Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 177: Mirabai Bush, Conversations on Loving and Dying

Episode Date: March 6, 2019

This week's guest, Mirabai Bush, has co-written a book with spiritual teacher Ram Dass entitled "Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying. In the book, and in our conversation, Bush explores how death can help us cultivate gratitude, compassion, mindfulness, and an abiding joy in the simple beauty of living. The Plug Zone Website: http://www.mirabaibush.com/ Website: https://www.ramdass.org/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. From ABC, to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Mirabai Bush is an OG in the in the meditative sense. Back in the 60s and 70s, there, there was this whole group of young Americans who went overseas to Asia and learned at the feet of various contemplative masters. Joseph Goldstein, my meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, Mark Epstein, lots of people who have been on the show were part of that group, and Mirabai Bush was also part of that

group. And a lot of these people came home and started teaching. And Mirabai did that and is now an amazing teacher who works in particular with organizations, including organizations in higher education, law, business, journalism, the environment, biotech, science, government, philanthropy, teaching, meditation, and related practices to make these people function with more mindfulness, more compassion, more productivity. She really has, is at the tip of the spear of this work of bringing meditation into into a professional context. She's also written

a new book along with Ram Das, who was also part of this vanguard of Americans that showed up in Asia in the 60s and 70s and learned how to meditate. So she and Ram Das have written a book called Walking Each Other Home, which is about Something that pretty much nobody wants to talk about which is death and they're reframing death in a really interesting way as As the ultimate spiritual practice. We're all afraid of it. Well, I could maybe I'll just speak for myself I'm afraid of it. I think many people are afraid of it, but their Concept is what if what if you could you could approach it with curiosity and myself, I'm afraid of it. I think many people are afraid of it. But their concept is, what if you could approach it with curiosity? And as they say, with love, which I think is

a fascinating way to look at it. So there's a lot to talk about with Mirabai, about her personal story, about mindfulness in the workplace and all of the some of the controversies that come along with that. We also talk about how me too has affected the meditation movement. And then of course, a lot about this really thorny, but I think immeasurably profound topic of death, which again, we seem to want to avoid but i think is is that's not the right move and it's oddly in live in the uh to to face directly so before we get to mirror by just a few notes as i like to do of business um one is uh just an unmitigated bit of bragging uh but if my friends and colleagues at the 10% happier, we just company, we just got a great honor from our friends at Apple. The folks in the Apple

App Store have given us the designation of editor's choice among the meditation apps and that's a pretty rare and special honor. so we're really excited about that, and I want to congratulate the phenomenal intelligent and cool and sadly for me all younger than me folks at the 10% happier app for the incredible work that you all do. So that apple recognizing that is no small deal. Also two new meditations up in the app. One is from Diana Winston. It's called New Morning. It's about how to get your day started. Another with Joseph Goldstein called It's Just a Mind State. That's a really good one. I think that's all the business. We're going to do the voicemails at the back of the show as we now do. Let's get to Mirabai. Not much more to say about her,

other than I've already said, or that she can't say better. So let's just get directly to it. Here's Mirabai Bush. Nice to see you. Ask me anything. All right. I'll ask you anything. Do you may wish you didn't say that?

Actually, knowing you, I only know you a little bit, but knowing you as I do, I suspect it's actually totally fine for me to ask you anything. It is. Well, let me ask you this. How did you get into the meditation game in the first place? Good question. I'll try to make it a short answer. No, don't.

This is a podcast. Oh, okay. This podcast are by definition a rabbit hole. So let's go down. Right. Okay. Well, back in 19, I was in graduate school from 1967 to 1970. Studying what?

Studying English literature, American literature then. But those were, as you probably know, like wild years on campuses. And I was very involved in civil rights and the anti-war movement. And it became, I was also teaching, teaching freshman English, and it became impossible to be there really. We, there was violence all over the place. You know, police, the police were actually, we're running the campus by the end of the time I was there. Which campus?

It was SUNY Buffalo. So, and, but more than that, it was, the world seemed to be falling apart, basically. We, and we couldn't, you know, all the men I knew were all finding one way or another to get out of the draft. I used to, we were close to Canada. My job was to drive people, smuggle people across the border. We, I just felt like there had to be a way of living on this planet that was sainer and made more sense and had more meaning than what we were going through then. We were Martin Luther King had been killed and Bobby Kennedy was killed,

you know, they just celebrated the 50th anniversary, not celebrated, but commemorated. not celebrated but commemorated. It was it was a really hard time. So with my then partner who I later married, we decided to just journey and see what we could find. And we started in Europe and we took one of those buses, and I don't know if you've ever heard about them, they were called the Green Turtle. And it's the longest bus ride in the world, from London to Delhi, two months. And on this broken down, a lot of people were doing that at that time.

The bus actually did keep breaking down, so we would stay, we stayed in Teraan for two weeks. This was a great one. Teraan then, the Shaw was still in power. And we were happy to be there on Thanksgiving, and because we were American, somebody knew we were there. We were invited to the American Petroleum Club in Tehran for Thanksgiving dinner. It was definitely a different time. We came through the former Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and into India. Places you could never go to the first place. Every place was completely peaceful.

