Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 179: Anuradha Bhagwati, Activism Against Military Sexual Assault

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

Our guest this week, Anuradha Bhagwati, is a writer, activist, yoga and meditation teacher, and Marine Corps veteran. She founded the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN), which brought national attention to sexual violence in the military and helped repeal the ban on women in combat. In our conversation, she details her lifelong journey of rebellion, the obstacles she's faced along the way and how she has found peace. The Plug Zone Website: https://anuradhabhagwati.com/ Social: @AnuBhagwati Author: Unbecoming: A Memoir of Disobedience See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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orange sofa, sleep meditations have become a big and growing part of our app and very happy to have orange continuing his contributions. All right, let's get to honorata Bhagwati. She is not your ordinary Marine. She was raised by Indian parents, and she refers to her mom as a tiger mom, and her way of rebelling was to join the Marines. And in many ways, she thrived in the Marines. She was trained as a black belt, and it was a leading officer in training for close combat situations.

But it was also a real struggle for her. And she had to work through sexual harassment and misogyny. She says while in the Marines. And after leaving, as a result, she says of calling out sexual harassment issues, she found an organization to bring these issues to Congress. And so she's been very active. And in the course of dealing with her own personal trauma and trying to help others with their trauma, she has found meditation to be deeply, deeply useful.

Although she has a lot to say about the limits of its utility. And she's telling her story now in a new book called Unbecoming, a memoir of disobedience, unbecoming a memoir of disobedience. I really enjoyed this interview and I think you will too. So here we go, on a rata buguetti. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Thanks for coming in.

Thank you. So, how did you get Nice to meet you too. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. So, how did you get into meditation? Oh goodness. I started through yoga actually, maybe 10, 11 years ago. I was in the Marines and just looking for something fun to do between training and went to a yoga center and loved it. It was a classical yoga center, and so meditation was part of the curriculum.

So we would start everything with meditation. That was my first glimpse into what it was like watching the mind. Then several years later, I decided, okay, this is the thing that's really helped me more than kind of stretching and moving around, which also has been great, but I walked away from my military experience with a lot of injuries, and so movement wasn't as available to me as it was when I was growing up.

So I had to learn how to sit still and figure that out, figure out all the dissatisfaction around wanting to move really quickly and not being able to, not being able to run anymore, not being able to lift really super heavy things. Right? So what is it like to sit and not be happy while I'm sitting? Right. And to wish you were doing other things, to miss the things you used to be able to do,

to watch all of that come and go and see how you're feeding it and learn how not to feed it. Yeah, yeah. And now that sort of my physical injuries have, I've been able to manage them a little more over the last few years, except I've seen a lot of experts. I actually prefer the sitting quietly, the sitting still to the movement. So I'm super curious and I'm sure pure will get this about how you got injured, but let me just stay with the meditation for a second. So how deep did you get into the practice?

I would say pretty deep. I mean, it's definitely part of my daily, you know, my day to day. I've spent several long retreats in Massachusetts and California at IMS and Square Rock. And you were saying before we started rolling that one of the retreats was a six week retreat. Yes, and that was absolutely transformative. And I didn't want to leave. When you say transformative, can you describe what the transformation was? I mean, in part, you know, there's something really radical about leaving cell phones and laptops behind, even for a day.

I mean, we don't have to talk about six weeks, but, you know, this is New York City where people are moving so quickly. And do we still many things? We should say you live here. I live here. I grew up here. And the city has not calmed down since I was a child here. And it takes its toll, I think, even for those of us who are used to the busy busy and takes subways every day and are used to rush hour and all of that, it takes its toll.

I think it's like the end of the day, we're really tired. It wouldn't be the same if we were out in the mountains or something. And so leaving all of that, leaving the busyness and committing to not consing harm to other people. In other words, the sort of day to day, the scowling, and the elbows and the trains, and all of this stuff that we do as New Yorkers, whether consciously or not, you know, there's a lot of irritation that we walk around with. You know, at these

retreats, there's this sort of commitment to, okay, we're going to be our best, the best versions of ourselves, even if we're grumpy, right? It's not hard. It's not easy being on retreat, being in silence is not necessarily easy and being irritated with your fellow human beings and not acting on it, which is the key, because irritation is natural, but not feeding the anger or the frustration. That's the transformative part I think about being on retreat, just watching the irritation and not diving into it, which is easier said than done. Like waiting in line for your breakfast and you're all in silence and it can be considered very boring. There's nothing else going on. It's just minute after minute and you want the

person in front of you to hurry the heck up and he's not. He's taking his time. I mean, audition out his oatmeal or whatever. So then the irritation arises, what are you gonna do with it? I mean, the line's not gonna move any faster and you've got nowhere to go. So why are you irritated in the first place, right? So that's the kind of thing. And then you realize that moment is the example

of the metaphor for like your entire life. Right? Like that oatmeal moment is you can apply it anywhere. Yeah. So whatever's coming up, you can see how impermanent it is. You can see that it's not yours. It's going to arrive at rise and pass unless you feed it with neurotic obsessive thinking. Yeah, and there's a lot of... It's going to sound a little grandiose, but there's a lot of freedom in that. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And all of a sudden, then when I'm back in New York City,

and there are 200 people in a subway car, and the car's not moving anywhere, and you realize, well, you can be frustrated and start growling the way that many New Yorkers do. When a train doesn't move during rush hour, or you can just sit there and be okay with it. You know, this is another oatmeal moment. It's not going to help to get riled up and rattled and talk about how frustratingly slow the trains in New York City are. Like that's, it's just not going to help because your train is going to be stuck regardless. You know, from, from me, I would say that it's sort of interesting transition to my own practice because I think we've been you're probably you've probably Been added a little bit longer than me, but but around the same time, but

Has been that when irritation comes up or anything comes up sometimes I'm awake enough to say oh this is an opportunity This is an opportunity. I get I've been trained. I've been doing this stupid practice every day for how many years this is what it's for. So let's just actually like to do it now. And that is actually a very, for me, that's kind of a life-enhancing feature of the practice at my stage. Yeah, I agree. It's kind of delightful when you can realize that because the moments of irritation actually

do decrease over time. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's kind of cool. And that happens again and again. So maybe that's what it, sorry, sorry, I just got excited, I apologize. But maybe that's what it is that there's, in my case, maybe I am actually getting less irritated, less frequently. And therefore, I'm able to see it as an opportunity

because it's not with me all the time. Maybe that would be an optimistic spin on my practice. I mean, I believe it. Certainly, you believe it's true in your case. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm less likely to get riled up over any number of matters.

I mean, you seem pretty chill, but maybe that's because it's there or morning at 9 a.m. and Lord knows what you're doing last night. I have no idea. No, I mean, the alternative is just not acceptable to me. So yeah, I still get irritated and all the emotions are there. I get super angry and super sad and all of these things.

But the zero to 100 that happens with most people and emotions, I'm more aware of, okay, yeah, I'm at 15 now, can I scale this back before it gets to 100? Like do I really have to be super in-raged right now? You know, I just noticed in it, because I mean, rage is something that I work on a lot, right, because I'm usually at 100 before I realize I'm there.

