Welcome to Search Engine, I'm PJ Vogt.Each week we answer a question we have about the world.No question too big, no question too small.This week a question that probably sounds like a very small one, but which to me feels like a very big one.
How do you sit quietly?Let's have just a match.This episode is brought to you in part by Ring. The holidays are almost here, between traveling, hosting family, and finding the perfect gift.
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Switch to ShipStation today.Go to ShipStation.com and use code SEARCH to sign up for your free 60-day trial.That's ShipStation.com code SEARCH. I always get a little bit nervous, like, reading an introduction in front of a human being.
I know, it's weird.It's very weird.
It makes you read too fast.So just know that I'll read too fast.Okay.Okay.I have some issues with anxiety.I know everybody does, but I suspect mine are unusually bad.
Lately, I've started to wonder if curiosity, which is my job, and anxiety, which I consider my enemy, might not just be the same thing.Or if not the same thing, siblings.One, the overachiever.The other, a slightly destructive fuck-up.
The reason I think that they might be siblings is because one not bad definition of anxiety would be a condition that floods your brain with questions.What do other people think of me?Is everything okay?Am I safe?
Or maybe a question a lot of people have today, what's going to happen next week? The difference, though, between those questions and the questions curiosity asks is that those questions are, frankly, terrible questions.
I say this as someone who loves questions, who spends my life inside of questions.I believe I have some standing here.I believe a good question takes you outside of yourself.It makes the world feel big and bewildering.
Anxiety's questions narrow the world to a straw's aperture.Everything we are here to see, we become unable to see.And instead, we are stuck somewhere else. Last year, I was interviewing someone.
We actually cut this part of the interview out when we aired it.But I was interviewing someone who brought up their meditation practice.He said every day he sits quietly for a short amount of time.
And I told him that for me, meditation felt like the final boss in a video game, like the hardest last thing I was going to have to, at some point, when my life got hard enough, confront. And he was really confused by this answer.
Sitting quietly in a room for 15 minutes, instead of seeing it as a helpful exercise, that was the scariest thing in the world to me.His reaction really stuck with me.I kept thinking about it.
The day that I'm writing the words that I'm saying is October 29th, 2024.We are somehow exactly one week away from an election.The national mood right now feels like everyone is visiting the place I usually live, anxiety.
If you consume any media, the most asked question you'll find is an unanswerable, in my opinion, unhelpful one.What is going to happen next?So I thought maybe this is a week to finally talk to someone about meditation.
I wanted to ask someone, how do you learn to sit?And I also wanted to ask what happens to you over the years if you keep sitting?Do you mind saying your name and who you are and what you do?
Yeah, I'm Rev Angel Kyoto Williams.Most people call me just Rev, Rev Angel.I think what I do is I sit quietly.
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams.She's an ordained Zen priest and teacher.Also author of the book Radical Dharma, founder of Transformative Change, CEO of Mindful.
I've talked to a lot of people overqualified to answer the questions I brought them, but even for me,
I help people understand a way of sitting quietly that is consistent with the life that they have and not some other idea that makes them go crazy and makes them feel like they want to run away or that it's the final boss.
What do you mean when you say consistent with the life that they have?
Consistent with the life they have means I have this take on things, which is most of the instruction
that we have received about meditation in the big mainstream world comes from largely monastic traditions, whether those are Eastern traditions, Buddhist, which is a lot of what we think of mindfulness meditation as hailed from Buddhism and Buddhist traditions, but also Western mystic traditions and so on.
So they're largely the instructions that have been given to and received by monastics people that have unhooked from life.They have reduced the number of hooks in order to have a life that has less friction.
And that's most of what we have received, the instructions of people that have chosen fewer hooks, fewer decisions in life.
They home leave, they go away, they cloister, they enter into a space in which they have fewer decisions, fewer things to contend with, they don't have children, they don't have partners, they don't have marriages.
many of the decisions that, the thousands of decisions that most of us make each day are actually made for them by way of the structure and the container that they're in.
And then there's this other direction, which is what I'm in the habit of working with, which is how do we stay in life with all the hooks and smooth out the scrunchy, squirrely, jaggedy side so that there's less of us to be hooked into.
So life's hooks remain, but we smooth ourselves out in such a way that our journey is less friction full, it is less busy, less harsh on us.
So just to make sure I understand, it's like, there's sort of two paths that people might take.And one is you're kind of retreating a little bit, like you're making a life that's simpler and maybe more removed.
And so it's easier to find this piece because, like for instance, I live in a city in New York that's like, it's a traffic jam and it's an assault on the senses.
And I work quite a bit and like the world sometimes I perceive is just as a volley of elbows. And there's people who would be like, well, just move upstate and find a quiet room to sit in.
And what you're talking about is a kind of practice that allows you to still inhabit the world, but more peacefully.
Yeah, they're saying get less elbows, right?Like go someplace where there are fewer elbows.