Wow. Some of them because they were dictators, you know, but there was no war going on at all. And people took us into their homes and their mosques and their churches. And it was, I mean, for somebody who was looking for different ways of being, it was really an amazing trip. But then I got to India and actually never really thought much about India growing up. But I felt at home from the minute I arrived, which was kind of strange because it was totally on the other side of the world and everything was different. But actually the first day I was in Delhi, you'll appreciate this, I met Sharon Salzburg

on the street. And she had been to the same school I'd been. She was an undergraduate, I was a PhD student. And we didn't know each other there, but we had heard of each other. And so we met on the street and she told me that for the first time ever, a Burmese Buddhist teacher was teaching a retreat for Westerners. And that's what we were called there.

And why not go? And at that point, it was a little bit like trying the kind of local thing. It was like wine and cheese and Paris. It was like, why not? So we a couple of days later, we went to Bugaya where the Buddha had been enlightened and we moved into the Burmese Vihara and which Translates says, House of Stillness. And Sharon and I were, well, we can't call it roommates, but because it weren't rooms, but we were except on the floor, and we separated our spaces by hanging up

sorry, you know, on string. And there we were, and I had never done anything like meditation before, you know, as a literature student. And I'd grown up in New York, you know, meditation. In New York City? Yeah, New York City. And Riverdale. And then I, we sat from, I think, five or six in the morning

till nine or 10 at night. What was the teacher going? Goenka. Goenka, okay. Okay, famous. Yeah. And of course, it was amazing. And itca, okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. teaching the basic insight, meditation practices, he also taught us loving kindness. And the combination, it was 10 days of first course. And that combination for me was, I just felt so much more at home on the planet when I finished that first course. I just felt like it was, you know, it was right to be here. And I could, I didn't know what I was going to do next, but I, I felt like kind

of radical self-confidence about the rightness of being alive that was that, and then, that's a great phrase. I never used it before. It's you. I really like that a lot. A radical self-confidence about the rightness of being alive. That's like the subtitle for your next quote. That might not have come after entirely after the first 10 days, but what happened was we all we all loved it. I mean probably a few people left but they were and I don't remember 50 75 of us there and so Sharon Salisbury was there in Joseph Goldstein and who went on to become yeah legends of the trade a Wes Nysker who is at Spirit Rock in California and Ram Das was there and that's where I met him okay so could you can you just Ramdas is very famous, but some people may not know.

Yeah. Ramdas was in the 60s. Ramdas was a professor of psychology at Harvard and he began to explore consciousness with Tim Leary through psychedelics and Harvard asked him to leave. And he did. But that was a timeline. Many people were exploring psychedelics and were confused. There was no real guidance. So he also, in some of the same way that I did, went to Asia looking for, he had taken, he and Tim had taken so many psychedelics and there was always this, although they, you

know, learned so much from it, there was always this kind of going up and coming down aspect and I thought, there's got to be a way in which we can incorporate this into our being and just be that person without always taking drugs. So Rambda swan to India and there he met, this is his trip, his first trip and I met him on a second. But there he met a great Indian saint named Neem Karole, and he stayed with him for quite a while. And there he learned meditation and yoga. And but mainly he learned, well, he came back and he wrote, he gave lectures in New York

and those lectures were turned into a book called Be Here Now, which sold two million copies because no, it was the only thing. It's hard to imagine now. There was like a billion spiritual books now. There was nothing and Rondus wrote Be Here Now and everybody read it. So when you met him on that second trip was he already kind of a rock star? It hadn't come out yet. It came out while we were there. When we got back the second time in 1972, you couldn't walk down the street with him in New York

or any major city. He was just like, people would just like come running. It was wild. He'd give a talk. We'd put a handwritten note up on a flagpole or whatever in the street. Electric pole. And just a thousand people would show up. It was crazy. But people were desperate for some help. Many people were seeing things in a different way, having glimpses of consciousness that they didn't understand,

but knew was important. And they were just like desperate for some guidance. And Ramdus was the first of what became many teachers, of course, to offer that. So what happened in your life? So you go do this almost serendipitously, you end up on a retreat with the future rock stars of meditation all together.

And what did it do to the trajectory of your life? Well, I thought I was going to stand in here for two weeks. I stayed for two years and I then, you know, I learned yoga with some teachers and then I stayed with Ramdasa's teacher, Nimkara Labava for most of that time. Now, he was a Hindu teacher. He was a Hindu, but he didn't teach Hinduism. He did not, he never encouraged any of us to become Hindus. But he He never encouraged any of us to become Hindus. But he famously said sub-ech or it's all one. And he really talked from that place.

He was outside categories. So I stayed with him. Now I came back, thinking I'd go back again soon, but he died the following year. So there weren't very many Westerners who were ever with him, but Danny Goldman, who maybe you know, was there. I know, well, he's been on the show many times. Yeah, he was there. It was an extraordinary group of people who happened to be there, and we've all stayed close since then and interacted with each other in all these ways.

Well, they're often referred to as the Jew Booth. Yes. You said that. I do not. I was in... You got the boo down. Well, maybe you don't have the boo down. I was in Catholic school from preschool through Georgetown graduate school.

