Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 204: Love, Death, Tech and Psychedelics, Jack Kornfield, Meditation O.G.

Episode Date: September 11, 2019

As far as meditation teachers go, they don't come more highly regarded than our guest this week, Jack Kornfield. Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. You might think this meditation master is unflappable, but you would be mistaken. Kornfield discusses how he, one of the preeminent teachers in the field, still encounters difficult times, including how his marriage ended in divorce. He also delves into the role psychedelics play in the mindfulness movement. Plug Zone Website: https://jackkornfield.com/ Books: https://jackkornfield.com/books-audio-programs/ Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/heart-wisdom-with-jack-kornfield/id923017416 Twitter: @JackKornfield Facebook: @jkornfield, https://www.facebook.com/jkornfield/ ***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. For ABC, to baby this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. This is going to be a plot bus grip. Jack Cornfield is a true OG, a true legend. In case you don't know anything about him, although I suspect many of you

do, briefly, he trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand and India and Burma in the 70s. He was really one of the first people who's on the vanguard of this group of young Americans who went over to Asia and learned how to meditate and then brought it back to the United States. He, along with such towering figures as Sharon Salisberg and Joseph Goldstein, ended up founding a place called the Insight Meditation Society in Barry, Massachusetts,

and then Jack went off to found another place called Spirit Rock Center, which is in Northern California, which is where I did my first retreat. He has written a series of extremely successful books that have sold more than a million copies, including a wise heart, a path with heart, seeking the heart of wisdom, as you can see he likes the word heart more than I do. He also wrote a book with the amazing title after the ecstasy The Laundry, which is about

title after the ecstasy, the laundry, which is about what it's like to have all sorts of amazing experiences while meditating, but then you go back to your regular life. And in this interview, you're going to hear him talk about the vicissitudes of his life, the fact that he's this man who's been practicing meditation, training his mind in intense way for 50 years. And yet he had meditation training is mined in intense way for 50 years and yet he had he endured a divorce and then a remarriage and so he he talks I think very candidly and bravely about that. We also talk about where he still gets triggered. In fact, we start with that and at the end, he's going to take your voiceml. So unlike most interviews where I start off asking people how did you get into meditation, I wanted to dive right into different sorts of questions with him, so his biography, I just shared a little bit

of it with you and it will start to spill out during the course of the interview, but we pursue a little bit of a different format on this one and I think you're gonna like it. So here we go, Jack Cornfield. Thank you for doing this, really. It's a pleasure, I'm happy to be here. I'm glad that it worked out. Me too. Yeah. This is a big opportunity for us. Our audience is

going to love this. Oh, I'm glad. Love this. So a question that was submitted to me, suggested by two people in the 10% orbit, both teachers. One is named Jay Michelson and the other is named Kara Lai. They both independently came up with the same question. I thought this was a very interesting one, which is, after all these years of practice, is there an area where you struggle the most to apply the teachings, to bring mindfulness in? Well, nothing comes to mind right away. I may be able to pull something up because they're all both wonderful and difficult. It's not like there's some particular area.

There had been at times in my life and past decades. I can get triggered by different things when there's a lot of conflict. One of the things I've noticed is that there are two different levels to my experience, so that recently I was helping a community that was in a lot of conflict and people were angry and blaming and resentful. And I noticed that now in my 75th year that my nervous system was not as resilient as it used to be, so that after some hours of dealing

with everybody's upset, I sat down to be with myself and my body was very unhappy, it was tense and kind of all wired and things like that. At the same time, there was a lot of equanimity. And it reminded me when I came back from the five years that I first lived in Asia and most of them as a Buddhist monk, I was driving down in your 20s. This was exactly, it was in my 20s.

And I had left the robes and was a layperson again. And I was driving down the Massachusetts Turnpike. And a big tractor trailer in front of me lost a big piece of tire. And it slammed into another car. And all these cars were breaking. And I was very calm. I'd been doing some years of meditation.

My mind was really still. And it said, oh, I'm slamming on the brakes. It looks like I might die now, Will. How interesting. It was very, very calm. And at the same time, my hands grabbed the wheel. My body got all activated and wrenched the car out of the way of the crashing cars in front of me over to the dirt on the side. And it said, you're not going to die yet. I'm going to keep you alive.

And it was these two things that were happening at the same time. One was a great calm. And the other was my body saying, no, no, you got to take care of yourself. And that I found interesting and it still carries to these day that there can be periodically in conflict or difficulty or things. I can get triggered, activated, upset even, although not so often. And then another part of me just sees it as, oh, upset. Not a problem. And that's grown over the years. And it makes me very happy, more than 10% even. Is that achievable for those of us who are never going to spend five years in robes

and dedicate our lives to the extent you have to the practice. I believe it's really the possibility for everyone. And it's not that one has to go on long retreats or go to the Himalayas or go to Kyoto and become a Zen monk or something like that. The beautiful thing is that the mind and heart can be trained. And it turns out, even with modern neuroscience, which we might or might not talk about, that they're discovering that even short periods of practice

start to rewire or decondition our kind of habitual responses so that we're not so caught in them. And I believe and have seen people who practice over some time in a dedicated way in their daily life for getting, at certain times, getting away for a bit of inner training, that people have a great deal more equanimity and balance and more perspective. So absolutely, and if it weren't, what good would it be? You know, how many people are going to go to the Himalayas and it would get crowded in the Himalayas anyway?

So it's just, it's not, it really is something that's in us. And because it's, are the beautiful language that uses, it's your birthright. It is your human capacity to awaken both compassion and empathy for others, babies are born with it, and your human capacity to be present without being so reactive or caught in things. And we love the exemplars of it in the world. When Nelson Mandela walked out of Robin Island prison after 27 years, with so much magnanimity and graciousness and compassion, he not only changed South Africa, but he kind of changed the imagination of the world, really.

It was as if to say they can put your body in prison, but no one can imprison your spirit. And we can learn that, and it doesn't take that long. The meditation isn't just about making yourself quiet or, you know, stress reduction, but it's actually the ability to become more spacious with your experience and say, oh, this is happening. You become the witnessing what my teacher called the knowing or the one who knows. And that spaciousness has more ease and more love and less reactivity and say, yeah, this is what human incarnation brings me today. And I can manage this. I see that play out in my own practice. I, 10 years of a little bit of practice,

not definitely no robes and no living overseas for extended period of time. But I notice that old situations that would trigger me or automatically I would sleepwalk into some sort of foolish behavior. It doesn't happen as much. And yet there are areas where the mindfulness, I just can't summon it. For example, claustrophobia.

