Good Life Project - Rev. angel Kyodo williams: On Liberation, Justice and Love

Episode Date: June 19, 2016

"Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters." – Reverend angel Kyodo williams+++Today's guest on the podcast is author, maverick spiritual teacher, master trainer and founder of Center for Transformative Change, Reverend angel Kyodo williams. She has been bridging the worlds of personal transformation and justice since the publication of her critically-acclaimed book, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, which was hailed as “an act of love” by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker and “a classic” by Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. Her new book, Radical Dharma, explores racial injustice as a barrier to collective awakening.Ordained as a Zen priest, Rev. angel is a Sensei, the second black woman recognized as a teacher in her lineage. She is a social visionary that applies wisdom teachings and practice to social issues. She sees Transformative Social Change as the world’s next great movement. Both fierce and grounded, she is known for her unflinching willingness to both sit with and speak uncomfortable truths with love.In This Episode, You'll Learn:How growing up in New York City profoundly shaped Rev. angel’s life.How moments to awaken are all around us, if we just open to them.How to move closer to a liberated life.How race and the consciousness movement interact with each other.The #1 component contributing to a full, complete life.The difference between grasping and aspiration.Mentioned in This Episode:Connect with Rev. Angel: angel Kyodo williams | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | 27 Days of ChangeBeing Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace by angel Kyodo WilliamsRadical DharmaRichard WisemanZen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Apple Watch Series X 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. 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 if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. So imagine stepping out of your day-to-day life and just dropping yourself into a gorgeous 130-acre natural playground

for three and a half days of learning and laughing and moving your body and calming your brain and just reconnecting with people who see the world the same way that you do and just accept you as you are. So that's what we've actually created with our Camp GLP experience. We've brought together this lineup of inspiring teachers from art to entrepreneurship and writing to meditation and pretty much everything in between. And it's this beautiful way to fill your noggin with ideas to live and work better and to fill your heart. And with this rare opportunity to create the type of

friendships and stories you thought you pretty much left behind decades ago. And it's all happening at the end of August, just 90 minutes from New York City. And more than half, actually well more than half the spots are already gone at this point. So be sure to grab your spot quickly because our final $100 early bird discount ends June 15th, 2016. After that, it goes up to full price. So you can learn more at goodlifeproject.com slash camp or just click the link in the show notes now. Does your essential sense of yourself come undone by what it is you're reaching for? If it does, right, it's sort of like if you become untethered from your basic ground, then that's grasping. And if, on the other hand, there's a sense of that reach actually enlivening you, even if it causes you to stretch, right?

Then that's aspiration and that's our evolutionary call. When I was thinking about how I would introduce this week's guest, Angel Kyoto-Williams, if you look all over the web, if you look at her public profiles, you'll see various different labels. Zen Buddhist priest is the one that's most often used, teacher, practitioner, somebody who's an activist and a champion of rights. But during the conversation, it became really clear in her own words, she's kind of in a post-every everything state where those labels are kind of dropping away and she's just exploring something bigger in life right now. The conversation,

we went into the deep end of the pool really fast and we kind of backtrack about halfway through and fill in a lot of her remarkable journey. This was a conversation that really covers a lot of ground and answers or doesn't necessarily answer, but it speaks to some of the big, big, deep questions that many of us have about how to live a good life. So I hope you enjoy. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. It's funny.

I have a past life as a lawyer. And one of the guys that I started with, you know, like, there were six of us that started at the SEC, like, you know, like a bazillion years ago. One of the guys is this really funny guy grew up in Queens. And his claim to fame was he was the top salesperson at Crazy Eddie back then. And so his claim to fame, he said he got a stick. Yeah, well, I'm 50 and so his claim to fame he said he got a stay in my area yeah well i'm 50 so his claim to fame was when he had a standing ovation from the entire sales team when and this is so awful when he sold a 25 dollar extended warranty to somebody who was buying a 20 dollar like walkman.

This was like back in the crazy Eddie days also. It was sort of, yeah, that was my era, and it was when they crashed. Right. Right at the time, they were like, sort of like they were the thing, and then I was there right when it went down. Yeah, and they crashed hard. And they crashed hard, yeah. Yeah, I remember this. It's very interesting. when it went down yeah and that they crashed hard and they crashed hard yeah yeah i remember that's it like a big public it's very interesting yeah it's a wonderful life of like you know

really eclectic experience of new york yeah you know that gives rise to like how i live in the world now right well yeah because you know sales and which is so interesting though because you grew up in mostly Queens or – Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. Yeah. Oh, so you kind of like – All real boroughs. Bounce from –

That's like – Bronx is coming along. That's what was really happening. All right. Bronx is coming along with Staten Island. Let's just get a scissor. We lived up in Riverdale for a couple of years. And so nobody outside of New York had anything to do with it.

So if people asked, I'd be like, well, I live in the Bronx. And then every once in a while, if I actually said that to somebody who really grew up in the Bronx, and they're like, oh, we're in the Bronx. I'm like, Riverdale. That's like, it's not the Bronx. It's like, you don't get cred for that. And then most of my real formative years were in Tribeca. So then I became like a complete downtown snob. And I'm just like, oh, that's bridge and tunnel. Yeah, yeah. And so then it's like, I got the other people.