But it turns out that most of my friends are our Jew Booth. Yeah, Ramdas. But it turns out that most of my friends are part Jew booze. Yeah, Ram does. So yeah, we all came back and we, a group of us, including Danny and Mark Epstein was around and who really was the first to integrate it into psychiatry. And I'm Richie Davidson, who was the first to really do neuroscience research, and Cliff Saron, who's also doing that work out at Davis. We lived in the home of David McClellan, who at the time was the head of social psychology at Harvard.

So this is back in the States? We came back and we were in Cambridge. And David had been the one to fire Ramdas, but he had had to do it, because he was head of the department. But they remained friends. And then David went to India. So the home group of us lived there.

And that was like, that became the base camp for the founding of Insight Meditation Society in Barry. Barry Massachusetts. Yeah. Yeah. We're Joseph and Sharon have taught all these years. And many things happened. But I had had in this unfolding, I had had a baby. And so I couldn't, in those years, the idea of meditation and babies did not go together. I'm sure you can appreciate that with a three-year-old. Yeah, I don't see how in these years they would go together.

My son is the least meditative dude in the world. But, well, I mean, like, later on, Tick-N-Ton started having retreats where there would be children. They wouldn't be in the meditation hall, but they'd be doing the child version of drawing flowers and putting love in each petal, you know Got you Yeah, but in those years and everybody, you know most people at that time had gone to India like right after college or Younger everybody was pretty young. I had gone to India right after college or younger. Everybody was pretty young.

I had been married and divorced when I back to graduate school, so I was a little older than everybody. Sorry, this child, who was fabulous. And so my then husband and I started a business because we wanted to integrate meditative practices and awareness values into a business setting. And this was before any of the even places like Ben and Jerry's and the body shopping, you know, but it did. We it was called illumin. And you'll appreciate it. It was crazy. We didn't know anything about business.

And we were still screening mandalas from all the different traditions on plastic with a sticky back. And they went on windows. And it turned out, David Clellan, who was the father of motivation psychology, said that it was the affiliative need of people.

People had just started becoming Buddhists or Sufis, or they'd left their root religions and they were exploring all these things. These were symbols from those traditions. There was no other spiritual paraphernalia at the time. And so it was crazy. It just took off and like everybody had one. Then we made, we saw screen rainbows as a universal symbol of peace and harmony. And I mean, we saw millions of them.

And then, just what I remembered was, then we made stickers of all these things. And then girls started collecting stickers, like 11-year-old girls. And so one night Dan Rather ended the 7 o'clock news with us as his end cap, because stickers had become this big thing. But the part I was always really most interested in was the integration of these practices and perspectives into the workplace. And it was very interesting and we really learned a lot and it ended in the 80s, early 80s I think. Why? Because it sounds like it was going well. Because, well, different reasons, but one was,

that was at the time when American, the bigger companies started noticing that we were selling a lot of stuff. And so they wanted to sell a lot of stuff, too. And they, but it was just when people were starting to manufacture in China. And they were, they came out with whole lines that they spent, like, a tenth of a cent where we were printing in Boston. And it was pretty amazing.

This is a gift business by that time. In one season, just the bottom fell out. And we've been such, such good, we're trying to create a vacant company. So we distributed all the profits at the end of the year to the employees, because you remember that Mark said that after all they did the work, right? But then when it came time to survive a difficult time,

because we'd never had a difficult time, we didn't really have enough retained earnings. Yeah. So what does that say about the possibility for awakened businesses? Oh, there are. You can run an awakened business. You just have to be a little more prudent than we were. Well, say more about that because I think that this is, you know, many of us work. Yes. And may not feel we work in a weakened environment. I know you've done it, you've worked with Google. Yeah, well that's really that was what allowed me to just walk into Google and feel at home

right away and able to do that work on search inside yourself. Search inside yourself is their program. Yes, yeah. It's the most popular program ever off course ever offered at Google And it's the same basic practices of you know, meditation and a lot of more compassion and kindness practices and some other systems have

Because they felt like the engineers needed that Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after. Life is 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 add free on the Amazon music or wonder yeah podcast You said ask me anything so I'm gonna ask you a trick question. Yeah, so a former guest on this podcast the founder of search inside yourself Yes, man

Recently I had to step down because there were some Me Too complaints against them. I don't know the details. What has that done to the organization? To Google or to Silly. Search inside yourself. Well, within Google, it's a hit or in the left. Yeah.

Search inside yourself leadership institute, we called called it because the acronym is CILLY, because Google, everybody likes to sort of play around, you know, as part of the culture, be playful. He was chairman of the board there, although this, what happened happened while he was at Google. And you know, I, it's made me think a lot about kind of cultures and collision. Like over the years, we watched a number of teachers come from all over Asia to this country to teach people.

