Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 193: Enough-ness and the Hungry Ghost, Narayan Liebenson

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

Most kids are not spending their time in solitude exploring the abilities of the mind. In that way, Narayan Liebenson was not like most kids. Fascinated with the mind since a young age, she has led a life studying meditation in different traditions. Her training over the past forty years includes study with meditation masters in the Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan traditions. In 1985, Liebenson co-founded the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, which describes itself as "an urban refuge and teaching center for all who seek inner peace through the liberating practice of Insight Meditation." She is also the author of the recently released book, "The Magnanimous Heart: Compassion and Love, Loss and Grief, Joy and Liberation." In it, and in our discussion, she describes how to move from the "constant squeeze" of suffering to a direct experience of what she calls "enough-ness." We also discuss how that concept relates to the Buddhist teaching of "Hungry ghosts," creatures with huge stomachs and tiny mouths, who always remain hungry. Plug Zone New Book "The Magnanimous Heart: Compassion and Love, Loss and Grief, Joy and Liberation" https://www.amazon.com/Magnanimous-Heart-Compassion-Grief-Liberation/dp/1614294852 Cambridge Insight Meditation Center: https://cambridgeinsight.org/about/teachers/ To donate to the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center: https://cambridgeinsight.org/generosity/unrestricted-gift-dana/ Ten Percent Happier Meditation – Oren Jay Sofer's Practicing Kindness: https://10percenthappier.app.link/3nu2IRiOiX ***VOICEMAILS*** Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 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. Listen 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. Hey guys, there is an ancient Buddhist concept known as the Hungry Ghost. I've always found this pretty compelling. The Hungry Ghost is a creature with a giant stomach and a tiny little throat.

So it's constantly hungry and can never get enough. That may sound familiar to you if you're a human being or if you're a human being anything like me, this kind of insatiability, this background hum of constant insufficiency that at least I feel, and I think many others do. Obviously because thousands of years ago they came up with this idea of the hungry ghost. So on the show this week we're going to talk about how many if not all of us are hungry ghosts at least some of the time. And we're going to talk about what may be the antidote to this condition which is the notion of enoughness. Our guest is Narayan Liebenson. She's a really

well-respected Buddhist teacher. She's been the guiding teacher at a joint known as the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an excellent place. She's been the guiding teacher there, or one of the guiding teachers there since it opened in 1985. She's been training in various meditation traditions for 45 years, and she's got a new book called The Magnanimous Heart. Okay, so a lot of long-time listeners on the show will know that I have a rather complicated relationship with the word heart and many of the other, in my view, kind of, syrupy terms that are often invoked when people talk about meditation. Nureian, as you will hear, has no qualms about using what it sometimes referred to as heart-centric language. If, like me, you have any kind of aversion or allergy to this kind of stuff, I really urge you to

fight through it because Narayan is, as you're going to hear, a highly trained hardcore teacher who seems to me at least to be incapable of saying anything uninteresting. I've talked about this a lot on the show that I'm kind of doing my best to transcend some of my less helpful biases and sitting with a teacher like Narayan is actually pretty useful in this regard. So what we'll get to Narayan in a second, first one lightning quick item of business. Speaking of heart-centered language, there's a new meditation up on the 10% happier app. It's called practicing kindness, and it's from orange sofa. So go check that out.

We want to feature that one this week. All right, back to Naurayan-Leabinson, aside from hungry ghosts, and my many somewhat irrational issues with the word heart. We're also going to talk about the power of using our whole lives as a meditation practice instead of quarantining it to the cushion. We're going to talk about the power of using our whole lives as a meditation practice instead of quarantining it to the cushion. We're going to talk about the importance of bringing female voices into the Dharma and the difference between letting B and letting go. And lastly, we're going to turn the voicemail section of the show this week over to Noreian to answer a couple of really fantastic questions from you about how to manage dreamlike states

and meditation and how to use dream-like states and meditation and how to use the meditative mindset to solve tough questions in life. And just before we dive in, one final note, I wanted to note that, especially toward the beginning of this chat, you're gonna hear me cut and Orion off a few times when she's speaking. It kind of took us a little while to get

into the groove of the conversation. She's very thoughtful in the way she talks, and sometimes I thought she was finished saying what she was gonna say before she was actually finished. So please know that my interruptions were accidental. And I'm working on that. And luckily, after 45 years of meditation, Narayan is pretty patient.

So here we go. Narayan Liebenson. Nice to meet you. Yes, nice to meet you too. So how did you get into meditation? Well, it really was on a continuum for me. I was really interested in how my mind was working when I was quite young. And I was awake later than the rest of my family.

I just couldn't go to sleep and I woke up earlier than anybody else. And I was quite interested in what was going on in my mind. And so I started to investigate and explore it. And I learned a lot when I was just lying there on my own watching, observing. As a little girl. As a little girl, exactly. Yeah. I was brought up Catholic and I also have a father who was Jewish.

So the Jewish part maybe took off the edges of the Catholicism. And I was able to enjoy the beauty and the silence and the spaciousness of the churches that I was in, which was really quite wonderful. I'm so grateful for that that I had access to these silent spaces in which I could just be quiet and let the outer silence point to a kind of inner silence. So it really benefited me quite a lot. I wasn't so involved in the beliefs about Catholicism or the mythology, but I was quite taken by, quite drawn by the beauty of the silence. I wonder if kids now, if kids now would have, if that would be resonant to any young person

now, given that they'd have a supercomputer in their pocket. I know, I know, I know. I mean, you know, when I was growing up, you had to get be bored a lot at the time too, because there wasn't much going on. And that was really beneficial, because when you're bored, it's very, very close to a depth of silence that can be accessed if you allow yourself to be bored.

So I don't know, you know, little kids these days, it's much more of a secular culture than it used to be. And to engage in and enjoy silence wherever you can find it, I would want that for little kids now. It seems like there would be a hunger or thirst for that. I've heard it said from some, well, the controversial meditation teacher, Kucho-gyum, Trumpla, as he's controversial for those

who don't know who he is, because he drank himself to death and messed around with his followers. Right. Nonetheless, created a big thriving meditation community called Fala. Yes. And I have good friends of mine who are followers of his

and makes no longer with us, but he had a practice apparently called cool boredom in which he actually asked meditators to cultivate Yeah, yeah, yeah makes sense to me. I mean and you don't have to if you're meditating You're gonna go through boredom as the stage. It's a phase of practice where you have to let yourself be deathly bored and ask yourself Am I gonna die from this? You know? That's not happened yet. But it moves.

If you're willing to stay in this phase, it moves you into something quite profound, quite beautiful, quite freeing. Well, I was going to say is that when I was so rudely talking over you, I got excited because it is one of these things where we are so now so programmed to avoid boredom. I remember when I got my first iPhone, I thought I will never be bored yet. And we now have, we never like boredom. We I don't think as a species really like it.

Something we like stimulant. Yes. We're trained to look for the next dopamine hit we're always on theant. Yes, yes. We're trained for the next to look for the next dopamine hit. We're always on the hunt. Yes, and there's something about cultivating boredom. Yes, sitting there and just like bring it on. That's it. And then you see it's not that bad. As you said, you won't die from it. That's it. And it's more that it's veiling over, you know, the gnashing. Exactly, allowing it and seeing it as a covering over the natural luminescence of the heart. Okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean by that? I mean that the Buddha spoke about the heart being free already. The heart already is awakened, that there is freedom from greed hatred and delusion, but it's covered over by our habits and our patterns.