Right. Because those were the days. Yeah. So wait, when were you in Tribeca? Like what time? When was that? Oh, in some ways, I'm still in Tribeca since my mom moved there in 77. She's still there. Yeah, man, that has changed since the 70s. Oh, my God. I mean, that was sort of, it was a bit of, remember, it was like a bit of a nowhere land in the 70s. It was a total nowhere land. There was just these three buildings, this complex that they set up up and put you know 39 story units three of them yeah and you know roughly 10 apartments so you know they just sort of chunked like you know

1200 you know family units into the middle of nowhere right but we grew up with you know robert like across the street yeah he's just sort of like you know sort of like our guy you know he's just like right he was the local yeah yeah and then sort of like our guy. He was just like a neighborhood guy. He was the local. Yeah, yeah. And then sort of like watched it as it started to do something else. And JFK Jr. lived there. I remember.

I sort of like see Daryl Hannah and him together. It was just like, oh, we're so – so it sort of made me sort of blasé about like, yeah, I've watched him grow up. And I watched him – it's like yeah harvey's down his bathroom right right and you know a very new yorker like right because you know somewhere between that kid thing where you didn't want to gush and but we also got to watch them you know we sort of watched them like grow and but we also watched the neighborhood sort of consume the the lower income people which is how my mother got in the neighborhood they did it was michelama oh yeah oh so i know those

are the big buildings like right along yeah i know the ones you're talking about right yeah we watched you know but on manhattan community college was a big sandbar yes it was nothing yeah we used to go out and play there and on like what was nothing right and so now when i go over there and i you know see like hudson roof park i'm like this was water before where did they get this from so it's fascinating because not only did i watch like the area change it like expanded its footprint in a way that is sort of you know mind-boggling when i knew that i would like look out on my terrace and the water was right there right you still have this thing called art on the beach and it

was like these like funky artists would go out and it was like basically beach that was right there on the west side it was still called west side highway right it's really yeah it's amazing thing to watch and bless her heart she's managed to stay on. My mother would probably, yeah, she'd probably leave the country before she would live anywhere else at this point. So she's diehard. She's diehard because, you know, it's sort of, it's an interesting thing. It sort of has affected her class sensibilities in many ways. Right? And so that she.

How so? Take me deeper into that. You know, she says, I can't live in many ways. Right? And so that she- How so? Take me deeper into that. You know, she's like, I can't live in the hood. Just like, you know, her income never changed dramatically, but her sensibility of like, what's the space that's around her, the sort of sense of uplifted space, you know, they began to build these, you know, beautiful parks and, you know, Tribeca was clean, you know, pretty much always. And so she just knows where she comes from,

but she couldn't go back there. She feels this sort of, in the Shambhala Buddhist community, it's sort of downgraded, the setting sun vibe of other places. Right. You know, the convenience. You know, you walk out your door, and everything is right there. The world is literally at your feet.

Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's amazing. Every once in a while we keep thinking about leaving the city. And I know it's funny because I grew up right outside the city and we've been in the city proper for 30 years now. And it's like I made the comparison to the mafia. It's like every time you try and get out, it keeps pulling you back in. There's a sensibility and an energy and a vibe to New York that on the one hand is crushing. And on the other hand is kind of defining and really brutally hard to leave. Yeah, it's very true.

In many ways, I never left. And so my body is there. My stuff is there, but I live, my heart lives here. Yeah. So let's fill in a little bit of the gaps. So you came up in between Queens, Tribeca, and Brooklyn. What were you into as a kid? I'm curious. Queens, Brooklyn, Tribeca, and then a little more Brooklyn in that order. Got it. different cultures and backgrounds and, you know, just all in a mosh together. And difference was the norm. We just took it as like that's what it is. My best friends were Moroccan and Cuban. And my sitter was, you know, South Asian.

And we just, it just wasn't a thing, you know. So you went into people's houses, friends' houses, and there were like different smells and, you know, different foods. And we ate different foods. And I grew up with that sensibility. And also the sense of these common spaces in which people would come together and converge. Because that's how the Lephrax city was built. Yeah. And so for those that are not familiar with Lephrax city and the city.

So I know what you're talking about. Yeah, exactly. But it's this really unique. It's almost like a city within a city. With its own sort of like, you know, public commons within these groups of towering buildings. So it's, I can completely see that. It's like you're living in your own sort of like mini ecosystem or, you know, like, did you have a sense that? A school was like built, you know, like all part of it, you know, everything.