And even these teachers who had had, you know, the best training, quote, new better, you know, many of them got involved in what we now call a Me Too Way. And I felt like, um, man having, oh, I don't really know, but, you know, I just met with a whole group of young Chinese entrepreneurs. The single child family has been very, it's put so much pressure on the child and then becomes a grown-up to perform and to be successful. And Meng was, you know, he did really well in school and then he got to Google and he was a really smart engineer and did great things there. And then we

developed search inside yourself and it started becoming this like very cool thing that everybody wanted to be part, not everyone, but many people wanted to be part of. And what the reason search inside yourself was successful at Google was that what we kind of figured out was that especially those early employees, now it's different, you know, now they have more business people involved and so on. But in the beginning, involved and so on. But in the beginning they were mostly all really young, really smart, really competitive and had been in front of their screens their whole lives. And so what they needed, what they weren't good at was self-awareness and awareness of others. And that's why we built in so much compassion practice and

loving kindness and mindful listening and things like that because they were graded algorithms. Once they had to start working in teams, they didn't have those skills as much. And I think that it all happened so fast. I mean, I don't know that this is true, but I feel like Meng and probably others, you know, got, it was confusing. There were lots, there weren't so many women at Google

and some of the coolest ones wanted to be part of Surgeon Side yourself and were around and I think Meng he didn't really know how to quite how to handle all that. I haven't said that to him and I don't know that that's I'm going to talk to him but not like that but I because I think it's bigger than that. I think that I think it's bigger than that. I think that it's been a hard adjustment for a lot of young people and Silicon Valley who have all this has happened. Of course, they all have, all those original engineers have so much money they never have

to work again. I think it's been really confusing. But I did what I found, and I've texted with him about it but we haven't had a real conversation. But I guess stepping away from the details of the case, I just found it to be a little disheartening because one would imagine that bringing mindfulness and compassion into the workplace would have

a salutary effect on sexual harassment. And I think it does. Right, but this is a case that would raise questions about that. Of course, of course it does. And I mean, I remember after we'd all been back here and founded centers and been meditating for, I think, 30 years it was. And I remember I was at Zen Mountain monastery teaching something and someone like cautiously raises his hand and he said, I just want to ask you something.

How could somebody be meditating for 30 years and not be very compassionate something that happened, obviously? not be very compassionate something had happened obviously. You know, we're pretty, I mean, I say that sometimes, like, as a throwaway line, you know, how could she be meditating on this time and act like that? But in fact, we're complicated and we're really good at diluting ourselves. And it takes a long time to see everything that we're attached to and ways in which we're behaving unconsciously. I mean, a long time.

Ram does and I talk about it in the book. We've been doing it for so long and still things arise, you know, I don't have perfect behavior. So let's talk about the book since you've very skillfully brought us there. What is this new book? Okay, it's called Walking Each Other Home and then the subtitle is Conversations on Loving and Dying. How did I come about?

It came about because we noticed that the boomers were getting older and Ram does notice that he didn't have too much time left and we noticed that more people were talking about dying and of course we're only to aware of the ways in which as a culture we don't talk about it. And so, at first I thought, we'd take everything, Ramdas had written already, and he started writing about it and be here now. And, you know, kind of pull it together, and this would be like the words of Ramdas on dying.

But, he said, no, I want to do it together. Okay. So I said, okay, I'll write an introduction and about you and me and this world and and then we'll put all your stuff together. And so we did. And I remember. And then Ramdas said, when I went to see him again, he said, I like your part better than my part. So of course, he said it and read it so many times. It's tired of it. So then, and Ramdas, 20 years ago, had a massive stroke. And from, he's recovered amazingly.

I mean, he's paralyzed on one side and in a wheelchair. But his mind is more clear than ever. And I mean, his heartful presence is more there than ever. But he has aphasia. And with aphasia, it doesn't affect your thinking brain, but it affects the way in which you're able to express what you're thinking. So you know the word, you know there's a word you're trying to express, you just can't get the word.

Yes. Sometimes he talks about it as like a closet of costumes or clothing and that he's got the idea and then he goes into the closet to decide what to wear, you know what, how to say it. And sometimes it takes a long time. So that keeps him from really doing a lot of lecturing And he can't write in paragraphs like he used to. So, but he's still learning and he's still having new insights. They're amazing.

And so, most of that comes out in conversation with close friends. And so, we thought maybe we could try that. And it just, from the first day, just flowed. It was great. So that's what it is. It's conversations between us. And it's in my voice.

It's kind of written like a memoir. A memoir of visiting Ramdhast and talking about dying. And then we integrate some of his past writing. I'll say before we talked about that subject, I went back and read this passage, and then dropped that in that way. And yeah, it worked beautifully. And we treated everything from our fear, all of our fear of dying, to all the way to the very practical part of how we went through it with him, how he wants to die, you know, and how, where he wants

his ashes to go, and does he want music, because he's dying, we went through all, like, practical things that are actually really good for older people to do before they die. Well, you could argue that it's actually maybe even good for people who aren't that old. Yeah. I mean, it's really good for people who aren't that old to think about it and talk about it and look at the places where we are like holding on because the easier you become with it the the more present you are right now and and Ram just makes a connection between presence and openness and lack of fear and

Loving that in creating that space You allow love to arise and then all your relationships become more loving. All right, that sounds great, but how do you do that? There are practices turns out. First of all, you bring it into awareness, into everyday awareness so that you... Death bring death into everything. Yes, yeah. There's a great little app called We Croak.

The founder has been on this podcast. Oh, no kidding. Yes. I have it on my phone. Oh, that's great. I really want to send my book. It is. It's great.