And I'm saying that that's most of what we've received in terms of the instructions, and that doesn't align with the lives that many of us live.Even if we move upstate, we find elbows.
Right.My idea that upstate is a place where life is perfect is a pretty good idea that I haven't spent much time there.
And so I'm saying that where I'm coming from is, how do we live with the elbows?And we find a way in which we're able to navigate life and navigate the elbows, and actually appreciate them, and appreciate the ways that the elbows
communicate something to us about ourselves, give us information, make us more curious.
So I guess what I'm curious about, I'm curious both how you got to that understanding of like living with elbows, but also even how, like to even go back earlier, like what was your
You've spent a very long time thinking about these things and sort of inhabiting different spiritual and meditation practices.I'm like using terminology that's unfamiliar to me, which is why I'm stumbling.But who were you before all of this?
Like, at some point, I imagine you were a person like anybody else moving through the world the way, for instance, like I am right now, and something happened to make you curious.Like, can you draw me a picture of you before you were a Rev?
Yeah, I was like you.I hope I'm still a person like anyone else.I was a New Yorker and I'm always a New Yorker.By the way, all of us that are New Yorkers, we know that that's true.I'm ever a New Yorker.
I was a young New Yorker though and living in a post-Ed Koch era.New York was emerging from its dirty, grimy vibe.
But I grew up in that, I grew up with the burnt-out Bronx, the harsh, be afraid, we used to call Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, Murder Avenue.
I grew up with the New York of legend stuff, the place that is angry and harsh and rough, and you had to look over your shoulders, watch your back all of the time, and you're kind of shuffling in with millions upon millions of people.
And it had a lot of elbows, and my life had a lot of elbows.I had a lot of elbows growing up.I was a latchkey kid.I grew up with single parents, swapped between them.My earliest recollection was living with my dad, who was a fireman, and firemen
for many of you that don't know, work either 9 to 6, like 9 to 5 and 9 to 6, or they work from 6 to 9, which is 6 at night and then to 9 in the morning.
And so babysitters, handing off to other people, toggling between going to this person's house and that person's house and being taken care of in that way, and learning quite early to take care of myself, to make my way home,
take care of myself before my dad could get home, which would be maybe 6.30, maybe 7.
And doing that and understanding that is just what my life was, and having to navigate all of the things that come with that, the scary kids in school that were not very kind to you, that you had to just pay attention to and keep your senses and your wits about you.
I've got a different kind of curiosity about life. I got curious, but what are they up to?What's going on over there?What's in that shadow?What's happening?
I did a lot of raising myself in that way in between the people that were taking care of me in little blocks of time.I was raising myself in that same space.That's who I was.
You're describing the thing that I feel like happens to everybody to some degree, but happens to some people more and at different times where it's like life is teaching you,
an alarm system, and the alarm system might be the right alarm system for a time to get you through a place, and then maybe you get through the place and you still have the alarm system.You're just anticipating and predicting.That's right.Yeah.
Well, that's a very particular part of my journey actually, and it's interesting of the many podcasts and things that I've done.I've not said a lot about this, and I think I'm just in this turn, this place in my life now that maybe it's time to come.
have this piece come through.One of the alarm systems I was abused quite significantly when I was young.
Yeah, I'm sorry for anyone that has to go through it.And those kinds of experiences in your life are real junctures of what's going to happen with that, what's going to be the path that unfolds as a result of that.
One of the things that happened is that I, by series of events, I ended up back close to the person that was discovered and they were separated from me and so on and so forth.
Then I ended up about 15 years old back in the place close to that person's family, the place that I associated them with.Talk about alarm system. I considered myself a pretty precocious child.I was very intellectually and culturally precocious.
I was back in Queens, which felt like back in the woods somehow.I was like, okay, that's where I'm going.I'm going to high school in Chelsea, in the midst of all the things, growing up in Greenwich Village and party vibe and everything is happening.
It's the center of all the things and I went to live back with my granddad and he lived in Queens and I was on the bus, two fare zone for those of you who like train and a bus.
I was on the bus and suddenly I would feel this prickling in the back of my neck and I found myself looking around for this person. Talk about anxiety, I didn't know that that's what it was.
I spent some, I don't know how long it was, time is weird and elastic.
I spent too long for me, a period of time, feeling like I was truly looking over my shoulder at every turn and feeling this alarm system that was going off of like I might run into this person. What will happen if I see her?What goes on here?
What do I do?How do I manage this?All of this, you can feel that just the energy as I speak about it was like that kind of energy.I just decided no.I decided no, I'm not doing this.
So, okay, so you're at a point where you're a precocious, like, New York teenager.
You have this problem, which is that you've had a traumatic experience and you're having the thing that people so often have, which is like, your brain is trying to keep you safe, but the way it's trying to keep you safe is that it is imagining terrible things happening all the time.
All the time.And you decide, this isn't how I want to be. what do you do?
