Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 148: Thomas McConkie, The Mormon Meditator

Episode Date: August 15, 2018

Having been raised in the Mormon faith, Thomas McConkie was feeling a little lost after he had a falling out with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his family and his faith-based community. When he started going to a Zen meditation center in Salt Lake City, Utah, a daily practice became "a lifeline," McConkie said, and it eventually helped him make his was back to Mormonism, start a meditation center called Lower Lights School of Wisdom and launch his "Mindfulness+" podcast. 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.

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I'm Dan Harris. This is an interesting one, folks. I stumbled upon our guest when I read an article, I have a Google, I've mentioned this before, but I have a Google alert on the words meditation and mindfulness, so I get all sorts of interesting articles about the meditation and mindfulness space in my inbox every day. And I saw an article in the Desiret news, which is the big newspaper in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the headline was, what a Mormon doing Buddhist meditation has to do with the future of faith. And it was about this guy, Thomas McCunkey, who had spent many, who

grew up in the Mormon community, and then went off and spent many, many years doing Buddhist meditation, seriously engaged with the practice. And then came back to Salt Lake City to this very Mormon community and has started a quite as successful, a little Buddhist meditation group called Lower Lights. And so I can only imagine, I could only imagine, as I read this article, what an interesting animation of cultures and beliefs and practices this would be, because I've spent some time as a reporter at ABC News covering the Mormon community. And so I was really surprised that this was happening and intrigued, and I finally got Thomas into the studio, and you're going to hear a really interesting conversation coming up.

First though, one item of business and then your calls. The item of business, I mentioned this on a previous podcast, but I want to mention it again just in case you weren't listening, and if you weren't listening, shame on you, we're doing a survey. We want to take the podcast to the next level and we want your help. So we're running a survey on 10%happier.com slash survey. If you've got a few minutes and you want to do us a solid, go there and answer a few questions about what we can do better, what more you'd like to learn from the show, other people you'd

want to hear from, other formats, that way you might move into 10%happier.com slash survey. Okay, thanks for that. Let's do your calls. Here's call number one. Oh, wait, wait, before I take the call. I gotta do my caveat. Not a mental health professional, not a meditation teacher.

I haven't heard these calls in advance. I'm just a reporter and a meditator doing my best to stay warm in a cold world. All right, here's number one. Hi, this is Francis. I have been meditating regularly now with the 10% happier app, thanks to you. And I really appreciate it as it has changed my life a lot. I have read your first book and I'm now reading second book.

I've got two questions. One, just a little housekeeping type question. When somebody tweets to you, does it go to somebody who reads them? Just curious because I know I don't usually get a response, but I thought maybe your somebody in the 10% happier is looking at them or reading them. And then the next one is, I noticed there are many meditations having to do with grief. And I experienced a profound grief this year with a death, a sudden death of a young person, and wondered if there are any meditations that directly address this and how to meditate on, and think about that and cope with it. All right, thank you very much.

Thank you. Two great questions. Let me start with the second one first. First of all, I'm very sorry for your loss grief is for pretty much everybody an unavoidable fact of life but it doesn't make it easy so again I'm sorry but I want to thank you for pointing out a deficiency or let's just say an oversight on the Tempers Head happier app we should be we should have meditations on grief and we will

So thank you for that suggestion. We will act on it I do want to tell you though that we did a podcast dedicated to the issue of meditation and grief the guest name was Joe DiNardo Joe DiNardo. He wrote letter to my wife and it was one of the podcasts that we got an enormous amount of feedback He he lost his wife. got an enormous amount of feedback. He lost his wife. We got enormous amount of feedback after posting that podcast about how moving it was. So go check that out. It might be useful for you if you're interested. As to this first question, Twitter. So I am reasonably good. I would say 100% good, but like reasonably good at checking Twitter. I am awful at replying. Once a while, if I'm in the mood, I will reply or

if I have the bandwidth to do it. Often, I'll just like press the like button on ones that I like, unless there are people saying really mean things to me. Sometimes I like those too, and it's actually, it turns out to be a great way to annoy people who've been trolling you. I think, I think, and I say this with 90% confidence, there is somebody from the company who actually looks through,

and if there is a specific question related to the podcast or the company or the app, we'll answer them and follow up. The way you can up the chances of that to 100% is to add to or tag in, I don't know if that's the right word in a Twitter sense, add at 10%. So if you tweet me and it's to me at Dan B. Harris and then you add at 10% somewhere in there, then I'm almost positive. And it's to me at Dan B. Harris and then you add at 10% somewhere in there. Then I'm almost positive.

I'm actually positive. Somebody from the company will see that. So yeah, I wish I was better at, you know, I don't even look at my Facebook messages. So I'm Twitter's where I'm at my best in terms of responsiveness. But, you know, I also have a huge stack of unopened mail in my office. I am not the best at responding. That's largely because I'm overloaded and that's something I'm working on.

