Good Life Project - Tara Brach | Wisdom For Anxious Times

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

My guest today, Tara Brach, has been one of my teachers for years, though she never knew it. Back in the early days of podcasting, I stumbled upon her weekly dharma talks or Buddhist teachings and meditations that she’d offer at her Insight Meditation Center in DC, record, then air as podcasts, and the blend of her gentle presence, her deep wisdom that was clearly not just studied, but also lived, her humility, real-world sensibility, and humor drew me in. Tara’s teachings blend Western psychology, she’s also a clinical psychologist, along wtih Eastern spiritual practices, mindful attention to our inner life, and a full, compassionate engagement with our world. The result is a distinctive voice in Western Buddhism, one that offers a wise and caring approach to freeing ourselves and society from suffering.She is kindness and insight embodied, and I’ve learned so much from both her offerings and also the way she seems to move through life over the years. Which is why I was so excited to be able to spend some time going deep into not just certain pivotal moments in Tara’s path, but also the powerful tools and practices she’s developed in the name of allowing us to breathe more easily into whatever comes our way, at the core of which is something Tara shorthands with the acronym RAIN, which is transformational and we explore how it can move into our lives, especially in the context of compassion, acceptance, and what’s been going on in society these days. You can find Tara Brach at:Website : https://www.tarabrach.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/tarabrach/Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, my guest today, Tara Brock, has been one of my teachers for years, though she probably never knew it. Back in the early days of podcasting, I stumbled upon her weekly Dharma talks or Buddhist teachings and meditations that she would offer at her Insight Meditation Center in DC and then record and air as podcasts. And the blend of her gentle presence and her deep wisdom that was clearly not just studied, but also lived, her humility, real world sensibility and humor just absolutely drew me in. In Tara's teachings, they blend Western psychology. She's also a clinical psychologist, along with Eastern spiritual practices,

mindful attention to our inner life, and a full, compassionate engagement with our world. And the result is this distinctive voice in Western Buddhism, one that offers a wise and caring approach to freeing ourselves and society from suffering. She is kindness and insight embodied. And I have learned so much from both Tara's offerings and also the way she seems to move through her life, which is why I was so excited to be able to spend some time going deep into not just certain pivotal moments in her path, but also some of the really powerful tools and practices that she has developed in the name of allowing us to breathe more easily into really whatever comes our way, at the core of which is something Tara shorthands with the acronym RAIN, which is this transformational process that we

explore and we look at how we can move into our lives, especially in the context of compassion, acceptance, and what's been going on in society these days with a bit greater awareness and ease. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. 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. So I heard Lomarado in conversation with Dan Harris, and he mentioned this interesting question to lead with, and that was, how's your heart? And not long ago, I heard you in conversation with your friend, Dan Gottlieb, which was this beautiful conversation. And we'll touch on that a bit. And you led into that conversation with that very same question. So I thought maybe it would be an interesting way for us to lead into our conversation by simply inviting you to share how your heart is right now. Jonathan, I'm glad you're opening that way.

I first heard it when you heard it, that opening with Lama Rod, and I started with him that way. And there's nothing better than a check into the heart. So right now I'm just feeling a kind of gladness and just a gratitude. I often think of Rumi saying, do you make regular visits to yourself? And it just always feels like such a gift when, you know, there's that invitation to say, okay, what's right here in this heart right now. So in this moment, a gladness to be talking to you, feeling a lot of, I have a lot of blessings in my life and the contrast of that and the degree of

suffering and pandemonium in our world is just so big that that's the ever present backdrop. So there's kind of the mix of sorrow and worry and concern, and also a feeling of gratitude, both for my personal blessings, but also a sense of hopefulness actually right now. Yeah. It's interesting to sort of have that balance of acknowledging the, you could fairly call it mayhem that tends to be swirling around so many of us right now. At the same time, touching down into this place of gratitude, I mean, I think gratitude is a really interesting word. If we actually circle back to that conversation where I first heard you share that question with Dan Gottlieb, I mean, his story alone blew my mind. I actually wasn't familiar with him until you introduced me to him.

And would you share a little bit about him? Because I think his story and the way that he sort of found his way back to this sense of present gratitude is really beautiful and compelling. Yeah. So Dan Gottlieb, probably in his early 30s, he was a psychologist, clinical psychologist, married, children. And he got into an accident that he ended up paraplegic. And he talks about his first kind of right at the beginning in intensive care and how everything in him just felt like life's not going to be worth living. I don't think I can do this. And he shared with me how one night an intensive care nurse was with him and she was really down.

