Duncan Trussell Family Hour - JACK KORNFIELD!

Episode Date: March 24, 2015

Spiritual leader and author JACK KORNFIELD  returns to the DTFH!!!!  Much thanks to Feral Audio, and Dan Harmon for letting us record at their studio and TREMENDOUS THANKS to the mindpod network��for making this happen!     This episode brought to you by Squarespace.com  use offer code DUNCAN to get 10% off a beautiful web site.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. I'm dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Hello, friends. It is me, Duncan Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast.

Spirituality Alert, Spirituality Alert, Spirituality Alert. If you don't like spirituality or love talk or talk about openness or opening your heart or heart chakra talk or Buddhism, you need to not listen to this episode because I just got back from a meditation retreat in Hawaii and it's what I'm gonna talk about because it's all I've been thinking about

and it's all I've been feeling. So if you're one of those people, and it's okay if you are, I totally understand, but if you're one of those people who's turned off by spirituality or spiritual talk, this is gonna give you probably 100 ERPMs. That's 100 I-Rolls per minute, at least. You're gonna roll your eyes so many times

that you're gonna look like a, you just snorted 500 grams of pharmaceutical grade MDMA in the back of a glow stick delivery van. It's going to bother you. You won't like it. There's plenty of other negative episodes in this podcast and in all these podcasts that I've done. Go back and listen to the Mistress Justine Cross episode

where I get flogged by a dominatrix. That's back there somewhere or you can listen to any of the episodes with Tim Heidecker or check out The Craftsman. These are all kind of comedically dark, negative versions of this podcast, but this one, this is way on the Uncle John's band side of the record store here.

So, because I've just got a talk, I've got a process that I tell you guys everything and I actually consider you, maybe I won't even talk about the meditation retreat. Maybe I'll just go right into Jack Cornfield who I was lucky enough to interview for this podcast for this episode and I don't know, just talk about how I just got an Xbox One or I don't know.

But unfortunately, because this event just happened to me, I can't stop talking about it because my mind is trying to grasp what happened to me and my mind is basically doing the exact same thing that conspiracy theorists have done after the Twin Towers crashed down or it's just like what just happened to this ego structure that we spent so long working.

I'm not saying my ego structure's gone, no way, it's there. It's doing great, fine, pumping hard, it's there, but something shifted dramatically at this meditation retreat and it's really cool because I didn't expect that to happen. I, at least consciously, I didn't expect it to happen. I thought it'd be relaxing, I thought I'd get to hang out with really cool people

because the last time I went there in spring, I made friends with a lot of amazing people and Raghu would be there and of course, Ramdas was going to be there, is there, and Jack Cornfield is there, but I don't know, it's really weird, somehow I didn't like lay, but I didn't recognize that that equation, this combination of a spiritual community

mixed in with Ramdas who is like some kind of love radiator. He's like a love, he's like just a space heater shaped like a person that pours out just love. So you get around him and you can't help, but get shifted at least in some small way. And then the, of course, the community, whenever you get a group of people gathered together who've been spending their entire lives

or parts of their lives or the recent part of their lives meditating, that's gonna create a specific type of vibe. And then the yoga teacher, Saraswati was amazing and just getting to do yoga is really amazing. And then, oh, it's Hawaii and Hawaii seems like proof that the universe that we are existing in is some kind of simulation.

Like if Planet Earth and the universe was a curtain covering up the workshop that God created things in, then Hawaii would be his elbow accidentally jutting out of a slit in the curtain. It's like proof that there's a God because it's just too much, it's too much. It's like God just left, it's like God's signature on Planet Earth.

Maybe it's his final work because it's a brand new thing relative to the other continents. It's maybe like after God figured out that, I don't know, dinosaurs, they're fun, but they end up getting evaporated by meteors and recognize that drab pine forests, they're great and everything,

but why not just create a black light painting island that's just a blast of just somebody just squeaking neon paint into the ocean and populating it with beautiful birds and coral reefs and you could go snorkeling and you just float out there in the ocean and Maui staring down at these fish communities. Really fun, really fun.

So the combination of all these things creates what the philosopher Hakeem Bay called a temporary autonomous zone, which is sort of in the midst of society or in the midst of a culture, in the midst of all the various patterns and the sort of well-worn patterns that exist in any society from time to time

emerging out of these well-worn patterns, a brand new thing will pop up. And when you're in a temporary autonomous zone, you start getting this strange feeling that where you're at is not the dimension that you're used to. You feel very, very different. And I think within those zones is where you can do

a lot of inner work and where there can be a lot of healing or a lot of transformation can happen in those zones. I'm trying to think of other examples of a temporary autonomous zone. I have never been there, but it seems like Burning Man could be like that. If you've ever been to a really, really good rave, then that can be like that,

where it's just wherever you're at just doesn't feel like Earth anymore. You feel like you've been temporarily zapped into some super advanced civilizations, a spaceship of a super advanced civilization or something. The mind, you know you're in an awesome place when you find yourself stammering or you find your mind sort of stuttering

to try to articulate where you're at. Because the place that you're at has actually gotten bigger than your language. And that's a really wonderful place to be. Because language is a very difficult, problematic thing that categorizes, that categorizes reality into these symbols that are so limited.

So if you get around something that you don't have the language for, then that means you're around something that is novel and is at the cutting edge of things, as far as I'm concerned. So the retreat was amazing and I had a few really intense experiences there. And it was, it's very weird because it's sort of a,

there was a progression to the whole thing. There was a progression. Like when I got there, I was really not in a great place. My, physically I wasn't in a good place. I'd throw my back out. I could barely move my neck. I had this gross cold

and it had been spraying yellowy flim everywhere. It was disgusting. And I had just the night before gotten in an actual fight with a friend of mine, like a real fight where I'd yelled, I'd yelled at him and just was like, just being a real, just angry dick. And of course, probably three weeks prior,

I guess three weeks, I'm not sure the exact amount of time, two weeks prior, two weeks prior, I'd gotten out of a relationship. So I was really just this tangled knot of unhappiness and I wouldn't even call it unhappiness. Just like, I hadn't started gritting my teeth at night, but I was probably just around the corner

from getting to that point where you're so stressed out and miserable that you find yourself gritting your teeth at night. Almost there, but not quite, but close. So I got, you know, I got there and immediately when you step out of the airplane, you know, when you're in Hawaii, when you finally step out of the airport

and you get to be in Hawaii and the energy of Hawaii, you just start healing then. It's very difficult to, I'm sure it happens, no doubt, because I know that there's like a, obviously I don't think that there aren't miserable people in Hawaii. I get it, I know there are, but man, I think to be miserable in Hawaii

takes like a few more calories than it does here. Like you really have to like, you've got to really squeeze that misery muscle to generate misery there. I don't know though. I imagine any place that you live, you can get used to it and then it just starts sucking. Who knows, it's, who knows?

But for someone who isn't accustomed to Hawaii, it's just you're immediately being buffeted by this insane energy, which I think they call prana, which is the term for like shakti or the term for chi energy or the just, it's like, you know, a baby, a brand new baby, just a fresh, sweet, darling baby. When you get around a baby, it really is like

the baby is glowing and you feel like you wouldn't be that surprised if you saw tiny little glittery fairies like flying around the baby and singing hymns to the thing because there's just something sacred and beautiful and holy about a baby. That's what Hawaii's like. It's the earth's baby.

So it's got that brand new puppy feel to it. Only it's an island. So there's that. But then when you get to the retreat, when I got to the retreat, there's an opening ceremony and it's really quite beautiful and Ram Dass is there and everyone's there

and something started happening to me where I immediately just started resisting everything. Like, you know, it's like my, my ego was like really going into like high gear. Not in the, you know, in the sense of like, I just found myself being kind of judgmental and closed off and just sort of like, what if I, man,

I hope I didn't, did I fuck up by coming here? Like, do I belong here? I mean, don't get me wrong. I was having an awesome, you know, dinner with friends and hanging out with Ragu's, one of the sweetest people ever. He's been on the podcast a few times and he's on this podcast.

So it was sweet, but still, you know, whenever you go to something like that by yourself, PS, you know, I was initially going to bring my ex-girlfriend there. So there was that element of it too, which was just like just this sense of like, fuck, man. I, you know, this is very different from the way that I expected it to be, you know,

cause I'm here by myself. And so there was all of that happening going on in my head, just an entire swarm of dark negativity flies zooming around in my brain. Lots of internal eye rolls happening, perhaps, and just a kind of closed down thing going on. So that was the first day. And then the next day, you wake up very early.

Well, for me, very early, it's actually not even early because it's, and I think nine o'clock LA time, but to me, it felt early. So you wake up and you go to yoga, which is, if you haven't done yoga for a long time, which I had, and you do it for the first time, it really is like smoking some amazingly great marijuana or it gets you so high.

So there was that. And then in that sort of buoyant, opened up state, you go to the teachings. And that's with Jack Cornfield and his wife, Trudy. Now, that's where things started getting really interesting for me because I'm, you know, I'm just sitting there and then Jack Cornfield, you definitely, definitely download an audio book

by Jack Cornfield or get one of his books or go on YouTube and listen to one of his lectures. I'm sure they're there. I haven't checked, but just listen to him talk. I have an audio book by him now called A Path With Heart. It's amazing, but he's got the like most call, he has such a calming effect. It's amazing.

You feel like you're a baby and you've been crying and your mom is singing to you or something. He just calms you down. And so, you know, he started talking and he's into something called insight meditation and he was a Buddhist monk and he used to work in the Peace Corps. He was in the Peace Corps and then he decided

to be a Buddhist monk. I mean, just think about that. Think about that. I mean, I don't know what you do, but you know, probably when I was Jack Cornfield's age, when he joined the Peace Corps, I probably the most selfless thing that I did was maybe, I don't know, let somebody cut into traffic

a couple of times a year. I definitely didn't have some calling that I'm gonna go join the Peace Corps to help people and then somewhere in the midst of being in the Peace Corps, I wasn't like, you know what? I think I wanna go join it become a monk and a monastery. It does happen to some people.

