Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Art of Mindfulness | Dr. Jack Kornfield

Episode Date: January 6, 2021

This week’s conversation is with Jack Kornfield, a PhD, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology.He has trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma, and is a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society, and the Spirit Rock Center.Jack is one of the key teachers to introduce mindfulness practice to the west and has taught meditation internationally since 1974.His 14 books include A Path with Heart; A Lamp in the Darkness; After the Ecstasy, the Laundry; The Wise Heart; and No Time Like the Present: Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy Right Where You Are.I couldn’t think of better conversation to get us rolling in 2021.We cover all things related to mindfulness — tools for getting better at quieting your mind, managing self-critique, vulnerability and so much more._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. One of the first skills that one learns in the art of mindfulness of mindful presence or mindful kind attention is to name and acknowledge the states of mind without getting lost in them and one of the most helpful acknowledgments is of the judging mind so there you are you know doing your art you're playing music you're playing ball you're you know you're painting you're whatever it happens to be, you know, and then the judging

mind comes to start it earlier. You should have, you could have done this. You, you could have learned as you, well, all the, all those things. And you could say, oh, I hate this judging. I want to get rid of judging is terrible. No more judging. I'm going to, what was your word? Eradicate that sucker, you know, stop judging. I hate judging, but what's that it's another judgment right just piles on instead what you do is you you turn almost with a bow and you say judging judging mind and then if if you need to or if it's helpful you can say thank you for your opinion to your to that part of your mind you know and if you want to take it one level deeper, you can even reflect now, whose voice does that remind you of?

Because it's not just your own. It was recorded in there from school, parents, whatever. We won't talk about them. OK, thank you for your opinion. I'm actually OK for now. You can rest. Put them on the sideline and go on. And it will arise a number of times, but all of a sudden your relationship to the judging mind becomes one

of not living inside it with the belief that it's true, but seeing it as just conditioned. And that is, this is a small example, a small window or doorway into the kind of inner freedom that comes as we learn to meditate and learn to practice. Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. Happy New Year. Happy 2021. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I am a sport and performance psychologist. And the whole idea behind this podcast, behind these conversations, is to learn from people who have committed their life efforts towards mastery. What does that mean? It means that they have dug into the nuances of both craft and self. And the design of this conversation, this podcast, is to help you understand what they're searching for, to help refine what you're searching for, to help understand what it is that they're doing to organize their inner life so that you can apply many of those same principles. And then we dig underneath to figure out what are the mental skills that they use to build and refine their craft. Finding Mastery is brought to you by

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Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com finding mastery. Now this week's conversation is with a legend, Dr. Jack Kornfield. He holds a doctoral degree in clinical psychology, and he's trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma, and is now the founding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society and the Spirit Rock Center. So Jack is one of the key influencers to introduce mindfulness into the West, and he's taught meditation internationally since 1974. So he's been at this game a long time. He's got depth and insight and richness. And I just can't wait for you to

just soak up the insights that he shared with us in this conversation. He's written 14 books. And one of my favorites is No Time Like the Present, Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy Right Where You Are. And I'm just so excited to start 2021 with this conversation. We dive in to the field and the practice and the science and the art of mindfulness. We get into the tools to help you get better at working with your mind, helping quiet it when you want it to be more quiet, helping to be more clear, helping to be more grounded in your approach. And, you know, we also work into the friction

and the sticky spots, which is like, how do you deal with self-critique? How do you deal with self-judgment? And then we also dig underneath like, okay, where does vulnerability sit in this whole thing? And how does that play into you becoming your very best? Because part of mindfulness certainly is having the courage to go explore. And when you go explore, by definition, you haven't been there before. And so when you haven't been somewhere, emotionally or physically, there's a level of vulnerability involved. And so I can't wait for you to meet Jack Kornfield, if you haven't been introduced to his work already, which maybe many of you have. He's a legend, like I talked about. And with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with a legend, Dr. Jack

Kornfield. Jack, how are you? I'm great. Happy to see you, Michael. Oh, this is my honor. I have been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. So I just want to say this is special to me. So thank you. My pleasure. And I look forward to it. And I'll say, ask me the weird and hard questions, too, or we can talk about them together. I'm not shy about that. That's more interesting than the, you know, run of the mill question. So whatever. Yeah. Okay, good. So I am that person that will take you up on it. All right. Okay, good. So let's start with some of the concrete stuff, which is 35 years practicing meditation, partly responsible, if not singularly responsible for bringing meditation to the west

and so um man what a body of work you have yeah actually 50 years believe it and i just turned 75 so and i started um and i think it's worthy of noting um i was at dartmouth college College and I was studying to go to medical school. And I took this course after my organic chemistry class in Asian Chinese and Asian studies. I had this wonderful old master who came up from Harvard to begin to teach this stuff and sometimes would sit cross legged on the desk. And he talked about the Tao and he talked about the teachings of Buddhism and especially he said you know central to Buddhism is the notion that there's suffering in life and there are causes and that there's an end to it there's a path to freedom and my family experience was really painful my father was brilliant in in many ways as a scientist and, you know, he taught in

medical schools and he did work in space medicine, all kinds of things, but he's also paranoid and violent and a wife batterer and a very unpredictable and violent person. So nothing in my standard education taught me how to deal with my own anger like his so I just suppressed it all taught me how to deal with you know what it meant to have a healthy relationship because my parents certainly didn't have that what how to work with forgiveness how to work with my own emotions of all kinds um so I started when I heard him say there's suffering and there's a path to the end of it. I had a lot of trauma and grief and I was interested and I began to read about Zen and all those things and wondered, is there are there still Zen masters and great teachers? And, you know, then I asked the Peace Corps to send me to a Buddhist country and found a great master after working on medical teams in Thailand in the

remote villages. I found this great monastery and master, and I got the second half of my education, which was the education that you don't get in the Ivy League or anywhere else. It's the education of the heart. How do you practice forgiveness? How do you master, in some sense, your own life? And how do you deal with that in a conscious, mindful, compassionate way? So that's a little bit of background story. And I needed it. And in a sense, you know, culturally, we need it. But that's, that's another question we might get to. I forget when you asked me, I just went off on this tangent. Oh, I'm going to follow every word that you have to say. So the, but I, I'm curious that, did you know, when you were at Dartmouth, did you know that you were trying to figure out trauma? Did you feel kind of quote unquote screwed up? No, I was, you know, I have to say I was a pretty clueless, you know, 19, 20 year old,