She had a relationship falling apart and so on. And she talked to him for hours about it. And the next morning, she came by and said, you know, it just made a world of difference to talk to you. And when she left, he said, you know, I can live. If I can be engaged and feel a sense of that giving and receiving life's worth it. And he's talked about how he's had just countless ups and downs, but there's something in him that is so cherishing life that he's probably the most grateful person I know. And there's something

about that, Jonathan, this person who's been confined to a wheelchair for decades. And soon after his accident, actually, his wife died. And he's gone through so many losses. And for him to have the basic lead into life being one of cherishing and savoring, it's just such a model. It's such a model. So yeah, Dan Gottlieb, he was a radio host in Philly for years for anyone that's interested in following his story. And he has a grandson on the spectrum and he's written some beautiful books, including something to do with Sam in the title. So yes, he's a notable. I reflect often on the research that comes out of the world of positive psychology and our kind of stunning ability to habituate to circumstances that we might deem both good or bad. And in the classic literature in that world, they actually offer these two contrasts of somebody who has won the lottery and somebody who has lost function in their body, somebody who has become either para or quadriplegic, and show how a year or two later, both of those extremes tend to habituate to their

circumstance and return to a fairly similar mean to the way that they experienced life beforehand in terms of their lens. And I know in the world of positive psychology, gratitude-based practices have become such a central modality that people have been researched as a way to just keep bringing you back and keep bringing you back. But it often sounds very just sort of a little too light to so many people out there in the world to really be in any meaningful way effective. And it is. I mean, we do have a set point in terms of what we come back to. And meditation, gratitude, there are actually ways we can change that set point. And I do feel like that's what Dan has done. And there's a lot more people now getting on the gratitude wave because of positive

psychology and the research, knowing that if you just have a gratitude buddy and just write down in an email three things that you're grateful for that day, you don't even have to say hello to them, just write down those things. There's a shift in your body. And my husband and I have started a while ago a gratitude practice where no matter what, before we go to sleep each night, we share what we're grateful for from the day. And we have a couple of times a week, we do a meditation together where we do a check-in and we always start with what we're grateful for. And we can then get into the deepest challenges and even where we're dealing with stuff between us. But there's something about the container that creates that reminds us of a bigger picture. So it is a precious

practice. Yeah, it really is amazing. I don't know if you're familiar with Dan Tomasulo at all in his work. He's a therapist, but he's also a former stand-up comic and studied theater for years. And he took the sort of traditional gratitude visit that I think Marty Seligman really popularized. You write a one-page letter to somebody who's done something deeply meaningful to you, and then you read it to them, which they've shown is about the single most effective gratitude and adventure on the planet. And Thomas Hulot took it to the next level where he literally, what he realized was a lot of people actually, the person that they would most want to write that letter to is no longer available to them. Maybe they passed on, maybe they're just not able to actually reach out to them.

And he would tell them to pull up an empty chair and sort of like envision the person in the chair and read it to them. And then also reverse roles and be that person. And the effects that he described are just breathtaking. I can imagine it. It's like with any of the heart practices, if you feel a sense of love for someone and then you say it out loud, it activates the motor cortex, which actually enhances the experience of loving. So if you're just thinking about somebody you care about and you mentally just think of them and then you whisper their name and whisper, I love you, there'll be an upwell in your body of loving. So it really makes sense. That's why in compassion training, which is really a fascination to me because I feel like that's the evolutionary

training our world most needs, where we learn to be able to really feel vulnerability and then respond with care. The true compassion, mature compassion involves activity. It involves engaging and actually through our words and our actions, acting on the feeling of caring. That's what brings it alive. So I love what you're saying about actually speaking out that letter. It really does allow us to embody the experience. Yeah. And I love the word embody also, because I think a lot of us are coming around to this notion also that these practices can't exist from the head up or from the neck up. They've got to be embodied in some way, shape,

or form. They've got to be felt. And that's the real challenge, what you're saying, Jonathan, because let's say with compassion, we can hear about people suffering. And mostly our response is, oh, those poor things. It's like a sympathetic but abstract thing. And it's not that common that we actually have that tenderness, that warmth, that full feeling in our hearts where there's real caring. And the understanding is that real compassion is not a sense of pity or real sympathy towards somebody else. It's more how we really share. And it's not your suffering, it's our shared suffering. But in order to experience that, we actually have to feel things in our body and our deep conditioning. This is a really pervasive

societal and really existential conditioning is to pull away from vulnerability. So really what we need is vulnerability training, like how to be with what feels intolerable. Because if you're in pain and I can't just open and let myself sense, well, what's it like being you? I won't have an authentic sense of compassion. Yeah. I think we're really well trained at pushing things away. If it's remotely uncomfortable, I know there's been such a focus of your work over such an extended season. You have an interesting personal story also.

