Good Life Project - Mindfulness, Compassion and Work: Leah Weiss

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

Her ninth-grade teacher changed her life, but the loss of a friend followed by time in service of Tibetan refugees in India would lead Leah Weiss to change the lives of thousands in ways she never saw coming, until they arrived.Leah Weiss, Ph.D., MSW, is a teacher, researcher, and meditation expert at Stanford University specializing in mindfulness and compassion. She teaches a perennially waitlisted course at Stanford, Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion, and is the Principal Teacher and Trainer for Stanford’s Compassion Cultivation Training program, founded by the Dalai Lama. She is also the author of How We Work (https://amzn.to/2jxpULU), and a women's rights advocate who strives to bring actionable methods for difficult work situations to women at all levels.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Weird girl over there, you just came out of a 100-day meditation retreat. Like, can you, A, do something for the patients we don't know what to do with, and B, can you do something for us? Because we're trying to, it seems like there should be a fit between what you're doing and this burnout, compassion fatigue. My guest today, Leah Weiss, is a PhD, a professor, teacher, researcher, meditation expert at Stanford University, specializing in the application of mindfulness and compassion. She teaches a number of the most popular classes at Stanford on compassion, world religion, philosophy, experimental introduction to Buddhism. She has a super cool new book out called How We Work. I actually began a conversation with Leah

a couple of years back because I became fascinated with not just her academic work, but her personal journey. When you look at the body of work she's created and the incredible volume of people whose lives she has touched, it's really impressive. But what I didn't know when I first met her was that that journey actually was set in motion when she was in ninth grade, when she stumbled into a class that was taught on enlightenment in high school, of all places. And that would end up serving her incredibly well, because in her early years at Stanford, she suffered the loss of one of her closest, oldest friends. And that set in motion this incredible sojourn, which took her out of Stanford, into India, into all sorts of really deep dives into who she is, the life and world around her,

meditation and compassion, and why it really matters so deeply. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday We've been compromised The pilot's a hitman I knew you were gonna be fun On January 24th Tell me how to fly this thing Mark Wahlberg You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're gonna die Don't shoot him, we need him Y'all need a pilot Flight Risk The Apple Watch Series 10 is here It has the biggest display ever It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. How does a kid from Short Hills, New Jersey, get interested in Tibetan Buddhism? So at the prep school that I went to in New Jersey, there was an amazing English teacher named Dean Slider,

who is an educator of all things in terms of big ideas down to the granular in like grammar. He was the hardest grader I ever had. He was the only one who really just pushed from the connection between the small being meticulous in how we do work and the biggest level of questions and how we think. So he taught a class called Literature of Enlightenment that changed the lives of many people over the years. And I was one of them. And in that class, we were exposed to ideas of enlightenment from across cultures and time. And when we hit the Tibetan Buddhist texts, I just was like, wow, this, it just floored me. It made, it was the first thing that had ever made so much sense to me. And that was when I started actively pursuing learning how to meditate. I'd go in, and he taught us some in the class, and then he would also offer opportunities sort of before school and different in the afternoon. And I became a person who was showing up for those and got really interested in the experience of the different qualities of the mind and the heart

and what that looks like. How old were you then? Ninth grade. Oh, so this is young. This is like the very beginning of high school even. That's really unusual. Were you brought up around spirituality or faith? We were, my direct family was very much secular Jews.

And I'd say like with the origin of a lot of the older generation, like very passionate about social justice. So I think early on for me through that generation, really seeing that our actions matter. You know, one of my grandfather's favorite expressions was, we vote with our feet. And it just seems profoundly true to me. So the lives we live, what we choose to do, and how we do it was emphasized from an early faith. And I had some examples of people in my family who were meditating. And I was always really curious about that. So before I was old enough to do it myself,

my older siblings each had phases of time when they were from that same English teacher. I was just wondering, it's like there's a lineage of this teacher through your family. It's so interesting. Did it cause, I mean, did your family just kind of see this as like, as any kind of conflict or just like, okay, well, this is interesting. It's another overlay of an approach to spirituality, maybe not even spirituality, because I mean, there's a reasonable argument that a lot of the practices from Tibetan and other forms of Buddhism are actually more just a psychology of the mind, you know, and practices that allow you to in some way cultivate it. Yeah. I think, you know, I think the best of what I got

out of the Jewish religious education that I had was value for asking questions. And for me, the precision of the practices that I was getting out of the Buddhist context of learning how to, different ways of looking at the mind and training the mind were very practical ways of engaging with similar questions. Yeah. It's almost like it allows you to cultivate a state of awareness and stillness that lets you almost like see more and understand what the deeper questions are. Does that resonate? I mean, that's just been my experience with a lot of these practices.

