Good Life Project - Susan Piver: The 4 Noble Truths of Love.

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Susan Piver (http://susanpiver.com/) is the New York Times best-selling author of 9 books, a speaker, and founder of the largest virtual mindfulness community in the world, The Open Heart Project. She has been featured on Oprah, TODAY, CNN, speaks around the world and leads teachings and retreats on Buddhism, meditation, relationships and the essential practices for a life well-lived.In her most recent book, The Four Noble Truths of Love, (https://amzn.to/2laMDxV) she offers a powerful set of tools to reimagine and better navigate long-term, loving relationships in a way that respects each person's individual truth, while making space for a living, evolving container for love.In our podcast conversation this week, Piver shares the eye-opening revelation that brought her to the Four Noble Truths of Love, then walks us through each one. She reveals the genesis of this work, her own 20-year marriage, her struggle with attachment to "what was" and the innately human need to contain and define and preserve it. And, she shares her awakening to how trying to lock something living and breathing and changing into the confines of something simple and clean and certain can only lead to suffering, while the opposite just might lead to freedom and a deepening sense of connection.To watch to Piver's incredible journey from Austin bartender to music industry exec to bestselling author to Shambhala meditation teacher, check out our earlier conversation here (http://www.goodlifeproject.com/video/mindfulness-serendipity-and-the-unplanned-life/).-------------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.

Ah, love. It's a word we love. We love the word, we love the feeling, we love the romance, we love the falling in love phase of love, we love to stay in that place for as long as possible, we love to believe that that can be the eternity and perpetuity of our relationships. And yet, the reality is, as we deepen into loving relationships, over time, things change. Question is, what do we do about that? What do we do with that? And when we feel things, when relationships with significant others, with partners, with spouses, when we feel these things where we really don't want to acknowledge that we feel them and we're not supposed to be feeling them. And what happened to the mad love? Rather

than saying, well, I guess it's just not there anymore. Rather than saying this signifies an end, rather than saying this is something that needs to be fixed. What if there is a radically different approach to cultivating deeply meaningful, rewarding, nourishing, rejuvenating, long-term loving relationships. Well, that's where we're going with today's guest, Susan Piver. Susan is a dear and old friend of mine. She is a multiple-time best-selling author and Shambhala Buddhist meditation teacher, speaker. And she latched onto this topic of love and shares stories of how in her own personal relationship and her marriage, which is going on 20 years now, they hit a window where just everything was going wrong. And she didn't know

what to do or where to turn. And a voice inside of her said, start at the beginning. And that led her back to some Buddhist teachers, which are profoundly relevant to all of us in the way that we can build, rebuild, and sustain deeply loving and meaningful relationships. That has led to a really powerful new book called The Four Noble Truths of Love. And we kind of dive into those truths. And I have to tell you, my eyes were opened in a lot of ways. I found understanding in some of these ideas that shed light on so much of what happens in my own relationship, my own longstanding marriage. And this actually goes beyond those immediate relationships to longstanding loving relationships with friends, with family. So super excited to share this conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. 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 are 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 him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. It's funny because we were friends for a long time now, but you have been on the show once before in the past. And I was realizing that it was actually a long time ago now. It was when we were filming. Must be five years ago.

Yeah. And I was like, how could we not have actually had taped a more recent conversation? Because there's so much awesomeness that you have to share. Anyway, for our dear listeners who want to dive more into Susan's incredible backstory, taking you from the wilds of Austin, Texas, bartending through hip hop music, mogul through Buddhist meditation, you know, like amazingness. We will throw a link to that awesome story in the show notes. This has a bit of a different focus today. One of the things that I've always loved about our conversations and about the stuff that you

create is you tow this really interesting line between deep wisdom, deep ancient traditional wisdom, and practical on the ground. Okay, so how does this work if you don't want to live in a monastery? And how is this going to actually help me? Is that intentional for you? Is that translation part of what you feel your work is? Well, I kind of want to say yes, because it would make me sound really smart. Well, yes, it is. Absolutely. It's been my plan all along. But no, it's, you know, I've been a Buddhist for a long time. And one of the things that I just love about being a Buddhist practitioner, not that anyone has to become a Buddhist. And the thing that surprised me is how practical it is. It's not just like, how do you transcend to another realm to become like a godlike human being, which obviously you don't need. It's how do you live your life on planet Earth as a human being with a completely open heart, a totally sharp mind, and a great and vast willingness to be of benefit to others. I mean, who doesn't want that?

Yeah, I want that. Me too. So you've written, what book is this? Seven? It's like nine. Nine? Yeah. If you count the three I edited, but otherwise it's six. So you've written a lot of books and touched on a lot of different areas of life. And you have a book now which focuses on love And you've spent years sort of thinking about this and deconstructing it. I know we've talked about like bits and pieces and snippets of this over the years. Why this conversation and why now?

Yeah. Well, as a longtime Buddhist practitioner and a longtime wife, I will have been a Buddhist for like 22 years and a wife for like 20 years, basically, as of right now. But as a longtime Buddhist practitioner, where there are millions of teachings on wisdom and loving kindness and how to be a good person, I just noticed in many people, including myself, it all sort of falls apart when you go home and look into the eyes of the person you're in a relationship with. Like, we're Buddhists except for right now.