You, from what I understand, grew up in Montclair just outside of New York and end up in Clark, and then spend about a decade or so after that in ashrams. And then there's an incident that happens that sort of awakens you to the fact that this is not quite where I want to be. You end up back in DC. And really, it sounds like pursuing this dual path of psychotherapy, psychology, from a clinical standpoint, and also Buddhism, sort of like your lens begins to shift to this different practice. And that has become such a center of who you are and how you bring yourself to the world and how you offer yourself to the world for decades now. I'm curious because it sounds like the blossoming of both clinical psychotherapy and Buddhism happened at a fairly similar time. There was a fairly tight overlap there. And the psychotherapy, or at least the therapeutic

orientation, kind of came first. It sounds like that was emerging when you were in the ashrams. What was it about the different tools that you were studying, that you were being trained in, that you found wanting that you then found in Buddhist practices and tools? Well, it's a great question. And there were two main currents that had me end up in an ashram. And one of them was that when I was at Clark, I got very, very involved with social activism and, you know, left-wing activism, you know, a lot of organizing, tenants' rights organizing and so on. And I also started practicing yoga and the contrast between sometimes being at rallies or at meetings and the kind of hate and anger and waving a fist.

And then I'd be in yoga class and the sense of peacefulness. I remember one time going for a walk after yoga class and it was spring. And at one point I just stopped, it was in the evening, and I could smell the wafting of the fruit tree blossoms and just the evening sky and feeling of it all. And realized that my mind and my body were in the same place at the same time. And there was a sense of peace and happiness. And I felt like, oh my gosh, this is what our world really needs. And it became clear to me that if we wanted to change, transform the world for more justice, more compassion, we needed to be coming from this. So that was a major current.

I was actually already scheduled to go. I was going to transfer to Cornell and then go to law school. And I shifted gears. I made a dramatic turn. Instead of going to law school, I joined an ashram. So that was a big one for me. And the other piece to share that brought me to an ashram was that during college, like so many, I was really facing myself and facing my insecurities. And I remember with one friend, I was on a camping trip and she said something like, you know, I'm finally learning to be my own best friend. And I realized with this horror that I was just the furthest thing. You know, I was like, I was so filled with, I mean, I hated my body, you know, being overweight, eating too much, letting down my family, not being a good daughter, being a bad friend,

you know, just insecurity on every level, always falling short, which I came to call the trance of unworthiness. So that, you know, then again, with the yoga and the meditation, I sensed a pathway to love myself back into healing. So both of those currents were there, Jonathan, both the sense of what's going to change the world, well, I need within this body-mind to come home some to some inner peace, and also to love the life that's here, not to be in a sense of self-aversion and blame, you know, with this voice of an inner critic non-stop. So the tools that I got from being in the ashram were both learning to meditate and be able to come back to the present moment and find some peace and ease in the present moment. And also, and this I kind of had to find my way into,

bringing increasing amount of kindness to the places in me that were hurting. And that's what started drawing me more and more to psychology. So I really wanted to weave together the tools of Western psychology, which have a lot of good tools, with the practices of meditation that teach us to not only to quiet our mind, but to truly unconditionally embrace the moment, including the life that's inside us. So those were the two currents that got me into the ashram and then deepened in Buddhist practice because Buddhism so right at its core talks about how with any moment of wanting life different,

I want myself different, I want you to be different, any moment of either blame or resistance or grasping, we can't really be fully here, fully alive, and in love with life. And so there's a really deep teaching about how to recognize the ways that we keep ourselves small with the self-stories that are just non-stop, and to open back into a very compassionate and very awake and very inclusive presence. So Buddhism really deepened the kind of tools that I got for both of those streams. Yeah, I love seeing how they all weave together. 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. I mentioned positive psych earlier, and I've come to sort of see almost that entire field as a whole bunch of nerds working really hard to validate the tools of Buddhism. Oh, that's a great one. I'm going to have to, I'm going to keep that one. That's a great description.

And many of those nerds are very good friends of mine, by the way. But yeah, you know, it's funny because so many of the actual practices and the tools when you really break it down are things that have been around for thousands of years. And now science is saying, oh, wait a minute. Oh, this actually matters and it works. And then they try and deconstruct, well, how does it work? And rather than just saying, but we know it does, so let's use it now rather than wait until we can prove why it works. But all that effort at looking at how it works and validating it has actually been what's broken it into mainstream. So that, you know,