Anyway, that's I'm oversharing. Let's go to second call. Here we go. Hello, my name is Lauren Sump from Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a former Evangelical Christian and trained as a minister and eventually became an atheist and now I'm into this, I guess we call it a secular Buddhism. I'm kind of curious about the community kind of stuff, like weddings and generals and other rights of passages and whether this is just kind of an individual thing

or more of a community thing. Thanks for answering, thanks for your podcast and your app. Wow, you got a great story. That's cool call. A lot to say. So I too, I would call myself a secular Buddhist, but I take the Buddhist part very seriously. I'll take the secular part pretty damn seriously too. The Buddha said there were three big parts of his teaching. There was the Buddha. There was the Dharma, which is, you know, the words, you know, he actually, the practices and ideas

that he promulgated. And then there's the Sangha that were dispelled, S-A-N-G-H-A, I believe, and that means the community. They're all, you know, one wasn't bigger than the other. I mean, they're all important. And so the Sangha among us modern day meditators is often, and I include myself in this, overlooked and under-emphasized. But it is, you know, if you put a lot of weight in the words, the Buddha said, and I'm not

arguing, you, the listener, need to, you know, treat everything you said as gospel. But if you, you know, if you think that it might have some importance, that's a pretty powerful argument he was making. The Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, they called it the Three Jewels. So there's a lot to be said for having a community of people with whom you practice and with whom you do this life. And in those, depending on the Sangha, there are, you know, Sanghas where, you know, you can do the rituals of life together, you know, aroundas where, you know, you can do the rituals of life together, you

know, around death, around marriage, around birth, and that can be very powerful. As I said, I am not great at this. I mean, I have a, because of the kind of life I lead in that, you know, I have a meditation podcast and I have a lot of friends who are meditators and teachers and I'm a co-founder of a meditation app company. I have a kind of ad hawk saga, but I don't have a formal one where I'm really regularly seeing the same people and deeply involved in their lives and marking the big personal landmarks, the deaths, the births, the marriages, et cetera, et cetera, the births, the marriages, etc., etc., the dissolution

of marriages with them. And I think that's a, you know, I think there's a lot to be said for that. And so my advice to you would be to look around and perhaps see if there is a Sanga locally with which you'd like to engage. It is the truth that in some parts of the country and the world, there are no options. But my understanding is there are some online options and I don't know much about it. And that I say that without knowing much about it. Our goal at 10% is ultimately to start building that out. You know, we have the beginnings of that now where on the app, you can talk to a coach

directly and really, our coaches are experienced meditations and they will engage with you as much as you want They really will but it's not quite the same as an you know a true online Community of people but we know over time our goal is to really build something toward that because the community part of this thing Having other people around you normal normalize the practice, who hold you accountable. That is, it's hard to overstate what, in my experience, what a powerful thing that is. So, a great question, and look, hopefully that's something for you to explore.

All right, speaking of Sangas, and I suppose that call was placed where it was because my brilliant producers knew it would lead to this segue. We're going to talk about a interesting meditation community, or Sangha, in all places, Salt Lake City, Utah, capital of the American Mormon community. As I mentioned earlier, I've spent quite a bit of time reporting on the Mormon Church and even some of the very controversial breakaway splinter Mormon, so-called fundamentalists who still do polygamy, which by the way was outlawed by the mainline mainstream Mormon

Church, you know, decades and decades and decades ago. But I've interviewed apostles of the mainline line Mormon church. And I once visited a Mormon temple, which is off-limits to non-Mormons, but it was before they opened for business. So that was a really interesting thing to be able to walk through a Mormon temple. And so I've had a little bit of exposure to this made in America religion. A lot of that reporting was done around the time when Mitt Romney was running for president. We got really interested in what Mormonism is, and so I got a real education

in that. And so, you know, this is a faith that really, there's a high, high level of orthodoxy. If you're in the Mormon church, you know, you don't find a lot of casual Mormons from what I can tell. And so I was so interested when I heard that there was kind of a thriving Buddhist meditation group in Salt Lake City founded by a guy who calls himself a Mormon and populated by many people who are active, practicing, believing Mormons. So I wanted to know how does this work and what was the founder's story. And so finally Thomas McConkey, who, as we said, lives in Salt Lake City and found himself in New York City,

and I got him into the studio. And here's what he had to say. First of all, thank you for coming on. We've been trying to set this up for a while. Totally. How did you get interested in meditation? I was 18 years old. I had had a pretty big falling out in the Mormon church. I was raised

Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah, Mecca, where there's still to this day a huge concentration of Latter-day Saints of Mormons. I had a falling out with my family, with my church, my community. I mean, when you fall out of the church in that concentrated environment, it's not just, you know, you don't see people while they're at church at Sundays. It affects 24 hours of your day, seven days a week. And I went through a kind of routy adolescence just, you know, trying to sort it out. But by age 18, I realized there was a really intense hunger and I needed something to, you know, channel my devotion towards. That was the environment I was in. Mormonism wasn't going to work for me.