I'm done to feel good, the point is it doesn't, it doesn't feel good. If it felt good, we had no problem. But it does feel good a little bit, right? I mean, self-righteousness can feel good. Until it doesn't, right? So yeah, I was immersed in the world of violence and rage, sometimes fueled it,

sometimes it was the byproduct of it, and it hurts after a while. So I know that I mean there there is there are great aspects to rage. When when I'm feeling like the world needs to change and I'm fired up, you know, literally fired up by a feeling of wanting the world to be a more just place for people who are hurting. That's where rage can sometimes fuel me in a productive way. But I've mostly experienced it in this kind of, in this way that eats me up on the inside and doesn't necessarily leave me feeling

renewed or productive. In the sense of like being able to help myself or others, that's what I mean by productive. I've used this quote on the show before. So repeat listeners may get annoyed with me, but I'm going to say it again because it bears repeating. The Buddha said that anger, I'm sure you've heard this has a honey tip, but a poison root. So the tip of it, that first little free song of anger of like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go get this person or I'm in the right. little free zone of anger of like, oh yeah, I'm going to go get this person or I'm in the right. I'm going to pound the table and release whatever kind of uncomfortable negative energies building up in me. It can feel good, but the rest of it, as you just described, actually feels pretty corrosive. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, when I say, like, I dwelled in it. I did for years during the military.

And then in particular, after the military, when I was processing a lot of painful experiences. And I was so enraged, and I don't know that there was any way but to experience several years of just misery. And that was just going to be my experience until I found my way out of it. And meditation was something that helped me find my way out of it, right? But I had to go through those years of just being suffering, just suffering, endless suffering, whether it was seeking treatment at the VA or processing and how, you know, fell and oriented, betrayed me or other women.

It was a lot, it was a lot to go through. I had to, you know, there's no easy way out. Okay, so now I'm super curious, and I'm sure the listeners are super curious. So let's just ditch meditation for a second and just go into your story about the military and then we'll look back to it. How and why did you join the Marines? A lot of it had to do with my upbringing with my parents. So I'm the daughter of two Indian immigrants who are fierce academics, and I'm an only child also.

And so kind of having tiger mom and tiger dad, putting a lot of pressure on me when I was growing up in New York City again, very fast-paced environments. I was kind of competing against ghosts from the time I was two or three years old. I mean, I had to get into certain colleges. And I knew the names of those colleges when I was a toddler. So it was that kind of kind of experience.

Like this is your life. This is what you're going to do. You know, your own personal interests and this thing called happiness or this is not a part of my, you know, our world. You know, my parents are actually pretty, pretty happy people. But for me, I was like, oh my God, there's so much pressure on me. I know siblings to share with,

which would have come in handy in some cases. So yeah, I grew up pretty miserable, not feeling like I had my own voice and my own agency. You know, oftentimes I was making decisions, but it was really my parents' decisions. And so I had no sense of what whatever this thing called self is. I had no sense of self. And so the Marines was a rebellion.

It was a way of fleeing my cultural heritage. It was a way of kind of getting back at dad, although I don't know if I really understood it that way when I made the decision. But like they couldn't get their hands on me once I joined the Marines, right? And you were in college. I was, yeah, I just finished college. Oh they couldn't get their hands on me once I joined the Marines, right? And you were in college. I was, yeah, I just finished college. Oh, okay, gotta, you finished college. I had just finished it.

And I, you know, I was making, I was making all these decisions for them. Like the college I went to, and I was probably gonna end up with the PhD and married to like a particular kind of Indian man. This is all very, this is what Indian parents decide for their kids, for their daughters in particular. Where did you go to college and what kind of PhD

would it have been? What did you have to go? I went to Yale. So yeah, one of the ones that are toddler, I can remember. Exactly. Although Harvard was really, like, Harvard is the one I should have gone to.

You're so, you're a disciple. You're a disciple. I'm already disappointed in you. Yeah. I mean, it's hilarious, right? But this is actually true. And it's true for so many Asian kids. And it's tragic because this is no way to raise children.

And I think the thing that a lot of Asian American parents don't realize is if you want your kid to succeed, even in that high-paced academic world, joy helps. It really, really helps. You know, especially in the long term, right? If you're doing it, if you're running on empty, when you're going through these Ivy League machines or wherever your kid ends up, you know, corporate America or, you know, I don't know, a neurosurgeon, you know, a Sloan Kettering or something like it's just they're're not gonna last very long. Some things gotta feed it, something real, you know,

I can't just be competition and ambition. It's not gonna last, it's gonna make your kid miserable on some level, so joy helps. That's my shout out to all the Asian American parents listening, but. Yeah, I mean, it's also true. I mean, I was raised by Jewish parent, one Jewish parent, one non Jewish parent.

They were actually not tiger, they were actually the opposite. They catered, I would say, if any five, one Jewish parent, one non-Jewish parent. They were actually not tiger, they were actually the opposite. They kind of, I would say if any, if I have any critique of my parents was that they gave us too much, we were raised in the 70s and 80s in that time when like there was no control over children before helicopter parenting became a thing.

And so we ran wild. But I have a lot of Jewish friends who had the helicopter parents and they've deal with a lot of what you're describing. Yeah. I mean, growing up in New York, I actually probably knew more Jewish kids than Indian kids. And there was such a symbiosis of familiarity there. And across parents as well, so my parents, I think, found a community here among sort of very, you know, just parents who cared a lot about their children, but put so much pressure on their kids to do sort of extraordinary things at really young ages.

You know, I'm sure it works for some children, just it didn't work for me. So when they found out that you would join the Marines, which by the way is like a diabolically clever rebellion on your heart, when they found that out, because that's so much more sophisticated than a nose ring or whatever else you could doubt, you know, tattoo on your face or whatever. What was their reaction? I mean, I think my mother was in shock, but I, you know, because they were Indian and pragmatic, and they're also economists, which is a whole nother, you know, maybe pathology, but like I had to explain it

in very systematic ways to them. So I told my father first, and then he told my mother explaining it in ways that she could understand in terms of cost-benefit analysis. Then she came back to me and said, oh, you'll learn a lot at discipline. And I laughed my head off, because I thought that's how she's gonna justify

this experience, as if discipline wasn't a part of my life since I was an infant, you know? But okay, all right, the Marines will teach Marines discipline. But why did you want to do it? I mean, aside from the middle finger to your parents, what was driving you about the why the marine specifically because you could have joined a punk band or whatever.

