)LMNT electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any drink mix purchase)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[05:36] Notes about this supercombo format.[06:38] Enter Elizabeth Gilbert.[07:04] Liz shares who Rayya Elias was and how she's remembered her in story at The Moth.[14:53] What kind of stories and storytellers make Liz break out in applause?[21:05] What has Liz learned from Martha Beck?[23:49] Staying true to one's inner compass and saying "No" without remorse.[27:03] The simple "No" via Byron Katie.[33:07] The wisdom of the body.[36:56] Enter Jack Kornfield.[37:24] Jack's connection with hang gliding and paragliding.[40:06] Jack's childhood, abusive father, and role as family peacemaker.[45:12] "If you're going to be angry, do it right."[47:48] Jack's transition from pre-med to Asian studies at Dartmouth.[49:28] From hippie to Buddhist monk.[50:57] Psychedelics' influence on Jack's spiritual path and current stance.[59:53] Meeting Stanislav Grof.[1:03:32] Finding and studying under Ajahn Chah.[1:05:59] Rookie monk training in Thailand and enduring suffering.[1:13:49] Long silence periods and out-of-body experiences.[1:16:37] Mystical experiences aren't always pleasant.[1:19:15] Tim's experience at Spirit Rock.[1:20:10] Challenges during training in Thailand and Burma.[1:24:47] "Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed..."[1:29:55] Advice for deep inner work with real-life responsibilities.[1:42:04] Compassion vs. empathy.[1:46:19] Technology's role in developing compassion.[1:47:26] Lovingkindness meditation for Westerners.[1:56:04] Attending the first White House Buddhist Leadership Conference.[1:57:59] The mission of CASEL.[1:59:18] Introducing mindfulness practice and love as a superpower.[2:10:11] Returning to self-discovery after derailment.[2:15:57] Apparent derailment as necessary communication.[2:19:17] Self-talk for managing inappropriate anger.[2:37:21] Returning to the US to study clinical psychology.[2:42:50] Using forgiveness to help veterans and at-risk youth.[2:45:30] Why community support beats community apathy.[2:49:23] Lack of significant initiation rituals in modern society.[2:53:10] Recommended book for newcomers to Jack's work.[2:57:48] Jack's billboard.[2:59:02] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

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00:04:59 Speaker_00
out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

00:05:03 Speaker_03
No, it is inappropriate to ask.

00:05:06 Speaker_02
What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue of a metal endoskeleton.

00:05:19 Speaker_05
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:05:22 Speaker_05
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:05:36 Speaker_05
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:05:45 Speaker_05
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:05:57 Speaker_05
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:06:11 Speaker_05
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:06:21 Speaker_05
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:06:38 Speaker_00
First up, Elizabeth Gilbert, the number one New York Times bestselling author of 10 books, including Eat, Pray, Love, and Big Magic, Creative Living Beyond Fear, which together have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide.

00:06:55 Speaker_00
And her latest book, City of Girls. You can find Elizabeth on Twitter, at GilbertLiz.

00:07:04 Speaker_05
I thought I would begin with the alpha wolf if you don't mind for those who don't know this is a moth talk slash presentation story slash tearjerker slash laugh out loud at moments

00:07:19 Speaker_05
tale, and I saw that Rhea's birthday, her 60th birthday, was just a few days ago. Could you speak to who Rhea was, a little bit of context, and then to how you prepared for that?

00:07:38 Speaker_02
There's quite literally nothing I would rather talk about than Rhea's. So you started in a good place for me. So Rhea Elias was quite simply the love of my life. She and I were friends for 17 years.

00:07:56 Speaker_02
I was married for most of that and just very slowly and very quietly over the years fell in love with her. She was a lesbian, Syrian, Detroit-raised, rock and roll,

00:08:12 Speaker_02
hairdresser, filmmaker, author, musician who had always wanted to live just right on the edge of life.

00:08:20 Speaker_02
She had been a speedball heroin junkie on the Lower East Side, New York City in the 1980s, was in Rikers Island, was in Bellevue, was in various rehabs and rehabilitations, was homeless, was

00:08:33 Speaker_02
Oh God, she'd had such a storied life and then she finally put it all down and she spent 19 years clean and sober. And when I met her, she was on the other side of that recovery and she was the strongest, most extraordinary person I ever met.

00:08:46 Speaker_02
And as I said in that speech that I gave in that talk that I gave at the Moth about her, which I shared a year after she died, she was the most powerful person in every room that she ever walked into. And I adored her. She was my guide.

00:09:00 Speaker_02
She was my teacher. She was the rock, the ground underneath my feet. She was the one person in the world who always made me feel safe. And she didn't just make me feel safe.

00:09:11 Speaker_02
The feeling that everyone had when Rhea walked into the room was, oh, thank God, Rhea's here. Everybody is safe. You know, that's what the alpha is, right? The alpha is the person who keeps the entire pack safe.

00:09:24 Speaker_02
And because she was the most powerful person in the room, what I always knew when she walked in was not only would she make sure I was okay, if anybody was preying on me in any way, she would make sure the predator was okay too.

00:09:38 Speaker_02
She had everybody under her wing to make sure that people were all right. She just had this way of handling humans like nothing I've ever seen in my entire life. I absolutely adored her. I was a loyal wife and I loved my husband.

00:09:54 Speaker_02
The three of us were really good friends and there was no way in the world that I was ever going to cross that line. I just kept that love very quietly in my heart.

00:10:01 Speaker_02
And we all just had a beautiful life together until the day that she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer. And I got a phone call from her saying that she'd gotten this diagnosis and that they said she had six months to live.

00:10:14 Speaker_02
And from that point forward, it was no longer possible for me to keep that love hidden. And very swiftly after that, I had a conversation with my husband and said, I need to go and be with Rhea. And no one was surprised by this.

00:10:28 Speaker_02
He wasn't surprised by it. He'd seen it for years. And he very, in one of the greatest acts of courage and dignity I've ever seen anybody do, he very graciously stepped out of the way.

00:10:39 Speaker_02
We separated and I went to be with her and I was with her until the end of her life. So that's who Rhea was and that's who she was to me.

00:10:47 Speaker_02
As for that speech that I gave at the moth, that talk, what I was challenged to do in 12 minutes was to try to get over the net who that person was, the most epic human being I'd ever met.

00:11:00 Speaker_02
And I decided the way to do that was to tell a few stories about the experience of her death and dying.

00:11:06 Speaker_02
which were mostly based on ideas that I had about how she was going to become very helpless and I was going to have to be her hero and protect her, versus the reality of the situation, which is that she never became helpless.

00:11:21 Speaker_02
She remained the alpha in the entire situation. She was a really hard patient to take care of for that reason. She absolutely refused to cooperate with my version of some airy, fairy, soft, hippy dab that I wanted to

00:11:34 Speaker_02
give to her and instead she died the way she lived like the badass fierce unrelenting warrior that she was and it was brutal and it was beautiful and she never stopped taking us by surprise right even up till the last second and the point is going to come where that truth is going to become bigger than your plans.

00:11:53 Speaker_02
And that extended into the way that I tried to manage, I'm using air quotes now, manage Rhea's death. I also went into her death with a plan.

00:12:01 Speaker_02
We're going to have an enlightened death, we're going to have a real hospice death, we're going to bring grief bereavement experts in here to talk. I mean I laugh now because it's like.

00:12:11 Speaker_01
It's just Rhea, who is such a biker chick, it's like, you're going to bring a fucking grief bereavement expert in here to talk to me? Give me a break. I'm going to go down watching football, eating chicken wings and smoking.

00:12:24 Speaker_02
I have no interest in that. So she just waylaid that plan completely and died on her own terms. I'm just thinking of something that a hospice nurse said to me because we were cracking up one day.

00:12:36 Speaker_02
I can't remember what it was about, but there's a lot of anybody who's ever been by it, you know, there's a lot of humor that shows up. And it is literally gallows humor.

00:12:44 Speaker_02
You know, it really is like I've got a picture of me and Ray's ex-wife and Ray's ex-girlfriend who were the two women who showed up like

00:12:52 Speaker_02
champions at the end of her life to help to take care of me and help to take care of her because they loved her so much.

00:12:58 Speaker_02
It was also just such a factor of what a boss Mac daddy Rhea was that she had like every woman who'd ever loved her came back to take care of her when she was dying, to take care of each other.

00:13:08 Speaker_02
There was a lot of laughter between the three of us about just handling this force of nature as she was dying. Can we survive it? She's the opposite of a good patient. There was a lot of humor in there.

00:13:19 Speaker_02
The hospice nurse was laughing with us one day and I said to her, it's amazing that you can laugh given the line of work that you're in.

00:13:24 Speaker_02
She spends her life working with people at the worst, most painful parts of their lives, at the end of their lives. And she said, we have a little motto. We say, if you can't laugh at death, get out of show business.

00:13:36 Speaker_02
You shouldn't be a hospice nurse if you can't laugh. You won't survive. And I'm sure that's what you and I are talking right now in the midst of the COVID crisis. And I've been thinking about that.

00:13:44 Speaker_02
I've been thinking about the nurses that I know, and I'm imagining that, you know, there's some dark ass humor happening in those hospitals right now.

00:13:54 Speaker_02
There has to be in the same way that soldiers would tell you about the humor that happens when you're under fire. Like, there absolutely has to be, or you simply won't be able to survive it. So I will say that the humor is there in those moments.

00:14:06 Speaker_02
I mean, right after Rhea died, I mean, we had been through such hell with her and her death was not, as I say, it was it was brutal.

00:14:15 Speaker_02
You know, one minute after she took her last breath, her last horrible breath, Gigi, her ex-wife, stood up, brushed off her hands and goes, OK, so that's done. I'm going to be on the next flight out of here like at two o'clock.

00:14:27 Speaker_01
You know, we just it was hilarious. But it was also just like what Rayo would have done, you know. OK, you guys good. We good. We done here, you know. We just all like rolled over laughing in the middle of our tears.

00:14:40 Speaker_02
You know, and I feel like that humor has to be shot through the entirety of your life or else you really are not going to make it through earth school because earth school is a hard, hard school and it's a hard assignment.

00:14:50 Speaker_02
And I think the humor is quite literally grace.

00:14:53 Speaker_05
Let's pair stillness with awe for a moment. I've also read that there are times when you'll love a sentence so much that you'll read that you'll start clapping by yourself where you happen to be reading.

00:15:12 Speaker_05
And I would love to know what type of writing, what writers have done that for you, if you could name even a few of them, and what it is. What are the ingredients that lead to that one woman standing ovation?

00:15:27 Speaker_02
Often in the bathtub. Well, they say that great art has to contain two features. It has to be both surprising and inevitable. So that's the great paradox.

00:15:37 Speaker_05
That's good. That's good.

00:15:39 Speaker_02
The paradox is that you have to go, oh my God, I didn't see that coming. And that is the only way that could go. I'm thinking of the ending of Breaking Bad, that whole show, but like the last moments of Breaking Bad. Oops, spoiler alert.

00:15:55 Speaker_02
You've had many years to watch it now, people. I won't tell you the ending. I will just tell you that I also stood up and applauded at that because it felt both surprising and inevitable.

00:16:03 Speaker_02
So that's the feeling you want your whole nervous system to kind of be like, oh, my God, I didn't know that could be. And yes, of course, you know, it had to be. And now it's rearranged my DNA in a certain way where I can't be the same now.

00:16:18 Speaker_02
Poetry tends to do it. The poets have this amazing ability to to put that into such a tiny space where it's like the encapsulation of inevitability and surprise. So I'll give you an example of one piece that I love, which is a poem by T.S.

00:16:35 Speaker_02
Eliot called East Coker that has gotten me through some of the darkest times in my life. Some of those moments in your life where you don't know what to do, right?

00:16:44 Speaker_02
Where a human being, and this is where I think human life gets really interesting, what happens to people when they reach the end of their power?

00:16:51 Speaker_02
Because especially in this culture, where we live in a culture that says you should be able to power through anything, life will very generously remind you that you cannot.

00:16:59 Speaker_02
And it will very generously break you at times and very generously show you, as we're seeing right now in the COVID virus, we're like, oh, actually, there's a limit to our powers here. And it's very humbling.

00:17:10 Speaker_02
And what do you do when you're at the end of your powers? So the poem East Coker is one, and it gets me every single time.

00:17:16 Speaker_05
How do you spell Coker?

00:17:17 Speaker_02
C-O-K-E-R. C-O-K-E-R. Yeah, East Coker. And there's a part of the poem where T.S. Eliot writes, Wait without hope, for hope would be hope of the wrong thing. Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing.

00:17:33 Speaker_02
There is yet faith, but the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. And so the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing. That's a stand up and applause moment.

00:17:47 Speaker_05
Yeah, that is a stand up and applause moment.

00:17:49 Speaker_02
And sometimes when people I know are grieving or they're stuck or they're broken or everything has been taken away, I will give them that poem because that says what I don't know how to say better than that, which is,

00:18:03 Speaker_02
Right now, you're being asked to wait without hope, for anything that you hope for would be the wrong thing, and wait without love. Anybody who's been going through a horrible breakup, I'll give them that poem.

00:18:14 Speaker_02
Like, you're being asked to wait without love right now, because love would be love of the wrong thing. And anybody who's a beginning meditator, I give them that poem because of the line, wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

00:18:27 Speaker_02
You don't have the wisdom right now to have the correct thoughts. So, you need to wait without thought. And then you will see, if you do that, and there's still faith, but the faith is in the waiting.

00:18:41 Speaker_02
The faith is in waiting without hope, waiting without love, waiting without thought. That's the definition of faith, sitting in the darkness, in that waiting.

00:18:50 Speaker_02
And then you will see how the darkness becomes light and the stillness becomes dancing, but only every time. In order to have it, you've got to give up hope, and you've got to give up love, and you've got to have faith only in the waiting.

00:19:00 Speaker_02
So that's a line that makes me applaud. Another author who gets me is another poet who gets me is Walt Whitman. And Walt Whitman sang, describing himself in A Song of Myself, describing himself as standing both in and out of the game.

00:19:15 Speaker_02
watching and wondering at it and also being involved in it. That description of he watching himself walk through life both in and out of the game is again something that I think of as the highest point of enlightenment. Can you engage with your life?

00:19:32 Speaker_02
Can you be involved with your life? Can you feel all of the feelings? Can you fall in love? Can you lose? Can you fail? Can you grow? Can you succeed? Can you buck up? and also watch it from a little bit of a detached distance and marvel at the game itself.

00:19:47 Speaker_02
So that line gets me. And then as far as fiction writers go, I'm so in love with Hilary Mantel, who wrote the Wolf Hall trilogy about Henry VIII and won the Booker Prize for the first two installments of it, and then the third one just came out.

00:20:02 Speaker_02
And the way that I've been describing it to people is, imagine if all three Godfather movies were as good as the first two. Imagine if Godfather Part 3 was just as good as 1 and 2, that's how good Hilary Mantel is, that the third installment.

00:20:16 Speaker_02
I'm reading that right now and it's just a bow down moment. As an artist, there are a lot of writers who I look at their work and I admire them, but I see how they did it.

00:20:27 Speaker_02
Because it's almost like a carpenter looking at another carpenter's work and being like, okay, see how you did the joints there and you hid that hinge there and that's cool. I see, well done.

00:20:36 Speaker_02
Then there are people I look at their work and I'm like, I literally don't believe that you're human. I don't understand how you can even do this. That's how I feel about Hilary Mantel writing about 16th century England in a way that is so intimate.

00:20:54 Speaker_02
You cannot read that book without thinking, this is exactly how it happened and I don't know how she does it. I'm happy to never be able to do that. I'm just lucky to live on Earth at the same time as somebody who can.

00:21:06 Speaker_05
I would push back a little bit and I would say that you have a rare ability to blend readability with wordsmithing sentences that are very memorable and really strike a chord. I don't think that is easy to do.

00:21:24 Speaker_05
And I would say Kurt Vonnegut is one who comes to mind, but it's not easy to combine those two things. And it made me crack a smile when I was reading about you appreciating sentences.

00:21:38 Speaker_05
The quote from you at the end of this portion of the interview was, It's part of the reason that the arts are around to remind us that we're not just here to pay bills and die, that we're also here to get excited and feel wonder and to feel awe.

00:21:50 Speaker_05
That's easy to read, but it is something that makes me go, fuck, goddamn, you're totally right. Like, I need more wonder and awe. I'm paying too many bills, spending too much on paperwork. So I do want to applaud that ability.

00:22:06 Speaker_05
And I'd love for you to speak to what else you've learned from Martha Beck. What are some of the other things that have really stuck for you?

00:22:15 Speaker_02
I'll give you one more Martha Beck line that I love. She says, there are certain moments of your life where you're standing in front of a bonfire and you have to jump.

00:22:24 Speaker_02
You just have to jump into it and you have to be willing to burn away everything that you've been taught and everything that you're afraid of and just do it. And she said, and I remember her telling me this was such glee.

00:22:35 Speaker_02
She goes, it's such a cool moment that you're in. And she said this to me as I was leaving my marriage and going to be with Rhett, she said that

00:22:42 Speaker_02
These bonfire moments are so fantastic because there's only two things that can happen when you jump into a bonfire.

00:22:50 Speaker_02
One of them is that you find out that it wasn't actually a bonfire, that you were afraid that it was going to burn you to pieces, and it actually didn't. It wasn't as scary as you thought. You did it, you took the leap.

00:23:00 Speaker_02
It turned out to be kind of like warm and soft and easy, so it was no big deal. The other thing that can happen is that it is a bonfire and you are incinerated and your entire life is incinerated by it.

00:23:13 Speaker_02
And that's even better because then you get to be reborn as a phoenix on the other side completely new. So either way you win. So there's no reason not to.

00:23:21 Speaker_02
You'll either jump in and find out it was nothing or you'll jump in and you'll be destroyed and that's awesome too.

00:23:25 Speaker_01
When I say Martha doesn't play by the game, that's what I mean.

00:23:29 Speaker_02
Like, that's what I mean about she's not even in the arena that we would call any sort of normal way of living. And for that reason, she's been one of the top three most influential people in my entire life.

00:23:41 Speaker_05
You're like, Martha, do we go left, left, right, or straight? She's like, we go up. You're like, what? How do we do that? That's incredible. Let's talk about the

00:23:51 Speaker_05
integrity check that sternum to navel area, we'll have to come up with some sort of perineum-like label that makes it a little easier.

00:24:01 Speaker_02
I think it's intercompass, there we go.

00:24:05 Speaker_01
That's where it's located, yeah.

00:24:06 Speaker_05
When you do, say, an integrity check, and I had read that when Rayya was sick, for instance, you began deleting or archiving emails without responding as a bit of a treat to yourself. Deleting, not archiving, deleting. Okay, deleting, goodbye. And

00:24:24 Speaker_05
When you say now, check in with yourself and decide to say no to something, let's just to make it easy or make it concrete, via email.