That's what they call dharma, is that you get drawn into service or helping people and it does happen. It's just really cool to be around somebody who's like authentically dedicated their lives to helping people or they just decided, well, you know what? If I'm gonna do something in this world,

it's gonna be helping people instead of making money or selling houses or whatever it is that all the rest of us do. I don't sell houses, but I would. If I had a bunch of houses to sell, I'd definitely sell them. So that's just cool. But then the other thing that's interesting about being around those people is you get to,

the first thing you're gonna do if you're me, maybe not you, but if you're me, you're gonna size them up. I can't help it. It's just my ego and the mechanisms of judgment automatically will size people up. Anyone who comes, unfortunately, anybody who comes in front of me gets the terminator treatment.

I don't know if you've ever seen the terminator, but he had this thing that's like, the grid pops up and it's like, the phony readout will pop up and the asshole, 90% asshole, 10% phony, all jerk. That kind of thing pops up. That's what the judgment mechanisms do. At a place like this, especially when your ego is starting to act like a cat that's about to get a bath,

you go into full judgment mode if you're me, maybe not you. So that's the thing that happens when you get around these teachers and holy shit, man. Jack Cornfield's got the most amazing vibe. So that gets shut down right away because he's just got this, I don't know, it's this thing that happens to you after you've been practicing for a long time

is you just put out this crazy, calming energy. He's like, human chamomile tea. You're just suddenly like, ah. See how he's listening to Jack Cornfield and then right away, and I mean, I could try to repeat what he said, but it's not gonna, it's not gonna, I'm sure it won't have the same effect,

but the thing that got me all of a sudden is I'm sitting there and he says, he says, if you're lonely, if you're lonely, just let yourself feel lonely. I mean, it sounds so simple. It sounds like, yeah, no duh, but for me, that's not like a thing that I do. That's not a thing that I, you know,

a lot of my life has been doing everything I can to avoid feeling lonely. And everything I can to avoid feeling grief and everything I can to avoid feeling anything, really, outside of feeling high or feeling like the higher states, like love or lust or anger, you know, but like to really just let yourself like go into your chest, your heart, as they call it,

but I wish they used a different term than heart because I think that's such a confusing thing for us these days. Because, you know, you hear a heart and you just think about that red, bloody muscle that they pull out of your chest in Indiana Jones movies. You don't, it's like an organ, you know, pumps blood through your whole body,

but it's that when, I think when they say heart, they really just mean this energy center, your heart chakra, it's where the organ of your heart happens to be. But that's a thing a lot of people avoid and I certainly, certainly have, unless there's like a tsunami event that happens, like my mom died, that created a situation where I couldn't, I couldn't turn my back

on the feeling of sorrow and loss. And so after my mom died, I had many, many moments of just breaking down and sobbing and sobbing and sobbing and holding myself and sobbing and just, I couldn't stop it. But, and a lot, I think that's a thing that a lot of us, you know, we put off feeling until our parents die or we put off feeling until some kind of like

catastrophic event happens and then we get permission to feel or we just get overcome by it. But there's little, there's like smaller things too. There's always this level of suffering happening that I think that a lot of us are unaware of, you know, because we get taught to ignore it. So something about Jack Cornfield, human chamomile, crooning universal mother force,

just saying that all of a sudden I just started like tears just started rolling down my face. Didn't want, did not want that to happen. I didn't want to be the middle-aged guy crying at a meditation retreat by himself. Definitely did not want to be that guy, but I was that guy. And that was day one. And it caught me by surprise.

It was like a left hook. Cornfield threw a little love left hook. Cornfield was doing the knockout game, but as a spiritual teacher. And he was doing that to my ego where all of a sudden my ego is caught off guard and now I'm like, Oh God, I'm lonely. Holy shit.

I'm lonely. There it is. And so that was the first like really cool experience. So then at this meditation retreat at night, this musician, Krishnadas plays. Now, if you've never heard of Krishnadas, I've played him a few times on this podcast. Krishnadas was a disciple of Neem Kerali Baba,

just like Ramdas, just like Raghu. And he sings kirtans, which are these like spiritual chants, sort of like musical mantras basically. And kirtans are, I had forgotten this because I hadn't sung a kirtan a long, long time. I'd forgotten how intensely psychedelic these things were. And you know what else is psychedelic?

The marijuana in Hawaii, holy God. Hawaiian marijuana is just, I don't know if it's the marijuana in Hawaii or the marijuana combining with the beautiful energy of Hawaii or what it is, but I just smoked some incredibly powerful marijuana. And I'm walking through, and again, man, I'm very closed off here.

These people who've been practicing for meditation or have been really working on themselves for many, many years, they're very open and they're not like trying to be cool. And they're not trying to act like they're at a martini bar or something and they're James Bond. They're all very loving.

They'll hug you just out of the blue. They give you authentic, real smiles. And if you end up saying something bad about yourself in front of them in a really sweet way, they won't correct you, but they'll point out like, why are you saying that about yourself? You are wonderful. So these people are very sweet.

And when kirtans are happening, they don't have a problem dancing to the kirtans. Now people like me, human icicles, we don't wanna dance or do karaoke or do any of that stuff, because it just doesn't work with who we think we are. And so I'm walking to go sit down in a very, I guess I was gonna in a very formal way

listen to ecstatic religious chanting. And I'm passing people who are dancing and one of them says, why don't you dance? And I'm like, I would not miss, I said, not in this incarnation. I'm not gonna dance to kirtans. What I look like, a hacky sack vendor. So I sat down and I'm sitting there.

And what I just said to this very sweet person is still kind of reverberating in my head. I'm really high. And I'm sitting there and I started singing these kirtans. And this is when the second sledgehammer blows. Which is I'm sitting there, sort of like singing this kirtan, listening to the echo of what I just said.

I had not this incarnation. Suddenly I'm looking at myself from this other place. It's like the kirtans are happening. It's very, very psychedelic. And I suddenly, I don't know what happened, but it was like I got the Google map zoom out for a second. And I saw the, this like, network of rules that I had assembled for myself.

And one of them being, I don't, apparently one of them being, I don't dance to kirtans. And, but there are many, many, many, many others. That's just this whole web. I could just see it for a second. This whole framework of like, you know, SNM level rules that were just like wrapped and bound

and tightened around this thing that was underneath it. And I looked at that being, and I saw that I didn't, that this being that I was looking at, this role or this ego thing that I had manufactured, when I saw it so clearly, I thought to myself, I would not wanna hang out with that guy. And then I realized that network of rules

that I had formed for myself, that personality I was looking at reminded me of everyone I don't like. That was the two big things. And suddenly I realized, oh, holy shit, man. Everyone I don't like is actually just me. I'm, it's my inability to love myself. Because that's the big move, man.

That's the move is that, are you gonna be able to cut the bondage straps that you've wrapped around your soul that represent your ego? Are you gonna be able to cut those? I don't know. But you could definitely, you can loosen them. And the way you loosen them is by,

instead of rejecting yourself, instead of rejecting the you that doesn't dance to kirtans, rejecting the you that rolls its eyes secretly, rejecting the paranoid, fearful, dark you, the practices you find, you begin to, you start loving it. And that's the practice.

I mean, it's not like you're gonna do it all at once. But even just instead of hiding from it, or pretending it's not there or pushing it down, just honestly appraising it and then doing what you can to love it. Because this is the next day, the exercise that they started doing, or I don't remember which day this was on,

is they start, you know, it's a compassion exercise. So the exercises you, first you acknowledge how much you as a person have suffered in your life. And you have, you have suffered in your life. Because that is part of what happens when you get torpedoed out of a vagina into this dimension. And the same way that when a dolphin is born, that dolphin is guaranteed to be wet.

There's no dry dolphins that are doing great. There's no dry dolphins. I mean, they might be temporarily dry or something, but it's not a great thing. There's no dry dolphins. In the same way, there's no humans, there's no way that you haven't suffered. You just have.

And it doesn't, I know, I know you're thinking, oh no, my life's been good, my parents were great. I had everything I needed. I had food on the table, whatever it is, no way, you suffered. You did, you did. You might be hiding from it. By the way, I don't know who you are.

Oh, lucky St. Light being with wonderful parents who are always had everything you needed. Lucky you, weirdo. I don't think you're out there, honestly. I think that's a phantom. I think in general, all of us have suffered, all of us have been rejected, all of us have, and some of us in some of the most extreme ways.

But for some reason, we don't embrace ourselves and acknowledge the fact that we have suffered and that this ego thing that we have or this hardcore, this prison cell that we've constructed around ourselves, which is keeping us from being vulnerable, is there because we had to build it. Because at some phase in our lives,

we had to protect ourselves from whatever was going on around us. It was just too much. We had to construct this safe cage, like in the walking dead, when they go hiding in the prison to stay away from the zombies. And we began confusing the cage with ourselves.

And we began to hate the cage ourselves, our ego mechanism, instead of recognizing that it's a natural result of suffering, like a callus. You don't hate calluses on your hands. If you've been working, they're there to protect your hands. In the same way,

when your consciousness comes into contact with the turbulent nature of the reality that we've been born into, it can and will produce calluses. And that's the ego, that's part of the ego. So you recognize, you see this whole thing that you've become, this personality, this series of mechanisms

and defense mechanisms and habituations. And that's when you say, oh, I don't like myself, because really what you don't like is the cage. No one likes a cage. And then the next step is having compassion on that thing, because it's like, you have to realize, no, that's there for a reason.

That happened for a reason. And here's the other fascinating thing. The person that you really dislike, the person that really rubs you the wrong way, the person that really, really annoys you or that you would like to shove out of a boat with an anchor tied to their necks, that person has suffered too.