I can talk about how if you really have a feeling of open heartedness and you stay with it and you feel it in your body, you're actually training your mind in that direction, you know, and then you can have the neuroscientist say, yeah, if you spend 20 to 30 seconds and you really feel the sensations of gratitude or openheartedness, it actually creates neural pathways, it creates memories that stick, you know, because it goes down into your deeper parts of your memory, and that you can actually change your emotional state over time. So people really like having science behind these mystical and ancient practices. And I'm raising my hand right there also, because I'm sort of like a citizen nerd when it comes to

all of this stuff. I love the science too. And I feel like it's, it's actually really useful to understand. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you, you shared in different ways how we tend to, the minute we experience something in our circumstance that we don't want to be our circumstance, we're very practiced in the order of pushing it away. You often use this, this word trance in various different contexts. Earlier you used it in the context of pushing it away. You often use this word trance in various different contexts. Earlier, you used it in the context of unworthiness, but it's also more of like this generalized state. Tell me more about what are we talking about when we're talking about trance? Yeah. Trance, like a dream, is a kind of distorted or fragmented

miniature reality that we're living in, that we're believing in those moments. And it's like waking up from a dream. When you wake up from the trance, you realize that there's a bigger world here and there's more. I sometimes think of it like being in an airplane and you fly into a cloud and your whole world becomes cloud. But then when you get past the cloud, the cloud's still there, sense of compassion and appreciation versus constantly being in contraction against what's here. Yeah. I feel like so many of us live, I would probably sadly argue, the better part of our lives in that state, wanting something else to be our day-to-day reality. That's exactly right. I sometimes think of wanting the next moment to contain what this moment does not. We're kind of tumbling into the what's next and are else very obviously

pushing away or contracting against the what's here. But either way, we're contracted and we're forgetting the larger sense of who we are. Yeah. There's this interesting sort of breakdown that I've heard you offer, the flags of trance. Yeah. In a way, we know the flags once we know, once we start becoming familiar, like for instance, anytime we really speed up a lot, we're usually racing to the next thing and are racing away from something, or when we realize we've been obsessively thinking, you know, we pull away from the living reality and go into our minds. So obsessive thinking is a flag of trance. And then judgment's a big one. I think judgment's the most pervasive that causes suffering where we

judge ourselves or judge others. And it's a way to try to control things or feel better about ourselves. But we're living in a very small and often conflictual world. So those are some of the big ones that I see. And really, I think of meditation and mindfulness as ways of recognizing and waking up out of trance. And one of the most personally alive examples for me, I often break down mindfulness meditation, mindfulness and compassion meditation into an acronym. It's the RAIN acronym, which is recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. Because in those moments, we come back to a larger presence. We wake up out of trance.

And my mother moved down here where I live in Virginia when she was about 82. And during that time, my biggest challenge was that I was super busy. And so my trance state was feeling guilty that I was letting her down and anxious that I wasn't getting stuff done. And that would be very contracting. So at one point, I remember working on a talk on loving kindness. And my mother walked into my office to give me an article from the New Yorker. And I barely looked away from my screen. And so she just very graciously put it down and started retreating. But when I turned to look at her, I had this just pain, Jonathan. It was like, I don't know how many years I'll have with her.

And so that's when I decided, oh, this trance, I'm going to regret this. And I practiced RAIN then. And so I recognized, okay, feeling anxious about getting things done. I allowed the feeling to be there because with mindfulness, you really need to let what's here be here. I almost will say, this belongs, it's a wave in the ocean. And then when I investigated, I could feel... An investigation, by the way, is really somatic. It's not a mental kind of conceptual thing. It's can you investigate and really get intimate with it in your body, you know. So I could feel the clutch in my body and I could sense the belief swirling that if I didn't get things done, I'd fail and be rejected by the world, that kind of a sequence. So I investigated and felt the clutch. And then

the nurturing was really... I often put my hand on my heart with nurturing, with the anavrine, because there's a lot of science now that shows that that actually begins to soften our hearts. And I just sent a message, you know, that I love her and the teachings will flow through me. I didn't have to be so anxious about preparing. And I just sent care inwardly. And I could feel this opening from trance where the world and what I was got bigger. I was not this anxious, frenzied person that felt guilty but was just speeding along. I was resting again in a just much more tender, open-hearted space. And I did that a lot. I practiced that RAIN practice a lot when my mother was around. And I started finding that I could really relax and just be with her rather than planning when I was going to get back to work. And we'd

have our big salads together for dinner and I wouldn't be anxiously trying to figure out how much I get done after dinner or take her to a doctor's appointment and just be with her. And we'd go on our long walks in the river without, it could be slow and long and okay. And she died about, no, three years later. And of course, you know, deep, deep grief because I adored my mom and we were really close, but really not regret because I felt like, you know, a lot of people tell me that rain saves their life. And I felt like rain had saved my life moments with my mom because it spared me being on automatic in reaction and going, you know, through my days with her in trance.

So I'm just sharing that with you because it feels to me like so relevant to our lives that we notice where we get small and just bring these practices of presence to that to free ourselves. I so agree. And as you're sharing that, one of the things that occurs to me also is that there's the RAIN process, you know, the recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. And I actually want to deconstruct that a little bit more with you, but it feels like there is also a precursor to that, which is cultivating the awareness to be able to know when we are getting small, when we are dropping into trance, so that we know,

oh, now it's time to actually step into this, to access these tools. I'm really glad you're naming that because that's probably the biggest question people say to me, okay, but I forget to even do RAIN. And that's where the flags come in, that we start looking at our lives and sensing, you know, where is there suffering? You know, where do I feel like I'm hooked in some way? Where do I feel like there's something between me and feeling closer to this particular person? Where am I at war with myself?