Yeah.I decide something more like, in New York speak now.Because by this time, as I said, I'm precocious.
I'm 15 and I'm in high school and I was in 10th grade by then, so I had already moved forward some more and so it was a little bit younger than people are typically at that time. and my crew, who I run with, is even older than that.
So typically, I grew up in a world of people that were maybe four to five years older than me.That was just how I moved through the world, and so that's also informed by that.It was like, nah, it's not happening.
Whatever this is going on, this is not happening.So my response to it is, I've just got to go and face it.And so I went to her parents' house and said, you know, where does she live?And turns out she lives literally blocks from where I was.
And got the address and, you know, pulled myself together. did some of the self-talk of like, yeah, I'm not five anymore.I'm this person.I have a life.I have friends.I have people that care about me and you can't hurt me.This person can't hurt me.
I talked myself into that and I rang the doorbell.You rang the doorbell of her home.I rang the doorbell of her home and I sought her out. and she wasn't there that particular day.
But the point here was that I got to have a conversation with the person that created the conditions for the most terror and horror in my life and ask them why, what was this about?
It's so rare for people to get to ask that question.Can I ask what was her answer?
entirely unsatisfactory and probably untrue.But what she could offer at the time, which this piece is true, she was suffering.That became clear to me that the piece of the suffering that she shared with me wasn't the entirety of it.
It was a very slim slice of it because I came to know her for a little while over the next few years.But it was clear that it was suffering and that she didn't know what else to do with her own suffering.
and her own suffering, her own not knowing what to do with the box that she found herself in, of also kind of abuse within her family, with confusion and, you know, trying to be in a relationship that was probably too soon for a person at her age and at that time.
That was the story that I told myself, and that's the story that I came away with, that this was a person that didn't know what to do with the suffering that they had, so all that they could do was to extend suffering to someone else.
That that was the way that they found control.That's how she found control, was to try to control someone else.And that's what she did, is try to control me through these various forms of abuse.
The way you just described it, is that how you understood it at the time?
I think in bits and pieces, yeah, I think it unfolded.
I think that the abuse, as much as people speak about the horrors of abuse, I think it also gave me a window and an awareness and a tenderness about the frailty, like how, I wouldn't have used that word then, but how
exposed we are and how easy it is for people to assault us.I had a sensitivity as a result of that abuse that gave me an insight and a care for what it means to be so tender.
And so the very abuse that she visited upon me gave me access to a tenderness about the abuse that was visited upon her.
Did you feel safe after that?I did, much safer.Yeah.Safe is relative.For those of you who know, I'm black, and so black in America is safe.That's a negotiated term.But I felt safer, and I felt like I had claimed my life.
And I think that that opened a path for me to make that my business, to claim my life.That every place and every turn where it felt like something else sought to determine, frame, feedback what my life could be, I decided that nope, it's mine.
I get to decide and I would. You know, people are weird when kids get abused.They didn't ask questions.They didn't want to know.They wanted it to disappear and make it like it never happened.
So no one had ever asked me about it or said, you know, what happened or how that happened.So all of the meaning making of it got pushed away.I didn't get to make any meaning.
I think that's why I was able to ask the question and want to ask because I needed to make some sense of it.That's what we do.We want to make sense of this life with all of its hooks and barbs and figure out why me?
You know, why did this, whatever was going on, why did this have to land here with me?What was it about me, you know, that made me worthy of abuse?
And that question felt gone after you spoke to her because it sounds like what you saw was just this person was suffering and you were just there.
Yeah.I was in the space.It wasn't about me.And I carry that to this day that most of the things that people are up to that are causing and creating harm is not about you.
It lands on you, it landed on me, it landed on this body, and it has all of its impacts, but I now have a sense of, oh, I get to decide that I'm not gonna land my suffering and extend that and have it land on someone else.
And so then where did you take that lesson?Like, where did you go next?
So that lesson, took me to so many ways of having more curiosity about the way in which the experiences that we have can be metabolized, right?Like, I got to metabolize a tremendously difficult, painful, life-altering terror in my life.
And that metabolizing, that's the word that I would use now,
led me to being able to take things not as a personal offense to me, but part of life that could either be metabolized or it could be something that I end up making me terribly ill and just hugging the toilet bowl of life trying to vomit everything out again.
Then rinse, wash, repeat.We just do it again and again and again.It doesn't go away.That's what I got.It doesn't go away until you metabolize it.
How do you, in the project of metabolizing these things, I think what's often hard, I'm gonna say for people, but really it's for me, is that you can't always knock on the door.How do you metabolize?
If it sounds like part of the work is that when you suffer, to not see your suffering as personal, but to see it as part of a chain of suffering and unskilledness and confusion, what if you don't have that opportunity to meet with the person?
How do you metabolize those experiences?
Yeah, you mostly don't get the... Actually, that's the truth, is you mostly don't get that opportunity.I slipped it in and it's probably the most important thing.The answer was entirely unsatisfactory and likely untrue.