00:24:35 Speaker_05
You get an invitation from a friend you do actually really like with something that could plausibly advance your career or be fun, but you check in with yourself and it's like, no, this isn't a yes. How do you phrase your no's or declines?

00:24:50 Speaker_05
Do you have any particular go-to language that you like to use?

00:24:54 Speaker_02
I just want to make sure everybody knows that this is not easy. I don't want to have any illusions for anybody that this is simple. And the closer the relationship, the harder it is.

00:25:04 Speaker_02
The closer and more intimately I'm involved with somebody, the more stakes there are for me and the harder it is for me to tell the truth. And that feels like it should be, you know, there's a paradox.

00:25:15 Speaker_02
The people you love the most should be the people that you're able to be the most honest with. Well, no, because they're the people who you want to hurt the least. That's where it's really, really hard. There's a couple layers of it.

00:25:25 Speaker_02
I now treat my inbox like it's my home because I think it's an extension of my home. So if somebody walks into my home uninvited and announces themselves and doesn't say how they got a key and asks for something, I delete that email.

00:25:40 Speaker_02
I'm just like, I didn't invite you in. There are proper channels, you know what they are. I don't know how you got my personal email and I just deleted it.

00:25:46 Speaker_02
And if I feel a sense in my sternum of offense, of feeling like this person has taken a liberty, I don't believe that I owe them anything.

00:25:56 Speaker_02
I don't believe that I owe them anything any more than if I came down to my kitchen and saw people sitting at my table who I didn't know eating breakfast, I wouldn't believe that I owed to make them a cup of coffee. I'd be like, get out of my house.

00:26:10 Speaker_02
You're not supposed to be here. I don't even think I owe them a polite response. I owe them nothing. I didn't ask you to come into my house. I don't owe you anything. So that's the easiest. Those ones are easy. And I now treat myself to doing that.

00:26:21 Speaker_02
I mean, I do that every day. I clear my inbox out very quickly now. And then I'm entertained when they come back later and they're like, just circling back.

00:26:29 Speaker_01
And I'm like, yeah, just deleting you again. Circle back as many times as you want. You are not coming in. So that's simple.

00:26:35 Speaker_05
Just bumping this up.

00:26:37 Speaker_01
It's like whack-a-moles.

00:26:41 Speaker_02
It's like, I can do this all day. Delete, delete, delete. If it's somebody who I care about, if it's something that I'm interested in, but I'm just not going to do it because I don't want to, I will write back and say, thank you so much.

00:26:56 Speaker_02
I'm really honored that you invited me to this, but I'm not going to be able to do this at this time. And I don't feel I need to give a reason. I think a simple no is really, really good.

00:27:07 Speaker_02
And the reason sometimes, the reason it's good not to give an explanation is that if that person is an expert manipulator, as many of us are, that explanation will not suffice.

00:27:19 Speaker_02
So it won't matter what you give as an explanation, because they can come back and be like, well, we can do it by audio. You know, we can do, oh, if you're, oh, well, we can do it a different weekend. Just

00:27:29 Speaker_02
No, and I learned a lot about this from my teacher, Byron Katie, who teaches an amazing thing called the School for the Work. She's a whole nother being who's not at all living by the rules.

00:27:41 Speaker_05
Extraterrestrial, for sure.

00:27:42 Speaker_02
She is extraterrestrial. She is the only fully enlightened human being I believe I have ever met. And as such, she does not have any trouble saying an honest yes and a no to people.

00:27:53 Speaker_05
Just to underscore that because I did an in-person training with her. I mean literally no hesitation, no struggle, no conflict. It's bizarre and mesmerizing to watch.

00:28:11 Speaker_02
She loves you. Yeah. There's also no hostility. No offense, no hostility. Somebody came up to her at an event, handed her a book that they'd written, which people do to me all the time too. I really marveled at this.

00:28:25 Speaker_02
They said, I wrote this and I want to share it with you. She said, oh, sweetheart, I'm never going to read that. She said, true, it's just true, I've never heard that. And I'm like, oh my God, I didn't know you could say that. So that's amazing.

00:28:36 Speaker_02
And she said it so lovingly, like oh, oh no, I have no interest in reading that. So she teaches, I don't know if you did, when you took her training, did you do where she teaches a simple no, and she does a training on how to give a simple no?

00:28:49 Speaker_05
I don't think we actually spent much time on that, so I would love to hear you say more. We worked on the emotional one pages and the turnarounds. We did a lot on the turnarounds, which is probably we could do a whole episode just on that.

00:29:03 Speaker_02
Everybody look up Byron Katie. She's amazing. And if you have the means and if you have the chance to ever take her nine-day school for the work, it's the most important thing I've ever done for myself. Oh, wow.

00:29:13 Speaker_02
say that quite simply, but she has a whole day in the nine-day school for work, which is about the simple no, and the simple no is ways to say no, and it always begins with, thank you, and there's never a but, because she feels that the word but is very cruel, and it's just an and, so it's thank you and no, and that's it, that's a simple no, and then if they come back, you can say- Well, hold on, just to pause for a second, is that literally the phrasing or is it just- Yeah.

00:29:42 Speaker_01
Thank you. No. Yeah, that's it. That's it. It still makes my stomach ache because I'm like, oh my God, you can't just do that. You've got to do the dance.

00:29:49 Speaker_02
She's like, you don't have to do the dance. She's the one who taught me if the person is a good enough manipulator, it doesn't matter what you bring, they're going to manipulate it.

00:29:58 Speaker_02
The beautiful thing about a simple no is that in the jiu-jitsu game, it gives somebody no weapon that they can take and bring back at you. They can say you're being incredibly selfish. And you can say, I hear that and you might be right about that.

00:30:11 Speaker_02
That's another one. She always says, you might be right about that. You might be right about that. And no.

00:30:16 Speaker_01
And you just keep adding and no after the statement.

00:30:21 Speaker_02
So then there's, but you know, I really, I need you to do this. I'm desperate. And you say, I see that. I see your desperation and no. And one other thing she'll add is you can say, if I change my mind about this, I'll let you know. And no.

00:30:35 Speaker_02
And that's been a game changer for me. So I just did one last week. Somebody who I have a professional relationship said, I want you to do this one hour video interview to promote this thing that I'm doing.

00:30:49 Speaker_02
And old Liz would have thought I owe her that because she did this other thing for me that time. And I checked in with my inner compass and I was like, nothing in me wants to do that.

00:31:01 Speaker_02
And so I just wrote back to her, I said, I'm so sorry, and I'm not going to be able to do this at this time. And she wrote back and pushed in and said, oh, let me clarify. I wasn't clear about why we need it.

00:31:11 Speaker_02
We really need it because right now it's really hard for us to sell things because of COVID-19. And that's why we need it. And I wrote back and said, I hear you and I understand you. And no, and it goes away. They don't tend to come back a third time.

00:31:26 Speaker_02
It really does just stop and let it sit at the no. The more words you add after that, the more entangled you get. But again, I want to make clear, it's hardest closest to home, and it's hardest with family.

00:31:40 Speaker_02
With family, I find if I anticipate that I'm going to be asked something, I really have to practice because it's scary. I have to really practice and be like, and just practice saying, I'm not doing that right now, I'm not coming this year.

00:31:54 Speaker_02
And I'll say it a thousand times, I'll just go for a long walk and I'll just practice it and practice it and practice it. Because as I say, the closer the people are to you, the more difficult it is.

00:32:03 Speaker_05
as a bit of personal digression here, I was working on an entire book about saying no this past summer. And the great irony, of course, is that I came up with all the reasons why I shouldn't write the book in the process of putting it together.

00:32:17 Speaker_05
But what I noticed as I was practicing different ways of saying no is that it's an incredibly clarifying exercise because in a sense it kind of brings to surface the true character of many people you know or people who are attempting to reach you.

00:32:38 Speaker_05
And what I found surprising, and maybe I shouldn't have found it surprising, is that many of my close friends who I anticipated might be upset would respond with, Dude, good for you for respecting your boundaries. That's a great line. Rock on.

00:32:55 Speaker_05
And they got it. And they were just like, oh, I wish I could say that more myself. Like, good for you. And it was the bonfire that wasn't a bonfire in those cases.

00:33:07 Speaker_02
Did you ever run into a bonfire that was one?

00:33:10 Speaker_05
Oh, for sure. Absolutely. And then I'm like, Oh, wow.

00:33:13 Speaker_05
Because if you what I like about what you said about the or the sort of jujitsu analogy is that if you provide really specific reasons for why you can't do it and you elaborate, you've just created a potential negotiation.

00:33:30 Speaker_01
Right.

00:33:30 Speaker_05
But if you don't provide that grip, that toehold, then one of the few responses someone can give you if they're upset and still want to push is some type of personal ad hominem attack or an accusation. And then you're like, oh, wow. Okay.

00:33:48 Speaker_05
Now it's that kind of party. Okay. This is good to know before we're on stage having a public tiff at God knows what. I mean, this is valuable information. So there were definitely some bonfires and basically people just self immolated because

00:34:03 Speaker_05
I was like, oh wow, you've just proved my internal compass to be extremely accurate.

00:34:09 Speaker_01
Right, this is the reason, and here is the reason I'm not working with you.

00:34:14 Speaker_02
But you don't even need to say that. You just know it because the body knows first. The body knows first, but only always. Only always.

00:34:22 Speaker_02
One of the things that Martha says that I love is she's like, because culture and civilization have overwritten the software system of the body so much and told you that you don't trust that,

00:34:33 Speaker_02
What you trust are the rules and the mores and the fear-based, scarcity-based, grasping, this is how you have to act, this is who you have to be in order to be safe. And meanwhile, your body's like, ew, can health work? No, yuck, ew, gross.

00:34:49 Speaker_02
Or on the opposite side, like, yummy. I want to be over there, I want to be with those people. I don't want to be with these people. And if you think about it, The wisdom of the body is so incredible.

00:35:01 Speaker_02
How many people do you know who said, I knew the night before my wedding that this was a mistake? How many people do you know say that? And yet, why did you do it? Because you were 29 and it was time to get married.

00:35:12 Speaker_02
Because you'd been raised in a culture that said this is what you do now. Because the invitations had been sent out. Because 300 people had gathered. Because your family spent $30,000 on the wedding.

00:35:22 Speaker_02
Like whatever the reasons were, you knew somewhere in that sternum area, you knew. And how much you had to drink that day in order to override that, whatever you had to do in order to shut down that compass that was saying, uh-uh, it's brutal.

00:35:38 Speaker_02
That's the work of the second half of my life. I can say that now that I'm 50, that the only thing I'm interested in anymore is that.

00:35:51 Speaker_05
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health.

00:36:02 Speaker_05
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00:36:15 Speaker_05
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00:36:29 Speaker_05
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00:36:48 Speaker_05
Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.

00:36:56 Speaker_00
And now, Jack Kornfield, one of the key teachers to introduce mindfulness practice to the West, author of 16 books, including Bringing Home the Dharma and Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, and a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California.

00:37:18 Speaker_00
You can find Jack on Instagram at Jack underscore Kornfield.

00:37:24 Speaker_04
Jack, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you, Tim. Pleasure to reconnect.

00:37:29 Speaker_05
I have wanted to have you on the show for some time now, and you've had certainly a tremendous impact on my life, both through your writing and through first-hand, in-person interaction, which I think we'll touch upon.

00:37:44 Speaker_05
But first I wanted to ask you a complete non sequitur from that, which is something that our mutual friend Adam Ghazali suggested I ask you about. And Adam, for people who don't know him, is an incredible PhD, MD, neuroscientist based at UCSF.

00:38:04 Speaker_05
And he suggested that I ask you about hang gliding. And I have no idea why he suggested that, But I'm going to start there, and if it doesn't go anywhere, we can change direction.

00:38:16 Speaker_05
But I figured we would just start with that, and then we're going to rewind the clock. But why did he suggest I ask you about hang gliding?

00:38:22 Speaker_04
Well, it started many years ago when I crossed country with a friend who had a hang glider, and we would stop periodically and go off different hills. And it was fantastic. And then I wanted to do paragliding and started to learn it now.

00:38:39 Speaker_04
because everything is developed and paragliding is a lot more official. You need a license, which I don't have.

00:38:45 Speaker_04
But one of my favorite things is to tandem paraglide and go off the top of places like Grindelwald in Switzerland, where you can take the ski lift up to 9,000 feet and then jump off and float silently like you're a bird.

00:39:03 Speaker_04
Among the clouds, the birds actually do come by sometimes and check out what's this big bird flying up here. You can catch thermals and go way up above the glaciers. It's one of the most thrilling and delicious experiences that I know.

00:39:20 Speaker_04
That's incredible. So you first experienced that at what age?

00:39:23 Speaker_04
Probably in my, you know, late 20s and did some and then sort of put it aside and then I was traveling and teaching in Europe and I saw a sign for paragliding and I said, oh gosh, I really want to do it and started and now each time I go where there's high mountains and paragliding, that's one of my things that I love doing.

00:39:44 Speaker_04
Most people have these dreams once in a while, if you're lucky, a dream of flying. Or maybe in your meditation you have this sense of not being limited to your body. And this is the closest thing that I know because it's absolutely silent.

00:39:57 Speaker_04
And you're floating there. It's quite fantastic. And this is something you still do? Mm-hmm. I hope to do it next summer when I'm back in the Alps. And how old are you now?

00:40:10 Speaker_05
72 72 good man. Well, we're gonna then go back a bit in chronology and Ask about childhood. I would love to hear you describe Your childhood. What were you like as a child?

00:40:24 Speaker_04
What was your upbringing like? Well, first thing to say is I remember when I got to Dartmouth College in 1963, and I called my mom from the pay phone in the dorm sometime in that fall. I didn't call very often, but you know how it is.

00:40:41 Speaker_04
And I said, Mom, I said, guess what? There are a lot of other really fucked up families beside ours. So that's kind of where we start. I had three brothers and my father was a mixture of a tyrant and a really abusive person and a brilliant guy.

00:41:05 Speaker_04
I was born on a Marine base toward the end of World War II and they didn't send him overseas to do, they put him in the medical part of the Marines because he tested so high on their test that they, you know, okay, we're gonna use him for something.

00:41:21 Speaker_04
So he was brilliant in certain ways. He was a biophysicist who helped design some of the first artificial hearts and lungs, worked on the space program, but also did other kinds of weird stuff like work for the army biological weapons people.

00:41:37 Speaker_04
Not making biological weapons, but trying to design things that were kind of computer biological interfaces, all kinds of creative stuff. But he was He had mental problems.

00:41:49 Speaker_04
And so we didn't know when the car pulled in whether we were going to get Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. He would come in and, you know, either he could shout, be abusive, throw my mother down the stairs, rant, chase after us, try to hit us, whatever, or

00:42:05 Speaker_04
we'd get this interesting creative person, but we hardly ever had people come over when he was around during the daytime, the way we would, because you never knew what you would get.

00:42:15 Speaker_04
And so our family life and my family life in some way was also, there were great parts of it because I had my brothers and we were like our own gang. We moved all the time. But we had each other.

00:42:27 Speaker_04
And because he was wacky as well as smart, my father either quit or got fired every year or two. And then we would go from one place to another. I went to, I don't know, eight schools by the time I finished high school.

00:42:41 Speaker_04
So my childhood, partly it was the happy things of roughhousing and being a boy with three other boys and adventures. And then in the basement, my father had all kinds of scientific equipment.

00:42:53 Speaker_04
He had all this stuff from World War II, this huge radio from a battleship that you could tune into, a thousand different shortwave stations around the world and projects he was trying to design stuff. And so we learned from him, you could pretty much

00:43:08 Speaker_04
take or design or do anything in the physical world. And at the same time, I felt like my whole childhood was also colored with the fear of his violence and his unpredictability. And I became kind of a peacemaker in the family.

00:43:28 Speaker_04
We all sort of had our roles and now I do it as a profession, right? Trying to kind of make it a little smoother between my parents so that they'd kill each other. And each of my brothers had their own strategy.

00:43:39 Speaker_04
My twin brother, who was a lot bigger and much more outgoing, played football, which I certainly didn't. I was skinnier and, you know, I was in the orchestra and he was the football player.

00:43:50 Speaker_04
I remember when he first got in a fistfight with my dad because my father was abusing our mom.

00:43:58 Speaker_04
My twin brother had been, as young men sometimes do, he was probably 13, 14, pretty big, and he was looking in the mirror, making muscles in the mirror to see how strong he'd become. Anyway, he just got into a fist fight with my father.

00:44:14 Speaker_04
And I was both thrilled and terrified, but it worked in some way because the abuse settled down quite a lot after that.

00:44:22 Speaker_04
So his strategy was just to get angry and then later kind of to go his own way somewhat more, although we all have been very close as brothers. So there was that. At the same time, there was a lot of interest, intellectual interest.

00:44:37 Speaker_04
So we read and learned about all kinds of things. Both my parents were really interested in the world around us.

00:44:45 Speaker_04
So it was sort of this next thing of the gift of being together with my brothers and a mom who was basically pretty nurturing, although she kept trying to leave him and never got it together.

00:44:57 Speaker_04
I think it was too scary in the 50s to have four boys, you know, no job. And so we were in the middle of this and the kind of healing that it took, it took a long time to do the inner healing work from the pain of my family.

00:45:13 Speaker_04
And I remember when I became a Buddhist monk and I was sitting these first years with my teacher, Ajahn Chah, in the forest monasteries of Thailand, on the border of Thailand and Laos.

00:45:27 Speaker_04
And I'd be sitting quietly, and then some of these memories or energy would come, or I remember one monk who had a pot near mine in the forest, did something that annoyed me, and I just got enraged inside.

00:45:42 Speaker_04
And I went to the teacher and I said, I'm really getting angry here. And he smiled. He said, yeah, where do you think that comes from or something like that? And I said, well, I don't know. I said, I thought I was a peaceful guy.

00:45:56 Speaker_04
I was never going to be like my father. I won't, you know, I'll be peaceful. But it turned out I just stuffed all that stuff. And so when I told it, my teacher about it, he said, good. He said, go back in your hut. It's the hot season.

00:46:08 Speaker_04
You got a little tin roof and close the doors and windows and put all your robes on. And if you're going to be angry, do it right.

00:46:15 Speaker_04
Sit in the middle of that, you know, and sit in the middle of the fire and don't be so afraid of it because if you're afraid of it, you're just going to keep stuffing it. And on the other hand, or if you're afraid of it, it'll just explode.

00:46:26 Speaker_04
There's another way to be with it. And so that was the beginning of some healing just to realize that I could actually tolerate the suffering and the energy that was in my, still carried from trauma in my body and heart.

00:46:40 Speaker_05
So we're going to absolutely come back to Ajahn Chah because I have many questions on that chapter in your life. But just so that I can create the proper visual in my own head.

00:46:51 Speaker_05
So you sat there in your hut in the sweltering heat with all of your robes on. Were you angry in silence? Were you yelling?

00:47:00 Speaker_04
I was pretty much angry in silence. And that's an interesting question. You know, in the monastery, the culture was not much that you would yell. You could go somewhere out in the forest and yell. It wasn't decorous or something.