Very bad claustrophobia. It results in a kind of panic response. I can't hurl myself into the lotus position in those moments. Or certain things with my wife. We have a very happy marriage. I consider marrying her the smartest and luckiest thing that's ever happened that I've ever done. And yet there are moments where the mindfulness is unavailable to me. It might be helpful to know that when the Buddha and Jesus both went back to their families, they both had a hard time. So this just kind of gives sets the bar in the right place. Right. The Buddha had a big fight with his sister-in-law or whatever, but she was trying to get

women in the same place. Yeah, well with his stepmother, but he also had difficulty with his father when he went back. Yeah, I mean, it was and his ex-wife, you know, and by the way, he named his kid Fetter. Yes, he did. He was not in a good mood about childy ring on that day. I think that was before enlightenment. Exactly. Exactly, his defense.

But anyway, so, I mean, our my dear friend, Ram Das, who's a wonderful, you know, wise sage and spiritual teacher says, if you think you're enlightened, who is a wonderful wise sage and spiritual teacher, says, if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family, basically. So, the closer we get to people, the more vulnerable we get, and also then our history and conditioning can more easily get triggered. And for me, when I was talking about these difficulties recently in this community that was all up in arms and so forth, I noticed when I sat and got quiet, when I was talking about these difficulties recently in this community that was all up in arms and so forth, I noticed when I sat and got quiet that it also triggered a kind of fight, flight, or freeze memory from my early childhood.

I had a pretty painful childhood. My father was in some ways brilliant scientist. He was a biophysicist who worked in space medicine and helped design some of the early heart lung machines and things like that. But he was also, he had mental problems and he was paranoid and violent and he would be really abusive to us and beat my mother and his terrible thing as a kid to watch them fight. And I noticed that that conditioning, even though I feel really peaceful much of the time, it can get triggered. And now I'm more aware of it, there it is, but it still hurts in some way, because it's a kind of trauma that's wired in very, very deeply in my body. And now, of course, the response is really different.

I just have a kind of compassion for myself or for anybody that gets caught in things, because we are all human, and we all get caught and I've become less and less judgmental of anything that's human because I see that we me that we contain it all as Whitman said I am large I contain multitudes and they're not all like you know the most beautiful incarnations of ourself so the most beautiful incarnations of ourself. So.

But it's, you're now talking about what it sometimes referred to as self-compassion. Yes. Not my favorite term, but nonetheless, we can set that aside. It's a, not my favorite term, but it is one of my favorite concepts. Yeah. And it is very different, speaking again for myself here, I find that the development of empathy

and compassion for other people while not easy is certainly easy, er, than it is for myself. When I see things that I'm ashamed of, it's hard for me not to spin into spirals of self-flagulation. And it sounds to me, based on the four going utterances from the other side of this table from you that you're actually at this stage in your life able to really see this triggering in yourself and to send yourself some good vibes. Yeah, and well you're talking about is something really important. There was this famous discussion that a number of us who were teaching

starting the 70s and 80s had with the Dalai Lama, sometime in the 80s, who was a teacher meeting with him, and we asked him about what to do with the amount of self-judgment and self-hatred that we saw meditators encountering in the classes and retreats we taught. And he was confused because there's no word in Tibetan for self-hatred. And he and his translator, Jimbo, went back on fourth in Tibetan, like, what could this mean? And finally he understood it.

And he looked up with this kind of surprise and sympathy. And he said, hmm, but this is a mistake. Why would anyone do this? But then he said, how many of you experienced this and all of us raised our hands? So it becomes a really important thing for people who undertake a meditation practice to not use it, to judge themselves.

We're already good enough at that. And some of us are so good, they wouldn't even hire us to be a judge in a kind of humane society. We'd have to go up, you know, through some dictatorship or something. But anyway, one of the great blessings that comes from mindfulness is that you can see the judging mind, judging mind of yourself or others. You can see the judging mind, judging mind of yourself or others. And the moment that you have this revelation there you are sitting with a mindful loving awareness, which is the translation I like for mindfulness now, of loving awareness. You're noticing your experience. And then the judging mind arises. You're not doing it right.

Those people are messing up. Whatever the judgment is. And the moment you recognize, oh, this is the judging mind. And then in that moment of mindfulness or mindful loving awareness, you can almost bow to and say, oh, judging mind. In that moment you've stepped out of the story and out of the belief of it, you recognize it, it's conditioning. Almost as if you could bow to it, say, okay, judging mind, you can even say, thank you

for your opinion, you know, or yes, thank you for trying to protect me, I'm okay for now, because underneath that judgment is some kind of self protection in some fashion or other. And to be able to meditate and step back from the grasp of judgment and other states like it is tremendously relieving. Now it also happens as you point out that it's harder to do for ourselves than it is for anybody else. And so when I teach loving kindness meditation, for example, which is a great complement to mindfulness, it used to be in the traditional form that we were taught in Asian temples

and so forth, that you'd start with yourself. But people in the West often find it really difficult, as you said. And so what I like to do now is have people picture first one and then maybe a second person who they care about, where it's not so conflicted, where there's love. For you, it might be, it sounds like you have this wonderful relationship with your wife, and wish them well, may they be safe and protected, feel the care you have for them, and also become aware of their measure of struggle or suffering, like every human being. And when you picture your wife even as we talk, and you see that she too has her struggles, there comes so naturally a compassion because you love her. It's just a rise. It's part of our

heart, the way we're wired. And after wishing well and developing love and compassion for one or two people, then what I will do is say, all right, now imagine those two people turning their gaze back to you. Imagine your wife turning her gaze back to you, Dan, and wishing for you what you wished for her. She looks at you, and I can do it with my daughter, for example, or my beloved, true to you, my wife, and they want the same thing. They say, oh, Dan, I wish you are well and safe and protected, and I feel a tender compassion for your struggles, like every human being, and you start to realize you can take it in

from these people because they care about you. And then the next step, I'll say, is all right now, if you like, put your hand on your heart, and take those words that you heard from these loved ones, and bring them in and say, all right, if they wish it for me, I guess it's okay to wish it for myself. May I be safe? May I hold myself with compassion, all my struggles? May I be protected. And it's as if the people that we care about can teach us what we can't find in ourself. I had a great good fortune to do a one-on-one,

loving kindness, meditation retreat with your student, Spring Washam, who's been on this podcast several times and is an incredible human being. And in teaching the practice to me, she did something very similar, which was we spent the first, this was a 10, 9 day retreat. We spent the first couple of days on easy people. So I spent the first one or two days only sending the phrases, maybe happy, maybe healthy, maybe safe, maybe lividies, et cetera, et cetera,