That was the best gift of the whole experience.Had she said something that just made sense and it just all lined up?
I probably just would have gone on with my life expecting things to line up and make sense because it was unsatisfactory and because it was likely, as became clear very quickly, likely untrue.
Other than the suffering piece, it was like all that was left was the suffering.The only thing that was solid and had meat was the suffering. What that gave me was the kind of access to the sense of like, oh yeah, I'm not going to get an answer here.
This is not going to get an answer.Eventually, we learn to, in order to metabolize things that we are not given like a data set, you know, we can add it up and put it in a spreadsheet and it'll compute nice and neatly, is that we sit with it.
And then when we sit with it, we metabolize it in a way that comes with every single one of us as human beings.There's all sorts of things that can come about and disrupt our natural operating system of being able to metabolize life.
We are all given that, that is what we come with. I don't believe that whatever it is that is necessary for that is hidden under the deep ocean or in a cave.In some mountains, it doesn't belong to some particular culture or some people or some time.
Every single one of us have a navigation system for life itself that is endemic to who we are.It is our fundamental nature.It is our birthright.
And then we have shitty things that happen in life that can disrupt it and throw that operating system offline.But we can go back and try our best to get it back again.
After a short break, Rav, before she was Rav, decides to pursue sitting quietly more seriously.After an interruption, we'll return. Search Engine is brought to you by Discover Doublenomics.
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Back in the early 90s, when Rev first wanted to deepen her meditation practice, she started going to retreats.You might not be familiar with these, until a few years ago I wasn't.I've never gone, but people close to me have.
What I understand is that at a retreat, people interested in meditating come together to meditate. A retreat might last five days, a week, or longer.If you go, you agree to follow a set of rules.You'll agree to wake up at the break of dawn.
Often, these retreats are entirely silent, meaning for the whole time, you will not talk.At a retreat, you are meditating many times a day.Rev would say you are sitting meditation many times a day.
In these sessions, you keep meditating until you hear a bell ring. There might be a walking meditation as well, or what's called a work meditation, where you're helping the center with chores.
The people I know who've gone describe this experience of mostly being alone in silence in your own mind for a week as exactly as excruciating as I imagine it.But they also describe it as beautiful, and most of them go back.
I don't understand any of this at all.And part of the reason why I was talking to Rev, an ordained Zen priest, was because I was hoping to understand it more.She told me what it's like to go learn to sit in retreat.
It's like a pendulum swing between, like, the most profound stillness you can enjoy the feeling of your body or the movement of a butterfly and utter excruciating why is that person laughing.Will somebody please ring the fucking bell?
It's all the things in between, and that's the best thing about it, is you realize that in this spaces that are set just so and everything is right and it's all prepared, you still manage to drive yourself nuts.
And to hate people and to love people, you do the whole gamut.
in there in a little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny constructed container and yet you managed to play out all of the shenanigans, do all the things, you hate people, you love them, you want to have sex with them, you want them to get as far away as possible, you know, the smallest things hurt your feelings, you get upset, you get cold and distant.
Like, you do all the things and you realize, whoa, wait a minute, if all of this is here, even though I'm in a different space, maybe I have something to do with creating.
Maybe that I have something to do with creating all of this and it's not everybody else's fault.I might have to take responsibility for my life.
So it's like the thing that it offers or one of the things it offers is that if it's like you find out that even if everything were taken away, like the things we think the world is doing to us, when you take away the world, you see that we do them to ourselves.
And so then it gives you a place to start to find a way to not do that.
Yeah, well first it humbles you, it brings you to your knees, you know.And it's a space of reconciliation.You reconcile the distance between the truths and untruths of your life.
Can you tell me a story about, for you, what it was like early on when you were sort of less skilled?Like what it was like to do a retreat like that, like what you walked in with and what it felt like to grapple with it?
What it was like was, this is awesome.That's such a great question.It was this cycle of trying to find a way out.
You mean out of the physical location?
Everything.Trying to find a way out.Trying to game the system.Whatever your shtick is, you're going to see it and it's going to be glaring.If seducing is your shtick, you're going to try to seduce everyone and everything.Me, it was gaming.
I was a good talker.Internally and externally, I was gaming the system. in every way that I could possibly find.I would sneak extra bits of sleep, or I would try not to be asked to do the things that I didn't want to do.
I would get myself into a little corner somewhere and try to disappear so no one would notice me, to ask me to do the task that I didn't want to do.You try to sit and look like you're sitting while you're really doing your taxes in your head.
You sit there and it's like, yep, I look really still.Nope, they can't see that.I'm so, so still.
Okay, if I just move this little way, then I look even more still and I look like I'm very concentrated and I really, I mean, I want to say that that's not the very earliest because the earliest, earliest, you're just holding on by the seat of your pants.