Absolutely. It resonates. And I think that for me, that some of the most interesting conversations that I have are with other people who are coming from any number of religious backgrounds or just even very thoughtful secular humanists who are paying attention to how their lives happen and how they unfold in the sort of detail of the interactions and their mental and emotional and physical experience. Yeah. So as at a young age, how did you, I'm curious, how did you interact with some of the more esoteric ideas of Tibetan Buddhism, like the idea of reincarnation and karma and some of when you start getting into that side of things. Yeah. It made a lot of sense to me. I mean, I think there were some things around early on, I saw a lot of discussion around dreams and the way we fall asleep and the different types of consciousness that we have just even in our 24 hours of our day of living a waking life,

falling asleep, dreaming, waking up, living our days that was very appealing to me conceptually. And I think also I've always been a person who would remember dreams and have lucid dreams and be interested in consciousness in that way. And, you know, and I think this was another place that my family played into. My mom from very early age would ask questions about our dreams and what we experienced. And I think that there was a way in which she just, that was part of the discussion, which made it something that I would focus on. And that's actually one of the things that I do with my kids now. I don't, you know, insert a whole lot, but I will ask questions like, what was your dream? How did you feel? And what was it like? You know, they go through phases where they have nightmares. And what was it like when you woke up and you realized it was a dream? To try to point to that idea of we're constructing during our sleep, during our lives, and that the insight that we can have about that is applicable. Yeah. I mean, I remember speaking with a shaman a little while back who came out of sort of one of the ancient traditions out of Mexico. And he was

sharing that their tradition believes that our realities are manifestations of our dreams. So to the extent that you can enter your dream and become lucid, for lack of a better word, and have some control over it and construct it the way that you want it to be, that that then becomes our manifest reality in real life and that that is sort of the unlock key for creating the waking life that you want. Such a great way to put it. And I think it's really interesting. I mean, there's research at Stanford on lucid dreaming and what happens when you try to provoke that experience for people. You can actually train them to dream and wake within their dream. And this is consistent with thousands of years old spiritual traditions. And I think

it's exactly how you just expressed that makes so much sense to me, because it's about the experience of waking within your dream, but was a technology, a history of technology class. And the paper presentation was about the interplay between Tibetan lucid dreaming practice and the matrix, which had just come out. It was so much fun. But I love like those glimpses that Neo has, I feel like are so on point with, you know, not even just Tibetan Buddhist practice, but if you think about things like sacramentality, like when I would take classes in graduate school from people like Father Michael Himes, who's, you know, a world famous theologian on, particularly on who is engaging with this idea of sacramentality, the really real, what's happening underneath our experience. I think that this is something that all the wisdom traditions are pointing to,

that we can access that through breaking open our constructions. And in my mind, this is another place where research like Allie Crum at Stanford, she has done a lot of really interesting studies just about how we think about things like how we move our body or the food that we eat impacts our body's experience of how we're moving and the food we eat. There's such a strong feedback loop between mind and body how we're moving and the food we eat. Like there's such a strong feedback loop between mind and body that we're only beginning to be able to really capture, but I think is a long held intuition from wisdom traditions. Yeah. It is amazing how deep that connection is, right? There's, I can't remember who did the research. I remember reading a study where they were looking at housekeeping staff in a hotel.