00:47:12 Speaker_04
People go, what the hell's wrong with that monk? So mostly I was sitting in silence and then scenes would come and I would realize, wow, I thought I was peaceful in every cell of my body.

00:47:24 Speaker_04
I also carry both the pain and anger of my childhood and my father, and just the anger that comes with being a human being, a human incarnation. And I was never going to have that, but of course there was.

00:47:36 Speaker_04
And it lasted, you know, this was, I had days of, and actually much longer, weeks or months of waves of this coming, and learning how to be present for it and not get overwhelmed by it. So I want to backtrack

00:47:51 Speaker_05
and then connect those dots, so between childhood and ending up in Thailand. You mentioned Dartmouth earlier, and from what I've read at least, you were initially pre-med and then ended up Asian Studies.

00:48:05 Speaker_05
Could you describe that experience in Dartmouth or how you went from pre-med to Asian Studies?

00:48:14 Speaker_04
Well, you know, we all get turned in these mysterious ways in our life. We think we're going in one direction and then something happens unexpectedly and a gateway opens. So I was

00:48:29 Speaker_04
coming from an organic chemistry class to the class that I'd signed up for out of interest on Asian studies or Asian philosophy or something. And it was an old professor, Dr. Wing Sit Chan, who'd come up from Harvard.

00:48:46 Speaker_04
He was kind of emeritus there and he even sat cross-legged sometimes, you know, in the front of the room and would talk about Lao Tzu and Taoism and they talk about Buddhist teachings and how the Buddha taught suffering and its causes and its end.

00:49:06 Speaker_04
And that really, all of a sudden, I sat up. There's an end to suffering. And he said, oh, there's all these teachings and practices where you can transform your heart and mind.

00:49:15 Speaker_04
And I became thrilled about it and realized that whatever impulse I had to go to medical school, probably part of it came from wanting to heal myself.

00:49:25 Speaker_04
And so I started to take more and more courses, and then it was the 60s, and I became a card-carrying hippie, card-carrying LSD-taking. hippie, as a matter of fact. And at the end of when I was getting ready to graduate, there was still the draft.

00:49:42 Speaker_04
And I thought, well, I definitely don't want to go over and kill people in a war that I've been protesting against. So I decided to go into the Peace Corps instead and ask them to send me to a Buddhist country where maybe I could find a

00:49:55 Speaker_04
one of those old Zen masters that you read about, and got assigned to Thailand. And when I got there, you could kind of request where you went, and I said, send me to the most remote place you can.

00:50:08 Speaker_04
I wanted adventure, but I also wanted to kind of, reading all those old Zen stories, I wanted to see if that still existed. You know, and there were little detours like being in Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love and things like that.

00:50:21 Speaker_04
Definitely, it changed my life also in a very deep way because for at least for a time, there was a window when people were just giving things away. There was such a sense that the world could be transformed. Some of it, as we know, very, very naive.

00:50:37 Speaker_04
But on the other hand, it also felt like a greater sense of brotherhood and sisterhood than I had ever known, except with my own brothers, who I love a lot, and we've done a lot of things together.

00:50:49 Speaker_04
And I started to feel like there are other ways for me and for the world to be and live. And that was also very wonderful.

00:50:57 Speaker_05
You mentioned a three-letter acronym that we're probably not going to spend too, too much time on, but you and I have had quite a number of conversations where I've wanted to ask you about some of your experiences

00:51:07 Speaker_05
with psychedelics, including LSD, but we've never really gotten into it, so I figure why not do it in front of a few million people.

00:51:12 Speaker_05
The LSD, at that point, your experiences with that, did that inform your decisions at all to then go into the Peace Corps and end up in a remote area?

00:51:24 Speaker_04
It did, and I've written a little bit about it in a couple different of my books, chapters in books I've written, because most Buddhist teachers and Hindu teachers of my generation also started psychedelics.

00:51:38 Speaker_04
You know, myself and almost all my colleagues, you know, in the spiritual industry that I'm in, that was a beginning. And for me, it showed an incredible possibility that all is created out of consciousness and the possibilities of inner freedom.

00:51:54 Speaker_04
And basically, I was able, at the best of it, to see my body and my personality and my history and realize that that's not who I am.

00:52:05 Speaker_04
to become much more the conscious witness of it all, to see, yes, birth and death, and to go through those kind of death-rebirth experiences that can happen at times in a deep session with LSD or death of ego or sense of self or removing and realizing, wow, there's a freedom and a life force that's what we're made of.

00:52:27 Speaker_04
And that profoundly influenced my interest in spirituality, also interest in what the world can be.

00:52:34 Speaker_04
Now, just a few days ago, I was on Maui with my beloved wife, Trudy, and we were visiting, spending time with Ram Dass, who, for listeners that don't know, was the author of this bestseller in the 60s called Be Here Now, and now he's 86, in a wheelchair.

00:52:53 Speaker_04
But Rondas, who had been at Harvard University and was one of the early explorers of LSD before he went to India and became a spiritual teacher, in the living room while we were there two days ago, Roland Fisher, who is one of the senior professors and psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins University Medical School.

00:53:14 Speaker_04
Oh, Roland Griffiths. Roland Griffiths, rather. And Roland laid out all the research that's happening now on psilocybin that he's been doing, and it's success for people, terminal cancer patients, all of

00:53:32 Speaker_04
losing a great deal of the fears that they had, working with people with severe depression.

00:53:40 Speaker_04
And it was a beautiful session because you could hear how these sacred substances and these mind-altering substances, when they're used in the right context, can really transform human beings.

00:53:53 Speaker_04
And NYU, Johns Hopkins, there's a whole series of studies that are happening now that are finally bringing it back into the mainstream.

00:54:02 Speaker_05
So I'd love to underscore just a few things that you mentioned.

00:54:06 Speaker_05
Number one, Ram Dass, for those people who want to do additional reading, formerly known as Richard Alpert, if I'm getting that right, also has a fascinating story coming full circle with psychedelic research.

00:54:21 Speaker_05
beginning, I guess, at Harvard in some respects. So it makes sense to me why Roland's research would be so meaningful to him. And a number of other just quick comments for people.

00:54:32 Speaker_05
Number one is if you're interested in looking into these psilocybin, which is considered the active psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere, I've actually been involved with

00:54:46 Speaker_05
crowdfunding and funding myself some of the research related to treatment-resistant depression at Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffiths as the senior investigator and I'll be posting some updates to that but fascinating work looking at everything from and this is also as you mentioned NYU and at other very well regarded universities alcohol addiction nicotine slash tobacco addiction as you mentioned end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients

00:55:14 Speaker_05
The implications are really profound and the data very, very promising.

00:55:19 Speaker_05
And I wanted to also mention to folks who are perhaps saying to themselves, well, I'm not interested in taking psychedelics myself, that there are people I know, good friends of mine, who do not currently use psychedelics, but had the ego dissolving

00:55:36 Speaker_05
experience of a non-ordinary reality through psychedelics that then led them to become or contributed to them becoming very very diligent meditators and Sam Harris who's a PhD in neuroscience and thought of or very well known as

00:55:51 Speaker_05
an atheist or, you know, one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, along with Richard Dawkins and others, is a very close friend and extremely diligent meditator.

00:56:02 Speaker_05
And he's written about how his psychedelic experiences, which were in some respects very, some of them uncontrolled, and you really have a coin flip there in terms of which direction you can go, but showed him possibilities within his own mind that then led to a very, very, I'm not going to call it devout,

00:56:21 Speaker_05
Although I should, just to bother him, maybe. Diligent practice. So, I don't want to take us too far off the rails, but you go to Southeast Asia.

00:56:31 Speaker_04
Well, I just want to say one more thing before we move on, because we are talking about this.

00:56:36 Speaker_04
It turns out, for those who are listening, that set and setting and intention are extremely important if one uses these psychedelics like psilocybin or something. to set the intention to learn, to open, to have a quiet. It's not as a party experience.

00:56:52 Speaker_04
Absolutely. Brings your attention inward and then all the kind of discoveries become right in front of you. But the other thing is that whether it's right for somebody to use psychedelics or to use meditation.

00:57:07 Speaker_04
These are all invitations to step back and see the mystery of your life.

00:57:14 Speaker_04
Because we tend to live in the daily minutiae and checking off our list of tasks that we have to do and completing them, our work or eating or all the kind of things that make up a day. And we go on to automatic.

00:57:29 Speaker_04
And whether it's meditation or other spiritual disciplines, or for some people, it also can just be that they have what in Greek is called a katabas, a blow.

00:57:40 Speaker_04
You know, somebody close to them gets cancer or is dying, or they have some accident or something, and all of a sudden you step back and you realize, whoa, life is uncertain the way I've been taking it. It's not just checking off the list.

00:57:56 Speaker_04
This is a mystery human incarnation. And what am I gonna do with it? And wow, look at this, how did I get in this body?

00:58:03 Speaker_04
Look at plants and trees and language, the air coming out of your mouth that you shape it different ways and it vibrates a little drum in the ear of someone else. And I can say Golden Gate Bridge and they can envision it.

00:58:15 Speaker_04
And you start to realize that all of it is alive and made of consciousness. And then the whole sense of who you are and what matters begins to shift.

00:58:26 Speaker_04
And you start to realize that life is not just getting through the hoops, but it actually also can be a celebration of the heart, of something that you have to bring to the world that you come out of life. And my friend Lala Doma Sommé, who's a

00:58:43 Speaker_04
West African shaman and medicine man, also true PhDs, kind of remarkable guy.

00:58:49 Speaker_04
He says with the Dagorah people in West Africa that he's from, that they say that every child comes into the world with a certain cargo, is their metaphor, like the cargo ships that ply the rivers of West Africa, and that they're given gifts

00:59:07 Speaker_04
to bring into the world and that we have gifts to bring to this mystery which include opening to it. And as we do, love grows, connection grows, and a whole different way of being in the world happens that we need so much at this time.

00:59:24 Speaker_04
So that's a little interlude there before we move on to your next question.

00:59:30 Speaker_05
I welcome as many interludes as you would like to interject, and I wanted to just ask you to say one more time that it was, I believe, Greek word for... Kathemos, which means a blow.

00:59:41 Speaker_04
It's like something comes and it just sets your life spinning in an entirely different direction.

00:59:46 Speaker_05
Right, like a catalyzing event.

00:59:48 Speaker_04
Exactly.

00:59:49 Speaker_05
I've had a few of those recently that I'd like to selfishly ask you about later, but so I can bookmark just so I can bookmark this name, Stanislav Grof, if I'm saying that correctly? Yes, that's correct.

01:00:01 Speaker_05
When did you meet him, roughly, what age or what date, just so I can come back to it? Because this is another thing I've been meaning to ask you about for a long time and get into, but I haven't had the chance.

01:00:12 Speaker_04
There's two things to say. When I came back from the monastery, and now it's, you know, I guess the year that I connect with Stan was maybe 1973, I made two really important connections. I came back and started a psychology in graduate school.

01:00:29 Speaker_04
I was in Boston, and first really important connection happened when I went to a meeting of the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and there was this

01:00:39 Speaker_04
guy who looked like he didn't look just like the straight psychologist, and it turned out he'd just come back from India not long before, named Dan Goldman, who was a graduate student at Harvard, and he'd projected on the screen this Tibetan wheel of

01:00:55 Speaker_04
birth and death that you see in the Tibetan thangkas, that normally would be taken as some kind of primitive, iconic symbol. And he said, no, no, no, this is a psychological diagram.

01:01:06 Speaker_04
The Buddha was actually, more than anything else, he was a scientist of the mind.

01:01:12 Speaker_04
and a profound psychologist, and here is how craving turns into contentment, and here's how aggression can be transformed into powerful energy to heal yourself and others.

01:01:24 Speaker_04
And he was going through this diagram, and I went and I talked to him, and he said, oh, you, you've come back from monastery, you've got to come over. And so he took me to David McClellan, who had been the chairman of the

01:01:37 Speaker_04
social science and psychology department at Harvard at that time, the one who hired Tim Leary and Ram Dass and then later had to fire them for their LSD work. And his house, he and his wife Mary were Quakers, his

01:01:52 Speaker_04
This home was a kind of soiree where Ram Dass and Tibetan lamas like Chögyam Trungpa and I think Krishnamurti and various spiritual figures would come. People were going to India and coming back.

01:02:06 Speaker_04
And I connected with this whole group of folks who have now been friends for 45 years.

01:02:12 Speaker_04
Richie Davidson was another that I met there who's now one of the preeminent neuroscientists in the world on studying contemplative neuroscience and affective emotional neuroscience. It was a whole collective of people.

01:02:26 Speaker_04
Dan Goldman who wrote Emotional Intelligence that sold 10 million copies and many others. And then I got a job working for an Esalen-like growth center in Boston at that time, because I was excited at all the new gestalt bioenergetics.

01:02:41 Speaker_04
What are the things that are transformative here? And they asked me to help set up programs. And I thought, well, who do I want to meet?

01:02:49 Speaker_04
So I set up a program with John Lilly and I set up a program with Stan Groff, who was still at Johns Hopkins and married at that time, just married to Joan Halifax, Joan Groff. And we became friends.

01:03:02 Speaker_04
And so we have Stan and I have now worked together for 45 years.

01:03:07 Speaker_04
I went out to join him at Esalen for many, many years, spending many months together, helping during his development of the holotropic breath work that's a powerful breath transformation. And he has been a partner and a heart friend for exploration.

01:03:25 Speaker_04
And we've traveled or we've taught in Russia and in and places in Europe and various places around the world.

01:03:33 Speaker_05
So this is definitely a path that we're going to come down and dig further into.

01:03:40 Speaker_05
But I'm going to steer us to Ajahn Chah, because I want to know, how do you land with the Peace Corps in remote, well, what most people would consider remote corner of the world, and end up finding a living master. How does that actually happen?

01:03:56 Speaker_05
I don't know, but I assume you didn't speak Thai at the time.

01:03:59 Speaker_04
I did actually, because the Peace Corps, and then I had to learn Lao. I did because the Peace Corps at that time, it was very early in the Peace Corps, had really good language training. They borrowed it from the Monterey Language Institute. So

01:04:16 Speaker_04
You know, initially I didn't speak that well, but because I'd also studied Chinese at Dartmouth, it came more easily.

01:04:23 Speaker_04
And I was there working in the rural health department on tropical medicine teams, mostly malaria, but also typhoid and teams going out to different villages and drawing blood and giving out medicine and things like that. And then somebody said,

01:04:39 Speaker_04
There's a Western monk in this province we heard about. Do you want to meet him? I said, of course I do. So I went to this little mountain and walked up 2,000 steps to the old Cambodian temple ruined at the top.

01:04:52 Speaker_04
And there was this very interesting guy who had just finished a couple of years before the first Peace Corps, I think, in Borneo, and then got interested in Buddhism and come and ordained as a monk. And I talk with him.

01:05:05 Speaker_04
He's now, he's named Ajahn Sumedho is his monk's name because he's still a monk. And he became quite famous in Thailand and then became the abbot of a temple in England. And I became friends with him. And he said, oh, I found a really fine teacher.

01:05:21 Speaker_04
He said, you know, a lot of them, they kind of take you, you're a Westerner and they treat you special. He said, this guy doesn't treat you any differently than anyone else. He just wants you to do the work. you know, and learn the deepest way you can.

01:05:33 Speaker_04
And he's in this forest, jungle, and I said, I'm going there. So, having heard that, I went and I visited Ajahn Chah, and he was a little bit like the Dalai Lama.

01:05:44 Speaker_04
He was funny and wise and very warm-hearted, but also very strict and very demanding, but he did it in this loving way. And I thought, okay, this is the real deal. This guy looks like what I was reading about in all those Zen stories.

01:06:00 Speaker_05
I read that he said to you, and I'd love for you to tell us when he said this to you, I hope you're not afraid to suffer. If that's true, when did he say that and why did he say that?

01:06:14 Speaker_04
So I visited him a number of times and told him I was going to become a monk. And then I ordained in a village where I was living in the Peace Corps. People wanted me to do that. It was a beautiful ritual.

01:06:26 Speaker_04
And then after some days made my way down to his temple, that was his opening gambit. I'm walking in into the gates and I see him, I bow and I say, I'm here. And he looks at me, you know, kind of leans back a little, a little skeptical.

01:06:43 Speaker_04
He said, all right, I hope you're not afraid to suffer. Welcome. It was like, you know, you didn't come here just to kind of do some interesting, cool anthropological experiment or something like that.

01:06:55 Speaker_04
If you're going to do it, we're going to put you through the training. And he did. But, you know, there was like this little smile as he said it, like, OK, are you up for it? All right, dude, come on in.

01:07:07 Speaker_05
And what did the training consist of? What were some of the first things that you had to do and then what was the suffering that he alluded to? What were some examples?

01:07:17 Speaker_04
Okay, so of course the first training was just how to walk around and not have my robe, you know, fall on the ground and embarrass me and everyone. So they all loved it. Oh yeah, right, look at the Westerners.

01:07:29 Speaker_04
He can't even chew gum and wear his robes right or whatever. So part of it was just the unfamiliarity of it culturally and otherwise. There were the two kinds of suffering. The big suffering, of course, was being alone with my own mind.

01:07:43 Speaker_04
I mean, there you go, you know, having to do hours of meditation when I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And then as I talked about with anger or fear or confusion or, you know, all those kind of states,

01:07:58 Speaker_04
learning to deal in a very conscious and mindful way, and then more importantly, in a compassionate way, in a kind and loving way, with all the energies that make up my humanity and our humanity.

01:08:12 Speaker_04
And that means when you sit and you get quiet, anything unfinished in your heart will also come up, all the unfinished business.

01:08:19 Speaker_04
So, you know, relationships that I'd had that ended badly in college or certainly stuff from my childhood and family, dreams that I carried, things fulfilled and not, all that comes up.

01:08:33 Speaker_04
Yeah, my friend Annie Lamott, humorist and writer, says, my mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone.

01:08:40 Speaker_04
And there's some way in which in community, sitting together with others in meditation and then sitting in my hut, it was really facing myself.

01:08:49 Speaker_04
and my full humanity, that was probably the most difficult thing, because then you get insanely bored or insanely restless, and then how do you deal with all those energies? Normally when we're restless or bored, what do we do?

01:09:02 Speaker_04
We open the refrigerator or go online or something, because we can't be with our own loneliness or our own fear. So that was the inner, and then there's the outer ones. And the outer ones were things like,

01:09:18 Speaker_04
Getting up, the bell would ring at 3.30 in the morning, and I'm not an early riser by nature. I'd go, oh God, here we go. And we'd walk through, it was actually very beautiful.

01:09:28 Speaker_04
Then we'd walk through the forest at night, either by moonlight or sometimes you'd have a tiny little flashlight.

01:09:35 Speaker_04
And in one of the forest monasteries where there were a lot of cobras, we'd have a little stick and you'd tap the path so that the snakes would know you or feel you coming and move out of the way, wouldn't step on them.