So, and he's picked up on, you know, a practice from one tradition, or I think Burmese, but anyhow, that you should bring death into your awareness five times a day. So there are five phrases, or quotes from people about death, just to, I mean, that works. You can tell yourself, I'm going to just, every day for a minute or so, I'm going to just think about it. But also there are practices about letting go, which you know about, the basic inside practices of seeing, training to see what is arising in your mind. And so if you start thinking about death, or it happens that someone you love has just died or is going to die or is diagnosed with something terminal

or, you know, all the way to, we're talking about pets dying. The ways that death comes in to our lives are even death at a distance of people in other parts of the world, but death is there. And then you sit with it and see what arises in your own mind about that. And what fears you have, what then reveals like what you're holding onto in this life. And then ways in which you can let go the attachment. You know, it's usually not for everybody, but it's usually the people you love, you know. And so it's not that you're going to let them go out of your life, but that you let go that clinging and need for them to be a certain way or for you to be there

with them in a certain way. And that like opens up a kind of space for to be more loving and to know to just kind of relax into the reality that we are all going to die. Why would that make you more loving? Because, think about a time when you've been like really afraid. There is that kind of it's closed and tight, you know and and self-centered. Yes, and For good reason, I mean, you know to defend yourself from whatever you're afraid of but in as much as you're afraid There's like no space there to be open and loving towards somebody else So that's how they're related Most of us don't think about death much, but

do you think the fear of death subconsciously drives us in real? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it's related to all the other fears. I mean, finally, why do we fear anything that we fear? You know, it finally gets down to that we don't want to die. I mean, if you keep you keep stripping away, um, what it is. And some people, I think, say, well, I'm not afraid of death, but I just I'm afraid it'll be painful at the end. And um, that's different. That is really, you know, especially now, we're talking about pain and pain management and so on and that. But for most people now, there isn't a lot of pain around dying because they're managing

it. Yeah. I mean, I volunteer in a hospice and I've talked about this before. I mean, I do. Yeah. Wow. I see people in some pain, but they do a very good job of managing it. And I find that comforting.

I wouldn't say that I'm not afraid of death anymore. Yeah. Well, do you see fear in the people you're with there? It's interesting. Some people, at least one case in particular, woman who I was sitting with was very scared. They couldn't keep her in the bed. She had, there's a name for this condition. She was just completely agitated and anxious and she kept trying to get up and she was just always really nervous and you know just

asked me to shift her position or change where I'm sitting and so that was very tough. Yeah. But then others, yeah, I remember sitting with this guy and he said he started to and I don't think any spiritual background was interesting when he said something that would fit right in with the Buddhist teacher that as he got older he started to feel something part of something larger. You know that it's just a system. Yeah, well I think that's the way it's supposed to work, you know, but it doesn't always,

you know. Yeah, and you know there's this one guy who I've been there. I've been there for a couple of years and I probably would have I was part of a program Zen hospice training program and it only went for nine months and i probably would have ended it after nine months but this is one guy in there ronnie who i don't think is gonna die uh... and he's awesome and we've become very close and so i go back mainly just hang out with him and we talk a lot about well often we just play video games, but we talk as well.

And yeah, he doesn't express a lot of fear about it. You know, he has chronic shortness of breath and that's scary. But he's kind of, it's funny, he's got a new neighbor who was a younger guy in 50s and he has got prostate cancer and he's just mad, I think, that had he gone to the doctor earlier, it would have been caught and it would have been managed.

And he's definitely earlier in the stages of grief. He hasn't gotten to acceptance. And so it's interesting to talk to him. And in the three of us, yesterday, the three of us were hanging out together. And yeah, it's interesting. Ronnie is much more relaxed than this guy. The other than the new guy who I don't want to name him.

He I haven't talked about him publicly before, but he was much more agitated. So I see this spectrum. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we talk about regrets and how yeah, regrets make it really difficult in the end times. And so it's obvious that it's good to let go of regrets. I mean, which is not to say that we all couldn't have done some things better, but we didn't.

So like kind of accepting that. And then, you know, then if there's something to be done in apologies or forgiveness or whatever, that you do that, but to let go of it as something you like deeply regret, like not taking care of yourself, it's really good practice to go through that and let go of that whenever you can because it does make it. I watched people with regrets try to die and it was really not try to die But die man. It was really hard, but but the hospice work one of the things that when I turned 70 I thought well now I guess I'm gonna

Somehow be closer to knowing about dying, you know But it doesn't happen that way, you know? And I, so one of our questions was, how do we learn about dying in a culture which really celebrates not just life, but young life? And where dying is largely hidden away, not happening at home so much. So, Ramdas has done a lot of hospice work too, and he started in the 80s during the AIDS epidemic. And he actually was so fun writing this book because yeah, I've known him all these years and I thought I knew every single thing about him but He he's gay. I don't know you know that I've never knew that. Uh-huh. Yeah, but um he

Said that but but he grew up so he's 87 now. So he grew up in the 30s and 40s and 50s, you know, when, which is, which is given name Richard, Richard Albert, Albert. So grew up in a, his father was a wealthy industrialist who was a guy in Boston. Yes, he are very upwardly mobile president

of the New York New Haven Railroad. Right. There's a great documentary about him called Fierce Grace, which is really good. And then there's a newer documentary on Netflix. Going home. Yeah. And that's set at just the time the book is, and so it's really sweet to see.