And so with meditation, we can start to be aware of the habits and the patterns, and that which doesn't serve us or anyone else. And then start to let that mist begin to dissolve into the light of awareness. I remember once I was interviewing John Cavitts and his meditation teacher. And he was getting a personality with me about language I was using. He said, there's this little bit of phrase that he used kind of off hand hand, but it's always this was a decade ago But it's always stuck in my mind. He said I have my own opinions about language

Well, I have personally I Dan have a weird hang up about the word heart Oh, I don't know what people mean when they say hard I mean, I'm married. I'm the child of physicians and married to a physician. I think of the actual heart You mean the physical. Yes, you feel. Would you say heart, you mean mind? I mean, yeah, I mean, there's this word chitta, right, in the teachings, Polly word, and it means heart, mind, but really in Western thinking, mind generally means thinking, and heart means something beyond thinking.

Well, it includes feelings, but it's also beyond feelings. When I say a weak and hard, it's not even though it sounds like a noun, it's not really a noun. It's limitless awareness. Let's call it that. Measureless awareness. We kind of got it cut into this quite beautifully. So, when you said boredom and other habits are covering up our natural luminous art, yes, natural natural luminosity of the heart or radiance of the heart of what is most important

of the sense of freedom within, that whatever way the conditions are, finding those conditions to be workable, instead of intimidating, or drowning in conditions, calming our minds, you know, calming, letting thoughts thin out some, and that allowing for a kind of space and sense of preliminary contentment, which can then be a springboard into a deep investigation of what's most important to us.

Why are we here? Why are we here? What is most important to us, right? One of my first guests, one of our first guests on the show was a woman named Lama Tomo who was a, she's in the Midwest somewhere I think, I spent a while since I met her. Anyway, she's really interesting, meditative practitioner in the Tibetan tradition. And she said that the Tibetan definition for enlightenment or the Tibetan phraseology around enlightenment is something like a clearing away. Okay.

And a bringing forth. Oh, beautiful. Seems to be what you're describing. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, I like, I like even though I'm in the terrored and lineage and I feel quite at home here. I like the language from the different lineages the different Buddhist languages. Because every way of talking about these things kind of opens things up in terms of being able to understand more deeply and clearly, according to our own experiences, you know, meditation, we take our life, we take our own experiences, and then we move from there.

We're not trying to transcend, We're not trying to get rid of anything. We're not trying to not be human. We're attempting to use all of it as material, really, for awakening. And one of the things I like about the Buddha as a died in the wool skeptic personally is he said, you know, come see for yourself. Exactly. A. He Paseco, come and see. Come and see for yourself how things actually are, not how you think things are or what other people have told you. Or what I told you. Or what?

Here's a quote unquote religious leader saying, don't take what I said. That's it. That's it. And I think those of us who are trying to follow after him, you know, or kind of in that same vein, of don't believe me. But take up the methods, take up the practice, take up the study, use your life, bring it all together, sit, you know, meditate in a classical wave using that word, bring it all together, and see what happens if you have any trust or faith whatsoever in something other than what you have experienced up till now.

We are going to dive much more deeply into this for me somewhat problematic word of heart and your thesis around a magnanimous heart. We're going to dive very deeply into that. That's the title of your new book. But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit more about your biography because we had you in church as a girl. We then I, I didn't railed you as I do with many of my guests. Can you just take me from there to actually starting to meditate? Yeah, yeah. So, so church and libraries. My parents used to do for whatever the reason, drop me off at churches and libraries. And oftentimes it seemed like they would forget to pick me up again. So it would be I would be in these situations roaming around on my own, feeling this vast spaciousness and silence and feeling like I could explore anything that nobody was going to stop me from investigation, from looking into things more deeply as I really wanted to do.

And after that, oh, and then maybe when I was about 11, I found a book in the library that was about rebirth and yoga. And when I read the part about rebirth, I thought, oh my God, that explains everything. I just had this, I mean, who knows? I'm not saying that I know anything about rebirth or other lives, I don't find that important. But it did open up something bigger than I had imagined that other people were exploring their psychies as well. Yeah.

And then the yoga, I started trying to do it. And, you know, I lit a candle and tried to concentrate. And then all these other... So that's not yoga, like a body. No, no. You're talking about a yoga meditative. Exactly, exactly. So I started trying to find all these ways to concentrate. You know, one way that I found was just to repeat my name over and over and over again. And if I did, it would open out into something beyond my name.

You know how little kids are so identified with their names? Right. So that was a technique that I found early on as a way to open out into something. So you use the name of the mantra that comes the mind of that opens up into something more. That's exactly it. And because of the identification use the name of the mantra that comes the mind that opens up into something more. That's exactly it. And because of the identification with the name, it would move into

a non-identification, just in doing it over and over again. So I found these kind of quirky ways, and I didn't have anybody to talk to, so I've had these quirky ways of working, working with my mind. I had a lot of fear. Is your given? Sorry, I would keep it through up to my I just okay. I get excited and curious so that Anyway, yeah, I promised stop doing that is your given name Helen or Narein? It's um when Helen was my mother's name so that was my given name Narein was given to me by Yogi Bajan when I was in my early 20s, 1920. Gotcha.

So the name was on my Social Security card and everything. It's us for, yeah. It's your official name now. Yes. But not for the first 20 years. Right. So when you were a little girl repeating and your name to yourself, it was Helen.

No, it was Janet. Oh. Yeah, or Jan. So I would repeat Jan, Jan, Jan, Jan, yeah. Yeah. And then it would open up into non-Jan somehow, the non-Janous of experience. You said something about fear when I was talking to you. Yeah, partly why I wanted to look into my mind and investigate was because I had a lot of experiences of fear when I was little.

And it's not like anything was happening. It was more fear of someone breaking into the house or being murdered in my sleep or things like that. And I think common fears that kids had, but they were very strong for me. And because I was up later and up earlier, I was alone with the fears, a bunch of the time. So part of my interest was in seeing if I could understand fear enough to be free from it. So I investigated it in different ways. And so that was a propelling force for me. You know in my book I talk about duke or

unsatisfactoriness Suffering as being like a constant squeeze. This was one of my teachers Ajahn Mahabua who defined the first noble truth as A constant squeeze feeling this constant. He tells about the first noble truth. Sorry. It is this Pollyward duke. And it means that things are not quite right. Sometimes things are incredibly wrong.

But even when things are good, there's some sense of uneasiness or discomfort or knowing that they're not going to stay that way, that everything is changing, everything is temporary. And then the second noble truth, trying to make things permanent, trying to hang on to the temporary, trying to push away or hold on to, or identify with our experiences, brings about more suffering, more pain within the quote heart. And then in my book, I actually changed the, I don't write this out, but I changed the Noble Truths around. The third section of the book is about the path itself, how to how to free oneself. And then the fourth

section has to do with liberation, non-grasping and meditative questioning, asking the right questions that might bring us to a new way of perceiving and a new way of understanding and really a new way of living and embodying our understanding. It's not enough to just understand. We have to actually embody and live our understanding as best as we can for a moment to moment in all circumstances. So it's not fragmented. So it's not a fragmented path.

You were I think we launched on this road because you were talking about this term, a constant squeeze. Yeah, one of my teachers early on I practiced in a Thai forest meditation center in Northeast Thailand with a teacher named Ajan Mahabua. And he had these very pithy definitions for poly words. Poly is the language that the teachings were written down in about 200 to 300 years after the Buddha died. And this word duka, or the fact, this first noble truth, that there is suffering, there is unsector, fat and satisfactoryness, things are oftentimes not the way we want them to be, things are not

perfect, all of this. He defined this as this sense of a squeeze that we feel squeezed in life, right? Yeah. And he called it a constant squeeze because sometimes we can forget it when things are going really well, but it always comes back. It always comes back. And when we meditate, it's so interesting to me because these days with meditation being so popular, you think you're going to sit down and you're going to feel better or you're gonna feel more peaceful, or calmer, or more balanced. But what happens is that yes, you do, and you feel the squeeze even more. Which is really good news.