And I happened to stumble across a Zen Center in downtown Salt Lake. There is such a thing. Absolutely. There was Kansion Zen Center, it was the name of that particular Zen Center. And it was the biggest order of Zen Buddhism outside of Osaka, Japan,

and the whole world at the time. So it was in its heyday, and there were Buddhist masters hanging out, you know, just a few blocks up from the Mormon temple and down to Salt Lake. And I was really fortunate to, you know, find some support from them and, you know, plant my feet on the path as they say. Did you start practicing with them there? Did you go overseas or what had I got? I did both.

Eventually I started practicing in downtown Salt Lake just at the Zen Center there. And I really took to the practice. I needed something to really settle me down. And I felt so committed to Buddhism after a short time that I just decided to move to China. Like, let's return to the fountain head of the wisdom stream. So I spent a few years in mainland China as well.

Skipping college? I ended up studying Mandarin there and transfering credits, so it didn't totally derail my life. Most Mormons, if not all, practicing Mormons do a missionary year abroad. Many two years. Two years. Two years. Two years. And like I said, I had been out of the tradition for quite some time. So you didn't do that?

I didn't do a mission, but it made sense for me to get really far away from Utah, because even though I was studying Buddhism and was really finding myself in it, it was still a really painful place to be. What was the reaction of your folks, your family, to you studying at the Zen Center and then going to China to study more? Oh, it was all sorts of edgy. And this is back. This was before the year 2000.

Meditation was not mainstream at the time, let alone in a conservative bastion, like Salt Lake City. So it was edgy. And I don't think people were thrilled about it. I think it was even threatening on some levels because it was so alien to our way of life there. But I knew there was something in it. The people I was meeting, just the qualities they emanated as human beings, I could tell whatever practice they were doing, it had done something to them and I was curious.

And after a short time of getting into my own practice as a teenager, I, you know, subtle things like I was, you know, approaching 10% happier, right? Like little adjustments and I wasn't so anxious all the time. And I was sleeping a little bit better and so on and so forth. So I, you know, I really took to the path early on and felt committed to it. How would you describe for people who are completely unfamiliar with it, Zen practice? What were you doing in your mind during this practice and what impacted it have on you? Yeah, that's a great question. And just to give a little background, Zen wasn't the only lineage of Buddhism I practiced

in or have practiced in. But in that particular school, that is an unusual school, and that the founder of Kanzion Genpo-Roshi, he innovated an approach to meditation that he calls big-mind, and it involves voice dialogue, which is a union psychotherapeutic technique that came from a couple named Helen Sidra Stone in Los Angeles back in the 70s. So we were, you know, it was a kind of interdisciplinary Zen Center. So there was a lot of voice dialogue, which would be a whole other conversation. But then you have your standard Zen diet of co-on practice, where the teacher hurls a riddle at you that the rational mind can't answer.

And it jams all your circuits, and you spend a lot of time just sitting still on your cushion and watching your breath and you know watching thoughts and sensations come up and pass. So it's a lot of just that a lot of the classical you know meditation techniques you know come to bear on zen as well. How does the koan interact with because you describe two things there you describe the koan which is a riddle that Zen masters will give you. It, as you say, jams your circuits and it really gets you, it knocks you out of normal, sort of discursive habitual ways of thinking. But then you also describe sitting, watching your breath, and then watching whatever feelings and thoughts come up.

I think most listeners to this show, that's kind of meditation. They do, they just kind of feel their breath coming in and they get lost. They start again. How does the Cohen interact with that or are they two separate practices? It's a good question. I think on one hand, they're separate and on the other hand, they're one in the same practice. I can speak from my relatively little experience compared to some, but the Cohen, it has

a way of bringing your thinking mind to its knees, so to speak. You realize after struggling with the coon long enough that the answer is you're looking for aren't up here. And so you start to train yourself like when you're sitting still and facing challenges in your practice, facing challenges in life that you're not going to, I like to say you're not going to think your way out of a think hole. And the coon's good at showing you that.'re not going to, I like to say you're not going to think your way out of a think hole. And the co-hands good at showing you that, it frustrates our normal path to trying to solve something.

And a different kind of action tends to rise out of that. I love the expression think hole. It's awesome. It sounds like you're saying sink hole with a list. But I see that so much in my own practice. And I usually note it, you know, I make you make a little mental note of whatever's happening, at least the way I've been taught meditation is so you feel your breath coming in and going out and then you're going to get distracted a million times and it helps for me at least to make a little quiet mental note of whatever's just carried you away. But often it's just random thinking.