trying whatever it is, trying to be happy, trying to get laid. Let's get real about it. You know, this is an all men's school. There was, that was, that was a big thing. A lot of drinking, not on my my part then I became a hippie so okay instead of drinking there was weed or LSD or things I was trying to figure things out but I actually didn't even know how um hurt and how much I carried I was just trying to survive as we do and using my you know I have a pretty good mind. So I was

using that capacity to kind of override everything else. But of course it doesn't work in the long term. You need all of that. This is leading eloquently into a question I'd love for you to explore is how do you introduce mindfulness to people? And there's a subtext to this, which is you found it accidentally because of pain. There was a serendipitous moment where somebody said, hey, there's this way that you could actually work with suffering. And you're like, what is that? Okay. I found it accidentally as well. One of my professors at grad school started every class. He was a Tibetan Buddhist monk and he served in the military and he came back and found Buddhism. And I thought he was a great man, a little weird,

great man. And I'm on this- Well, we all are. Yeah. I love that. And at that point in my life, I was really concrete. It was about outcomes. And I'm down this early stage of my career, pre-career around sport and performance. And it was such an outcome-based world. And he's like, Mike, it's about the process. And it's like figuring out who you are through sport. And that thought never lost me, by the way.

But this is an old way. I'm sorry. This is a long way of getting to this thought, which is he started classes with some meditations, but he didn't call it that. He's like, okay, everybody just kind of settle in and go ahead and close your eyes. And we're just going to kind of be here for a moment. And I thought, what are we doing? This is a waste of good time.

You know, like I'm paying for this to learn, you know, and little did I know for years, that's what we're doing. And so I found it accidentally and then I hooked on to it because of pain. Long narrative to say, how do you introduce mindfulness to people? People come to want to heal or awaken or live in a fuller way for a hundred different callings. I like to think of it as a calling. Sometimes you're hurting and you hit bottom or you're desperate. And that's so well known in AA or something. You almost have to get there and you go, I need help.

I need something. Sometimes it's the infectiousness of someone who's around you, who's excited. I just started a yoga class. I didn't even know what this yoga stuff is, but my body feels better. Hey, you know, you should try this. Or I just, you know, did this. Sometimes it's something that you read. Sometimes it's, there's a kind of deep seed in us that knows that we're not just supposed to be automatons getting a good job and saving for retirement. There's got to be more. And it turns our heart to that. So there's a hundred ways. And for me, I'm not a proselytizer in the sense that mostly, you know, I noticed it as a parent, your kids watch what you do and who you are. You can sell them anything.

And it doesn't matter that much because they're, you know, the little ones, they're just watching you. Okay. Well, how are they actually living? And so for me, it's more responding in this beautiful and serendipitous way when people say, yes, I know you trained in these things. Can you tell me something about it? And I don't, I don't, I'm not interested in people becoming Buddhists if they want to, that's fine. I'd much rather they become Buddhas, you know, people who are compassionate and present and awake, you know, spare their friends and family from having some new, you know i'm now imagining a football field or a soccer pitch or a you know whatever it is um or a basketball court there's openings and when you're quiet and you're present and you feel what's going on in that field there's a sense oh somebody sees something there's a seed they want to know something more.

Or I, you know, I'm asked to put it out and I work with big corporations. I don't talk about Buddhism when I work with Ford Motors or Salesforce or things like that. live in a way that's um to live your life that's um that's full and loving and caring for yourself and others so you feel really fulfilled what would it take for you to feel fulfilled and there are ways to do this okay that is so eloquent it begs the the question, which is how, you know, so when you sit, when people say, I, I'm looking for a deeper way of living, I'm looking for relieving some stuff that I'm troubled by the suffering or the angst or whatever it might be. How do you in a concrete way, like, how do you map that out for folks? Again, it's really important. If I asked you, how do you play football or basketball? You know, for football, you could teach someone how to pass or how to catch a pass,

you could teach someone how to block. You could teach someone about strategy. Those are the tools. Here's how you how you spiral a ball. So there are a whole set of what are called in Sanskrit Upaya or beautiful tools. And it depends on the circumstance. But there are some core things that everyone needs. So I get a call from a man who's become a good friend from Bill Ford, who at that time was the CEO of Ford Motors. He's still the chair. And I'm talking about it using his name because there's a YouTube you can see of us in dialogue about our work together. So it's not so private. And it was in the previous financial meltdown 2009 something like that and he called he was practicing meditation um uh some he'd been reading my things and others and he said you know i'm about to lose my grandfather's company and the whole auto industry on my watch and I can't sleep. What can I do? So then I listened. We kind of inquired together about what he needed and ended up giving him

several practices. A practice of loving kindness for himself and others, a practice for steadying his body and heart and mind, which is a mindfulness practice where you go to these different dimensions of yourself and hold it with steadiness, root yourself in the earth, bring a sense of well-being, a breath practice. So it would depend what someone came. I might offer them a forgiveness practice or a practice of deep self-compassion, which is the kind of thing that when you talk about being a young man and learning to be a competitive surfer and all of a sudden, all the mental judgments and anxiety and how will I look and will I perform and so forth, there are simple practices of first mindful self-compassion where you really see your own humanity and you say, this is who I am and I'll offer my best, but it's not going to be measured by the world.

It's going to be measured by my own heart and whether I've given myself to it. Because in the end in life, that's what matters. You know, have I given myself fully and I've learned to love, you know, and if you do it out of any other motivation, you can do things, but in the end, it doesn't satisfy the heart. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous.

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FelixGray.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 felixgray.com for 20 off when somebody makes a mistake they want to live this way they're practicing to live a particular way whether it's love or compassion or kindness or whatever adjective that they describe as the highest attribute or the highest state that they want to live through and with. And they make some mistakes. And they are the exact opposite. They rage, they find a moment of deep weakness, where it's their old self that creeps back in. And it's like, Oh, not that. How do you help people through that ping-ponging or that slip back to revert to an older version of oneself? Well, first of all, there's a kind of humility that's a dimension of wisdom

that we only learn from making mistakes. I mean, if you watch a kid learn to walk, they fall on their diaper and their ass and their knees with this little girl or little boy, and it doesn't daunt them. And they do it a hundred or a thousand times. So first of all, we reframe it. Of course, you're going to make a mistake. It's like the great Zen poet, Ryokan, Zen master, who wrote last year, a foolish monk, this year, no change, you know, we're just human. And so there's a certain common humanity. And you say anybody who gets good, I mean, Nelson Mandela talked about it, he said, it's not that I've fallen down 1000 times, it's that I've fallen down a thousand times and got up a thousand and one

and pointed my feet in the direction I want to go. So part of it is just appealing to the heart rather than the judging mind to say, this is who we are as human beings. And that, you know, then quiet yourself. And you asked, what are the techniques, the most central ones are mindfulness and compassion. So quiet and center yourself. Let the mind quiet down a little bit. You see all the stories it tells and you become the mindful witness, the kind attention that says, okay, mind, thank you for trying to correct me and protect me. I know, you know, that's what you've been doing.