It doesn't seem like good news. And I think it's good for beginning meditators to know that because it's shocking if you don't know that it's normal. Yeah, you know this, right? Yes. There's an expression hurts more suffer less. Yeah. So, it's cushioned by calm.

I mean, it's all workable because the calmness cushions the squeeze or the pain and allows it to be more visible to reveal itself. And as it reveals itself, that's the only way that we can let go of suffering is if we see what needs to be let go of. If we don't see, we're just crunched. We're walking around unconscious, we're tense, we're hurting others and we don't even know why and we don't even want to and we are anyway

and we're't even know why and we don't even want to and we are anyway and we're not happy ourselves. So if we can see this squeeze and experience this squeeze and be brave enough, you know, as long as we have enough loving kindness and compassion as our allies, because we don't want to go in there alone, but with compassion and loving kindness, but with compassion and loving kindness, we can gently, lovingly, with friendliness, embrace the squeeze. Embrace the squeeze. Embrace the squeeze. Embrace the squeeze. It's like it almost redundant in some way. Let the squeeze start to uncoil itself, rather than squeezing more. Well, that's the question I was just going to get at because you said then you can let it go.

And letting go is commonly used phrase in meditative circles. I know. But it can seem mystifying to the uninitiated because what do you mean? Okay. So now I'm sitting on the cushion, a little calmer than some of my ancient pains start to reinstate. Yeah. Yes. Come up. Yes. a little calmer than some of my ancient pains start to rebegear. Yes, come up. What do you mean let it go?

What does that actually, I think what people mean is let it be. There is no doubt about that. And I actually do trust that in my book because letting it go seems like we have all this agency, I am going to let go. And we don't. We don't. We have to see enough for what is gripping us to let go of itself. So it is much more a matter of letting be rather than letting go.

Letting go feels like it's pushing what we don't like away. Letting be is friendliness, bowing down to, embracing, extending the hand of friendship to so that we love it up. And then it lets go of us. It's still counterintuitive. I don't want to love my ancient anger at the end of my life. I know, but the only thing that works, you know, anger, hatred applied to hatred doesn't bring about anything more than hatred.

I mean, it's practical only loving kindness is gonna help You know brought to anything. It's the only thing that's gonna help But again, you know a he-pastico Tested out find out for yourself whether that's true or not and that's where I think some of the Courage has to come in that we have to develop a kind of courage that we're willing or desperate enough. It's okay to.

Yes. Yes. That's all right too. That's fine motivation to be desperate enough to go in a counter intuitive direction. So was it desperation for you that finally brought you to the cushion? Well, after the experiences as a child and then after these yoga experiences, little bit of a gap for drug sex and rock and roll, and then moving into a more contemplative life as a yogi, Kundalini yogi, I got involved with teacher named Yogi. Oh boy, I'm forgetting his name, Yogi Bajan.

Yogi Bajan, yeah. And so I did that for a few years. And I was working in a restaurant. I was the waffle maker in a restaurant called the Golden Temple in Harvard Square. And everybody, everybody from all spiritual traditions in the Cambridge area, which was quite alive with spiritual teachings at that time. Wouldn't it was the 70s? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was the 70s. Yes. So many teachers coming into town and offering what they had to offer and then leaving town and all of this. Did they stop for waffles before they start? Oftentimes they stop for waffles. Yes.

So I got to meet them. So I got to meet some Buddhists at that time as well. And I was drawn to what I was being to the kinds of conversations that the different Buddhists were having. And I bumped into someone that maybe you're familiar with Larry Rosenberg. Yeah, he's a colleague. He's 86 right now, still teaching a bit. Wants to die in the saddle, which I'm responsible for. So I wanted him to teach as long as he can.

Legendary meditation teacher founder of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. Yes, yes, yes. So we met by mistake. I mistook him for someone else and we started a conversation. And he had just come back from a three-month retreat at IMS Insight Meditation Society. I was so taken by this idea that one did not have to ordain. You didn't have to become a monk or a nun

which I've never been interested in, that you could live a deeply contemplative life in the midst of your ordinary, domestic life. So he was modeling that for me, that he was just an ordinary guy, and he had just come back from a three-month retreat. So sign me up. I was just so taken and drawn by that. And then, shortly after that, I did sit my first three-month retreat at IMS.

And then when Larry and I started the center, we had this idea, I co-founded it. So I shouldn't have said he was the founder. So I said co-founder. Yeah, yeah, that's okay. My apologies. So our idea when we began the center was to have a place where people didn't go on these longer treats and then come back completely Discombobulated. You know, how do I live? How how am I with my partner? How can I be with my kids? How can I be in my job in A contemplative way rather than just getting completely caught up again, right?

Because you know what it's like to be on a retreat, you know? And the reentry sometimes can be a bit on the bumpy side. I'm more familiar with what it's like to be completely caught up. I see, I see. Okay, so the center is for those who don't go on retreats and are just completely caught up as well. Yeah, like, exactly. A mediacy of contemplation, a medi of freedom, like not, like, practice

years and years and years, and then you get somewhere, but right now, just to amplify just a word you use there, freedom. Yes. Because that can sound a little grandiose freedom. You know, we're going to, you know, well, yeah, it's can sound. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, slightly political, but also, from a spiritual sense, a little grandiose or over-provency. But when you say freedom, it's consent. Not only like slightly political, but also from a spiritual sense, a little grandiose or over-provency. But when you say freedom, it really is going back to letting it be. It's totally ordinary. It's not at all anything special.

It's not special. It's recognizing our discontent. And then it's turning towards it in a kind and sustained way so that we can find our way through it into greater spaciousness. If you want to use the word spaciousness instead of inner freedom, but I'm using the word inner freedom instead of this big word enlightenment of using the word inner freedom or awakening. And this is what is possible for us, as we're conversing right now, to understand things differently, both of us as we're, as we're talking,

to understand things differently than we had. And that's the possibility. I just say in terms of that possibility, I just say, sort of not being yanked around by your ego and your emotions. Sure. That's fine. And your reactions, right? Being able to pause and recognize, be in the body, you know, be aware of what's going on in your body and being aware of how your mind is operating, not having to say everything you're thinking, not having to believe everything

you're thinking, you know, being aware of thinking is thinking, and not being as fascinated and enchanted with one's own thoughts. And instead you can actually become fascinated with the process of thinking, the process of the mind, the sort of infrastructure rather than the little thought. Absolutely. And you can also be fascinated with that affection that begins to bubble up within what I would just want to call the heart right now. You know, that sense of well-being, that sense of being happy when other people are happy,

that sense of wanting to alleviate suffering wherever you find it. It's so great. And it just begins to bubble up naturally because it's our true nature. It's not something that we're creating or concocting. We are cultivating it, but it's already there in seed-like form. Bringing forth what's our... Bringing forth what's already there. So that's such a delight, you know, when that begins to happen. And then we see, ah, there's another way. There's another way to live rather than cutthroat or competitive or comparing or any of that. Room for all of us.

I want to be clear, just like John Cavitz and I may have my opinions, but I don't not militaristic about it. You should not put quote around heart. You should just go for it. Okay. Heart is like the one. Okay. I'm trying to attune to you. Yeah, don't.

That's not much. You should do better at it. You're doing more for me. What you're talking about though is so resonant for me and also mysterious. This idea and Buddhism and I think other spiritual traditions, but Buddhism is the one I know the most, that our fundamental nature is loving. Yes, I know. It's a leap of faith. Yeah, and yet I had a guest on recently who I assume you know Helen Torkov, the founder of Tristan. I never met her, but I have a lot of respect for her. She's done a great work.

