Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 132: George Haas, Regulating the 'Fear Mind'

Episode Date: April 25, 2018

George Haas has worked as a filmmaker, an artist, a doorman at "every major nightclub in New York City" in the '80s, and now he's a meditation teacher in Los Angeles, but even his meditation journey has many turns. "What can I tell you, I'm a seeker," Haas said, as he described how a regular practice helped ease the psychological trauma of a "crappy childhood," got him sober and now he guides others through his attachment theory-based healing practices. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Hey guys, I'm literally phoning in my introduction to this week's podcast because I can't make it to the studio because I'm in Oka Polko, not on vacation doing a story for nightline, which will air I think in the next few weeks, actually quite an incredible story.

Anyway, that's not what you came here for. We've got a great guest this week who has some really fascinating theories about the overlap between attachment theory, which is a psychological idea and meditation. George Haas is his name. Before we get to him, I just want to do a few items of business. I can't take calls this week because I'm not in the studio, but I do want to mention one thing, this is kind of like a PSA, for a previous guest. If you haven't heard her before, I recommend you go back and listen to her episode, Jessica Mori.

She goes by Jess. Jess Mori, she runs a program called IDME, sometimes known as inward bound mindfulness education. Outward bound is the program routines go into the woods, inward bound is where chains also go into the woods but also meditate. It's from everything I've heard, a great program and she just wanted me to remind people that if any parents or teenagers are listening to this, you can go to ibme.info, ibme.info. And there's room for the summer's retreats. A lot of parents come to me and talk to me about the anxiety.

Their team of yours are dealing with and we know it's on the rise and so this is one thing I think is worth looking into. Okay. So our guest this week, as I mentioned, George Hoss is his name. He's a meditation teacher who lives in LA. He focuses a lot on attachment theory, which is about the critical role that caregivers play in any person's development. George comes to this from a position of pain, really, in his personal life. He had a really rough childhood. He went on to experiment with a lot of different kinds of meditation, which he credits with helping get him sober. So he says it much in a much more interesting way than I do, so I'll shut up and bring

you to your class. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Thanks for doing this even though you have a cold. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. I'm happy to be here. Let me ask you the question I ask everybody,

which is how did you get into the meditation game? I guess I would say that I was desperate and in pain and wanted something that would help. And I found that doing even a basic concentration practice relieved that immediately. And so I had an advantage, or I saw an advantage in being able to practice. The aforementioned desperation and pain,

what was that about? I like to say that I had a crappy childhood and that a lot of the legacies of that came with me. And so that as I went on to try and get things to happen for me, say in my teens and 20s, that differentiation period, there were a lot of obstacles to getting that to happen. Mostly relational. I had a lot of opportunities, but because I couldn't manage the relationships, the opportunities didn't really grow into much. So when you say crappy childhood,

can you tell me a little bit about that? To the extent that you're comfortable, you don't have to share anything you don't want to. Yeah, I'm Irish family, a lot of drinking, a lot of violence, a lot of various kinds of abuse. So sounds genuinely crappy. Yeah, no, it was it's crappy by anybody's definition. Yeah, yeah And so I've read about you that you're interested in attachment theory and I'm hearing that come through and everything you said up until

The last thing you said which is that You had opportunities, but the relationships couldn't blossom because you had stuff on your own and that you needed to deal with. Right, I needed, I was very dissociative coming out of my childhood and dissociation and intimate relationships doesn't work very well, because you're not really there a lot of the time. And I had probably the most extreme outcome of attachment disturbance that you have. I've had my AAI done, you know, an AAI, an adult attachment interview as an assessment tool for what your actual attachment strategy is.

And so my outcome from childhood was one of the most disturbed really You were about to say something I apologize for interacting before you go down that whatever road you were about to go down Can you there may be some people don't aren't really familiar with attachment theory? Can you just walk us through what that is and then get to wherever you were going sure? attachment theory was originated by John Bulby and Mary Ainsworth. It was John Bulby's theory. He was an English psychiatrist who, one of the things I should tell you is that I can go into incredible detail about these things so I'm not sure what's appropriate, but this is a podcast man you can do it everywhere with no rules. How familiar are you with your psychoanalytic history? Assume zero because it's close to the truth. Okay.