You're so busy. Thank you for all that hard work. I'm okay for now in this moment. And it's never too late to start again. Then you come and you take a breath and you invite that quality of beginner's mind and presence and say, all right, fall down, you know, a thousand times, get up a hundred, a thousand and one times and the zen one of the zen masters i studied with day sansanim this great korean sungsan sansanim this great korean master um he would say only go straight you know very very simple efforts and only go straight don't check and don't check means you know don't judge to when get your best intention put yourself

into it and do it and then finish okay start again you know and anybody who's good knows that so we're we're kind of talking about mastery um and as it says in the kind of traditional buddhist teachings um these beautiful kind of poetic verses, do you want to learn mastery? Master yourself. Master yourself before you can teach others. This is called the best master to find or something like that, you know. And what I found for me in my training there was physical mastery but more importantly there was emotional mastery so the physical mastery we'd sit up all night we do these I lived in a very ascetic forest monastery because it was a young man and you know how young guys are they want initiation you know is there anything dangerous to do around here let me try it you know how young guys are they want initiation you know is there anything

dangerous to do around here let me try it you know it's like the masai sending out a young man with a spear to get their lion you know or there's initiations for young women one of the large the most magnificent and dangerous especially in the old days was simply having a child because it was terribly dangerous for mother and child all of that we all we long for initiation and that would be an interesting thing to talk about because we live in a culture that's forgotten that you know so there I was and then I went to another monastery that had some very intense physical training. And one of the things we had to learn was to master posture, which meant you would sit and not move for 24 hours or stand in one place and not move.

And I remember standing, you know, and not, okay, I'm going to do this. And after a few hours, and I had been meditating and had some stability, my feet started to swell, my legs started to burn and it got more and more and more intense after 10 hours. It was like I was literally standing on coals because I had not moved for 12 hours. And my body was just feeling as if I was in a fire. And I stood and I I relaxed I did my practice of mindfulness and just making space and letting that be one of the energies of life and at some point maybe around hour 16 or 18 that the flames of the fire turned into bliss into the like the wings of butterflies or something filled with nectar and all that pain

not only became bearable but somehow I opened bigger than it and all the sensations were just light now I'm not saying well we should try that I talked to David Blaine who's this extraordinary magician and artist of all kinds who lived in a glass box suspended over the the Thames River in London for 41 days or stood on top of a pillar for for days without moving we talked about this a little bit and he said his days in that glass box silent not leaving were some of the most beautiful days of his life because he'd become so present and so conscious. So we had physical training to not be afraid of pain basically and to not turn our gaze from the fullness of our human experience.

But there was something a lot more important and these are sort of extremes but I'm going to bring it back to what's practical for people who are listening. And that is what was more important was the emotional mastery. Because you can master your body in certain ways, but you know it as well as I. You can be an Olympic athlete at one level and be an emotional idiot on another and destroy your life or those around or not enjoy way all of that. And emotional mastery meant to be able to sit still and be present for the what Zorba called the whole catastrophe, the depth of your tears, the fear that arises, the self-judgment, the confusion, the anger. And because my father had been so angry when I, you know, I tried to be really

peaceful and not be like him. But when I was in meditation and I started to feel the anger that was suppressed under there come up, because everything will come up after time. I went to the master that, you know, I was studying with and I told him I'm starting to get really irritable and angry at everybody, the monks at the hut, the hut in the forest near me, they all pissed me off. And I wonder, he smiled, he said, great, now you've got some practice to do, to work with. He said, go back in your hut. Remember, this is the hot season in the tropics. He said, wrap yourself in all your robes. He said, sit your butt down there and sit in the middle of the fire and name it, call it anger, anger, and let it get as big as it wants until the whole universe wants to open like the sun into fire

and learn that it's just energy and that you can be present for it and see what it turns into. And I did anger, anger, I laid it bigger, bigger. And then if you do that with anything, it starts to dissipate and you realize that the, the art of mastery is not to run from things, but to stay steady and invite them to open. And when you invite the tears to open, you might feel the grief for the world open, tears, tears.

And then, you know, as it opens more and more in your present, then you become the space, the witness that says, wow, that's like surfing. That was a really big set. That was a a huge wave but who you are is so much bigger than the emotions that come and we live in a culture that doesn't understand emotional mastery in fact quite the opposite i was talking with vivek murthy who is was the Surgeon General under Barack Obama and will now be our new Surgeon General again. Wonderful man. And he said that he's discovered that half of what walks through the doors in our hospitals and clinics of people coming for medical help, half or more of what comes in is really problems rooted in the emotions, in conflict in relationships, in unrequited love, in the blame self and others,

and lack of forgiveness and rage and fear. He said, that's really the medicine that our culture needs as much as anything. I'm right there with you. And I'll add this note. I just had a conversation with a brilliant woman, Glennon Doyle. She talked about there's two kind of approaches to helping people. You can be downstream and pluck them out, or you can go upstream and figure out, you know,

why are they jumping in or why are they being pushed in? That's really the question about structural, you know, what are the structural causes? And if you haven't read Isabel Wilkerson's new book called Cast, in which he talks about the caste system in India, the caste system in Nazi Germany, where gypsies and homosexuals and Jews were the outcast, the caste system in the U.S., where Black people especially, but Black and Brown, were and are created as a lower caste and so forth. You start to see, you can't not see the suffering in our society of the, you know, of white supremacy and not just, you know, those neo-Nazis, but the fact that we have privileged European skin and views and culture and music and as if it's really better than some other kind. And the enormous suffering because it has

education and economics, all those things that the lack of it, the way down on so many people. So when I go back and tell a different story, so I was working with some wonderful friends, Luis Rodriguez, who was the poet laureate of Los Angeles, a great Latino poet. Michael Mead, who you may know in Seattle, who's a, you know, work with Robert Bly in the men's movement, and then done all this multicultural work. Maladoma Somme, a West African medicine man. And we were doing a retreat for young men, some of them coming out of street gangs in Oakland and Los Angeles and Chicago and you know they came into our event and they were sitting in the back with their hoods up on their heads and their hats backward and like man you want to read us a poem you're going to have us do some damn meditation you know we're out on the street. People got nine millimeters shooting at us. You've got to give us something better than that. Right.