And she recently wrote a book, a co-wrote a book. I think she probably wrote it, but it was based on the experiences of a famous monk named Minjur Rinpoche. I just had an interview conversation with him, a public conversation on Friday with Mingur Rinpoche. He's adorable. We had a wonderful time. The book is called In Love with the World. Yes. And it's about many things, but one of the things is that he had a near death experience. And as his attachments were falling away, his body was decompensating. He really got in touch

with this idea that all that's left as this stuff gets stripped away is love and he was in love with the world and Helen and I had an interesting conversation that I'm gonna now ask you some of the same questions You see what you come up with Like this you said it before it's a leap of faith. I mean is there any real evidence that for sure if you strip away all the habitual thought patterns and stimuli that what's left here is love. You know, when I was growing up, there was this idea of original sin, and that did not serve. The sense of original sin of my original sin, and everybody else's original sin did not serve me.

And when I opened to this path, and I heard this idea, it was completely topsy-turvy. But there was a sense for me, all these things are intuitive. There was a sense for me of awe. It was the same thing of being 11 and having this mind-blowing idea about life being much bigger than I had been told. So it was the same kind of thing. It was like topsy-turvy. Oh, this actually makes more sense to me. I don't know if it's totally true or not, but it makes more intuitive sense to me. And it makes more intuitive sense because if we're really quiet and if we look back on our life, all of us, I think, have had glimpses

every so often of this that we dismiss, that we cover over, that we just move on, that we just look at our iPhone instead of appreciating and sitting with and saying, ah, you know, maybe this is what the Buddha was speaking about. So I don't think this is foreign. I do think that, and on retreats sometimes, or even forget about retreats, just daily sitting, it has a way of reconnecting us to the sense of inner peace, inner goodness, intrinsic peacefulness. And the methods, you know, the techniques and methods of the practice, they're waste, train ourselves to be able to access it. And then you have to have, when I call it courage, you have to have some degree

of trust in where you're going, or we were laughing about desperation, right, or desperation, but something that makes you willing to at least look in a different way. Use the methods and the techniques to see does it access? And then you understand a little bit and it really makes you want to continue. And then you continue, then you have your own experiences, not when somebody else is telling you. Because it's interesting with Rinpoche. He obviously grew up in a Buddhist family, and everybody was telling him, yes, this is the way it is.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, intrinsic peacefulness, you know, all of this, but for him to actually know it, he had to go through what he went through. And then he knew it for himself with complete confidence. And that is what all of us need to do each of us in our own way. I don't think it has to be what he did. Each of us in our own way in our lives as they are developing complete confidence. But there's a difference between having intrinsic common clarity and intrinsic maybe there isn't a difference but it seems a little different to my unenlightened mind. You in the preceding paragraphs

we're talking about in an intertwined way between intrinsic loving, and intrinsic sort of common clarity. Yeah, yeah, I'm just using words. I'm just using words to point to what does not have words and we have to use words. I'm a teacher using words all the time words are wonderful but it's pointing to the wordless. It's pointing to the nonverbal. It's pointed to the non-conceptual pointing to the nonverbal. It's pointed to the nonconceptual. So we have to be careful. We can use words up to a point and then we drop off. The words drop away and we have to trust that dropping away and that silence

and that love that is there in the midst of the silence. Can I say a few words and see what you think of him? Sure. I don't know what's gonna come out, but I've been thinking of you, we've been talking about words. So my job is actually to be a little bit personicative about words. Buddhists are very precise in their language, because it can be very precise in their language, because we're describing very subtle concepts. I'm precise or picky for different reasons, maybe, but I see my job on the planet primarily as sort of relanguaging some of these

concepts to make them attractive to skeptical people like me. I see. But that's where I get weird around heart because A, I don't actually know what exactly it's referring to, I get a little anatomical about it. And B, it's a little syrupy for I think some populations myself included. Not so much now, I'm a little bit pretending now, but definitely the premeditation me would like heart, what is that? It would seem I yeah, it would seem a little we go we yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And yet this is where I'm going to bring things around to what you were just talking about.

I think one of the failures of my first book and my initial and there were many failures. But one of the failures or insufficiencies in my initial approach to talking about meditation and my initial approach to meditating itself is that I was really attracted to the calm and clarity aspect, which is, okay, I've calmed down a little bit, I can see my mind and see more clearly, oh, yes, this experience, this emotion is arising, anger, or whatever, and I don't have to be owned by it. Yes. But there's another big piece that you're talking about in a very robust way, which is this innate friendliness or loving nature,

which of course only intertwines with the common clarity in a way that creates a virtuous cycle. Exactly. That's beautiful virtuous cycle. It's a beautiful way to put it. I love that. So I'm really starting to think about how can I a, explore this for myself, because I'm writing a book about kindness now,

and b, how can I talk about it? Yes. And I will say that I went on a loving kindness meditation retreat a couple months ago with a great teacher named spring washam who I really love and It was a one-on-one retreat Which is one-on-one mean? Just me and her. Oh, yeah, it was pretty cool. Oh, well

There were two other people there one was cooking and the and the fourth was filming it for We're gonna use it in the temper. So I have your app and I'm writing about it Okay, so she agreed to do it. Yeah, because or 10th year app and I'm writing about it. So she agreed to do it because she's a very patient person, putting up with a very tough yogi. And I started to get the sense that, call it what you want, heart, sub-intellectual intuition, gut, whatever you want to call it. Whatever you want to call it.

Yes. But we may not know for sure that our fundamental nature is loving. But my intuition is closely aligned with yours for the following reason. I do know that we're wired to seek pleasure. Yes. And it feels better when you're acting out of the heart for lack of a better word. It feels better when you're being friendly, caring,

compassionate, kind, that it does when you're being aggressive, dismissive, disrespectful, et cetera, et cetera. It's tense, it's tense when you're being disrespectful and harsh, and it's relaxed and enjoyable when we're connected. I mean, there's a difference between disconnection and connection. It's the difference between thinking that we are all separate beings walking around each of us trying to satisfy our own needs versus an interconnectedness,

where it just looks like we're separate. But in reality, we're sharing. I mean, you and I right now, a lot of sharing is happening on a level that we cannot be aware of, or that is not visible to the naked eye. Let's just say, yeah, I know scientists would agree with me on that, but the Buddha got it before the scientist got there in terms of the interconnectedness of us all. So of course it's going to feel better to be loving and kind and connected, then disconnected and harsh and unkind. By the way, I love the title of your book because it's so humble. 10%, not even 50.

You know? It's a beautiful title. Thank you. I appreciate it. Having trouble figuring out the title for the next book. Ian, can I also say that in terms of you're moving into this new dimension of entertaining, what you're talking about in terms of heart or gut or intuition or love. When I was younger as a younger teacher and didn't have as much confidence as I have

now, I would veer away from the word heart, trying to fit into kind of the sutas in a certain way. But as we grow as yogis, as practitioners, we have to be honest and we have to be authentic. And what we are all offering, whether we're teachers or practitioners, or offering ourselves, or offering our lives. And so my language has just gotten more in tune with what I actually know, rather than trying to fit into a model. Which really was more male teachers when I first began. And there's a feminine, there's another voice that is coming out differently now.