I'm short and lovely. But yeah, so he grew up in that family. I mean, he became a full professor of psychology at Harvard, but his mother didn't really, you know, he wasn't a doctor and he wasn't a lawyer, so as his brothers or lawyers and business people, and so she never really felt like psychology was a little soft, you know. So he, growing up, and he was in prep school, and the boys were brutal to him. He struggled with that in ways that is different now, and it's not all fine, but it's different. When we were writing the book, he talks about being with people who are dying, doing hospice work

or being with family or friends, is one of the ways in which we really get more familiar with dying, is being with people who are dying. How did he get into it? In the 80s, someone asked him to sit with someone who was dying of AIDS. And he did, because I mean, he was already out as gay and he was a spiritual teacher. So he did. And then he sat with quite a few people who had AIDS. And as you know, many people died during that time. And he said, he said, I was so drawn to them. You know, I wanted to get close to them because it was so intimate. And he said, they were, they were

dying. They weren't afraid of being gay, but they were afraid of dying. I wasn't afraid of dying, gay, but they were afraid of dying. I wasn't afraid of dying, but I was pretty nervous about being gay. So he said, for me, it was a real turning point in doing that work with AIDS. But so he'd never said that to me before, so I thought it was interesting. But he talks in the book about, we talked together about people we've known who we've been with while they died and what you learned from that. He talks about as a teaching for people who are doing that with one person or many, about being a loving rock that you're there. If you don't have any medical responsibilities or other responsibilities, you're just there sitting, not judging,

not trying to tell them what it's going to be like after they die, not just being there, being loving, being maybe holding hands or whatever is being called for in the moment, maybe it's watching a video game, you know, but just being there so that the dying person knows it's all okay and I'm being held by love and that's all I need to know now. held by love and that's all I need to know now. I resonate with that for sure. I bet. So, what about you? Are you afraid of death? Well, I'm so much less. I wasn't, I didn't think I was desperately afraid before, because, you know, I've done lots of practice around it and so on.

But I, and I was with my sister who died two years ago and I went through a lot of changes around it then. So I thought it was pretty cool, but having these conversations for a long time, well it took us about two years to write the book, but he was in Maui and I was in Massachusetts and I go back and forth and we renew the conversation. But I found that just talking about it and you know, reading about it sound, but mainly just these conversations made it the process of thinking and talking about it just things

just fell away. And I feel now, I don't know what will come up when it happens. I could have all kinds of fears that are totally repressed that I haven't even glimpsed. But I feel pretty easy about it now. And I'm hoping that this book, which is a conversation, and it, from people who've read it so far, I've told me that it kind of draws you into the conversations. We set this, you know, as if you're in the room, as I said, it's written in a memoir style. So, they, it'll help people get familiar in a different way. The sections are each like about two pages each and it's beautifully illustrated. So it's as easy a read as it could be for the subject.

What would you say to, I mean, what would you say to younger people about the importance of thinking about death? Because I don't think people who aren't more sort of by the actuarial church more proximal to the end. Yeah. I think about this, or do I think most people who are younger think about the need for it? Yeah.

Yes. And Ron does have a caregiver who is in his early 20s and we brought him into the conversation and some other younger people also. And I remembered that there was a time some years ago and I was Bill Moyers did a series called, I thought it was a terrible title from dying on our own terms. He says, this is the one thing that's not on your own terms. But it was really more about like, you know, patient, what's that movement called, like, control, you know, of how you're going to die.

Patience, right? Yeah. And so I was working with his production crew and with Frank Usseski, you probably know him. He wrote a book. Yeah, it's called the five invitations He's done he ran the Zen hospice in San Francisco for years and So we were doing some work with the production crew because we knew that you was one of those series that it took I don don't know, a year to film. And we knew that some of the people they were filming and talking to and working with who were in hospice were going to die while they were doing it. And they were mostly young guys.

And we wanted to help them be prepared for what emotion they'd be going through while they were making a series about dying. So we taught them some things. But during that time, I was one night I went to meet my son who was a student at NYU then, so he was 19 or 20. And I told him I was doing this and he seemed really bored, you know, like a fat series with Bill Moira's on all people dying. I had no interest. And so I said, okay, what does death mean to you? And he said, he said, AIDS guns in the environment. He said, AIDS guns in the environment.

I said, hmm, we hadn't really talked about those things. And when he said it, I realized that, yeah, I mean, death's on the, you know, it's part of our awareness, no matter how old we are and how we're living. And important, we, one night around the table, and I put this in the book, we had a conversation about people's first awareness of death. And for some, it was grandparents dying, but usually they just disappeared. You know, it was always the children

shouldn't see the body and we shouldn't talk about death. And for some it was pet-stying and how, in most cases, nobody ever explained to them what happened and how that would relate to them dying or their parents dying. And so, yeah, we talked about the importance of, in whatever way is like natural and appropriate, like being open about it at whatever age people are. We had to talk about it with my son because he's three. We lost a cat. And we just had to say, hey, Gus got my wife came up with a good formulation. He got sick and didn't get better. So yeah, he grasped it now. Now when my mom's cat just died and he's like, oh, okay. So Harry's dead. Yeah. Yeah. That's the first for so many children, but that reminds me of my granddaughter was around that age. She said,