Exactly. Except for when you drop all your crap all over the floor. It's weird how your big mind sort of devolves into little petty hissy fits. And why is that? Why is it actually the hardest to love the person that you love is a question that I've always been interested in. And also, I wanted to be happy in my own relationship. I want to be a good partner and I want to be happy in my own relationship. But we go through phases, you probably have no idea what this is like, where we just don't like each other. Where it's like, who are you again? And why am I sitting

here talking to you? Because everything you do irritates me, and nothing you say makes any sense. It's like, suddenly, you find yourself in this place where you're very distant from each other. And one time, Duncan, my husband and I were in one of those places for a long time, like months. I mean, I think I wrote in the book, we fought about everything. And once we even fought about what time it was. Yeah, I remember reading that. I'm like, how do you do that? How low do you have to go to make that a point of contention? So I was really upset, and I didn't know what to do. Nothing that we tried worked. And one day I was literally sitting at my desk crying, thinking, I don't even know how to begin fixing this.

And it sounded like also the way you described sort of like that window, that it wasn't where you could point to something and say, oh, this is what it's about. This is what it's about. It's almost like it's this non-specific sustained thing. That is so right. That is so right. There's like, everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. There's these little slights, little slights. You blow by that one, you put that one under the rug, you forget about this one, you explain that one away because they're explainable, awayable, they're small. You know, you didn't look at me, or you know, I asked you how you were, but you didn't ask me how I was. I mean, these teeny tiny things that don't mean anything, accrue, and then suddenly,

shit like breaks loose, And it just blows up. And then because it's so weird, you just struggle to find some, well, it's because you did this or I did that. But at least for me, I don't think that there is such an explanation. There's more like the weird irritation of trying to be close to someone else every single day creates this weird tension. I don't know. Does that sound right to you? Yeah. I think we're married actually probably similar amounts of time. We're working on 21 years this year, actually. Congratulations. Yeah. It's really interesting how everything changes and everything evolves. We're going to get a lot more into that. So you get to a point where you're just kind of like, what? Exactly. What? Exactly. I'm thinking literally, I don't know where to even start because I've

tried everything. And then I heard myself say, I hesitate to say I heard a voice because there was nobody there but me, but something inside me said, begin at the beginning. At the beginning are Truths, which I'm sure you know. And I'd never thought that they had anything to do with relationships. Life is suffering. Grasping creates suffering. It's possible to stop suffering. There's an eightfold path for doing so. Right view, right intention, and so on. Didn't think it had anything to do with my love life. But then in this moment, it's like those teachings kindly reformed themselves in my mind to apply to my relationship. So I wrote them down. I mean, it's so interesting, right? Because you're practicing for years, you're deep into study, you've gone on retreats for months at a time. This is like, okay, so I have all this deep wisdom from

some of the most incredibly accomplished and skilled and studied teachers in the world. And in theory, this applies to every aspect of my life. And yet, until this moment where there was a complete breakdown, it didn't come to you that, oh, maybe like the most fundamental teachings of this entire tradition apply to this one particular area as well. That is exactly right. That's so perfectly said. Yeah, I never thought to do it, but maybe these four truths, which if they're true, they're always true, could also be true here. It just never occurred to me. I think probably because most of the teachings, whether the teachers are modern

or ancient, are from monastics, people that did not live in apartments and have to take the subway and go to the grocery store. They had a different kind of life. So, for whatever reason, I just thought, well, they don't know what I'm going through. But incorrect. They did know what I was going through. And the teachings are profoundly illuminating. And P.S., not just to me, but also to my partner, who is not a Buddhist, not a meditator, not into any of that. But it was useful for both of us. That's what really gave me a lot of heart. Yeah, I love that. I know you kind of like went through really quickly the Four Noble Truths. Talk to me about each one of them a little bit more just before, because I know those became the foundation for then what you then developed, sort of like the next iteration of that specifically as it applies to this domain of love.

But tell me more about just the basics of these four noble truths. Sure. Happily. So when the Buddha attained enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago, and he went back to his, you know, practicing posse, not sure what they called themselves, and he was apparently enlightened, they could tell. They said, what did you learn? What did you see? He said, I saw four things. Number one, life is suffering, which is really easy to interpret as life sucks or life is awful. But upon great investigation, I conclude that that is not what he meant.

He meant that everything changes. There's nothing to hold on to. And everything we do to create stability or ground with this relationship or that home or this degree or this amount of money, it's all going to dissolve and it's very painful. So that's the first noble truth. Life is suffering, aka everything changes. The second noble truth is the cause of suffering, which is called grasping, which basically means not wanting the first noble truth to be true, or pretending that it isn't. Well, okay, maybe that's true for you, but I am going to construct this fortress for myself that is, you know, inviolate and so forth. So, you hold on to what

you think will make you happy and try to push away the things that you think won't, and that's called grasping. And that is actually the cause of suffering, not the suffering itself, not the loss, not the dissolution. Painful though it may be, the real cause is holding on. The third noble truth is called the cessation of suffering, which means, oh, you can stop. Now you know the cause, you also know the cure, stop grasping. Of course, much easier said than done, but just mathematically, that's the answer to how you stop suffering. And then the fourth noble truth is called the Eightfold Path, which is how you actually do that. How do you stop grasping? And I don't know if I can say them all, but right intention, right view, right speech, right livelihood, right action, right effort, right mindfulness, right wisdom.

All those rights have a vast canon of knowledge around them, and you could study one for your whole life. And if you do those eight things, just like the Buddha, you got the same trick bag. You too could attain liberation from suffering. So it's the whole path right there. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting because when I was first exposed to the Four Noble Truths and the first one, immediately my sort of like Western mind translated as you, you know, so eloquently said, life sucks. And I'm like, no, my life doesn't suck. You know, there's great things in it. There's, this can't be true because you're like, I don't see life as suffering.