to my then three-year-old son and his cat Toby. And that was really easy. And then as soon as you get the juices flowing, slipping yourself. And that, I found to be quite effective. Beautiful, also much the same way. It's like the principle, we kind of think that meditation has to be some sort of grim duty. And it's really the opposite. The principle is to do that, which opens the doorway of

the heart most easily. Whether it's loving kindness, meditation, take your dog, your child, your beloved, and whatever way, and let the heart open and then little by little let it open to things that are a bit more difficult and the same in mind from this you don't want to sit and say all right now I'm going to sit and not move and make real pain for myself and learn to do this which is a kind of nice warrior training and is in monastery something and if you're a young man as I was you know we would say things in the forest monastery, like is there anything dangerous to do around here? You kind of want to

prove yourself. But what's most helpful actually is to allow it to be a gateway to well-being. So when Zen Master Tiktun Han says, as you breathe in and out, use the words calm or ease with each breath. And I try to point people as they begin to meditate to look for even moments of calm or well-being that start to punctuate the stream of thoughts. And as you feel even a little bit of it, relax into it and invite it to be there a little longer, let it spread. The point isn't to overcome things,

but to come back to a deeper sense of rest in yourself, and you can learn to do that. So that it becomes something that you want to do, or that you find nourishing. And even when you don't, because a lot of people also use meditation when they get triggered and upset and so forth, you have the bodily memory, oh, there's a place that I've found already where my body finds greater ease, where attention is much more spacious. Let me see if I can bring that into even this difficult time. Can I go back to sending you said earlier about you you were talking about mindfulness and you said that the translation or the phraseology you now

prefer is loving awareness. Yes. Let me just say a few words and then you can riff off of that. I've noticed, this is something I learned on the aforementioned loving kindness retreat with spring, which is that I had by that point been practicing, I don't know, nine years, whatever, not some massive amount of time, but not nothing. And I noticed that in my, I didn't notice until this retreat, that my mindfulness, I didn't notice until this retreat, that my mindfulness, which I would have defined as sort of

non-judgmental awareness, seeing clearly what's happening in your head without getting carried away by it, something in that range. My mindfulness had a here to four, to me, imperceptible, aversive flick to it. So I would notice judging, and I would note, oh,

yeah, I'm judging myself. But there was in there something that I hadn't seen yet, which was I was kind of pushing it away, just around the edges. And what I noticed about adding and doing intensively this complimentary form of meditation, loving kindness, another term I don't love, but whatever, it created such a warm, sunny disposition in my mind, so that when all of my ugliness, and it's all there for all of us, all of my ugliness arose, I was actually, you know, welcoming it to the party as opposed to gritting my teeth. So is, if I in the range of what you're talking about when you say loving awareness? Exactly. Because it's possible for mindfulness to be subtly a form of judgment. All right, I see it, but underneath it's like,

well, I'm seeing the judging mind and I kind of wish it would go away or the other. I'm so proud of myself while I've seen it. Even all kinds of reactions. With loving awareness, you say, oh, he's proud of himself. Isn't that charming or you know, he's still judging. Thank you for your opinion. It's okay. We know who recorded those judgments in there anyway. We won't talk about them, but thank you for trying to protect me. And there's a sense of humor and graciousness and a kindness that which is exactly what you found in yourself in that

retreat with spring. And this is again part of allowing meditation to have a ground of care of well-being and even of a kind of happiness that's not happiness of pleasure, but it's somehow deeper than that. It's the ground that realize, oh, I'm okay. I can be with all the stuff that a mind creates, all the, as you said, the ugly things and the frightened things, because most of the things that are really ugly actually come out of fear, of self-protection and so forth. I can be with all that and say, oh, this is just humanity.

I think about Oscar Wilde's phrase, something about the tainted glory of humanity, that we have all these parts of ourselves, and not to be so judgmental or I think it's Auden who said to love your crooked neighbor with your own crooked heart, some poetic line like that. We're in this together as human beings, and with that there comes a kind of graciousness. care for our common humanity and much, much less judgment of ourself and others. And this is really important to say, when we talk about non-judgment, it doesn't mean that there still isn't a discernment, so that actions that are causing harm to others, to us or others.

We see that clearly and can stand up and do whatever is necessary to stop that. So that others are not causing harm to us or to other people. So it's not a lack of clarity or discernment. There's actually a, that's part of compassion, a response, a natural response to protect ourselves and others when we're quiet. And it's in us, even the most hardened criminal, is going to pick up a child that fell into the street when the traffic is coming.

It's just wired in us in the earliest studies, the studies at Yale of, you know, pre-verbal kids' infants, when not their own cries. If they hear their own cries recorded, they're blithened. They don't care about it. But if they hear the cry of another child or they see an adult or someone in trouble, the tracking of their eyes and their senses just, they want to do something about it. We're born with this. And in a certain way, meditation makes the space. We become the space of loving awareness that can say, yes, here is our human predicament, our human life, and allows for that. I call it the great heart of compassion that's born and you and us, that original goodness to come forth.

It's like you're bringing your better angels to the gym. Absolutely. Or to the game or to life itself, exactly. But the gym by the gym, I mean, is that these are, they're in us, better angels, so is the ugliness, and you can train one and let the other atrophy if you go down this path Yeah, and what you say this is I mean because we live in a very paradoxical Life that

Just like light has is both a wave and a particle. In some way you could say, all right, we have better angels and ugliness and so forth in that dualistic way, but then there's another part of us that can step back and be the awareness itself that says, oh, there's all this going on, but that's not really, that's not who I am, who I am is this witnessing, this awareness.

And even as we talk, you can sit there and be in your identity as Dan, doing an interview which you've done many times and have this skill and comfort with. You can be identified with your age, your body, or personality, and so forth. Or you can be the awareness that says, ah, here it is, all this is playing out as if on the screen. And that awareness is outside of time. My teacher, Ajahn Chah, who was a great forest meditation master,

and really celebrated in Thailand, when I met him, he was not well known at all, and in some ways he was criticized a lot because he was a very strict teacher. But after he died, because his wisdom and humor was so beautiful and it started to get disseminated by little cassette tapes in the 1960s. A million people came to his funeral including the King and Queen because he had such love and wisdom that came through him. Anyway, he had practiced for ten years as a monk in a really ardent way back in the day when you read those stories, the people who lived in caves and out in the jungles, and there were tigers and things like that.