Do you recall who that was? That's Ali Krum. Okay, there we go. And where she showed that simply telling one group of the housekeeping staff that what they were doing, you know, quote, qualified as legit exercise, and they went back afterwards, and they measure, you know, like real physiological changes in the body and the body mass index of the group that just thought that what they were doing qualifies as exercise, somehow doing the exact same thing, it chains them metabolically and physiologically,

which is kind of mind-boggling because it really does speak to how much of we think, we think about, we think about our, I think our physical destiny as being controlled by what we do, you know, but how much of it, if like without changing anything that we do, like, is there a way to shift our intention and the way that our mind interacts with our body to just internally change it? It's kind of amazing. It's completely amazing the degree to which the body really does follow what we believe. One of my favorite studies that she did in addition to the housekeeping study that she did with Ellen Langer at Harvard, she also did this milkshake study where she was comparing what happens if you drink, so same milkshake, but if you believe that this is a healthy, low calorie, like nutritious drink, and I believe it's an indulgent

treat, high calorie, then our bodies, our glycemic response will actually be in line with our beliefs about the same milkshake. That's crazy. So I had lunch with her right after I had my third baby. And I was like, okay, how am I going to leverage this? You're like, this is a green drink, whatever it is. Whatever it is, this is exactly. When I probed with her, what do you make of all this? And she was saying, along the lines of what we've been talking about, that the power of how we construct the world,

I mean, if we think about things like the placebo effect, more powerful than any medicine is our belief about. So, you know, I think when we get sort of tactical, like, so what do we do with that? I think that there's a really strong reason then to take seriously our mindset and what we can do in how we're influencing it. Yeah, because I mean, if you extend that, right, it's not just whether, you know, a milkshake provokes an insulin response or not. Like if you really extend that, especially sort of like into the dark side and the health side and the illness side of things. But I don't think we like to go there because then that implicates us in the state of our well-being.

And when on the opportunity side of that, we love that, we love to stand in that, we love to say, okay, so now, you know, like my intentions can actually have a dramatic effect on optimizing my well-being. But we really don't like to own the idea that lack of attention to those intentions and cultivating a certain state of mind can implicate us in a lessening of our well-being, in potentially even the manifestation of illness or disease or pain. Because then we don't, you know, it's very uncomfortable to say that in some way I am ill and there's some blame. Like the word, the B word comes out and we freak out around that.

I think it's complicated. Yeah. And the last thing I ever want to do is be placing blame on people. Right. And yeah, I think that's where this gets really nuanced. And I've been particularly interested in this question for many years because I work with a lot of people who have post-traumatic stress, both in the military and then also sexual assault survivors. And the last thing I ever want to be telling them is like, you're responsible for your suffering right now. But I think that with the directions that research is going in terms of post-traumatic growth and understanding what are the factors of resilience so that people can take that understanding and leverage it.

But I do think that, you know, one of the ways I think about that distinction is an invitation and knowledge, but not blame and telling another person what they should be doing because, you know, people are amazing. We survive so much challenge and yeah, I don't, I think that's the slippery slope here. Yeah. And I think there's a, but I think to me that the hope side of that equation, the idea that we have some, that we may well have a much greater level of agency over our ability to optimize well-being at any given moment in time. To me, that's where the power lies

and sort of like this idea. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot Flight Risk The Apple Watch Series 10 is here It has the biggest display ever It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever Making it even more comfortable on your wrist

Whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch Getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. We kind of jumped into the deep end of the pool. We went from ninth grade to sort of like through PhD and practicing. And let's kind of let's fill in some of the gaps here, because you're a ninth grader who's going deep into ideas of Tibetan Buddhism, cultivating the mind. And did you actually then sort of like develop a regular practice early in high school? So I would say I meditated on and off throughout

high school. How was that viewed by sort of friends in high school too, by the way? Was it like a freaky thing or was because of the existence of this one teacher, was it kind of normalized? Hmm. Probably both. I was part of a club of freaky people. Depends who you were. Yeah. I mean, there was definitely like other people who were into this practice and would go and sit with this teacher. But it wasn't like the dominant thing to do. I mean, we had like a young Republican club, which like, you know, just probably, you know, that was probably had higher attendance than the meditation club.

Got it. So you moved through high school, as we know, you ended up going to Stanford to do your undergrad work. But somewhere after high school, you had a tragedy with a friend also. What happened? So one of my very closest friends from growing up in New Jersey, I spent so much time at his house. There was actually like a guest room that they called Leah's room. And after his freshman year in the college he had started out at, he transferred to Stanford and he was having a really hard time.