Yeah. The Marines are so extreme and I was such an extreme kid. Like I had to see things in their most dramatic versions. And so, you know, if it wasn't the Marines, I probably would have ended up in a war zone doing war correspondence. I just wanted to see things. You know, I was interested in like the theater of life. I know that sounds dramatic, but I ended up seeing G.I. Jane with a Demi Moore film back

in the day and was so riveted. You know, it's complete fiction, complete Hollywood and like the Navy Seals were not open to women then obviously it took 20 more years. It took suing the government, which is actually what I ended up doing when I got out for women who wanted to have combat assignments like special operations. But I was riveted and I was like,

I wanna do this, which sounds silly. Some people were like, what you were just moved by a Hollywood movie. Yes, actually, it was my version of Top Gun. I remember when Top Gun came out and then an entire generation of men wanted to join the Navy or the Air Force and become pilots. It actually works. That kind of advertising, those storylines are so powerful for I think American kids. And yeah, it seemed to me more

doing doing that proving herself competing with men and bucking the system, you know, succeeding under some pretty dire circumstances. All of that appealed to me. And did I realize back then that like the military, the Marines were sort of another version of my dad and all of his oppressive stuff? No, I didn't because I was a kid, but I really wanted to fight. I just wanted to fight him. I wanted to fight other dudes. I just wanted to fight and prove myself. Wow. Okay. So did you fight? In my in my own way. Yeah, I, I, I fought every day for something. Yeah, the Marines. So, you know, I was warned before I went in and I, I even knew it up to like the last minute. Just from some

conversations I had with recruiters. The Marines aren't fond of women. Um, it's the branch with the least number of women. Um. They're still segregated basic training, unlike the other branches of service. Like the army integrates all of its training, as well as the other branches. The Marine Corps still segregates boot camp for no good reason. And so that segregation of men and women, and these are young people, these are teenagers,

leads to, it fosters a culture in which men both fear and despise women and women don't think they're good enough. So it hurts both the guys and the girls. And at the time when I served, combat assignments were off limits to women. So things like, you know, the Navy SEALs were not going to happen for me But neither were like I wanted to be a human intelligence specialist, which I thought was really cool You know, I was going to gather intel on the enemy and You know and help the infantry Acquire. It's targets more efficiently, right? Like this is a lot of military language

But that's what they do and so human intelligence was off limits to women because you would be attached to an infantry company or an infantry unit. What could you do as a woman in the name? I mean, at that point, something like 70%, don't quote me, but something like 70% on the jobs are off limits to women. So it would be a support assignment.

I ended up being a communications officer, which was not particularly exciting, but what ended up- Was that even mean? You know, you would command a radio or a data platoon at the lieutenant level and provide communications for a larger unit. So if there, you've got guys in the field and they're guys, I would imagine they're out on a mission, they're radioing back to you.

Something like that, yeah, yeah. And it would be combat units, it would be support units. I mean, everybody needs to talk, right? Commanders need to talk to their troops and vice versa. So it's a very kind of pragmatic functional assignment, but I was an interested in technology. I was interested in human behavior and where the action was.

And so the first kind of taste of that that I got was, I volunteered for the Marine Court close combat system, which was very physical. It was being revamped at the time, women were being, women, women volunteers were being asked to join. And so I was one of the very, I was actually the second, the second woman in the home Marines to volunteer for this black belt training under this kind of legendary war fighter. He was a reconnaissance Marine, a special ops guy, and he, he'd been in the Marines for well over 30 years at that time.

He was a Colonel. We'd done a Colonel by the time I met him. And he was like my first huge kind of war fighter influence who really shaped my mind and got me to get out of my head and just think in terms of pure rage, pure violence. When you're asked to shoot, you pull the trigger. When you're told to take, you pull the trigger, when you're told to take the hell you take the hell.

But it was very intimate, it's close combat as, I mean, you're basically touching your enemy, right? You're not like shooting at him from afar, you're grappling with him, you're stabbing him, you're gouging at eyes, all of that kind of intimate, in personal, in-person violence, right? But if we'll, I'm sorry to interrupt, but why if women aren't allowed to have tip of the spear assignments, why would they even allow you into this training? Everything was starting to open up slowly, slowly.

So this was about introducing female instructors to the core also. So I became an instructor trainer. So I, yeah. So then the idea was women would be teaching other Marines these skills. So across the board, every Marine was required to learn these close combat skills. And then the belt system is still in place.

And yeah, the system's gone really nicely right now. But yeah, even back then, you know, when I was doing that, the war in Iraq hadn't quite started yet, but a couple of years later, I'll even, yeah, earlier than that, war in Afghanistan started first. And so women were being deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq very soon after that and fighting and dying. And so this idea that women were not in combat was quickly disproven.

So did you participate in those missions? No, I didn't. I didn't. I was mostly in Asia and stateside. And I got out in O4 after a lot of hard experiences, personal experiences, with sexual harassment. And so that was my kind of, my exit was not one that I was happy about because I wanted to stay in and to play and do a lot of things. Yeah, because by 2004 you had watched the fall of the Taliban, you would watch the invasion of Iraq and the first flowerings of the insurgency.

You'd, you'd, from a distance, there had been a lot going on. They're had. I mean, from my perspective, I wouldn't have even known that language. It was more that, okay, my friends had started deploying. I was as simple as that, right? Like, I wanted to deploy with them. So, and I was in, I was in a unit, I was in an all infantry training unit and as a company commander, which for a woman was like this huge thing. I was training 400 Marines in actual combat skills. It wasn't just the close infighting. It was weapons systems like grenades and machine guns and all of that. So these kids, these Marines of ours were then being further trained and then deploying to a rocket So like my next unit would have been in a deploying unit, but what ended up happening was a

series of sexual assault and harassment scandals, which I witnessed, tried to stop. They were all swept under the rug. And this sort of the final straw for me was a sexual harassment investigation against the fellow officer that I initiated on behalf of a couple of sergeants in my unit. And I knew that going into it, it was going to be risky, a little bit of a suicide mission for me, but at that point I'd seen so many bad things happen to women in that unit that I decided it was worth it, and maybe life on the outside was gonna be better. And that particular lieutenant was not punished,

even though it was recommended that he lose his job, et cetera. He was promoted and given command of a company spent at least 10 more years in the Marines, then got in trouble for something similar and was kicked out. So. Does that say that the tolerance, there's reduced tolerance now, then there was back then?

Tolerance of sexual harassment and assault. I think there's high tolerance of it. It's still. Absolutely. So I ended up, when I left the Marines, the mistreatment of women was high on my list of issues that enraged me. I mean, it was pure fury because there were still a few of us, six to seven percent of

the Marine Corps's female, so that it's a tiny number. And I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the rage, except I had an education, I had some resources, and so with some other women veterans, I found it in an organization, and we ended up taking all of this to Congress and putting a spotlight on sexual harassment and assault in the military. And it actually worked. It actually worked. I think it was a product of hundreds of thousands of women

deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of them coming home in body bags or wounded. And the American people, I think, were ready at that time to consider that women deserved better treatment in the military if they were going to serve overseas like that. I know you write about it in your book. Can you tell me a little bit about what you personally witnessed in terms of the mistreatment

of women? Yeah, I mean, I sort of went through it day to day. As a woman in the Marines, for me, it was daily misogynistic language, pornography in the workplace. And kind of, you don't belong here language, which is, present in many institutions in the civilian world, but I don't know that it's as blatantly out in the open as it is in a place like the Marines.

Marine Corps leaders who are largely men, almost exclusively will probably say, oh, but things have improved. And yet, if you look at the Pentagon statistics, the Marine Corps is still the branch with the highest rates of sexual assault. Right now, yeah, even talking about it, you know, I get a little, I have to be mindful. It's a lot. It's really hard. The Marine Corps is the branch with the fewest assignments open to women. And so when we sued the Pentagon in 2012 on behalf of service

women, it took only a few months for Secretary of Penetra to basically side with us and say, okay, we're opening these assignments, it's time, it's time. And this was an ACLU lawsuit, ACLU represented us. And it took several years, even then, to slowly start opening up these units. Now you've got women in the infantry, which is unbelievable. Because when I, you know, when I started out watching G.I.J., there were no women in the infantry. Now there are hundreds of enlisted women across many, many combat assignments, particularly in the Army, the Army is doing this much better than the Marines. But the DoD and the VA have an acronym. I like to say, if the military has an acronym,

you know, they're serious about something. So the acronym for this entire sort of condition is military sexual trauma, MST. So veterans will know this phrase, but MST is conditioned related to sexual assault or sexual harassment in the military. It's so pervasive that they needed an acronym for it. And this actually started right after tailhook in the early 90s. Do you remember tailhook?