And he overcame a lot of obstacles, and then he started to have all kinds of beautiful experiences of great peace and calm, dissolving his body into light, having a sense of somebody, which is a word for just unified consciousness and openness or tremendous love, and things that also can come in meditation. And this is a little parenthesis in the middle of this story. Western psychology tends to focus on pathology, and we have this great big manual, the DSM Diagnostic Manual, where you look up the number as this person, a depressive or a bipolar, or you know, have an anxiety disorder,

and that way you get the insurance to pay. And Buddhist psychology tends to all those things. It understands those, but it has a whole other volume about the positive capacities of 25 different states of joy and 15 of happiness and well-being and states of tremendous peace and equanimity and how you develop them. So he developed a lot of these things and had all these great insights. And he went to see the greatest meditation master of the day, another odd John, a teacher named Adjon Man. And he went to see the greatest meditation master of the day, another odd John, or teacher named

Adjon Man. Now, to him, and he said, can I tell you about my meditation? And he said, I went through this, and I had these insights and these visions, and I also overcome the difficulties in what should I do next. And the master looked back and said, Ja, you've missed the point. Those are just experiences. He said, they're like movies. You have a romantic comedy, and a war movie,

and a documentary, and there are other different kinds of movies you can see. He said, there's really only one question you have to inquire into. And that is, who's watching the movies to whom do these happen. So instead of trying to get, okay, I've got a great movie, I don't want to keep it, but you know, anything you try to keep, it's like holding your breath, you can't keep any mind state. He said instead of trying to keep something, turn your attention back to the knowing, become the one who knows, was his phrase,

Sikibuto, become the witnessing to experience. And that's the place that you will find freedom. And this is really what I'm talking about as loving awareness that there is a place that is available to us, no matter the outer circumstances, where we can become the, where we shift back to become the conscious witness, the loving awareness of experience, and not be triggered or caught. And in it, there's understanding and discernment and compassion.

And even when we're getting caught, we say, oh, there is caught again, you know. But there's some little smile with it like, okay, I don't have to go down that road fully. And this capacity that we have to shift identity from being in the middle of everything to being a space of love and awareness is really the gateway to our well-being and freedom, and that's possible for anybody. Let me pick up on that. Yeah, please. Because you say that is possible for anybody, and you've invoked this phrase of the one

who knows simply and granularly, how do we inhabit that space? Yeah, and that's the big question. So I was invited a few years ago to the first White House Buddhist leadership conference. There was a White House Buddhist leadership conference. That was under action. And that happened, President. Let us say the previous president.

It's not gonna be happening in this next week, I don't think. Who knows? But one never knows. It's true. The universe is more mysterious than we could imagine. You're old friends. You're old friend Joseph Goldstein likes to say anything

can happen anytime. Anything. That's right. So may it happen. But anyway, I'm not packing my bags to go. I'll just say that much. But in any case, I was able to be part of the kind of summary address of what we talked about.

And I quoted, I brought a teaching from the ancient time of the Buddha, as these things were written down, you know, going back thousands of years, because not only was the Buddha, he was a human being. He wasn't some kind of a god or something, but he was an awakened being, which is to say the word Buddha means someone who's a way, who's living in a conscious and free, free-hearted compassion way. He was also a counselor to ministers and kings, as well as to everybody else that he met. So I said, so the Buddha were around these days, he probably would be invited to the White House, you know.

And he'd have, and then I said, so here was his advice to a particular king or ruler, he said, for a society to prosper and not decline. The first principle is that people have to come together and meet and listen to one another with respect to see the dignity in each person. And if they meet and bring a quality of respect to their differences, they will prosper and not decline. If the society treats the vulnerable among them, the women, the children, those who are in need with care and protection, they will prosper and not decline.

If the society tends the natural environment, well, they'll prosper and not decline. If they follow the healthiest and wisest traditions of their ancestors and of the wise teachers before, they will prosper not to decline. So I read this and I said, now the truth is that this is not unique to Buddhist teachings. You can find it in Socrates and Plato and you can find it in China and Lao Tzu. you can find it in the indigenous elders of the Eroquoignations, or in Africa, or other places. And I said, the thing that makes Buddhist teachings particularly important in our time, and it's not to make you become a Buddhist, spare your friends and family.

You don't want to be a Buddhist, you want to become a Buddha. But the thing that makes them particularly relevant is that there are trainings to do so. This is not just a beautiful philosophy or a vision of wise society. Here's how you train compassion. Here's how you train loving kindness. Here's how you train mindfulness. And by doing so, even in small chunks, in 10 or 15 minutes, I have a program with my dear

colleague Tara Brock called Mindfulness Daily online that you can get for free on my website, 40 days of 15 minutes a day. And people report change my life 15 minutes a day with all the instructions of how to do it. And that leads all the way up to this beautiful teacher training that we do for people. But I said so, our neuroscience research in the last couple of decades, there have been more than 5,000 studies in papers published on the benefits of training and mindfulness and its capacity and training and compassion shows that in education, in healthcare, in all these different dimensions and business and so forth that if people actually spend some time training and do these systematic trainings

that the mind and the brain itself starts to change is amenable to and is actually itself starts to change is amenable to and is actually responsive to how we pay attention and how we train ourselves. And I found this, first of all, I find it to be completely heartening because it means it's not just, we're just not peddling some new idea or some belief system. That's fine. These are all lovely ideas, but how do you do them, which was your question? That there are ways and that they're actually pretty straightforward and they're not belief systems, they're not a new religion. I mean, we've had at our retreats, Catholic monks and, I'm Catholic nuns and priests and rabbis and e-moms and people of all different faiths and atheists and

agnostics and everything in between, say, totally fine. Whoever you are, these trainings offer you a simple way when you undertake them to learn to quiet the mind, to tend the heart, to find an inner well-being and balance, to open yourself to compassion in the world. These are the birthright of humanity. They're known in other ways in the world. It's not just unique to Buddhism, but there's beautiful systematic ways to do it. And now neuroscience says, yeah, these actually work.

Is there something, if I'm listening to this podcast right now and I want to be able to access this space that you've described of the one who knows, is there a way to do that, or do I need to take your course, or is there something I can do without access? There are two things. One is, it's helpful to take a course. My course happens to be quite a good one,

but there are many of the little judgment in there. But there's some- Well, let me just bolster. I mean, if you and Tara Brock, I mean it's the gold standard. So. And at the same time, there are lots of other very good trainings and meditation online that one can find.

And it's really helpful to have instruction, because you sit first and you close your eyes and you say, all right, I'm just going to become the witness to it all and 10 seconds later, I'm really upset that she or he said that and I'm going to go and I'm going to call them or write a letter and you know, and then I have to I'm worried about this and I'm going to, and you know, and it's called the monkey mind and you see it and it's called the monkey mind. And you see it, and it's so easy to get lost in it. And then you find yourself faced with restlessness and doubt and confusion and fear. And you don't know what to do with it. So having some simple instructions that say, here's what you do with the monkey mind.