And in the game that I have played, and well, I'm sure I will probably continue to play it, not enlighten, just I realize some stuff at this thing. The game is, okay, you have this person and they suck, whoever it is. So in the equation of judgment, part of the equation of judgment is the person who sucks, and the other part of the equation is the person

who's right. You have the right person and the wrong person. So for the whole judgment game to happen, you have this one fill in the blank, you know who it is, you probably just talked shit about them yesterday. Throw that person into the spotlight of your consciousness for a second

and look at that person and whatever it is that they did, whatever it is that they did, you know? Maybe they're not as artistic as you, maybe they're not as artistic as you, but they got some success, or maybe they don't work as hard as you do, but they're getting more success than you do, or maybe they were cruel to you,

they said something nasty to you, or maybe they ignored you, or maybe they actually stole from you, or stole your girlfriend, or your boyfriend, or whatever, you know? Here's the crazy thing. They have suffered immensely in this world. And you wanna see extreme examples of this,

watch Locked Up Raw. And when you see these giant muscular prisoners who are like, you know, just so, so expressionless. And the only way they think they express is rage, or that they're frozen up, what you're seeing there is a being that is really, really suffering and has suffered in the most extreme ways.

And when you start recognizing that first you recognize it in yourself, and then you recognize it in other people, the judgment game or the game of really hating people or getting to really get angry at a person, it just ruins the game. Because how can you really be angry at someone, and how can you really, really truly get off,

get that nice hit off the anger pipe when you recognize that all you're looking at is a prison surrounding a very sad, hurting being. You might as well, the next time you wanna like really hate somebody, go to the local animal rescue and kick the cages that the puppies are in. Just go and shake a rescued dog's cage.

That's what it's like. So that sort of, that happened to me. It was a suddenly I realized like, oh, shit, man. All of us are, of course, all of us are really, really suffering and hurting and lonely and grieving and sad and hiding from ourselves. And then you realize that.

And all these things, it starts making this like, sort of ice prison around your consciousness start melting. And then, the final big moment for me, and I thought about not talking about this on the podcast because it feels kind of personal, it's extreme. In fact, it's the most extremely personal thing. I don't think I've, I mean, I've said so many like, weird, like, you know, embarrassing things, sex things,

but I've never, I don't know that I've ever like, I've, oh, I'll just tell you guys, I'll just tell you guys, I'm not gonna keep saying that I tell you guys everything because you know I do. But this was like, I guess the final Sledgehammer event, which was at the end of this beautiful retreat, there's this, a Mala ceremony. And what happens is Ram Dass gives you chanting Mala's,

which is a, which basically are chanting beads. And these beads sort of have tied in them threads from Maharaji, Ram Dass' guru, Neem Kareli Baba's blanket that he used to wear, which is really cool. So you get this Mala and Ram Dass gives it to you and you, you know, you bow to Ram Dass and or do whatever you wanna do.

Everyone does something different. Like you're just gonna do whatever, whatever you do. It's a very curious situation to be in, to be standing and because everyone kind of gets in line, they do this. And it's really weird, man. I mean, at this point, you're like, you've been sort of warmed up and opened up by the retreat, but you're still like, I was still like,

kind of locked down a little. And he gives you this, he gave me these beads and then I felt totally fine, just happy. I just felt really happy and fine. And then I walked outside of where the event was happening and I walked it over to sit out in the sun in this like nice manicured lawn and just out of nowhere, I just started sobbing.

Like nervous breakdown level, just sobbing, but it wasn't like sick, bad crying. It was just this, it was crazy. It was like all the sadness of this year that I've had, my mom dying, cancer. Like all of this like pain came out really fast. And then not just pain though. Like all of this, it wasn't just pain.

This is where it's really weird. It's this crazy intertwined like wave of feelings, like just happiness and like joy and thankfulness and feeling so grateful to exist at all and to be at such a beautiful place combining with like all the sadness that I've been and hurt and sorrow and grief that I've been repressing. Just all of it just came pouring out at once.

So there I am at this resort in Hawaii, just crying like a baby, and I would stop and like try to wipe my eyes off because not everyone's at this retreat. So they're just looking over and seeing this weird bearded guy crying. They probably thought that my fiance or my new wife just drowned

or got eaten by a shark or something. It was really embarrassing and awesome. And it kept happening. Like I'd stop and I'd wipe the tears away. I'd stop and be smiling and then bam, another wave. And then that happened a couple of more times. That I think was like me experiencing my heart opening up. Probably for the first time in a very long time.

When my mom died, it opened up but it shut right back down. I couldn't help it. It just broke when my mom died. This is different. Or maybe not different, I don't know. Maybe opening your heart and heartbreak are just different words for the same thing.

So that happened. Now, the other thing I took away from the retreat was, you know, I'm always trying to find like, what do I do? What's the practice? What do I do? And the other thing I took away, it's just so obvious

because it's right there in front of you all the time. It's the three things that Neem Karali Baba told Ram Das to do when he came back to the United States. And these three things are love everyone, serve everyone and remember God. And that's why his foundation is called the Love, Serve, Remember Foundation. So the practice here is so very simple

and that practice is love yourself first, work on yourself. You are the first being that you come in contact with in this dimension. That ego structure inside of you in your heart, that is a being, a thing that deserves your embrace, not your rejection. And yes, it's not, yes, it's a jerk. You are roommates with a dick probably,

but you've got to love that person. You have to love that person that you are, that ego structure that represents the sort of stratification of your life, all the different, you know, like when you look at a cliff face and you could see the different geologic events that happened in the history of the earth. Well, you've got that, that's what your ego is.

That's the role you're playing. It's these, it's the rings of a tree that have grown around your soul. And you start loving that, you start loving that as much as you can. And somehow when you start doing that, and I'm telling you, this is like not just, you're not gonna do it, there's no rush,

doesn't happen in this lifetime, probably won't happen in several incarnations if you believe in that stuff. But just the, just dipping your toe in the waters of your heart, just playing around with it, just play around with the idea of loving yourself, of seeing yourself and loving yourself,

just play around with it, of feeling again, play around with the idea of feeling again, of going into your heart and feeling so many people don't feel. And in fact, that scent, that anger, maybe that feeling of anger is actually just another name for pain. You know, like when your hand goes, falls asleep,

and numbs out, it's like, that's, maybe that's what anger is. Or maybe anger is just your like, the collision of love meeting this prison. And that's, and it's that, it's like, maybe it's the feeling of anger is your soul stubbing its toe on the prison of your ego. Does that make sense?

I don't know. But there's more feelings than anger, and there's more, and there's more feelings than that, like, than like, kind of the, than lust, or like, that's kind of like, graspy feeling that goes along with looking at porn, or like having, you know, trying to like, find happiness through fucking all the time.

Not that you shouldn't, not that any of this is like, not, the whole point of all of this is like, you start loving the whole picture. And behind it, you know, behind all this stuff, there is, I, there is, here's the great hope. I have some childhood memories that I really like. One childhood memory that I have is when I was very, very young, way before the divorces,

and way before, you know, the catastrophes of life happened, I can remember, I would walk with my mom to the beach, because we lived on St. Simon's Island in Georgia. And I can remember how good the flowers smelled, and I would, I still remember smelling this one flower, and just like, oh God, it just smelled so good, and life was so beautiful and simple. And you would go to the beach, and I remember looking down

at my feet, wearing flip flops, and watching the way that they hit the ground as we walked towards the beach, and just feeling so good, and that went away. That feeling went away, and it got replaced, and it got replaced by the series of brief dopamine hits that happen when you get some success, or when you find a new girlfriend, or when you say something, when you win.

Those brief kind of like fever-like jolts of adrenaline replaced this calm, peaceful sense of being happy with just the beauty of the world, which you get, which you have when you're a kid, and which kids have when you watch a child, you can see they have that. Here's the great hope. Underneath that prison, that weird, dark prison

that encircles your heart, underneath that, there is the possibility that if you start waking that up, practicing what they call loving kindness for yourself, and for others, you can actually feel like that again. You can get that feeling back as an adult. And now you get that feeling back with all the extra experience and wisdom that you've gained from being in the world,

and that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. And this is why there's so many different stories about the prodigal son, or about returning, returning, not even realizing, it's the fantasy when you're really pissed at your parents as a teenager, you might have this fantasy like maybe I was adopted and I'm the child of some billionaire. Yeah, some people have that.

It's like that, but it's a million times better, because it's suddenly realizing that you can, after all the just suffering and grief and all being closed down and shut down, you can actually experience bliss again as an adult. And that's why they could always call this rebirth or being reborn, born again, as the Christians call it. That can actually happen, that's real.

I'm not saying it happened to me, but definitely my walks have gotten better. I feel like my friendships have already gotten much better. I feel much closer to people and more grateful for my life than I've ever felt. And I imagine in like two weeks, it's gonna completely go away. I'll be gnashing my teeth and watching pornography

on my Xbox One, completely having forgotten about all of this, but right now, it's great. And maybe it won't go away, you know, maybe it won't. You know, Rom Doss and the teachers, they do say that there is this kind of wave form to the whole thing, where you go up and down, up and down. Sometimes you're there and sometimes you're lost. So I'm sure that's gonna happen to me.

And of course it has, I mean, there are throughout the day, you do have these different mood states and everything, but when you get these tools, or these kinds, these tools, really simple tools too, which is just love yourself. So even when you do fall away and you don't feel like you're Mahatma Gandhi spreading seeds of selfless love to the world,

even when you do just feel like a swamp pig that just climbed out of a gutter, you get to practice loving that thing too. And so that's really cool about it. It gives you a practice, which is just to love yourself. And in the process of loving yourself and working on yourself, you will find yourself falling in love

with everyone around you. And that is a blast. So that's the story of my meditation retreat. We have got an amazing podcast with Jack Cornfield, but before we jump into that, let's do some business. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! Guys, listen, all spiritual talk, all the hummus, breath, talk aside.

What's on the horizon? It's Christmas. Christmas is right around the corner. And sure, instead of just giving someone some material thing, you could sit down with them and be in the present moment with them and look them in the eyes and have them look you in the eyes

and forget about your past and forget about the future and just be in a place of absolute nerve-onic bliss with them. Or you could buy them a Blu-ray DVD player that you can find on amazon.com. Let's face it, not all of us are ready to dive into the universal hot tub of love and embrace our human brothers and sisters by emotionally opening up our heart chakras

so they could experience what it's like to finally be in the presence of non-judgment and understand that underneath their ego mechanisms is a glowing, beautiful, eternal love beam. We're just not there yet. We're not ready. It's not that part of the party for us in our current incarnation.