And it really, it took me a long time. It took me a lot of conversations, a number of conversations with you to understand how to translate that in a way which landed true to me. What did you come up with? Really almost the exact same thing. For me, it was about, you know, the, the, it's almost like the only thing that I'm certain about is that the future is uncertain. And the more I try and make it certain, it, it means that I'm devoting substantial amount of my energy and intention

to something I can never have, which to me lead can only lead to futility, which is a form of suffering. And futility at the mildest level and just sheer angst and anguish and sorrow and suffering and pain on the deepest level. And when I kind of looked at it that way and said, oh, okay, I get that. Because like you said, life is persistent change. If you try and live as and joy if you can let go to any degree of imagining that you are permanent. truths wrapped around the same concept is the idea, the second truth of the notion of grasping as essentially the cause of suffering. Because when, sure, when I think about material things, I don't need to have that, I don't need to lock it down. But when I start to think about, and this is where we get into relationships and love, right? When I start to think about the people who are closest to me, my family, you know, my sister, my parents, my wife, my daughter. The notion of not grasping onto those relationships

is almost inconceivable to me. I know. I totally understand what you're saying. And people mistake, I believe, grasping for caring or loving. It means I shouldn't love you so much. It means I shouldn't need you. I shouldn't appreciate you. I shouldn't be so attached. That makes me really mad. Because often when people have said to me, you shouldn't be so attached, what they really mean is you shouldn't care about something I don't give a crap about.

And I don't like that. So anyway, one of the things that helped me get my mind around grasping, because me too, I love so many things and people and my life and things I feel very attached to. What helped me is to recognize that non-attachment itself is an attachment. You can be attached to non-attachment. It may sound elliptical. Very meta. Very meta. Exactly. But non-attachment doesn't mean holding back, and it doesn't mean converting all phenomena into an equal tone,

where you have this very narrow range of where pain doesn't hurt you and pleasure doesn't make you too happy. It doesn't mean that at all. It means the opposite, actually. Non-attachment means not attached to keeping things the way they were or preventing them from becoming what they will, rather to dive into what you are experiencing fully without attachment to hope or fear, which is a very powerful capacity, should one ever be able to do that. So when you feel joy, you just completely feel it without being attached to what does it mean or where will it end. And when you feel, you know, utter death-defying grief, you don't fault yourself for caring so much. You just feel it completely. And it itself begins to dissolve. And when it does, you don't try to

stop it. So the non-attachment means just going on the ride completely as a total human being without holding back. It's the opposite of constantly chill. Man, how come these things are the noble truths? Why is something so true so hard to live? I don't know, but I will put right next to that question, why is something that is so ordinary, like being born and dying, the only two things we actually have in common and that are completely ordinary why is it always a complete outrageous miracle whenever they happen can't get your minds around it someone was just born it's impossible to conceive someone just dies it's impossible to conceive but there are certain aspects of of existence that are like beyond conventional comprehension. They're in the realm of magic or non-conventional or beyond thought. And those, it's very hard for us to grasp with our conventional minds. But in our hearts or in our minds or our deepest wisdom, whatever you want to call it, we know, we know these things are true.

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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. so you go from this place of thank you for that overview of the four noble juice by the way i want to take you back to that dark place where you had this big awakening okay cool so you go from the from saying okay so i don't know which way is up with my loving partner somebody give me an answer you go back

to the beginning the four noble truths come to you and but you take that and then create this additional overlay so that they become, it feels like much more relevant to the context of relationships. Yeah, it really helped me to look at them this way. So Four Noble Truths have a kind of sequencing. There's a truth, the cause of the truth, the cessation of the suffering connected to the truth, and how to do it. The truth, the cause, the cure, and how. So when I took those into my marriage, what they looked like was the truth. Relationships are uncomfortable. Period.

You know, if you, of course, we were just talking about the ordinary irritation of just living with someone. You've been in a relationship for 20 plus years. You're like, why are you doing that thing again that you said you would never do? Why are we having this argument again? There's just this discomfort, this everyday and beyond everyday discomfort. But if you haven't even ever met the person, like you're going on a blind date, there's already discomfort. What if they don't like me? What if they do like me? And so on and so forth.

So in every phase of relationship, there's discomfort. That's the truth. That's the first truth. Relationships are uncomfortable. Really? Relationships are uncomfortable? Well. There's something that you wrote about this, about this phase, about this first noble truth, that when I read it, I was just like, oh, wow.

With your permission, I'll read a couple of lines. Here's what I read. Very few individuals are naturally convinced of their inherent worthiness. In fact, in Buddhist thought, to possess such conviction is considered a corollary of full enlightenment. It's more likely that we are caught in cycles of self-denigration and self-aggrandizement, both of which are forms of aggression. We are so hard on ourselves, so unremittingly unkind in the way we consider ourselves. The opposite, insisting that we are, in fact, awesome, is simply the flip side of that thought pattern. I was like, huh. And what popped into my head when I read that is we bring so much to the way that we interact with other people. And it's that, it's sort of like this is,

it's that old saying, if we treated ourselves the way we treat some other people, or if we treat other people the way we treat ourselves, sometimes you would have disastrous relationships just all the time, all day, every day. But then you add to this, and this is where I kind of really like my hard one. Wow. Reading again from you, when it comes to love, this unkindness to self begins to mix with the relationship. As you become emotionally intertwined, the energetic space between you begins to close up. As it tightens, your ability to see your partner as separate from your own mind stream diminishes. The closer you get, the less able you are to actually

see each other. What happens at this point is that because you cannot discern who is who, you begin to treat your beloved the way you treat your own mind. The kindness or unkindness you extend towards them is a reflection of the way you treat yourself. Generosity of spirit, so powerful in the early stages of a relationship, begins to contract. Tell me more about this, because I think so many people will sort of hear that and be like, oh. Well, thank you so much for reading it. It made me feel so happy to hear you read it. It gave me great delight. Thank you so much.