It's like, why did I do this?I shouldn't be here.I could just get up and walk out.But I'm grown, I can just get up and walk out.You do that for at least four days.Well, what will happen?You play out fantasy.Well, what would happen if I just got up?
Then you get to your clothes and you're like, okay, nobody's stopping you.You could pack your clothes and you have to make a decision. And you make a decision, and you make a decision.And that's all it's made up of, is making a decision to come back.
And so at that point, you're walking up a mountain in a way.You're going to these retreats and you're finding that the practice is worthwhile for you.What did it mean then to decide to become a Zen priest?I don't know how that, I know nothing.
I feel like it's when you watch the movie. Oh, I could be a wizard.I could be a mugwort or whatever they call that.I could be a wizard.That's it.
You're like, oh, it's going to be hard and there's going to be the snake people and the rough people that are doing terrible things to me and playing jokes on me and stuff like that.Or I could go back and just be a human.
And you're like, I'm going to do it.And I might fall off my broom and end up being dragged.And I'd rather be a wizard.I'd rather know a little bit more about what's going on in this life and not feel so confused and put upon.
So Rev chose the more interesting path.She studied the precepts, she trained, eventually she was ordained as a Zen priest.She was the second black woman recognized as a teacher in her lineage.That was three sentences, but they describe many years.
So I did all of that, and I went through the ranks, so to speak.I hold the most senior title in the Zen tradition.There's a very small handful of Black women that actually hold that role as sanctioned Zen teachers, and I'm one of them.
And then I got a cool honorific, it's called Roshi, means old teacher.Not that old for those of you that can't see me.
So I hold that, and right around the time that I was heading towards that, and I was getting the titles and all the ranks, and I was like, know about this, y'all."In fact, I wrote an essay called, I May Not Get There With You.
And it was saying that, yep, I did this thing where it was like climbing the mountain, you know, doing all the ranks and all the things.And I was like, I don't know if this is really what most
people are going to be, I know most people are not going to be able to do this, what I just did.They're not going to commit the time, the energy, the, you know, whatever.
And it's not because they're bad or because they're less or they're less deserving of liberation and freedom in their life.It's not because of that.It's because we haven't structured it in a way.
And we are, I'm an activist, social justice-y to all of that.And I was like, we're jacking the planet up and creating destruction at a rate at which this will never solve.
And so this journey, this 20-year thing that I've done, now 30 plus years, we are not going to be able to deal with the crises of the world and the planet if we don't have more people mature
right, become more mature human beings, more kind human beings at a more accelerated rate.And we need something that will operate, forgive me for saying this, at scale.Enlightenment at scale.
We need to be able to, I don't know if that we, I don't think we need a thousand more Buddhas I think we need millions more people that are, I like to say, aware, more aligned, and more alive.
And when we do that, it is not that all of our problems will disappear.We will learn to conflict well with each other.We will learn to conflict honestly and with integrity.
and with a willingness to meet life as it is and not to abdicate to fantasies and the fictions that we're creating and getting ourselves looped into.
To be clear, Rev still holds the title of Zen Priest.It's just that she's decided, in her words, to leave the track.To help people find liberation where they are.
Presumably this mission includes the slightly unusual choice to talk to doofy podcasters such as myself.After a short break, where does someone go to sit quietly? Search Engine is brought to you by Betterment. Do you want your money to be motivated?
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a practice that, I don't know, it's like if you never jogged and everyone's jogging and they seem a little bit happier and they seem like a little bit like fitter and like they're breathing a little bit easier.
And I honestly don't understand the relationship between, I understand that the very few times I've tried to sit down in a room quietly, it has been surprisingly excruciating, but I don't understand
the relationship between closing your eyes for 15 minutes or 20 minutes and contending with that feeling of wrongness or recentering yourself.
It's not that I'm skeptical of it, I'm really curious about it and I'm slightly in awe of it, but I don't understand it.And maybe it's something that you have to experience to understand, but I'm just curious about it.
I know that's more of like a question mark than a question.
Yeah, I do think there's something of experiencing it.So there's a state and there's trait, right?
So there's the state of meditation, there's people that, you know, practice meditation, they have a kind of meditation practice, and letting that system, that operating system, go offline for a while and not just keep churning and churning and churning and churning and churning.
and giving it a break and letting it reset so that you become a little bit more aligned and in tune with your own pace, rhythm, speed.
and the frenetic pace, rhythm, speed, or sometimes the too slow pace, rhythm, and speed of life, you recognize them as not being yours.So you can stick closer to your own pace, rhythm, and speed.
When we are more attuned to our own pace, rhythm, and speed, then we feel happier. are more aligned within ourselves, within whatever confluences of this thing that we call, this fellow once said, the thing I shamelessly refer to as me.
When we're more in tune with it and we feel more aligned with it, even with how weird we are and odd we are and out of sync we seem with everything else, we feel more happy.That's our navigating system.Our navigating system says,
that you are here to be you.You're not here to be anybody else.You're not here to be me.You're not here to match up and sync with my rhythm and the way that I am.You're here to be you.