It's one reason I wrote my book. I felt that there needed to be more feminine voices in the normal world. People asked me about that, and I felt like I needed to do my part. Yeah, and men are less likely, although certainly there are some men that are coming to mind right now, but there may be less likely to use language like heart, although both Jack Cornfield and Joseph Goldstein

to prominent male Buddhist teachers have written books with the word heart in title. In a title and Joseph Goldstein, to prominent male Buddhist teachers have written books with the word heart in title. In the title, yes, yes, yes. And I'm not trying to make this used distinction because of course the male psyche is equally loving. There's not no difference in that way. But the experience in life are different. That's different to grow up differently. It helps to help the voice in the

greater Dharma discourse, I feel. What do you think it is that male voices seem to have dominated the meditation slash Dharma world just because male... I just... I just... I just... I just think it's just think I think it's changing and I think it's changing quite rapidly actually because when I first began as a teacher there weren't many women teachers and now there are many. So I think it's just the way things have been, things are changing now but it's the way things have been in terms of Buddhism being a patriarchal religion like every other. I mean, the Buddhist struggle of this exosem. I mean, he didn't allow women to their ranks. Well, first of all, you know, and you can say this about anything, right? But first of all,

his words were not written down until 200 to 300 years after. That's always my wiggle room here. until 200 to 300 years after. That's always my wiggle room here. I can't accept him as enlightened, which I completely believe in, and think that there was sexism too. It doesn't work. It doesn't intuitively. It doesn't make sense to me that you would leave a huge group of beings out. Makes no sense. So I think it was that he was trying his best in a world in which any moving in the direction of women being seen as equal to man was really hard. And I felt that he did his best in the time period that he was alive in. According to the scriptures, which again were written down hundreds of years after he, the man himself died. Yeah.

The story, if memory serves, is that he was kind of controlled by a family member into ordaining women as nuns, if he had all these monks. And then he did build a pretty large cadre of them, but the historical Historically they were kind of second class citizens and in some Buddhist communities still women are Oh my goodness, that's for sure and what I I have a problem understanding now is that there's a thriving Community of monks and still in terribaut and boostoussism, women can't be ordained. And I don't understand that that has to change. I don't understand how that has any conscience to it. You can rely on the sutus to say the Buddha said this, the Buddha said that. But here we are now in modern life.

And to, I have never wanted to be a nun. I've never wanted to be ordained. But it has an impact on labewomen as well. You know, when I found this out, it was so shocking to me as a young woman. And not that I wanted to go there, not that I wanted to ordain, but it still had an impact on my psyche of, oh, what's up with this? What's happening here? And I still can't say that I understand it. And I do know it will change. It's just going to take time.

Yeah. More 10% happier after this. 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 ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondering app. So, you've mentioned your book. Let's get into that. You titled it Magnanimous Heart.

Yes. What does that mean? Well, it's based on something that Dogen who was a 13th century Zen Master said. And he speaks about the Magnanimous Heart. He says, magnetanimous heart is like a mountain, stable and impartial, exemplifying the ocean. It is tolerant and views everything from the broadest perspective. So it's a heart of generosity. It's a heart of limitless spaciousness. It's a heart of vulnerability. I'm using my own words now, not doggins. I don't know whether he would totally agree with all this. But it's a heart that is porous, that allows everything to come. You let all of life in, you also let it be

and embrace it and find a way to be friend whatever experience is happening, and then it leaves on its own. So you're not accumulating experiences. Things don't build up within. You don't have the list of, you know, things from the past that you have to correct or change or fix. You're not treating yourself like an object that needs to be fixed.

There's this immense or vast way of viewing yourself in everyone and this world, sensing yourself as nature rather than separate from nature. So, Magnanimous Heart, room for everything and learning, you know, learning from everything that happens rather than thinking that this is my practice, but this is not my practice. Everything is my practice. You know, everything that happens is something that can be understood and learned from differently and integrated. I can imagine two responses to this.

One would be, that sounds awesome. I wish I had this spaciousness, calm generosity, loving capacity available to me, but you're going to have to give me a massive hit of clonipin or valium. So, how would you get what you're talking about? And I could imagine another reaction of, I don't wanna let the world in in that way. The world is cruel and has already perhaps shown me whoever this fictitious person is,

I'm conjuring a lot of cruelty. And so I'm unwilling to cultivate the porousness that you describe. Yes, well I want to just speak about Eddie Hiloson. I'm unwilling to cultivate the porousness that you describe. Yes. Well, I want to just speak about Eddie Hiloson, who died in Auschwitz at the age of 29. She didn't have a choice because of the time period in which she was living and because she was Jewish. She didn't have a choice.

She wrote this. She had a have a choice. And she wrote this. She had a very powerful practice. I don't know all the details of the practice, but she had a powerful practice. Some of which include the writings, included the writings of Real K, which as you might know, is always about turning towards the difficult

and befriending the seemingly negative forces. So this is what she says. You're reading out of your book. Yes. Yes. If you don't understand while you're here, and she means in a concentration camp, that all outer experiences are like a passing show as nothing beside the great splendor inside us, and things can look very bleak here indeed.

She's talking about Magnanimous Heart. This great splendor that she's speaking about is Magnanimous Heart, and she was able to access it and know it in the worst of possible situations. I find this very inspiring. I find it inspiring. What's the mechanism by which we can know it? I do think that the Buddha's methods and techniques as well as Studying the principles of the practice. So we're not just method oriented. You know, it's not prescriptive But we have this this wide View this vast perspective where we're learning about the principles and the Kind of the concepts of

the Buddhist teachings, I think, are really, is really important to understand ethics, to understand the importance of steadying the mind, to understand the essential nature of wisdom and compassion. The noble, eightfold path is essential to learn about and study. And then the third component is living our life and using all experiences in our lives as practice itself. So I think those three components are the crucial ones in terms of knowing magnanimous heart within yourself. So it's not just a rumor or a nice idea. Or the result of the aforementioned pound of valium.

Well, yes. Yes. And so much reliance on drugs these days. There's so many different ways. Little kids reliant on drugs. Yeah. So, to find a way to shift out of that with great care, with the understanding, compassion, that people are reliant on drugs because of so much suffering. But that it's not the only way. Do you think after all these years of practice on your end that your heart is truly magnanimous or do you allow all experiences to come and go through a revolving door?

Do you think that I'm... I have, I guess there would be a foundation there of trust. I have a lot of trust at this point. I have a lot of confidence in the path of practice that it's seen me through immense ups and downs in my life. I've had quite a rich life, I would say, and a very diverse life. And the practice and the Dharma have held me up every time. It's never, it's never let me down ever since I began to practice. So, so I do have that kind of trust. But you may have a bad day where it's not working as well.

It never a day, you know? It's never, it's never a day. Yeah, it's, it's a moment. Right. And then it might be another moment. But it's, it's not like a day, right? The's never a day. Yeah, it's, it's a moment. Right. And then it might be another moment. It, but it's, it's not like a day, right? The concept of a day. You, you, you talk in the book about enduring not that long ago, both the death of your father and a divorce. Yes. Five or six years ago, now. Yeah. Maybe six years ago. And when you say the practice has it let you down. Oh, it was, it was like a,

almost like a testing, you know, that here, this immense city of grief, and I kind of bring it on, you know, the sense of bring it on, I've been practicing for this length of time. I do have a great deal of trust, but here I am being challenged. I mean, it was almost like like Rinpoche's near death experience. Everybody's got their near death experience. And for me, for me, perhaps it was along those

lines of near death because there was so much that was going on and there was so much grief. And practice, practice, practice through it because of the trust in my previous practice experiences. It allowed something deeper to begin to emerge and something even more trustworthy to happen in the year since. But take us inside your mind. Because of having to go through it. So take us inside your mind then.

So you say practice, practice, practice, you would sit, the grief would well up and what would you do? Yes, the sitting practice was quite a refuge. And some, yeah, and it isn't for everyone. I do know that because of so many years of being with practitioners and teachers and you know the Dharma community that it isn't for everyone, but for me the sitting practice has always been a very real refuge. So it's almost like I just get into the posture and I'm quiet and in sense sometimes they say the posture is enlightenment itself. And I've always had that kind of sense of just just get into the posture. Just be quiet. Don't be looking around. Don't be trying to change anything or fix anything. Just stay completely still and quiet within yourself.

And then it'll all take care of itself. So, and that's my basic practice is not doing anything. And what do you mean by that? I mean, just sitting and letting everything be there that is already there anyway. So you don't occur on the breath? Not not really. No. I mean, the breath is always there, right? As long as I'm alive, there is breath. I can count on the breath being there. But I don't, every so often, I might use the breathing as a touchstone.