But think whole actually adds another layer because it's so seductive. It's got a quick sand aspect to it. Right, exactly. And you know, more thinking leads to more thinking leads to more thinking. Yes. And you're in a hole. And when you're in that hole, it doesn't even occur to you how you got there, which is by thinking.

Right, so. So the little note of think hole, actually, I think, can knock you out of it. Yeah, it's a little rope. You can toss out and hopefully climb back out of. Exactly. So, but I guess technically, and the colon versus the sort of straight up sort of basic breath practice,

you do them at different times. You, you may sit down and say, I'm doing colon work now, but the next hour I'm going to do straight up meditation or is it, or do they intermingle even on the cushion? My experiences, they start to really coalesce over time and you're still sitting when you're just sitting still, the co-on bubbles up at different times, you know. And so this spoke to you obviously at a deep level sent you overseas, although you haven't been trying to escape that also. But escaping was more important than enlightenment to me at that point, but it worked, you know,

two birds. What happened then? Did you keep, did you like get a traditional career and start working in that, or did you stay in the practice? I did both. You know, in China, I was a student and learning Mandarin, but also really dedicating myself to a Buddhist practice. A lot of people were doing Tai Chi, which I hadn't anticipated, so I started learning Tai Chi.

I ended up doing two years of coursework as an undergrad in China, and then going on to be a consultant in China and you know, living in other parts of the world as well. But the daily meditation practice was really a lifeline for many, many years. And did you stay in the Zen school? You know, it was, I would say, after the first few years of Zen practice, I started to drift towards a more kind of what a lot of the people listening to this show would identify as just like a standard meat and potatoes meditation practice. I was watching my breath, I was letting things come and go. I wasn't, you know, working with a co-on so much. I wasn't interfacing with a Zen teacher at that time. And then a

big turning point, another guest you've had on the show who I revere and who I've had a really meaningful relationship with is Shins and Young. Oh yeah. So I met him back in 2005 and he did a lot to shape my practice and helped me pick the Zen back up. He holds Zen very deeply. He's not transmitted in that lineage. He doesn't hold an official post, but he holds the tradition deeply and is blended that really beautifully with other traditions. So. So the twist in your story though is that so it is so surprising because you hear lots of stories about people who grow up in a tradition. They believed in the tradition and then they stop believing in it and maybe take up meditation as like some sort of alternative

alternate spirituality or source of meaning or spiritual practice But for you you did all this meditation for a couple decades and then you came back to Mormonism Yeah, talk me through that process till advisedly no, I mean, I was surprised I um It and it was there was kind of a specific turning point in my life and my practice Where if I look back on I didn't know it at the time but if I look back in hindsight there was a moment where where things turned a little bit. I was studying with you know at Shin Zen's advice with Shin Zen Zen teacher,

Joshu Sasaki-Roshi who passed away a few years ago but I was really fortunate to get to study with him for the few years before he died. I had an experience with Sasaki Rochi at an intensive Zen retreat where my life, all of a sudden in a single moment, kind of came to the head of a pin. It became very simple, very simple. And a lot of the scripts that had been running in the background in my consciousness that were so embedded, I didn't even really know that they were there. So much of the pain that I'd carried around, the cellular memory of growing up in a really traditional society and feeling

cast out by it, it's like it kind of evaporated in a moment. And not that it didn't leave residue. I was still, you know, a flawed human being with, you know, scars and all that stuff. But everything got really simple. And I literally just drifted back into a Mormon chapel a few days after that experience. And I connect them because I remember sitting in this Mormon chapel and kind of looking around me like, how on earth did I get here? Like I would have never expected myself to be in this place on a Sunday morning, somewhere at something I'd left behind so thoroughly so long ago. And at a deep intuitive level, I just knew that's where my new practice was. I knew if I was really going to heal. I knew if I was really going to get my life back,

that I had to be able to sit in the belly of the beast, which for me was Mormon church. No, but does that mean the practice for you was to sit and to coag this peaceably with your, I guess ostensiblyibly co-religionists and maybe even your family members, or did you buy the orthodoxy? Because Mormonism, and I'm not an expert, but I've done some reporting on Mormonism, is there are some elaborate claims? Yes, indeed.

I mean, my friends who know me best back home joke that I'm a Budeo Mormon and I'm some manifestation of a hybrid practice That's not well recognized yet. So I'm not necessarily the voice of orthodox Mormonism They're far more qualified people to talk to about that topic But I yes to the first question for sure. I was there and I knew enough about meditation practice That it's not just when I'm sitting still. Meditation practice is moment to moment, how I'm meeting life.