Here's what you do with the judging mind. Here's what you do when fear arises or pain in the body. You can approach that pain and hold it there like three steps. First is you turn toward it. Secondly, you acknowledge it and see what is that pain. It's fire, throbbing and so forth and you see your reactivity. Then third, you step back from it and hold the pain the way you'd hold a crying child with a, you know, there's this infant and their diapers changed. They've been fed, so there's nothing you can do that way.

And they're still crying. What do you do? You pick them up, you hold them, and just the fact of holding them with a kind attention that child, ah, little by little, they're crying, slows down their breathing quits and they become more peaceful in your hands or your arms and it turns out you can do that with

your own body's pain. Doesn't make the pain always go away, sometimes the body will hurt but you can hold it in that way and all of a sudden you realize all right there's a level of freedom here I didn't know I kept running away from it being afraid of it and now I actually can be with, and it doesn't scare me so much. Then the next step is to turn your attention from the pain and that space of holding with compassion and say, well, what's holding this? Who is holding this? And in not some kind of weird way, because you don't find somebody and they're like, there's like a little person in there, the wizard of Oz with the levers or something.

But instead you start to sense that there's a space of awareness that's not caught in it that is available to you. And so if I say to you, even as we're sitting here, Dan, try to stop being aware. All right. So this is our little practice for, you know, 10 seconds or something. Do whatever you can do, you know, close your eyes, grit your teeth, imagining whatever you can, stop being aware. Okay. On your mark, get set, try it. And you can't do it. No. No. The only best I can do is try to get lost in some stream of time.

Right, you could go away, but then you're kind of aware of that thought you're sort of in that stream. But to stop awareness, you can't do it because it's here. So what, the movement of becoming the one who knows, in a kind of simple way, a little bit like fish and water, which is why it's hard to explain and something in some way, is to say, oh, there is awareness. And then there's all this stuff going on, and the shift

from being in the, even there, as we were in that example, holding the pain with kindness and realized, oh, yeah, this is now holding the pain with kindness. And there can be a little commentary that's thought. But beside the commentary, there's just spaciousness and stillness. We long for silence. You know, we long for it and yet we don't quite know how to find it. Yes, it's beautiful to go out in a starry night and look at the sky and feel a sense of mystery. But we live in mystery. And just as we're seated here speaking or those who are listening, you can step back and become the loving awareness and say, wow, this day isn't this mysterious this moment. And that is available at any time.

Yeah, just, I said this before in the show that that you know there are lots of great mysteries. We know how how did the universe come into being? Why are we here? But the all great mystery that is available that you can bump up against in your own mind 24 hours a day if you want is the mystery of consciousness. How do we go from high as I've heard you once say, how do we go on this planet from rocks to being able to sing opera? How did, how, how do we become aware? How did a bunch of particles become aware? Yeah.

And all you have to do is to look, you know, is to notice whatever you're hearing right now, and then to look for what's hearing it. Yes. And then you can add on the other question of, who's asking that question? Yeah. And you're not gonna find anything,

but as is often said, probably by you, in the not finding, there is something very important. There's something beautiful, which is the space of openness that sees that everything actually arises in mind, in consciousness. In mind is the primary thing. And that, well, there are several really important things that follow from that.

One is the teaching that no one can harm you more than your own mind untrained. And no one can help you more than your own mind wise or opened or trained. Not even the most loving family or friend that in some way it says, who is your enemy? Mind is your enemy, if it's not trained. Who is your friend? Mind is your friend. That the ability, this remarkable ability we have as human beings to turn our attention from the outer experience to our own heart and mind, to see both the content of mind and

then to recognize that there's the possibility of awareness is magic. 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, pure 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. As I mentioned before, I've collected some questions from you from for you from all sorts of people. Another person suggested some questions was our mutual friend, Dr. Mark Epstein. Our listeners will know him because he's been on the show several times. Great psychiatrist here in New York City who's written these beautiful books about the overlap. uh... doctor mark epstein or listeners will know him because he's been on the show several times great

psychiatrist here in u.s. it is written these beautiful books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism and so i asked them so which which i asked jack and he said very this is a very short quote ask him about silicon valley and psychedelics and love

so i want to start at love. We've been talking about loving awareness, but love, I guess it's boy, it's a freighted term. And I just wonder if I could get you to riff on the term. Yeah, it's freighted because it has so many meanings in our culture. You know, I love Basque and Robbins ice cream. You know? Or I love, you know, I love Basque and Robbins ice cream, you know, or I love you know certain people or I love a sunset

So there's there's kind of there's sense desire. I love it when people who've been in conflict can find a way to resolve it There's those kind of love, you know, I love new understandings and then there's just plain love, feeling somehow connected with the whole world. It is mysterious. Love is like gravity. We don't quite know what it is. But I feel in myself that love is that resonance or connection, when the sense of separateness drops away, my dear friend Alice Walker wrote, she said, one day when I was sitting there like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me that feeling of being a part of everything, and I knew if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed, and I laugh, and I cry, and I run all around the house. In fact, when it happened, you can't miss it.

And we all have had that experience. It might have been making love, if you're fortunate enough to have that, which is a wonderful thing, or it might be walking in the high mountains, or it might be lying out in the high mountains or it might be or lying out in the grass and looking at the night sky when it's dark, that great mystery, or maybe it's when you're there at the birth of a child. Part another vision of the mystery, how human beings come into this world of another person's

body. Or if you're there holding the hand of someone when they're dying, and that person, the spirit leaves that body. There's that body there. And in a moment, it's just a dead body. And you can feel the difference when there's consciousness and when there's not. And the gates between the world's open, or maybe it's through taking some sacred medicine like psychedelics, but almost everyone has had this sense that we're not just limited to this little physical body or our family identity or our conditioning, that who we are is connected with the vastness. And that's a part of love. I'm tempted to just interrogate that a little bit by saying,

please, it sounds to me like you're describing awe and inter-connection and interdependence. Yes, that's different from the way many in our culture would perceive love. Yeah. Well, I think that it's sort of like you're worried about climate change and the rainforest and things like that. When you feel that as has been written, they're part of your lungs, that every breath you take, past, you know, at some point through the Amazon rainforest, it also dusted the tops of monike and monoloa and the Fukushima nuclear reactor that we are. This is our air and our lungs.

There's a kind of tenderness and love that comes because it's us. And so this is one dimension of love that we actually feel a care because naturally it is who we are. I don't tend to use the word, even though I talk about loving awareness, these days I'm using the word compassion a lot more because of the complexity of the word love, which is where you started this question. That in fact, you know, I want you, I need you rock and roll songs, you know, baby, oh baby. You're playing an air guitar. We have, I mean, our culture has all these, you know, or I love my new, you know, air sneakers or whatever.