01:09:47 Speaker_04
And then we would sit silently for a couple of hours and then do an hour of chanting on a hard stone floor, mind you, where everybody else seemed comfortable and my body was killing me.

01:09:58 Speaker_04
And then at least once a week, we would sit up all night with the teacher And he would sit there comfortably meditating, maybe talking with another colleague that would come, and we'd just be sitting and meditating.

01:10:10 Speaker_04
And he would kind of peek over at us like, how are you doing? I go, God, it's been four hours. When is he going to let us go back to sleep? And he didn't.

01:10:18 Speaker_04
You know, so sitting up all night, it got very cold in the cold season, and it got insanely hot in the hot season. And somehow learning to live extremely simply with a set of sandals and a set of robes and an alms bowl.

01:10:37 Speaker_04
And then you would eat what you got offered in the village, and we would share it in that monastery with others around us. And sometimes you'd get

01:10:46 Speaker_04
nice food, and a lot of times in the dry season, you'd get really, really skimpy food and there wasn't that much to eat.

01:10:54 Speaker_04
And so, picture a day where you get up at 3.30 in the morning, you sit for a couple of hours in meditation and do longer than an hour long chanting on a stone floor.

01:11:04 Speaker_04
Then it's getting dawn and you walk barefoot, three miles, five miles, ten miles with an alms bowl and a handful of other monks. and get your food and come back, whatever you've been offered, and that's the food for the day.

01:11:16 Speaker_04
And then you go back to your meditation or to the work of the monastery of sewing robes or drawing water from the well, and it's muggy and 105 degrees hot season. Then you go back and you join in the community for more meditation.

01:11:33 Speaker_04
And then the teacher smiles and says, how are you doing? And then other kinds of practices, for example, we had a charnel ground there. I'm sorry, a what ground?

01:11:42 Speaker_04
A charnel ground, which is where, a cremation ground, where people, bodies would be burned, and so on occasion would go to a cremation and then sit up all night. and contemplate death.

01:11:56 Speaker_04
Look at the body and then watch as it burned, and then do these meditations where you would reflect on, well, this is going to happen to the body that you're inhabiting as well. Who do you think you are?

01:12:06 Speaker_04
Do you think you're this physical body made of hamburgers or lettuce or whatever you happen to eat? Are you hamburgers and lettuce? Or are you your feelings? Or are you your thoughts? Who are you really born into this body? Like Koans. So, anyway.

01:12:26 Speaker_05
And the alms bowl, so you'd be, did you eat whatever you gathered in one meal? Was it spread throughout the day?

01:12:36 Speaker_04
One meal. One meal. You eat one meal a day, which makes you very easy to, makes your life easy. And at the same, at that monastery things were shared. There was other monasteries I stayed in where you would just eat what was put in your own bowl.

01:12:49 Speaker_04
And you didn't have to eat everything that was given to you. There were some things that were you know, in the dry, poor season, there would be curries that were too hot for me to eat because they use the chilies to kind of... Preserve the food.

01:13:03 Speaker_04
Preserve the food.

01:13:05 Speaker_04
But, you know, when it was a really poor village or something, you know, they would have to make curries out of field mice or field rats or bats, or, you know, I remember eating, there was a curry that was made out of basically grasshoppers that had come spread through and there was this whole big

01:13:23 Speaker_04
insect, wave of insects that were eating the crops and they collected them all and made a curry out of them. So, you know, okay, this is what you get for your food today, dude.

01:13:33 Speaker_05
I think I might take the grasshoppers over the bats, but... Yeah, well...

01:13:38 Speaker_04
Yeah, when it's really highly spiced you can't tell what is mystery. That's true. We all had mystery meat in middle school anyway. This was like mystery meat on steroids.

01:13:47 Speaker_05
Exotic mystery meat. What was the longest period of time that you spent in silence during that time in Thailand?

01:13:55 Speaker_04
Well then I went to a Burmese monastery because I wanted to do this very intense meditative training and I spent about 500 days, so less than a year and a half in silence, with the exception that I would talk to the teacher every couple of days.

01:14:11 Speaker_04
I'd have a little 10-minute conversation about what was happening in my meditation. And the rest, I was just sitting and walking 18 hours a day when I could or so, sleeping a little bit. And I remember at one point, It was relatively early on.

01:14:29 Speaker_04
I'd been sitting and walking and pushing it as young men do, you know, I'm going to get enlightened and all of that, and not moving, sitting with a lot of pain, which is also part of what happened at the forest monastery, sitting on a stone floor for hours without moving.

01:14:45 Speaker_04
You really had to learn how to deal with your own physical pain. And I was exhausted from sitting and walking in my little hut that I had for that long retreat. And after a couple months, I thought, I'm really tired. I got to lie down.

01:15:01 Speaker_04
But then I thought, well, but I'm not going to nap for very long because I'm on my way to enlightenment. Whatever. I'm going to do this right. So I said, all right, I'll lie down on the wooden floor rather than on the little mat that I had.

01:15:13 Speaker_04
And that way I won't sleep so long. And I'm lying there. And then I wake up.

01:15:19 Speaker_04
And I get up and I walk very slowly doing this mindful slow walking to the end of the hut and look out the window toward where some of the other monks and the teachers live some way down through the trees.

01:15:32 Speaker_04
And then I turn around and I start walking the other direction in this meditation hut that I had that he could walk probably it was maybe 15, 18 feet long. It was long and narrow. And I see this body lying on the floor.

01:15:49 Speaker_04
And all of a sudden I go, oh, that's me. And then I realized that I'm having an out of the body experience. And what had happened is that I was so intent. I'm not going to sleep long. I'll get up very soon.

01:16:01 Speaker_04
That intention was really strong, but my body didn't want to get up. So I got up. But it wasn't in my body. And I walk very slowly, and I peered down at my body, and I turned around, walked the other way, walked back.

01:16:13 Speaker_04
And then the second time I walked back, I got closer, and then I fell into my body. And I woke up. I said, oh, wow, that's interesting.

01:16:21 Speaker_04
But what I saw out the window wasn't just like a dream, because I was watching my teacher and talking to these other monks. And then I got up again, and that's exactly what was happening.

01:16:32 Speaker_04
And that was the first of a series of all kinds of very interesting experiences that happened.

01:16:37 Speaker_05
What would other examples of those types of unusual experiences be? And was it your time in Burma that found you experiencing these for the first time?

01:16:48 Speaker_04
First of all, the first experiences, even though I had experimented with meditation back in college and so forth were experiences again that came through psychedelics.

01:16:58 Speaker_04
And so I was familiar with all kinds of weird and powerful and mysterious or mystical kind of experiences. But there's something about learning how to navigate it

01:17:10 Speaker_04
without taking a substance and learning that your own consciousness is the field that you can learn to navigate.

01:17:18 Speaker_04
First, all the personality and emotions and history and so forth, but then you start to realize that you're bigger than that, that who you are is not just your thoughts and feelings in your mind.

01:17:30 Speaker_04
And so whether it's out-of-body experience or the experience of vastness and becoming the sky,

01:17:36 Speaker_04
within which everything arises and passes, or the experience of profound silence or of the void where you enter a stillness before experience even arises, or the experience of luminosity where my body would dissolve into light.

01:17:53 Speaker_04
There are times sitting as you get concentrated in samadhi or concentration builds that your whole body and mind open up and, you know, first you get the elements, your body can feel

01:18:04 Speaker_04
heavy like a stone, the earth element, or it can feel so light that you have to open your eyes and make sure you're not floating because it feels like you're floating in the air, or it can be filled with fire and you feel like you're in the middle of a raging fire, or it can get icy cold, you know, or all kinds of vibrations and kundalini energies and chakras start to open, and sometimes it's pleasant and sometimes it's not.

01:18:27 Speaker_04
You know, as deep energies start to move through your body, they also kind of push open the places that are held closed, so that when your heart starts to open in deep meditation, sometimes it feels like you're having a heart attack, physically painful, because all the things that you've held around your heart to protect yourself

01:18:48 Speaker_04
start to loosen, or when the energy hits your throat and it starts to open, weird sounds come out, you know, and then you get to visions that come and the brow chakra, you start to see all kinds of colors and visions and hear things.

01:19:04 Speaker_04
All possibilities of the play of consciousness can start to open after both period of silence, but also of really deeply training attention and concentration.

01:19:16 Speaker_05
These experiences, just to put them in, or at least part of what you said in context for people listening, there are a number of things you mentioned, but one in particular, that opening in the chest that I experienced in the 10-day retreat done at Spirit Rock, for which you are one of the instructors, or the lead instructor, and it was an incredibly powerful experience, and

01:19:44 Speaker_05
Listening to your description of some of the feelings it makes me want to go to the jungle and spend time doing this type of training however the 10-day retreat as you know from first-hand observation and interacting with me was incredibly difficult for me and terrifying it a number of points where I felt like I had crossed a boundary and

01:20:04 Speaker_05
into maybe even madness, where I was fearful I wouldn't be able to return from.

01:20:10 Speaker_05
So I'm curious to know, during that period of time in Thailand and Burma, could be afterwards as well, but when you were in the jungle and doing this very intense work, were there any particular points when you wanted to quit, to go home?

01:20:25 Speaker_04
Oh, absolutely. I mean, and I remember I got What I think was malaria. I had a really high fever and I was sick as a dog and I'm lying in the bottom of my little hut there, high fever and shivering, and Ajahn Chah came to visit me.

01:20:41 Speaker_04
And in the Lao language, and he was also funny and quite blunt, and the Lao language is a very straightforward kind of The sentence structures are fairly simple. So he looked at me and he said, sick, huh? And I said, yeah.

01:20:55 Speaker_04
And he said, hurts all over, huh? I said, it sure does. He said, hot and cold. Yeah. He said, makes you afraid. I nodded. He said, makes you want to go home and see your mother, doesn't it? And I'm nodding there.

01:21:08 Speaker_04
And then he looked at me and he said, you know, this is the jungle fever. This is malaria. We've all had it. But now there's some good medicine. I'll send the medicine monk over and in a couple of days you'll be fine.

01:21:18 Speaker_04
And then he looked at me and he said, you can do this, you know, you can do this. So, I mean, that was an example of wanting to show my mother, what am I doing?

01:21:29 Speaker_05
What kept you going? I mean, I don't want to interrupt, but it's like, what kept you going? I'm imagining 500 days of silence. I could barely handle 10 days.

01:21:37 Speaker_04
You know, Tim, I mean, what's kept you going? What keeps any of us going about things that we care about? I had somehow, I don't know, kind of a wacky, but I think also important

01:21:51 Speaker_04
kind of passion to say, I want to understand, or I've started down this road and I want to see where it goes.

01:21:57 Speaker_04
And I think all of us find at a certain point in our life that there, or if we're lucky, that something really matters and you've done it in your work and your travel. You want to explore what your human capacity is.

01:22:09 Speaker_04
And I'd read these old Zen stories and I want to see if this is true. I want to find out. And then as I started, things started to happen like that out of the body experience and rapture and changes and openings.

01:22:22 Speaker_04
And I realized there's really something to learn here. But there are a couple of other things that I want to add to this. One of them that's the most important is that it turns out that it wasn't and it isn't so much about the actual experiences.

01:22:37 Speaker_04
So Ajahn Chah, my teacher, talked about how in his own training for... the first eight years in the jungle.

01:22:46 Speaker_04
He had been a very ardent meditator and had all kinds of insights in dissolving in samadhi and jhana experiences, all kinds of... Samadhi is awakening? Samadhi is... Nirvana? How would you translate it?

01:23:00 Speaker_04
Samadhi has a lot of meanings as a word, but it can mean profound states of concentration in which the mind dissolves into light or into joy or bliss or becomes absorbed with any one of all kinds of states.

01:23:14 Speaker_04
So he went to the most famous teacher of that time, another Ajahn Ajahn Man, and told him about all these experiences. And the master looked back at him and said, Cha, you missed the point. These are just experiences.

01:23:27 Speaker_04
You know, it's like going to the movies, and you have a romantic comedy, and you have a war movie, and you have a documentary, and you have, you know, a Disney movie. They're just movies on the screen, some pleasant, some unpleasant.

01:23:40 Speaker_04
The only question is, to whom do they happen? Turn your attention back and ask, look to see who is the witness of these, what is the consciousness that is knowing these ever-changing experiences. This is where your liberation will come.

01:24:00 Speaker_04
He said, become, his language, if I translate it, is the one who knows, become the knowing rather than the experiences, and then you can

01:24:09 Speaker_04
tolerate anything and you can respond with love and understanding because you rest in the timeless consciousness which is your true nature.

01:24:19 Speaker_04
So part of what I also learned in meditation and teach is that it's not so much about the experiences, oh I want to have this or that experience. But it's this profound turning back to ask, who am I?

01:24:33 Speaker_04
What is this consciousness itself that was born into this body and that will leave it? We can talk about death at some point if you want. What is this mysterious consciousness itself? So there was that.

01:24:47 Speaker_04
And then I also had the opportunity of being with a few other teachers. And one of the people that I was very close to and inspired me profoundly was a Cambodian monk named Maha Gosananda, who was the Gandhi of Cambodia.

01:25:05 Speaker_04
And when I met him, we were living and training together in a forest monastery in Thailand. And it was during the time that Khmer Rouge came to power and eventually killed two million Cambodians in a kind of genocide.

01:25:18 Speaker_04
He survived because he wasn't in country, but all 19 of his family members were killed. His temple burned. All the Buddhist texts and so forth were destroyed. And when he was able to, he went to the refugee camps.

01:25:33 Speaker_04
Refugees were pouring out of Cambodia by the hundreds of thousands. And he went to the refugee camps on the border of Thailand and Cambodia. I was able to go with him at a certain point.

01:25:46 Speaker_04
And he decided to open a temple in the middle of one of the biggest refugee camps. Here's 50 or 100,000 people, these tiny little bamboo huts.

01:25:55 Speaker_04
And got permission from the UNHCR, High Commissioner of Refugees, and built a platform with a little roof over it and put an altar with a traditional Cambodian Buddha on it and so forth.

01:26:08 Speaker_04
But it was a camp with the Khmer Rouge underground, lots of them. And so they put the word out that if anyone went to be with this monk, when they got out of the camp back to Cambodia, they would all be shot.

01:26:22 Speaker_04
So we wondered who would, if anyone would come, and went through the camp the day, the opening day, with a big kind of temple gong ringing it, and 25,000 people poured into the central square around this little temple, my God.

01:26:40 Speaker_04
And he, Maha Ghosananda sat there and he was a scholar.

01:26:43 Speaker_04
He spoke 15 languages and he was a, you know, extremely kind-hearted human being who had suffered enormously and had transformed it into the kind of compassion that we think of with the Dalai Lama or something like that.

01:26:59 Speaker_04
In fact, they became friends and Ghosananda became the head of all Cambodian Buddhism. But there he was at this point, sitting, looking out at 25,000 people who had suffered immense traumas.

01:27:13 Speaker_04
And you could see there was a grandmother and the only two surviving grandchildren that she had, or an uncle and one niece. And their faces were the faces of trauma and of survivors. And I thought, all right, what is he going to say to them?

01:27:28 Speaker_04
And he sat very quietly for a long time, just in their presence. And then he put his hands together in this kind of modest way and began to chant in the microphone. He had a sound system.

01:27:42 Speaker_04
In Cambodian and in Sanskrit or Pali, the Buddhist language, one of the first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes, hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law.

01:28:02 Speaker_04
And he chanted it over and over in Cambodian and in Sanskrit Pali. And pretty soon the chant was picked up and in a little while 25,000 people were chanting this verse with him.

01:28:18 Speaker_04
And I looked out and they were weeping, many of them because they hadn't heard their sacred chants for years, but also because he was offering them a truth that was even bigger than their sorrows.

01:28:34 Speaker_04
that hatred never ends by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. And they were sitting in the middle of the healing energy of the Dharma, of the teachings of the heart that can liberate us.

01:28:49 Speaker_04
Later on, Goswami Nanda, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times, spent 15 years walking through the killing fields and the mined areas and so forth, leading people on foot back to their village.

01:29:05 Speaker_04
And he said to the refugees, you can't go back in a bus or the back of a truck or something like that. You have to reclaim your land with love.

01:29:15 Speaker_04
And so he would lead a thousand people and he'd be in the front with a bell and a gong and a few other monks. And the whole way back they would be chanting the chants of loving kindness so that by the time they got to their village,

01:29:30 Speaker_04
whatever had been destroyed, there was this sense that they were reclaiming not just the land, but they were reclaiming their own hearts.

01:29:39 Speaker_05
That's a beautiful, really beautiful story. And it prompts me to ask a question that I struggle with answering myself. And it's also a question many of my friends have asked themselves. And I'll take a stab at it.

01:29:54 Speaker_05
How do you decide when to do deep inner work and take an extended period to do that versus being in the world and trying to impact others in the world? And to just provide a little bit of background on that.

01:30:13 Speaker_05
I have friends who are building businesses or building careers of some type, or families, and I at this point do not have wife, kids, or company to build, at least with a large organization, and I've come back from various

01:30:29 Speaker_05
experiments, sojourns, experiences over weeks or months and shared these with them and they've expressed this longing, this deep yearning to do something similar and then they ask this question like how do I how do I best decide if and when to do the deep extended work versus being in the world and I know it might be a false dichotomy you might not have to choose

01:30:52 Speaker_05
But I'll talk a little bit more just to fill the space.

01:30:55 Speaker_05
But I had this experience personally not long ago when I was in South America and had someone telling me in Spanish, which was not their native language, this is an indigenous tribe, but this Apo, this mayor effectively who worked a lot with different plant medicines.

01:31:09 Speaker_05
And he said that he recommended one 15 month diet, very, very strict 15 month period.

01:31:16 Speaker_05
with many different restrictions, no sex, no alcohol, no pork, etc., to develop certain capacities and to practice, in effect, I mean, at certain types of meditative practices. So I struggle with this myself as well.

01:31:31 Speaker_05
How do you suggest someone think through... So did you give up sex and pork?

01:31:36 Speaker_04
I've done it for short periods of time.

01:31:38 Speaker_05
Not a year and a half. I've done it for weeks at a time, but not for 15 months. But what appealed to me about that, definitely not the lack of sex and pork. I like both of those things.

01:31:48 Speaker_05
It was, he said, that's something you only have to do once in your life and it opens doors.

01:31:53 Speaker_05
and it creates opportunities that are difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise so of course that's very tantalizing but fifteen months is a really really long time to opt out of everything else and I'm not saying it has to be fifteen months for some people as you know setting aside even ten days to do a silent retreat is hard and I know there are things that they can do on an ongoing basis like morning meditation and so on but for those who are really drawn to

01:32:20 Speaker_05
this extended deeper work, how do you think about, and that's why Ghosananda brought it up for me, because he'd spent so much time outside of his country and then went back and was really on the ground doing work with locals.

01:32:31 Speaker_05
How do you think about that or suggest someone think about it?