And then often it helps right at the beginning of the day to spend some quiet time and just have the intention to be awake. Because if we start the day with that intention to notice those things, it's almost like the field of gravity. We get more, our attention gets more alert. And then the biggest challenge of all is being willing to pause. I call it the sacred art of pausing because it's like being on a bicycle and the more anxious we get, the faster we pedal and we're pedaling away from presence. And to be able to actually stop the bike, get off and actually say, okay,

let's have the courage to be with what's right here. That's really the compelling piece. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, I found that that's the ability to sort of zoom the lens out a bit and get meta and recognize when I'm stepping into that, you know, into trance, into however we may describe it personally. That's actually, I think, come for me largely through just, I've had a daily practice for about a decade, just a very simple mindfulness pranayama practice every morning. And people ask, well, how does it make you feel? And I'm like, on a daily basis, I have no idea. I'm out of 25 minutes of sitting time. I feel like maybe I get two minutes of actual still time on a good day.

But what I have noticed is over a period of months and then years, it changes the way you move through the day so that you're both less responsive, but also so that you start to see more clearly, I feel like. If I'm being an idiot one day, I'm aware of the fact that there's no reason at this moment in time I'm being an idiot other than the fact that I probably slept badly. And rather than just spinning and being aggressive, I'll just kind of pull back and give myself a break and maybe just stop working and go for a walk or something like that. Because I know that I need it. And I know that I'm not being in the world the way that I want to be. And I didn't notice that. It took a long time

until I noticed that something had shifted in my ability to sort of perceive, almost look down on myself from outside of my body and be like, oh, this is what's really happening. That's a beautiful way to describe the gift of it, though. I'm really taking that in, Jonathan, that in a way, when you think of what we're doing when we're meditating, we're just practicing coming back again and again right here. And it sort of trains us when we're in the day to come back. And that's the gift is that we're just not gone as long. There's less of a gap I find for myself. I still get reactive, but there's less of a gap now between noticing that and then pausing and in some way inviting myself back, the other thing I notice is I don't believe my thoughts. And to me, wow, you know, and I've noticed when people leave a week-long

retreat, let's say, that's the takeaway. You don't have to believe your thoughts. And our thoughts keep us in a very small world because we know with the negativity bias that a lot of them are fear-driven. And so they keep our body anxious and they keep us in a smaller sense of who we are than the truth. So being able to see that my mind has been telling me that I screwed up in something and I wasn't very sensitive to somebody and I kind of let people down and I was modeling and I shouldn't, you know, now a lot of people are going to just... Anyway, once I see that circling and I can say, wait a minute, you just don't have to believe your thoughts. And I can come back into my body and come back to my breath. And then I can look at

the situation with fresh eyes and say, okay, what lessons can I learn? But I'm not caught in this very tight place of feeling failure and fear. Yeah. That capacity, I think, is really, even before you get to the process, the right process, that sort of precursor capacity, I think, is transformative as well. You've had a lifelong practice and deeply trained in a lot of these ideas and tools. And I guess it was probably a number of years back where you also, and very active, athletic for the vast majority of your life. And then your body, there came a time where your body started to effectively betray you. And I remember first reading, you wrote about it back in 2012, an essay, Living Life No Matter What, that then you've written and described more since then. But it seems like there was this moment where the very identity of you as this type of person who does this in the world was being challenged in a profound way. And you were faced with having to figure out how to grapple with this and to step into all these things that you had been learning and studying in a completely different way. Yeah. And that's exactly what happened. I was spiraling down

for probably six or eight years. I have a genetic disorder. It's the pre-mutation of fragile X that makes... And one of the symptoms is that my joints or my connective tissue is too elastic. And so I can injure myself really easily. And I went into some years of less and less mobility. And so here I was, this person who kind of, without knowing it, was quite vain about being very fit and physical and plus loving, loving being outdoors and whether it was running or kayaking or boating or swimming or whatever it was. And then it was really one summer when I was on Cape Cod on the East Coast, and all my family and friends were going out to the ocean. And I could no longer boogie board, which was one of my passions.