So here's and this is the real situation because this is where we are in our culture. And so before we started, we said, you know, we can't we really can't talk together because there's so many who are in this room who we don't see and need to be honored first. So would you go out in the parking lot? We're going to light a candle and we lit one candle and put it on the table. Would you go out in the parking lot and pick up a stone for every young person you know who's been killed? The undeclared war in the streets and the sad grief. I mean, you could weep because here's a young man or, you know, coming in with hands full of stones. Like no young person should know that many dead people. And then taking you take each stone and say the name and you put it by the candle. This is for Tito and this is for RJ and this is for home girl, you know,

and pretty soon there was a huge pile of stones around this candle and everybody sat down and we didn't even need to say a word. The hoods came down. It's like, Oh, okay. This is a place where we can actually talk about what's happening. And in that conversation, then Luis wrote a poem that was like a Mayan sacrifice, open your veins and tell the truth of what it's like to grow up under that kind of oppression. You know, we started a conversation where people could tell the stories

of their trauma that no one had ever listened to, and where it was okay to let the emotions come in the light of that candle and arrive, and to realize that there was enough safety and space to begin to actually re-inhabit your life. So this, of course, isn't the people you're working with at the very high level of mastery, but I think about it because I was talking with a friend, Rick Rubin, who's a great music producer. He was the founder, co-founder of Def Jam Records and co-president of Columbia Records. And the conversation we had was about these young people who make a huge breakthrough and at age 22 as a rap artist or music musician you know have made 30 million dollars and you know by the by the Bentley and the house and whatever um and you know what with

athletes we were talking about George Mumford together doing the same work you do and these and they have no idea what to do with this and you know a few years later often they crash the money is all gone what happened their life um so there's a kind of mastery that's not just the mastery of body um but it's the mastery of the whole person in some fashion and i'm assuming that that's part of the work you do and that mastery means that one brings mindfulness to body. Pay attention in deep way. What does the body need? What can I learn from it? How can I support it to be its best? One brings mindfulness to what's, these are the foundations, to the heart. What are the unprocessed emotions? What are the fears? What drives us? What's the trauma?

What needs to be seen and held with compassion and released? And getting help to do that, because it's hard to do it on your own. Therapy or with teachers or things. Bringing mindfulness to the mind. What are the stories we tell ourselves? The imprints. Are they true? Is there a bigger space, a wiser place. And step by step, as you breathe and bring that kind of attention, there comes an inner settledness or mastery. Oh, now I can be with my own body, my own emotions and fears and longings and love. You know, I see the thoughts. And now let's bring that same mindfulness to our relations to others because the word mindfulness is traditionally a compound word that means mindful presence

and mindful response so in zen they say there are only two things you sit and you sweep the garden and it doesn't matter how big the garden is. You steady yourself, you quiet your mind, you tend your body and heart until you feel a kind of presence and courage and compassion, love, and then you get up to the garden of the world and you bring that in. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that.

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that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. I really appreciate not only the stories, but the texture and the nuances in which you're able to articulate with clarity the words that escape many of us. Because these concepts are difficult to talk about. And I am fascinated by the things that are hard to talk about that are just out of reach of the stringing and stitching together of words in an eloquent way, because those are the ones that challenge me personally. And I think that what you're describing is the way I think about

mastery, at least, is mastery of self through craft. And people can do mastery of craft but they definitely can miss mastery of self but i'm not so sure that mastery of self alone is possible without some sort of expressive craft it could be writing it could be painting it could be talking it could be fill in the blank many many things sport included but i'd love for you to wave me off if that is not quite right. Well, it's an interesting view and it could be right. I don't know, but I do know that it's possible wherever or whoever you are to inhabit and cultivate and discover the power of presence. And even whether you're, you know, an elite athlete

or whether you're, you know, a preschool teacher or an accountant and whether you have something you're trying to master like, you know, electric guitar and you know play like whoever your great model is or parenting or parenting but i you know i'm i think i'm telling a story from my beloved uh trudy goodman who's the founder of inside la and a colleague in teaching as well as my wife. And she went to work in the refugee camps in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, on the border of, in Chad, on the border of Darfur, where there's these dusty, incredibly poor camps

with hardly enough food and water for hundreds of thousands of people that had run away from the killing and the genocide from the Janjaweed and so forth. And she worked for this beautiful small nonprofit called IACT, I-A-C-T, that is a kind of small but in its own way mighty anti-genocide group because they're willing to go into Sudan and they're willing to go into these camps and they're willing to go into the Rohingyas and places where people have been thrown away and they've done a few things first of all they were the ones that helped create the Darfur soccer team because

they did this beautiful thing. They sat down with the women in the camps and instead of saying, okay, we're the big Western colonial NGOs, we're going to do this and that, which is generally what happens, even with well intention, they sat down and they said, what do you want? I mean, there's the question to start with. What do you need? What do you want? Anybody you're teaching, what's going on for you? What would, and the women said, we want soccer

and we want kindergarten. And they said, well, tell us more. And they said, we want soccer because we want our kids to know they're part of a bigger world and that there's something more than just being refugees. And that became the start of what eventually became this really beautiful team called Darfur United that played in an international tournament in Europe with the other ones that didn't have their own passport or countries. And these are kids who've been playing barefoot, you know, and their whole thing was, can we even score a goal against these other teams?

The other thing that they wanted was kindergarten. So their kids would realize that they could learn. So Trudy, who's also beside teaching meditation, is a developmental psychologist and so forth, when taught all these things, she taught mindfulness practice and games for kids and how they could learn to care for themselves and tend themselves. Because if you learn it young, you know, it can start to heal those traumas. We were very resilient. And when she left, she also trained the teachers. There was a cadre of teachers. She asked them what was the favorite thing that that they had done the best thing. And to her surprise, they said, oh, the mindfulness.