And that's telling that even when we don't seem to fit in whatever else is happening, that we are more, and this word is a funny little word for me, but I'll just use it, happy, right?We're more content.
when we are more true to ourselves, that is just real.And the other thing is we are more content when we're just doing what we're doing.What do you mean?When we're not running other programs while we're doing what we're actually doing.
So in other words, we're not talking about what we're doing, questioning what we're doing, wondering about what we're doing as we're doing it, when we're just doing what we're doing, we experience ourselves as more content.
What you're saying is one of the things that people might develop from a practice like this is the voice gets quieter or it goes away sometimes?Yeah, for sure.
I would say that what the voice does is the voice syncs up and it's got something to do with just the thing it's doing instead of watching the thing that it's doing.It's like we're separated from ourself literally, right?
Because there's us doing what we're doing and they're thus watching us and having commentary and having judgment about what we're doing and anxiety about what we're doing.And then we're like, wait a minute, I don't think you should be doing that.
It's like when you're watching a movie, you're like, don't go, don't go, don't go. Don't go over there.I know what's over there.I'm not sure what's over there, but I have a sense because I've watched this movie before.
I've watched movies just that are like this.And so then I'm anticipating what might happen if that person and you're getting all of the anxious feelings and the heart racing and the blood rushing of
what happens when you're watching someone else and you're closely connected with the watching.But that's your life that you're doing.You can turn it off if it's Netflix or a movie or something else.
But when it's your life, you live with that and you're just running on that fight or flight.You're running in the sympathetic nervous system all the time.Because you don't get to turn the movie off.
And it's sometimes time to just join in and just be the character.
And for you, for most of the time you don't have, like the voice in your head is in sync in that way.
It is very much in sync.In fact, the voice in my head just now was your voice.What do you mean?So as you were speaking, the only voices in my head is your voice.I'm with your voice because that's what's happening.
So I'm in the habit and the practice of being with what is and not running commentary alongside which for some people maddens them because it means I respond to things slower as a result because I have to then process.I'm with life.
I'm with what is happening, not watching life and being a spectator.I am in my life.I feel being alive rather than being a spectator of my life that's sitting there on the sideline
you know, annoyingly having all kinds of judgments and interventions and, you know, postulating about and perseverating about what's going on and what could happen and what might happen and what happened.Why didn't I do this or that?
You know, you can feel the energy of it.It's just it's maddening.And when you throw that offline, you just get this.
So when you said What do you hear when you sit quietly?
So when I said earlier that the instructions that I think most of us get is, you know, we think and even sit quietly, right?So that conjures up all sorts of weird stuff for us, you know, and so then we sit there, we're actively trying to be quiet.
And so then we're in a little bit of a battle.So here's the way that I come to it. we're super stealthy, right?Like the ego structure or that extra voice, the sideshow is super stealthy.It's as faster and smarter than us.
And so my approach is you have to kind of get out of the way of even getting out of the way. And the way to do that is to have one single instruction.And the one single instruction is that you just return.You just come back to yourself.
Just come back.Everything else is a sideshow.Everything else that you're doing.
is a sideshow or a rationale for the sideshow, or it's a judgment of the sideshow, or if it's the judgment of why you should have the sideshow, or maybe the sideshow is worthy this particular time, and it's all a sideshow.All of it is a sideshow.
There's just your life.Can we just pause and say, you've just got a life, and that's it.That's it. And when I'm fully in my life, that's kind of enough for me.It's just my life.It takes up all my time.It takes up all my energy.
It takes up all my attention.If I'm fully online with my life, that's all I need is my life.I don't need the sideshow.I don't need the conversations.I don't need the judgment.I don't need the perseverating.I don't need the postulating.
I don't need going into the past, projecting myself into the future, wondering about that.I can just take up the full, as space of my existence with facing my life and meeting my life just what's right here.
So rather than sit quietly, I just invite people to come back to themselves because that's what we're trying to do.It's a shortcut.Instead of doing all these other things that are about coming back to your life, how about just come back to your life?
Just come back.You don't have to sit quietly. The way that I say it is, you're getting quiet enough to hear yourself.Whatever is happening, you can hear it, and you're getting still enough to be able to feel yourself.
Because if you've got a lot of things happening and moving around so that you can't even feel the condition of yourself, then you're not even in the game at all.So enough means just enough for you.
And if you can feel yourself and hear yourself when you're running, that's awesome.That's good enough.You don't have to sit in a room. If you're on a bike and you just go and it's just like, wow, I can feel my senses.I feel my heart.
I feel the quality of my skin.I feel the temperature.I feel the air moving through my hair and I'm in this body.That's still enough.That's quiet enough.And that's the point.
When Rev uses that word point, she's referring to something specific. I might use the wrong words here, so you'll have to forgive me, but my understanding is that she means a particular place where you learn to rest your attention and awareness.