Did you have a sense at that point that sort of like your world was the world? Of course. Yeah. Well, no, I had a little bit of a sense of that, except my mother and father split very early. And so then I would go and visit my mother's family. And my mother actually lived across the street though interestingly i'm not in lefrak city and so i had a sense of like the there was this other world that was really segregated and and different and harsh in some ways that i had to grapple with and i would visit out into

those worlds but those were the real worlds where I was, was the real world. It was like, oh, those other places. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting, though, to start to have that experience at a young age. It seems like there's a certain amount of foreshadowing there also in sort of like your life path. Absolutely. Because then my dad met someone and we moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn. And it was Flatbush, Brooklyn, I would say at the beginning, really at the surge of West Indians, really in that whole area transitioning. And so Flatbush, Brooklyn around Linden Boulevard, and we still had Hasidic Jewish run bagel places and lots of Italian run pizza shops. And so there was still the vestiges of the Italian Jewish community there. But there was also the big rise of West

Indian Americans. And it was an utterly different experience for me to be in the midst of people that were not only really different, West Indian Americans and African American communities, and I was really kind of had a mixed race sensibility, were very different and also invested in how different they were. So there was a very sharp like you're different, you're a Yankee, and we're different. And it was a lot of, you know, messy, like, class oppression induced, you know, internalized oppression stuff about,

you know, you all are lazy, we're better, you know, meaning that, you know, black Americans were lazy, and the West Indians were often, you know, better, and this sort of like British, you know British influence. And at the same time, there were, this was not far from Erasmus High School where Barbra Streisand went to high school. But the neighborhood had become degraded over time and there was a harshness to the city, I think, that had come over the city you know by that time and a lot of you know roving gangs of young men of color and and black men that were you doing sort of you know

participating in sort of that that gang gang mentality you know or the the what did we call it at the time it was um pack mentality yeah and you know grabbing people and stealing their sneakers you know was the age of the brand right and so you had like your adidas sneakers or your you know azad or you know this is like you know your labels your jordash jeans and like all of that was hitting people and it was hitting communities that didn't have the money to actually access a lot of those things. It sort of created this want and desire for the appearance of being part of a different class that then expressed itself as, you know, grabbing people, trying to grab things and asserting their strength, you know. And I would say that they were asserting their sense of loss and grief about what they didn't have by organizing these kinds of ways.

But for me, it was just hideous. I spent the entire three years of my time living on Parkside, just with my head down looking at a comic book and just hoping no one would bother me the whole time. Yeah. You know, you could imagine that this is something that like you thought was the case in your own, you know, imagination. Years later, I opened a cyber cafe, and it was called Coco Bar. Right. And it was very early. We'd opened it, and it was at some point a woman walked in, and she looked at me, and I recognized her, and she recognized me.

And her eyes lit up, and I was like, oh, and recognized her. She was from my middle school. So it was basically kind of middle school. Her eyes lit up, and at first she didn't smile, and then suddenly her face dropped. And she paused and she said, the first thing out of her mouth was, they were so mean to you. Oh.

And, oh, yes, and it was so affirming. Yeah. To actually be able to say, yes. Yeah. That was my experience. And I didn't just make it up. And it had this, you know, very complex mix of yes, oh, how terrible that any was. It wasn't my imagination. I hadn't kind of made it up. And in many ways, I think it actually gave me space to release that experience and the tension and, you know, I think anger that I felt about it. You know, it's so me when I hear stories like that about chance moments that create almost like an instant change.

Like my brain always goes to this place of, what if that moment hadn't happened? And again, I don't know how you follow that through, but that's always, I'm always sort of asking those questions. Like what, there's this moment that just awakens you and acknowledges you and gives you what you need to let go of something or move through it in a different way. I think the wonderful thing is about that is that if you develop a sense of relationship with your life, yet you look for those moments, they actually surface more and more often. I think they're available more often than we tend to see. And so it's almost a pivot in terms of how you relate to your life rather than

they're entirely by chance that you actually open yourself and make yourself more available to see. Because I've actually had a few of them, actually quite a few of them. And I realized it is because I hold a stance that is open to not only receiving them, but then to actually do something with them. And that's the key thing. Because I could have had that and just blurred over it, but I really held it as a sense of like, oh, and okay, and what do you do with this? Right? And for me, I took it to the place of really being able to say, oh, wow, that actually helped. I had a lot of sadness around that, a lot of anger, and a lot of it shaped a way in which I thought of my sense of value, and I can let that go. Yeah, that's powerful.

And I love the notion of not just chalking it up to waiting for those moments of serendipity to come, but actually saying that you participate. They're probably all around you all the time. So part of your job is to actually start to open yourself to them. There's a study that was done a couple years back by a guy named Richard Weissman. He was curious about luck. And so he did this fascinating test where he gave a newspaper to two groups of people, one group that self-identifies as being very lucky in life,

and another self-identify as being unlucky in life. And he basically said, you have three minutes, tell me how many pictures are in the newspaper. And the unlucky group, for the most part, took about the full three minutes and, you know, like said, okay, the number is 42. And the lucky group took a few seconds and said, the number is 42. And the difference was at the end, when you flip open the newspaper, it was a special paper on the inside front cover in large block letters, was a message that said something like, there are 42 pictures in this newspaper, stop reading. And what he found was that the people who self-identified as lucky

opened themselves to the possibility of something beyond this very narrow focus task. And the people who self-identified as unlucky were just so hyper-focused and weren't willing to consider the possibility of anything that was outside of the narrowly defined task that they closed themselves to. And so really valid, it's like, that's the same thing, what you're talking about. Yeah. Everything shapes how you see and how you filter the world. And I think we have been very, very wrongly trained to think that we, you know, just like we see the same things, you know, within some reasonable limit, that there are things that are just factual, right?

And that it's just not true. We are products of like our experience and our shaping and our orientation and what we've been offered and what we've been given. And then we then have the opportunity to say, and now what will we do with that? Right. And the idea that we have a limited set of things that we can do with that. There's a limited set of configurations is just completely wrong. It's like it's upside down thinking like, it's upside down thinking.