And this was a particular kind of practice for me. You could call it trigger practice, where I was intentionally going to a highly triggering and activating environment, where I mean, it felt like a nihilatory threat to my being to be back there, but I had enough momentum in my practice like, okay, but let me see how this sense of annihilation comes up in my body,

the challenging emotions, the negative thinking, and I just, on this impulse, as they say, in Buddhism, I sat with it. It really changed me. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle,

and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears.

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Follow Dysentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. So all that I get, what I just want to get to the work. Yeah. So Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism talked about these golden plates that he dug up, guided by an eight now working from recall here, but he was guided by an angel who appeared to him in his bedroom, an upstate New York, took him to a hill and he dug up these golden plates Translated them and then we got the book of Mormon and a few other books later on that

I don't know if they came from the plates or from a revelation of another variety But do you believe that story is true? What I believe having you know been in that environment my whole life in and out, is that there's a real power in the Mormon tradition. What you see now in modern Mormonism is a whole spectrum of people who relate to the church and its teachings literally, other people who relate to it on different levels and feel a certain metaphorical resonance, and so on and so forth. I wouldn't say that I would reduce all of the Mormon

churches' truth claims to metaphor. I think that's a mistake, but I also think there's something more subtle than just a strictly literal. This is what happened historically. I think there's something subtle in there that we don't exactly understand just yet. I think Joseph Smith had spiritual experience and through that consciousness that was filtered through that particular mind and that part of the world and so forth, he wanted to share a message of how people can live joyful lives. And I've tasted of that joy and Mormonism and have a real profound respect for it. The my understanding again based on some, but not a ton of reporting,

in the Mormon community, was that actually that the level of orthodoxy was very high, that you're basic, that if you, I was always in the impression that there was a huge gradation where you had people like in the Catholic church, who started to, you know, whole wings of the Catholic church where that whole huge swaths of the population that view it all sort of metaphorically. But I thought in the Mormon church, it was really about like, if you're in it, you're in it, you believe it, you know, chapter in verse.

I think that's true. And Mormonism is a young religion relatively speaking, 180 some odd years old, almost 190 years old, I'm not gonna do the math right here on the spot, but it's young compared to, let's say, you know, Judaism. There's a real, there's a real stew boiling back home, not just in Salt Lake City throughout the world in the church, but it's concentrated in Salt Lake. And I think people are starting to reckon with what you're pointing to that traditionally it has been monolithic and now in a postmodern world people have very different experiences of Mormonism. There are different ways to Mormon as we say back home

and I think our tradition is starting to grow into a fuller maturity that can see that and respect it and celebrate it. And the church is okay with that. The church hierarchy is okay with this? I think the church hierarchy, my experience of the hierarchy is that they're a way clergy, right? The people who serve in the Mormon church, they're kind of called out of their communities and neighborhoods to serve the church and their people like you and I who want people to live spiritually, satisfied lives, I think they're eager to adopt anything that would work for people's happiness. I have been remiss in not asking about your relationship with your family. So how bad did it get at the time when you were,

you know, having this revolt? And what is it now that you've sort of got found your way back inside the church? Yeah, that's a juicy question. At the moment, you know, I'm grateful for the friendships and the relationships we have. There's a long time in my life where I didn't expect to be in touch with my family.

I went many, many years without really being on speaking terms with some people in my family. Including your parents? Absolutely. Yeah. More my father than my mother, but even when my mom was available to talk to me, I had felt so much pain and alienation that I wasn't available to talk to her. And there's just a lot of pain all around.

It's a serious thing in Mormon culture when your kid leaves the fold. There are repercussions. Celestial repercussions. Yeah, I know. Thanks for pointing that out. It's socially, yes, but like, doctrionally, you know, there are teachings that the sins of the children fall on the heads of the parents. Well, the family goes, if I recall correctly, and I'm forgave me if I've seen this incorrectly that the family goes to heaven as a unit Salvation and Mormonism is social. You don't get saved alone We get saved, you know the community gets saved or we don't get saved There's a strong element of that So the stakes are really high and blood boils and it's difficult to sort through those things

So how are things now? I, you know, from my point of view, they're quite amazing. We've really mended to a great degree, not that we don't have a lot more healing to do, but, you know, I think they've, I had an epiphany. I'll start here in my late 20s when I felt all sorts of sorrow and heavy heart in this around, just home life, you know, and

family life. And I think if I were to like point to what was really bothering me about it, it's that I felt like I wasn't accepted for just honestly walking the path I felt called to. And I have this epiphany that I was guilty of exactly that same thing towards my parents that there was a part of me that really begrudged their Mormon faith and begrudged that they couldn't let me have my faith. And so there was something in me that softened and realized if we're going to get the ball rolling, I need to really learn to accept that this is the way of life here and that people

care as much as they do, and it's genuine, it's authentic, and even though I find it painful in my particular circumstances, it's an authentic belief. It really matters. And with your dad? I consider him a good friend. That's amazing. It is. It's a big transformation. It really is. Yeah, and I have a lot to thank.