And I think he was hoping that changing location would help him. And what was happening that we understood after the fact is he was having onset for really severe mental illness and was going through kind of manic phases interspersed with phases where he would return to his sort of usual self and really be in pain. Was he aware of the fact that he was sort of going there and coming back or no? I don't think he was at the time. You know, whatever the idea that he was, he was so smart. He was such a smart, thoughtful person and always cared so much about ideas. So when we were kids, we would study together, which would really be like just taking these deep dives into whatever the subject area was. And we would just talk, you know, for hours and hours and hours after having

read, trying to understand things. Like he was just that kind of a person who would make a subject, a history test come alive and feel really, like it really mattered. And so that quality continued, but his thinking became distorted as, you know, happens. When we are in periods of mental crisis, you know, it was hard. You know, he was, we were both far from home. We were across the country. I was really worried about him. I think it was not a period of time when there was a kind of clarity about what resources are available to students and how to understand and get help. And so I felt a lot of like responsibility, but also like I couldn't understand it.

Like I didn't know how to help him. My ability to help ground him diminished as his challenges got more severe. So eventually it just was impossible for him to stay in school. And he went home for ostensibly a break. And he got, I think at that point, it became clear that he needed to have some pretty acute mental health support, which he got. And he seemed to be doing better. And then he went home and he was pretty much surrounded by his family all the time. But there was a little window when they were out and he died by suicide. It was awful. And one of the last things he was actually reading was one of the Tibetan Buddhist texts. And I think he had taken some of the ideas around rebirth. And, you know, I think in some sense they probably gave him hope for another round, another opportunity. Like maybe he could come back in a more peaceful way. Yeah. He was just so agonized at that point.

That had to have been, I mean, obviously terrible on so many levels. And you as sort of a lifelong friend, especially layered on top of an already, I mean, Stanford is not the type of place where you're just kind of kicking back and playing Frisbee every day. There's huge academic pressure. How were you when this all happened? I, so he had just left and I decided, you know, when, right before spring break came up, and so I guess it was winter quarter, and my friends were all going on a trip, and I was just like, I can't. And I just, you know, crumbled and I couldn't go back to school right away at all. So decided I had been planning further out to go and spend time in the Tibetan refugee community in Northern India. And I just did that sooner because I was like, I can't be in the classroom.

I have to go pursue that. That felt really important and meaningful. And like it would hold some truth or something that was felt reliable to me, which I just wasn't feeling like could happen in the classroom in that moment. So I went, I missed the funeral because he was also Jewish. And so, you know, this funeral happened really quickly. So by the time the news had gotten to me, it was already too late to be there for that. But I did get back for Shiva and then just stopped out from school and went to India for, I think that first trip was probably about a year because I just didn't, it took me a lot of time to get settled in the Tibetan community there. And I was finding so much that was helpful that I just felt like I couldn't come back.

Yeah. When you arrived in India, what was that like for you? Sort of like stepping into this completely different world, especially in coming out of this profound loss? I was grieving so acutely. I couldn't sleep. I just remember vividly being up all night. First I went to Delhi, and then I took a train to Northern India, and then a bus of this crazy, totally sketchy mountain path. I've actually heard about that bus and that path. Was this on the way to Domsala?

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's legendary. And also that I could do with the friend in mind. And I would just do those all night long. And then as soon as it was light, I would get up and go do the kora or circle around of prostrations and refuge practice and just with this friend in mind. And I think eventually my sort of nervous system started to downregulate after some time of this. And then I was able to sleep and eat and do those basic things again. And the fortunate thing is I didn't push myself to like start doing my research right away. I gave myself a big chunk of time to just arrive. And then, so that gave me, I think, probably the best possible context for me, what I needed. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like also it was key to your process of healing, but also it kindled other things in you.