And I couldn't walk on sand as part of it. I had to be carried to get onto the beach. And I remember watching everyone leave and just breaking down. And it wasn't as much the identity of someone who's fit or anything like that. It was more the pure grief of, oh my gosh, the life I love, I cannot live. And the pain of that loss. And that's where practice kicked in, just staying in that kind of fire of loss and feeling it and letting it tear me apart. And in that presence, what I realized was it was really coming from a love for life. And so there was this real prayerfulness in me at that time, Jonathan, where I just prayed, you know, please may I

live and love this life no matter what, you know. And it was a really powerful prayer because what it did was it forced me to take refuge in presence. And so even if I couldn't do some of my hikes by the river, I could look at the fern in my bedroom and just love the delicacy of that leaf and just absolutely savor that. And it actually was very revealing. The book I wrote, True Refuge, came out of that experience, how it's when we sense everything being taken away, we have to find a way, a refuge that can give us a sense of safety, peace, love, belonging. And during that period, I deepened my capacity to feel a belonging and tenderness and connection with other people and with plants and animals and really take refuge and presence in the very moment that's right

here and sense behind it all a very timeless, vast awareness that's really our true home. So it gave me pathways to real sense of refuge that I hadn't otherwise gone so deeply into. And just to complete the story is that I am much, much better. And I don't understand why I managed to spiral out as much, but I'm able to swim and hike and do a lot of stuff. So grateful for it. But here's the thing. I know everything will go. I really know that. I know from the inside out that what I love about living will be taken away and then I'll be left again with presence, awareness, and love. And that's enough. I know I'll fight losing things. It's not like I'll let go easily. I'll fight it again. But I have more of a true faith or trust that I can rest in something larger. So I won't be holding on quite as tightly.

Yeah. I mean, to be able to hold onto that realization is pretty stunning because many of us go through something in our lives where it drops us to our knees, whether it's a loss, whether it's a health crisis, whatever it may be, where we feel an intense sense of present pain. And in that moment, we make all of the prayers and the promises and we say like, if I get through this, I will be this way for the rest of my life. And then God willing, whatever that source of angst goes away, gets treated, you move through it. But the further away from that inciting incident most of us get, the more removed we become from the original intensity of the pain, the more we also abandon the commitments, the practices, the awakenings that would allow us to stay in this place of awareness and preparedness and acceptance that would allow us to stay in this place of awareness and preparedness and acceptance,

you know, that would allow us to keep our world not small, you know, rather than just sort of like expanding out rapidly, you know, out of force and then slowly allowing it to contract over time. What really strikes me about what you're sharing is that you have moved away from this experience of intense crisis where the pain that motivated so much of this reexamination is not present today, but it rewired something in you that made you continue to revisit this and say, but it will be one day, whether it's because of this or just because of aging.

And I wanna keep this lens on the way I live my life. Well, what you're bringing up is it's so wise and true that the intense dramas actually just catalyze the spiritual path. And for me, I am getting older. you know, I'm 67 and I am so aware of mortality. It's every day, many, many moments a day, aware of impermanence and aware of how many people around me are getting sick and dying, all the losses, aware of this body, you know, getting older. And I find that I cherish that remembering and that the more I can stay really close in with the truth that it's all going, the more authentically, authentically I'm loving. It's like we have to let go a huge amount to be big enough to love unconditionally.

And so I actually use impermanence and mortality as part of my practice, just on purpose noticing and paying attention to how it's all passing. Yeah. It completely resonated with that in a 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. 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 I mentioned that I've had about a 10-year practice. I didn't come to my practice willfully.

As many people don't. I ended up with tinnitus. And so there's a sound in my head 24 seven. And a lot of people actually have this, but a percentage of people it's, it's devastating. And I was in that percentage of people. I was really struggling to wake up every day and get through each day and live. And I was heading into a very dark place and I had a yoga practice and a spiritual practice for years before that, but I'd always kind of faked the meditation part. I would say, I'm a moving meditator. I do it mountain biking and rock climbing, which I did, but it's not the same. And I got to a place where I kind of said to myself, okay, I'm spiraling into the abyss here. And every moment of my waking hour is focused on trying to avoid the sound in my head, distract myself from it, and hope that it's not going to be there anymore. And the big shift for me was when I said, it's funny, I literally remember

a Buddhist teaching that I'd never understood previously, which translates roughly to abandon hope. And I always thought that was so futile. And it came back into my mind and I thought to myself, well, it doesn't necessarily mean abandon all hope that maybe someday this will go away, but ask a different question. What if this is me for life? How do I get as good as I can be right now and just accept that this is what it is? What I found myself doing was inadvertently moving through the process of rain, recognizing what is this? What is the reality of what's happening here, and then trying to do everything in my waking hours to push the sound away to allow it,

and then to investigate it. So I actually, I started a sitting practice focusing on my breath, but immediately every time I would sit, all I could do was hear my head. So then I followed the traditional instruction. I allowed the sound of my head to become the focal point. And it was devastating at first because I didn't want it to be there. But then when I started to investigate, I started, well, what's really going on here? What is this sound? Is it one sound?