She thought it might be the game she taught, the way she showed them how to help kids grow and all these kind of beautiful things. They said the mindfulness. And and she asked why is that and they said well our past is so terrible you know our villages were burned so many people our families were killed we trekked across the desert we survived and now we've been here for a dozen years we don't know how long if ever we, we'll get from here. The future is also really unknown and bleak. You taught us that there is a kind of freedom that we have that no one can take away from us. And so when you ask about mastery,

and yeah, you might have an art, but this is really pointing to the to the center of that art you can't escape that story without um i can't i'll speak for myself feeling um both saddened by the conditions that others live in and by and a sense of deep gratitude. But somewhere in there, there's a guilt for me that pops up like, man, I am sloppy with how I appreciate what's good in my life. And I practice gratitude. But when you share that story, yeah, thank you.

So let's talk about this cultural aspect. And at the center of much of the teachings, mindfulness and otherwise, is about self-critique and judgment. And it's a bit of the scratchy, prickly nature of the present moment is when we start to judge and critique that we're not good enough it's not good enough they're not good enough and it is something that's been important for me to try to sort out because i was harder on myself before anyone else would be because somehow i was afraid of what would happen if they were harder on me than me and i would be exposed for not being good enough. I mean, that's old stuff for me that still rears its head, you know, from time to time. And I'd like to say I've eradicated it, but I haven't. But I want to talk about this universal cultural idea of critique and self-judgment. Is this something that we do as humans, or is this more of a Western frame?

Is there a cultural aspect to self-critique and judgment? So there are a few things to say about it. I'm glad you raised it because it is an important, it's a really important question for us to intending our heart and lives and mastery which is the thing that you've focused on a group of us as teachers who've been teaching these trainings of mindfulness compassion presence and so forth had a gathering together with the Dalai Lama some years ago and we were talking about teaching in the West and how how things were unfolding here. You know, it was like a company meeting with all

the all the Buddhist honchos or whatever. Anyway, and the you know, the question one of us asked the Dalai Lama is, what do we do about the frequent rising of self-hatred in people? Not just self-judgment, but even deeper than that, self-hatred as well. And the Dalai Lama looked puzzled and he said, what? And we said it a few times and he kind of couldn't get it and he turned to his translator talked in tibetan in this beautiful tibetan you know

deep voice he has and finally he understood oh self-harm and then he looked up with these kind of wide eyes very tenderly said oh but this is a mistake why would anyone do it and apparently it's not very common in tibet so that's part of the answers here you want a cross-cultural question but we explained then he said how many of you have encountered this all our hands went up you said just students no us too and so one of the first skills that one learns in the art of mindfulness, of mindful presence or mindful kind attention, is to name and acknowledge the states of mind without getting lost in them. And one of the most helpful acknowledments is of the judging mind so there you are you know doing your art you're playing music you're playing ball you're you know you're painting you're whatever it happens to be you know sweeping the garden yeah something um and then the judging

mind comes you could have swept better you should have started earlier you should we could have done this you you could have learned as you well all the all those things um and you could say oh i hate this judging i want to get rid of judging is terrible no more judging i'm going to what was your word eradicate that sucker you know stop judging i hate judging but what's that it's another judgment right just piles Just piles on. Instead, what you do is you turn almost with a bow and you say, judging, judging mind. And then if you need to, or if it's helpful, you can say, thank you for your opinion to that part of your mind. And if you want to take it one level deeper, you can even reflect now,

whose voice does that remind you of? Because it's not just your own. It was recorded in there from, you know, school, parents, whatever. We won't talk about them. Okay, thank you for your opinion. I'm actually okay for now. You can rest, put them on the sideline and go on.

And it will arise a number of times. But all of a sudden, your relationship to the judging mind becomes one of not living inside it with the belief that it's true, but seeing it as just conditioned. And that is, this is a small example, a small window or doorway into the kind of inner freedom that comes as we learn to meditate and learn to practice. And I have, you know, for anybody who's interested on my website, jackcornfield.com, there's something called Mindfulness Daily for free. I'm not even trying to sell it. 40 days of a little bit of instruction, 15 minutes a day of how you learn to work with your emotions or your judgment or pain in your body, how to hold it in a way where you become the master of it rather than being thrown about by everything that's painful where you react

against it and everything that's pleasant where you don't. So your question is an important one. It doesn't go away. These things don't go away. But they're part of your history, like you carry your parents' DNA in some fashion or other. But you can take them quite lightly. Yeah, thanks for your opinion. That's a great judgment.

Thank you for that. And that's enough. Why are people so concerned about the opinions of others? Because one of our deepest longings is to love and be loved to be connected more than anything i mean the ones who run away and don't want to be connected generally do that because it's too painful because they've been hurt too much they can't trust that connection and often for very good reason i mean i again would not judge that but underneath i believe that one of the deepest and most significant longings of human incarnation, it's not just that you've taken this body that consciousness has come in and

given you this body, but that to be a human being is to be connected. And it's true from the moment you're an infant, none of us survived without people, even if they were, you know, not very good parents or tenders, we were fed, we were cleaned enough, we, you know, and there's something in us that wants to know that we're a part of something. So in the old, you know, in the old villages, the worst punishment of all, there are all kinds of censuring, the worst punishment was when you were banished when you later yep when the the worst punishment was when you were banished and you couldn't be

part of um that community anymore so we need that like we need oxygen in some way and then we get afraid well if i don't do it right then people won't like me they'll push me away they'll banish me in some fashion or other and we want that we want the connection and we want approval again because we've been taught that we're in some deep way we've we've taken in that we're not okay as we are you know and, and there's a difference there. There's the whole notion of original sin that somehow there's something wrong with you. In Buddhist psychology, it's called original goodness, that every child has this child of the spirit and innocence in them to begin with, and that that can be brought out or supported.

And even when it's forgotten in some way, it's inviolable, buried under there. When you think about the happiest moments as a child, your most joyful day, running, laughing, tickling, which almost every child, even the ones in the refugee camps, they do that because it's who we are. That can't be taken from you. It can be buried under your fear and your trauma. But in fact, that joy is part of your true nature. Sharon Salzberg, one of your longtime friends and partners, was on the podcast. And I asked her about her meditation practice currently. And she said, you know,

I'm working on just returning to the innocence. And I was like, Oh God, you know, just her, her, her very particular voice and the way she said it, but then just the, it just hits, you know, like returning to innocence is such a vulnerable, you know, like returning to innocence is such a vulnerable, you know. And we have that vulnerability. That's right. I heard her also say something else. Somebody asked, What do you do when you meditate, Sharon? And she said, I sit down, and I get real. I just get to be with things that the way they are and of course as men especially and i've done 25 years of retreat men's retreats with everybody starting with robert bly and michael mead and so

forth teaching together and i loved it but in the beginning and i remember it was true for myself they said when are you mostly with other men oh it was sports you know or business or something well how about how much you really hang out and, you know, or business or something. Well, how about, how much you really hang out and talk, you know? And when we started to open up, the men were really afraid of each other. It was okay if we talked about sports or we talked about business, we had some third thing, but to actually look and say, God, this is what I've been going through. This is what's happening in my marriage or my business or with my sons or daughters or kids or in business. We realized that we didn't know that and that this wasn't

taught to us so well in this culture. And when I've lived in other parts of the world, many, you know, in the Middle East, in Asia and Latin America, men sit and they put their arms around each other. They walk down the street and hold hands. And it's not, I mean, in Latin America, men sit and they put their arms around each other. They walk down the street and hold hands. And it's not, I mean, we're so homophobic. We're afraid of each other. We're afraid of loving each other. And it's not about that at all.