And it's intentional thinking, I think, in many ways, I think there's an aspect to our culture that requires a good, significant number of people to have a closed view of what's possible for them. So this society doesn't work. Yeah, but it's I mean, is it rooted in the desire for order? Or like, what's your sense of that? Sure. You know, let's see if we're ready for this. You know, I think capitalism is, necessitates order and it necessitates, when I say capitalism, I don't mean trade. I don't mean, you know, I mean, human beings have been trading for, you know, since the

beginning of time. But kind of parasitic capitalism that is organized around the flow of resources to land in the coffers of like a very few number of people. It requires order and it requires the capacity to be efficient and to quickly value people and therefore to quickly devalue people. And the best way that you can quickly devalue people is have them do that for you, right? And so if people just are devaluing themselves, then you have to do a lot less sorting as in life that is what is available to them. And it's like the pictures that you see that people saw on the page or didn't see on the page, right? It's like, this is what I see as possible for my life. And that's what's available to me. And almost how dare you suggest- There's something more or different.

That I would be entitled to something different. And yet, conversely, which is absolutely a phenomenal aspect of this society, we're going to get this impossible brass ring that's like way out there somewhere. It's a fascinating, if you really think about it, it's like a fascinating converse relationship. We both keep ourselves in a very narrow scope and field and we sort ourselves, you know, down and keep ourselves sort of downriver, so to speak. And on the other hand, what we need in many ways to do is, you know, to organize ourselves and to come together and to push back at forces that would have many of us kept down. We don't do that, right? Because in some ways, we want to be that, you know, that like big, completely separate other. Yeah. That's, you know, impossibly different from everyone else. Right. And it's certainly, I mean, massively glorified at the same time, you know, in this country, who do you see in the media every day? It's the big, impossibly different others. You know, It's the icons who are the absolute

outliers. And yet we all aspire, we're told that that's our aspiration. While we simultaneously hold ourselves back. So people are like, I don't want the mega wealthy to be taxed because what if I'm mega wealthy one day, I wouldn't want to be taxed like that. And it's like, well, but right now, I mean, it's a really amazing system that is like resilient and self-correcting and it keeps us organized in that way. That's why I love work like this and work like what you do. We sort of bust the myths. Yeah, I keep deepening around this word possibility and it's becoming more and more the focus of my exploration and study and work. And it is a deeply complex word and,

and just idea, you know, it's like, and you're laying out these sort of two extreme variations of complete stifling and then complete, you know, a radically different, you know,

like, but, but I think the central thing is not, I think, but here's my question is, you know, like, is one of the central explorations

our willingness to reclaim how we identify possibility in the way that we want to exist in the world, rather than sort of surrendering to ideals that are moved into our minds through a lot of noise? Yeah, I think that that's exactly it. I think that there is a way in which we can gradually or dramatically and it's some of those, you know, sort of using those stepping stones of those moments of, you know, opening and awakening of and glimpsing possibility and saying, Oh, I'm going to use that I'm going to stand on this for a while and then begin to look for the next stone, right? And then suddenly we see that the water that we think exists between us and whatever great possibility is, is actually just underneath what looks like water. It's paved with all of these stepping stones of moving closer and closer, and we can cause them to reveal themselves. It really is about a stance. And I think about that in terms of and i was thinking

about it a lot of course because this is called good life project i've been thinking about like how do i think about the way that i orient to my life right so it's not in some particular sphere it's not in this sphere solely of spirituality or religion or it's not in the sphere of of any single thing right it's not solely in the sphere of any single thing, right? It's not solely in the sphere of dealing with social oppression and intractable social issues. It's also in the sphere of productivity and how I take care of my body. And it's really like, I thought if I could think of a way of like, what is that stance? How am I positioning myself? That gives me kind of like my litmus test question about pretty much everything. It's like,

oh, I'm choosing to stand in a liberated life, right? And so everything then I start to measure it against this sense of, is this moving me closer to a liberated life? And everything comes up against that question for me. So even when I have moments where I'm like, you know, trying to decide what am I going to wear in the morning? I'm like, is this energy? Well, is the energy that I'm spending on this, right, moving me closer or further from a liberated life? And so the decision making is actually the thing. It's not which shirt is more liberated. That might show up, right? Like today I have my Black Lives Matter t-shirt on and that it was just instant and it showed up for me and I was like, yeah, that's what I want to be wearing. And, but when I find myself sort of like churning and energy is being expended, that's not regenerative and not giving back to me. Right.

So is that how you would, for yourself, define a liberated life? I'm sort of familiar with the concept through the study of yoga and through the idea of the Jivan Mukti, and that the idea is not so much transformation but appealing a way of that which allows the essential you, which has always been there, to become liberated. Right. But I'm curious, is that similar to your sense of a liberated life,

or would you sort of describe it differently? Yeah, I think that it's very close. It's a sense of what is hindering my most vital expression, my most vital expression. And the truth is, as a result of systems that are organized to have us think of ourselves differently, I don't necessarily know what is my most vital expression. And so that's my charge is to keep getting further and further along with both simultaneously moving towards what I understand is more vital, but also being willing to be open to the possibility that there is greater and greater vitality that's available to me that I'm not even aware of, and sort of dancing in the

place of those things. So I don't have this place, as you said, right, transformation, that's like, I'm going to get to this spot. It's going to be like transformation or awakened, period. And then it will all be over. But rather, this is a verb, right? I am living. This life thing is a verb. Love is a verb. It's like, it's a really active endeavor.