Is it three? Are there layers? Is it one sound? Is it three? Are there layers? Is it melodic? Why am I actually triggered by this? But I lived in New York City and it was 10 times louder all around me and I was fine with that. And then sort of like opening this nurturing heart. And I had no idea I was moving through this process.

It changed everything. Wow. It's a beautiful story. It's one I'll share with others because I know a lot of people who fight against what's going on with exactly what you're describing, the sound. And it's true that what we resist just keeps on causing suffering. And that in the moments that we truly, truly say it's okay, like truly say it's okay, all the space opens up. So it's like we become the ocean that has room for it.

But your example is powerful because there's such a deep part of us that fights when it's so close in and so consistent like that. So thank you for that. Yeah. And as I sit here talking to you today, the moment I look for the sound, it's there. But that's really the only time it's there. And it doesn't mean that my brain isn't generating the signal for it. I'm just okay with it. It's just a part of everything else, all the other stimuli that enter my daily experience. We've been talking about a lot of upheaval and suffering. And I know a lot of your focus has really been expanding out to this notion of compassion, not just on an individual level, but at scale and applying these ideas and tools in that

way. Tell me more about your lens on sort of what's happening around us these days and how we can potentially tap some of these ideas and tools and practices to both open up a more compassionate space within ourselves individually and also more broadly. Well, thank you for asking that because it is, to me, it can't be separated if we really want to discover who we are, if we really want to experience the fullness of our being that has to include all beings. And we have such deep conditioning towards othering and bad othering that it requires really intentionally facing that. And wow, it's on display right now. And it's not just like the bad people are doing the bad othering, so to speak. In other words, whether

there's a violent person, bad othering, a nonviolent person, it goes both ways and the violence keeps on perpetuating itself. So one of the stories that impacted me a while ago was hearing about Ruby Sales, who's a great civil rights activist and elder, describing being with a young woman and her mother. Her mother's a hairdresser. The young woman had kind of come in bedraggled after a night on the streets. And Ruby looked at her and all of a sudden just was just moved to ask her, where does it hurt? And all this young woman's story came pouring out about incest when she was younger and so on. I think she hadn't ever told her mother. And that question, where does it hurt? If we could, no matter who it is and what they're

doing, in some way be able to look deeper and say, where does it hurt? What's going on behind your activity that would make you act this way? We might still do everything we can, I mean we would, to protect ourselves and protect others from getting hurt, but our hearts wouldn't be shot. And I often use the metaphor of a person walking in the woods and they see a dog by a tree and they go to pet the dog and the dog lurches at them with its fangs bared. And the person goes from being friendly towards the dog to bad dog. And then they see that the dog has its paw in a trap. And then everything shifts. It's like, oh my gosh, poor deer. Now they might not get really close because the dog could still be dangerous,

but their heart is no longer in a place of blame and anger. And that's a trance. Whenever we're creating a bad other, we're in a trance. There's something we're not seeing. And not only are we making them less than the full truth of who they are, we become less. We become the blaming person, the angry person, that our identity shrinks. So Jonathan, I think there's a training that is part of what's needed for our whole species in being able to wake up at a bad othering. Because as we know, we've been bad othering for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. And when a person looks different from us or acts in ways we don't like, we make them bad and the enemy. And it's not until our hearts can see their humanity,

and I'm talking about humans, but I also think we, other species, and end up violating them too. It's like wherever we're causing violation that we need to pause just as we were talking about in our personal lives and sense how it makes us smaller and it makes them smaller. And to me, one of the probably primary necessary places for this right now is around white supremacy. It's the place that in my own life I keep saying, how could I not have seen this? And, you know, even when I was feeling, you know, even just feeling pretty awake and so on, moving through life and not seeing how I'm participating in a society that daily, regularly has people of color, black, indigenous people of color, feeling threatened, feeling violated, and directly

treated unjustly. How could I not have seen how pervasive and horrible it is, and how it's been going on for centuries. And so I think we all have blind spots where we other, but we're so used to it, we don't see it, so we're participating in it. And if we want our world to move towards a more democratic, just, compassionate society, every single one of us, and I'm speaking as a white woman now more to white people, needs to be able to have the courage and commitment to look at the ways that we're part of that. And I've had a lot of really difficult, painful experiences in that process, but it just became so evident to me. I

remember a few years ago, it was more like about six or eight years ago now, my husband and I were swimming and we're swimming out to an island. And I remember swimming and feeling, wow, I'm really, I'm in my body and I'm feeling graceful and athletic and strong. Then I remember coming back and oh my God, I was exhausted. I could barely, barely get back. I was, you know, just totally awkward in the water and realizing that I had been carried by the currents and how that just like, wow, as a white person in this society, my life is so carried by the currents when I have friends that are every day fighting them. So that's a bit long-winded, but it feels like the place that it's critical that we all pay attention. Yeah. No, I so agree. I mean, one of the