So there's some Sharon, when Sharon talks about that, and it's a way of not being so afraid to be, to trust that vulnerability vulnerability because as the poet Rilke says, ultimately it's upon your vulnerability that you depend. And I mean, I'll say what I think he meant. You know, every time you drive down the street, some people stop at the red light so you can go on the green. Every time you get your groceries in the market, you have to believe that that person with the bandana who picked it

from the field and the person who trucked it and so forth, that they took care of it so that it was still healthy for you. That we actually, we're in this relationship where we're always vulnerable to one another. And if we can acknowledge it, it actually opens the doorway to trust in the universe itself. That something in the universe has carried us this far. And that in fact, it is trustworthy. There's this beautiful passage in the Tao Te Ching. Let your heart be at peace, watch the turmoil of beings and contemplate their return.

If you don't realize the source in yourself, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize who you are, where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kind-hearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you.

And even when death comes, you are ready. And like Sharon, it just invites us to come into the present which is a mystery nobody knows what's going to happen and from this place then to take up our art sport or whatever it is but not I you know I'm going to triumph over them all you, or else I'll beat myself, but to say, let me give what I've been given out to the world in the best way that I can, something like that. Let me tell you a funny story that was important for me is that there was a professor early in school for me, and he selected 10 of us to go to the bottom of the Grand Canyon into a native area that was sacred with all the right permissions. And he said, I'm giving you two things.

We're going to live down there for a week. And I'm going to give you two things, the Tao Te Ching and a journal. And then we had to be by ourself. So we couldn't see any other of our of our you know classmates or the professors and i'll tell you you give a 19 year old you know the dow de ching and a journal and a freaking pencil by themselves for a week i i was changed it changed me and so did it change you what what yeah i i got in touch with my fears. I got scared.

I got angry. I was like, oh, I'm not. I thought I was kind of together. And then I was doing pretty good. And I got down there and I was like, the magnificence of the place I was in and the silence that I was forced to examine. And then these riddles where I was like, okay, well, intellectually, I kind of don't understand it, but man, I'm just a mess feeling things. And so it was this, it was a, we'll say it, it'll sound surgical when I say it, but it was an

awakening, but not an awakening as an enlightenment. It was an awakening to the pain. And we had to pack up a day early because there was a storm coming. And I think I ran up the entire hill. And when I say hill, it's like, I mean, how long does it take to get out in and out of the Grand Canyon? I had so much scratchy agitation. And so I think back to my first experience to the dalai ching and uh i'm so moved by what you did and the brilliance of your professor to have you do it and what you did was like it was the first half of a meditation retreat i wish you the storm hadn't come and you had a little longer because people will come in especially their first retreat

and they're kind of they're weary and whatever and they sit and in you know 10 days of silence all the things that you describe for the will come up oh my god the fears i haven't the worries the the anger the you know and and that's what we practice with not they shouldn't be there and the bodily pains and so forth and then we have this beautiful thing that we call um the meditation facelift because at the end of 10 days um something happens somewhere after about a week or so it's not the same for each person but it's like the sky's clear and you go, yes, there's all that, all those emotions and fears and all that stuff. That's not who I am.

I am this space of awareness, of loving awareness that can hold it all with some compassion. And we do self-compassion practice and with some courage. And you see them at the end and they look, you know, 10 or 20 years younger. I thought, well, we can go down and sell this in Hollywood. Oh, yeah. Without a doubt. I've been talking for a while, Jack, about the new wealth is not a big house, big car, big watch, big, big, big.

It's not that. New wealth is a sense of vibrance and a zest and a lightness that people are demonstrating that like, no, I understand. And there is a sense of peace that is the new wealth. And I first touched it there, but I got pulled out beforehand. And I'll tell you a funny, it's not funny. I'm going to say this story, but then I want to ask you a question about it. Is that, so I have a foundational, a first principle belief that we are spiritual beings. And sometimes I wrestle with myself that that's a placeholder because I don't really know. And the reason I don't know

is that I'm not sure, and I say this with sadness and humility, I'm not sure I've ever heard God. Okay. And Jack, I don't have this idea that he's a great man, old beard that we saw, you know, that Michelangelo or, you know, like the, the, the Christian faith has presented to us, but that voice that, um, and, and so I listen, I listen a lot and I hear me a lot, you know, so I hear that voice a lot, but I was on a three day with, uh, Jon Kabat-Zinn with my wife and I, and, um, you know, it's like a, I don't know, 12 to 14 hour meditation practice per day. And on the second day, my wife, you know, we kind of broke the silence a little bit just with some eye contact and those moments are kind of built in. And in and and then we were sharing and she says i heard god i said my goodness and like so i just want to ask you it's a long way to make it to um to the question is like how do you wrestle with

that hearing or not hearing have you what is your experience with spirit it's a beautiful and deep question and it really goes to who are we really you know we're not our bodies it's so clear you're you know you're not that infant body you're not your middle-aged body then you get an aged body that's just not who you are it's so clear you're you know you're not that infant body you're not your middle-aged body then you get an aged body that's just not who you are it's always changing you're not your emotions because they're always changing you're not your thoughts i hope that would be really tragic for a lot of us in some way but there's good thoughts but it's pretty chaotic in there. Who you are as consciousness itself, is this consciousness, this awareness

that was born into this body. And I've had the honor of sitting with people when they die doing hospice work. And it's an extraordinary thing to watch somebody who's there and then one breath when it stops and consciousness leaves the body, they're not there anymore. And the body is just a piece of meat basically. And I've watched people go in and out and they'll say,