But most of the time, breath is there just as a nice help and as just signaling that life is still happening, whatever else is going on, life is happening. Sense of the body just sitting, and then letting the mind do whatever it wants to do, but not getting involved. Not getting involved. I wanna be clear, because some moral listeners might be thinking, okay, what she's describing sounds totally impossible, because if I sat without trying to hone in on the breath,

or using a noting practice to note everything that comes up, I would be off cooking, you know, planning lunch or whatever it is. You've been doing this for a long time, you have a base of concentration, I think it's just important to point that out. I agree with you very much, because I don't teach in this way.

I teach having a touchdown. I teach having an anchor or the breath of the breathing or sound or the entire body just sitting and then gradually expanding to whatever is happening. So yes, it's developmental. It's just important to recognize that it can develop. Right? That this is where to recognize that it can develop. Right? That this is where throwing yourself into the practice and sustaining it over time so that it's your life and not just something you do from time to time matters, really matters in terms of greeting the enormous joys and sorrows of life in a way that is meaningful. That's gonna be a challenge, a challenging, I think positive sense,

challenging statement for I'm guessing now, because I'm not in the minds of all the people who listen to the show, but I think for some listeners who are just trying to, at this point, maybe dipping their toes in or just feeling proud, I think justifiably for maintaining a five minute, a most day practice, but you're saying no, no, no, it's the whole of life. Yes, but I'm also not saying no, no, no, I'm saying five minutes is great.

And yes, no buts in this saying and five minutes out of a day, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And not to limit yourself, not to think that it's more than what it is either, you know, to recognize that this is a vast world of Dharma. That it's so rich these days in terms of what one can partake in and learn and who you can learn from and all of that. It's extraordinary. And so many contemporary Dharma books that translate the teachings in ways that are more contemporary. So it's so rich right now. I would just encourage those who are happy with the five minutes to be happy with those five minutes and feel good about it and sustain those five minutes to be happy with those five minutes and feel good about it. And, um, you know, sustain those five minutes, but just know that there's a much bigger world that, um, that one can find one's way into his world as well, not to limit yourself.

It's really about that. It's not about good bad or good yokey, you know, this is like bad dog, you know, it's not like that, or comparing yourself to anyone else. It's recognizing what is available and the significance of being alive right now is something so precious. I had prepared a list of questions I doubt I'm going to get to all of them because I am to use a term mindful of your time. And I want to get to some listener questions. Usually I take the questions, but when there's a great teacher here, I like to let the teacher do it.

But there's one question from my list I want to ask before we bring in the voicemails. You invoked the name earlier of this great Thai teacher named Ajahn Mahabua. Yeah, that's the honorific Ajahn given to great Thai teachers. Ajahn Mahabua. And you used a phrase called that he used, which is constant squeeze, life is like constant squeeze. But there's another phrase that you invoke of his end of book that I wanted to get you to talk about. Yeah. nothingness. Exactly. So it's really brilliant. You know, his definition of duke, this word that means unsatisfactoriness, things not being the way we want them to be, sometimes from moment to moment, is the sense of a constant squeeze. And then he also defined the word Nirvana, or liberation, or awakening, or the awakened heart as the

sense that there is enough, the sense of enoughness, nothing lacking. Because we can go through our life feeling and we do go through our life feeling like there's never enough. People can have huge amount of money, it's not enough. People can have, being beautiful relationships, it's not enough, yeah? And the sense of enoughness can only come within one cell. And then we can enjoy our lives

whether we have a lot of a little, but we always feel the sense of enoughness within ourselves. And then, if you feel enough, you also have something to share. And then you have the joy of being able to share without feeling the poverty around sharing. That if somebody else is joyful, there's not enough for me. But actually, when you know it within yourself, it's easy. It's easy to share. It's fun to share. I don't want to put you in a position of having to be like

bad dog with me, but you know, bad yogi, bad dog. But I will just say that I find it very compelling this concept of enoughness. I've had glimpses of it on retreat. Yep. of enoughness. I've had glimpses of it on retreat. And I can feel it in the little moments of equanimity that come up for me on day-to-day life. But a lot of my life still, even though I've been meditating for a while, is insufficiency, competition, etc., etc. Does that make me a bad dog? You are never a bad dog. No, you can't be a bad dog. It's what a meditator thinks about themselves. From a teacher point of you, no one is either a good dog or a bad dog. We're just practitioners doing our best, right? Let me just read you a tiny bit of this. Yes, you're right. Okay. Because you didn't

read it yourself. When we are not in touch with enoughness, we are like hungry ghosts. In Buddhist cosmology, the concept of a hungry ghost implies a hunger that cannot be satisfied, a first that cannot be quenched. That's what you're talking about, really. Yeah. The image of the hungry ghost is of a being with a very large belly and a tiny mouth. So even though a person with hungry ghost mind is trying to nourish themselves, they can never eat quite enough to feel full. That's a really important sentence, right? Trying to feed oneself, but never feeling full. The hunger or thirst cannot be quenched because they are looking in the wrong place for satiation.

The impoverishment is inner rather than outer. What a hungry ghost needs is nourishment for the heart, rather than food for the body. Not only do we think we do not have enough, we also think we can never do enough. Instead of giving a wholehearted attentiveness to what we are doing now, we often act half-heartedly, reserving our full attention for an imaginary moment that may never come. When we lose ourselves in efforts to get something done, we also lose a sense of awe and mystery. We find ourselves lost in intensity instead of being appreciative of the ordinary. In the awareness of enough, how could there be anything other than a richness of gratitude and appreciation? I love that. I just find myself in my own experience of fearing between the two. Right, right,

right. So you want to nourish the moments when you do have that openness to unoffness. Those are the moments that you don't want to cling or grasp onto because then it moves into something too personal. I am enough, I have enough. Something too self-centered, right? But when you have those moments to appreciate them and to be grateful for them,

orient you towards having more of those moments because in a way you're practicing enoughness. In a whatever we practice, the fruit of that practice is gonna be more of what we're practicing. So if you practice intensity, the fruit is gonna be more intensity, if you practice intensity, the fruit is going to be more intensity, if you practice anger, more anger, it's just lawful, right? So if you practice enoughness, then there will be more moments of an enoughness.

That was great. Before I let you go, can we take some questions from some listeners? We have been doing this interview without headsets, but now we're putting them on so that we can listen to some questions. Hi Dan, this is Cassie from Philadelphia. I've been meditating for a couple months and I just started recently listening to the podcast and I love it. It's been really helpful in growing my meditation practice. I meditate for about 10 minutes every day and I feel like I've been improving a little bit on my technique, but something that started happening in the past couple weeks when I meditate is I feel like I almost start to dream during my meditation.

I am familiar with the noting technique and I use that when I have kind of racing thoughts which happens pretty often, but this seems kind of new to me. I'm not really thinking about anything real. I just start to have like my imagination goes wild and I have these weird dreams, almost lucid dreams, because I feel like I'm in them,

and I try to keep pulling myself out. And my imagination just always goes right back to these dreams and fake situations that I'm imagining myself in. And I'm just wondering if this is normal at all, and if you have any insight on how I can kind of cut down on the dreams that I'm having while I'm meditating so that I can be a little bit more present in real life and not in my dreams.

Thank you so much. I'm so glad that our producers wisely saved that question for you, because I would have known not to begin answering that. OK. So I think it's very good. I think that what's probably happening is a greater degree of relaxation is entering in.