So what can we do instead? We can buy people meaningless, useless chunks of plastic assembled in ways that will distract our nervous systems away from feeling for just a little bit longer. And there's so many wonderful things out there that will do that for us. TVs, computers, iPads, Kindles, you name it. We have got so many wonderful glowing,

rectangular distraction mechanisms these days that Satan himself is considering coming back just so he can sit and zone out, staring at Instagram, swiping Tinder and allowing his already blackened heart to be numbed even more by the wonderful technologies that exist around us. It's Christmas. It's coming.

The holiday that once designated the celebration of the solstice, the shifting of the seasons or the birth of love into the universe has been converted by the reptilians into a horrific materialistic ritual where we give each other presents. And it doesn't have to be that way. It's the intention behind it.

But come on, let's face it. Most of us aren't giving gifts in a spiritual way. We're doing it because we feel like we have to. Bottom line, you can do what my stepdad did and opt out and say you're not gonna do a materialistic Christmas, fine. But the conditioning is so powerful and potent that not everyone's gonna understand.

I'm not saying you have to succumb to the materialistic orgy that is upon us this year. Halloween for materialists is what Christmas is. I'm not saying you have to do that, but if you are going to succumb, if you are going to let the cobra of greed, stick its venomous fangs deep into your juggler vein and pollute your nervous system

with the terrible guilt that comes because you feel like you didn't buy somebody a thing that was equivalently priced, if you're gonna really fall prey to this idiotic hypnosis machine that has us all by the shorthairs, then why not do it by going to amazon.com and going through our portal at dunkintrustle.com

and supporting the Dunkin' Trustle Family Hour podcast. So at least when you are diving into the writhing, eyes-wide, shut level, horrific, horrific, not even horrific, but horrific celebration of lifelessness that is Christmas, you can at least support this podcast. Do it, matter, matter, matter, matter. Go crazy on amazon.com, amazon.com.

It's a dispensary of so many different forms of matter. It's all there, any kind of matter conglomeration that you need, you can find it at amazon.com. You wanna find matter formed in the shape of a fancy Vitamix blender, it's there. And that's a great gift. Listen, if you've got an unhealthy friend and you wanna give them something

that can really, really make them feel guilty for never using it, get them a Vitamix and let it just sit on their counter and stare at them. Like the Raven and that Edgar Allen Poe poem, mine does, I walk by it every day, you should see it stare at me. If it could shake its head at me, it would sadly shake its head at me, but I've got it.

I've made some great shakes with it too and I'm going to revisit it one day, but right now it's not being used at all, nor is my Roomba, is that what it's called? Yeah, Roomba, I was thinking of Zoomba, the dance thing. You can even get somebody as Zoomba's dance DVD if you really wanna piss somebody off for Christmas. Look, if you're gonna engage in this satanic holiday

that is disguised as some kind of moment where we're truly loving each other, which you will do and you can do, whether or not you have gifts or not, but if you really wanna just dive into the thing and just admit what it is, maybe get annoying gifts for people. Nothing will give a person,

nothing will make a person feel more insecure than if you give them a Zoomba exercise DVD. Just do that. Wrap it up in the editorial section of a newspaper and give it to them. So many great things you can get people on amazon.com and you know what, not all giving has to be terrible. It's the intention behind it

and you can give somebody something with love and you don't have to feel as though you've been sucked in by some corporate magnet and convinced that this is the only time of the year that you're supposed to buy things for people. You don't have to feel like you've been tricked or hypnotized. You can actually just ignore that you've been tricked

and hypnotized and be in the moment and watch the eyes of your lover light up as you push something across the Christmas tree in her direction that more than likely she'll forget about in two weeks. Amazon.com, we've got a portal located at dunkintrustle.com. If you go through the Amazon portal, you will, Amazon gives us some small percentage

of anything that you buy. So it's such an easy thing to do. The next time you find yourself late at night, stoned or drunk about to order that pentagram tapestry or the space heater that looks like a fireplace that seems like such a smart thing to buy. But when it comes, you'll realize what a sucker you are. Go to dunkintrustle.com and slide through our portal.

Do it. They give us a small percentage and it's a way for you to support the podcast. We are also sponsored by Sure Design T-shirts. Sure Design T-shirts creates the softest T-shirts on planet Earth. Oh God, these shirts are soft. And I saw so many of them at the meditation retreat

that I could only think that our campaign to eventually cover the entire planet in one giant Sure Design T-shirt is going to happen. They're wonderful shirts to wear at a meditation retreat. They've got pictures of Ganesh and they've got Sanskrit and alms and beautiful designs. And you can find them all by going to SureDesignT-shirts.com. And if you put my name in, you get 10% off.

My God, these shirts are so soft. When I was snorkeling in Hawaii, one thing I forgot to mention is that I made love with a dolphin. And that was soft. That was very soft, but it still wasn't as soft as the feeling of a Sure Design T-shirt. It just couldn't compare.

So go to SureDesignT-shirts.com, put my name in. You get 10% off. Finally, and then we'll get going with this podcast. We are sponsored by Audible.com. Audible is a purveyor of incredible audio books. And if you go to Audible trial, forward slash family hour and sign up for a trial membership, you get one free audio book.

And then you can cancel your membership. You get to keep the audio book. What that means is if you wanna quickly get a Jack Cornfield lecture after reading or after listening to the interview with him, you can go to audibletrial.com forward slash family hour and sign up and get a free Jack Cornfield book. And if you don't wanna pay a monthly fee to Audible,

which you should do, because it's really cool to have an endless access to audio books, then you can cancel your membership. Get to keep the lecture. So, and of course, if you know one of your friends is a fan of the Duncan Tressel Family Hour podcast, if you go to DuncanTressel.com, we've got shirts, we've got posters, and there's even a bonus episode,

a Halloween bonus episode, which is completely not going to make any sense at this time of year. But if you just wanna listen to an extra episode and pay for it, it's there. If you don't wanna pay for it, I'm sure somebody's put it on a torrent site by now, or it's probably, who knows,

it's probably on YouTube or something by now. And you don't have to pay for it. You can, if with like a couple of Google searches, I'm sure you can find it and listen to it for free. And you don't have to feel guilty about doing that. It's just a way that you could support the podcast. But I'm happy that you just listened to my raspy lesbian voice.

And send me an email. Contact information is at DuncanTressel.com. Now this is a special podcast because I did it in conjunction with Raghu Marcus, who is the co-host of the Mind Rolling podcast. And you can find that at mindrollingpodcast.com. He does it with David Silver. And so you're gonna hear him on this podcast,

along with me and Jack. And if you feel like maybe you wanna dive in and go to one of these Ram Dass retreats, you can go to ramdass.org. They have them twice a year. There's one coming up in the spring. And I'm going to be going to that one too. Today's guest is a world famous Buddhist teacher.

He has written a ton of books, including the path of insight meditation, as well as a path with heart. You can go to his website, which is located at spiritrock.org. He does regular retreats and teachings so if you listen to this interview and you feel like you wanna get more info from him,

definitely go to spiritrock.org. I'm gonna have links to all this stuff at dunkintrustle.com. If you can't remember it, it will be in the comments section of this website. Okay everybody, please welcome to the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour, the great Jack Cornfield.

We are here. Welcome, welcome on you, that you are with us. Shake hands, we're here to be with you. Welcome to you, wow, wow, wow. It's Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour. Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour. Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour.

Four, five, six. So, we are here at the Open Your Heart and Paradise Retreat, Dunkin' Trussell and meet Raghu Marcus. And we've got a joint kind of podcast going on today, you know, Dunkin' and I, and we have Jack Cornfield. And Jack has been, well, we've known each other a very, very, very long time. He's part of our greater family that includes Buddhists

as well as our bhakti people. I'm gonna have to start again because I forgot we gotta turn this down, turn this off. What was that? It sounded like an ice machine or something. Yeah, we'll have to live with that, but we got a hug on the, so let's just, can you roll it again?

Yeah, we'll just keep rolling. Yeah. Take two. Hi, this is Raghu Marcus with my buddy Dunkin' Trussell. Hello. We're at the Open Your Heart and Paradise Retreat in Maui and boy, oh boy, we're looking out at the ocean and we just invited Jack Cornfield,

who's one of the teachers from the retreat alongside of Ram Das and Krishna Das and Jack has his partner, Trudy Goodman here. So we're in pretty good shape, Dunkin'. Yeah, this is amazing. And Jack has been, has one of the three people, Jack is a very old friend. We met in India back in the day.

And Jack is one of three people who are instrumental in bringing insight meditation back to the United States. And they started a center in Barry, Massachusetts, insight meditation center. And then you went off to California and in California, Jack runs Spirit Rock and is part of Spirit Rock, an incredible center on the west, so you have it covered on the east

and the west side. And Jack has many, many, what's the latest books? I hope you've had up on Ram Das. Bringing Home the Dharma or The Wise Heart, all those are good. So, and you can get these on Amazon and you can go through whatever portal from Ram Das to Dunkin' Trestle family.

So many portals to choose from. Yes, you can just swim right through, find the great vast openness with fish swimming and good Dharma for you. Yes, exactly. Now, so at this retreat, we've been, the theme of the retreat has been suffering and grace and how to work with suffering,

how to see grace in our lives, how to open our hearts and make friends with the untoward that happens every day. So, Jack has been giving incredible talks with Trudy Goodman every morning. We're just halfway into it. Just tell me a little bit in its most nuts and bolts way, how do we deal with just the day-to-day separation

is suffering, untoward things that happen to us is suffering, how do we make friends with suffering? Well, you just said it. You said how do we make friends with suffering. Because the fact is that life is human incarnation, this mysterious life that you find yourself in, you didn't even ask for and then there you find yourself in this human body with the wiggly things at the end,

the little patches of fur and a vestigial tail, if you notice, little bits of claws that are left and the whole one end into which you stuff dead plants and animals and grind them up and glove them down through the tube and you ambulate in this human body by falling one direction and catching yourself and you fall the next direction, you catch yourself. It's really bizarre.