as I know well from meditation, I left my body. I was in light. was peace it was beauty but but I have to be here a little longer all those kind of all the near-death things they're true um we we touch the sacred let's use that word in many different ways for some people it's walking in the high mountains and you have a sense of the magic the mystery of it for some it is sitting with someone when they die or being there for the birth of a child your own child or you know someone and you go wow here's another human being appearing out of you know nothing and then the body created this human body and now spirit comes you know or sometimes it's listening to an

extraordinary piece of music you know or making love or or taking a psychedelic which you know a lot of us did starting back in the hippie days and things like that and it's really magic in its own fashion um so you can't tell or say how we're supposed to know that which is sacred but everybody who's listening and you too Michael have had these moments in your own way. Maybe it was even down there in the Grand Canyon when you were beset by the demons, you know, that's the description they're talked about in some meditation texts. Oh, you sit and then Mara, the demons come to tempt you, the demons of anger and of fear and, you know, all the kinds of temptations. And your task is just to sit there and say, I see you. Okay. But it's not you. But also you looked up those walls,

you know, of 5,000 feet. It's like a mile deep down there and the strata of millions of years and something in you knew that you weren't just, you know, Michael who has to graduate college and get a good job and, you know, fulfill the cultural norms. That you were part of something so much greater. And the way that you see the sacred will be your way and not anyone else's. One of my mentors, pulling on that thread, one of my mentors pulling on that thread, one of my mentors early on and Jack, I needed a mentor. We all do. Let's just say, what's up, Gary? You know, it's a beautiful man for me.

And so he says, it's Mike, the ocean is your altar. And I thought, what? He says, yeah, that's where you go. He goes, you're at peace there. You're at one. You talk about it as if not that you're shredding waves, but that you're connected. And, you know, I think that that is where I have a natural proclivity towards awe. And so, you know, moments of awe for me are like, it's actually how I measure daily success, Jack. I'd love to hear what you think about this, but awe is like, there's a physiological response to awe. Your hair stands up, you know, the nerd and you and I would recognize it's called pilar erection. And so your hair stands up when you're in that moment of grasping vastness,

but at the same time connected to the intimacy and fragility of this moment, awe. And so when I feel it, my hair stands up, I go, oh, check, there's one. And so much of my training is to be able to be so present that I'm going to be able to find, accidentally find, or slip into those moments of awe. And so I share that with you because maybe you want to say, ah, it's a little mechanical. Maybe it's a little short-sighted. No, it's not mechanical. I would never say that. I would say that it's beautiful that you have, it's like somebody playing music and you just did that piece and you realize, oh, this one came through me. It's not just, I mean, Mozart didn't write those stamp symphonies.

He heard them. Rumi didn't write those poems. Mozart heard it and he wrote it down as fast as he could. Yeah, cool. I was talking to a bunch of other authors because I hear what I write. And there was a leaf blower outside one day. And I had to stop writing. First, I was irritated. I noticed the irritation.

I know how to meditate with that. Let that go. But I couldn't write after that because I couldn't hear the words that i was supposed to write down and i asked these other authors and several of them hear the words and write it said no no i said i get an image and i write that somebody else said no i feel it through my body it comes up what was clear is nobody was writing their own material. It was really coming from something bigger. So this is your way. The only thing I would add is that for me, I don't, I don't look to increase the moments, whether it's of awe or a sense of the sacred um i've discovered that the mind and the heart and everything it opens and closes you know how the body breathes and the cerebral spinal fluid

you know and they're the phases of the moon and the tides come and go and the stock market goes up and down and everything kind of is breathing itself in its cycles and the galaxies are turning that 250 million years for the wheel of our arm of the galaxy to go around and the heart opens and closes and sometimes we think ah the goal is to have it always open awe beauty you know connection everything, like you're holding your breath. But in fact, sometimes the heart also needs to close and just take rest and be quiet and not be in touch with anything and nothing mystical or magical, just stillness or, you know, okay, it's time to cook breakfast or whatever it is. And I've come to really appreciate and love who we are as beings

of expansion and contraction. And to know that, and knowing that allows me to give myself to life without that extra attachment part. there's freedom in how you describe that and i i'd love to use that as a segue into change because there's this undulation that you're talking about the opening the closing and i've often thought about that uh there's two camps if we're going to oversimplify thinking or thoughts there's two basic camps now i'm to get in trouble trying to be a reductionist here. But the idea is that there's thoughts that create constriction and there's thoughts that create expansion or space. And so the next thread here is there's change. There's this undulation that takes place between types of thoughts and feelings and the heart opening and closing.

But here's the question. What is it about humans that we have a difficult relationship with change? On one hand, we crave change. And that's why we love to travel and have varied experiences. And on the other hand, we resist it. And sometimes we find ourselves going to places where we choose the same food. And, you know, so that's like the concreteness, but there is a relationship to change that is at the center of being human. So can you talk about that? Well, I'm not sure even that it's only at the center of being human. I think there are dogs that don't like change either that like the regime that they, you know, or the regimen they're in and so forth. But to answer, because it's a deep and a beautiful question,

I think it's wired into our nervous system, Michael. I think when you look at the triune brain, there's the sort of brainstem that runs all the autonomous things in your body and also that scans for danger in a certain way and that can get triggered in fight flight or freeze and we needed that to survive when we were in a cave whether there was the sound of an animal or we saw other people coming you know we needed to know right away were they friends or foe or something so that's a circuitry that we've had for you know hundreds of thousands of years if not millions um and that can easily be activated it's what modern politics does that's how politics works is to scare you to activate that you know say oh the the mex, the Mexicans, the immigrants, the Black people,

the Muslims, when I was a kid, it was the communists. They're sort of coming back around as the enemy du jour, you know, they're going to come and, you know, take your everything you cherish and things like that. So I think that that's part of what happens is just that it gets activated in some way and it's not a bad thing, but then there's the, you know, the midbrain of emotions and it's possible not only to know the emotions with mindfulness, but also to cultivate qualities like compassion and love or generosity, or you talked about gratitude and joy, those can be practiced and they become the tunes that the heart then settles in more frequently. And then there is the, you know, the neocortex, which actually can step back and reflect and say,

you know, is that a coiled rope or is that a snake I should be afraid of in the dark? Let me take. And you can kind of see something anew. And beyond it is our consciousness itself. So I forget I'm following the thread of your question. And I realize I've lost exactly where you where you started me on this. You were talking something about why we human beings get, wasn't get afraid, but get, what was the question? What is our relationship with change? Well, with change. That's right. So, so, so we were, we're afraid of change because when you're