many children, but that reminds me of my granddaughter was around that age. She said, and my sister had died, and I said something like, well, I'm getting old. And Dallia said, my sister died. Yeah, a couple of years ago. Okay, but and Dallia said, well, you know, I'm getting old. And Dallia said, I'm getting old and Daya said, I'm a you're not old and I said what what is old to you? And she said, old is when you get broken and you can't get fixed. So just what you said. You get broken and you couldn't get fixed. That's right. Yeah. Is there anything that I should have asked you but didn't? Well you write a lot about grieving, which even if you are not thinking about death comes

on all of us. And just there's some really good thoughts about grieving in there. And that can be helpful to anybody. Yeah, I think that for just ordinary folks, you know, that we all need to bring it into our awareness. And for people working with the aging and dying, there's probably to be really helpful. And do you think it's possible for ordinary folks to come to sort of a level of comfort with impermanence as it applies to everyone we love in ourselves?

Yeah, well, you're right. I mean, it is the ultimate impermanence, all right. Well, what do you think? You've been meditating? Yeah, I wouldn't say that I've achieved it. I think it's a process. And part of it is a natural process that we touched on this earlier that as you get closer to death, I think you see for many people you just naturally get more comfortable with it. But my friend, Jeff Warren, who is a meditation teacher at my age, talks about trying to bring

the wisdom of old age into the middle of your life. And so I'm intrigued by that. That's pertains to what you're doing. Yeah. I mean, my experience in meditation, which is the same practices that I know, at least you started out doing. Still doing it.

I thought so. That, you know, you get glimpses of impermanence. I mean, you can watch and feel the process of it in your own body and see it in your mind. And it becomes, you just understand it as part of the unfolding, even though, of course, you're still attached to things not changing, whatever, or changing in a way that you want them to change. So yeah, I think it's, I mean, I think that's as human sense that waking up has to do with

recognizing both the impermanence of everything and the interconnection of everything. Yes. And that this isn't, we don't need to put the pressure on ourselves. They haven't happened overnight. It's just a work on it. Yeah. I think Joseph's first book was called A Gradual Unfolding. That's the way it happens.

I mean, for some people, like an experience that, you know, some radical experience that shakes everything up and then they see something and they get it. But mostly, it's a gradual unfolding. That's why it's good to start now. Before we go, just plug the book and let us know where else we could plug everything you want to plug. Like we'll find your websites and anything. Okay. Search inside yourself. Just give us the whole thing. Okay. The book is called Walking Each Other Home.

Conversations on Loving and Dying. It's published by Sounds True. You can get it from them. You can get it from Amazon. It's the number one bestseller in Amazon's books on spirituality right now. And you can, and Ramdas' website is Ramdas.org. Even if you don't buy the book and you're curious about some of

this, there are lots of videos and teachings of all kinds on that site. My website is meribibush.com and that'll get you started. Great job. Thank you. Mirabai Bush, big thanks to her for that conversation. I really enjoyed it. I hope you did too. Let's do some voice-mails. Here's number one. Hi Dan, my name is Maggie and I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I've been listening to your podcast for the past six months or so

and I really enjoy it. I got into a meditation practice around that same time and it has been pretty consistent about doing about 10 minutes per day in the morning and I recently went to the episode with you and Sam Harris and Sam mentioned that he thought you didn't really meditate into what you have gone to a meditation retreat. And since then, he's planted this kernel of doubt in my mind that what I'm doing really matters or is helpful or is real meditation. And it's kind of spoiling my meditation practice

to be honest because I feel like I'm just uncertain what I'm getting out of it. I know you quickly refuted that on the stage when you commented on what he had said, but it's still just bothering me. And so I wanted to know if you had any advice on how to move past that and to help kind of reassure me that this 10 minutes a day really does make a difference in one's life. Thanks so much.

I really appreciate all you've done. Bye. Okay. I'm really glad you asked me this, and I'm really sorry that you're dealing with doubt because doubt not doubt in the pejorative. I mean in some context doubt is really positive and I'm a journalist skepticism and doubt is really important, but this kind of doubt identified by a guy known as the Buddha several millennia ago as one of the five classic hindrances to meditation. This kind of

quicksand of self-doubt, corrosive self-doubt. Am I doing this right? Is it making a difference? Is is just kryptonite? And so I hate to think that Sam and I may have added to it unnecessarily, because it's often there for no reason whatsoever, and now you have ostensibly a reason. So let me just take it off the table entirely. Your meditation practice is excellent, and in fact, at the high end of the range of what I recommend for people, I always, you know, what I say to people is five to 10 minutes a day would be a great habit.

That's my opening gambit. You're already at the high end of that range, but what I often revert back to after saying that is, if you did one minute a day daily-ish, that too would be great. Because let's recognize starting habits, it's incredibly hard, I say this all the time. So you are deriving many of the advertised benefits of meditation at the level you are currently doing it, and if you never increase, that is totally fine. You are doing great. Yes, meditation retreats can be super valuable, but that is in no way a diminishment of what you are doing.