All right, so here you are and you say, all right, what are the rules of the game? And part of what the rules of the game are is that human incarnation includes joy and sorrow, praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, beginnings and endings, birth and death, sweet and sour, and you can't tease them apart. They actually come as a package.

You know, if you take the ticket for the human ride, this is what you get. Then people think, well, I'm doing it wrong because somebody got sick or somebody died or, you know, there was some loss, even though there's also insanely beautiful days and great blessings and then you realize there's an unbearable beauty and ocean of tears

and they make up human life. Then the question is not so much, what do you do with suffering? Suffering's the first noble truth of the Buddha. It's just included in the dance of humanity. And with that understanding, you can meet the suffering with a compassionate and open heart that says, oh yes, this is what humanity is like.

And instead of being afraid or judging yourself and saying, I've done it wrong, which we do very well, you instead you say, ah, here we are. And you take in yourself, you take your seat, or you stand like the Buddha, looking out with a gaze of infinite compassion and say, this is human life. Let me live it in a way that brings sweetness

and beauty to the world. When you say looking at something with a gaze of infinite compassion, you make it sound really easy. I'm looking at myself, when I came to this retreat, right before I came to this retreat, I got in a vicious text fight with my ex-girlfriend. I broke up with my ex-girlfriend over this retreat

and I was angry and in the text, she's pointed out, it's pretty hilarious that we're fighting over a retreat. And then I thought about it and I thought, well, the reason I am going to a retreat is because I'm getting into these text fights with you. That's not because of you, but because that's where I'm at. So when you say, look through these eyes of compassion, I think of like, when I'm mindful and I see that anger

or the fear body as you were calling it, it is not that easy to love that thing. In fact, I can look at it and say to it, I wish I could love you, but you seem like someone I wouldn't want to hang out with and I'm you. You're stuck, aren't you? Yes.

I feel for you. Oh, thanks. But the truth is that we all have a personality. You get issued a body, this kind of human form, which is already pretty wild, and you get issued a personality and people think, well, if I do therapy or I do it right, then my personality will change and I'll be Buddha personality.

I'll be some, I'll be Dalai Lama personality, but it's more like this. If you can love whoever of your family and friends come through the door, if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy, if you can sleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill,

if you can eat everything that's put on your plate, if you can find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog. We have all these spiritual ideals and the very first step in meditation or in becoming conscious is to take a step back and make a bow and say, oh, wow, look at this package of neurosis and love and fear and confusion.

The mind contains everything and if you think it shouldn't contain that, that's just judgment and then the judging mind comes and you can bow to it and say, oh, thank you for your judgment. You say, I hate judging and you bow to it and say, oh, hating too and I wish I could get better, wishing, wishing and the place of the awakened heart is the place in you that can take a breath and bow

and say, oh, look at this, the tears, the text from your ex and then the rage that comes and the fact that the mind has no pride and not only that, it writes, it will sit there in meditation and it will choreograph a text, a killer, an assassin text that she's gonna get and she'll be both devastated and completely in love with you at the same time. That's how grandiose you are and then you say, man,

what a magnificent anger that is, what a magnificent fantasy and you laugh and you take a bow and you say, here we are, we're being human. Anybody who's listening to this, who hasn't had trouble with their ex, hasn't had an ex. Right.

Anybody who hasn't had trouble with their personality, hasn't looked at their personality, it's just the way it is and when you understand there's a kind of deep softening of the heart that says, yeah, we're in this together, it's not about becoming an ideal, it's actually, the point isn't to perfect yourself, it's to perfect your love.

Oh. Now the question you ask is, well, how do you do that when you're trying to love somebody as neurotic, as we Americans and Canadians and Europeans and now it turns out all the new, you know, wealthy Indians and Chinese and modern people, little machine crazy, how do you do that? Mm-hmm.

Yeah? So. How? How, how, how, how, how? Well, the first step, oh, you know, we teach loving kindness meditation and I'm not gonna, maybe you'll teach it here if you want, but it turns out that people

can't love themselves very well in the West. We had this conversation with the Dalai Lama like 1988 or something, a group of us met with him who are also teachers and said what to do about how much self-hatred and unworthiness and self-judgment comes to people when they just try to sit and innocently sit and meditate. And he said, self-hatred?

He didn't understand. He speaks pretty good English and he turned to Tuptenjimba, his translator and they went back and forth, oh, no, no, no, no, in Tibetan, you know, for a while. Cause there's no word in Tibetan for self-hatred. And then he looked up at this circle of us, you know, Sharon Saltzware, Robert Thurman,

I forget who was there, a group of teachers. And he said, do you too have this self-hatred judgment? How many of you? Everyone's nodding. He paused for a minute. He said, mm, but this is a mistake. You know, so, why would you do that to yourself? All right, so what do you do is the question.

Because you can't start loving kindness with yourself very easily. What you can do is this, even as you listen, picture the person who, a person, not the, a person where it's not so complicated, not like your ex, who loves you. And generally there'll be somebody, even could be your, the Dalai Lama, it could be your dog,

you know, you come home and they'll go, they love you when you walk in the door. Picture this being that loves you, you know, and you look at them and you wish them well cause you love them too. You say, may you be well, you know, I hope you to be safe and, you know, healthy and all the things of love

that you wish for somebody you care about. Maybe you picture a second person. There they are, these people. May you be well, may you be safe, may you be protected, may you, may you be happy. And then when you feel your heart begin to open a little bit, like the camera dilates open the lens, only when it gets a tiny bit sweet,

then you imagine that they look back at you and they see you, they see you as a child. There you were, this little Duncan going around being completely innocent and wacky and cool and wonderful as little kids are. And they see you now grown up forgetting that original innocence. And they look at you and they say, Duncan,

just as you would wish me to be well and happy and safe, I want that for you. And you feel from their eyes and their gaze, imagine they put their hand on your heart and they say, listen, man or woman, whoever it is, you're all right, we love you, you're wacky, we all are, we're human. And may you be safe, may you be kind to yourself,

may you be well. And gradually you start to take it in and you realize, oh, just as these people who I care about and all for love to look at me, they want the same for me, maybe I could even wish that for myself. And you do a little bit and you realize I can't do it, it's impossible, it feels dead, it feels stupid, it feels mechanical.

And then you know what you do with that? You hold the same, all those thoughts with the same kindness and say, wow, today it's a hard day to love myself and you love that. Now the other thing to say is that it's a practice. So a man wrote to the IRS and he said, I haven't been able to sleep because I cheated on my taxes in 2010 and 2011, can't sleep.

So I've enclosed an anonymous bank check for $2,000. If I still can't sleep, I'll send the rest. And that's really why we talk about practice. Because it doesn't happen all at once. You say I wanna forgive and you forgive a little bit and you say, yeah, but that SOB, I'll never forgive that person. I can't love that in myself.

But you love a little bit and you add a little more and pretty soon you start to feel like, actually feels kind of good to be kind and then your heart shrivels, so yeah, but I hate that person. That doesn't feel that great. You go there, there, it's okay. Not in some superficial way.

But in the way that in that moment when somebody has really cared about you, maybe you were little, maybe it was your grandmother or grandfather, maybe it was the gardener or your uncle, somebody saw you, somebody saw how cool you are underneath all the guises and they just appreciate it and love you and you remember, oh yes, and you let it in. Yes.

You know, what you're saying, I mean, we have gone through so much as children in the culture that we came from and used to. And His Holiness talks about mother is the most important thing that can happen to anybody in terms of being a whole person. And then, so we weren't that. And then we went to India and I'm the Ramadans,

Krishna as myself, whoever. And we met this being who did what was necessary. They loved you just as you are, yeah, yeah. Exactly, so I'm thinking, oh, Jesus, that. You're lucky. Big piece of grace, lucky, whatever. But the beautiful thing is that you don't have to go to India. That actually India has come to you

and the amazing thing is now we're getting invitations to go back to India to teach in India or to teach in Burma and places. They say, oh, you guys have figured this out for the modern world, you've got neuroscience, you've got the trainings and compassion. Come and show us. Yes.

Now you sit down, you decide, all right, I'm going to try to learn these ancient beautiful arts of love, whether you had your guru in India or what turns out as your guru said, your guru's actually here with you, inside you. And the first thing you encounter is your own mind. My friend, Annie Lamott, the humorist, she writes, my mind is like a bad neighborhood.

I try not to go there alone, right? So you sit and you go, oh my God, it's streams of thoughts and plans and memories and judgments and you take a few breaths and you take a seat halfway between heaven and earth and you say, that's the mind, it secretes thoughts the way the salivary glands secrete saliva. It just has a stream of images and thoughts,

praise and blame and pleasure and it likes this and doesn't like that. And you say, thank you for your opinion, you kind of bow to it and then you rest in the heart and then the emotions come. And you feel when you get quiet, your grief for the earth, for the global warming and the loss of species and the tears

and then the great environmentalist, Gary Snyder said, we said, well, what should we do about this? He said, don't feel guilty, you won't fix it. If you get angry and get guilty, it just adds to it. Greed, hatred, that's what made the problem. He said, if you want to serve the world or save it, do it because you love it. So you sit and you feel your concerns

and you realize that you've been put here with the gift of your life and you could do something cool with it. It might be start a, do a startup or it might be start a family or a garden or business, but you take that and you plant beautiful seeds with what you've got. And you know, your soil's a little rocky dude.