And if I stay active in it, then I realize that it is moving, right? And the possibility that exists in it is ever present and always recreating itself around the context that I now find myself in. So it's not static. It's not like, there's possibility and one day I'll get to possibility. It will keep reorganizing itself. Yeah, I love that. And completely, that's the way I experience life as well. It's just, I'm kind of like really completely geeking out on what you're saying over here because I think there's this notion of, you know, like we've, when I get there, quote, you know, capital T there, everything's going to be good. Yeah.

Like that's, and then when you get there, you're like, you know, at that point you had imagined and somebody is like, well, okay, you're there. And you're like, well, but it's just a little bit further actually. You know, rather than trying to get to some predefined place, I love the notion of looking at life as a series of intentional experiments when you hold yourself open to serendipity. So you're like, you want to move, and maybe you have some sense of where you're moving towards, but at the same time, you're not locked into what that has to be, and you're open to the possibility that something completely,

like you said, like you have no idea of it exists yet, could drop and be better. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that for me, what that does is that removes the kind of obsessive anxiety that we have brought to the notion of accomplishment, right? our yoga practices, our meditation, our mindfulness become yet another acquirement, right? It's always something we're going to acquire. And again, I trace that back to like a capitalist mentality, right? That there's something to be acquired. And when you acquire that thing, you know, then you will have freedom or you will have liberation. And so in many ways,

it's entirely disruptive of systems that keep us bound actually to choose to be boundless in this way that's yeah it is an intentional experiment like i'm i'm hacking my life all the time i'm hacking my experience of everything all the time where it's just like i'm doing this with the complete whatever it is that i'm doing whatever it is i'm up to making coming up with like the perfect smoothie for me for now right you know figuring out where it is by'm up to, making, coming up with like the perfect smoothie for me for now, right? You know, figuring out where it is. By the way, if you find a recipe for that perfect smoothie, let me know. Exactly. And doing that. And it's like, and it is, it's going to be utterly perfect for that moment. Right? And then when it's not, I'll be open and available to the possibility that it's time to change. I had a, I have a chronic illness. And so I wrestled with a period

of time at which I had this idea of like what my breakfast was supposed to be, what I needed. And I had to strip that away and open and realize that my body at the time needed something different. And so I needed firm things like, you know, like eggs and toast and, you know, like a real sort of breakfast and and now i'm in a different place where it's like oh no i can actually have a smoothie for breakfast again and so we have these you know all of these things that are telling us like the best thing to do is this and it's actually not true for us it's not true for us in this moment it's not true for our makeup it's not true for, it's not allowing us to

express our most vital selves. I think the listening is for me, the thing that's underneath all of that. Yeah. I love that. Just the notion of sort of like a primary, like one of your big jobs is to listen, to observe, to pay attention. I think it's huge. It's funny as you're sort of talking about this also, a friend of mine who actually is a functional medicine doc who lives in Berkeley, Chris Kresser, I've had this similar conversation with him where he's like, you know, talking about nutrition or diet. And he's like, it's not just about what diet is right for you, how you're going to fuel yourself. Like you said, it may be right for that moment. Yeah. But that moment is over in the next moment.

So a year later, you're a different person, your needs may be different. So it's this a profound need to want to lock as much of life down as humanly possible yeah i'm curious so we should probably fill in a little bit of gaps here because we just dove right into the deep end of the pool yeah coming out of you know like your three bar experience in uh in new york city you ended up somehow discovering buddhism zen yeah so take me there a little bit. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of thinking about this. So the short story is we had Tower Bookstore still here. I remember that.

Yeah. And, you know, I was already a strange, you know, creature and experienced myself as like not quite this and not quite that. And also accustomed to bridges, accustomed to being able to like bridge worlds that, you know, having to navigate that experience in middle school. And then in junior high school, they finally realized I was suffering deeply. And where I ended up was a school that was right on the border of Chinatown. So it was 90% ethnic Chinese. So there I was different, you know, utterly different than everyone and made relationship in that, right? And most of who wasn't Chinese was Latino. So, you know, Latinas. And so I was in

this sense of difference. And what we have to do to relate to multicultural experiences, right, is really open ourselves and broaden. I mean, you have a choice and you can kind of like close down and turn inward and sort of lock yourself in your own world. But that wasn't my orientation, I think, from my earlier life. And so I think there's some like beginnings of it must have been there. And the beginnings of being open to something that's really was different for my, you know, my background. And so there I was in Tower Records, and I ran into this book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And many people have since told me that it's like Greek to them. But when I read the book, it's by Shinru Suzuki Roshi. It's a classic book. And I read the book and I was like, oh, somebody understands my life.