It was a scandal in the Navy? Yeah, Navy pilots. Yeah, on a carrier, right? It's actually a hotel. It was a scandal in the Navy. Yeah, Navy pilots. On a carrier, right? It's actually a hotel. It was a convention. A convention of pilots. And so they were all housed in this hotel, and the women who were present had

to run a gauntlet in the hallways, where they were groped and assaulted, basically, trying to get back to their rooms. And so, you know, that kind of behavior is still so tolerated, and it's hard to believe except it's such an insular institution. This is military-wide now. And the thing, you know, we raised so much attention that the media is all over the stories right now. I mean, there's scarcely a month that you aren't hearing something about sexual assault

or harassment in the military, but the big sort of still-live story is Marines United, which happened about a year and a half ago where 30,000 men mostly Marines were online on Facebook. They'd created this page, which was it contained explicit images of service women and civilian women nude photos and calls to rape women death threats homophobic and racist slurs, and the media just lost it. It was so hard to bully. And for me, it wasn't hard to bully. I was like, yeah, this is the Marine Corps I know, but I think the American public was really surprised that this

was happening. And the Marine Corps was kind of caught by surprise and Marine Corps leadership, because I don't think they understood that the internet was such a powerful force. They tried to clamp down, certainly federal authorities tried to clamp down Marines United as well, but it just appeared in another forum online as these sites do. A little bit like Wacomall. What do you think is going on here? Is there something inherent in the nature of men, especially in a war-fighting context that brings this out, is it encouraged or tolerated because we're asking these people to

go do horrific things and defensive the nation and let them let off a little steam. Or what, I'm just theorizing here, what's going on. I don't think so. I think that would be the easy answer. I think the military fundamentally has just been behind in terms of basic law and policy regarding the treatment of women in the workplace. And there are actual policies

that don't apply to the military yet. Like if you're the victim of negligence in the civilian world, you have access to suing your employer. This is a basic civil court or open to you for redress. Off limits to service members. If you're the victim of assault, if you're the victim of medical malpractice, you are just out of luck because the Supreme Court will not allow you to effectively sue your

employer, even if they're technically negligent. So there's this culture of once you sign up, you sacrifice many of your rights. And this is true. I mean, you sacrifice your first amendment right when you're a service member. And that's part of the most common example that's given. You can't just say anything you want to your boss. You could go to jail, you know, for for for disobeying an order, for example, you know, that's not going to happen in the civilian world. So there's a whole different set of rules that apply to service members. When you have so few women in a system that is very gendered where misogynies used as a tool of incentive. And this is true for in the world of athletics as well, unfortunately, but I don't know what I'm allowed

to say on here, but words like, you know, et cetera, et cetera, when all of these are used as incentivizing words to get your unit to perform better. When you have segregated training, and you're literally taught by your drill instructors that women are weaker, that women are nasty, women are sluts, women are, and these, this is all literally taken from the so-called rulebook of training Marines. That's going to impact your entire culture, right?

So I don't think it's war fighting necessarily. Yeah, war is nasty and ugly and horrible things happen. But if you have a culture in which men are allowed to do things, to want another or to women, and oftentimes encouraged, that's the problem. You think we can effectively fight wars without toxic masculinity. I mean, I've never seen it yet, right? Like we saw the talks in the military. Well, maybe some European militaries, I don't know. Well, I mean, it's interesting what you're seeing

in Europe, you know, with NATO or, you know, I've got friends in Scandinavia, maybe not surprisingly, that are working on gender relations in foreign militaries. And women are in positions of power there that, you know, they women are in positions of power there that they have enormous amounts of influence. So, gender isn't seen as a sort of a bad word in some parts of the world.

Here I think the jury is still out. And we had a secretary of defense recently who still, even though women were in the infantry, was publicly expressing his doubt about women in the infantry. So again, there's a leadership problem in the US military when it comes to women. We've got to weed out the older generation that is simply behind. It's not where we are right now. You said before that you dealt with sort of daily misogyny born in the workplace, misogyny is the comments,

but you also talked about sexual assault. Was that something you saw personally, experience personally? Yeah, I mean, I experienced, I would say unwanted sexual contact, for sure, I wasn't assaulted in the military. I was before the military. I write a lot about those experiences in the book. As an officer, I tried to, when sexual assault was brought to my attention in my own units, I tried to get justice for those women and it didn't work.

So what I often saw was, as a junior officer, I was a lieutenant and then a captain. It was usually mid-grade officers at the rank of lieutenant colonel or colonel that were receiving the complaint, the information, and then sweeping it under the rug because they didn't want, I mean, my interpretation of that was they didn't want their units to, they didn't want the news to get around. You know, so they were interested in, okay, how do I become general, right? If, if, if, you know, my, my unit is seen as a bad unit, then it's my leadership failure, which is absurd, right? It's like, if they didn't commit the crime, right? And yet they would see it as a leadership failure.

That's, and that's, and that's another cultural problem in the military. I don't know if that's particularly marine or not, but we have to change that perception that if you actually report the assault that you're going to be punished as a commander as a leader, right? So you talked about, you left in 2004, is that right? And you talked about leaving with physical and psychological injuries. Yeah. with physical and psychological injuries. Yeah. At what point did, you know, why did you turn to meditation and how much did that help?

And I imagine it was among other modalities as well. Yeah, I remember when I launched the sexual harassment and investigation against a fellow officer, I went back to yoga and meditation. and it was kind of like I had, I write a lot about how when you are trying to cultivate a killer instinct and be tough all the time and you know I was scrutinized like, I mean guys aren't just just aren't scrutinized like this in the military. Every woman sticks out like a sore thumb in the Marines because there's so few of us. You have to be like 100 times as tough.

You can't let any vulnerability seep through. I had this really hard exterior and yet I was suffering inside because I was mistreated and I saw so much mistreatment of women. But yoga and meditation offers you the experience of seeing things as they are. So there's no pain will only hide for us. It's not a permanent thing. Right? Pain will find its way out somehow. Your real feelings will eventually be exposed as much as you try and hide them or beat them down. And so I couldn't really afford to meditate while I was in the Marines.

I couldn't afford to do yoga while I was in the Marines because it would have made me too soft. That was my take while I was in. By the end during that sexual harassment investigation where I was really a mess, I was commanding troops. There was a very dangerous job. We were dealing with live, live fire every single day. And I was just barely keeping it together. I had to have that tough exterior because I was a company commander. But on the inside, I was just falling apart. And so yoga put

me in touch with all of that again. and it provided me a safe space to cry, you know, which was really important. And then I realized also, like if I was really going to heal, I had to go all in into healing. But yeah, there was a lot I needed to recover from in terms of the pain. So do you view, I mean, you still hold the view that it would be inappropriate to be doing yoga and meditation as a war fighter because it wouldn't be hard enough? Not necessarily. I think it's, the thing is, if you're, I'm thinking out loud because for me, the jury is out on this, honestly.