A place you will drift away from, but which you'll learn to return to.I'm describing a place I'm trying to learn to get to, but the instructions for getting there, as I've heard them, go like this. Find a place that's quiet enough.
Get your body into a position that's comfortable enough.Find the specific place.Rev specifies your lower belly.That's the place where your attention is supposed to rest as you breathe naturally.
And as you find your attention awareness moving away, and it will, to a to-do list, to questions about what's going to happen next week, or what happened in the past, you'll just gently return to point. That's the whole thing.
But I'm at the very beginning of trying to understand it, so it feels very strange to try to explain it.But the most basic instruction is just return.
Meditation is not, for me, about sitting quietly or becoming quiet.It's about the choice.That when you find yourself anywhere other than where you intend to be, you come back.That's what I did when I was a kid.I was like, I don't want to be there.
going to come back.I am out here someplace else tripping on some other possibility that hasn't happened.I don't know if it's going to happen.I'm just going to come back right here.
I'm curious how many people come to you, like me, like whether election week for people who have a meditation practice is sort of like January at the gym, like just like a lot of nervous people who need help.Yes.Yes?
Yes, absolutely.I don't personally entertain it anymore, like it's not how I face the world, but I always get my most podcasts and everything. everything right around the election and right around in January, right, when everything jumps off.
It's like prayer, you know, it's like, you know, you lose your keys and suddenly you get religious.I need to pray, I need to do something.
But that makes sense, you know, it's when the bottom falls out, we feel the bottom is falling out or we fear the bottom is going to fall out beneath us that we want to find some ground.
So it's right, it's the right thing to do, whatever brings you there, whatever throws you over the edge, that's the thing that should get you there.
The thing I've been most astounded by in the people in my life who have been drawn to this, it's funny.
I feel like this, not the sales pitch, but the sales pitch a little bit is feels like maybe it would be easier to live in your own mind, which for me is very attractive.
But then what I've seen some people growing into has been instead meditation that's about compassion, that's like about not just being in your own mind as easily, but extending compassion to people who might be difficult or just far away from you.
And I was wondering if you could talk about compassion practices.
Yeah.I would love to say that compassion naturally arises out of every type of meditation.I don't think that's actually true.
I think there's ways that people can meditate and use very focused meditation, right, where it's about focus and concentrating attention that
if there's no moral container, there's no moral container, and it doesn't necessarily cause compassion to arise.So yay for your friends and the people that are like this, this comes along with it as well, because they
they clearly have enough of a moral container either that they brought to it themselves or that's coming along with it as they teach.That is the ideal if we want to be useful for humanity.
Meditation that doesn't cause and incite compassion to arise is not going to be of much use to us on the planet, frankly.Meditation is not in and of itself, it's just going to be good.
It makes us better at something, but not necessarily things that are pro-social all the time.We pitch it as pro-social, but we should be clear about that.
You could be like an executioner who was living in the moment and you would still be an executioner.
But what about, I mean, I guess one of the things that I was at, I won't say drag too, but I attended as I was going with my editor, Shruti, to this event that was a bunch of meditation people and they were speaking.
And I found it interesting and it was nice to be among people who were not my people, who were trying to ask and answer some of the questions I care about.
And the moment that stopped me short was somebody, I think it was an audience member, asked one of the people on stage,
They said, well, you know, I'm somebody who's trying to practice compassion meditation, and how do you, when you sit and you try to extend compassion to, you know, difficult people, what do you do about Donald Trump?
And I had a moment, it was funny, sitting in the audience, the first feeling I had was like a groan, which was interesting, where I was just like, how come we have to talk about this right now?Or maybe it felt very like,
we're in Manhattan where everybody's of the same tribe and everybody agrees that the same person is bad and there's something, but then really sitting with the question for a moment, I thought like, it's a great question.It's a really hard question.
Like, how do you feel compassion towards people who have become an avatar of people who just like inflict suffering on a really wide scale?And I think,
Like, I live where I live, and I'm in the tribe where I am, and so, like, it's not hard for a person to predict, like, most of the people in my life what they want to happen in a week.
But everybody in the country right now has kind of been... Everybody feels like the world's about to end.
Maybe you feel like the world's about to end because Donald Trump's about to be elected, or maybe you feel like the world's about to end because Kamala Harris has been elected, and it feels like a moment of... I think most people feel alienated, and most people feel like
who are these people, even if they don't agree, which people are.
And I'm curious whether your meditation practices, when you think about having compassion for people where you really disagree with them, or you really feel like they are moving through the world without compassion and just like kind of like human bulldozers, but those feel like the people that you're supposed to aim it at.
And again, this is more of like a series of statements that are shaped like a question mark than a question.But like, let me put it as a question.Okay.You, I assume, have a smartphone.
And you open your smartphone and like one of the apps pushes you a notification that's just like, here's the last thing Donald Trump said and it's horrible.And you know, a part of your brain comes online.What do you do with that part of your brain?