So, and I would love to hear what it evoked in you. It's always been kind of curious, why does it become harder to love this other person the longer we know each other? And this is not my, I did not make this up. This is a teaching of the bodhisattva path, the awakened being path. The bodhisattva being one who is here to be of benefit to others. This is a classical Buddhist teaching. And it also gives dimension to the cliche, which also happens to be true, that in order to love someone else, you have to love

yourself, which I always thought meant, oh, I have to like myself, or I have to think I'm awesome, and my self-esteem has to be perfect, and then I'll be able, but that's not what it means. It means that your self-talk and the way you actually think of yourself could be riddled with gentleness and acceptance and spaciousness as opposed to, I'm an awesome person, which is very constricting. I'm an awesome person sometimes, and I'm also a crazy person other times, and a cruel person, and a beautiful person, and silly. to make room for all of that to hold that in a kind of gentle space with complete authenticity and accuracy is what is meant i think by self-love and that when you can do that for yourself bring this spaciousness and this

courage and gentleness then you can do it for someone else. But until then, these weird neurotic, I guess you'd say, mind streams just mix and wreak havoc. That's what it means to me. What did it mean to you? It's so interesting reading it. A couple months back, I had a conversation with Tim Ferriss, literally the week that he came out of a 10-day retreat. And for him, this was not a good experience. I mean, it was good in many ways. He was very thankful that Jack Kornfield was actually his mentor who was on retreat with him and helped him process a lot of darkness

that came up during it. And we left that conversation, and Tim said to me, he's like, you know, the one thing I've learned is you've got to love yourself before you can love another person. And for Tim, I was like, well, this is really different because that's not the way he's normally had conversations with me or other people. And then when I read your words here, and I've always heard this thing, you've got to love you. We've all heard, you know, we've, we've seen the platitudes. We've seen it all over Instagram and stuff like this. You're like,

love yourself before you can love anyone else. I'm like, okay, sure. I think this landed so powerfully for me because the way you laid it out, it's like, okay, so you start as you and this other person. And in the beginning, you've got your own, you're diminishing and demeaning yourself. So many people have trouble with their own self-worth, as you say. And you think to yourself, it's okay for me to take myself down, but this other person I love and I'm going to hold them up and they're awesome and they're great and all of a sudden I'll be gentle with them. And the visual of, as you get deeper into the relationship, the space between the two of you, closing and closing, closing, closing, until essentially there's no space anymore. And whatever feelings you held just and applied to you, now without space between

the two people becomes the feeling that you apply to the relationship and to that other person. Well, if you're torturing yourself and demeaning and diminishing yourself every day, and now you've reached a depth of relationship, a the first time, I was like, okay, I get it. With that description, I really better understood why doing that work yourself is so important to your ability to truly see the kindness and generosity and love in that other person. So I don't mean to be your fake therapist here, but let me ask you, how did that make you feel? How did it make you feel when you saw that? How did it make you feel towards yourself? How did it make you feel towards your wife? It made me feel good. I'm not somebody that tends to have a lot of negative self-talk for me. Maybe it's that there have been times in my life where I have.

I feel like I'm in a moment where I'm pretty okay with who I am and how I feel about myself. And so for me, it was a reason to continue to revisit the idea as my relationship evolves over time. You know, because 21 years in now, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, we are going to grow individually. Or the nature of our relationship is going to grow. The space will become lesser and lesser and lesser and lesser and lesser. So as that space continues to shrink over the next five, 10, 20, 30, 40, God willing, it gave me a reason to keep revisiting the idea of how am I speaking to and treating myself

in the context of my ability to continue to cultivate a healthy, nourishing, loving relationship. That's awesome. That the way you talk to yourself could actually comprise a loving gesture to her, which makes everything workable, useful, inspiring. Because when I think, well, I just have to work on myself, I just get kind of bored. You know, I find it claustrophobic and unpleasant. But when I think, oh, I'm doing this for us, for me, that creates more space. I feel more inspired to do the work.

And P.S., as you were talking, I was thinking that one of the reasons this is so hard to do, I didn't write about this, but it's because the closer you get, and as you were talking, I was having the visual of just two people's lives mixing, their energy mixing, their whatever, their lives becoming one, as it were. That's terrifying. That's terrifying. For ordinary reasons, like you don't want to be overwhelmed, you don't want to lose your independence, and so on, but that's not the real reason. The real reason is because someday you're going to have to part. That is unthinkable. That is unthinkable. For some reason, all relationships will end. Sorry, First Noble Truth, we got to come back that's one of the reasons why many relationships don't cease to progress is because it's easier to hold the arm's length, to think that, oh, you're not this enough or you're too that, as opposed to I'm going to love you so fully and give my heart so completely,

knowing that I'm going to make myself cry, that someday this will end. That's un-untenable. So we throw all sorts of roadblocks in the way. That's my working theory. To avoid the deeper pain of it ending by experiencing some form of ending now that's not quite as invested. Exactly.

I'm going to break up with you before you break up with me. Yeah. That principle. Yeah. And just to be clear also, you're not saying that every relationship is going to end in separating or divorce, but you may, at some point, if you're together for your whole life, one of you is very likely going to die before the other. Yeah.

I wrote a book about heartbreak once, and I used to give talks about it. I would start by saying, all relationships are going to end. You're either going to break up or someone's going to change their mind. I mean, you break up, someone's going to change their mind, someone's going to fall out of love. Or you're going to live a long, happy life together and one of you is going to die. And that's the best case scenario. Sorry. It's all good. Under sort of like the umbrella of the first noble truth of love, you also talk about this thing called the three poisons. Tell me about these. Yeah. Also classical Buddhist teaching. These three poisons, and we each have our poison of choice, although we all have all three poisons.