Freud and young were the big guys at the end of the or the beginning of the 1900s, and then they moved into a kind of secondary anaphyroid, and Melon and the Klein was an object relations theorist. All of these were in general sense about how you react to things, not what happens to you. And John Bulby's interest really was in, isn't it what happens to you that affects these outcomes? And if you could track that, then you might be able to understand what kind of behavior, what kind of conditions a child faces and how that affects them and whether they would come into a skill set as an adult that was based on actually what happened

to them, not on how they imagination or fantasy related to it. But he discovered with Mary Ainsworth is three main kinds of attachment. So people who are securely attached to their mothers. of attachment. So people who are securely attached to their mothers. It doesn't have to be their mothers, but it often is. They're primary caregiver. And really what it is is the relationship between the mother or the primary caregiver and the infant that forms an idea of your own competency to get your needs met, and also what you can expect from the world. So there you are, a child, three months old, you cry out for someone to take care of you and depending on how they show up, you develop a working model of yourself as capable or incapable of getting your needs met. And

you also develop a working model of what you can expect from the world. So if they show up good enough, you have a sense that I'm competent, I can get my needs met and the world is likely to meet my needs. And if they don't do that, then you develop other views. I'm not competent of getting my needs met and the world is likely not to meet them. Or I'm not competent to get my needs met but the world will conditionally respond to me depending on how I perform or the world I'm not competent of getting my needs met in the world is a dangerous place that I should not engage in because

of what can happen. And so were you in that last category there? Yeah. Yeah, so you grew up, was it so were you in that last category there? Yeah. Yeah, so you grew up, was it New York City in which you grew up? No, I grew up in Chicago. Okay, so Chicago, difficult family, as a consequence of insufficient, or not good enough attachment,

you end up viewing the world as a hostile place that where you can't get your movement. Right, I grew up in a fluent way, but also with a depressed mother, a lot of drinking in my family. Those things are very scary for children because they alter the nature of how your caregiver responds to depending on how much they've had to drink,

which you don't really know how to calculate as a child. My mother also tended to be violent and unpredictably violent, and so those things were also scary and hard to manage. So we all have the conditioning that we had as children, and one of the things that it does is it affects these two things, the working model of self and the working model of the world. If you don't know that you have a working model of the self that says that you're not capable of getting your needs met, you still go about the world as if that's true for you.

And if you have the view that the world won't help you, you still go about the world as if that's true. Now, people who have a secure attachment, they may not be aware either that they think of themselves as capable of getting their needs met and that the world will meet their needs, but they do go about exploring the world in that way. It one sense what we're describing is in view, so in a conventional meditation way, exploring the view of the Self and the world.

If you don't think the opportunity is there for you, you often don't even see that it's there, even if it's being offered to you. When you refer to opportunities, what do you mean? Well, somebody likes you or you have a work opportunity. I mostly think of life as this pursuit of love and of work or work as a term of meaning, maybe a better term. You want to pursue and engage in activity which actually has meaning to you and you want to do it in the community of people who love you and will support you. And if you can do that, it doesn't really matter what it is you're doing as long as you

found meaning in what you do and also that the people are there to share that exploration with you in attachment. We would call that attachment in the relationships and exploration. And then depending on the conditioning you had either your good at relationships and good at exploring or some combination of that. For an example, as a dismissing adult, this would be sort of in the narcissistic end of we're a very psychologically oriented society in that way. So we often use the masters and model of narcissism at one end and borderline at the other.