We have all these different meanings for love and we get confused about it. And we could talk about that and, you know, intimate relationships and so forth. The word compassion has a lot less freight. It's not exactly the same as love because it's more attending or caring when we meet the

suffering of the world. It's the hard opening to try to respond in some way to that. But what it does speak to is, again, our very deep sense of connection and caring. And maybe instead of talking about love, I talk about universal connection or universal care. And to live in that way makes us happy and makes the people around us happy. If you know caring people, you want to be around them. You know?

And when you've had a day, when you've been able to express some care you could call it love and so forth, there's a satisfaction in that day that's beautiful and so important because in the hospice work I've done in many things that have been written about it the end of life. Some of the biggest regrets or the biggest questions are, did I love well? Did I let myself love? Did I let myself express that love to people,

things that I cared about? Did I let it in as well as out? This is what makes us human and makes us happy. So there's a little riff on love. What about, give more to say about romantic love? I love romantic love. And you know the problem with romantic love is there are several problems. One is that it doesn't last generally so long. It's half life is not as long as you would like. And I've been together now with Trudy for 10 years and it sounds like you have a wonderful beloved yourself.

And most of the time it's there and I'm just still happy. I asked her to marry me. We'd been together for some years. And I asked her at one point what she wanted for her birth there, something, and she said, oh, I'd like a husband. I want to get married. And I paused and I wasn't sure because I'd gotten divorced. And it was sad and painful. I didn't want to get divorced, but there it happened. I was a little bit reluctant, even though I was very much in love with her. And I said, oh, that's something.

I was forget what I said. It was something like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. And now I understand what you want, but it wasn't like, okay, let's do it. I was a little reluctant. And she knew that. She was sort of teasing me, too. And then I sat with it, and I realized I love this woman, of course, why not? So some months later, after I'd sort of worked through my own fears about it, really,

because the ending of my marriage had been so painful. I invited her to take a ride on the Ferris wheel in Santa Monica. We, her home where we lived, part of the time is in Venice, next to Santa Monica. And she likes that. She's a big kid in a lot of ways, and I do too. So I said, let's go ride the Ferris wheel. And she said, sure, it was lovely afternoon. And I whispered to the guy at the bottom of the Ferris wheel. I said, stop at the top. I'm going to propose to this woman. And so he stopped us at the top. And I got on my knees and I pulled out this little box of,

you know, ring and, and Esther to marry me and she was completely surprised and it was wonderful and now every year we go and ride the Ferris wheel and kind of redo it. So there's something beautiful about romantic love because we're able to see the beauty of someone in a way that makes us happy and them happy. in a way that makes us happy and them happy. Now, the downside, beside the fact that it can change, is that it often is also a kind of idealization, that if this person loves me, I'll be happy, so there's sort of business man's exchange in that way.

And, oh, we see all the beauty of this person. When you're in romantic love, you just see how great that person is. And then, of course, later on, as in all the great poets writing about, oh my god, it turns out that they have feet of clay and they fart or whatever it is. And they're human and they're not just that beautiful idea that you imagine. And in that way, romantic love, I think, is a gateway to a deeper kind of love. I mean, we can seek romantic love and try and find, well, when that ideal fails, then we end that relationship we look for another another another as if that's going to last.

And in the end, it's very unsatisfying, but when that romantic love becomes a gateway to see the secret beauty of that person, that they are behind these eyes that was born in them as a child, that the kind of innocence and spark and consciousness that's far deeper than their conditioning and their personality, then love really blossoms in a different way. And my experience of meditation is that it allows me to be present for myself in a more fundamentally honest and open way, and it allows me to be present for others, and that is part of the gateway to love. I enjoy romantic love.

I'm still happy to have some of it, you know, just like I enjoy beautiful music and I enjoy great art. You know, I also enjoy a mystery or a thriller or other kinds of things, even that aren't romantic, but it's a gateway for us. I've heard you speak in other places quite, in my opinion, bravely and helpfully about your divorce. I can hear a question through,

because I'm such an expert meditator, I have the divine ear, and I can hear the questions of my audience, even though they haven't even listened to this yet. That's my tongue in cheek. I can hear a question possibly of, okay, this guy is such a meditative adept. How did he get into a relationship that went pear-shaped? I think that's an unfair question, but I can see you're here.

No, it's a fair question. I think that's a fair question. Because we're always looking, for example, like, okay, I would pick up my teachers and say, how enlightened are they really, you know? And then I've watched, because I'm in the industry, and I hang out with lots of swamis, and lamas, and mamas, and gurus, and things like that. I see all their beauty and I also get to see, you know, the shadow side of it.

And sometimes, of course, it's just a bad shadow side because it's people who are in the role who are actually quite unconscious and exploit people. And that happens whether it's teachers or doctors or gurus or anybody who has a role of power. It's a misuse of power. But I've also been around and watched great teachers like San Master Tick-N-Hon get angry, you know, and upset.

Or the Dalai Lama get upset. And I go, whoa, this is interesting. And Dalai Lama get upset and go, whoa, this is interesting. And Dalai Lama is fantastic. He is such a one of the finest human beings I've ever met. Such a gracious heart and a beautiful laugh. In fact, I think people go to see the Dalai Lama, not so much for all those Tibetan Buddhist teachings, which are mysterious and some of them are life-changing and a lot of them, we can't even figure out, really. I don't think they go for that, or even because he's this sort of celebrated Nobel laureate.

I think people go to hear him laugh that somebody who could carry the tragedy of Tibet and the burning of the monasteries and his life in exile and still have such a beautiful laugh as if to say, you know, if he can live with so much love and joy which he has and laughter, I guess it's possible for me, it's possible for any of us. So living a human life is not without its difficulties. And everybody there's the, they all, I'm Tick-Not-Hon, was in exile and had terrible difficulties in Dalai Lama. And in my marriage, I got married quite young and had a, you know, had a beautiful daughter and some years of quite a lot of joy and happiness.

But as my daughter left for college and graduate school, law school and things, as we do in marriage, emptiness, you sort of look at, well, all right, what are we going to do now? And my ex-wife is one of the most introverted people I've ever met in my whole life. Very private, very quiet. I, on the other hand, have, you know, a thousand best friends, travel around, teach large numbers, you know, I've kind of the crazy extroverted life. It was not really a very happy match in that regard. And it takes to be married. She's like, okay, I had enough of this, I think. I mean, not to put words in her mouth quite, but she didn't want that. And I'm a pretty loyal person.