These are the things we do to throw roadblocks in our own way. And they're called passion, sometimes also called grasping, aggression, and ignorance or numbness. So these are three neurotic reactions we have to the things that upset us. Rather than opening to them and experiencing them and letting them form us and responding to them and so on, we have things that we're like, the passion part is, I need this. I must have it. If I don't have it, I'll die. Getting super attached in the neurotic way, not in the wonderful way, to particular outcomes or to the prevention of particular outcomes. So that's poison number one. And of course, in a relationship, it's really easy to hang on the person's every word. Does this mean you like me? Oh, this means it's over. This means

it's great. So there's this intensity, this grasping of the moment as proof that you're either going to leave me or you're going to continue to love me. Nobody particularly cares for that, giving or receiving. The second poison aggression is meeting the things that could hurt you with a sense of, I'm going to destroy that. I'm just going to decimate it. I'm going to get it out of my way. Ixnay, whatever it takes. Aggression, I'm going to move against it. Okay. We all do it. Some people, that's their default response. The first two, passion and aggression, you can kind of work with because you can kind of see them.

The third one is most insidious, ignorance. The poison of just shutting down, turning off, turning away, avoidant. This is my particular poison of choice, so I'm familiar with it. Just not happening. I'm going to do something else. That's the opaque, difficult poison. But we do all three of these things, and it would be very painful to think, well, I got to stop doing those three things, because there's no passion, aggression, ignorance switch. So if anybody wants to work with the poisons, the best place, the only place to start is by just noticing them, noticing when you employ them, noticing them when they are employed against you

and just starting to learn their texture and their personality and get to know them. It makes it much easier to work with them. Not that you asked me, but I thought I'd mention. No, it's all advice on what to do is always helpful and appreciated too. And these are all sort of, I guess the poisons, you could also translate them as common and destructive reactions to having to face the first noble truth of love. Exactly. They are common reactions to fear. Okay. Second noble truth of love.

Thinking that relationships should be comfortable is what makes them uncomfortable. So, of course, I hope everyone's relationship makes them happy and comfortable and so on, and I want to be comfortable and happy and all that, but I don't think that that's necessarily the job of deep, romantic, intimate love. However, when most of us say we're looking for love, we don't normally mean that, according to my anecdotal observation. We're looking for safety. We're looking for someone to make us feel that everything's okay. Or someone with whom we can sort of turn our back on certain trials and tribulations and make a cocoon.

And, okay, those things are great. But if there's one thing I have learned about love and that I can say with great certainty about love is that it is not safe. There's no way to make it safe. And the minute you try to make it safe, it ceases to be love and starts to look more like some sort of a transaction. I will do this and you will do that and so forth and so on. And I don't know what that's called. I just don't think it's called love. So we think, well, if only it was comfortable, if only you didn't have this behavior, if only I could make that amount of money or we lived in this house or you stopped jiggling your foot every time you talk to me or whatever, whatever crazy things, which you are not doing, by the way,

whatever crazy things people do. I'm looking down at my foot right now. I looked at it too. No jiggling here. Then we would be fine. Sure. Okay. Work on your problems, your foot jiggling and your money problems. Work on those things. I hope you solve them all. But thinking that when you do, everything will be cool. That's where the problem comes in because the weirdest thing that I ever learned about a relationship, and I'm fixing to tell you what it is right now, this drove me crazy. They never stabilize.

They never stabilize. So I thought, well, we'll be in this relationship. We'll get to know each other. We'll have these kinks. We'll work them out. And then at some point, it's going to be fine. And at some point, it is fine until it is not. And I can't predict what weather fronts are going to blow through this now close to 25-year relationship

with someone I know really well and who knows me really well. I still can't predict. I could be really nice and kind and sweet and sort of get a blank stare. I can be a complete ass and just see him looking at me with the eyes of love. There's no telling. It doesn't stabilize. It never does because it's alive. So trying to get it to stabilize, like let's make it perfect and then hold, actually is what creates the discomfort. The discomfort's not the problem. Thinking it should be comfortable is. Does that

make sense? Yeah. Are you buying? Are you picking up what I'm putting down? I'm picking up what you're putting down. And it makes sense also to me on a different level, which is that if you operate on the assumption that for a relationship to grow and remain healthy, the individuals in the relationship must also honor their own need to grow as individuals and remain healthy as individuals, then unless there's some freakish level of similarity in the timing and the nature of the way that each individual grows, where it is just for a really long time identical, which I don't think happens, it can't be always just lockdownable. So it makes sense to me. And yet that's what we want.

And I think it's not just in loving relationships. It's in everything in life. But this just happens to land in the context of, okay, so when will I just know that everything will be okay? You talk about something called romantic materialism. Tell me more about this concept. This is, from what I recall, it's kind of under the window of the second noble truth. Yeah, yeah.

No, I appreciate you bringing it up. I made it up, so I'm happy to have a chance. I love made-up terms. I do it all the time. The Buddha did not say this. But the great Tibetan meditation master, who you know I love, and I know that you also have great respect for, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, named something called the Three Lords of Materialism. And these are three lords,

three things we try to put our attention into with the aim of being safe and steady and making the Four Noble Truths not be true, and they're tricks. The first Lord is called the Lord of form. And it's like, I'll be safe if I have this house and this amount of money and this degree and so on. Okay. The second Lord is the Lord of, I can't remember what it's called, but it's the emotional Lord. It's the Lord that says, if you can only figure out why you are the way you are and why I am the way I am, we can solve our problems and be happy. So the second Lord is saying, if you have the right theory, the right system, if you do the right studies, you can solve all these problems. And you can solve a lot of problems. There's certain problems, aka the

problem of being a human being who lives and dies. You're not going to solve that one. The third Lord is called the Lord of spiritual materialism, which is a very insidious Lord. And that's the Lord that says, well, if you're a meditator, if you really perfect mindfulness, if you get your spiritual cred way up there, you can be exempt from suffering, and actually you'll be better than other people. That makes me want to vomit. I don't like that one, probably because that's the one I'm most likely to fall victim to. But the Lord of Spiritual Materialism says, mindfulness will save you. It won't. It won't.