The practice is really what helped me kind of let go of a lot of hardened beliefs. And I carry to belief that we're never going to get better. We're never going to heal. I'm never going to talk to these people again. And as you know, as a meditator, you start to see those scripts. You start to see those thought forms that congeal and possess us. And they just, they softened over time.

And I realized that, you know, it was kind of a form of insanity to latch onto this thought like we can't just come back to the next moment and meet each other again. That's great. So, you've gone so far now, this is how you came to my attention, which is that you've started meditation group in Salt Lake City, which got you a little bit of attention and somehow popped you up into my radar. So what is this group? So the name of our group is, the name of our organization is Lower Liet School of Wisdom. And we go by the short name Lower Lides.

And Lower Lides just for listeners. It's a phrase that comes out of an old Christian hymn, let the Lower Lides be burning. And it's this kind of metaphor, like we can, we can, through practice, through cultivation of the spirit, we can learn to be better people and serve one another. So, I won't get into it. It's a gorgeous little hymn. And it felt like a nice intersection to me of the paths that I hold really deeply Christianity and Buddhism.

And just to be clear, a lot of people won't know this, but Mormons consider themselves Christians. Right. Not a lot of... that's controversial and say evangelical circles. Sure. They'll often argue that Mormonism is actually a cult, it's not Christian, etc. But so I just want to make that clear in the minds of the listeners when you talk about Christianity, you're talking about your own faith. Absolutely. I've got the bully pulpit here, so I'm saying Christian, Mormonism is Christian. Go for it. So, but I wonder like it was this a controversial move to make?

I know you say before that the churches has a reasonably open mind right now, when it comes to people having differing views on the, on the, on the, the, you know, taking a legal fundamental view of Scripture, but to add in this Buddhist meditation practice, how did the community feel about this? And was it difficult to attract people to come do this with you? It's a great question. I think I want to look at the kind of macroscopic level for a minute here, because I think what we're doing in Mormonism is actually happening all over the planet. for a minute here because I think what we're doing in Mormonism is actually happening all over the planet. The way I would sum it up is that we're looking at how we can share this kind of life-changing practice with different demographics, people of different persuasions. I happened to be brought up in the Mormon church and I got to a place in my practice where I felt a pain that people back home weren't going to experience

these beautiful teachings that are part of our human heritage. And so I got really serious about sharing it. And like I said about the church leaders, I think you need to be careful when you introduce a completely new species or religion into another religious context. But that's really not what we do at lower lights. I think when we're at our best at lower lights, we're taking universal human principles, practices that transform us,

and we're translating them hopefully responsibly into a Mormon language that people can understand and they can run with in their own spiritual lives. And I see you doing that in a different context. You're translating meditation into language that anybody in the, let's say, the modern working world could pick up and say, yeah, that's me.

I could do that practice. So there's a big movement and effort right now to make these teachings more available, I think. And so take me inside what a meeting, what are the, what's a meeting like? What are the practices you're referring to? Yeah, that's a big question I want to say also that it's not just Mormons that come to our events. That's actually a big part of our social function that, you know, Salt Lake City to this day is

still quite divided between Mormons and non-Wormons. So a big part of our mission is can we create a meditative holding environment where people with very different belief systems can come together and actually, you know, recognize one another's humanity. So that's a big part of what we do. We need to do translation work for the Mormon community as much as we need to do translation work for other kinds of people who come to our events, I language the teachings differently to teenagers who

come through the door than I do, you know, to people in their 50s and 60s and 70s. So there's something generational about people absorb the practice. But that must be tricky for you in terms of languaging it for an audience that's both Mormon and non-Mormon. It is. It's, you know, we're really holding a space that there's a lot of tension in holding that space, but I think there's also huge potential to bring the community together as well. And you are attracting active, believing Mormons? Yes, absolutely. That's that's a big part of our mission to

engage the whole spectrum of humanity. It's easy enough to get into, let's say, a secular mindfulness practice and share it with the people who are going to flock to it anyway, but to really hold out for every kind of human being who could potentially walk through the door and offer them an experience where they feel honored and met and seen That's that's an art that were were students of we haven't mastered it by any means But our intention is to really hold a communal space which hasn't been done traditionally or I'm from it It's not infrequent from me to hear from believing Christians I'm frequent from me to hear from believing Christians that, and I'm now I'm talking about what will traditionally be understood in the broader culture of Christians, that meditation

might be some way a threat to their, you know, it is derived from Eastern spirituality. It might, you know, there are actually are evangelical pastors who will tell folks that this is, you shouldn't be doing this. Right. Or yoga. Right. What do you say to a Mormon who might be attractive in some level to this practice but have concerns? Yeah, that's one of the essential questions we're working with.