It kindled something, which it sounds like then became really a focus of your life's work to a certain extent or some different awakenings. Yeah, absolutely. I think being in that environment where so many people, you know, they had left their home, they'd left their families or their extended families, and they were in diaspora, and they were living in the context of acute suffering without a lot of the privilege that I came with of, you know, the education and the passport and the financial support. And so I think very quickly, it helped me to see that if they could find a way of being amidst that uncertainty, then there was hope for me too. And then when I started spending time at the Tibetan refugee, the Tibetan Children's Village, which is basically an orphanage. And so it's a school that's above the town. So you'd walk up or take a rickshaw up and the kids would live in

these houses of like 50 people, 50 children with like a couple. And the couple is like younger than I am now, you know, in their 30s often or 40s. And I spent time in these homes and just, you know, seeing the way that I didn't know what their mindset was, but it was very clear that the parents taking care of these kids were finding so much. They were clearly practicing their, you know, it's not just meditation, like their ritual and their chanting. And like, it was just so embedded in the way that they lived their life. Like you would have people sitting around with their long, thin paper, pasha texts and chanting and praying while other people around them were eating.

And there was just such a focus on compassion practice and using suffering as a way to learn and connecting across suffering and across difference. So I just found myself wanting to be around and understand what are these practices that they're doing, and started learning, actually getting better at learning Tibetan at that point, so I could have the conversations with people directly and learn these texts without having to go through the translations. And then the other piece that was

interesting at that time, there were so many people who were, you know, they're in diaspora, they're trying to find, they're refugees, they needed political help. So I would find myself frequently taking newcomers, that's what they were called, when they'd recently escaped from Tibet, and I would take them to go get help with getting their papers. And then sometimes I would take them down to Delhi, down that terrifying mountain bus ride that we just talked about. And I think that process of the very putting together the spiritual, the very practical, really appealed to me because everything felt so grounded in terms of like actually people who needed real practical help, like food and papers and a country to live in. It wasn't like the kind

of spiritual practice that's sort of like self-centered or self-indulgent because I think that those two together made a really big difference for me. And also, you know, putting that together with the experience of losing my friend, I realized that I wanted to get more skills so I could support people with mental challenges and tactical challenges. And it was kind of out of all of those trying to figure out how to be a caseworker with no resources and be a mental support, you know, and talking with people about their trauma. And they speak about it very differently from different cultural contexts. So all of that got me really interested in what later became my desire to do social work training. So I could like actually have some skills and frameworks that I felt like I could pull from. Yeah. So it's like, this was the underpinnings

of it and the deeper practices and the just personal experience. How did you know it was time to go back? Well, first my mom came to try to get me. That was a sign. And, you know, I was like, well, while you're here, why don't you come and meet the Dalai Lama? She, I signed her up for one of these situations that she could do that. And I'll never forget when he met her, he just started cracking up. Like, just, and she was so struck by that, that afterwards she was, I think she had a little insight into like what I was doing there. But what, and I didn't leave then. She went home. But eventually I got really sick.

And that was what led me to go home. I was like super, super sick. And one of my good friends from Stanford had been traveling around. And then eventually came and got me and helped me mobilize because I was like too sick to even get myself out at that point. So you end up back home, recovered, clearly. And when you go back to Stanford, I mean, it sounds like then there was this big shift towards more modern psychology of the mind and like precise skills and practice skills and social work. And that wasn't the end for you either. No, I've always loved this kind of intersection between the practice and like application, I guess. So I finished school, but then got another grant to go back and this time try to provide skills and support for newcomer refugees.

So I went again for a long period of time, offer these courses and try to feel out how I could come back and raise more money, basically, and try to create. My thought at that point was like a loosely formed sort of, maybe it was technical skills that the Tibetans could get so that they could work and get paid. It was early days for the dot-com situation. There was just a lot of need for some very basic skills, but then I was struggling with the ethics on that and wanted to really talk to people and understand what kinds of work they wanted to do and figure out how to put that together. So my next sort of phase in Dharamsala,

and then I spent a bunch of time in Boda, Nepal, which is another big epicenter for Tibetan refugees, exploring all of that. Yeah. Somewhere in all of this also, you ended up doing some of the classical, really deep retreats, 100-day retreat. And which, I mean, I think about, you know, like a three-day retreat. Most people think about like three hours sort of in quiet. And then, you know, in this country, it's becoming increasingly common to do the sort of more classic 10-day retreat. But part of the traditional Tibetan Buddhist path is you do a series of much longer, 100-day retreats, and then six-month. And I think there's a three-year one, too, from what I recall.