It won't. It's an amazing tool. Powerful. The Lord of romantic materialism, that's the one I coined, says, if you can only find the one, in quotation marks, you will be liberated from suffering. If you can only find the person who's meant for you, maybe there's more than one, but just find one of them. If you can only make that relationship, if you can only solve all your childhood wounds so that you will attract, quote unquote, the right person into your life, your problems will be solved. That is materialistic view of relationships. I think it's, again, just using the word transactional. It's a transactional view.

So if you're sitting there making lists of the person you want to be in a relationship with, which, great, it's good to have something clear in your head. And if you're thinking, well, I attract, this makes me very mad, actually. I keep attracting the same thing into my life so that I can solve it. And until I do, I'll keep attracting bozos and losers. I really highly suggest ceasing to do that. It's useful to explore your problems and figure out who you are and why you are. Great. Super great. But to escape even the trials and tribulations of true love, which are vast and powerful and wonderful and crazy-making, it will not help you. So just love is real, totally real. And you don't know when it's going to arise. And there's nothing you can do to make it be there. These are certain things in our world we can't game. Meaning we can't make them be there when they're not, we can't make them go away when they are. Love is one of them. And there's a lot of AI scientists who are trying to figure this out right now. I mean, there are billion-dollar industries that are literally trying to figure out how to game this. And the most accomplished researchers I know in the, quote, space of love will still tell you, no.

Yeah, we can tell you little pieces, but. 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.

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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. You know what? I mean, the other thing that this sort of like concept brought up for me is this kind of idea that in the beginning of a relationship, we want the fire. We want the instability.

We call that, you know, like passion. We call that romance. We call that we want the breathlessness. The, oh, my gosh, do they, don't they? And this is what gives it energy, what gives it fire, what gives it momentum. And then over time, we start to say we want comfort, we want safety, we want stability. But then if we get it, there's a yearning for that breathlessness, for that edge, for that fire that we've lost. And so it's sort of like we keep telling ourselves that we want what we don't have and trying to make adjustments to get it rather than just saying, this thing is hard. It is ever changing.

And let me just be in it. Yeah. Well, that's a really good relationship strategy, by the way. This thing is really hard. It keeps changing, and let me just be in it. That's like the best relationship advice possible. Yeah, in our Western culture, especially, maybe unless you're from France or something, there's this idea that I want a love affair, and then I want the love affair to be a relationship. And both of those are great things. I think that feeling of just falling madly in love and being everything heightened and just transported,

and I think that's totally real. And I get upset when people say it's some weird illusion that you have to get past so you can get into the weird housekeeping weeds of a real relationship. BS, BS, BS. That is a real relationship, too. It's great. It's a love affair. Love affairs, yes.

But love affairs and relationships are two different things. In our world, for whatever reason, we think that all our love affairs should somehow turn into relationships, and all our relationships should remain love affairs. And the truth is, that's very rare. They're two different animals. And, you know, well, I won't get into too many details about my personal life, but, you know, I've had both. And I've also had love affairs that have been super hot, super amazing. And then I'm like, but I don't really want to introduce you to my friends. Well, okay, that's a relationship part. It's really helpful, I think, to look at those two things as different.

And maybe if you're really lucky, you'll find one that could be both. But in a long-term relationship, that falling in love only happens once. I mean, it keeps deepening in this funny way and then it disappears and then it deepens and then you remember it. It's never with that intensity. But one of the ways I think about it is in Buddhist thought, I think you've read some books about this, as I remember discussing with you. The Tibetan Buddhist world, there's six realms of existence. The human realm, the jealous god realm, the god realm, the animal realm, the hungry ghost realm, the hell realm. And in certain Buddhist schools of thought, those are real places. I don't know. I'm not sure I've ever been to them.

But I know that I visited them in my everyday life. I go to the animal realm every time I just phone it in, just go to the hell realm if someone I love dies, so forth and so on. So in my opinion, the way I think of it is love affairs happen in the God realm. You get like a free ticket to the God realm where everything's amazing. Everything makes you happy, even the things that make you sad, because everything's so meaningful. It's very powerful, totally real. But we don't live there. We have to come back to the human realm where things are more not quite as, but I, yeah, that falling in love part was

like, what planet is this? I'm very happy to be visiting here. It's amazing. I felt like I woke up in a different world. It was truly extraordinary experience. And now what I feel is that had sharp peaks, highs and lows that were very intense, and I happen to like that. Now what I feel is more like an ambient quality of love. It's this, I look at him and I'm like, I adore him, and he drives me crazy, and I find him amazing and completely strange. And somehow what I feel for him is not particularly the focal point of our relationship anymore because our relationship has kind of become a container for love. And that's where we live. Sometimes it feels good, sometimes it really doesn't.

But every time we come back and sort of stretch to reconnect with each other, that container is reinforced. And so when I look around, I see, oh, love is everywhere. Sometimes it's in my heart, sometimes it's not. But it's a structure that we created. It does not arise in a love affair. It arises over time, you know, if you're lucky. I don't know. Does that sound resonant to you?

Yeah, no, that totally resonates with me. Yeah, and I don't think there's a way to accelerate that either. No, you're right. I think it's just, it is time invested, time in presence. Third noble truth of love. Third noble truth of love. Remember, in the Buddhist sense, it's the cure. Time and presence. Third noble truth of love. I'm really sorry. Let's dispel this discomfort by assigning blame. And once we assign the blame, we're like 90% on the way to solving the problem.