questions that comes to me as you share that, this makes sense to me. When you ask that question, where does it hurt? How does that apply? Or when does it apply? Or does it apply in the context of somebody who is a part of a non-dominant or disempowered community, culture, demographic, whether we're talking about race, whether we're talking about business, whether we're talking about religion. Because in the context of somebody who's experiencing current harm at the hands, whether directly or indirectly, intentionally, or by impact of another individual or community, to ask them to then look back at the person or the community who they perceive as the source of this harm and say, where does it hurt? Feels like a heavy and potentially unjust ask. And that isn't the ask. That ask is the ask for those that are in a position of power. Okay. For the person in a non-dominant population, the where does it hurt is directed inwardly.

It's the commitment to bringing compassion and presence to the wounds within themselves. There's a natural unfolding sequence of how we heal personally and societally. And for people of color, it's to both individually and collectively find a way to hold and heal those wounds first and foremost to protect themselves from further wounding and where there are white allies and others who can get behind them, great. But no, it's not the responsibility of the non-dominant population to try to have compassion for those who are abusing them. And in general, this is a broader statement, forgiving someone that's hurt us, having compassion

towards someone that's hurting us or has hurt us can be premature. And when it's premature, it's actually not authentic. Like I've had many people that have been abused, sexually abused or otherwise abused as children who have felt really guilty because they couldn't forgive their parents and had some spiritual notion that they were supposed to forgive their parents. And I often have to say, that's premature. In fact, we can't will forgiveness or compassion. We can be willing, and then the first place we start is with the wounds inside ourselves. And if we skip that, if we try to forgive or have compassion to someone else when we haven't taken care of those wounds, in a way, it'll be a false persona.

We'll be kind of living in a smaller part of ourselves. So I'm frequently terming it this U-turn where instead of aiming or trying to aim our forgiveness outward, we bring the energy inward. And I'm putting my hands on my heart right now and deepen our presence and kindness to the place we're hurting. And we seek the support and the company and the community that can help us do it. And that's part of the reason in the Buddhist communities, we found it so important at our retreats and gatherings and communities to have to support the affinity sanghas, the BIPOC, black, indigenous, people of color communities within our community and the LGB communities, because there needs to be a certain amount of sense of safety and belonging to really support

us on the spiritual path. And when we have been oppressed and violated, first place that it's safe is with others that understand. And so that is a growing part of the spiritual understanding that this is a part of the development towards a larger community that really does belong is let the smaller places of belonging really be nourishing. Yeah, that lens is powerful, isn't it? And I think in no small part because of what you shared and because of the invitations, but also the acknowledgement that blanket prescriptions for all people coming from all histories and all places and all levels of trauma or wounding or benefit, we're sort of not in a moment where those are the appropriate invitation. Right, right. That's so well put. I hadn't put it

that way in my mind, But it's a time where we really need the flexibility and adaptability to have different people with different wounds, healing in different ways. And that takes a broadness of mind that's much more willing to be with ambiguity, because we don't have exact formulas for everybody. Yeah. We started our conversation with you sharing a bit and you also offering that part of what you're experiencing now is also hope and that we are in this moment of profound disruption and pain and a revealing of truths. And yet, whenever the ground is removed from beneath us, we have this invitation to explore, well, how do we want the ground to look when we step back onto it and start walking forward? And it does feel like we're in that moment right now. I agree with you. I think

that when there's suffering, there's a possibility of deepening our compassion and our consciousness. And it's huge right now. And the kind of hope I'm talking about, because you mentioned the word hope and giving up all hope, isn't an expectation that has a particular pathway and it's nothing we're grasping onto, like I can't be happy unless this happens, it's really opening ourselves to the possibility of what is possible if we all deepen our dedication to waking up our hearts and minds. And there's a growing dedication, I feel that in the atmosphere. There's more and more people that are reckoning with white

supremacy. I mean, it's just happening. It's happening at a much stronger, faster pace than before. Of course, we're going to have all the backlash and the very vivid expressions of the violence of it, but it's happening. And there are people around the world that are feeling more of a need than ever to hold hands and to help our planet. I mean, our planet is in such dire shape and people are waking up to that. And there are more people than ever that are horrified by the way we humans treat animals as food and animals to be at our disposal and the cruelty of it. And so the movement towards not being cruel to animals,

being compassionate and eating in a way that not just helps the animals, but really helps our earth and our own bodies, that's growing. So I'm just seeing on so many fronts more consciousness, and that makes me hopeful. Yeah, me as well. And it feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversations. So hanging out in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

The words that come to mind are serving, savoring, and where they come from, which is a loving presence, to really have life arise out of a loving presence. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com.

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