01:32:33 Speaker_04
First my answer is yes.

01:32:36 Speaker_04
Because all of the things that you say are true that yes most cultures encourage at some point human beings most wise cultures human beings to step out of their ordinary roles and their ordinary routine whether you go to the mountains or the ocean

01:32:50 Speaker_04
you know, or a temple or a change, how you're living, so that you can open up to the mystery.

01:32:57 Speaker_04
And so that you also can open up to love, because what I saw with my teachers in Gosananda as well, Ajahn Chah and others, is that they were able to love no matter what.

01:33:06 Speaker_04
It was really because they inhabited consciousness in a very different way than just the small sense of self. There was something, a possibility, that we could live with forgiveness and love and be really effective in the world at the same time.

01:33:22 Speaker_04
So they're not separate. And that's sort of what your question is. How do we live in the world and at the same time, you know, what trainings and how do we connect with something deeper? And part of it is just intuitive.

01:33:34 Speaker_04
You know, Tim, if you have newborn, you know, or young children and so forth, it's not the time to go on a long retreat. Your kids are your practice.

01:33:44 Speaker_04
And in fact, you can't get a Zen master who's going to be more demanding than, you know, an infant with colic, right? Or, you know, or a teenage, you know, certain teenage kids.

01:33:57 Speaker_04
But with the young ones, you know, your Zen master might say, you've got to get up early in the morning. And, you know, once in a while you might roll over. The kid is crying and sick. You have to get up.

01:34:07 Speaker_04
your family needs tending, and you know, if you're even vaguely a responsible and caring parent, that becomes your practice. And if you think, well,

01:34:20 Speaker_04
If only I could be in the Great Zen Temple of Kyoto or an ashram in India or down in the Amazon with Tim taking ayahuasca or whatever plant medicine they give. You know, your kid can be like ayahuasca on steroids.

01:34:34 Speaker_04
Okay, you want to face yourself and your own limitations.

01:34:38 Speaker_04
and your own, you know, you want to look at the small sense of self and find out how to live with a freer and bigger spirit, here, we've just hired someone to live with you and train you full-time.

01:34:51 Speaker_04
And that's an important thing, but what makes it work

01:34:55 Speaker_04
is that you have that intention, not just to soldier through it, but to say, let this be a place where I awaken graciousness and inner sense of freedom and peace as things come and go, where I awaken the possibility of presence

01:35:13 Speaker_04
in pleasure and pain and joy and sorrow and gain and loss and all that changes, that I find an inviolable or a timeless place of becoming the loving witness of it all, becoming the loving awareness that says, yeah, now I'm having a family experience and this is the place to find freedom.

01:35:33 Speaker_04
Because freedom is not in the Himalayas or in the Amazon, the only place it's found is in your own heart exactly where you are. And that's what Gosananda taught and what Arjun Shah, that's really what they wanted to communicate.

01:35:48 Speaker_04
Now that being said, if you have an opportunity and you're drawn to it, like somebody you might, do you know Jack Dorsey? I do, I do know Jack, yeah. So Jack just did his first 10-day meditation retreat. Oh, good for him.

01:36:02 Speaker_04
And he tweeted about it, I wouldn't say it otherwise, but he tweeted about it and it was, you know, one of the top transformative experiences of his life.

01:36:10 Speaker_04
And it's not to say 10 day retreats are the be all and end all, they are very powerful and compelling, even if you have a company.

01:36:18 Speaker_04
Or even if you have a family, there might be a period of a week or some days where you can, in fact, get away and step out of those roles and turn inward. And that can be tremendously valuable. So I think both are important.

01:36:33 Speaker_04
You just have to listen when the time is right.

01:36:36 Speaker_05
There are so many things that this brings up. The first, though, is just a housekeeping for people who may not recognize the name Jack Dorsey. That's Jack at Jack. I believe it is on Twitter of you might then wonder, how did he get that user handle?

01:36:50 Speaker_05
Well, He is one of the people behind Twitter, so he is of Twitter and Square fam among many others. Fascinating, fascinating guy. So people can check him out.

01:37:00 Speaker_05
The comment on the infant being the full-time trainer working with you 24-7 reminded me also, since you mentioned Ram Dass earlier,

01:37:10 Speaker_05
of a quote of his that I like, and I'm going to paraphrase, I'm sure, but, if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family.

01:37:20 Speaker_05
Which I think is a fantastic one, and that's part of the reason, and you know some of the backstory, but we all have, I would imagine, we all have tough things that happen to us, traumatic experiences.

01:37:31 Speaker_05
As children, I have a lot of triggers related to family members typically.

01:37:35 Speaker_05
And for me, the forced break takes a number of different forms, but that includes a trip every six months, an extended trip of two to four weeks with my parents and my brother when he can make it.

01:37:47 Speaker_05
So that's only after being introduced to meditation, something that I would even consider

01:37:53 Speaker_05
as a practice and the last point I'll mention just out of my personal experience is there's a piece of paper I have in my wallet and I've had in my wallet for a few years now. It's getting a bit worn down. It's a piece of construction paper.

01:38:06 Speaker_05
An ex-girlfriend gave it to me who knew me very well and it says, the task that hinders your task is your task.

01:38:14 Speaker_04
Beautiful, beautiful.

01:38:16 Speaker_05
And that's a good reminder for me. I wanted to ask you two questions that are personally important, but also may apply to other people. The first is the question that I believe you mentioned, Ajahn Chah, perhaps others have indicated is the question.

01:38:33 Speaker_05
versus the experiences or movies of these, say, out-of-body experiences and so on. To whom do they happen, right? To whom do they happen?

01:38:41 Speaker_05
Is this a koan, like what is the sound of one hand clapping, where there isn't really an answer you're expected to arrive at? Is the value in contemplating the question more than any answer?

01:38:52 Speaker_04
Yes, both. No. Yes, both and no. Yeah, because it's a profound contemplation for us. One of the great questions of human incarnation, who are we?

01:39:07 Speaker_04
How do we get into this body with the wiggly things on the end of your limbs, you know, and the little bits of claws that you have left, you know, as nails in a

01:39:17 Speaker_04
vestigial tail and a hole at one end into which you stuff dead plants and animals and glug them down through the tube. I mean, the whole incarnation thing is really pretty wild. So who are we? And then how do we make meaning of it?

01:39:31 Speaker_04
This is a lifetime question. In that way, it's a koan. But in another way, it also actually does have an answer. And the answer, of course, has to be found by each person.

01:39:42 Speaker_04
The answer to point toward it, it's very clear that you're not just your salad and vegetables and hamburger body, and you're not just your emotions, I hope, because they're always changing, and your thoughts, good God, I hope you're not your thoughts.

01:39:57 Speaker_04
So you start to realize, all right, What is there then? What is this self? Who am I?

01:40:03 Speaker_04
In neuroscience, you know, there was a Time magazine issue on modern neuroscience where it said neuroscientists have searched throughout the brain over many decades now and come to the conclusion that they cannot find the self located anywhere in the neural mechanisms of the brain and that it simply does not exist.

01:40:24 Speaker_04
But what does exist is a sense of self that's built out of a sense of identification with our thoughts and body and so forth. It's all wise and appropriate. We should be, but we also know that it's not the end of the story.

01:40:40 Speaker_04
And you know it from walking in the high mountains or listening to an extraordinary piece of music or making love or taking some sacred medicine, you know, or sitting at the bedside of someone when they die, that mysterious moment when spirit leaves the body.

01:40:57 Speaker_04
Or when a child is born, we have these moments where we open to mystery and realize that who we are is not just our personal history or our body and emotions.

01:41:08 Speaker_04
that we become the consciousness itself, the witnessing awareness, that we are the loving awareness that was born into this body. And that becomes actually a direct knowing, a direct experience.

01:41:22 Speaker_04
So there is a way in which we also can come home to ourselves. And it brings a tremendous sense of freedom and wellbeing as all the movies of ever-changing life happen to us. So that's why I said yes and no in both.

01:41:40 Speaker_04
And as a little aside, thinking about going back to your family as a practice, twice a year as you're doing, I just want to remind you and the listeners that Buddha and Jesus both had a hard time when they went back to their family.

01:41:54 Speaker_04
So don't think that there's something wrong with you. That's why they call it nuclear family, I think.

01:42:04 Speaker_05
There's another, I guess it's a word more than a question that I'd love to ask you to define and that is compassion or compassionate. When you use that word or those words, what do you mean exactly or what would you like it to mean for people?

01:42:19 Speaker_04
I would like to distinguish compassion from empathy and I'll use a simple illustration. If you're on the playground and you see a kid being bullied, and you feel, oh, that must feel terrible, that hurts. That's an empathy.

01:42:38 Speaker_04
And empathy can be useful, it also can be, you can get overwhelmed by empathy if you don't know what to do with it, but there's some way in which you start to feel resonating, because we are not limited to these bodies, we are actually an interconnected system of consciousness, and I'll talk about that a little bit more.

01:42:59 Speaker_04
in a minute, but we all know whether it's mirror neurons from neuroscience or the field of presences, you know, scientists like Dan Siegel talk about extended presence, that we can feel empathy with one another when someone's sad, someone's angry, someone's hurting.

01:43:17 Speaker_04
Compassion is the next step. You see or recognize, you feel And then you care. You care about it and you want to, if you can, do something that helps.

01:43:28 Speaker_04
So that you see the kid being bullied and you realize, I want to tell the teacher or the principal or I want to just walk over there and say something or intervene to help stop it. And so compassion, it's called the quivering of the heart.

01:43:43 Speaker_04
when it wants to move to alleviate the suffering of yourself, because you can have self-compassion, that's very important, or of those around you.

01:43:52 Speaker_04
And it's born into the earliest studies of infants, you know, at Yale and various places like that, show that even very, very, very small children have this resonance and this kind of care. And so it's not shut down in us.

01:44:08 Speaker_04
We're a species that's interconnected, and we care for one another. And this is your birthright, this natural compassion. And through practice and meditation, you can reawaken it, you can extend it, and it can become your way of

01:44:24 Speaker_04
living and moving in the world.

01:44:26 Speaker_04
As a little aside, and I'll just bookmark this one, just got back from a conference with our dear friend Adam Ghazali, our mutual friend, Richie Davidson, who's another of the most famous neuroscientists, especially in this area.

01:44:41 Speaker_04
and a number of other, some contemplatives and neuroscientists and some technologists from the valley in BC, talking about how to build compassion into our interface with the technological world, compassion tech.

01:44:56 Speaker_04
Starting from the very simplest things of projects like, can you build a Fitbit for compassion? where instead of your body, where you can either note moments of care around you or in yourself, or be prompted to care for yourself.

01:45:11 Speaker_04
You know, or when you say to Siri or Alexa, you know, I'm feeling lonely or and so forth. What kind of response do you get from the algorithms and all of that?

01:45:22 Speaker_04
Because in the UK, England just appointed their first minister of loneliness for the country. And you'd think it was a joke. But it's not. It's like an old Beatles song, All the Lonely People.

01:45:35 Speaker_04
There are 10 million lonely people in England, they've estimated. And it's, you know, it's for isolation and loss of capacity and health and all kinds of reasons that loneliness makes things way worse.

01:45:46 Speaker_04
But there's some way in which compassion is that which connects us. And it's a beautiful thing, even if you walked on the street and you see someone, you know, who's struggling and so forth. It doesn't mean you have to fix the whole world.

01:46:00 Speaker_04
That's not your job. That would be egotistical. But you can reach your hand out and mend the things that you can. You can tend the things that you can. And you can do it not because, oh, you pity them, those poor people, but because they're your family.

01:46:15 Speaker_04
You recognize that we are common humanity, we're in this together.

01:46:20 Speaker_05
I'd like to build on that and preface it with a comment on the text. You mentioned collaborating with Adam and at least discussing the potential of combining or utilizing technology to help people to

01:46:34 Speaker_05
Develop and harness compassion and some folks listening might be like, oh, come on.

01:46:38 Speaker_05
That's so pie in the sky But I'd like to point out that you've already collaborated successfully with Adam on software like Metatrain M-e-d-i-t-r-a-i-n which was one of the tools Adam has used in his n of 1 or n of 2 experiments in

01:46:56 Speaker_05
rejuvenating his mental capacity to I want to say in in his 20s and Adams Adams one of those guys you can't tell if he's 28 or 45 he's just a silver fox who always looks young so I don't know how old he is but he's not 22 but the Mediterranean was one of the tools that he utilized I don't remember the the name that he used for this run of experiments you might know the training that he did neuroman or something like that

01:47:20 Speaker_05
was very, very successful. So you already have a track record of collaborating successfully with neuroscientists and technologists. On the compassion front, I'd love to use that as a segue to loving kindness. And by way of personal example,

01:47:37 Speaker_05
I failed, well failed is a strong word, I quit, I stopped meditating after many many attempts, had a very absurdly high number of false starts over many years and it really stuck after a number of experiments and experiences I had doing three or four day trainings with say Transcendental Meditation and having the social accountability, being accountable to someone else is very helpful, but another turning point was experimenting with

01:48:06 Speaker_05
loving-kindness meditation and I think in part it succeeded because it took the focus off of me me me III and Allowed me to focus on others, but I'd like to read a brief paragraph from a profile of you in the New York Times is from 2014 and feel free to correct anything that is incorrect, but I'll give it a read first and

01:48:31 Speaker_05
And I quote, in the West, Kornfield says, quote, we encounter a lot of intense striving ambition and a lot of self-criticism, self-judgment and self-hatred.

01:48:40 Speaker_05
Concerned, he initially turned to the Dalai Lama for advice, but self-hatred was such a foreign concept to the Tibetan Buddhist that he wasn't able to offer any real insight.

01:48:48 Speaker_05
Over time, Kornfield and his colleagues began to believe that Americans needed particular meditation practice closely linked to the concepts of self-forgiveness and loving-kindness, a training in the unconditional acceptance of imperfection.

01:49:00 Speaker_05
Without such a foundation, says Kornfield, meditation can easily become, and this is the part that I underlined and started, Without this foundation, says Kornfield, meditation can easily become yet another form of striving.

01:49:11 Speaker_05
Quote, another thing you do to make yourself better, end quote, instead of a path to true contentment.

01:49:15 Speaker_05
Could you please describe for folks what loving kindness meditation practice looks like and elaborate in any way that you feel might be useful or helpful for folks?

01:49:26 Speaker_04
Yeah, that meeting which was some decades ago with the Dalai Lama. Yeah, he didn't understand when we talked about self-hatred. He couldn't even, there's no word for it in Tibetan. Back and forth with his translator. What does this mean?

01:49:39 Speaker_04
Finally, he looked up and he said, but this is a mistake. Why would anyone do this? But then he asked how many of you, there was a group of us who were teachers that had experienced this and almost everyone raised their hand.

01:49:50 Speaker_04
So we see that when people begin in our culture, in the West, to meditate or to turn inward really, that it's very common to encounter a lot of self-criticism, self-judgment, or even self-hatred.

01:50:08 Speaker_04
And there are all the causes from our, these are all kind of conditioning that we got from our childhood, our education, and so forth. But what it means is that you're sitting there saying, I'm not doing it right, I'm no good.

01:50:21 Speaker_04
You turn meditation into one other thing that you don't do right, because you can't control your mind. The truth is that you can't control your mind easily. That's not the point.

01:50:31 Speaker_04
There's a different way of approaching your mind, which gives you tremendous capacities, but it's not, oh, I have to stop my thinking, or I don't want to have these feelings, and I hate having all these judgments. I don't want to be so judgmental.

01:50:44 Speaker_04
I hate this judging mind. What is it? It's just more judgment. So instead, as you become first able to become the loving witness, the mindful loving awareness that says, oh, this is the judging mind, and it's been trying to protect me.

01:51:00 Speaker_04
Thank you for trying to protect me. I don't need you now. Thank you. All of a sudden, there's a distance from the painful or destructive or self-critical thoughts simply by witnessing them with loving awareness and acknowledging them.

01:51:15 Speaker_04
This becomes the gateway to the practice of loving kindness and self-compassion. And very often people can't do it for themselves. They feel that's too much of a stretch. Like, why would I wish myself well? It feels egotistical.

01:51:30 Speaker_04
And so the way that this practice begins skillfully for such folks is instead to think of someone that you really care about a lot and to picture them, remember them, put them in your mind's eye.

01:51:47 Speaker_04
And feel the kind of well-wishing you would want for them. You know, may they be protected and safe from difficulty. May they be held in loving kindness. May they be well, healthy, strong. and you wish them that may they be happy.

01:52:05 Speaker_04
And you do this for a time, a kind of inner well-wishing, and also maybe you feel as you think of this person that you care about, you let yourself also tune into the measure of sorrows they have, the struggles that every human being has.

01:52:22 Speaker_04
And it tenderizes your heart as you think of them, because you don't want them to suffer. You feel a kind of rising of compassion and care. So may they hold themselves in compassion, may they be safe and protected and well.

01:52:36 Speaker_04
And you do that with one or two people that you care about for a time.

01:52:40 Speaker_04
And then you can imagine, even as I'm describing this and you following your own heart, you can imagine these two loved ones looking back at you with the same kindness and saying, just as you wish us protection and safety and happiness and well-being and compassion, they gaze at you and they say, you too, may you be safe and protected and may you be filled with

01:53:10 Speaker_04
tender compassion for yourself and kindness. May you two be healthy and well, and may you be happy. They want you to be happy.

01:53:21 Speaker_04
I think about when I'm doing this, I'm visualizing some loved ones, and I know that as I do it, I can feel they want that for me.

01:53:29 Speaker_04
And then finally, as you feel that from these loved ones, you can put your hand on your body or your heart even if you like, and take it in and then begin to realize that you can wish this for yourself.

01:53:42 Speaker_04
May I hold all of the joys and sorrows of my life with tenderness and kindness. May I hold my struggles with compassion. May I be filled with loving kindness and loving awareness. May I be safe and protected. May I be well. strong or healed.

01:54:03 Speaker_04
And as you repeat these simple intentions that have been done for thousands of years, it's as if your cells are listening.

01:54:12 Speaker_04
And this is the research of people like Liz Blackburn and Alyssa Epple, who Liz Blackburn got the Nobel Prize for discovering the telomerase and the telomeres at the end of the caps and the DNA. It turns out that your cells listen.

01:54:28 Speaker_04
to your heart and to your intention that consciousness affects your body.

01:54:33 Speaker_04
And little by little, even though it can bring up its opposite, I hate myself, I've never been good enough, and you see all those and you say, thank you for trying to protect me, I appreciate that, may I be well, may I be safe, may I be held in love.

01:54:47 Speaker_04
And little by little, like water on a stone, it starts to soften the places that are holding your lack of self-forgiveness, your lack of care, and loving kindness starts to grow in you. And it's a very beautiful practice.

01:55:02 Speaker_04
There's lots of places you can find it in my work and teachers like Sharon Salzberg and Emma Chodron and Tara Brach and so forth.

01:55:11 Speaker_05
Do you have any guided loving-kindness meditations or audio that you can recommend people listen to?