We start with where the tradition is. There are teachings practices that already exist in Mormonism that lend themselves deeply to meditation. I don't think about meditation as a graft onto the tradition. I don't think you're implying that either. I happen to be trained up in the Buddhist tradition primarily, but when you survey the world's wisdom and contemplative traditions, you start to see patterns. You know, cultivating concentration is universal. You see that across all the traditions. So to talk to Mormons about concentration and point to scripture that says, we're asked in our

holy scripture to keep a single eye on the glory of God. It's a poetic rendition and scripture of focus. Focus your mind, focus your heart, focus your attention on what is higher, what is enobling. And there are ways that are really natural entry points into the practice because it's a human practice. There have been different expressions of meditation across different traditions and geographies for thousands of years, but they're all human practices. So what we do at lower lights, if we're doing it well, again, it shouldn't be foreign to anybody. We hope to really communicate directly to people's humanity.

I think meditation is a really beautiful way of being human together. And it has it going It's crazy good, you know like we it's really picked up fast In terms of people who come to the events people who want to support our organization And people who want to share our story people like you who were really grateful to because more people hear about it But it's you know, it's the organization's been Growing faster than we can keep up with it and we hope to just get to keep doing what we're doing. It was like important work. I'm curious about your personal practice before we started rolling. You said that you

had just come back from a retreat, but it was in the contemplative prayer tradition. Oh, yeah, that's right. So what does that mean, actually? What can you, what, what is the practice? It's interesting. I was at a retreat with Cynthia Bergeau in North Carolina, a beautiful teacher, a real master of the tradition. The practice in Christian centering prayer, it's very simple, not an easy one, but the basic practice involves noticing when something is occupying your awareness. It's often called an object of awareness, whether it's a thought, whether it's a feeling, etc. And you'll come back to your prayer word.

Or if you don't use the word, you'll just practice letting go of whatever the particular contraction and awareness is, whatever the particular fixation is in awareness at a given moment, you just let it go. And so it's this basic practice of noticing when awareness grips on something and practice letting go. And having done a lot of practice and different traditions over the years, I see the unique languaging and the spirit

and the different emphases that come up in Christian-ering prayer. But I recognize it in Buddhist practice and Hindu practice. My sense, I don't know if we have the science to back this up today, but I sense that there are probably universal mechanisms that the world's traditions are intuitively training. And we still tend to think about them in terms of compartments. There's Buddhist meditation, Christian meditation. I think over time we may discover underlying mechanisms

that train a suite of meditative skills. Anyway, that's somewhere down the road. But to answer your question, to me, and part of this is just my interference as a Buddhist meditator. I tend to see Christian meditation as, oh, well, that's Buddhist too. There's a certain bias in the way I perceive things, but that's what it amounts to.

And if you're using a prayer word in this centering prayer practice, so is that kind of like having a mantra? It's different than a mantra, and that a mantra is something you will rehearse, you will repeat it over and over so it will bring the mind back into concentration, the mind wanders and you bring the mind back. This is like almost like a reverse engineered mantra and that you're not using this sacred word until you notice that the mind is pulled away.

So in theory, if you're not occupied by any objects, for a period of time, you're not reciting the mantra, you're not using the word at all. So a lot of people confuse the two, but they're actually training different aspects of awareness, where if you say on one side of the spectrum, there's a concentrated awareness, and on the other side of the spectrum,

there's a kind of an expansive quality of awareness. The Christian centering prayer method helps us return to expanse, return to expanse again and again. So, if you're not aware of any objects, if you're not aware of anything specifically, what's happening? Well, that's another conversation. That touches on what they refer to in Buddhism as cessation or shunyata, zero. If you're not aware of any objects, then at the deepest level of that, you're not aware of anything, you're not aware of awareness itself. It's a kind of luminous emptiness. I don't know how

to language it, but that's kind of my Buddhist background coming in, but it's incredibly rewarding, non-experience experience. But is that happening to people in and in centering prayer? Or is it more just like you're just continuously letting go of things that come through? I think it is. I think in Buddhist terms and classical enlightenment terms, people who are doing centering prayer wake up. They have that moment where they recognize that it's not a subject looking at an object, but they touch into the nothing, the zero of experience. And then all of a sudden, what arises in the next moment is,

they have the experience of being everything. They're merged with everything for a split second, for a minute, for a day, for a lifetime. I know people in that tradition who really have deep practices and awareness and it seems to be taking them in a similar direction that the meditation I've done for years has taken me. So it's amazing that you have these practices that all emerged in cultures that are disconnected in time and in geography. So what is that?