So what do you do? You know, you clear it a little bit, you put a little. My soil is a rock. Yeah, you put a little fertilizer on that puppy, you plant another seed and you begin to trust that if there is a good seed there, it will grow. Well, I, you know, I love all of this. And, you know, since when I came here,

I was completely frozen, definitely thought out in- You look thought. You look thought. Instead of saying you look chilled, you look thought, right? I feel very thought out. But I think about the pragmatic, like how, I think about like this,

I'm just using this relationship only because it just ended and it's the most relevant thing to me. And you can't divorce your ex, right? So they're there with you, right? But I think about how as the thing's falling apart and I'm beginning to realize that this relationship is a hope, it's not meant to be. I started meditating really hard.

You know, when you start meditating hard- That's desperate. You're really desperate. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Desperation meditation. So I'm walking up and down the river, chanting, praying. And then I realized that this is just a, I'm actually using this process

as a way to procrastinate action. So it seems like everything that you're saying is incredibly beautiful, but at what point are you, do you need to stop loving the part of yourself that has too many beers at night? And at what point do you need to stop loving the part of yourself that yells at people

who haven't really done anything to deserve it? Well, when you talk about that, I'll answer that in a second, but the first thing that I hear when you're in a sense distracting yourself is that you're doing it because the grief is too hard to bear. It's not just that, you know,

you've got to do something else, but actually you're feeling the loss. I tried to love this person. She was actually pretty cool, but I'm such a slap, I didn't do it right, or she and I, we got in the wrong, or our wavelength, or something happened. And then you feel the tears in your heart,

and that's hard to bear sometimes. You think I can't bear it, you know? And my friend, Maladoma Somay, who's a West African shaman and medicine man, he came to America after his initiation, and it says, if his psyche and his third eye, whatever you want to call that magic, where you intuit and see,

he said, your streets are full of the ungrieved dead. He said, the homeless people who died without anyone to care for them, the people in the ICU who had good nurses, but no family were there, the people in the old age homes, he said, in our culture, everybody knows someone, we're in a village,

and when they're in trouble, the village knows you're in trouble. It's like auntie or uncle, it would be, you know, auntie Condoleezza, and uncle Colin Powell, and right like that, auntie Hillary. Everybody's your relative, but here we don't know that, so we feel so alone. So then the next step is to let,

as you sit, to actually let the tears come. They're called the tears of the way, not be afraid to let the tears fall, because those tears water the heart too, and you go, oh, underneath those tears is the steep longing to love and be loved. And then after the tears, flow a little bit, and that's not, you know,

oh my gosh, so pity, you know, it doesn't matter. You just let yourself feel it, and you grieve, because you not only carry your grief, you carry the grief of the world in your heart, and you turn on the news, and you could weep. What's happened in Africa, or Asia, or America, it doesn't matter. And after the tears, and the heart softens,

then the mind starts to get a little bit quiet. And then you say, all right, let me listen to my heart, not to my mind that says, she said, and I said, and I'm good, and she's not bad, and whatever. And you say, what's my best intention? In the next text that I sent her, I could get even, I could be right, all those things which we like to do, our ego feel like, I gotta show that I've got some.

And instead, you quiet yourself when you say, what's my best intention? Or there you are actually in an argument with somebody, and your move is to prove yourself right, and say, here you're wrong, I'm right, here's how it really is. And then if you take two breaths, and just take a pause in yourself for a second,

and say, what do I most want, what's the best intention? So, well, underneath it all, it's not just to be right, or prove, I wanna connect, I wanna love this person, I wanna be loved, and then all of a sudden you realize, well, maybe that text I was gonna send, I need to rephrase it a little bit. Maybe that email I was gonna respond to, ah, before I press send, my intention says,

oh, it's a little different than that, it's not just to be, you know, this way, I actually wanna connect with this person. And if you listen to the heart, it begins to remind you that that's what matters, and you do it, and you practice it. And Annie, I'm not Annie, and Julia Childs, the French, wonderful French chef, big cooking show on television,

she says, it's very simple, if you're in the kitchen, and you drop the lamb, you can just pick it up, who's gonna know, right? And in the same way with spiritual practice, you mess up, you will a thousand times, you say, all right, that text wasn't so cool, let me try another version of it, and you send again, say, you know,

when I really listened, what I wanted to say was this, and you practice, and what happens is, anything, if you practice piano, if you practice flying an airplane, you practice coding, after a while, you actually can fly or play music, you can actually practice love. I don't wanna cry.

You're invited, you're these teachers, what you guys do is you invite us to dive into this blender, and it's really scary, and we think, you know, you hear meditation, you hear meditation, retreat, you think about a whole different version of what this is, and the thing that you're pointing to is exactly right, but the bull's eye is not, it's not initially pleasant,

the thing you're talking about is, I mean, I do wanna cry, I like it when it happens, but it's a very scary thing, it's scary, it's terrifying. So when you stop running, and here, this is, here's a kind of indictment of American culture, a modern culture by Ann Wilson Schaeff, who wrote The Addicted Society, she says, the best adjusted person in our society

is the person who's not dead and not alive, just numb, a zombie. When you're dead, you're not able to do any work for the society, so it doesn't want you that way, but if you're fully alive, then you must constantly say no to many of the destructive processes of the society, the racism, the polluted environment, the nuclear threat, the arms race,

drinking unsafe water, eating carcinogenic foods. Thus it is in the interest of modern consumer society to promote the things that take the edge off, and keep us busy as worker bees, keep us slightly numbed out and zombie-like. In this way, modern consumer society itself functions as an addict. And so we're kept distracted from ourselves,

and then when you stop, like any addict, it's not just your pain, it's like, oh my God, how do I stop? I wanna come back to myself, but then there's fear and judgment and all these tears for the animals that are dying or the fact that, you know, I got wasted so many times in the last month, and I don't wanna live my life that way. Right.

So here's the deal, you find your way, and sometimes you can't do it alone. Like Annie Lamott said, you know, your mind is a bad neighborhood, you need to find friends to go with you. You find some place, it can be the local yoga studio, the local sitting group, the people who, like you, realize it's time to wake up together.

And maybe in your meditation practice, or your heart practice, together with them. Because otherwise you just run screaming out of the room at first, and then you realize, oh, I can tolerate a little bit, and then it gets worse. You sit there, you think it's gonna be cool. Right.

Okay, now I'm sitting, and I'm gonna become this wise young person that likes Buddha on the block. Yes. And your loneliness hits, and you think you're gonna die of loneliness. Or you get insanely bored, I'm so bored. And the instruction is just to become the witness with this loving awareness, to begin to witness

and name things, okay, this is loneliness, oh, I hate this loneliness, oh, this is hating. This is boredom, this is restlessness. Because if you don't find a way to sit with your loneliness, to let it cut more deeply, to let it season you, as the poet says, then the minute you get a little bit lonely, or bored, what do you do? You open the refrigerator, you go online,

you do anything, you do the addictive thing, which we all do, our society says, distract yourself. But so you can't bear to be with yourself, and you can't actually, so you're doing this amazing and beautiful and great thing. You become the, you know, the yogi that you saw on those images in the saints in India, you become the Zen student in Kyoto,

but you do it in your own home, or with your friends, and you realize, I can bear this, I can tolerate this, and I name it lonely, lonely, oh gosh, restlessness, restlessness. I wish this would go away, wishing, wishing. I feel like I'm gonna die, dying, dying. I wonder what I'm gonna do for dinner. Should we get pizza, or should we go out? Because the mind has no pride, we'll do that.

Okay, dying, dying again, planning, planning, desire. And you start to see that you become the space of witnessing which can allow this with a gracious heart, and you realize you can trust your awareness, you can trust the capacity to be present for yourself, and then you can be there for the things that you love and care about. It's beautiful, but it's, you know, it's a lot of work.

What you're talking about is, reminds me of, not even realizing that you, you know, have you ever seen that show, Hoarders? Oh yeah. So it reminds me of suddenly realizing that you are a hoarder, and that your mind is equivalent to one of these houses. It's great, I love it.

Packed with just a piece of paper. Old newspapers, and, and you realize like, kitty litter, and yes, and a clean up. And crap from your third grade class, right? Exactly. And so it's not like, that's something I got out of this retreat. I feel great, but I've realized like,

oh God, so much work. It seems like so much work, which is something I'm not really that fond of. Hey, wait, what work? The work is to, exactly what are you saying, which is that instead of avoiding, first of all, it's a real mind-blower when you say, you know, and it's obvious to you, but when you say from chanting

and from meditating, you are actually just avoiding grief. That is a real mind-melter. It's real, because that undercut. The little spiritual bypass, trying to use your spiritual practice to not actually feel the, the direct immediate experience. And that's the work I'm talking about, Raghu. That's the, the, the, the having to go back into that place

and then soften up. And also, what about the fact that when you go into this numbness, this cultural numbness, and you've been numb for years, what about the fact that you might not be surrounded by Jack cornfields and Raghu marquises and Ramdhases? You know, you might be around other numb people and have nowhere to go and no, no access

to these communities. That makes it harder, but actually you're not alone. There are millions of you waking up. There are millions of beings who are not asleep, whose hearts are open, and I see them everywhere. I see them when I go in the hospital. There's this woman cleaning bedpans and, you know, tending to somebody who's sick, who's just beaming.

And, you know, maybe she grew up and talked about parents, you know, in some culture where they still held their children and she carries that radiance from Jamaica or the Philippines or someplace where that family was still intact or maybe she grew up here. But I see human goodness in lots of places. Now, it's true, you can be surrounded by that and you think that's the way the world is,

but it isn't, actually. There are a thousand, thousand acts of goodness that are also happening from the littlest gesture of people planning their flower gardens to stopping at the red lights so you can go green. I mean, if you begin to look at how people are caring for each other, you can also tune to that. And yes, there's an unconsciousness about it.

The thing about the work is it's not like, okay, now I'm gonna make myself a big project and I'm gonna get a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree and a damn PhD in spirituality and I'll be the great master and I'll go to great international conferences and be lauded. There's nothing more sorrowful

than international spiritual conferences. You don't need to go to those, right? That's suffering. Instead, the work is to be where you are. It makes it so much simpler and Raghu was sort of pointing to that when you said, well, what's the work? The work isn't to become somebody else or go somewhere.