I'm aware of the mindfulness training that's going on in the US military right now. I teach yoga to veterans actually right now. I have been for the last 10 years. If it's used as a healing modality, I think it can be very, very powerful. If it's used as a way to avoid confronting with emotions, I think it's very risky. Why would it be used to avoid confronting emotions? If you can imagine a scenario in which Marines or soldiers in combat are being taught mindfulness practices in order to more effectively kill, that's maybe an oversimplification, but I think a realistic one. I think we've got a problem. I don't

know that that's an effective way of maintaining the human spirit. It may work in the short term, may make you more mission effective. I don't know what the cost is to that individual at the end of all of that. I've spent some time with the folks training meditation in a military context. I was out in Camp Pendleton when they were teaching there. And I've also had on the show some guests who are involved in teaching mindfulness within the military. And the way it's always explained to me is not actually how to make people better killers.

It's how to make people kill fewer people unnecessarily. So if you are able to see your emotions clearly and not be acting around by them, you may not be indiscriminately opening fire in a village in the middle of rural Afghanistan, which of course plays right into the insurgents playbook, which is you've provoked over reaction by the invading or occupying force, and then that overreaction turns the local populace against the occupying force. So the theory you may disagree with it, and you would know more than I would, but this

is at least the theory is that letrain train troops to make more efficient, more effective less inflammatory decisions in the field and who, because they're now more self-aware, less prone to the scourge of PTSD when they return. Yeah, I think that's where it is out. I think we're playing with fire. When we think it's that simple. I think, again, I think it's, this is really about short term versus long term, kind of human effectiveness.

I have no doubt that in the short term, soldiers can make more effective decisions on the battlefield because of mindfulness application. Whether or not it can sort of protect one from PTSD, I think that's fishy right there. I think that, you know, and this is where a lot of meditators with Buddhist roots will, I think, also have problems with this discussion. And again, I don't have any sort of hard and fast concrete opinions about this. It's just, it's more a feeling based on what I've seen, which is that PTSD is very complex.

And that when we as human beings cause harm to other human beings, no matter who they are, whether they're on our so-called side or another so-called side, that that takes a toll on us in ways that cannot just be explained by operational orders. And so, you know, and I have talked, I talked to a two-star general about this, who's very upfront with, you know, how heavy this stuff is, you know. I mean, it's, I know that there are far too many veterans committing suicide. I know that when we come to terms with what we have done either to other people or what may have been done to us in my case, that there's so many overlapping emotions that there's so much that can impede our ability to move on and to help one another and be contributing members of society or even to our families.

And so, yeah, I hesitate anybody, and anytime anybody's really sort of convinced about the effectiveness of a tool, a spiritual tool, which is literally, it has its foundation and not harming others, and it's suddenly being placed in an institution in which causing harm is part of the mission. And I don't mean that in a sort of ideological way. I mean, just literally, like, we must pull triggers. That's part of our job, right? I just think it's complicated. More 10% happier after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to 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 Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans,

a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. I am growing up learning American interpretations on Asian Buddhism. I think that's where I'm at right now with my education in all these traditions.

But because I know that if I were in Thailand or elsewhere, it would feel very different. But in terms of my military experience, or elsewhere, it would feel very different. But in terms of my military experience, I mean, that too is complicated. I don't look like the typical marine, I don't have the name that most people can pronounce. I think there's a lot of things that make me different. And in the era that we live in right now,

this Trump era, I see a lot of things differently. So I write in the book about how, for me, even my relationship to my veteran status, I just shifted a little bit over the last couple of years because I don't primarily see myself as a veteran. I have certainly in the past, particularly when I was in Washington representing men and women who had been harmed by the military. I was very much veteran all the time. This was my community.

But as someone who is brown and female, I don't identify it straight. There's so many parts of me that feel other in the society, and those parts of me have been put under the microphone and the last couple of years. The Marines have been most likely to vote for Trump. There's been all these kind of comparative studies across service branches. Somebody who looks like me is not necessarily welcome in the Marines. You know, I mean, I knew this.

I loved it, right? But, you know, I think we need to talk a lot more about about what it means to actually serve in the military and be respected as much as the next guy. Because it's not yet a meritocracy. But do you, would you do disavow violence now, or do you think actually know if some violence is justified, we need to protect our nation, et cetera, et cetera?

Yeah, no, I don't disavow violence. I'm not a pacifist. I don't think I ever have them. I mean, I'm more interested in sort of my personal relationship with violence, not necessarily like, you know, I think talking about the United States and military history is maybe another conversation altogether. I have roots, my families from India, my two uncles that helped overthrow the British Empire.

They were still called insurgents, terrorists. You can use whatever wordurgents, right? Or, you know, terrorists. You can use whatever whatever word you want, right? And I'm saying that with like a big wink. But, yeah, they were freedom fighters. I believe that violence has a role in society, particularly in movements of justice. But, you know, state sanctioned violence against particular populations is not something I'm afraid.

And again, I primarily in this day and age see myself as a brown person, a person with family that has immigrant roots. Someone that is more likely to be taken aside by TSA, someone who is more likely to be discriminated on the streets or in my own building. This is just the world we live in. So I see myself as a brown person in the United States more than I see myself as a veteran. In part because for me white supremacy is the sort of like the soup that many of us walk through, particularly today. Like it was a little bit under the radar a couple of years ago. And now there's so much more out in the open,

even in terms of dialogue you see on social media. Right? So would you say white supremacy do you mean the actual, like marching in Charlottesville, or do you mean the fact that whiteness is the dominant culture here? Both. I mean, I think whiteness being the dominant culture

is kind of a byproduct of vicious white supremacy. But, you know, when we talk about institutional racism, I think that it's still alive and well. It's oftentimes, it looks a little softer than it was maybe 50, 60 years ago. But, but absolutely. I mean, I, you know, whether you're talking about police brutality or even in meditation centers, you know, there are fewer you were people of color practicing, Buddhism or sort of secular meditation

in the United States. Why is that? It's not a fluke. It's not like people of color are less likely to want or need peace of mind, obviously. So what's that about? Why are there structural barriers to people practicing self-care, right? So it manifests in that way too. You've been by my math out for 15 years. Yeah, I'm about. And you've been doing a lot of meditation.

How is your piece of mind? I mean, it's always a work in progress. I think writing for me has been a huge source of healing and sort of processing everything that has happened to me over my lifetime. Meditation is a huge part of that. Yeah, I'm less likely to want to engage in violence. That's for sure. I'm less likely to want to fight. I don't really have the energy for it. Not in kind of an exhausting way,

but I just, I don't see the need for it in many ways that I used to. So had you been engaging in violence after the military? In what context? I mean, everything from wanting to engage in martial arts, like literally wanting to punch a bag maybe, or a wall or something, or a face, right? Like there are all these instincts, like, which is not to say I got into barfights.

I've never been in a barf, but like the instinct to want to really hurt somebody, which was very much present when I got out barfights. I've never been in a barfite, but the instinct to want to really hurt somebody, which was very much present when I got out of the Marines. That is practically nil right now. And so even when you talk about things like politics or no matter what side you're on, people use language that is so harsh, it's so violent. No matter if you're left or right, and I am literally shocked by it. I don't want to cudge violence to anybody, even the folks that are the most violent.