What makes you want to do that? Well, I just felt when I started practicing that there was so much there when you're asking questions and trying to understand the depths of our own attention and how our emotions work and what consciousness is and really trying to get to the bottom of that. Those are big questions that require time to execute the practices that are designed to answer those questions. And I remember when I was finishing up college, I went on a meditation retreat with one of my teachers. And I was basically like, okay, as soon as I'm done with college, I want to go like be in a cave and practice. And he was like, yeah, well, what about a three-year retreat instead?

Or some longer retreats where we chunk out the content. And he was someone who had done multiple three-year retreats. And he was like, I'm not loving the idea of you as a young woman in a cave. Like that's not feeling, I'm feeling a little fatherly around like trying to nix that. But I like the sentiment of the deep dive. And it took another couple years to get together a group of us. And it was all, we were kind of binary, like there were younger people. I was the youngest, but there were some who were like five, six years older than me, sort of early in career and life after college. And then there was a bunch of kind of retired folks. It was like,

you know, couldn't make sense, like in the middle of, I couldn't do that today, or I wouldn't leave my kids. So he gave us the curriculum chunked out in 100-day increments so that we could go through the traditional training. And his takeaway, and a lot of people have seen that in the first generation of sort of convert Buddhists who did the three-year retreats, some of them came out of that and had really impactful teaching careers. And some people who weren't the ones who were going to be the teachers, for whatever reason, just wasn't their personality or that wasn't their role in life. It became really challenging for them to be gone for three years and then put things back together. So his answer to that was, let's do the 100 days and then you can be pushing forward something with your career and the rest of your life in the rest of the year.

Which I think was still really, really challenging in application because there's not a lot of jobs that are psyched about you like coming and going like that. Right. So how many vacation days do I have? Exactly. 100. That's a weird conversation with HR. Yeah, totally. So my workaround for that was like, if in doubt, get some graduate degrees. So I lined up, that's when I was like, okay, great. I'll do social work, school alongside it. And then I had to convince all the powers that be because they were not excited about, you know, there are all these required classes you had to take in the period of time I was gone. So I kind of finessed all of that. But what ended up working really well was going between these 100 day retreats. And then being in the social work is particularly the internships.

So like from retreat to the mental hospital. And this was around the time that there started to be a lot of conversation about compassion fatigue for providers and secondary trauma and what does it mean for professional caregivers who are working with trauma day in and day out. And so I kind of organically ended up being asked, they were like, hey, you, you weird girl over there, you just came out of 100 day meditation retreat. Like, can you A, do something for the patients we don't know what to do with? And B, can you do something for us? Because we're trying to, it seems like there should be a fit between what you're doing and this burnout, compassion fatigue issue. So I started doing, offering those trainings.

And this was, you know, before mindfulness and compassion had the sort of buzz around them that they do now. It was kind of one of these, you know, it'd been really popular in the 70s and die down. And now this was kind of like still perceived to be a little bit of like a throwback hippie thing. It wasn't like there was no wisdom 2.0 world yet. The Compassion Center at Stanford was just starting then. So it felt like a really important question. Like, what does it mean to take practices, make them accessible, make them secular so that people from different religious traditions can engage with them? I knew you were going to be fun. Tell me how to fly this thing.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So that was what I was doing between retreats and then going back and doing more practice.

Yeah, I mean, it must have been so interesting also to go from 100 days on retreat into an institution where there was profound suffering both within the patients and the providers in different reasons, but they're both experiencing this deep suffering. And then to come from, be able to bridge with, okay, so now you have a modern skill set and now you're going very deep into wisdom tradition-based skill set and then be able to say, okay, so let me meet these two groups at a point of maximum pain and see how these two different worlds blend together in a way that might be a sort of like compound interest, right? Maybe these can all work together in a way where we can create better outcomes for everyone. Yeah, that's such a good way to summarize the project. That's exactly right.