Different in attachment. It's the dismissing view is that I don't really need anybody. anybody. And the internal sense is I'm great, I'm fantastic. I should have whatever I want. And with other people, the view is, you know, they're not really up to my level of fantastic this, so I'm entitled to just take from them whatever I want. And so you see in those kinds of relationships, it's one directional. You give to me and I don't reciprocate. In a preoccupied adult, which would be an anxious and bivalent child, the carcubing was so erratic that the child could never rely on the caregiver. This is a difference, say, from the dismissing adult, whose childhood was one of constant neglect. Nobody ever came, and so they didn't actually ever develop

the capacity to rely on anybody. And they explore, but they never come back and share their exploration with anybody because nobody was interested. And so they tend to explore things that have social standing, social meaning, rather than things that may be authentically meaningful to them. How does meditation help with attachment issues? Well, first you need to be able to see what it is that's happening, and then you need to be able to move in a direction that's more secure. Most of this is going to be in seeing the mind states what you do, but you think how that affects how you view things,

and then also there's a big piece around emotional regulation. Attachment, the attachment mechanism regulates the fear of abandonment or fear of being harmed physically. And so it's an activating strategy which makes you seek proximity to somebody who will protect you. So it can either it turns on and it turns off. In a secure person it turns on and then you get proximity and then it turns off. So that's a pretty functional thing. Then in a dismissing person it just turns off. So whenever they feel a need for somebody else they turn off their mechanisms, so they're not seeking proximity, they're not seeking closeness. In a preoccupied adult, for instance, it hyperactivates, so they're constantly seeking proximity, constantly seeking closeness. And where were you, were you dismissive preoccupied?

I was, it's called unresolved cannot classify Extremely preoccupied and extremely dismissing at the same time like off the charts. Well, yeah, just sort of at that end of The needles all the way over. Yeah Well, how did that how did that manifest itself? I was highly dissociative. So you know, dissociation. Yeah, you're just not there. You're often greener pastures in your own mind. Zooming in and out of the present moment. The colloquial term for a cannot classify is fearful avoidant. So I was the sweetest guy around, but I was completely unreliable. Fearful of when people need to withdraw to emotionally regulate. And so they withdraw if something happens. If there's a conflict in the relationship,

they will withdraw from the relationship and stay withdrawn until they've figured out the perfect thing to do to come back into the relationship because they're afraid that if they make a mistake, you'll kill them. I'm not really kidding about that. The fear is at that level. But you can imagine a child with a depressed violent mother who, if they make the wrong move, she goes off into a rage, which is completely terrifying.

And so you're hyper sensitive to what you have to do and you have to do it right or Anything could happen as you carry that into your adult life of course The likelihood that that's going to happen is very small, but it still feels like that that's still what the view is and so you engage in Figuring out the perfect response and if it takes you three months to figure out the perfect response, and if it takes you three months to figure out the perfect response, you've been gone for three months, and then you just show up and present the solution that you've come up with. The main harm to relationships is not that you have come up with the right thing or the wrong thing. It's that you're not reliable and showing up for people.

And so it's the lack of reliability really that damages the relationships. People are happy to have you around but they don't count on you. And you can't be in intimate supportive relationships if you won't rely on you. It's a kind of mutual exchange. If you look at what a mutual relationship is based on really, the ground floor of it is reliability. That you can really count on somebody to show up for you when you need them. Then all you have to do is trade them that.

That you'll show up for them reliably when they need it. That's a mutuality piece. And that creates a felt sense of safety and relationship. If you have that felt sense of safety and relationships, you'll be willing to attune to them. So attunement is this process of connecting empathetically. And also, you'll be able to reveal yourself authentically to them. If you don't trust somebody else, you tend to withhold an authentic expression of yourself. If you're not willing to let somebody see you, then nobody sees you, and you feel unseen, which is not a great place to be. If you attune to somebody,

and then the empathetic connection deepens, they can actually soothe you or co-regulate you emotionally. And then what comes from that basis is a felt sense of delight in seeing the other person. This is a model that was developed by Dan Brown of At Harvard. Do you know what it's like to have somebody see you and just be delighted that you're there, that you're who you are without needing to do anything? I had a really good parents. I'm glad. Yeah.