What is the way you talk to yourself or what is the way you think about that?
I'm from New York, so I say, oy.I'm like, oy, and then I put it down.
Yeah.I put it down.Actually, it I have a lot of compassion toward him or for him.
It doesn't mean I have to keep him close or make him my bedfellow or want him to win the presidency, but I feel a great amount of suffering from that human being, and mostly because I believe
I don't believe much, but I do believe that human beings are designed to be human, and so when they're acting outside of humanity in ways that are in conflict with humanity, then there's something wrong.And I feel badly for that, right?
I feel badly for anyone that's been fashioned or shaped in such a way that the demands of their nervous system express themselves as operating against humanity.I feel for that.
If I didn't feel for that, I should just jump off of this whole ship and get out of here.Because that means that I've lost a hope and aspiration for us to do better.
when I take it as somehow it's okay that that person is like that and they're just a shit because they're like that and I can write them off, then I've lost aspiration for all of us, honestly.
Or I've decided that I'm going to partition and cut everybody up into the ones that deserve to be here and the ones that don't because they align with
my values, beliefs, orientations, wishes, wants, and I'm queer, and I'm black, and I have so many points on the little marginal spectrum.I would just suffer immensely if I spent my time, not even all, some of my time,
suffering because of what other people are doing in ways that are contrary to the way that I want to live my life.I take it that just they're doing their thing.And I put my time in, my effort in, my energy into
try to slow down the wheels that are grinding some of my freedoms to a halt the best that I can, and then try to advance and accelerate the ones that open up portals to evolutionary leaps to something else, like marriage equality, that just leaps us forward, despite many people's best intention to keep it from going that way.
And I just play that.But you know what?None of that is my life.That's not my life.That's the structures and the contours that we're living within and operating within.
But I think the trait of, I don't want to say meditation, I would say liberation, the trait of liberation is to not mistake the mechanics and operation stuff for who I am.I don't mistake all of the things that are happening.
I have to contend with them, but they're not who I am. I get to keep being me.I get to keep choosing who I am and how I show up.And when I find myself veering off the track of how I'd like to show up in relationship to life, then I return.
What do you think people come into meditation typically wanting?And do you think that they get the thing that they come in wanting?
Yeah, I think they come in wanting escape.Quiet, right?Which is escape.And if they mature, they don't get it.And if they don't mature, they do. So if you don't mature, you do get the escape.And when you mature, you don't get the escape.
And when you mature more, you don't want it.
It's what you're describing that you're able, it's like you're able to sit more fully and completely.I guess people talk about wanting to be in the present more.Everybody says it.It's like this, I always joke with my partner.
I'm always like, you need to be in the MoMA. But what it really means to be in the present is to not turn away from what hurts as well as what is beautiful about it.
Yeah, and not just not turning away, it's like welcome it.Welcome it as an understanding of it's the flip side.It's just another facet of the joy and everything that we want to welcome.That's like, oh yeah, that comes to that too.
That's my favorite thing to say.I'm like, oh, that too.That too. Yeah, and then you take a breath and you make more space in your body, your heart, in your physicality, and yeah, welcome it.
We don't get a single direction door where we can let all the good stuff in and, you know, keep out and ward off the bad stuff.It all comes in.
Well, you've started already.You just return. You know, that curiosity that you have, that yearning to find yourself is all you need.Respond to it.It's like, oh, where am I?What am I?Okay, right here.
That's it. There are courses.If you want 14-week courses, they're there.But I don't know, call me lazy.Call me expedient and interested in scale.That really is it.What we're building on is the motivation to heed it.
You have it, it's there, we all come with it, that you ask the question, it means you're already there.
What we build is the motivation and the practice to heed it, and to heed it so much that it becomes second nature, and then to heed that so much that it becomes back where it belongs, which is first nature.
It's so intimidating, but I really, I'll try it.
I hope so.I hope it's a little less intimidating.You know, it's intimidating because we are intimidating.Meeting ourselves is intimidating.That's the thing that we find out.
It turns out none of that other stuff, and we spend a lot of time fabricating things to be intimidated by, but it turns out that the most challenging thing is to turn around and just meet ourselves where we are.
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams.You can find her online at revangel.com.If you visit, you'll find audio recordings of instructions for point meditation.Also, on November 16th, she's holding a half-day sitting meditation.It's over Zoom.
You can join from home.If you want more information, you can also find it on her website.Rev, thank you.
That's our show this week.If you are getting any value out of this show, and you would like to help us make it, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode.You get ad-free episodes of the show, as well as the occasional bonus episode.
Mainly, you vote for our existence.If you want to sign up for Incognito Mode, go to searchengine.show.Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Panamanani.
And it was produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme, Original Composition, and Mixing by Armin Bazarian.Our Executive Producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis.
Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Parello, and John Schmidt.And to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf.
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