So from there, I mean, that for you, it sounds like your career has just sort of like then followed this trajectory or it's like, okay, that did you know at that point, like this will be my work, that this would then become the work that you do as a professor and then bring it out into organizations and enterprises and stuff like that. Did you have any sense? Or has it been kind of just like, I'm waking up today and I'm doing the thing that I feel

right about? Yeah, I think it wasn't until it was already happening that I thought it, I didn't, the things I'm doing now, I had not planned for. I thought that I would pursue more retreat and probably teaching within the Buddhist tradition. But I became so interested in these conversations and the exchange between the secularized versions of these practices and seeing the impact they were having on people who are getting them. And, you know, a game changer for me was when I was finishing up my doctoral dissertation, I had reached out to Chutin Jimpa, the Dalai Lama's interpreter, to interview him because he, you know, was at the forefront for decades of this exact intersection, what the Dalai Lama calls the secular ethics. And I was interviewing Jimpa about the compassion training program he had been working on at Stanford and asking a number of questions about how he was putting together, you know, how was he thinking about impact and making sure not to dilute the message? How do you know when you have that right? These kinds of questions. And also asking from the Buddhist perspective, what are your concerns in terms of

sharing these practices outside of the tradition and the context that they're embedded in? Because these are things I was deeply concerned about. So, Jimpa flips it around and also starts asking me, well, these are very specific questions to be asking. What brings you to this topic? And I told him that I had been starting to, by that point, had done a good amount of, particularly in healthcare, offering trainings and developing practices, started a nonprofit around it. And he said, well, great. You know, when I was talking to him, I'll never forget my, I was sitting in my home office and my 10 month old daughter was playing on her gym beside me. I didn't have childcare and my husband was in architecture school and he was like out doing a studio.

And so Jim was like, great. Can you come to California in two weeks? And we're in Boston at the time, huge snowstorm, epic snowstorm. And I need you to come to California in two weeks because we're having this small invitational retreat for people who I want to run, to set up and run our teacher training program where we're going to train people around the world to teach the compassion curriculum. And I'm looking at my daughter on the floor. I've never traveled anywhere with her yet. She's my first kid. And I'm like, okay, you know, like we're going to make this happen. And we did get there. And the conversation to me was so exciting because it was this combination of people who were coming from deep contemplative traditions

and neuroscience and, you know, great research backgrounds. And it just felt like such a important time and place. So I ended up, you know, pretty much by the end of that trip, we were there for a week and I was ABD, little baby, hadn't finished my dissertation and had agreed to go and be the director of education for this compassion center out of Stanford and help them, you know, set it up, which was exciting. And, you know, it's been kind of one out of that practice, out of that being at Stanford, then started teaching at the business school. And some of these other things kind of unfolded. But it was definitely not the master plan. Yeah.

I mean, it's so interesting also because you sort of just keep following the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, which takes a lot of faith to a certain extent. Or it takes an openness to saying, okay, I have no idea how this is going to end up. But something inside of me, it just feels like this is the thing I need to do right now, which seems like to a certain extent, you're wiring as well, because you made a lot of non-traditional choices. And granted, some of them were fueled by deep pain. But even after that, you have clearly made a series of choices and taken action to back them up that a lot of people wouldn't have taken. And it's led you to a really fascinating and powerful, and it sounds like a very aligned

place, which makes me curious, with all the work that you're doing with everyone from refugees to people in pain to care providers and patients and people with various forms who've been through trauma on many different levels. And then when you sort of, you arrive at Stanford and you start teaching, and then you start to realize that a lot of the people that you're interacting with and sharing these ideas with are either students who are planning to go into business. And then as you start to go out into the world and consult and write and have a book on these

ideas, and you're in larger organizations doing this, how, in your mind, sort of like, how does that evolution feel to you, sort of taking these ideas that are so deeply, clearly so deeply personal to you and built on personal consciousness and personal pain and awareness into the context of business and organizations? Well, I think when I started doing this work, it was kind of an experiment. Like, let's see how this goes. And I was very cognizant upfront that I was going to do what I thought would be impactful and see what worked and didn't work in that environment. think one of the things I really learned is that whenever there are people in a room together, there's pain and there's history that is beneath the surface. And that the line between working with a group of trauma survivors and working with anyone, I mean, trauma is so prevalent. I think to the class that I was just teaching this quarter at the business school, I had multiple students who have one with very severe post-traumatic stress,