And with that relaxation, more thinking, she's becoming more aware of the thinking that has always been happening, that she has not been aware of. Should I speak right directly to her or to you? Yeah, you can speak to both. Yeah, okay. Either. Okay. Hi. So, yeah. So I think, I think

more ease and relaxation has begun to enter in and to not reject that. You don't have to follow it. You want to let awareness kind of pop you out of it, but what I mean by that is when you feel yourself drawn to it like moth to the flame kind of feeling. See if you can simply be aware of the feeling tone of wanting to go back into it. But that's all you need to be concerned about. The fact that it's occurring, I think think simply indicates that there's a greater degree of letting be happening. And so you're more aware than you were before.

And now you're rejecting it. You know, I shouldn't be. I'm not doing this correctly. But it's natural. There are different points in the practice where you aren't doing it, either correctly or incorrectly. It is doing you. The practice is working on you and that's where we have to let go of control. And that's really a huge insight is the letting go of control. So much peace when

we let go of control that we never had to begin with. So I think that's what's going on for you in this experience that you're having. Is that helpful? Yeah, I mean sometimes for me, I feel like I'm slipping into a dream but it only just means I'm falling asleep. Yes, but even that falling asleep, if it's happening within the context of the sitting,

it's a little bit different than just ordinary falling asleep. You can trust that too. Everybody thinks that sleepiness, because we talk about wakefulness so much, that sleepiness is like the worst thing that can happen, because it's in total opposition seemingly from wakefulness. But there's a lot one can learn from lethargy and sleepiness and not having enough energy as well. If you can trust yourself to simply have a little bit of Attentiveness on the sleepiness. I mean be awake enough so that you're not completely under with it

What can you know that it's happening? Well, you can learn more about the fact that we Don't like it and the pushing it away is actually exhausting and makes you more fatigued. We can learn about a deeper level of weakfulness, actually, because if you can stay with it, stay with it, stay with it, and again, just a little bit of attentiveness. Not like I'm supposed to be completely attentive, but just to know what's happening, know what's happening, know what's happening, know what's happening. If you can be really patient in that way, sometimes you'll pop out of it into a deeper level of wakefulness than you had ever known before

in your life. Yes, so the attraction is to come. I've sometimes wrestled with, I try to get in an hour of sitting a day, a day to do two, but I got less ambitious recently. And my rule is Sharon Salzberg actually gave me this. I just do it in whatever intervals I can throughout the day. I see. And so I'll try to kind of track it a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like 10 minutes or so.

Yeah, well, hopefully longer, but in minutes, if that's what's available, I'll track it on my phone or just in my head, or my watch, whatever. And sometimes I'll be on a plane or anywhere and I'll just like straight up fall asleep, like find that my torso is folded over my knees. Right. And I've wrestled with whether I should count that

as meditation. Yeah, I think it's a little too much counting. Yeah, well, there you go. Right. I do. I just think it's just in that world counting. And there's something very to me, resident about what you're saying, because we do a lot of, we're in an era where there's a whole term now that's called quantified self, that we are constantly counting our calories or how much sleep, what our heart rate

is, we can get all of this data and it's intriguing on some level. Let me use an analogy with you and see what you think of this. I stopped eating animal products about a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago. At first I got really sick because I didn't know what I was doing. And then I got an nutritionist and he got me to count calories and track my food so we could look at it. And actually it was very useful for a long time because I really learned how to eat in a way that made me, I could be true to my ethical values without getting

myself sick. Right. And now I'm realizing, I don't want to count these stupid calories anymore. And it's actually getting a little unhealthy. I'm getting a little obsessive over it. I see. So let me port that back over to meditation. Yeah. I think it's actually, and I want you to tell me whether I want you to fact check me on

this or that's probably the wrong word, but just check me on this. I think there's a certain amount of value in saying, especially at the beginning of a practice, you know, I'm gonna aim for a certain amount of sitting. But after a while, the amount of counting I'm doing is probably cross the line into counterproductive. Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, I think it moves into a evaluative of an approach, too much assessing, too much centered on the eye.

Yeah. Yeah. And that if you can open up that, really more fruitful practice could be happening. If you could kind of open that door beyond the evaluative and the assessing and the agendas and the hopes and the fears. If you could open that door a bit, at this point for you, because of your dedication and your interest and sorry about the gastroposism, because I sense a great deal of dedication. Yeah. This comes through very clearly. I'm not skeptical about the practice. Uh-huh. You're skeptical about yourself. You're skeptical. I'm skeptical generally. I don't believe things in listers evidence. Right, right, right. Okay. So that's that's that's saying that's saying doubt.

Yeah. Right. I mean, that's doubt that with things that should be doubtful. Yes. Right. Yeah. That's definitely not skeptical about the practice. Unless you tell me I'm going to get in light and right away or something like that. Right. Right. Yeah. So anyway, though, to see that as a pattern of mind could be really helpful. In other words, you have to have a certain kind of intentionality, but then you have to let go in terms of what the results might be because they're out of your control.

So to have a clear sense of intention, great and dedication, great, but then all the evaluation, am I getting anywhere? Am I doing this right? Am I doing this correctly? How am I doing? This is pretty neurotic. And I'm not saying that to you personally,

it's a lot of sherry cans. Because it's neuroses. Well, it may be generally true, but it's also specific to it. Well, taken. But let me ask you one last question, and I know we're supposed to be letting the thing. But let me may be generally true, but it's also specific to it's well taken. But let me ask you one last question, and I know we're supposed to be letting the. Yeah, but let me also just say quick too. Oh, go go go. To be aware of it as neuroses, rather than as I need this or else I'm not going to get anywhere in my practice. It's a very, very

different perspective. To move to seeing it as neuroses and making it into an object of meditation. Instead of, I can't let this go, I'm going to be too lazy. I'm never going to get it. Well, that's what I was. My question was going to be, okay. My neurotic self is wondering, is wants to ask you. Yeah. The artist formerly known as Jan, whether you, whether you would worry that somehow, or I worry at least, that somehow, if I let go of timing, that I'll just, I'll never get any sitting down. Yeah, see, I would love you to try that. I'm going to.

Yeah, because you're ready for it. In the beginning, you do have to be a little bit more on track, but it's developmental. So at this point, everything points to the fact that for it to open up more for you, you need to move with it rather than hold yourself back with the old thought structures. I love it. Yeah, I do. Okay. All right. So I'm to stop selfishly gobbling up your time to ask personal selfish questions. Let's get the not selfish because you know it's it's really everybody has the same questions. Hi Dan, my name is Betha. I'm a big fan of yours from Finland. So your word is spreading. Yeah, so one of the obstacles that I'm having with my practices to understand what a mental problem solving process should look like sort of inside my head.

So one of the most common meditation techniques is the noting, as you very well know. So once I learn how to note my thoughts, I can create a distance between them and myself, and then I can not engage with unhelpful thoughts, okay, fantastic. But decision-making and problem solving are hugely important things in a daily life of normal human being. So I don't always know what is an unhelpful thought and what is not. It takes some time and reflection and thinking, like, what are these thoughts? What is, why am I having these thoughts?

And which one I should follow, which one I shouldn't follow? So what does that process should look like? Like, for example, in NLP, I'm sure you know what that is, so you can make images black and white and shrink them in front of you sort of visually, to make them feel smaller ones you think that you don't want to engage with that thought or whatever. But I get a feeling that all this mindfulness teachers and websites, they talk very little about this specific question that I have or have I completely misunderstood something about mindfulness and meditation.

Thank you so much and keep up the good work. Bye. Thank you. So I would say just to clarify one term there that I think you got hung up on and I'm getting a little hung up on, but I'll say something before you answer the question. I think she was referencing NLP, which is neuro-linguistic programming. I don't know anything about NLP. She talked about somehow shrinking the thought or something like that. So maybe set that aside and answer the rest of the question. Okay. Yeah. Well, this very much has to do with daily life practice,

where we are in the situation, where we do have to solve problems over and over again. And if we abandon that, we are trying to live in this other world that is not practical and not real. And so it's part of our meditation practice to come to the question of how to solve problems, but from a meditative point of view.