So you know what that is. I do. Yeah. But then imagine a child who never had that. I can. It's wrenching. Yeah. So I kind of derailed you. I had asked you a question

about what meditation, how meditation is helpful for people with attachment disorders. And you were starting to answer it. And then I asked you another question about how to throw it up for you. So I apologize for that. Back to that, you said the first thing, the way in which meditation is helpful in the sense completely intuitive and true to me is just to be able to see clearly what's going on. But then how, once you see things clearly, how is meditation useful? Well, you want to be in seeing things clearly move your attention into a more secure framework of operating in relationships.

A great deal of that is going to be emotional regulation. I think that the goal of meditation in the long game is going to be classical enlightenment. But there's a lot of things that you have to do along the way so that you're capable of going into that classical enlightenment. What does that mean? Well, in a teravada sense, it's... Teravada being old school Buddhism. Yeah, old school. I'm a teravada teacher, so that's what kind of what I do. That you see through the nature of self, that it's a femoral and not substantial, that you see that everything arises and passes, that nothing lasts, that as a human being we're stuck in a body which

will grow old, get sick and die, that we have to deal with, getting things we want and losing them, that we have to deal with not getting what we want, we have to deal with putting up what we don't want, putting up what we don't want, and then also that subtle ongoing constant irritation that nothing is exactly the way that we would have it. If we were actually in charge of anything, which is kind of a double-edged sword, it's not what we want, and we're not really in charge of anything.

If you could see into that, it would change this perspective that you have, and you would move from an identification with the consciousness of experience into awareness. And then you would, this figure ground reversal would put you into awareness where there's no suffering in that sense. So it's, you're not stuck in the ups and downs and contents of your concerns and you're actually just the person, the one who is aware of all of this coming and going on the stage of your own consciousness.

Yeah, that's it. So that would be classical alignment. So you're saying that's the long con. That's a long game. Yeah. The short game then is how do you get your life to organized in such a way that it can support you in getting to that. And often what we find is it's relational and also workwise or exploration wise. Many of us spend most of our life engaged in activities that don't really have meaning

to us, and depending on where that's a problem, not knowing what is meaningful, for instance, is one, and not being able to organize your life around spending most of the time and energy that you have engaged in an activity that's meaningful is a problem for a lot of people. And so you begin to examine how are you organizing your life and living your life, and then moving in the direction of that. A lot of that comes from the practice of meditation, in being able to see these fluctuations of self come and go, and fluctuations of desire come and go, or aversion come and go. And then what we notice is that in order to change a lot of these things, because there are strategies that we order to change a lot of these things because there are strategies that we use

to emotionally regulate ourselves, we need to provide an alternative emotional regulation strategy because the body mind will emotionally regulate itself with the strategies that you have. You don't have agency over that. What you have agency over is the strategies that the bodymind uses.

And you have to learn them. It's like anything else. In the beginning, it's effortful, it's conscious, it's this repetition of practice. But once they become automatic, then the bodymind just does them. And meditation, which is this practice of repetition and paying attention and training the mind, allows you to develop these alternative skills that then take over for the ones that aren't as useful. To all these strategies that you use, like when you have a fight with somebody, you retreat to your corner and don't come back until you're confident that they won't kill

you. All the stuff that you described that you were doing because of the difficult relationship you had with your mother, one first step is see it clearly and second step is to be able to develop healthier strategies. Right. So if we use that as an example, what I suggest that people do is they pay attention to the normal window of communication, which will be different with each person. Normal window of communication? Well, you communicate to somebody and they can communicate right away back, but it's too soon, or they can communicate back too late.

So, another way to put that is, when you communicate to somebody that you're relying on in a relationship, how long is too long before you begin to worry that something's wrong? And how short is too short that you're irritated that you have to attend to it again? That would be the window. Between those two points would be the window of communication. That if you drop a communication in there, the other person just accepts it and receives it. And the fearful avoidant, the fearful avoidant problem is that you don't respond in the window of communication. And so the fix is to respond.