several who are struggling with severe anxiety. And I've definitely had students talk about pretty much the whole range of mental experiences. So I think in my mind, that's just part of the world that we're in, but we don't, we slice it differently. We don't necessarily think of like there's the normal population and then there's people who have problems, but actually there's just people. And I think that that's one of the things that happens in this class that in the reflection papers, you know, that in the discussions I have with students one-on-one and I hear more about their lives and their hopes and, you know, they are high potential leaders and they also, many of them are passionate about how they want the world to look. And so I start, you know, thinking about this is an opportunity when I work with organizations, when I work with these leaders in the business school, that, you know, they're going to be the

ones who are going to create the workforce that our kids are going to enter into someday. And so I take that very seriously. And it also has been helpful. I've really benefited from doing the work with the Women in MBA program. And those are just groups where I've facilitated conversations for small groups of women over time. There's no grades. It's not a class. It's just an opportunity to get together. And my role is to facilitate their conversation with each other and their exploration. And they're asking big questions like all your listeners are. How can I live? How do I want to live? How do I make the best choices for my full self that includes professional, but is not only limited to that part of that role? Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. And I think, I mean, it feels like on the one hand, a lot of the gloss that I see around things like mindfulness and compassion training in the context of business is performance related. And it feels weird to me, but I also understand that that is,

I'm not averse to offering that as a point of entry to simply introduce an idea that you know that regardless of why people come to the ideas and the practices. If they embrace them over time, it will affect them in myriad ways that go so much deeper and so much farther beyond that. And also what you said, I think is really important. And I think it's a nice reset for me to hear you say it, which is businesses are made up of people. I think sometimes we forget that, you know, and if you got a thousand people

in a business, they're going to be as human, as alive, as concerned, as anxious, as wounded as any students, as any, you know, like other thousand people that are living in a lot of different places, maybe in different ways on different levels, but still, you know, and to simply introduce these ideas and these practices, you know, okay, so it's within the container of this thing called a business. on a very human individual level. And if that ends up changing them in some way or giving them skills that ripples out into the culture and the impact and the quality of the way that that entire organization serves, how could that be a bad thing?

Yeah, I think that's, you know, and I think for me, the other piece that became really important was just seeing the challenge of putting together the training that I had had with what life looked like working full-time with three little kids and struggling. And I think for me, one of the really challenging times was after I had my third child and that postpartum and back to work time. It just was very real to me how the organizations respond and offer support

in the challenges that so many people are going through alone in that space in their lives, especially in transition times after, you know, going back to work, after you've had a child and you're exhausted. You know, it's like you reach the peak of exhaustion right when maternity leave starts, because now it's been several months where you've been woken up every two or three hours, you know, you've been through this. And so I feel like there's a real, one of the concerns I have about when we just teach practice on the individual level, and we don't think in terms of organizations or systems, it's not, you know, when someone's in a toxic or an impossible context, we can give all the personal resilience tools in the world and we can change their mindset about that. But better would be if we can have the environment and the context and the organization be humanized. So I think for me, there becomes this really important opportunity now that I

think leaders are thinking in terms of, okay, if there is a return on investment in making my workforce more compassionate, if that makes sense to the bottom line, how do I do that? I want to seize that moment and really help know, really help also have families and, you know, have sick loved ones that they're trying to look after and all the realities that we're going through. We don't compartmentalize who we are in these different roles. They're all happening at one time. So how can our organizations that we spend our time in get that and do that better for themselves, for the bottom line, but also for us as people. Yeah. I mean, so it's like a two-pronged approach from bottom up and the top down simultaneously, and hopefully the effect of both complements and amplifies each

other. Really, I mean, I'm so interested in the work that you're doing. And also, I'm really curious to see how this work gets adopted on a larger scale over the next five, 10 years. Because I think we need it now on an individual level. I think our culture needs it now on a organizational and societal level more than ever. And to the extent that we learn to be more mindful,

to be more aware, to cultivate personal and cultural compassion. If not now, then when? So it feels like a good time for us to come full circle also. So I always wrap up with the same question with everybody. So as we sit here, if I offer the phrase out to live a good life, what comes up? To remember that we are embedded in networks of relationships, that we're never actually alone, and that our actions have deep and profound impact, that what we do matters. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, if you're still listening, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love that you've enjoyed this episode so much that you're still here. That's awesome. You are awesome. And while we're wrapping things up, might as well share a quick shout out to our really fantastic brand partners. If you dig

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