I don't have it in me. I'm really thankful. And a lot of that has just been diving into the darkness of what that rage feels like. That's what comes up a lot on retreat. It has. I mean, it's not, again, I've kind of exercised a lot of that out of my system. And I mean, I'm talking about over a decade and a half, right? It's not like it happened overnight.

I mean, I've been suicidal, I've been homicidal. I've felt all the feelings to their max. And I'm not there today. I've felt all the feelings to their max and And I'm not there today Thankfully, I'm not there today You know, I've done a lot of healing practices you know meditation but pasta not being one of them Yoga being another I have a service dog now. Yeah, Duke serve your service dog was sitting in the control booths as we do this. So how does he help?

Yes, I got Duke through canines for warriors, which is the largest service dog organization for veterans in the United States. They're based in Jacksonville, Florida. They offer dogs to veterans who've experienced either post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury or conditions related to military sexual trauma. And they, you know, I did apply for the dog and it was a little bit like applying for college or something.

It was a competitive process. I went last August. It's a three week training program. And they segregate their classes by gender, which in this case I think is a good idea. And amazing trainers, amazing program, they match the dog with you according to your medical conditions, your lifestyle, your physical abilities, and he was a really great match. He flies with me, he digs the subway system. He's very good in public.

So yeah, he helps me with a lot of symptoms of PTSD, keeps me calmer in crowds. And you know, it was just- Just his mere presence. Just his mere presence. I mean, you're attached. I think one thing I would have taken for granted had I not known this. And now I intimately know it. He's attached to me on my left side, basically, anytime I'm with him, which is most of the time. So you

literally have this battle buddy, like within inches of you through throughout your day. He, like, in fact, I can't even turn around normally without navigating him around my body. So he's always on my left, like, literally right there sitting or standing. And yeah, it's amazing. That the few times I've been without him as I've had to leave him home for a medical appointment

or something like that. I feel like I'm kind of in appendages missing. Like I'm missing, yeah. It's a very strange feeling. Do you think I'm just guessing here? I've never had this conversation before about the mechanisms by which there be animals could work. But I imagine part just the presence of a calm animal

that is there for you about a buddy is important. But do you think the engagement of your own mammalian care systems that's required to take care of this creature? You have to feed him and clean him and house him and all that stuff. Do you think that too is healing? I think any pet is going to be healing for a human being who's interested in connecting with another animal. But service animals, I think, are operating on an entirely different level. So I've had pets before,

and this experience with Duke is completely different from having a pet dog or a cat. with Duke is completely different from having a pet dog or a cat. Also, he learns specific commands related to safety. So for example, if somebody's coming at me from the front, very much like a close comment scenario, it's like, what can you do to protect yourself? So you can actually command your service dog to block the oncoming person. So literally put his body between you and that person.

Similarly, if your back is facing a lot of people, you know, and for folks with PTSD, whether it's like sexual trauma related or combat related, the idea of not being able to see what's behind you can be terrifying. So by so many vets or folks with PTSD in a restaurant in a public place have to sort of see doors and windows like who's entering an exiting, right? So there's a command to have the dog watch your rear well. Let's say you're at an ATM, you know, getting cash out of the machine. So he covers your back.

The command is cover. For physical injuries, I can lean on him also if I need to bend down and get something, there's a command where he takes your body weight. So for a lot of us who have issues going up and down stairs or that kind of thing, the dog will literally take your body weight. So he's been trained to do all of that. And yeah, I think there is this sense of, and if you took the average pet and put them in positions in which Duke or other service dogs are like, they just wouldn't know what to do.

I think they would flip out at normal sounds, the movement of things and people. And he is amazingly, he's transitioned to this loud, raucous city in ways that probably most human beings can't. I mean, it's a transition moving to New York and he's done it pretty well. So.

And when you said you have physical injuries, what is that from? From the Marines, yeah, I mean, I was calm back. Yeah, the close combat training, like I was lifting guys twice my size, just like ground fighting and I blew my knee out a couple times. It's surgery and then the other one went and then the shoulder and you know, got lower back stuff.

It's interesting. And then this will happen to most. I think most folks who've served in the military and done anything remotely physical is the joints just they wear and tear far more quickly than they would if you were not in the military. Our musculoskeletal systems are kind of wasted from the weight bearing and from the awkward equipment. It's just, you know, even under the best circumstances, it's not going to fit your body perfectly. Given all that you've gone through, the physical deterioration you're describing, the misogyny, sexual inappropriate sexual contact,

the fighting on behalf, the apparently futile fighting on behalf of people who were sexually assaulted, the frustration around not being able to do what you've dreamt of doing all those years after seeing GI Jane. If you go back in time, would you join the Marines again? I would say I would definitely join the military. I think I would have joined another branch of service just because I would have been appreciated more. I don't regret it.

If the question is do I regret it? I don't regret it even a tiny bit. The things I was exposed to on the person I've become as a result, I'm really proud of. I'm so happy that I can help other people navigate really hard issues in their lives. For me, the ability to just be a friend or a support system to another woman or girl who's been through something like that, I's it. I feel like it's a gift. You know, like I just really want to be able to let people know they're not alone.

That the things that happen to them are not their fault. Um, and that was, that was the gift of writing this book to like people often ask me, oh, like was it therapeutic? No, it wasn't therapeutic. It was hard as hell, but, but I did it because I wanted to, I wanted, I wanted there to be a story that women and girls could refer to and know that they were not alone. And this issue of sexual shaming, which was such a big part of my life, both growing up and then in the Marines and after the Marines, it's not something we bring upon ourselves.

Sexual shaming. Sexual shaming. Sexual shaming. Yeah. The inappropriate things that happened to us, the sexual violence, the harassment, the gazing, all of the things that happened to so many women and girls. And for me, it happened when I was a girl. It started very early on. It wasn't my fault, right? But children have a way of taking all of that in and assuming that it's because of something we did, you know, because we're so, you know, we're just so innocent. You know, I didn't talk about things that happened to me for decades, decades. And it's a normal experience for a lot of people and for boys too, you too. And we have to start, I think not just sharing

those experiences, but really believing and listening to those experiences. Trauma is not something that just sort of gets resolved overnight. The mind and the body are very sophisticated systems. And sometimes we suppress stories. We don't remember things for years because it's our way of protecting ourselves from the hurt.

So, again, meditation is such a gift because, you know, sort of gently with daily practice, you can access some of those parts of yourself. And hopefully what is a safe setting? The other thing we train in meditation is a sense of, um, friendliness or compassion. Yeah. Can you muster that for the people who hurt you and for the systems? Yeah, yeah. No, I have a really positive, I think, relationship,

in terms of the way I see the military and the way I see military leaders. I can both speak firmly and confidently about what I think folks are doing wrong when they're in charge of troops. But at the end of the day, one of the gifts of being in the military, and this was long before I discovered compassion practice or metafriendliness practice, all of that is, I mean, I was just surrounded by so many incredible people. And mostly on the enlisted side, just the Marines I served with and I commanded were so hardworking, were so humble.

In many ways, I was just like the best of what this nation has to offer. And I wouldn't have met them in the Ivy League, that's for sure I wouldn't have met them in the Ivy League. That's for sure. Wouldn't have met them in New York City. That's for sure. Some of them are fast friends now. People I can really count on. The institution is a whole, that's different.