It doesn't matter what you do as long as you respond because that's the thing that makes you reliable. You can always fix bad communication. You can't fix an unreliableness in the relationship. Secure people have a view of the world as people who will meet their needs and they have a view of themselves as capable. They don't do unreliable,

because it doesn't even occur to them to consider it. So secure people are most often relationships with other secure people because that's the dynamic. Dismissing people don't do mutual and so they're most often in relationships with preoccupied people who are willing to abandon their exploration for proximity. And as long as they can be close to the dismissing person who never likes to be alone, they're fine, but they don't get to explore because it's all about the dismissing person. And the fearful avoidant person is almost never in relationship with a secure person because they're so reliable that a dismissing person doesn't't care whether they come and go as long as they show up they have juice.

Right. Yeah. And they're never in relationships or not in long relationships with preoccupied people because they need to withdraw for emotional regulation and the preoccupied person needs proximity for emotional regulation. So you can begin to describe these views and people can begin to identify them and see how they function. Then in order, for instance, for a fearful, avoidant person to show up in the window of opportunity, they have to be able to regulate the fear mind that is keeping them from doing it. Then so you apply meditation technique to the fierce experience

well enough that you can make the action or the gesture to communicate. And then you've in that sense resolved that difficulty in the relationship. Like the short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve

on my weekly podcast, Life is Short, with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode,

I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times.

But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. So let me loop back to the very first question I asked you that sent us on this very interesting, down this very interesting path. The first question I asked was, how and why did you start meditating and you said it was pain and distress. How old were you? What was going on in your life? And then what happened subsequently? Well, I won. My adolescence was in the 60s.

And so the first big understanding of meditation was transcendental meditation. And the white album, you know, The Beatles. I love that. Dear Prudence, my favorite song. Maybe my favorite song of all time. Played to my son all of the time. So I was deeply resentful of the $400 that they wanted for the mantra. And so I went, I grew up in Evanston, Illinois. I went to Northwestern and I talked to somebody into giving me their mantra.

And so I practiced with that for a while. It was a good concentration of meditation. Worked pretty good. And then I, you know, I was a vagabond, hitching around Europe for a year or so and I came across Ramdass. Be here now. It was a book that he wrote. Ramdass, just for the uninitiated born Richard Albert. Yes. Boston, Massachusetts, and then that area, Jewish guy went to Harvard or went to fancy schools and then gotten trouble as a professor at Harvard where he gave acid to the students as part of some sort of disaster.

He was timothy leery. He was timothy leery around you. Yeah, so anyway, then when I went to India, became Baba Ramdas, the rest of his story. Yeah, so that actually worked really well for me. And then I was in New York in the 80s, during the AIDS period. Were you an artist? I was.

Very hard, a very hard period that every couple of months going to a funeral of somebody who had been a dear friend and a whole generation blighted really and then the terrible response from the Reagan administration. So I then started to practice more seriously. It had been kind of tilotante up until then. Also got sober. So I was a hard drinker in just in line with my family system of emotional regulation.

You came by it honestly. Yeah, indeed. So taking away the use of drugs and alcohol as a primary means of emotional regulation, I needed to develop some alternative to that. and meditation seemed to be really excellent at that. Turns out it really is excellent as an emotional regulation strategy. So if you have afflictive strategies and you want to stop using them, you can't just stop using them. We have to stop and replace and meditation was great for that. I was mostly doing the Trump or Rinpoche,

so that would be in the Tibetan school. So you went from TM to Boba Ramdas, to Trump or Rinpoche, it was a Tibetan teacher removed to the West and taking people. Right. What can I tell you, I'm a seeker. A little judgment here now. Just trying to make sure I got the chronology straight. So then when I moved to LA in 92, I did some

of a pasta in introductory classes. I really liked the pasta. It was a great thing and I was a Dharma orphan for years because my relational problems made it impossible to have a relationship with a meditation teacher too, and tell lifehound shins and young who has been my teacher for 20 years. Previous guest on this podcast, awesome guest. Everybody should go back and listen to that one. He's that guy's awesome.