I would have stayed married, but it didn't happen. And it was really painful. And then somebody says, well, how does a mindfulness meditation teacher get divorced? They get divorced like anybody. They go through the pain of it. They have regrets. As I had, I

had my regrets. You try to do it in as thoughtful ways you can, but it's not easy. And you do it as a human being without trying to hold it all without so much judgment and without, with some compassion for everybody, because it wasn't easy. It's not just hard for me, hard for my ex, hard for, you know, my daughter. And it was interesting. I was talking to my daughter who's very wise. And I said, she was in her 20s. And I said, so your parents are getting divorced and even though you're grown up, it's still your mommy and daddy. Do you have anything that would help you? And she looked at me and she said, Dad, be happy.

And if you're happy, then I'm okay. And she wanted that for her mother too. It was a beautiful thing and very, very wise. And it's an incredible thing to say. Yeah, yeah. That's an example of, I sometimes think, about this thing you've talked to you and Vogue to the name of the Dalai Lama.

The first time I interviewed him, he said something to me that really had a big impact, which I'm sure I'm not the only person he said this to, but he was talking about the fact that all human beings are selfish. We're wired for that. But there's a wise kind of selfishness, which is to develop generosity, empathy, and compassion. And that's what your daughter, it seems to be, empathy and compassion. And that's what your daughter, it seems to me, was demonstrating there, which is the best thing for her is for you to be happy. Yes. Yeah.

The other things on Mark Epstein's list were Silicon Valley and psychedelics. I don't think he means them in connection. Do you care to talk about either or both of those? I will talk about both of them. I've written about psychedelics in a number of places, a whole chapter of it in a book called Bring Home the Dharma. And one of the things that's true is that my generation of Buddhist and Hindu teachers, spiritual teachers, who had a big part in bringing Eastern practice, not just Eastern philosophy, Eastern practice alive in the US, were almost all deeply affected by taking LSD and other psychedelics,

starting in the 1960s when they became culturally more available. And what we found was that it opened certain doorways to see, oh, the mind really creates everything. And how do we work with this mind and so forth. Now I want to learn more. And it took Sharon or Joseph to India or to Thailand places that or Ramdas to India and various teachers. So I think it's really important to acknowledge that it's woven in with the movement of these practices from the East that have really transformed our lives, it was a gateway.

It's not a panacea and it's not something that will just solve things, but now it went underground because the culture became, or the FDA and the medical establishment became scared of it in some way, and it was mixed with the revolutionary ideas of the 1966, I think, too. But now with the publishing of Michael Pollan's book on the scientific research and psilocybin and other such things. That book, just for the curious, is called How to Change Your Mind. New York Times, number one, New York Times S.C.E.R. he documents the new research that's being done that in certain cases,

psilocybin and other such things have really powerful beneficial effects so that people with PTSD vets coming back sometimes one or two sessions changes their life and releases them from that or stopping smoking which is a really hard thing. Almost any intervention, the best interventions were like 15, 20 percent and then people start smoking again. Nicotine's so addictive. After psilocybin sessions I think it was either at NYU medical school or Johns Hopkins. After a year, 80 percent of people were not smoking.

So these have great value. And they're being spread in other ways in Silicon Valley where I work part of the time because I live in the Bay Area. And there's this sort of hip-silicon valley culture that the exploration of these things is also become relatively common. I'm all for it when it's done in a thoughtful and sensible way. Of course, we're Americans, so we know how to misuse anything. We can misuse meditation, and it can be misused.

We can misuse psychedelics, but in a discerning and wise way, they are one of the, that kind of medicine is one of the gateways that can help us to some kind of really important understanding. So I'll say that much and I've written a bunch about it. Esfrasillicon Valley, living where I do, we've had a number of tech leaders come to retreats or be interested in meditation and I've gone to different companies and so forth. And I've become part of a group called Mobius, among other things that are doing in Silicon Valley, and connected with the Center for Humane Technology of Tristan Harris, another really wonderful leader, trying to find ways to recreate a vision of technology that brings out the best

in humanity, because it's turned out like everything to have a very beneficial side and a really destructive side, whether it's the destruction in, you know, it's being used in ways to foment racism or tribalism or violence around the world in different ways or to squash things or false news or, or teenage girls who are looking at their image on the phone and how many likes and, and feeling terrible about themselves. It's all the kinds of misuses. And so we're part of a group of people in Silicon Valley that are really stepping back and saying, how do we make principles for artificial intelligence,

for the engineers, for the developers, so that this gets steered in a way that's not just about profit, that doesn't just try to grab your attention by making the scariest or the most enticing thing one after another until you can't stop watching YouTube as an addict or something. How can we do it in a way that enhances our well-being? And that's a question for our time. What's true is that, and the reason that I'm a part of it, we have neuroscientists and contemplatives, and then tech leaders, is that no amount of outer development, nanotechnology,

computer technology, AI, biotechnology, space technology, is going to stop continuing warfare and racism and environmental destruction. Those things are based on the human heart, war, conflict, environmental destruction. And so the outer technologies that are so remarkable where I have the great library of Alexandria in my smartphone in my pocket now have to be met with inter-transformation, that humanity is being called upon to learn these capacities for compassion, interconnection, wisdom, loving kindness. As one of the chairments of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, we're a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants. And so our outer development now has to be matched with inner development or those outer

things become forces of destruction. But do you think the titans of this particular industry tech? Are going to listen to you or is the profit mode of just too strong and they're beholden after all to their shareholders? When someone asks a difficult question like that my answer is yes to both sides The profit mode of is really strong and it's both in the industry and that kind of greed and wall street and how our and it's both in the industry and that kind of greed and wall street and how our whole economy is based on profit and greed in some way. And there's also some leaders who have great hearts and wisdom who are really looking, how do we do this and balance it? And this is our human predicament, all those who are listening, you have all this in you. It's not just those Titans. You're the Titan in your household or whatever. And the beautiful thing is that when you quiet yourself even a little bit and step out and stop

multitasking and running around and whatever and let yourself get in touch with what really matters. matters. You can begin to both tend quiet your mind, tend your heart, open to the deepest values you have, and discern in sense how can I live those? And I like to say there's a beautiful quote from Albert Einstein that I don't think is an artifact of the internet because I read it of the American, where he said, if you can drive safely while kissing a girl, you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. And there's some way in our modern life that we get so pulled by distraction, whether it's technology or other things, that we lose touch with ourselves with our own Hearts with what really matters and part of meditation is to quiet ourselves

But that's the beginning in that coming to Quiet we connect with ourselves and a deeper level of wisdom and Care and even tenderness for life starts to come and also a deeper level of wisdom and care and even tenderness for life starts to come. And also a deeper level of courage that we can stand up with a kind of dignity for ourselves and others that we have a kind of courage because we're connected to what we really care about. I've heard, I don't know if this is true, I think it's true, but Tibetan phraseology for enlightenment is something like a clearing away and a bringing forth.