I have no problem telling a general to his space exactly what he's doing wrong. These are institutional failures. But in terms of forgiveness, I've forgiven everyone who's hurt me or others. And again, hard work, right? I can say that as if it was easy, but it took years. I mean, they too were part of a system that the culture was, you know, inserted into their minds, and they were acting it out. And what, who knows what their conditioning was, I mean, I'm not defending it. I'm just saying there's a way in which there's a way in which one can have

compassion for even for people who are doing inarguably awful thing. Yeah. I mean, and having worked with trauma survivors a lot over the last decade or two, it's, I find that one of the things that's helped me the most in terms of understanding even what forgiveness is all about is there's this, you know, forgiveness doesn't mean that you forget. Forgiveness doesn't mean that you've given away any of your power. Forgiveness doesn't mean that somebody else has won or that what they did was right. If I'm forgiving in a way that's constructive for me, I'm firmly standing my ground. I am a willing participant in this process. I'm

the one who's in control. And I get for people who have had any sense of control taken from them by a violent act or by some kind of betrayal. These issues of control are like at the key, they're at the heart of everything, right? So when I choose to forgive it is on my terms, I determine the distance, like the physical proximity between me and that other person who may have physically or emotionally hurt me,

that's really powerful. You know, and in meditation or mindfulness practice, you're so, you're intimately aware of like the feelings that are coming up, right? And if I can sense, you know what, I'm feeling like I'm giving power away, then I'm not ready for something, I'm not ready for it.

Because when I'm forgiving wholeheartedly, I feel a strong sense of power. I'm not like hurting somebody, it I feel a strong sense of power. I'm not like hurting somebody. It's not a violent kind of power. It's a confidence, it's something that comes from within that makes me feel whole. All right, so if there's a sense of weakness, something's not quite right yet.

I might not be ready to forgive that person. So interesting. So interesting. Unbecoming what is behind that title? For me, I'm laughing because Michelle Obama, her title is becoming. So I feel like I'm always talking about Michelle Obama. Unbecoming for me, that's also a Buddhist phrase, which a lot of folks comment on. It was about kind of unlearning my cultural conditioning as an Indian American kid, becoming a marine, then on becoming all of that, you know, I say, you know, once I'm rearing

all is a marine, which is in part true, but really like examining what it means to be a veteran and relationships, all of these identities. Right. So at the heart of this, it's becoming these various identities and also letting them go, maybe becoming something else altogether. But also, unbecoming is part of when you get court marshalled for conduct. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it's very much a military term. Yeah, yeah. So for me, I mean, I get very real in this book. Like there were times where I was no saint, you know, both before I was in uniform and

in uniform. And so, unbecoming is also a very gendered term, you know, sort of used to refer to women over time if they're doing something sexually inappropriate. So there's a lot of that in this book as well. Yeah, I'm sort of brutally honest with myself in terms of decisions I made, whether naively or not so naively, and you know, the impact that that may have had on myself or other people. So a lot of that goes to the heart of sexual shame again. Yeah. So yeah, on becoming I felt like it really captured the heart of what that was about.

It's a great title. Thanks. In closing, we've talked about the book, but I'd love to give people a chance to plug as much as you can possibly plug. So give us everything, your social media, any groups you want us to know about and where to find them, like, unload in what we call the plug zone. Okay, yeah, sure. So the book is called Unbecoming. I'm a member of disobedience. It's been published by Atria Simon and Schuster.

My website is just first name, last name, Anoratha Bhagwati, ANURADHABHAGWATI. The organization that I founded that really became the voice of reform for women in the military, is Swann Service women's action network. They're still in Washington doing advocacy on the Hill. And they're still involved in kind of the last legal fight

over integration of women, particularly in the Marine Corps. So they're lawsuits, swans lawsuit, which is still the ACLU lawsuit that initially opened up combat assignments to women. The sort of version in which it is right now is trying to integrate bootcamp in the Marine Corps. So the courts will be speaking about that hopefully this year.

Yeah. And I will plug canines for warriors again if you're interested in supporting an organization that helps vets returning from war or with military sexual trauma. They're fantastic organization canines for warriors and Jacksonville, Florida. Go Duke. On a ride. Thank you very much. Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it. And I think you can see some pictures of Duke up on the internet because after that interview, we took some pictures and Duke made the cut. Good looking dog. Ana Rada, Bagwati, a fantastic interview.

A big thanks to her. Let's do some voice-wells. Here's number one. Hi, Dan. This is Ellen. I'm calling from Los Angeles. I really love your app and your podcast. It's been really helpful to me. So my question is about, I was wondering if you could talk about the similarities and differences between having a meditation teacher and seeing a therapist.

Having been in and out of therapy over a number of years in a variety of modalities, but never having been to see a meditation teacher, I was just wondering if you could talk about that in terms of how the year sessions with the meditation teacher go, how long they are, frequency of meetings, your meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein just seems like he would be the pinnacle of meditation teachers. So I was just wondering if you could talk about that. Thanks very much and keep up the great work. Great question, really appreciate it. And yes, Joseph is incredible and definitely isn't getting paid enough to deal with me. So in my experience and in my opinion, therapy and meditation teaching, those are two separate

disciplines. meditation teaching, those are two separate disciplines and and and there's some overlap in the Venn diagram, which I'll talk about, but they're they're both again in my experience and opinion incredibly useful and complimentary. So I don't think it's an either or. And as I've said many times on the show, when it comes to happiness and well-being, I'm a maximalist, I think you should investigate all the evidence-based options that are out there, stress evidence-based. And both of these therapy and meditation are evidence-based. So in therapy, in my experience, you tend to talk about the content of your experience. Things that happened to you as a child, things that are happening

right now, how are you dealing with them, your habitual thought patterns, your habitual behavior patterns, and all of that, as I said, is incredibly helpful. You can reorient you. Although there are in the view of therapists themselves, some limits to this as I think it was Freud who said something like, and I think this quote was in my first book and it's a lone embarrassing and I can't remember it. It's something that the best therapy can do is bring you from hysteric misery to common unhappiness or something along those lines. And another critique of therapy is that it can bring you understanding without relief.

And that's where I, in my experience, I don't know if that's always true, to be fair, even in my own experience, that sometimes the understanding is a relief in and of itself and changing the way you see things or the way you react to things can be a relief too. So I'm not sure I buy all of the running down of therapy, but I do think meditation is a great compliment in that it really does give you actionable moment-by-moment advice for dealing with all of the difficult and positive stuff that comes up internally and externally. Through many mechanisms, but one of them is mindfulness, which allows you to see clearly what's happening in your mind so that you are on your own by it.

And so my conversations with Joseph Goldstein, we do talk a lot about my life either just because he's interested in more friends, or because we're talking about how is my practice showing up or failing to show up in certain key difficult areas of my life. One thing we've talked about a lot in over the last year is my schedule how overloaded I am, what can I cut back on, what are my motivations for doing, why I'm doing, and how can I more thoroughly explore my motivations through meditation and how can I use the feedback from my meditation practice. In other words, the self-awareness that I've generated over almost a decade now of daily

seated meditation practice to get a sense as I'm moving through my day. Well, what's making me happy? Where am I getting tight? Where am I not being that cool to others or myself? So we talk a lot about that, but we also talk about the less about the content, the psychological content of my mind, before the process of the mind.