And that was the beginning of, as many people do, sort of hacking my own meditation practice in a closet with a pillow and towel rolled up and that kind of thing. And eventually I had the opportunity to go to San Francisco where his original temple is located. And I, you know, hoisted myself up at, you know, some ungodly hour in the morning. This is actually a moment of realizing something is really going on here that I'm willing to get up this early in the morning to go do this. Like, I really actually noticed it as I was doing I was like, wow, that's some significant motivation. And so, you know, there I was, and I came back from San Francisco with my first, you know, real meditation cushion and something different than a rolled up towel. And then my grandfather passed not too long after

that. And so I had this sort of beginning foundation of a practice and, you know, was reading and that kind of thing. And I wasn't a terribly religious. I was a good classic kind of Western Buddhist in that I was sort of tossed the religious aspect aside. And it was, you know,

I held it more philosophical. That's why Zen worked for me. It was like, it's philosophical. And I didn't have to acquiesce to the idea that it was religious at all. And my grandfather passed, and it was just, you know, the world coming out from beneath me. And I had established enough of a practice that when the world came out from beneath me, that the practice was there as the ground. And that was my beginning of really dropping into that as something that I was going to begin to orient my life by.

At around that time also, so this was, was this also around the time that you had the brief Cyber Cafe experience? Yeah, the Cyber Cafe, yeah, it was. The Cyber Cafe came a little after right sort of really formation of my practice and so they live together did you have a sense that you know that the practice was going to become as central or that you would essentially become you know devoted and this would become a major part of your life path in your work no i was like you know busy being like the part of the black

didgeridoo you know the rising class of like you know colored and brown people that were engaging in this bizarre thing new thing called the internet and opened a you know what i called a cyber cafe which was you know way ahead of its time to really, you know, I just thought this thing was going to be, you know, fantastic and amazing. And I wanted it to be accessible to people in neighborhoods, you know, and they were taking internet access out of libraries and redlining people in that way. And so I thought that this was a great way. I was very entrepreneurial. And so I thought this was a great way to bring internet access. Even though it was early, you know, we still had bulletin boards and stuff like that. And, you know, we figured largely. And so no, I was busy, you know, being like the cool New Yorker. That was my job. It was like to be like hip, you know, it was not at all. It was like this, that was my side thing, you know, the sort of thing I ran off and did on my own. But I was firmly rooted in, you know, just being groovy New Yorker.

Yeah. So what tipped the scales then? I don't know if I would say I know what tipped the scales as much as I would say I know when the scales were tipped. Okay. And so we had this party and it's like it was a legendary party. So this is Fort Greene, Brooklyn in 1995. So that was when it was really Brooklyn still. Yeah, it was still Brooklyn. Before it turned to Hipsterville.

Yeah. Long before, actually. It was coming, though. Yeah. And we had this party. And, you know, it's like folks would roll through because of where we were. And so, you know, like Mums Schemer, you know it's like folks would roll through because of where we were and so you know like mom's a schemer you know poet would come through and erica badu would come and like you know hang out you know it was just sort of like we were all laid back and cool about it

and you know just like yeah you know erica lived you know a couple blocks away and so folks would like roll through because it was this like interesting spot, you know, in a place that didn't have enough services yet, not far from Brooklyn Academy of Music. And we had this party and it was for, I think it was a Christmas, it was a New Year's party. And it was an amazing party. It was like, you know, people were just like, you know, it's like throngs of people. It's awesome. And the following year, we were going to have the party again. And I did not go to the legendary party. I went to a silent retreat, upstate New York in the, you know, God forsaken cold, and was walking around in circles. This is what walking meditation looks like, walking around with circles, in circles with, you know, about 30 mostly middle-aged white folks. And I was like, something has happened. You have changed. And it was really recognizing in that moment that

the center of my life orientation had shifted. Yeah. That whatever it was that I was discovering there, which turned out to be me, was more important than the ideas that I had constructed about who I was and who I needed to be. Yeah. So did that trigger sort of a more accelerated cascade of your journey into Zen? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, Zen is kind of funny. You do all sort of so-called Buddhist practices. I think of myself mostly these days as like post-Buddhist, post the whole thing. Yeah, whatever. I'm doing my thing i'm just yeah i'm just doing my thing and and that i think for me that's the point right like i'm not invested maybe that's your liberated

life right yeah i'm not invested in the labels i'm not invested in you know it's useful sometimes the titles are helpful and you know it helps people orient around me but it's not how i orient and so i'm not so invested in the ideas of what name you call it. It's like, is it getting you closer to your liberated life? That's really what's important to me. And at the time, that was. And so at the time, it was Zen. At the time, it was Buddhism.

And what I was going to say about it is, though, there's this sort of interesting tension of not grasping. And because I'm so glad you brought you circled back to that all right so yeah let's go deeper into it yeah just say like it's so on the one hand you're like oh like this is my thing and on the other hand you're like oh you know but that's grasping and so you're sort of doing this weird like reaching for it that's very habitual like we want something we go after it and we like dig into it and And on the other hand, you have a foundation of the teaching that really talks about grasping as something that actually brings up suffering for us. Right. Since this is on the table, now let's go deeper into this, because I have a real curiosity and probably a struggle around this. And I'm guessing it's

probably not just mine, but probably a lot of people who are listening in, which is the sense, is there a distinction in your mind between grasping and aspiration? So I'm bringing up someone who we both know, the Saccom, Saccom Mipham Rinpoche. He's an awesome human being living just in the world, like as a dad, as a husband, but also as the head of a lineage right now. And at the same time, you know, he runs marathons. He's an equestrian. He's a very competitive athlete.