All right, now that we've cleared that up. Okay, problem solved. Let's have dinner. What do you want? Exactly. Next fight. Exactly. It's so hilarious.

How could you possibly eat that? We have been there a billion times. But if a great partner in my mind is not someone who will blame you or take blame, but one who will sort of stop looking at you and turn, my visual is you turn and you put shoulder to shoulder, and you look at the problem, and you meet it together. And you see, oh, now we really love each other. Or now I really love you, but you don't seem to be that interested in me. Now we don't like each other. Now we seem to be in love again. Now we just want to be apart. There's these incredible waves that roil and roll through the relationship on a daily basis, a minute-to-minute basis, certainly a yearly basis,

and to ride that together, to me, that's the ultimate love. We're on this ride together. And I'm feeling this way about it, and you're feeling that way about it, and now it's beautiful, and now it's not. To me, that's an incredibly loving partner. That's a beautiful thing to do. That's a companion. Yeah.

Couldn't agree with you more. And I think that's the place also where when you are in it long enough, you'll go through all the day-to-day things that happen from the outside in that you have no control over, major loss to health, to people that you love, to family and stuff like this. And it's been my sense that your willingness to sort of like be in this thing together and respect and open. And when those things happen from the outside in, the really big things that have the ability to either really tear apart or deepen, you know, like get you on the ride even more together. That's when I think this commitment sort of like really shows its face. At least that's been my experience.

I dig your voodoo right now. And how lucky is a person to sort of stumble into such a situation where there's someone who's like with you and who will continually deepen with you. It's very, very fortunate and wonderful. And I would like to throw down a caveat here that the kinds of things we're talking about tolerating discomfort and meeting discomfort together does not include things like oh one of us is addicted to something one of us is abusive one of us emotionally abusive no those things are not included beyond the pale those don't come under the oh tolerate it exactly yeah in the context of the third noble truth of love you also bring into the conversation the idea of the four measurables again pulled you know like classic teachings

how to put it i actually have them on my wedding band in sanskrit right now do you i do oh and what tell me about this concept and how it applies to the context of love and relationships. Well, it's very heartening to realize that you possess an immeasurable quantity, the capacity to love. And in four sort of faces, the four faces of love, maybe you could call it. The four immeasurables are Brahma, Viharas in Sanskrit, which means royal dwelling place. So if you want to know like, where do I live in my inner world? Well, these are really good places to live. And you do live there and this is who you are no matter what. Although obviously from time to time it can get super clouded over. So the first is loving kindness or maitri, metta in Sanskrit.

And that implies a kind of just general warmth, which means you feel kindly disposed towards others, which sometimes is really easy and sometimes is really not. But the underlying, the sort of formula for that warmth is to recognize your similarity to other people. Everybody's trying to be happy, even though people do crazy, insane things in the name of that, that you will never do in a million years. Their underlying motivation is the same. So actually, oddly to me, loving kindness doesn't mean you can't hate someone. Even though people get mad at me when I say hate, but

I'm a human being, sometimes I feel that. It doesn't mean you can't hate someone. Even though people get mad at me when I say hate, but I'm a human being, sometimes I feel that. It doesn't mean you can't hate someone. You can still have loving kindness for them in the following way, which is kind of funny to think about. You can hate them, you don't have to forgive them, let them off the hook. Loving kindness isn't like, oh, sweetie. It's not like a snuggle. It's much more fierce than that. It means, I hate you. I think what you're doing is ridiculous, horrible, violent, destructive. But here's what I can't do. I can't think that I'm any different from you.

That if I wasn't subject to your causes and conditions, that I wouldn't do the same thing. And if you think, well, I hate this person because they, oh, let's say, make up lies to get their way, you could ask yourself, have I ever done that? Of course the answer is yes. So you find a little common ground. That's the provenance of loving kindness. The second brahmavihara is compassion, which means feeling someone else's pain in your own heart, which when you love someone, you do. And when you're a Buddha, you feel it about everyone, theoretically. The third is sympathetic joy, mudita, I think that is in Sanskrit.

And... Nachas in Yiddish. Nachas in Yiddish. Sanskrit. And it's like, you're driving the nachas machine all over town when you're, when you got the sympathetic joy going. That's really funny. That means if compassion means feeling someone's pain in your heart means you actually feel their happiness in your heart. That's actually kind of hard to do. You get jealous or, but sympathetic joy is, oh, you're happy, I'm happy. And the fourth one has a little bit different tone, equanimity, finding a kind of balance within it all.

So loving kindness, each of these measurables has what's called a near enemy and a far enemy. And the near enemy of loving kindness is coldness, and the far enemy is grasping, carrying too much, getting carried away. So equanimity is finding balance within these very powerful emotional states. So the good news is they're immeasurable. You can't get rid of them. You got them now. And they're really useful in a relationship. Bottomless wells.

Exactly. Yeah. Take us to the fourth. Fourth noble truth is the path. There's a way to work with it. And it's not an eightfold path, although I do apply the eightfold path stages to relationships,, as a meditation teacher, mirrors actually the practice of meditation, which has three particular qualities, which I will just mention briefly. The first is meditation is precise. You're a meditator.

I know you know this. You place attention on the object of your meditation, which in most cases is the breath. It could be a mantra or an image. It's out of a car horn in the background. Or out of a car horn in the background, exactly. That's my New York City mantra. Which is a beautiful thing.