And that's what meditation is really orienting you towards. To see that there are some basic fundamental facts about the mind that are worth observing that can lead you toward for lack of a less grandiose term, freedom. To see that everything passes, everything is impermanent, including whatever emotional squal you may be experiencing right now. To see that there is really on some fundamental level, no you there to experience. Of course, there is a you, right?

But overly personalizing everything, all of your emotions, just get you wrapped up at them, get you further broiled like a briar patch. But if you can dis-identify with your anger, and so it's not your anger anymore, just anger, passing through, then you aren't taking it as personally, you aren't feeding it so neuratically and compulsively. Also another fundamental fact about the mind is to see that given the impermanent nature of reality, clinging to things that will not last is likely to produce suffer. So I hope that makes some sense.

So there's a difference between the content, why you're angry about whatever you're angry about, who did what to you, et cetera, et cetera, and the nature of anger as an impermanent phenomenon that will arise and pass in your mind, that if you cling to as yours is a misunderstanding and bound to increase your suffering. That is more in the realm of the discussions I have with Joseph. And also super technical stuff about how long am I sitting, what kind of practices am I doing, am I spending most of my time doing breath awareness where I'm just feeling my breath coming in and going out and then every time I get distracted,

I start again, or am I doing love and kindness practice where you systematically picture people and send them repeat phrases in your mind that are sending them good wishes. Or am I doing an open awareness practice where I'm just noting whatever arises. We talk about that. He's just filled with all sorts of incredible technical advice

about these practices because they get very subtle and he loves to fall back on, fall back on maybe sounds a little negative, but he loves to provide these phrases that he uses over and over again in his teaching. Some of them are funny. One that's coming to mind right now is, if you point out how your mind continues circling back

on ludicrous or egotistical things, one of his favorite expressions is, the mind has no pride. So he has these little aphorisms, maxims, whatever the right phrases, whatever the right word is, that he uses that really can, that you can use as mantras in your practice. Another one is, for example, to watch when a desire passes.

So we, when desire comes up in our mind, we can be completely caught up. And in the throws of desire, we can do a lot of shopping or we can make decisions that are Maybe not the best interest of our whatever long-term relationship we're in etc etc But actually if you sit calmly and pay attention to desire it will pass and noticing the moment it passes is Really liberating so he's got all of these little phrases and techniques that he's honed over 50 years of meditation, and it's all incredibly useful. By the way, while not everybody can, I recognize that I'm extremely privileged that I have this one-on-one relationship with him. He does a lot of teaching in the 10%

happier app. We have courses, several that are up now, and more more coming where we dig in on several of these phrases that he uses and he expounds upon them and then walks you through them, not only in a video clip interview with me, but also in guided audio meditations. Long answer, sorry for such a long answer, but it was such a great question. I just had so much to say. Here's the second voicemail. Hey Dan, this is Mike in Omaha. I'm 26 years old and I've been meditating for about two and a half years. So first I want to say thank you so much for the podcast, for your books.

It's been a big help getting me going, meditating and this habit really has changed my life. and this habit really has changed my life. So I have a question about mindfulness, meditation, and metha. And mindfulness, meditation, the way I understand it, is that by attaching yourself, well, not attaching, by using an anchor like the breath, you can become more aware of your thought patterns, more aware of your emotions, and more aware of everything, really. And by doing this, you can see things more clearly. With Metta, I look at that as a way to elicit friendliness towards yourself, towards others, towards the world. And I guess what it comes down to is my question is this.

In mindfulness meditation, I feel like we are trying to tease out our biases and get into our thought patterns to avoid delusion to see things clearly. I feel like in meta, even though it's the sake of friendliness towards ourselves and towards others, it is a way of deluding ourselves on purpose. I guess we're forcibly trying to exhibit as friendliness and that's kind of undermining the whole point of mindfulness. So anyway, I hope that wasn't too long-winded. This question has been pressed for me for the past week and hopefully it makes

on your show. Thanks a lot. It's probably work again. You did make it on the show. I didn't find the question long-winded at all. I think it's actually really sharp and I can see how this would be confusing. In my understanding, actually there isn't a conflict between unbiased, un-non-judgmental awareness that we're cultivating in straight-up mindfulness meditation where

you're viewing whatever arises with some dispassion and Meta or loving kindness or friendliness meditation where you are trying to generate a feeling of goodwill for whoever your target is. And what allowed me to get over the hump to do this thing is that in fact the you are not actually expected to force yourself into goodwill. It's simply the the attempt the repetition of the phrases. So you're picturing so we in the course of a loving kindness meditation, often we start with ourselves, or actually, recently I've been starting with easy people,

so one of my, one of our cats, my son, then myself, so I'm primed, I'm feeling reasonably good with the after the easy people, then myself, then a benefactor, often my dad, my wife, a neutral person, somebody who I see all the time, but don't have much connection with a difficult person and then all everybody, people and humans. You're not actually expected to feel a certain way. You're just supposed to go through the exercise of envisioning the people in your mind, repeating the often it's four phrases, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, may you live with ease. Again, I've said this a million times, it's a little, it's more than a little sappy, can be pretty annoying, but it's the inner bicep curls of envisioning the people and

sending them these phrases that somehow mysteriously does the work for you. So expecting to feel a certain way is actually probably going to be a hindrance. It's more just trusting that if you do the practice over time, something may shift. And it may not show. Nothing's permanent, so it won't shift. I don't think it will shift permanently. But I noticed, for example, sometimes I am actually generating quite a bit of goodwill, even for the neutral or the difficult person. Other days, I can't even generate goodwill from my cat. And that's maybe because he has a pension for waking me up in the middle of the night and drinking out of the toilet and drooling. But again, you are not forced to feel a certain way. And you're not, in fact, and you're definitely not

reinforcing your biases because when it comes to a neutral or a difficult person, you're uprooting your biases. You're creating the ability over time, the muscle over time to have a baseline sense of good will for everybody who exists, based on, you know, pretty logical, in my mind, I said, of logical, it's pretty logical idea.

You know, we're all, we've all been born human or animal without asking to be born, we're gonna die at a time likely not of our choosing. Everybody we know is gonna die. Everything's changing all the time. It's chaotic. And there is reason to have baseline friendliness. We're all in this thing together.

And I think that does cut against some of many of our biases to otherwise people to want to put ourselves first. Of course, this stuff is still going to happen, but we're talking about marginal changes here that can compound over time. So it's a great question. I hope the answer I've given you is somewhat satisfying, and I hope to understand the stuff even better myself as I continue to write the book that I'm writing right now about kindness, which I'm hoping to finish by the end of the year, and then we'll see. All right, thank you very much for listening this week. I really appreciate it, and I really want to express gratitude to the people who make

this show. So as he loses operating the boards today, Ryan Kessler does a ton of day-to-day work as the chief producer on the show, Samuel Johns, Grace Livingston, both 10% happier employees who do a lot of the vetting of the guests and preparing me for the various introductions and the interviews. Deeply grateful to all those folks for doing all the work they do and to the ABC News Radio hierarchy for allowing us to do it, and also to you for listening. And I know I say this every week, I'm going to say it again, if you've got a moment to rate us, review us, talk about us on social media, all that stuff really helps.

It's a little crass, but I'm asking anyway, because I think it serves a larger purpose. Thank you again for, you don't have to do that by the way, but if you do do it, thank you, and at the very least, thank you for listening. 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 Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com-survey. Serve.