in your cave and you know where the berries are and you know where, when the bear hibernates and when it's dangerous or whatever you're safer and there's some part of us that wants that safety but as you point out you know or Shakespeare said you know or maybe it was Whitman, Shakespeare said I'm a man of parts and Whitman said yes I am large I contain multitudes that part of us wants safety and part of us wants the full human experience and so we tug between those two and it's natural because the brainstem wants safety give me what I know and then another part says yeah but there's this world to explore and experience and both of them are part of being

human and i think our navigation and it's different for different people some people are more introverted or extroverted or you know silent or um is what what nourishes you what leads you to be the most deeply true to yourself and connected with what your gifts are. And for some that will be to have a really simple rhythm and not change very much. And for others, it will be to challenge themselves in change. And one of them isn't more right than another. I think they both are, they both can be an expression of our inner, of the best of ourselves, of our inner truth. I'm reminded, I don't know, it's a little bit of an aside, but William Stafford was one of our great nation's great poets who died a few years ago, lived up in the Northwest. He was part Native American and was a conscientious objector in World War II, which is kind of extraordinary, and basically said, I don't want to fight in white

men's wars. And when you hear that, you can have a certain sympathy for that perspective, even in the righteousness of, you know, in the face of Hitler. But anyway, he was being interviewed on national television by Robert Bly at one point about poetry. And Stafford had the habit of, had the practice of writing a good poem every morning you know and poets struggle to find the words to write a good poem and rewrite it and all those

kinds of things and Stafford's practice was to get up and do his morning ablutions, whatever they were, and write a poem. Get up early. And Robert said, how can you do that day after day? Have you missed a day? He said, I haven't missed a day in years. He said, how can you do that? And Stafford looked back, his eyes twinkled a little bit, and he said, simple. Lower your standards.

Now, I don't, I don't, I don't mean to take away from, from, you know, from your bread and butter of helping people become masters. Stafford was a master, but he was really talking about doing the practice for the love of it itself. Yeah. Not even for the love of it itself yeah not even for the product of it and just saying this is who i am he was a quiet introverted this is what i do you know and i do it every day it's not like there's some change every morning i do this and yet gandhi called it blessed monotony and yet that kind of practice also becomes a different expression because we can't help but change in everything that we do is actually changing.

And the goal, as Suzuki Roshi said, is to keep your beginner's mind, to let it become the place that change. No breath is the same. No more, you know, the universe starts new at breakfast every day. It's never happened this way before. You are a legend. You are a legend, Chuck. I want to change that topic to one other thing that relates to what we're talking about. I don't know how long we have, but I'll go a little, little into this. Please. And remember when I talked about that we need to have a certain, or to be wise, to be successful,

to fulfill our humanity, we need an emotional mastery along with a physical mastery or mastery of other skills. It's becoming more and more clear with the pandemic, the climate change and so forth, that no amount of outer technology, computers and internet and AI and biotech and space technology and nanotechnology,

where you have your cell phone, you know, that has the great library of Alexandria and all the songs of, you know, the past generations and 23 million cat videos, whatever you could imagine in that little device or its connection. But that's not going to stop continuing war. Technology won't do it. Outer development. It won't stop continuing climate change, continuing racism, continuing tribalism.

That can't be changed from the outer development, no matter how magnificent it is because the roots of war or racism or you know climate destruction or all these other things um they're all in the human heart and so what we're talking about we can talk about individual mastery um but there's also a kind of cultural mastery, which is to say that we have this magnificent outer development, but we are, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff past said, we are a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants. And so what our human task now in some very straightforward way is to match the miracles of outer development with the development of interconnection, of the capacities for caring and forgiveness or compassion, of attention to ourselves and the earth from the heart, you know, our abilities to love in some deep way and to live in a wise relationship. And that's the task for humanity right now. Yes, the rest will continue and will develop. But without that, we're stuck. And the suffering, as you can see, gets really great with the racial injustice and the economic injustice and the kind of

ways that people are marginalized. And the thing is, it doesn't have to be that way. The richest nation on the earth could afford to house its people and not have them living on the streets. It could, we could afford that. The richest nation on the earth, you know, could afford to, you know, to support, to support beautiful education for children, starting from very young, for everyone. We could do this.

We have this. So all of this becomes a matter of heart. And part of the conflict now is that one between the rugged individual. Okay, you're going to pull yourself up for the boots by bootstraps. And, and we're not going to help you, because that would make you dependent. We want you to, you know, pull yourself up. That's what a good American cowboy, but they forget the fact that the saddle that the cowboy rides on is the result of some thousands of years of the art of leather tanning from the Mongol first horse riders and those in India. And then when it spread to Europe,

they forget that the stirrups that their feet are in were from the long thousand year history of human beings taking first, you know, bronze and brass and then iron and learning how to smelt that, that the food that they is actually based on all the humans and ancestors that they're not independent. They are interdependent with everything. And so this shift of consciousness from the what's called the body of fear, that sense of separateness where we feel vulnerable. to realize that actually our salvation and our humanity flowers from the place of deep respect and connection with one another.

And that's an inner job. That is an inner job. Yeah, it is. So, quick hits. Thank you for your time. You are a legend. This was a gift to many. Myself, first in line.

And a couple quick hits. Like super crisp, one, three word, four word sentences or words to describe it. My purpose is... To love. My vision is to bring goodness, blessings, love from me to the world. I am.

I don't know what I am. I'm a mystery. I'm loving awareness. I am consciousness. But even to say that reduces the mystery. It all comes down to? Being present here and now. What I understand best is? That I don't really know everything, even in spite of what I think I know. Oh, goodness.

All right. Thank you so much. Humility is not my strong suit, but I'm working on it. Michael, I enjoyed very much the conversation and the depth of the questions that you ask. And the beautiful message I do have for people is that, first of all, your heart, you have born in you the great heart of compassion, you can trust it, you can learn to practice and open and develop presence in whole wonderful ways, and that there are simple and great trainings to do it. And if you undertake those trainings at home, 15 minutes, 20 minutes at a time, you can settle yourself, you can integrate, you can tend

to things that are unfinished. And you can actually learn to live from a place that's both more peaceful, but also more authentic and more empowered. So I just commend that to you. jackcornfield.com. jackcornfield.com. Yeah. And Spirit Rock is at.com as well. Spirit Rock is.org. .org. Yeah. So again, thank you. Honored.

I hope our paths cross in person. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Michael. Take care. Pleasure. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us.

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