So in our usual non-meditative approach, perhaps, we're always trying, we have this concept of, this is a problem and it needs to be solved, from a net, from from a and that's true that's true from a meditative point of view which is equally true we want to bring our attention to the sensations that are happening in the body I'm not a real fan of the noting I want to say. I did it kind of as bootcamp for a couple of years with Upandita in my early years of practice. Right. Burmese teacher. Upandita.

Yep, I did it and it was very helpful, very useful, but it was something that changed as the practice developed. Recognizing that we have to think, we have to use thinking. And the point in solving problems is, are we being used by our thoughts, or can we use our thoughts in a wise way, right? So to come to particular issues in our lives, to be free from the ways that thought has its hold over us. This is a meditative development, because thought does have its way with us until it doesn't. And if you continue to practice, you will come into a clearer space in which you're not

drawn to thinking in the same way. You're not as enchanted by your thoughts in the same way as you were, which means that you can actually think. It brings us back to thinking, but in a wise and thoughtful way. And I think one of the best ways to use thinking is to meditatively question, to bring up a question that is a meditative question for you, that allows you to hold the problem without thinking in conditioned ways about it. Because that, because that's what we do. Our conditioned ancient ways of thinking. A bitual. A bitual, exactly. Yeah. And then we're just, you know, following, following like a jirple around

a cage, we don't get out of it. Or we sell that problem, then there's another problem. Then we sell that problem, there's another problem. But to come at problems from a meditative point of view means to ask a question that is bigger than the problem. And something that does happen in meditation is that problems have a way of resolving themselves or dissolving as a quote problem, in our willingness to hold what we're calling a problem in a different way. So it's a shift. It's a real shift. And it's one of the fundamental shifts. I think that happens in our meditative life, in our life as meditation, is how we approach what we call problems. So let me see if I can, see if I can sum that up a little bit.

Okay, thank you. I may be doing it. No. I may not get this close to what you were saying. So let's, let's make sure I land it. Yeah. A lot of people, I think there's a confusion among meditators because in formal meditation practice,

your quote unquote not supposed to be thinking, you're supposed to be feeling the raw data of your breath or you're mindfully aware of all sensory input, including thoughts, but you're not supposed to be carried away by the thoughts, right? Right, no problem, that lots of thoughts are happening. Of course. But you just know that it's thinking.

That's thinking. That's right. Good. So then people get a little confused, okay, well, what? I'm not meditating, but I do need to do some problem solving. What's the role of my thinking mind now? Yeah. And I think that the point you made that I think answers the question is, once we learn

not to get so enchanted by all of the random, wild, habitual thinking process that goes on in our formal practice, then once we're not meditating anymore, our whole capacity for thought has improved because we're focused on the new and original. Exactly. Our thinking is actually more fruitful. Do you mind if I read a little bit about meditative questioning? Life questions are precious. They are precious jewels in our lives. I'm talking about the problems that we have. We need to respect our life questions and have great patience with them.

Although there may not be an intellectual answer that satisfies, there can indeed be a resolution and ending of confusion. In other words, whatever it is, the problem is no longer a problem. The issue simply dissolves. It is important to understand that our relationship to issues and problems can change. The same situation may arise with all

of the same particularities, but our relationship to it may change so profoundly that something that bothered us mentally in the past doesn't bother us at all anymore. The issue has resolved itself completely not by being ignored or judged, but through being held with loving awareness. All questions, even such a question as what is the meaning of life are resolved in that we no longer think about or experience angst in relationship to what was once an immense issue for us. The issue does not arise in the mind as one that needs to be thought about or pondered.

So that's a little bit of what I was pointing to. But I do think a question oftentimes is better than the pondering or the ruminating about problems. You know, like, how can I hold this differently? How can I look at this differently? What is needed right now? And what is needed right now? And what's needed right now might not be thinking about the problem, it might be I need more calm right now.

So that there's more spaciousness to be able to think about the problem in a fruitful way. So could you use that in a meeting, for example, when ostensibly we're there to, I don't know, figure something out specific, but maybe you could ask a larger question and let the room kind of sit with that. Yes, yes, I think it could be really helpful. I have a whole chapter in here on meditative questioning, and it's kind of questions that you don't want to ask, like, why am I such a jerk, is not really such a, you know, a helpful question to ask. There's endless answers to that, right? But a question, so we ask the wrong questions sometimes, and we think that there's going to be an answer to that.

That is actually going to be intelligent or sane. But there are other questions, life questions, that are really helpful to continue to ask. And then there are meditative questions like, who's experiencing this problem, really, really cutting through in a different way. And then in a meeting where you have to make decisions, there's a different sense in the meeting. There's more relaxation. There's more of a capacity to listen and respond.

One isn't quite as caught up with finding a particular result. And so maybe the result is something completely outside the box and completely creative. Yeah. That's cool. In closing, we do this, we have this little tradition on the show, which is we usually close with something we call jokingly the plug zone. So to plug everything, remind us of the name of the book. Where can we find you on the internet? Also tell us a little bit something about the CIMC, the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center.

Okay, so my new book is called the Magnanimous Heart and the subtitle is Compassion and Love, magnanimous heart and the subtitle is Compassion and Love, Laws and grief, joy and liberation. I thought I would go for it. It was published by wisdom publications and wisdom publications is composed of many meditators who work at this publishing company, they are just so wonderful and inspired. And when I have to mention them, instead of like Shimon and Shulster suggested I do this or that, I can say wisdom suggested that I do this or that. So it's my little joke, right? The book is available via Amazon. And I'm kind of out and about talking about it because it's really a body of teachings

having to do with when I first began to meditate up till now. So the idea is for it to be an honest and authentic rendering of a meditative journey. So not something idealized, not something that is not realizable, but an offering, an offering from my heart to yours. I'm laughing at the heart part again. That's going to let you get away with that. I didn't realize it was a joke.

And are you on the internet, social media, anything like that? I'm not on social media. You can look me up. If you plug my name in, you'll find different things, reviews for the book, and this kind of thing. I teach at a center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. And it's in, as I said before, it's an urban city, Dharma Center. And so people come for classes, for dropping classes, for talks.

And we have non-residential retreats, a number of them every year, that I am in great favor of, because it's quite interesting to sit for a day like nine to seven or something. And then to go home at night, go to your home, get caught up by your pillows and your partner and your this and your that. And then come back the next day and Recognize what has happened because of even just one day of practice. So these residential retreats are much more powerful Then they sometimes appear to be you know because in our lineage

Residential retreats are the big thing and I do of course I teach at the inside meditation society, and I teach longer retreats. And I believe in them. And I really, IMS is a wonderful institution. You go on the right day, you might catch my mom at the CIMC. Ryan, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Great job. Wonderful. Thank you so much.

You're a really, really wonderful interviewer and practitioner. Thank you. Alrighty, big thanks to Narayan. If you want, by the way, to donate to the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, please go to Cambridge Insight.org, Cambridge Insight.org, and click on the Donate Now button. They do a lot of good work there, most of which is funded by donations. And before we go, no voice mail is obviously just to that with Naurayan. Before we go, I just do, I do want to, as I always say, thank you to the folks who do make the show possible. Ryan Kessler, Samuel Johns, Grace Livingston, Mike D's working the boards. He's the engineer this morning as I record the intro and outro for the show. Big thanks to our podcast Insiders panel.

The folks who give us feedback every week. Big thanks to you for listening. If you like this show, you want to do a solid go rate us, review us, talk about us on social media. That's always extremely helpful, gets the word out about the show and helps us justify our existence, et cetera, et cetera. And after having said all of that, I do want to say that we will be back next week with a freshy, a new show. We'll see you then. Next week with a freshy, a new show. We'll see you then. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

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