And actually one of Shins and other students, can you Jeff Warren, who they did at Toronto, he and I just wrote a book together. So I'm quite familiar with Shins and Big Fam. Yeah, awesome. So one of the things about having a crappy childhood Toronto he and I just wrote a book together so I'm quite familiar with shins and big fan. Yeah awesome so One of the things of about having a crappy childhood is that I have a Kindness bar, which is really high. I mean In order for me to be willing to be in a close relationship with you. You have to be somebody of extraordinary kindness and

That was the problem with most of meditation teachers. I encountered they weren't kind enough for me. But Shinsen was, and that opened up a whole kind of process of really being able to go into these mind states and the conditioning, then to see it clearly, and then in seeing it clearly, recognize what I needed to do in order to see it clearly and then in seeing it clearly recognize what I needed to do in order to shift it into a more secure way of being in the world. And then also he's an enlightenment teacher. So the first time I sat with him he said, I expect all of you to become enlightened in this lifetime, which I really was encouraging,

I found encouraging because the first class I went to, there was a moment where we all went around and said, why did you come here? And I said, I came here because I wanted to be enlightened and everyone laughed, but it wasn't a good laugh, you know. It was like an uncomfortable laugh, but you weren't kidding. No, no, I wasn't kidding at all. So has he gotten you there? I think that my practice actually has transformed my life entirely.

So, um, is that, I mean, my practice is transformed my life, I don't know about entirely, but I wouldn't call myself in light. Okay. Um, you know, it's a kind of dicey thing, that line of conversation. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. I would, I would, I would, explain why it's dicey. Because we're a competitive culture and different traditions regard the conversation of we're attainments differently. For instance, in a Tibetan practice,

nobody, even the most enlightened people, will tell you what attainments they've met because it's considered so rude. Meditative attainments, yeah. In fact, Tibetans will often say, oh, no, no, no, I'm a terrible meditative, even though in those in the know, they're super enlightened.

Right. Culturally in the know, you know, they're super enlightened. Right. Culturally in the West, and maybe this is just a good thing to know, what is enlightenment? What do you think enlightenment is? And if you told me what you thought enlightenment was, I could tell you whether that was what I have. But if I say to you, yes, I'm enlightened

without defining that very specifically, who knows what we're actually talking about. Well, classically in Buddhism, it's the uprooting of greed, hatred, and desire. I would say that no, I haven't completely uprooted any of those. Uh, but if you look at the four-path model of terravada Buddhism, uh, that's our hot ship, which is this fully enlightened. Can I just jump in for a second just to explain that? Because the four-path model of, of, of

enlightenment, just for those who haven't studied this thing is basically, and I'm going to put it simply, there are four stages on the way to what's known as full martin enlightenment or our huntship. And each step along the way, you gradually erode the hold with which greed, hatred, and delusion has over you. You gradually erode the hold that these defilements have over you. Right. So anyway, back to you. I would think so. Not our hot. My teachers, a guy named Joseph Goldstein. I'm sure you've heard that name. And a great, amazing teacher. He often says somewhere between the first and the fourth, you know, that would work for me.

Yes, because and the reason why the reason for your reticence is I want to affirm there's a good reason for this. I when I first started asking people about enlightenment and they would get really cagey. I thought was this like some weird mafia, American thing. I didn't get it. It's what you said earlier. We live in a competitive culture and if you start saying too much about where you are

in this model, which by the way, it's just one model of enlightenment, then people start measuring where they are against you and it gets into a whole weird competitive thing. So better in some ways to be a little bit cagey. Right. But it's, what I think that it's important for you to do is to understand what it is and then look at the person and see if they actually manifest that. That would be the better way to do it.