I mean, maybe an analogy would look that could be useful would be this. Many of us exercise, and we do, you know, two or three, four days a week, we do 30 minutes a cardio. That's really good for us. We should feel good that we have that kind of exercise practice. Some people do Iron Man or triathlons. That does not negate the value of your 30 minutes of cardio three to five times a week. It's just a different thing that other people are doing, which is also awesome, but it doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't also awesome.

There's another thing to say is everybody's mind is different, so if you're LeBron James, and you're doing just a little bit of cardio once in a while, well your baseline athletic ability is so high that you're probably fine. If you're me, you need to do a lot more exercise because I am, you can't see me, but I am not LeBron James, let's just say. So the same is true with the mind. Some people really need, I am not LeBron James in the mind. I need to do quite a bit of mental training because my baseline levels of Concentration and friendliness are not that high Let's just say and yours may be I don't we don't know each other Maggie yet But yours may be incredibly high. I don't know and you may be getting as much out of ten a day ten minutes a day

As some people get by doing a meditation retreat, just based on what your, in a Buddhist context might be called, spiritual faculties already, you know, what the levels of your spiritual faculties already are. In other words, what you're basic, you know, so your mental wiring is. So, I really don't want, I really hope that this doubt can diminish with time, if not evaporate entirely, because exploring the mind for 10 minutes a day can take you very far, and you're already there in many ways. If you want to go further at some point by going on retreat, great, but it is by no means a must.

Keep going Maggie, don't let me and Sam get in your head. Let's go to the next voicemail. Hey Dan, love the show and everything you've done. My question is about thinking, about thinking. During meditation, when I realized that we've been thinking without knowing that we're thinking, that magical aha moment, at that point we're taught to compassionately and gently return to the breath. But sometimes I find that during that realization, I want to explore the thought itself. Where did it come from?

What is it? Which can be helpful as long as I don't get carried away again. Should we even try to analyze and thought when we notice that Huckler responsibly approach thinking about thinking during that magical moment. Thanks so much, all right. All right, so this is just one guy's opinion. And as I've said before, I'm now,

we're now in the process of recruiting. I promise this can happen soon. We're going to recruit actual meditation teachers to come on and answer these questions Instead of just sticking you with me, but here's here's With the in my experience. I do not spend time thinking about thinking I don't want to tell you should never do that or some of breaking the rules if you do I don't I don't know But I don't if I want to think about thinking, I'll do, I got plenty of time to think,

just walking around, sitting in the back of a cab, whatever it is. However, there is a move you can make with thinking that I have found, and again, I'm just speaking based on my own experience here, that I have found to be really quite meaningful in a meditative sense, which is to look for who is thinking.

So a thought comes up, comes out of it, comes out from underneath its rock, and you just look like who's the thinker? You can do the same thing with sounds. Who's hearing this? And that sets you into a, usually often just for like a nanosecond or two, into a really interesting space of like seeing that in some ways, you know, there's nobody home here that I've

used this phrase before that there's, and this is going to sound a little grandiose, but my experience, this is actually not a bad description of reality, which is this all there is here is this yawning chasm of pure knowing. You can't find the owner and that is throwing you up against a fundamental mystery of the universe and I'm not talking like that I'm not like getting stoned and playing Dungeons and Dragons here. I'm this is me wearing a suit being a journalist guy, it is the mystery of consciousness is one of the fundamental mysteries of the universe. We know that we know things.

We know that we're aware that we've just had a thought, we know we're hearing a sound, you know you're hearing my voice right now, but we don't know who is knowing it. You listen for what or who is hearing what I'm saying right now, you won't find it, but the act of looking from a contemplative standpoint is said to be really fruitful and really interesting. So that's what I would recommend. And again, you're getting your meditation advice from a morning television echo here.

So take it for whatever it's worth. And as I said, eventually we're going to have actual meditation teachers given the advice here. But my move when I notice I've lapsed into what's been called a think hole is to is to either ignore you know salute the thinking and go back to the breath or whatever my object of focus is or to take a moment to look for you know who who who's who's doing this thinking and and even a step further who's asking the question because again it just throws you up against this

Who's asking the question? Because again, it just throws you up against this, when I could tell, inarguable fact that there's nobody here, nothing you can claim as you or yours, which is just inexhaustibly interesting, in my experience. All right, well, thank you for both for your questions. I really appreciate it. Thank you all for listening to the show. I really mean that. I really appreciate the thank you all for listening to the show I really mean that

really appreciate the fact that I have a podcast is I just can't get over it I love it so I really appreciate that you all listen and I want to thank the folks who are involved putting this together Suzy Lu is working the boards today Ryan Kessler is the primary producer for the show Samuel Johns Ryan Kessler is the primary producer for the show Samuel Johns who is a 10% happier employee and really helps as help me get my act together on Upping our game here generally in many specific and general ways. I want to thank him as well So thank you to all all the folks who work on this and one last request I know you hear every podcaster in the world say this but there's a reason why we do if you have a second to give us a rating or a review or to share us on social media that actually really helps us with

the rankings on the various podcast players and that means more people find us, more people are listening and we have our bosses will continue to let us do this really cool thing. Thank you again. See you next Wednesday. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple

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