You know, so there's a deep sense of aspiration. Like there's a 26.2 mile mark in a marathon. Yes. You know, but even so when I look at our lives and, you know, there's this really interesting tension that I think is always sort of there, which is that, you know, but even so, when I look at our lives, and, you know, there's this really interesting tension that I think is always sort of there, which is that, you know, can you be simultaneously grateful for where you are aware and present, at the same time, want something more or different, and not have that be rise to the level of grasping, but have it be present enough so that it motivates action to create change. Absolutely. Yeah. That's it. Okay, good.

For me, that's it. And I think early on, we sort of sort through this idea of grasping. And we have to kind of discover what is our grasping. What you grasp after will merely be aspiration for me, right? I think what it comes down to is, do you, right? Does your essential sense of yourself come undone by what it is you're reaching for? If it does, right? It's sort of like if you become untethered from your basic ground, then that's grasping. And if on the other hand, there's a sense of that reach actually enlivening you, even if it causes you to stretch, right, then that's aspiration and that's our evolutionary call. And we can be utterly grateful for exactly where we are. And in fact, we have to be utterly grateful for exactly where we are, exactly as things are in order to strengthen. If you think of it as a body, right, you can reach for something.

But if you're already kind of like lurched forward and on your tiptoes and that's where you begin from in terms of reaching for something, but if you're already kind of like lurched forward and on your tiptoes, and that's where you begin from in terms of reaching for something, well, then you're, right, then you're off balance, and you're likely to come apart, right? Your appendages are actually disconnected from your core, from the ground of your being. But on the other hand, if you stand in the ground of your being with gratitude and an honesty and an openness to exactly where you are, that's the physical expression of having your feet on the ground and firmly rooted, right? Your core well engaged. And from there, you go for it, right? And your appendages, right, they stay attached. And so you're not overextending, you're reaching, but you're reaching from a place that is rooted to your sense of your core being. And so I like to express that in physical terms, because a lot

of it gets kind of esoteric. People can't really get a clear embodied sense and i would say if anything like my sense of like being post you know whatever is that really i'm rooted in the sense of embodiment right it's like how does this show up and how i show up in the world because i can tell myself all kinds of things about you know my awakening or my wanting my grasping but but really it's like how is it showing up as reflected back at me by the relationships that I have and what my life is doing? That embodied experience is actually critical because so many of us have the physical memory of trauma and the physical memory of oppression and the physical imprint of limitation, right? And what we're not entitled to, or what is not possible.

And so to actually practice in a physical way, we actually move that energy through us. And so that our practices become something that's not just in our head, but deeply rooted in our body. And so for me, I try to then start to say to people, so imagine what that would look like if you were reaching for something, but where your starting point was, was not rooted in a sense of like gratitude about where you are. Yeah, that's really powerful. And I love the idea of coming at it from an embodied standpoint, because it just makes it so much more relatable. You know, it's like, you don't have to go up here to get it. It's just like actually just cut you down. And if so much of our challenge is the way in which we've been programmed by social circumstances,

by things that happen in our family, by our upbringing, if so much of what has happened to us in terms of limiting our vital expression has happened in our mind, using the mind as the sole way in which we try to make ourselves out i think einstein had something to say about that right

that it's it's apparently for flawed right and so the degree to which and i don't have the the statistics that you know there's a growing field of mind-body science, of embodied science that is talking about how much of our experience is actually in our cellular tissue. Yeah, very much so. Right? And no amount of thinking about it is going to move it out of the tissue. Especially in trauma. There's so much work going on now around trauma and PTSD and how if you don't integrate some sort of embodied physical practice into the process of trying to explore and move through it. It's like, it's never going to go. We've been working creatures for much longer than we have

been these, you know, idle couch potatoes standing behind a screen creatures. And so I think we're seeing the impact of having moved so quickly beyond millennia of experience in terms of how we actually process and move things through us. We walked, we moved, we worked, we picked things up, we touched things with our hand, we had a relationship to the earth and to life and to the reality and our connection to all things. And as we move further and further away from that, I think we're seeing the impact of that in terms of how we treat our society and how we treat ourselves and how we treat our planet. Yeah, so powerful. My mind is thinking in so many different directions in a good way, in a good way. So as you sort of move into what's

feeling through this conversation is sort of like it, and me if i'm off but it kind of feels like there's an energy of like you're stepping into something that feels newer or different it feels like you're in a really deeply exploratory place right now yeah i think i always am these days i think that that's part of the right i'm in the the really active place of saying like oh oh, that's what it is. It's totally being in that exploration and utterly happy with the places in which I'm settled, right? And so when I settle down and I sit down, like that's where I am and that's the moment. And then I look up and there's something to explore and I reach out and to explore that. And for me, I'm in the practice of looking really intently at the ways in which I have been trained to limit myself and staring