Because you know, you could say anything. Yeah. Or you actually, so from a person, from a personal point of view, learn what it is that enlightenment is and then see if you recognize those characteristics in the person that you're going to work with so that you know where they're actually at. I think it's very well said. That you just brought it down to the most useful level possible. So you've had such an interesting life. A lot of which we won't be able to get to you were an artist, you just you have an open, you've had the reason why you're in New York right now,

is because you've had this opening at Mama. Love 57 show at Mama. And you mentioned before that you were a dormant, a lot's of the big, I think this is probably pre-subriting, a dormant, a lot of the big clubs here in New York. Well, actually it was my sobriety job Oh, really? That that seems like in terms of people places and things maybe not the best

decision Dorman are outside. Yeah, right. No drinking. Yeah, but you're getting you're getting the waft and you're constantly witnessing the horror of it Oh, it's very reinforcing But I said all of that to get me to the question I wanted to ask, which is, what do you do now? What do you really... I'm a full-time meditation teacher, and I still make art. That's what I do. I live in Los Angeles.

We have a group called Metacrupe, and we're calling it a meditation and psychotherapy center. We are focusing heavily on attachment. For instance, attachment, I think, attachment disturbance is the basis of addiction. And so we have a model for addiction. Attachment disturbance is the basis of personality disorders. So we're going to be working with people with personality disorder. And we do a kind of psychoeducation about what attachment is and what meditation is and how they can work together. And then we train people to do meditation techniques that will be supportive in transforming their insecure attachment more towards secure

attachment. And so that's basically what I do. What about people who had great parents and healthy attachment and are still jerks? I'd explain that. Because attachment isn't the whole game. Okay. I was referring to myself. You'd have to convince me of that. No, I'm talking to you over. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm still I still retain the capacity to be a

jerk, but there's the old version. Yes, I think that we all should have that as a way of being in the world. Spontanate freedom. The, so you have the early attachment experience really, which winds up at about three years old by the time. Actually, I was at talking to Dan Brown and he said that they have a new study that shows that the first installation of the working model of self happens between two and five months, but by the time you're three years old, it's pretty well fixed, and it can stay that way the whole of your life. If you don't do something to change it, or some adverse circumstance doesn't affect it. What happens next is we begin, as soon as your parents turn

you loose into say preschool or school, you begin the operation of negotiating your own personal relationships and depending on how that history goes, that also affects greatly the experience of somebody. If you like somebody and they like you back and that consistently happens, it creates a different kind of person than if you like somebody and they don't like you and that consistently happens, it creates a different kind of person. Then if you like somebody, they don't like you and that happens, or it's a mix that sometimes you can get somebody and sometimes you can't.

A lot of that is cultural and the way that you look and your socio-economic stuff that you don't have any choice about, really. And then in puberty, there's another one of these cycles that happen when we add that exploration around sex. Are you, what's your sexual orientation, what's your gender? Are you able to attract and be in relationship with the people that are attractive to or are you not, and that also can have a great impact? If you're consistently going for people that you can't have, it creates a sense of deprivation.

If you easily find the people that you want and you're able to have relationships with them, those are the main three things that affect that attachment cycle. Can you have two healthy and attachment? Like I have a kid at home was about to turn three. It's our only son. And, uh, you know, he, not only he does not have any problem getting his needs met as whenever he asks for something. Like there's a swarm of people, you know, trying to help. Totally awesome.