01:55:18 Speaker_04
I do, they can go on my website, JackKornfield.com. I think they will be on there.

01:55:24 Speaker_04
I do know for sure, I have a whole series of great programs with Sounds True, SoundsTrue.com, that include meditations on the mind vast as the sky, meditations on compassion and loving kindness. And I did a book, one of the books I've done is called

01:55:40 Speaker_04
A Lamp in the Darkness, and it contains, I think, eight or nine different guided practices that you can get either with it on the CD, but you can get it as a download, basically.

01:55:51 Speaker_04
And Sounds True also has that, and it has a compassion practice, and a grounding practice, and a vast sky-like mind practice, and so forth. So you can look for all of those.

01:56:02 Speaker_04
The beautiful thing is that you can learn this, and I was, a couple of years ago, invited to be part of the first White House Buddhist leadership gathering. There were 120 Buddhist leaders from around the country from different communities.

01:56:16 Speaker_04
I don't think that's going to happen again very soon, but there it was. One could hope.

01:56:21 Speaker_04
And most of the communities did beautiful things that were involved in soup kitchens and tending the homeless and projects to support healing for whether it was malaria or other diseases in different other parts of the world and so forth.

01:56:37 Speaker_04
All kinds of great stuff. and certainly meditation.

01:56:42 Speaker_04
And when I got to talk, which was kind of a summary talk toward the end of it, I mentioned that in this historical record, whether it's true or not, the texts and so forth describe the Buddha meeting with kings and princes and ministers and so forth, and probably if the Buddha were

01:56:59 Speaker_04
were around now, he'd go to the White House if he were invited. He certainly would have met with Obama and who knows now. And he had advice about why society, which he would give to leaders.

01:57:08 Speaker_04
And he'd say, if you can train your people to meet one another with respect, to listen with respect to differences, and to come together peacefully listening to one another, then your society will prosper and not decline.

01:57:24 Speaker_04
And if your society tends the vulnerable among them, the young people, the old people, those who are sick, it will prosper and not decline. And if your society tends the environment around it in a healthy way, it will prosper and not decline.

01:57:40 Speaker_04
These are principles of compassion and wise society that you could read perhaps in a number of great traditions from the Iroquois nation or from the Taoist sages. But here's the beautiful piece.

01:57:52 Speaker_04
Yes, these are good things, meeting in harmony and discussing in harmony and being respectful for one another and so forth. There are practices that you can teach and learn that develop this capacity.

01:58:06 Speaker_04
So that in our elementary schools now, you know, through organizations like CASEL, which is a consortium for social and emotional learning that's worked in, you know, 10,000 schools, kids learn social and emotional learning.

01:58:22 Speaker_04
They learn compassion and it changes their lives. They're better academically. And all these kids carry the troubles of our times. They hear the news, they see the trouble even in their own family.

01:58:33 Speaker_04
to teach you how to steward your own heart from when you're young.

01:58:38 Speaker_04
And then these capacities are now being incorporated as we know mindfulness-based stress reduction in clinics and hospitals and businesses and there's the mindfulness teachers when the Seahawks won the championship or the Chicago Bulls and the LA Lakers when there were championship teams.

01:58:55 Speaker_04
They had a They had a meditation coach, a mindfulness coach, George Mumford, a good friend, and that these capacities can be learned wherever we are and they transform our life.

01:59:06 Speaker_04
It's not just by accident or that you have this beautiful experience on the mountains or making love, but you can make that alive for you through these trainings every day, every part of your life.

01:59:18 Speaker_05
Jack, there was a question I was planning on asking at some point anyway, and I think this is a good segue, which is, how can you get a busy person hooked on mindfulness practice? What would be a first step or how to start?

01:59:31 Speaker_05
And since we're talking about loving-kindness, I would like to give a bit of a hard sell for loving-kindness meditation as one option. I recall, perhaps it was two years ago, I was really beating myself up.

01:59:43 Speaker_05
And for people who don't know this about me, I've spent the majority of my life being my own worst enemy in terms of inner dialogue, being extremely brutal and hypercritical and loathsome of myself in so many different respects.

01:59:59 Speaker_05
And I was going through a particularly intense and difficult time with that inner critic, just ruthlessly. beating myself up and at that point another friend of mine chade mangtan who Created the search inside yourself classic Google.

02:00:15 Speaker_05
He was a very early up engineer Which became the most oversubscribed class for employees at Google recommended that I take a look at loving-kindness meditation And and I didn't have any particularly sophisticated approach to it But I decided with nothing to lose and that I was having so much trouble during that period sitting still

02:00:34 Speaker_05
and trying to focus on, say, the breath or anything like that, that at night, this happened to coincide with book deadline, probably not pure coincidence that my beating myself up was exacerbated during that time. That was a few years ago.

02:00:49 Speaker_05
And I began at night, in my case, when I would take a shower at night or sit in a sauna.

02:00:54 Speaker_05
I very often go to hotels to write, which is something Maya Angelou and a few others convinced me might be a good idea, that I would consider two people, just like you had mentioned, two people I really cared for and wish them well. That's all I did.

02:01:09 Speaker_05
And Che had said to me, Meng is usually what I would call him, that at one point a woman in one of his classes had done this for,

02:01:17 Speaker_05
one day at work every hour on the hour she would just look out of her office and wish someone well that she could see in her mind's eye for 60 seconds or so and she said it was her best day of work in seven years and I found that unbelievable so I decided to try it myself and that week of just spending maybe two to four minutes at night before going to bed

02:01:38 Speaker_05
ended up being one of the most blissful weeks in memory, certainly at that point, in several years. It was really profound, and I couldn't pick out any other variable that had changed.

02:01:49 Speaker_05
So for me, I just want to, for people who are listening and saying, ah, you know what, I'm type A driven, super hyper competitor, this doesn't apply to me, that

02:01:57 Speaker_05
it very well could apply to you in that by taking a little bit of the harmful edge off you don't automatically remove your competitive edge and in fact I would argue just as you mentioned that the Bulls and so on used to have or still do it used to have a mindfulness coach for competitive advantage that it can be another tool in your toolkit and doesn't take you out of the game so to speak it just makes you more aware of the games that you're playing so

02:02:27 Speaker_05
That's a long sort of infomercial sales pitch that I wanted to just make sure I got in because I discounted a lot of these practices for a very long time because I thought it would at best be a waste of time and at worse take away some of my skills or tendencies that allowed me to get to where I am.

02:02:47 Speaker_05
So that is more of a confessional than a question but

02:02:50 Speaker_05
I would love to hear your thoughts, any additional thoughts on loving-kindness meditation, but also any additional thoughts on how, if you wanted to get a busy, maybe even impatient person hooked on mindfulness practice, what first steps or approaches you might suggest?

02:03:07 Speaker_04
So, a lot of different questions sort of woven into what you said. And the first is that there's a kind of misunderstanding in our culture that love is a weakness. And it's not.

02:03:18 Speaker_04
There is a way in which it's the force that can, probably the only force that can meet the level of aggression or violence and other such things that are happening in the world. It's the power that lets mothers lift cars off their children.

02:03:35 Speaker_04
or to let somebody like Dr. Martin Luther King stand after his church was bombed and children were killed and say, we will meet your physical violence with soul force.

02:03:47 Speaker_04
We will not harm you, but we will love you so deeply that we will not only transform ourselves, but we will transform you in the process. And so the notion that love is somehow a weakness I think we do everything out of love.

02:04:01 Speaker_04
We want to be loved even in our, you know, ambition and our desire for success. Underneath it is, you know, we want to be well, we want to find our happiness. And that's part of love. So it's actually a power.

02:04:16 Speaker_04
And my colleague and friend Wes Nisker went to interview Gary Snyder.

02:04:21 Speaker_04
a couple of years ago, Gary is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and environmentalist for 50 years, been writing about bioregionalism and one of our great kind of elders in this environmental movement. He said, Gary, what do you have to say to us now?

02:04:37 Speaker_04
The oceans are rising, the world climate is changing hotter and hotter, the species extinction. And Gary looked back and he said, Don't feel guilty. If you're going to save it, don't save it out of guilt or anger or fear.

02:04:52 Speaker_04
Those are the very things that are actually making the world worse. Save it because you love it. Because it's part of you. And that is the power.

02:05:02 Speaker_04
Whether you're starting a company, but also it's not just that you, you know, some vision, okay, now I'm going to become this wealthy playboy or whatever, you know, zillionaire. Then what does your life mean for you? And what do you really want?

02:05:18 Speaker_04
And when you listen, there is something in you, and it's part of your birthright to both be able to give your gifts, but also to love and be loved in return. And it turns out that it's a power.

02:05:29 Speaker_04
So then what you talk about is that it doesn't take much to begin the training.

02:05:34 Speaker_04
And you're, you know, two minutes or four minutes in the evening, or this woman at her work taking once an hour, 30 seconds or a minute to look at somebody there and offer a well-wishing, can transform everything.

02:05:50 Speaker_04
For people who want the practical support, because it is hard to do on your own, if you go to SoundsTrue.com and look up the programs that I have, first, there's a 40-day program called Mindfulness Daily, which is 15 minutes a day or 12 minutes a day, depending on the segment, that both gives instructions in mindfulness, loving awareness, and loving kindness practice.

02:06:14 Speaker_04
And it's 12 or 15 minutes a day. And by the end of those 40 days, you really have learned the inner skills. And then it builds up. There's then a deeper training called Power of Awareness.

02:06:24 Speaker_04
And for those who are interested, we're about to open an online teacher training for people interested in mindful Passing along mindfulness and loving-kindness to others.

02:06:33 Speaker_05
Jack, just interject for one second. For people listening, I will also link to all of these resources in the show notes, which you can find at tim.blog forward slash podcast.

02:06:43 Speaker_05
So you don't necessarily have to remember all these things, you can go to the URL and we will have direct links to these resources. Sorry to interrupt Jack, just wanted to mention that for people listening.

02:06:52 Speaker_04
And with it then, there is also of the programs there, there's one called Guided Meditations that's, you know, a download, it's like 10 bucks or something. And it has a loving kindness practice, a compassion practice, a forgiveness practice.

02:07:06 Speaker_04
I think it may even have a joy practice. And it's really helpful to have guided meditations at first, because otherwise your attention, we have a very short attention span in modern society. Albert Einstein, at least according to Scientific American,

02:07:21 Speaker_04
said, if you can drive safely while kissing a girl, you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. And we are in this kind of multitasking world with our devices and we've forgotten how to tend our own hearts.

02:07:37 Speaker_04
We've forgotten how, in some ways, to really be present for one another and more importantly for our own life. And so getting guided meditations is tremendously helpful.

02:07:49 Speaker_04
And doing these little mini practices that you talk about one minute, two minutes, several times a day can transform you.

02:07:56 Speaker_05
I was just going to mention to people also, if you look at behavioral change, if you look at BJ Fogg, formerly of the Persuasion Laboratory at Stanford,

02:08:05 Speaker_05
You look at dietary change, any of these things, doing less than you think you're capable of doing is a really good long-term strategy in terms of starting off rigging the game so that you can win in the beginning, so that your pass-fail mark in your mind is a really, really low hurdle.

02:08:21 Speaker_05
So I just wanted to reiterate, guided meditation. Don't white-knuckle in the beginning. Make it as easy as possible.

02:08:28 Speaker_04
The same principle from ancient texts say that you start in the easiest way. For some people, kindness for themselves seems impossible, but then you pick a child you care about or someone else.

02:08:40 Speaker_04
Or even when you do go to yourself, you think of yourself when you were an innocent child and wish yourself well. The game is to do whatever naturally opens the gateway, whatever is the easiest. For some people, it's their dog. You come home and

02:08:54 Speaker_04
the most non-judgmental being in their life wags its tail and loves you and it doesn't care, you know, what's going on in your head.

02:09:01 Speaker_04
So you take the avenue that most naturally opens your heart and then you do this just a little at a time, as you said, and it doesn't take long.

02:09:10 Speaker_04
But the other thing that's important is that sometimes as you do it, it can actually display or show you the hypercritical nature of your mind, the shame that you carry, the self-judgment or self-loathing.

02:09:24 Speaker_04
And so then you say, well, what do you do then? Or it brings up its opposite, is that's the place that you just breathe and hold all that stuff with kindness, because this is our humanity. And we all have some of that.

02:09:37 Speaker_04
And the point isn't to get rid of it or judge yourself for having it or try to fix it. It's almost as if you put your hand on your heart and you say, you know, this is like mindful self-compassion or deep training.

02:09:49 Speaker_04
This is part of the measure of struggles that I've been given, like every human being. These things have tried to protect me, and now I can hold them with tenderness and say, all right, thank you, but I don't need your help anymore.

02:10:03 Speaker_04
I can be kind to myself. And in that way, you're not trying to fix yourself or perfect yourself. If anything, you're trying to perfect your love.

02:10:11 Speaker_05
Jack, I wanted to give you credit for help that you gave me and also tactical advice that you gave me during the 10-day silent retreat. You gave me a lot, but I want to highlight one that's related to what you just said.

02:10:25 Speaker_05
I was going through a very, very difficult time, particularly days 7, 8, and 9, and you gave me the advice that you just mentioned, and there's one component I want to really underscore for people, and that is,

02:10:41 Speaker_05
When you're, for instance, trying to do loving-kindness meditation and instead you get the opposite, or you get this self-ridicule, who are you to try to meditate in this self-indulgent way, this is ridiculous, or this voice starts to pop up that is angry or hateful, whatever it might be, the process of not simply dismissing it

02:11:03 Speaker_05
or fighting against it, but recognizing it as a coping strategy that helped you in the past in some way that you developed because in my case, you know, the rage was a fuel that without which I probably would never have left Long Island where I had friends who later overdosed on opiates and so on.

02:11:24 Speaker_05
So it was a gift in a way and a tool. And as you said, you can thank that

02:11:31 Speaker_05
response or that part of yourself and then put it and I remember you recommended even visualizing and please correct me if I'm wrong or elaborate but visualize taking that part of you that is a coping strategy thanking it and then putting it say on a shelf where

02:11:49 Speaker_05
you can use it later if need be along with say other icons or figures who whether it's Buddha or other that you recognize as wise and then continuing with the meditation so that thanking that part of yourself for the function that it once served even if it is not serving you now was such a key insight

02:12:08 Speaker_05
for me that then helped me to manage my internal states or observe and appreciate my internal states for the next several days where I really felt like I was lost at that point. So that was a really direct tool that helped me tremendously.

02:12:24 Speaker_04
Yeah, thank you for bringing it up because it's so important for people. When we come to that hypercritical shame place, we feel very vulnerable and we've been identified with it. And because you needed it, I needed these things for survival.

02:12:39 Speaker_04
And if you try to get rid of this stuff, you just end up in a fruitless battle against yourself and it's just more judgment.

02:12:45 Speaker_04
So what you described as saying, thank you for helping me survive, I appreciate it, let me put it on the shelf or the altar, I'll put it in the lap of the Buddha or whoever, you know, the goddess of infinite compassion. You hold it for me.

02:12:58 Speaker_04
If I need it, I'll pull it back. And that sense that this isn't who you are. It doesn't describe who you are. It isn't who you are.

02:13:05 Speaker_04
It was a strategy because we're vulnerable beings and you were tender as a child and you had to make sure you could survive. Thank you for that. And now I have a different capacity.

02:13:17 Speaker_04
And let me just talk about that capacity a little bit because the capacity for presence and the great heart of compassion that's said to be your birthright is a really mysterious thing. Talk about identity.

02:13:30 Speaker_04
And when my youngest brother's wife, Esther, was dying of cancer, and she's just a beautiful being, and I spent quite a bit of time with her and with my brother. She was close to dying.

02:13:44 Speaker_04
I'd gone home to sleep, and I wanted to get up early and hurry back, because it was very close. And I...

02:13:51 Speaker_04
got in my car, I had to stop at the drugstore to pick up a prescription, hurriedly running, dashing through the aisles and so forth, and I'm at the checkout counter, and all of a sudden my whole body relaxed. And I thought, oh, Esther died.

02:14:05 Speaker_04
And I got out to the car, and I called my brother. I said, how's it going? He said, oh, Esther died a few minutes ago. And I said, I know. You know, I'll be there shortly. We've all had these experiences.

02:14:19 Speaker_04
If I ask in a room how many have had this particular kind where you knew someone died when they died, you know, a quarter of the hands will go up. Why is this? It's because who we are is not this body. We are the consciousness itself.

02:14:35 Speaker_04
And so with all these practices, what they allow us to do is to step out of what's called the small sense of self, or the body of fear, and reconnect with a field of connection, of interdependence, of compassion, and to take our history and to honor it, but not be bound by it.

02:14:55 Speaker_04
One of my favorite stories is a Ram Dass, again, this wonderful spiritual teacher.

02:15:01 Speaker_04
In the early years when he came back from being with his guru in India, he was sitting up there and teaching devotional practices and meditation practices and he had a beard and white robes and beads and he was sort of in the guru outfit.

02:15:20 Speaker_04
And a woman in the front row raised her hand and said, hey, Ram Dass, Ram Dass, aren't you Jewish? What's with this Hindu stuff? And Ram Dass said, well, yes, I am, actually. I was bar mitzvahed as I was, too.

02:15:30 Speaker_04
And there are many things I love about the Jewish spiritual tradition, the generosity of it, the Kabbalah, all the great teachings on the many stages and states of consciousness, the Hasidic masters who are like Zen masters.

02:15:44 Speaker_04
And then he paused and looked at it and he said, but remember, I'm only Jewish on my parents' side.

02:15:51 Speaker_04
And there is something both witty, which he was, but also profound about it, because we are not just our parental history or the historical circumstances of this place and body that we were born into, and something in us knows this.

02:16:09 Speaker_04
So that when you look at the, there's a wonderful book that came out last year, the year before, called The Book of Joy, which was a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu, and both of them have marvelous laughs.

02:16:22 Speaker_04
I think people go to hear the Dalai Lama by the tens of thousands, not just for the Tibetan teachings, some of which are actually hard to understand, or even the fact that he's this Nobel Prize winning world figure.

02:16:36 Speaker_04
I think people go to hear him laugh. That somebody who's carried so much suffering from the loss of his country where he can't return and the burning of temples and texts and all of those things.

02:16:49 Speaker_04
And he and Tutu had a week together when they were asked, and this created this book, how can you be joyful? How can you laugh like this when you've lived through apartheid and the death of so many people around you?

02:17:02 Speaker_04
And Dalai Lama, they banter back and forth like brothers. And Dalai Lama says, so much has been taken from me. You know, they've taken our sacred texts. They've taken our ability to make prayers in public. They've taken so much of our culture.

02:17:18 Speaker_04
Why should I let them take my happiness? And then Tutu starts to laugh and giggle and say, you know, I've been through so much, but I am not going to let myself live in that place.