It's to say, all right, here I am. I'm in the slums of the country, you know? Or I'm in the slums of my own heart and there's graffiti and there's, you know, it's tough. And what seeds am I gonna plant in these slums? Am I gonna sweep the doorstep and plant a little garden? And I have seen even in the slums,

people with so much dignity. It's just the way Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday, walked out of 27 years of Robin Island prison with so much graciousness and forgiveness and dignity. They can put your body in prison. You can be surrounded by difficult people. No one can take your dignity. No one can take your fundamental nobility.

And no one can take your spirit, the spirit of your heart. That is yours to choose in any circumstance. I mean, you realize that that's tremendously empowering and beautiful. Intention, I wanted to talk to Jack about intention and you have brought it up because in talking about, boy, it's a lot of work to hustle myself into an open hearted place or whatever.

Whatever you gotta do. There's a basic, and this is what I'd love for you to talk about, there's a basic intention. It's the intention you emailed ramdas.org and said, I'd like to help you out because ramdas has done something for me. And it was your, it's all about intention. And then that's part of, we talked about in this retreat,

it's part of grace. I think that there's a big connection with that natural intention or desire to be good to oneself, love oneself and start to love one another. I mean, talk to me about intention. Well, the simplest thing about intention, which we actually started to talk about a little bit before,

is to take a pause. I like to call it the mindful pause, the sacred pause. It can be a few breaths when you're in an argument or it can be in the morning or evening or you just sit quietly for a minute or two or three. And when the mind starts to quiet, and you say, all right, here I am, next day of my life, next year of my life.

And then you have a little conversation with your heart. Most cultures know you can actually listen to your heart. We're not taught that in school. You're taught to do everything outside, read, write, do math. But nobody teaches emotional and social intelligence, listening to the heart, listening to another. So you quiet yourself and you talk to your heart

and you say, what's my best intention for the day? What's my deepest intention? And when I go off to this circumstance, it's hard at work. Or when I go off to try to manage this part of my life, what's my best intention? And when you get in touch with that best intention, it can be very, very simple. I actually want to be kind.

I want people to find a way to be caring for one another. I want something good to happen on the earth. And so I want to be contributing to that rather than destruction. When you listen, the heart speaks a good intention. And then through the day, almost like checking the compass. You check your smartphone, but this is like the smart heart phone, right?

You turn and you say, okay, what was that intention again? Oh yeah, takes a breath. And then you feel that. Now there's long-term intention. The Dalai Lama wakes up in the morning and he says, the Shanti David prayer, may I be a bridge, a raft, a boat for those to cross the flood?

May I be medicine for the sick? May I be food for the hungry? May I be a resting place for the weary? May I be a lamp for those lost in the darkness? May I offer my life for the benefit of all beings? It's his Bodhisattva vow. And of course that sounds like, oh how I could ever do that.

But you can do it in the simplest way. All this is incredibly simple. My intention today is to stay in my own body, right? To actually stay here and open to this mysterious life, not be somewhere else. Cause there's that line from James Joyce where he wrote of a character. Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body, right?

And we do in the addictions. I really like Gonzo, right? But if you don't live here, you don't taste the slice of tangerine. You don't see the eyes of that child. You don't see the lavender light reflected in the rain puddles just as the sun is setting, you know? Or the little buds on the trees poking out,

even out of the snow saying that someday spring is gonna come and it always will. It's like the poet Pablo Neruda says, you can pick all the flowers, but you can't stop the spring. There is a life force that pushes grass up through the sidewalks, through the cracks in it. And it will not stop and it's in you.

And you get a little quiet and you feel that life force. You're gonna say, what's the sweetest, most important, deepest, most honorable intention? What has dignity in it? And you hear that voice and then you return to it. And you could call it the voice of wisdom, the voice of compassion, the voice of, it has all kinds of names of Jesus and Mary

and Maharaji and all the saints. Everybody in the world when they listen deeply can ask this question, what is my best intention? And it changes everything. Is it okay to make up the intention? It's great. Sure, it's all made up. It's absolutely all made up. And you know, it's like doing the loving kindness practice.

See, that's why it's called its practice. Sometimes it feels opposite. I hate them, I'm never gonna forgive them. And they say, well, let me pretend. Part of it is you kind of pretend you're enlightened a little bit. And then maybe little by little you start to actually feel it and you're like,

hey, not bad to pretend this. And people want mine. The point is that you're not supposed to become a Buddhist. You're supposed to become a Buddha, right? Spare your friends and family from being a Buddhist or a Hindu or any of that stuff. The point is, and to do that, you can pretend a little bit.

All right, today I'm gonna pretend that I'm gonna live a more wiser, more gracious life. And sometimes it'll work, sometimes it won't, but that's okay, I'm gonna pretend a little more. And you start to feel that as an experiment. What's it feel like when you actually do it, even for a moment? It's beautiful.

Sorry, you guys, we lost that. This is great. Is this good? Thank you so much. We lost audio? I'm just gonna. Oh, battery. I think it's a battery left.

This is really good. Really, really good. Did we catch that part about faking it? We have the boom too, so. Perfect, yeah. No, but we don't want to turn it back. Let's go back. We're rolling again.

So the question is, coming from the idea of like full numb, 100% pure American numb, deep, deep ice. Yes. So you don't feel an intention, you don't feel anything, you feel like the dentist freezes your mouth. So the question is, is it okay to make up an intention

that you think would be a good idea? Absolutely, yeah, I mean, what do they say in 12 step, fake it till you make it? The thing is that it's all made up. And the Buddha begins the Dhammapada, all is created out of the mind, the mind in the heart.

It's the same word in Sanskrit. How you live your life, the circumstances change, praise and blame, and gain and loss, but really it comes from how do you navigate this? And so of course it's fine to make it up in practice and fake it and pretend. And then after a little while you say,

pretending to be kind to people actually, gets me a little bit further than being an ass. Yes. And you start to realize, there's a little bit of a choice here, or you're completely frozen and numb. And before you even fake it, you ask yourself, well,

what would bring a little bit of thought? And you say, well, I wanna, and it's not just an addictive thing. I wanna eat something that's actually nourishing, that feels good, and you do that. It's like, you can take care of yourself. I wanna have a nice, a decent meal. I wanna take a little bit of a walk,

just to kind of calm myself down. Maybe I'll read just a little bit this passage from, be here now or from, I'll listen to a podcast from Duncan. I'll do something that kind of reminds me, oh yeah, there's a whole other way to be. Then I'm gonna sit quietly. And now it's like you can feel the ice beginning to soften

a little bit, and you notice that inside, they're frozen way deep down there is your heart. And you kinda look at it and say, hey baby, how is it? And they're just, oh god, it's so cold. I've been so busy in so far. Say that's okay, that's okay. You're just being kind and okay,

and the heart starts to beat a little bit inside the ice. And that's when your dad says, so you're going to Hawaii and meet your gay guru. That's it. And you say to your dad, that's beautiful. What'd you say to your dad? I thought about it, cause I was gonna get mad.

And then I'm like, uh... He's right. You're right. Yeah, I'm going to Hawaii. Not only that it's great, the guru's gay. You notice there's something wrong with that and your point is, you know? He's jealous, that's no problem.

He would say, dad, come on, it's really good snorkeling. And you don't even have to be gay to do it. They leave the gay part to him and you could if you want, but come on, my ties, nice snorkeling. Okay, maybe I'm so glad. Aren't you glad your son gets to do this? It's beautiful, what you're saying is so beautiful and I think a misconception that people have

is that this is a passive, weak sort of work when it's the opposite. It takes this incredible courage to start thawing out your heart. You know, I'm sure when people have frozen their hands mountain climbing, I bet when their hands start thawing out, it hurts like hell.

It's not a great feeling. And so a lot of us are pain adverse, you know? So it's a very courageous thing to do this and your face, I think the thing that you were faced with is not just that challenge, but also the challenge of having all these relationships with other people that involve a communication of biting each other, you know, or of clawing at each other

and suddenly you wanna stop clawing and the other person's like, wait a minute, we've been clawing each other for years. I, it doesn't feel right to stop this war. Yeah, in the Dow it says the philosopher is wedded to his opponent. I mean, if you don't have somebody to argue with what kind of relation and it was true

and my fact a really painful family situation, what's new, lots of people do. My father was kind of a brilliant biophysicist and taught in medical school and did space medicine and army biological warfare, all kind of weird stuff, but he was violent and paranoid and a wife batterer and all this stuff, you know? And I didn't wanna be like him.

So I was gonna be chilled and never get angry. Then I realized when I started to meditate that because I wasn't gonna be like him, I had suppressed everything, it was all done. And I realized there are a lot of things that pissed me off, you know, but I didn't know what to do with it, I didn't know how to handle it. And then I began to realize, oh, okay,

these are the forces of humanity. Fear and anger are part of being human, just as love and joy are part of being human. And my teacher said, you take your seat and when fear comes, you name it, fear, fear. And then you say, oh, but this is so terrible. I feel like, you know, I'm gonna panic. And then you name that, oh, panicking, panicking.

And you discover that you can stay where you are little by little with some practice. And realize that those are just waves of feelings and who you are is so much bigger than that. Who you are is the loving, the space of awareness that says, wow, what an incarnation. I've come thought, I'm frozen, I'm afraid, I'm not. All those things come and go and you become the space.