Yeah. Right. But could, but it could, could, couldn't that go pear shaped in some way? Well, I think the term in Contemporary society is a helicopter parent. Yes. Yes. We try not to do that. Yeah, he gets his needs met Yeah, so you wanted to develop in the kid the idea that if he has a need and he expresses it that somebody will help him Get the need met. That creates a great sense of security. You want to encourage them to explore what's meaningful to them and

you want to be delighted by the experience of them exploring. So it's these two things. They can go off and explore at the edge of their capacity to explore and they know 100% that you're there when they come back from that. That's called, I believe. I've read a lot of books by my friend, Dr. Mark Epstein, calls it ego coverage, I think, is the term something like they can go off

in exploring knowing that you're there, kind of watching. Right, yeah. If you don't think anybody will be there when you get back, you go off and explore but you don't come back. If you're worried whether they'll be there, you don't go explore. So what you want to try and do is teach your child to find meaning in the activities that they pursue and that the meeting should

be their own. You use the term delight because as a parent, that is, I would say, the primary emotion that I feel, just gazing at him. Right. That's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome for me. I don't know if he likes it, but I think you think I'm annoying. Which is totally fine as long as it doesn't affect the delight that you're giving it. No, no, no, no. Sometimes it's bad for my ego, but whatever.

Well, yes. Kids, some kids don't have that. They have conditional delight. So for instance, somebody who grows up to be a dismissing person, it's very likely that the only delight that they could get was when they, they delighted in their parent or they idealize their parent. So they know that they're getting bad care and the only way they can get any response at all from their caregivers is by presenting an ideal view of the care that they're getting. So you can imagine the skills that that creates in them.

People who grow up to be preoccupied adults have had no experience at any time of delight. They're never delighted in because the way that they get connection is by bringing up problems. So they scan for what's difficult and then they bring it up to you in a sort of angry way so that you'll fix it. But it has a tendency to short-circuit the delight that they would experience from someone else. And for full avoidance, adults are too afraid to be seen, so they never present themselves openly, and so nobody can see them to delight in them. And so how are you now, after all these years of meditation, and how are your relationships and are you getting the delight you need?

I have wonderful loving relationships, and I'm actually in secure territory now in terms of that. I would say secure with slightly preoccupied features is where I'm currently at. So you kind of had to do some reparenting, self-parenting. It is a change of view is maybe a better way to put it. You need to see that actually you can get your needs bent and the way to do that is by telling people what your needs are. Surprise. Right? If you're fearful of going, you would never tell somebody what you need because you're

afraid that if you tell them they'll kill you. How often are you going to tell anybody what you need from them if you think that the response is that they'll kill you, never. You have to be willing to reveal yourself authentically, which is, I like to call it the earthquake in the tsunami. If you're in insecure attachment and you authentically reveal yourself, you're immediately afraid that you'll be abandoned. And if you can hold on to that abandonment, terror, regulate that well enough, it will dissolve and you'll hit me hit by this tsunami of terrible sadness. And then you're just crushed by this terrible sadness. If you can hold on through the terrible abandonment and through the terrible sadness.

I look to call it the terrible dread. The terrible dread of the terrible sadness, then you come into a place of security. We might think that, oh, I'm going to be authentic now, and it's going to solve all my problems, but actually you feel much worse doing it in the beginning. And then you have to chip away at all of the conditioning, and then gradually be able to reclaim your authenticity. Because if you move toward authenticity and you have this terrible spike of a badminton terror, the inauthentic thing that you could do arises in the mind, and if you choose

it immediately relieves the abandonment terror. But then in a little while you're angry that you couldn't be authentic. And then anger is the expression that you make to the person in the relationship. So it is very effortful to reclaim your authenticity. Now secure people don't understand this and they give no credence for it because they haven't learned how to be an authentic because they never had a use for it. They've always been authentic, it's always gotten them what they wanted, and so that seems obviously the best way to do it, which is obviously the best way to do it, except that if you grew up in an environment where your authentic expression was in some punished or the demand was that you be someone else. Children will always try their best to become the thing that the parent wants, even if it's a total

abandonment of their authenticity because they can't survive without them. Thank you for helping me understand it. Two last questions, these are quicky. Well, maybe not, we'll see. Is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn't? I don't know. Fair enough. Oh, for people who want to learn more about you, how your group, where could they go? I have a website called metagroup.org, so they just have to go on there pretty much everything is up there.

Thank you very much for doing it. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also if you want to suggest topics you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts.

You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.

Slash, Survey.