02:17:28 Speaker_04
I'm going to let myself live in that which affirms life and in a kind of profound joy that we made it, that we're still alive, that we can contribute, that we can be here in this beautiful earth. And this shift of consciousness

02:17:43 Speaker_04
is what's needed for the world. Because if we look honestly, no amount of technology alone is going to save us.

02:17:51 Speaker_04
Nanotechnology and space technology and biotechnology and worldwide web, internet, computer or supercomputer technology is going to stop continuing warfare and racism and tribalism and environmental destruction.

02:18:07 Speaker_04
Those are happening based on consciousness of the human heart.

02:18:12 Speaker_04
And so we are now, you know, we've made these enormous developments outwardly where you have the great library of Alexandria and your smartphone in your pocket along with a million, you know, cat YouTubes or whatever. But there it is.

02:18:26 Speaker_04
It's all in there. And then what we need is collectively to develop a transformation inwardly of our inner life that is parallel to this enormous outer transformation.

02:18:41 Speaker_04
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff some years ago said, we are a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants. You know, I don't know how old humanity is, but it's time to grow up. So that this work that we're talking about is both individual

02:18:57 Speaker_04
But as you learn to meet your own life with greater understanding and compassion, it empowers you to move through the world in a different way and to help others do the same.

02:19:09 Speaker_04
And then you get that kind of joy of Tutu and the Dalai Lama, that you're somehow part of an awakening that humanity now needs more than ever.

02:19:18 Speaker_05
Jack, I'd love to ask you, these interviews are always driven by some self-interest. I always have some issue or challenge or problem that I'm trying to figure out, so I reach out to someone like you to help me do it, but I record the conversation.

02:19:32 Speaker_05
As we chatted about before we hit record, and you know this already, but the last several years have been very, very important for me in terms of addressing certain traumas, and the last eight weeks in particular have been transformative in a lot of beautiful ways.

02:19:47 Speaker_05
and the duration of periods within which I don't berate or attack myself have become longer. But there are still times when the wheels fly off the car, and this last week has been one such example.

02:20:02 Speaker_05
And I tend to, when I make a mistake or feel like I'm backsliding or relapsing, to compound the problem by beating myself up. Then I beat myself up about beating myself up, and you know where that goes. So let me paint a picture.

02:20:16 Speaker_05
So I found out recently that my Japanese host father, and I've been in touch with this family since I was 15. I'm very, very close to them, 40 now.

02:20:25 Speaker_05
And I found out that he just was admitted because the host mother sent me an email to the hospital with liver cancer. They don't have the details yet. I just sent a follow-up email. They don't know what the prognosis is exactly, but

02:20:39 Speaker_05
Needless to say, the worst case scenarios are certainly being conjured in my mind, or the potential of those.

02:20:45 Speaker_05
And then simultaneously have been contending with, and I believe you have some experience with this, contending with a, what should be a very simple construction project of a cabin

02:20:59 Speaker_05
Up in the mountains and it has been delayed and delayed and delayed and there have been cost overruns and cost overruns and cost overruns and promises made promises broken expectations set expectations missed and A friend of mine called with a whole new slew of problems yesterday related to this place And I lost my shit for lack of a better term I mean there are many other things going on simultaneously, but I got really pissed.

02:21:22 Speaker_05
I was like you know what I?

02:21:24 Speaker_05
This extending the olive branch being understanding can't gambit is not working with these people like I need I need to take out the baseball bat and like pull old Tim off the shelf who was just this like juggernaut head through brick walls and be like listen fuckface like if you don't do a B C D and E here well these are gonna be the consequences and Then I'm like well wait.

02:21:44 Speaker_05
I'm supposed to be compassionate, but how do I not be a pushover and it turns into this big

02:21:50 Speaker_05
dramatic play inside my head, and then I wait, this is gonna end soon, I'm not gonna keep going, but what I then often do is self-medicate with caffeine, and I think it's a way of feeling productive without actually being productive, and it also creates so much volume on the noise, I think I use it to tune out a lot of feelings.

02:22:12 Speaker_05
So when someone relapses or has this kind of experience, What do you suggest to them? I mean, is there a particular pattern interrupt or approach that you've found helpful for regaining footing?

02:22:26 Speaker_04
Oh, so there's a number of things to say. First of all, you could call it relapsing or you could just call it, yeah, being human. The most beloved poet in Japan was a Zen master named Ryokan.

02:22:41 Speaker_04
And there's a two-line verse of his that I particularly find fitting for this, where he wrote, last year, a foolish monk, this year, no change, you know? And you can sort of feel the humor and the tenderness in it.

02:22:57 Speaker_04
And there's a way in which you see your personality, the point, you know, you have a body, you have this particular body you're born with, and you can transform it in certain ways within the limits of the body that you were given.

02:23:08 Speaker_04
And similarly, you have a personality. And anybody who has a number of kids realizes that you don't come in tambla rasa, that you actually, this kid is born and has this kind of temperament. So you have a personality.

02:23:19 Speaker_04
And just like you don't want to look too closely to the body sometimes, you don't want to look back closely at the personality either. You know, it has its foibles and its fears and all of that.

02:23:28 Speaker_04
And so you start to kind of look at it and say, oh, now there's a really good example of how neurotic I can get. Thank you. Thank you for reminding me.

02:23:38 Speaker_04
And then you get a little sort of like the keeper of the zoo, a little more tender with those kind of creatures. It's bringing in the non-judgment or loving kindness for the way that you actually are, and not your ideal, or bringing compassion.

02:23:52 Speaker_04
You could say, yeah, this is a tough one, and it's triggered. I get triggered. So what? Now, the other thing is that I had the same experience when we had a big remodel of our house when I was, some years ago, raising my daughter in my first marriage.

02:24:07 Speaker_04
And we were supposed to go and teach and travel in Europe, and this guy, who was a good contractor, but you know, everything, of course, gets more expensive when you have to do this. And it kept getting slowed down.

02:24:17 Speaker_04
I said, you are going to get this done so we could make these decisions for into Europe, and it's not happening. You've got to hurry up. I do that like three or four different times, and it doesn't happen. Finally, I go in.

02:24:29 Speaker_04
pissed and I say, listen, you said this in our contract was going to be done. And if you don't fucking get this done by the time I'm going to pull your ass in court and sue you because I need this done and I'm not going to pay you the goddamn money.

02:24:43 Speaker_04
He looked at me and he said, oh, you really want this done, don't you? I said, yes. Next day, there's a huge crew, it starts to get done, and I realized, okay, I had been sort of talking meditation speak, yeah, nice, get it done.

02:24:56 Speaker_04
He was a fucking contractor, and I just had to speak contractor-ese. Get the goddamn job done, or I'll haul your ass in. Okay, I get it, yeah, I'll send the team over. And that's all it took. So there's something playful about that as well.

02:25:12 Speaker_04
It's not that you can't, I've seen the Dalai Lama get angry at people. It's not that you can't use that power and that understanding when it's necessary to get to be very strong or forceful. And you don't have to judge yourself unless you hurt people.

02:25:28 Speaker_04
And then of course that's the misuse of it. But it's just, it's part of being human.

02:25:32 Speaker_05
Is there something you say to yourself, I don't know, you are certainly in person and with any contact I've had with you, one of the most compassionate people I've ever met, and I don't use that word very much, but you're

02:25:48 Speaker_05
presence of listening and being with someone is really incredible. I don't know how much of that is intrinsic versus trained, but for better or for worse, coming out of the womb, I've been very impatient since day one.

02:26:03 Speaker_05
So I worry about, I can get, it seems like my default is speaking contractor-ese to more than just the The wayward contractor who's putting off work.

02:26:19 Speaker_05
Is there some, when I feel that the sensations of anger beginning to bubble up, is there something that you would suggest as self-talk or just a temporary pumping of the brakes to make it an informed decision versus just a lashing out?

02:26:37 Speaker_04
Well, I could give you an answer, but in a minute I'm going to guide you in a little practice so that you can find a better answer. First, I just want to say that that anger, you know, yes it's your habit or maybe your temperament, that's energy.

02:26:52 Speaker_04
And there's nothing wrong with energy, you know, it's the power to let you do all the kind of things you've done in your life that are tremendously creative or resourceful or daring or whatever kinds of things.

02:27:02 Speaker_04
So you want to respect, okay, I'm getting filled with energy. And you know, it might be then you want to lash out. But first you want to respect that energy. Wow, let me feel this in my body. Ooh, anger, how big is it?

02:27:14 Speaker_04
Okay, then your question is, then your question is, What can I do to modulate it? I could give you, you know, okay, take some breaths, ground yourself, look at that other person, blah, blah, blah.

02:27:25 Speaker_04
But instead, as we're talking, let yourself picture a circumstance recently. It might have been with your, you know, the contractors doing your cabin or something else, you know, that uprising of

02:27:39 Speaker_04
the injustice of it and how right you are and how you're going to get this goddamn thing done and how you have to be hard and strong. You feel all that and feel that energy in your body. First thing is just remember what it felt like.

02:27:52 Speaker_04
And now you're becoming the kind of mindful, loving witness of it and saying, wow, this is a lot of energy. So can you feel that and remember that?

02:28:01 Speaker_03
Oh, yeah.

02:28:01 Speaker_04
Oh, yeah. OK. Now, next step is that the wisest

02:28:08 Speaker_04
Figure you can imagine, maybe it's the Buddha or doesn't matter, some great master or martial arts master, you know, who's mastered themselves as well as there are comes to you and let yourself imagine somebody is going to teach you how to manage this powerful energy.

02:28:26 Speaker_04
And see who appears, somebody appears to you. And first they look at you and they smile and they say, yeah, this is the big energy. And they appreciate you.

02:28:36 Speaker_04
So instead of saying, oh, you're a doofus, you know, they say, oh yeah, you actually carry some powerful energy. And they acknowledge that, they bow to you. Yeah, Tim, you got it, all right.

02:28:46 Speaker_04
And then you say, yeah, but how do I manage this when it takes me over? And so this Zen master, whoever comes, reaches under their robe

02:28:55 Speaker_04
and pulls out a gift for you, which is a clear symbol of exactly what you need in that moment to help you regulate it so that you can keep the energy, but do it in a way that doesn't cause harm to you or another.

02:29:10 Speaker_04
And this clear symbol, you'll be able to see it's just what you need. So let yourself picture the gifts that they put in your hand. and let yourself imagine, see, envision, picture what it is.

02:29:22 Speaker_04
And if you can't see it clearly, hold it up to the sunlight. You'll be able to. And then let me know what you get. You want me to tell you what it is? Yeah, yeah. All right.

02:29:31 Speaker_05
So the person who came to mind for me, I went through a few, was the creator of Judo, a fascinating guy named Jigoro Kano, really small guy.

02:29:41 Speaker_04
Who, who, who? Yes, who could throw all the big guys and smile at the same time.

02:29:47 Speaker_05
Right, exactly. Changed a lot also in Japanese government. Fascinating guy. The symbol, I don't know why this is, to be honest, but it's a pyramid, the size with straight edges, about a little too big to hold in your palm, that is

02:30:06 Speaker_05
It's like almost a mixture of pure sky blue, like bluebird blue, with a bit of electric blue mixed in. And it's sort of a smoky vapor that's floating around inside this glass pyramid. I have no idea why that's the case, but that's what came up.

02:30:23 Speaker_04
All right, so we'll stay with it, and then there's one more little piece. So he gives you this pyramid.

02:30:28 Speaker_04
Free associate a little bit on what it might possibly mean, because these symbols are like dream images, and they come from a deep place in your psyche. And this pyramid has a message for you, this blue pyramid. Just guess what it might be.

02:30:44 Speaker_05
I think it's very, very stable. It's an extremely stable structure. And for me, it also, I could imagine it representing power. Also, it seems like a very powerful symbol in many different cultures, certainly. Yep, the blue is a little easier for me.

02:31:02 Speaker_05
It's a very cooling soothing color where Certainly red is the color of the fire with a fire with the right high Resonance anger energy would be more of a red fire element. So the blue would be a cooling or countering balancing force for that

02:31:23 Speaker_04
All right, so now what I want you to do is imagine taking this blue pyramid gift, which represents a kind of extreme stability and also a kind of power and cooling that's given to you by Jigaro Kano, and taking this into your body so that there you are filled with this energy and anger, you know, this huge wave of

02:31:46 Speaker_04
You let that be there and you take this pyramid in and you let that energy be inside this stable, grounded place of power and feel what it's like to be inside this blue pyramid with this energy and feel how it affects it.

02:32:03 Speaker_04
Just notice as if there you're in that circumstance and now I'm remembering I am the blue pyramid and what does it feel like?

02:32:11 Speaker_05
The most noticeable thing I wonder, of course, how much of this is the actual visualization versus the timeout that I permit myself to have.

02:32:22 Speaker_05
But there's very often a tightness on the left side of my chest, right by the sternum, that I feel when I start getting wound up. And that is absent after taking this gift and then visualizing it being incorporated. That dissipates.

02:32:40 Speaker_04
What you're practicing, and you know this very well in athletics,

02:32:44 Speaker_04
Yes, you practice things, but other times you also practice envisioning, whether it's playing piano or whether it's some Olympic training, that some of the times you just do it through visualization and it activates a lot of the same neural circuitry.

02:32:58 Speaker_04
So here you're starting to get the feeling of what it's like to be in the middle of this

02:33:03 Speaker_04
upwelling of anger and so forth and then taking a couple of breaths and feeling the blue pyramid and the connection with the earth and the stability of it and the power then of that presence that cools you and allows the anger to be there but not in the same

02:33:22 Speaker_04
uncontrolled way. Now there's one more thing and that is if you imagine again Jigaro Kano, I believe you said his name is.

02:33:31 Speaker_04
He comes up to you after giving you this gift and he touches you kindly on the shoulder and he has a few words of advice of how to handle this powerful energy that comes up in you because he knows all about it.

02:33:45 Speaker_04
And what does he whisper into your ear, calmly?

02:33:49 Speaker_05
Well, he whispers, this came to mind immediately. He says, zen'yo ko zen'yo, which is, you know, I still have this actually.

02:33:58 Speaker_05
There are two, he has many famous quotes, but he has what you might consider proverbs, short aphorisms that I've actually carried with me since I was 15, but they're packed away somewhere. I have two of them, they're on cloth.

02:34:12 Speaker_05
And the first is 努めれば必ず達す, which means basically if you work hard, you will achieve, you will reach your target. It's not the best translation, but that's the idea. The other one is 全力全要, which is effectively

02:34:29 Speaker_05
the most efficient use of energy, but it could also be the best slash most benevolent use of energy. It's a principle of Judo, but it's something that he applied to everything, including education.

02:34:41 Speaker_05
So it would be that very short, bite-sized aphorism, which is, and I'm sure some scholars probably disagree with me, but roughly translated here, at least as I take it, is the maximum or most efficient use of energy.

02:34:58 Speaker_04
So take that in, take his intentions, Zen Yoko Zen Yo, the benevolent and efficient use of it, feel the pyramid, and now your assignment is that the next five times that this comes, which it will, maybe tomorrow or next week or so forth,

02:35:14 Speaker_04
Bring in the blue pyramids, stable, powerful, cooling, so the energy is still there. And then you hear his voice say, Zen Yoko, Zen Yo, and you go, oh yeah, I can use this, but I can use it in a benevolent way.

02:35:27 Speaker_04
And try it five times, then text me, let me know what happened. Because now we're closing the loop. If you do it, and see, now you're responsible if you agree that you're going to do it, it sort of gooses the game a little bit.

02:35:40 Speaker_04
You go, okay, now I better do it because I have to let Jack know what happened. And let me know what happens.

02:35:46 Speaker_05
Well, I'll be able to use it this week because I'm flying out to the site of this cabin to meet with everybody and see what the hell is going on.

02:35:53 Speaker_04
So I'll have at least five opportunities to do that. You have your Zen training ahead.

02:35:58 Speaker_04
I mean, the other thing that's great, and then that you can hear in this, rather than by giving you a cookie-cutter answer, is that we actually have the wisdom that we're seeking, or that's available, we have it in ourselves.

02:36:15 Speaker_04
I mean, you didn't have to fly to Kyoto and get in your time machine to go back and see Jigaro Kanno.

02:36:22 Speaker_04
you know, or whoever it happens to be, the Dalai Lama or whoever happens to come to you, the Buddha or some other great figure, that actually, the goddess of compassion, that we carry that wisdom in our own heart.

02:36:35 Speaker_04
And part of what these contemplative trainings do is they give us access Just by taking a little pause, it didn't take you 30 seconds, okay, he appears. What do I do? Ah, here's how my body would feel. What perspective should I bring?

02:36:49 Speaker_04
Ah, here's efficient and benevolent use of energy. Okay, now I remember. So these answers for the questions of the psyche and the heart don't require going somewhere. They ask us to quiet and begin to listen.

02:37:06 Speaker_04
And as you do, you discover your own inherent wisdom and your own compassion as well because the benevolent use that he offers to you, where does that live? It lives in Tim. It lives in you.

02:37:21 Speaker_05
One of the reasons I've wanted to have you on the podcast for so long is that for me, you represent a very wide spectrum of tools.

02:37:31 Speaker_05
You have developed a toolkit that has enabled you to work with everyone from the seekers of, say, the Buddhist, along the lines of the Buddhist traditions, to, say, adolescents who are cutters, to war vets with PTSD, missing limbs, and so on.

02:37:46 Speaker_05
You've worked with a very diverse set of students and patients maybe even. And that leads me to my next question, which is after these experiences abroad, why did you decide to come back to the US period?

02:38:00 Speaker_05
And then why did you decide to go back to school and study clinical psychology?

02:38:06 Speaker_04
So after the first five years in Asia, there were two other Westerners who had become monks. It was a handful. And some were going to stay for the rest of their lives. I'd learned a lot. And so that was kind of a choice. Am I just going to stay?

02:38:22 Speaker_04
And I realized, no, I want a family. I want a lover. I was a young man after all, and just the celibacy for those years was actually pretty hard. I want to see if what I have learned really translates into the life back home.

02:38:39 Speaker_04
I don't want to just leave it. And so I was some wrestling, but it became very clear to me that I wasn't fit for the monastery for the rest of my life.

02:38:47 Speaker_04
I had other, not only other desires, but also, and longings, but also were real interest to say, does this work elsewhere? So I came back and I thought, well, what can I do? I got a couple of jobs and right away.

02:38:59 Speaker_04
And of course, what I knew how to do is be a student, but I was now a student of the mind and the heart. And I thought, well, how do I learn more about what happened to me in the monastery? Oh, I'll study Western psychology.

02:39:12 Speaker_04
And so that started me on that particular path. And I learned a lot of complementary things.

02:39:18 Speaker_04
There's some very good trauma work in the West that I've learned about that really enhances the compassion and loving kindness and mindfulness things that I learned in the temple.

02:39:29 Speaker_04
And now I've done a lot of years of teaching Eastern and Western psychology together. These principles that I've learned are spreading so widely in Western psychology.

02:39:38 Speaker_04
I went to the largest therapy conference in the country in December down in Anaheim and gave a talk, you know, here's a room full of 3,000 or 5,000 people. And I asked, how many of you have some experience of meditation or mindfulness practice?