Now the practice, like on my website and various books, there are these trainings of forgiveness meditation or trainings in loving kindness or training compassion. My teacher said, all right, do this forgiveness practice, forgive yourself, which is a big piece, or forgive other people little by little. And he said, here's a training,

it's a five or 10 minute practice of forgiveness. Do it twice a day for the next six months and then come and let me know how it's going. What that meant was do it 300 times. I would do it sometimes, I would hate that person, I'm not gonna forgive that person, never, never, never they did this, you know. And then I remember the story of the two ex-prisoners

of war and one says to the other, have you forgiven your captors yet? And the second was after what they did to us and have never and the first man looks at him and says, well then, they still have you in prison, don't they? Wow. Because those people that it's hard to forgive, they could actually be on Hawaii

having a nice vacation, right? And there you are in Cleveland freezing you and you're hating or hating him. Well, you know, who's suffering, you are. And then you begin to realize, okay, I don't wanna close my heart, I don't wanna shut myself down, I don't wanna carry the hatred, not for them,

you're not forgiving them, but because that's not who you wanna be, that's not who you are. Now it's political too, you talk about it being hard. Everybody who's listening, who's even half awake realizes that the modern world is in trouble and that no amount of science and technology

of nanotechnology and biotechnology and computers and internet and smartphones and all of that stuff is gonna stop continuing warfare. It's not gonna stop continuing racism or environmental destruction or destruction of species. The outer developments of the world need to be matched by inner human development. We are a nation of nuclear giants,

said one of our generals, and ethical infants. And there's some way in which we as a species now have to develop the inner technologies, which is really what we're talking about. All the modern neuroscience shows greater neuroplasticity, greater emotional resiliency, ability to focus attention, integrative fibers in the brain,

faster healing, extended telomeres that keep you from aging. All those things come from the simple practices of training of mindfulness and awareness and compassion. We know it now, we can put it in our schools, we can put it in our education, we can put it in our healing systems as we do. But underneath it, what's called for right now

is a change of consciousness. And either you go along and be asleep as a sheep, or you practice, say, okay, we're gonna practice hating other people and greed and so forth, it doesn't really make you happy. Or you say, no, the world needs something different. And you become part of that awakening that you are joining in with 1,000 other beings

on your block, you don't even know it. And the block next door, they're all kind of in secret, they're hiding in the closet or whatever, but they're there. And when you show yourself a little bit, you start to see that they're all around you. Wow.

We should, first of all, JackCornfield.org. Sure, and there's a whole, if you go on the line, K-O-R-N-F-I-E-L-D, Jack. Call the wings, they'll be at DuncanTrustle.com. And mindrollingbycast.com. But the point is, there are wonderful practices. Many practices, that's what we're talking about. There's one thing, we're getting close to the end,

but I do want to talk about, I want to hear from you about, and that when we talk about somebody awakening, we're talking a lot here, we're referring to your basic, who you are, your audience, your confereces, and so on. And when I first heard, I mean, Ramdas, we're at a Ramdas retreat with Jack,

when I first heard him, one of the most inviting things was, honesty, he was honest with himself. And it led us to be able to say, shit, we can be honest with ourselves too. We don't have to hide, we don't have to hide the shadow. We can have, and that was a major process alongside awakening, or with our awakening.

So, can you talk about, and I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. Truth is the most difficult to pass you, difficult path. So, maybe talking about that. Yeah, there's a part of us, part of us doesn't know ourselves so well, and all you have to do is get quiet a little bit, and other parts show themselves,

because we've been numbed out, and then part of us doesn't want to see what we discover, self-knowledge seems like it's bad news, but it's actually just seeing the personality. When I sat first as a young man, and I was in my early 20s in this wild monastery in the border of Laos and Thailand in the jungles, because I'd heard about Zen masters,

and I thought, I'm going to go seek out the real deal. Let me see if it's actually there. And it was, which was really fantastic. Took a while to get there and find it, but went through the Peace Corps and did all these things. But I found this great teacher, and I thought, oh, now I'll be happy. And I start to meditate.

Now things are going to be good, and things got worse. Things got worse because I had to sit with my loneliness, or my fears, or my boredom, or the things that I didn't like about myself. I'd look in the mirror and go, oh, you know. And then my teacher would smile at me, and sometimes he would even, it's like you, like your guru would sort of read mine and say,

oh, unworthiness today, huh? And he would just do it with so much law, where he'd say, oh, a lot of self-judgment isn't there. And it wasn't like you shouldn't have self-judgment or unworthiness, or I got really sick with malaria. And he said, sick, huh? I had this great fever, and they gave me some medicine. And he said, yeah, we've all had it.

He said, so sick, it makes you want to run home and cry and be with your mama, right? I said, yeah, he said, yeah, this is called sickness. We've all had it, those of us who live in the jungle. We all had malaria. He said, you can bear it. There's much better medicine now. We've given you some, you'll get over it in a few days.

And the moment that he said, you know, you can do this. We've all been there. We've all felt this. We've all felt our fear and our loneliness and our disappointment. It's part of the human heart. And he would say, oh, disappointed today, aren't you? He goes, ah, he knows.

And there was so much love in it, because it was truth, it was acceptance. And then I could see in others and not judge them so much. So, so simple. May I ask just one more quick question? Yeah, yeah. So, this is, what is something people listening right now

can do in this moment or when they stop listening to this podcast to move them in the direction of learning to love themselves and thawing out the giant black chunk of polluted ice surrounding their heart? I love your description. I mean, I think that's, I think that's artistic. And in part, it's true.

In part, it's true. You've got that giant black frozen ice and it's got like, you know, old tires and you know, it's got trash and it's got exactly nuclear stuff. And it's got all the exhaust from buses in there. Yes, exactly. And not only that, it has, you know, it has stuff from your third grade

and your fifth grade all buried and twisted. Every nasty text you ever sent is frozen in that ice. Yeah, it is, it is. And then it's, you know, when it starts to thaw out, then you feel the regret from those and you feel that and so forth. So, if you see your task as one of trying to fix yourself, okay, I'm gonna do spiritual practice

and it's like a grim duty, okay? I'll go to therapy and I'll do my Pilates and my Qigong and you know, I'll go to yoga and, you know, I'll buff myself up and I'll take some courses and stuff like that. It's like endless, you know, it's like you're gonna go and shovel all that. But the task isn't to perfect yourself.

As we said before, it's really to perfect your love. And I think that's a great thing to do. And what you can do today is to begin and take a seat for a little bit and you can do one of two things. Either you can just sit, put your hand on your heart, feel your breath and feel actually how you care for yourself. You must say, I don't, but if you step out off the curb and a car comes careening around the corner,

just where you are, your body jumps back because you wanna live, you protect yourself and feel that, that you actually do wanna protect yourself. Put your hands and say, yeah, there's black ice and there's fear and there's confusion like every single human being. And you just hold yourself with that respect. It's almost like you're bowing saying, yeah,

here we are, we're in this human incarnation. This is what you're given, you get a body, a mind, you get, your culture is all embedded in there and you can either fight it and be angry and conflict all the time or you can discover that there's a greater power, which is what Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Chi walks out of prison 17 years.

She said, they never had me in prison because I never hated them. And you realize that you in this moment could switch the channel just a little bit and say, all right, here I am, I've got my suffering, I have my tears, I have my addictions, I have all this. And the first step is to be honest, to say I have all this and it's not who I really am,

it's not all of who I am, it's just a part of me. And it's a part of everybody human. You take a breath, you put your hand in your heart and you say to yourself, what if I were just to become a little bit kinder today to myself? What if I were to be a little bit sweeter? Let me try that out. What if I were to be a little bit more compassionate?

And all of a sudden you start to realize it's like the army lieutenant, I told this story in there, who got angry a lot and then he started to train in mindfulness and he was in line in the supermarket and this woman was holding a baby and talking and the checkout counter, he got angrier and angrier. You know, like there's a long line, doesn't she see? And he got up there and started to talk to her

and she said, did you see that little boy? He's my boy. He said, oh, she said, yeah, my husband was in the army like you, but he was killed in Afghanistan last year. And so now I have to work all the time and my mom takes care of my boy and she just tries to bring him in once a day so I can see him.

And all of a sudden all his judgment melted him away and we're so judgmental of one another and his judgment of himself. And he began to realize, oh, we're in it together. This is us, this is family, you know how family is, it's a mess, but also it's beautiful, it produced you, it's gonna produce more life. And you say, all right, baby, I'm gonna be in this

and I'm gonna do this from the place of graciousness and wisdom rather than the place of poor me or anger or things like that, they're there, yes, I see all that, self judgment, but that is not your great heart. Who you are is so much bigger than that. So much love and dignity is born in you. It was there when you were a little kid

looking out this amazing beauty behind those eyes. Even if people didn't see it, you know it, and I see it. And even you see it. You know what? There's a simple, beautiful message that could be in India formed with your palms to do this to yourself. And not to everybody, it's namaste. Namaste.

I honor the divine in you. I see who you really are behind those eyes, behind the trauma, you have your trauma, but you don't wanna be loyal to your suffering. It's okay, you're kinda loyal to it. That's not the end of the story. That's the beginning of the story. You have your sufferings, just where you started Raghu,

and that suffering that everybody lives through brings the heart of compassion. If you allow it, you realize, oh, we're all in this together. We're all in it together. And then when somebody's really having a hard time, you hold their hand and say, yeah, I know that. I've been afraid. I've been depressed.

I know what that's like. I really know that, you know, Duncan? So you're saying my ex-girlfriend was wrong for breaking up with me? Always. Yeah. A magnificent man like you, on the other hand. On the other hand.

Do you know how it is? No, she was right. Well, thank you, Jack. This has been so terrific. Thank you so much. Thank you both. Thank you, Raghu. Thank you, Duncan.

Thank you, folks. I appreciate it. And look for a look at Duncan Tressel Family Hour, and you will find all the links to Jack. And look at mindrollingpodcast.com. And look at ramdas.org. Yes. Or look for this, I've got a lot of books,

but there in particular is a book, a very simple one, called The Art of Forgiveness, Loving Kindness and Peace, that has 10 different practices of compassion and self-compassion and forgiveness in it. I'm checking that out. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. Pleasure.

Cutting. That was Jack Cornfield. You can visit him at spiritrock.org. And now this is Bonnie Prince-Billy. It's from his album, Blue Lotus Feet, and it's called I Am The Sky. And if you like this podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes.

Hare Krishna. I am the sky, mother. I am the sky. I am the sky, mother. I am the sky. I am the vast blue ocean of sky. I am a little drop of the sky. I am a little drop of the sky.

Frozen sky. I am a little drop of the sky.