Right. I mean, on one level, it's kind of a mystery. I don't know what it is. The perennial philosophy that all this Huxley referred to, that it's coming up, these teachings, these practices, they're everywhere. What is that? And I think human beings just have a certain genius for,

you know, if there's something, if there's an edible shrub in their physical environment, they'll find it and they'll find a hundred ways to cook it and make it taste delicious. And if our internal environment is like more or less the same, then we'll find a hundred ways to cultivate a life where we're not suffering so much. I mean, I think there's something just intuitive and innate about these traditions that crop up. And I'm quite fascinated by this great human tradition where we're learning how to not just master the external environment, but how to make more of a home to come home to

in our internal environment. If you've been able to introduce meditation into what one would imagine to be a deeply inhospitable environment. What does this say about the future of organized religion in America? Yeah, now I love that you asked that question because it's one I'm really passionate about. I hope over time that the work we do in the Mormon community can become a case study of how like you can engage your particular neighborhood community cultural context, and

we can share with you what we've learned about how to do that well and what doesn't work so well. Of course, there will be specifics to meditating and Mormonism that will just apply to how to introduce that practice in the Mormon church. But I think there will be universals too, and I think over time more and more people will figure out how to apply it in novel ways And really that's the injunction of the practice. It's in Buddhism It's the Bodhisattva vow that you know to the extent that we've received any goodness from the practice

We want to share that we want to be really generous with it So I'm really hopeful over time that you know will be part of a global network that says hey We've got our case study here. And if we've gotten emails from people in Protestant traditions in Australia saying, like, hey, what would you say about, like, here's where I'm working here, do you have any pointers? I mean, it's already starting to gel a little bit,

but I think there's potential for more of it. And I imagine advice you're giving is often along the lines of, here's how you can make people comfortable doing that. This stuff isn't going to attack all of their core beliefs, et cetera, et cetera. At this point, a lot of what I do is listen and just try to have a respect for how different the environments are

before I assume the sameness of the environments. I think there is a lot of sameness, but I try to just really take in like, so what are you working with? And let's have that conversation. But I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful for people and I'm hopeful for people. And I'm hopeful for humans.

And you mentioned religious tradition. I'm finishing up a book right now that looks at that a little bit. What will religious experience look like in the 21st century? I think there's room to argue that we're not just secularizing in the 21st century that we're shifting our aesthetics. We still want higher meaning. We still want to live the good life. We want to know joy.

We don't want to suffer. And a lot of these practices have traditionally been held by religious traditions. But these religious traditions were designed thousands of years ago for a different task. So I see the traditions getting reinvented and I see this kind of work as part of that work. Yeah, I mean, we're in an interesting moment in history where most millennials are what's called nuns, N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S, that they don't embrace any organized religion. But that doesn't mean, as you said, that they don't want any organized religion. But that doesn't mean, as you said,

that they don't want to search for meaning or have what spirituality in their lives, whatever that may mean to them. Right, like a community that will witness the birth of their first child or marry them or bury them. It just community rituals, practices that kind of fill us, like whether that some people read scripture as a practice, some people pray, some people go running at Central Park, but we have different practices

that help build resilience to human life itself, which can be really difficult. And we're seeing a breakdown of faith, and I think the claims of a lot of these traditions. So how can we take the best of what these traditions have passed down to us but leave behind the limitations, maybe belief systems that strain us a little bit too much. We can't sign up for all of it, but we certainly want the goodness of the tradition, the lineage, the history, the community. This has been such a fascinating interview. Is there something that I should have asked you, but didn't any areas that you would have liked to have touched on that I failed to bring us to?

I appreciate the question. You asked a little while ago about, so how is this working in Mormonism? Something that excites me, something that I think has allowed us to exist and persist and flourish to some extent, is that there's a really strong value in Mormon culture to look for truth far and wide and bring it back and corral it into back into the tradition. If there's anything good, if there's anything that can elevate us as human beings, we're interested in it.

So that's the enterprise we're engaged in at lower lights. And I think you'll see more of us. If people want to learn more about you, how can I do that? The best place is our website. It's lowerlightssLC.org. So the phrase I talked about earlier, lowerlightssLC.org. How about you on social media? I'm pretty lame at social media.

I don't do a lot of it, but you could Google me. And we have articles and meditation resources. We have a podcast, mindfulness plus. Yeah, absolutely. So the podcast is mindfulness plus. That's with a plus sign and a lot of our teachings and things like that that we do as a community. I try to put into the content of that show. Awesome.

And when does the book come up? I'm getting through the manuscripts, so it could be probably a year-ish before we're actually, unless I pull them like you and brother Jeff Warren did. I don't write a book. It's the word. Thank you very much. You're a great, great job.

Really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah great, great job. Really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Donna. Appreciate it. 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.

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