02:39:55 Speaker_04
And the majority of the hands went up. And that would not have happened, you know, 20 or 30 years ago. So Eastern psychology is now becoming more invisibly woven into the understandings of clinical psychology in the West and it's beautiful.

02:40:10 Speaker_04
Now, I want to say something else, you know, when you talk about working with a variety of population, Yes, people in prisons, yes, dads or kids coming out of gangs, but also CEOs. And there's a dialogue that Bill Ford and I did.

02:40:27 Speaker_04
He was, at that time, the chairman of Ford Motors. He was actually the CEO, perhaps, before that. But then he's the chairman of Ford Motors. And he talks about it, too. It was in 2008, I guess, when the auto industry was just about to melt down.

02:40:47 Speaker_04
He called. We'd had some contact. He's a meditator. And he said, you know, I'm going to lose my grandfather's company, maybe the whole industry on my watch, and it's hard to sleep. What can I do?

02:40:58 Speaker_04
And we did loving kindness practices and mindfulness practices together and so forth. And I gave him some practices that he could use. And it turns out that at whatever level you're on,

02:41:09 Speaker_04
whether you're incarcerated or whether you're a CEO or whether you're a returning vet, that these inner capacities that we have to be present without getting lost, to bring an understanding attention to these energies, just as you were doing with anger in ourselves, are really, really liberating.

02:41:30 Speaker_04
And sometimes what's needed, like for the vets or the People coming back from the war is also a kind of forgiveness practice and trauma work. And we'll come together and, you know, they'll say things like, I can't tell you what I saw.

02:41:45 Speaker_04
Because in fact, people don't want to hear the horrors of war. They can't tell the story. And if they do, often they re-traumatize themselves and the people around them. couldn't bear it.

02:41:56 Speaker_04
But there's something worse, because they'll say, I can't tell you what I had to do. And so it's locked up in their hearts, you know, and then what do they have? They can drink or they can distract themselves or get in blind rages periodically.

02:42:11 Speaker_04
But if you get a room of returning combat vets and hold it with a proper space of understanding and compassion, not only can they tell their stories, which they've never told, but they can listen to one another and say, oh, yeah, I've been there.

02:42:29 Speaker_04
And all of a sudden, they're not so alone anymore. And that release of the weight on their heart. So there's a social dimension to trauma where we need to tell the story.

02:42:40 Speaker_04
helps them release also what's carried in their nervous system and in their body and there's some correlation between those two together that becomes very powerful. And we need that. I do a lot of teaching of forgiveness practice and self-forgiveness.

02:42:54 Speaker_04
Those are also on those. guided meditations that I teach.

02:42:58 Speaker_04
And for a lot of us, self-forgiveness, like self-compassion, becomes a very, very important way to liberate ourselves from what we had to do to survive in the past, so that we're actually free in our life.

02:43:12 Speaker_05
How do you set the stage, for instance, with those vets? What do you say to them or what exercise might you do that opens the door for them to share these stories?

02:43:23 Speaker_04
So a couple of images, one with gang kids and then one with vets. For gang kids who come in or these kids who are trying to get out of gangs and might come with a mentor or something like that to some events we've had.

02:43:34 Speaker_04
And you get these guys and their hoods are up and their hats are on backward and they're leaning back and saying, like, come on, man, you're going to teach us meditation. You're going to teach us, give us some poem stories.

02:43:47 Speaker_04
Listen, we're out on the street. People got nine millimeters. You got to give us something better than that. So we try to make a setting

02:43:55 Speaker_04
that honors who they are from the very beginning and say, well, we can't talk yet about the real things that we came here to do because there are too many people in this room who have not been acknowledged and not been respected.

02:44:10 Speaker_04
So would you go out in the parking lot

02:44:13 Speaker_04
and pick up a stone for every young person you know who's been killed, and we light one candle and put it in the center of a table, and say, bring it back in and say their name, and put their stone by this candle. The simplest possible ritual.

02:44:27 Speaker_04
And these guys, and sometimes gals will come in, and their hands are full of stones. No young people should know that many dead people. And they'll say, this is for Tito, and this is for RJ, and this is for Homegirl.

02:44:41 Speaker_04
And pretty soon, there's a mound of stones, and the names of people they've lost were put into the fabric of the air of that room, and their hoods are no longer over their heads.

02:44:54 Speaker_04
They're sitting up like, okay, this is the place where we can talk about what's really going on.

02:44:59 Speaker_04
So there's something about making, whether it's through the simplest ritual or making a container in which people realize that this is a safe place to talk about what we've never done before.

02:45:11 Speaker_04
With the vets, one of the things that Michael Mead, Luis Rodriguez, these guys from Mosaic Multicultural Foundation that I've worked with for years and are really wonderful,

02:45:21 Speaker_04
Michael, who's a great drummer and a storyteller and mythologist who's also been working in prisons and with vets and gang heads for years, he'll say, let me tell you an ancient story of returning warriors.

02:45:35 Speaker_04
And he has a handful of stories from Africa or Tibet or the Mayan tradition about warriors coming back

02:45:42 Speaker_04
you know, with their hands covered with blood and, you know, their eyes filled with the martial energy that they would, that they can't stop the violence because it's taken them over.

02:45:53 Speaker_04
And here's a myth or a story that tells about how ancient warriors were brought back into their community. I'll tell you the myth if you want to hear one of them. Oh, yes, please.

02:46:03 Speaker_04
So here we are, you know, and there's these vets and already stories have started to pour out about I can't tell you what I saw, I can't tell you what I had to do.

02:46:13 Speaker_04
And Michael stood up and he said, let me tell you an old Irish story of an Irish warrior named Coquilaine, or I'm not sure how his name is pronounced, something like that. And he was the most fierce and famous of all Irish warriors.

02:46:27 Speaker_04
And the Irish warriors were madmen because they would go out, they'd paint their bodies and they'd go out naked. And sometimes you just see them coming and you'd run the other way.

02:46:36 Speaker_04
But anyway, there was some marauding king and army that had come to threaten their area, and so Kukulain went out and almost single-handedly chased them and defeated them.

02:46:47 Speaker_04
But then he was coming back to his own town in a chariot covered with blood and his eyes blazing, bearing down on his own town, still possessed with the violence of war, with the god Mars.

02:47:02 Speaker_04
And they were all terrified he would come and do violence there too. And so they went, what can we do? What can we do? And they went to ask the old wise woman in the village. And she said three things.

02:47:15 Speaker_04
And so the first thing, they lined up all the women in the village who bared their breasts. And this slowed him down as if it reminded him of his mother's milk or something.

02:47:26 Speaker_04
And because he was slowed down, then the second thing they did was take a rope and tie it around him and put him in a huge cauldron of cold water which hissed off his body.

02:47:38 Speaker_04
And then they filled it three times with cold water and finally his body cooled down.

02:47:43 Speaker_04
And then the third thing they did is they took him at Stillbound and they lay him on a carpet in the court of the local king and they sang to him the stories and myths and songs of warriors who had protected the kingdom and then come back.

02:48:02 Speaker_04
and released the violence and the fears that they carried, and planted their crops again, and loved their families, and resumed living in harmony with the community from which they came.

02:48:17 Speaker_04
And they told the ancient stories and sang the songs for three days and nights. And when it was over, Kuling's eyes opened, they untied him, and he was back as a normal human being again.

02:48:29 Speaker_04
And after Michael told this story to vets who'd been telling terrible accounts of things that happened, in this room, a hundred men stood up and we'd been working with a simple African chant, a song that was really an African chant of a prayer, you know, Earth, hold me for this living is hard.

02:48:50 Speaker_04
We all sang to the vets. together for a long time as if we could sing them back into their bodies from this, as if they were lying there in the court of the king.

02:49:02 Speaker_04
So this is, and you asked the question, how do you make a setting that allows people to truly feel that they can tell their stories and be held in compassion, whether it's the grief of these gang kids that no one's really given them a place to give voice to,

02:49:19 Speaker_04
you know, or the that who says, I can't tell you what I had to do. That's very powerful.

02:49:26 Speaker_05
And it makes me also think back to conversations I've had with Sebastian Junger, who is

02:49:35 Speaker_05
A wartime journalist has co-produced and shot a number of really harrowing documentary films, including Restrepo, and most recently wrote a book called Tribe that touches on some similar topic area.

02:49:52 Speaker_05
and leads me to ask you, are there any rites of passages or rituals that you feel would be useful for every man or woman to experience? And this is something that I've felt a longing for and a lack of.

02:50:07 Speaker_05
Since my teenage years, I'm not Jewish, did not have a bat mitzvah, bar mitzvah.

02:50:12 Speaker_05
I don't know if that serves that purpose in the Jewish tradition necessarily, but are there any rituals or rites of passage that you think we could use in, let's just say, the United States that would be helpful to, whether it's a specific population, specific group, or

02:50:31 Speaker_04
You know, so what you're talking about is a really big subject. It's a subject of initiation and unfortunately Bar Mitzvahs, at least when I was, was a relatively lightweight and meaningless thing.

02:50:42 Speaker_04
You get up there and you recite your Hebrew portion of the Bible and now you're a man and they give you a bunch of presents and there wasn't a lot of meaning in it. The problem that you raise is that of the lack of initiation.

02:50:55 Speaker_04
And what's true is that it's been forgotten in our culture. One of the few places you get initiation is going into the military. That's an initiation.

02:51:05 Speaker_04
But a lot of these gang kids, for example, they're trying to initiate themselves, which can't really happen. You need elders and you need it in a ritualized way.

02:51:14 Speaker_04
But they'll go on, you know, if you're in the Maasai tradition in East Africa, the Maasai people,

02:51:21 Speaker_04
As everybody's heard, you know, a young man at a certain age of 14 or something will go out and kill a lion to prove that they're now an adult member of the society and that they're brave. And that's part of their initiation.

02:51:35 Speaker_04
There were initiations for young women as well. And it's not just in Africa. The Mayans had initiations. And in Thailand, when I lived there back starting in the 1960s, at that point, almost every young man and many young women

02:51:50 Speaker_04
When they reached the age of 1920, they became a monk for three months or for a year and lived in an austere way. And it was part of their initiation to learn both the inner life of themselves and also a kind of discipline. We don't have it.

02:52:07 Speaker_04
And because of it, you know, kids are trying to initiate themselves on the streets by shooting somebody or doing something, you know, that shows that they're brave, but it's not a lion, it's another person.

02:52:17 Speaker_04
or it's trying to get the attention of the others and prove how powerful or strong they are. So we desperately need these, and we need them built into our education and to our psychology.

02:52:29 Speaker_04
And I can't give you a simple answer, but one of the people who has the most intelligence about this is a man, a colleague of mine named Michael Mead.

02:52:38 Speaker_04
And if you look at Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, his writings on initiation and what's possible here and the things he's led are very, very inspiring. So that's a place that I would look.

02:52:51 Speaker_05
That's a good starting point. Wonderful. I will definitely find that.

02:52:55 Speaker_05
Well, Jack, I think we could go for hours and hours and hours, and I always love chatting with you, and I'd love to perhaps even consider doing a part two sometime, but given that we've already gone for two plus hours, I want to ask just a few more questions, and I'll actually start with just reading something very short, which is from your 2017 year-end message.

02:53:17 Speaker_05
I think this is just to inject some more optimism into our conversation, which we've already had plenty of, but this is just a small portion of your year-end message. Martin Luther King Jr. describes our collective journey with hope.

02:53:32 Speaker_05
Quote, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. End quote. And Pablo Neruda explains further, you can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming. Renewal is happening. This is back to your voice.

02:53:45 Speaker_05
Take quiet time to listen to your heart, to meditate, and to rest amidst the great turnings. Feel the renewal of spring that can be born in you. Align yourself with goodness.

02:53:54 Speaker_05
Let yourself blossom like a lotus or whatever unique flower you are, shining in the world, offering tiny seeds of love amidst it all. Blessings to you in 2018, Jack."

02:54:04 Speaker_05
And I want this note to then lead into, and certainly you're welcome to comment on that, but Which book you would recommend of yours people start with, or where they start with all of the many materials, recordings, readings that you produce?

02:54:19 Speaker_05
Because you're a fantastic writer and a prolific writer. You have some of my favorite book titles I've ever heard, by the way, including After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, which maybe we could touch on.

02:54:30 Speaker_05
But where would you suggest people start of the many things that you've written and shared with the world? And if you have any comments on that year-end message, you're welcome to share that as well.

02:54:41 Speaker_04
So, for books, if you want something simple, I have books like, you know, An Introduction to Meditation, that Sounds True Publishes, or I have a little book called The Art of Forgiveness, Loving, Kindness, and Peace, which is very simple stories and practices.

02:54:57 Speaker_04
If you want something that's richer and fuller, then you could look at one of my bigger books, like A Path with Heart, or The Wise Heart, The Guide to the Principles of Buddhist Psychology.

02:55:08 Speaker_04
And again, I think lots of stuff online and Sounds True is particularly a good place to go, along with my website. Then, and that 40-day mindfulness, mindfulness daily, which is like 30 bucks or something, is a really wonderful way to start.

02:55:23 Speaker_04
In terms of what I had written about the trusting heart, one of the greatest Zen texts from a thousand years ago says to be awakened or enlightened is one with the trusting heart and mind. And that doesn't mean that we won't go through hard times.

02:55:39 Speaker_04
We always have, and we will again, and we are now in many ways. but that we also have born within us the capacity to meet these difficulties with understanding, with courage, with compassion, and to transform them.

02:55:56 Speaker_04
And in that way, one of my favorite recent books

02:55:59 Speaker_04
is called The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, and he's a remarkable professor at Harvard, anthropologist, historian, talking about the growing consciousness of humanity in spite of the kind of wars and conflict and environmental things.

02:56:14 Speaker_04
There are so many good things that have happened that he charts over the last few centuries of the development of

02:56:20 Speaker_04
certain abilities for peacemaking, there's actually less war than there'd been, respect for women, the reduction in child labor, all kinds of things.

02:56:29 Speaker_04
And in that same regard, there's a wonderful book called Bury the Chains, which is about the ending of slavery in the British Empire, starting with this handful of men

02:56:40 Speaker_04
who met in a British tea shop or printing shop and spent 30 years riding around the country bringing ex-slaves who were well-spoken to talk about the Middle Passage and the horrors of slavery and so forth.

02:56:54 Speaker_04
And even though the British Empire's economic engine was built around slavery and sugar, by the end of their work, 30 years, the British Parliament outlined slavery in the British Empire, you know, decades before it happened in the U.S.

02:57:11 Speaker_04
And the Quakers were a big part of this, and the Quakers famously wouldn't take their hats off for the king.

02:57:17 Speaker_04
But when, what is his name, Thomas Clarkson, who was the center of this group, trying to end slavery and going everywhere to do it, when Thomas Clarkson died, all the Quakers of the England took their hats off.

02:57:32 Speaker_04
because he had freed so many spirits and so many lives. We have these amazing possibilities as human beings, and we're just growing into them now culturally, and it's about time. They are possible, and we each have a contribution to make in it.

02:57:48 Speaker_05
Jack, I'm going to ask you one more question before we wrap up with just letting people know where they can find you on social media and elsewhere on the website and so on, but last question is one I like to ask.

02:58:00 Speaker_05
This is a metaphor, but if you could have a short message on a billboard, in other words, get a message out to millions or billions of people, could be a few words, one word, a phrase, a quote of yours, a quote of someone else's, what might you put on that billboard?

02:58:17 Speaker_04
Well, two things come to mind. One is a question that when I've sat with people many times at the end of their life that they then ask of themselves silently or out loud is, did I love well? Because in the end, what matters really?

02:58:31 Speaker_04
The billboard would have a question rather than a statement. And it would have a question something like, how could I love myself better? So that it actually, it's not that I'm going to tell them something.

02:58:45 Speaker_04
They already know this, but I'm going to remind those who read that there is something that's asking to be awakened in them. How could I love myself and this world better? Then you go, well, it gets in the way of that, and how could I love that too?

02:59:00 Speaker_04
How could I love myself and this world better?

02:59:02 Speaker_05
Well, Jack, I want to, of course, thank you for your time today, but beyond that, I want to thank you, and this is very, very much from deep in my heart. Thank you for helping me to learn to love myself better, and quite frankly, to see something

02:59:21 Speaker_05
in the first place that is worth loving. That's not where I've spent most of my life.

02:59:26 Speaker_05
So it's turned into, if not my, I hesitate to say my top priority because I worry about sounding self-indulgent, but it's become one of the most important and fruitful tasks in my life is asking that question. How could I

02:59:42 Speaker_05
love myself better or how could I learn to love myself better so thank you very very sincerely for that and the words don't do it justice but that's the best I can do right now remotely is to put it into words so thank you for that.

02:59:54 Speaker_04
Thank you Tim this was a pleasure to do and what I feel and I know is it as you tend your own heart.

03:00:03 Speaker_04
in a wise way, then it makes you available to bring the gifts, the many gifts you have to the world, you personally and others, but to do it in a way that's on the carrier wave of connection and love and it transforms everything. So, thank you too.

03:00:17 Speaker_05
Well Jack, I'm looking at a text thread of ours and I'm feeling the necklace around my neck, which is really a thread, a red thread that was used to close the

03:00:26 Speaker_05
one of the elements of the closing of the ten day silent retreat and I shot you a text not too long ago asking what the three knots meant because I'd forgotten. And this is what you wrote back.

03:00:39 Speaker_05
First knot equals refuge in whatever you hold is most inspiring and sacred. Second

03:00:45 Speaker_05
Commitment to compassion for self and others third following your highest intention and The intention that I've said at the end of that 10-day Retreat was to learn to love myself So I could love others more fully, but I've realized that maybe what it is is Learning to love myself so I can help others learn to do the same and you've been an integral piece of that and I just love

03:01:12 Speaker_05
that I have the opportunity to introduce you and your work and these traditions to more people, and I will certainly be linking to where everyone can find you online, but are there any particular best places, just to reiterate, where people can find you, and I'll link to these in the show notes.

03:01:28 Speaker_04
JackKornfield.com, and also look up jackkornfieldonsoundstrue.com for those programs that I talked about. And then spiritrock.org, which is our great meditation center in the San Francisco Bay Area.

03:01:42 Speaker_05
Absolutely stunning stunning beautiful location worth visiting just to bathe in the scenery But many more reasons to visit as well. Well Jack. Thank you again, and Thank you. Thank you Tim.

03:01:55 Speaker_05
It's a pleasure and to everybody listening you can find show notes links to all the resources books and everything that we discussed at Tim blog forward slash podcast and Until next time thank you so much for listening Hey guys, this is Tim again.

03:02:10 Speaker_05
Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

03:02:20 Speaker_05
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page

03:02:31 Speaker_05
that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

03:02:39 Speaker_05
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

03:02:51 Speaker_05
And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

03:03:06 Speaker_05
If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.

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03:05:41 Speaker_05
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