I'm amazed it's the first time we've ever heard one. So it's very one-pointed. You place your attention on the breath or the mantra, whatever it is, and if you stray into anything, it's considered thinking, so you come back. Foo! Super precise, one-pointed. From that, oddly, something interesting happens. You sit there being one-pointed, allowing yourself to be exactly as you are. like yourself you don't like yourself you're distracted you're not distracted doesn't matter doesn't matter because to meditate you don't have to stop thinking please if you think that

stop thinking that you just sit there with yourself as you are you open And from this precision, the ability to open arises magically. Meditation is famously associated with insight, sometimes called the practice of insight. So from this one-pointedness, this openness of mind happens. Insight arises. It's quite expensive. The third quality is called letting go. Because you put your attention on the breath, you let yourself be as you are, then you notice you're distracted.

That's awesome. You just woke up. The instruction is let go. Letting go is very profound. Because then you let go and you're in space for a moment until you come back to your object, breath or mantra. Letting go is the lesson of being human. Letting go, letting go, letting go. So precise, open, letting go in a relationship. What do these things mean? So the precision is the foundation

of meditation. The foundation of a relationship in mind, is very simple. It starts with good manners. That may sound really cheesy. Yeah, because good manners are profound. It's not just, do I use this fork or not? It's, am I actually thinking of you and what you are experiencing and how I might be kind to you? Am I noticing you? Good manners are profound form of thoughtfulness. And you actually think about the person. It's radical. If you don't have that, it's very hard to establish the foundation of a relationship. So it's like the focused awareness in a very directed way. Exactly. Without an agenda.

And also to be honest. Like to say the truth when you know it and to say it skillfully, not blurtingly. Those are the precise, that's the precise piece of this path. Good manners, truth telling. The second quality, openness. I'm laughing because I was quite taken aback when I realized how this came into play, which was to imagine that the person you're in a relationship with is of at least equal importance to yourself. Shocking. Oh, you're there.

Yeah. I'm going to be open to you. I'm going to be open to you. I'm going to be open to you. And the third step, and the book has more suggestions than this, is letting go. I find this very interesting, personally, that as we were talking about romance ends, just as, sorry, But intimacy has no end. The letting go piece in a relationship is letting go constantly of how you think it ought to have gone, to be with what is, in such a way that everything you encounter, wonderful experiences, detrimental experiences, loss, boredom, confusion, everything that you encounter together can actually be used to deepen intimacy, which has no end, and that you can commit to for a lifetime. You can't commit to romance, you can't commit to any feeling, but you can commit to deepening intimacy. That made me very happy when I realized that. I could do that,

honestly. I can't honestly say, yeah, I'll always love you, but I will always try to act lovingly towards you or see you or be with you or stay near you as you go through what you go through and we and I go through things. That I can commit to. So that to me is very hopeful. So precise, open, let go. This all emerged out of your own seeking to try and understand which way was up in your own relationship and trying to figure out, how do I understand this? How do I navigate it? How do I be in it or not be in it? But how do I at least figure out how to be okay with this person in this moment and maybe in another, another, another, another.

And wow, when I go back to the beginning, this whole idea kind of jumps out at you. You start to apply it in the context of your own relationship. And like you said also, Duncan is not a Buddhist. Were you sort of, were you actively and openly saying, okay, I am now sort of engaging in the Four Noble Truths of Love and the

relationship and sharing with him what you were doing and how you were doing it and say, come, come do this with me. Or was this just, huh, here's a bit of wisdom. Let me try it on for size and relationship.

And maybe he'll pick up on what's happening and not. And if he wants to engage in any of these reciprocally, awesome. And if not, that's fine too. How did this then turn around and unfold in the context of your relationship? Yeah, I appreciate you asking that. There's actually a great benefit to being married to a non-practitioner, quote unquote, when you are a practitioner of something, in my case, Buddhism. And the great value is that you cannot bullshit them with Dharma notions. You cannot unload some Dharma stuff on them and think that it will mean anything. You have to be those things.

So, I didn't say, hey, baby, I've discovered the four noble truths of love. Let me tell you what they are. Instead, I started acting like discomfort was part of the deal and looking at it together was loving and meeting it together could deepen our intimacy, started sort of doing those things. Luckily, he is, I'm not saying this to be humble, he is much more loving naturally than I am. He's more relational. He's more naturally attuned to the dynamics of a relationship than I am. So I didn't have to like convince him of anything, but it was more the way I showed up. And of course, the way you show up has much more impact on the way someone else shows up than any charts and graphs that you can unroll about.

This is my theory of relationships, which is basically useless. It's useless, the theory. The practice is the only thing that matters. So all I had to do, which is not a small thing, I'm not trying to minimize it. All I had to do was just try to do these things. And it changed things for us. Yeah. And there's another lesson in there, which is that I know you're asked this very often.

I've been asked it very often, too, which is, I've discovered this amazing body of knowledge or idea or practice. How do I, quote, get my significant other to do it too and to see how important and transformational it is? And the answer is what you were just saying, which is, you don't. You just live it. You just be it. And the quality of you living and being in the context of a relationship will or will not affect that other person in a way where they want to in some way stand in a similar energy or not. And that is all you can do. And it is the best thing you can do.

But I agree. I hear that too. I want to be loving in this way. I want to think relationships shouldn't be comfortable and so on. How do I get this other person to do that? Well, just as you're saying, just show up and be that way. Yeah. I love the idea of the Four Noble Truths applied to the context of love. And I'm actually really excited to start kind of dancing with them, exploring them, sharing them. So as we kind of come full circle together, again, I can't believe it's

been five years since we hung out and actually recorded a conversation. And I don't even remember if back then in the early days of Good Life Project, when we were filming, if I always ended with the same question that I do now, which is, if I offer the phrase to you to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life is to be unafraid to be as brilliant and luminous and ridiculous and loving as you actually really are. No shame. Thank you. Thank you. I love talking to you. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Life Project podcast. And thanks to our absolutely fantastic and wonderful sponsors. If you love the show, if you dig the show, please support them. They help make the podcast possible. Check out the links in today's show notes to find them. See you next week.

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