those things down. I've done a lot of work with my own sense of suffering. And I think that does a great deal to allow us to break through a phenomenal amount of limitation, particularly limitation around our relationship with other people, the way in which we can project about how other people and external circumstances are impacting our happiness and keeping it from us or our sense of, I like to say more contentment, right? And resilience. And so I've completely divested myself to external circumstances being the cause and therefore having the potential to detract from my basic sense of contentment with my life and who I am. And that's a very active practice for me. There's another layer of programming, I like to call it, that I'm also

contending with in a very strong way. Like this is sort of the, I would say, like the place that I'm putting my attention in terms of my practice around a sense of like, where are limits at? And so the word that I'm, I'm actually working with two things. One of them is what you'd recognize from the Shambhala tradition is uplifted. Right. So that's a real, you know,

just really, you know, dynamic and bright exploration of practice to be uplifted. But also that has been up undergirded, and it had to come first with the practice of being undefended. And undefended is about like, where are these places in which I'm closing down to other people, to my experience, to my relatedness to life and to myself? That's not always a fun explanation. That's not always.

Well, I guess you could view it as you know like if it's getting me to a place of uplifting and to liberated life then you know you can reframe the like sort of approaching your walls or your the places you shut down as well yeah there may be some unpleasantness there but look at where it's you know it may it's gonna lead me yeah oh it's fun is the word you say not always fun oh you know i like i gave up on that yeah yeah no clearly it's yeah yeah the whole like big smile it's so overrated right there's this notion that like things are supposed to be like fun or always pleasant as part of like that is deeply connected to our sense of suffering because we're grasping after this idea that

what it is about is that it'll be pleasant. That I'm saying something here, if anyone has mistaken what I'm saying here for that I'm having this constant experience of being pleasant, that's not at all what I'm talking about. Liberated life is not about having a pleasant life. It is unbound and untethered, even to the idea of it has to be pleasant. And when I allow the truth of all of it, even the unpleasant stuff, especially, frankly, especially the unpleasant stuff, is the thing. That's it. That is it. Joy, I am entitled to, the access to in the midst of that suffering, in the midst of that unpleasantness. Joy is still possible. That's not, the opposite of joy is not discomfort, unsatisfactoriness, the thing we sort of broadly say is suffering, but gets, you know, that's sort of like, over the top for people. So I just say, like, take it down to the sort of like ordinary level, if we think of suffering is sort of big, huge life events. But rather the ordinary experience of a life turned upside down, uncomfortable. It's awry. It's not what we

want, damn it. Not what we want. And joy is to be found in the midst of that, not despite it, not around it, not once we get on the other side of it, but literally in the midst, not ice cream. I said this the other day, not ice cream in the midst of our mess. So I'm not talking about finding the golden needle in the scratchy haystack. I'm talking about the haystack. There's joy in the experience and choosing the experience of this haystack with all its scratchiness. And it calls for divesting in searching for the golden needle. Which kind of brings up the whole, at least Western world, US-based obsession with happiness these days, which I have very mixed feelings about. That's why I withdrew happiness as a contentment.

Because the mad quest, I think, causes as much suffering as it does anything else. And this feels like a good place to come full circle, because I think we're heading there anyway. So if I offer, we're hanging out, this is a good life project, if I offer out that term to live a good life, what bubbles up for you? First and foremost, to live the life that I have, right? To live that life fully, to really root in the life that I have fully with a great love and appreciation for all the aspects of it, the darkness, the difficulty, the challenges,

the hardness, as well as the bright you know, bright and sunny days that we have right now. And, you know, but we'll soon be clouds and it's like not, oh, and it'll be clouds. And so that's awful. And, you know, now I'm going to resist the clouds. I'm going to fully enjoy the bright and sunniness of the day. And then I'm going to fully enjoy what there is in the cloudiness that like actually helps me work better and kind of like focus. And so I'm going to fully enjoy what there is in the cloudiness that actually helps me work better and kind of focus. So I think that that's what, for me, a good life begins with the sense of fully rooting in contentment and appreciation. I really want to say appreciation in the life that you have in this very moment. Not the life you're going to have, not the life you should have had, not the life you might one day have, but the life you have in this very moment. And then it just

unfolds into the next moment, and then into that moment. And every time we're not feeling that sense of it, it's like the active practice is to search for the gratitude and the appreciation of the experience you're having right now. So that's the ground for me. We could talk about all of these other things that, you know, they enhance life and they're, you know, they're a lovely thing. Like we were talking before we began about like you know toys and tech stuff and you know gear and things like that and it's awesome and and uh but if we if we can't root ourselves in in the moment and in real gratitude and appreciation for the the complexity of who we are and the basic goodness of our of our being just right here and right now, then everything else is just a wish. It's

just a dream that's out there somewhere that produces anxiety and ultimately suffering. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening. We love sharing real unscripted conversations and ideas that matter. And if you enjoy that too, and if you enjoy what we're up to, I'd be so grateful if you would take just a few seconds and rate and review the podcast. It really helps us get the word out. You can actually do that now right from the podcast app on your phone.

If you have an iPhone, you just click on the reviews tab and take a few seconds and jam over there. And if you haven't yet subscribed while you're there, then make sure you hit the subscribe button while you're at it. And then you'll be sure to never miss out on any of our incredible guests or conversations or riffs. And for those of you, our awesome community who are on other platforms, any love that you might be able to offer sharing our message would just be so appreciated. Until next time, this is Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. 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 eight 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.