Lovely. Lovely. I think so too. We have about 13 minutes left. I would love to get to listener voice mails. I don't know if we'll get through both of the ones we've got queued up, but let's see what happens. Sure. You want to put some headphones on? Yeah. Can you hear me?

Very well. Okay. The first book however that put me on this path is A Path With Heart by Jack Confield. Someone lent me this book many years ago and I consider Jack my first and foremost Dharma teacher even though I have never met him in person. I'm now extremely happy given a chance to ask him a question. So on our minds with Pat we are instructed not to identify with our thoughts and stories we tell ourselves since they are not necessarily true, nor with our feelings and emotions, since they might stop us from seeing clearly, nor with how we exist in this world.

The jobs we have, the people around us, since these are the things we cannot always control or choose, nor with our bodies that will perish, instead we sit still and see who we really are. That's at least in short my understanding of the teachings. My question is, how do I know who I really am? What is it that I can identify myself with, in what can I reflect myself, what are the dimensions or references or media to use use to see who I really am when I am no longer my thoughts, my emotions, my surroundings, my body, what's left. Thanks Dan and keep up the great work. Thank you for the questions. Just so you know, Jack,

10% insider or podcast insider is basically there are group of people who give us feedback on every episode so that we can do better job and they dedicate an enormous amount of time to this. So we gave preferential treatment to the insiders to be able to ask questions to you. Well, I'm glad to hear from an insider. I feel like now I'm inside too. It's great. The question is a deep and beautiful one, and it's one that's asked certainly in the practices, whether it's in Zen, where

one might sit and have the koan or the question, what am I, or who am I, given by the master. It's there in the Advaita tradition in India where a great teacher like Ramana Maharshi might say there's only one question you to ask who am I And so she's asking this question in some way she's also asking for my answer like how do you find this? And the answer really is there in the question because as you ask it, what you discover is that there is no solid answer. Okay, I'm not that little person in there working the lever is like the Wizard of Oz and I'm not those thoughts. I can have thoughts about who I am, but those thoughts appear and disappear. And it points you instead back to the mysterious, quality of awareness itself, which is openness

and presence. And when you look for it, you don't find yourself in it, but you do find awareness, and you do find the connection that it holds everything. So I would invite her and those who were listening or in some way following along with this, not to look for something solid because that would be the mistake. But to be in that, what one Zen Master called,

don't know mind to say, well, all right, I know I'm not this in this and this, and to be open to that space of not knowing where there is still awareness, and there is also still a sense of presence and connection, and explore this in the simplest way, rest in it, and experience that it's possible to rest in awareness itself in loving awareness because it contains or is connected with all things. And this is one of the great beauties of meditation. There isn't a cookie cutter answer.

All right, now you have this and you fix it and you find it. Instead it's an invitation for you in your own way to discover, oh yes, even as I listen to these words, there's the hearing and the sounds and the ears, and then oh, there's an awareness that's here to know this, not just the thoughts I'm thinking about hearing, but there's actually awareness of these sounds. And now I will be the space, I'll be the vast open space, in which the sounds and the experiences arise and pass, I will become the space of awareness itself. There is a meditation that I like to teach, and my dear friend, colleague Joseph Goldstein, teaches it often as well,

called Big Sky Mind or Big Mind, that we have on our websites and so forth. That is another very simple doorway to help people enter into the question that she raised. Remind us exactly where we can find your. If you go on to two things, either to darmacy.org, which is a website that has thousands of teachings from Insight Meditation Teachers, and look under my name or Joseph Goldstein,

you'll find Big Sky or Big Mind Practices, or if you go on my website, jackcornfield.com, there will also be, you can look under meditations. And this is an invitation to practice together for a time and turn your attention into that mystery. And it turns out to be relatively accessible as you do this meditation, starting with sound and allowing your sense to sense that your mind is not limited to your head,

but that it's actually vast like the sky, awareness in which all things are arising and passing. Try it, it's actually pretty cool. Okay, we have just a few minutes. So let's do the second question, and if it's so big that we can't answer it in the time that's allotted, we'll drop it. But let's give it a try. Hi, it's Janice, and I'm a podcast insider. This is a question for Joseph and Jack. I'm wondering about including somebody who has died in a, as part of my loving kindness

practice. So first of all, do people do that at all, or how would you go about even phrasing that and how do you include somebody in that? So thank you for everything. Bye. That's a simple question. There is a teaching in some of the instructions for a loving-kindness meditation to not use people who've died. When that practice is being used for profound concentration,

because it can be distracting, you might feel grief, or you might miss them. But in the way that it's asking in our normal practice of loving kindness, it's great to bring in people who've died and to picture them and to wish wherever you are, because again we're now opening to mystery, wherever you are. And to turn ourself to that mystery with love is a beautiful response. And part of what you learn in meditation is how to wed the individual and the personal with something that's vast in universal. So you remember your Buddha nature, your vastness of awareness, but you also have to remember your zip code, your social security number, and you have to drive on the

right side of the street and stop at a red light and so forth, and where creatures of paradox and the discerning mind and heart is natural to us. We know how to live when we get quiet. We live in a wiser way, and we live with these two worlds. We live with the world with the great heart of compassion and a sense of vastness that grows as we practice, or access, or ability to shift our identity to that becomes more available. And then we tend the world. And in Zen they say there are only two things you sit and you sweep the garden and it doesn't matter how big the garden is. That is that you quiet the mind and tend the heart and open yourself to something mysterious

and vast and filled with compassion and love. And then you get up and you tend the garden of the world and each of us has particular gifts or areas that we can do. And we're not happy if we don't do some gardening. Our life, part of our happiness comes because we're each born with certain gifts and to be able to offer some of our gifts to the world is also what makes us happy. So, like breathing in and breathing out, there's mindfulness has two dimensions. It has the dimension of presence, loving awareness, and then it has the dimension called mindful response.

And both of those are a part of what it means to live wisely. Two things to say to you. Sure. First, your lovely wife, Trudy, who I've met, would you pass her a message? Yes. Please come on my podcast. I will tell her that and she'll do it. I'm sure. Two, thank you very much.

Oh, thank you. It's just a pleasure. And I feel like you have with your own personal experience, with your combination of skepticism and sincerity and wit and honesty, self honesty and so forth. You open the door for people in ways that again is not some kind of weird, you know, cultural transplant, but you actually invite people to get real and honest and then say that this is not only this workable, but my guess is that actually you could change it and it would now be like 20% happier, maybe 30%. Mark Epstein has argued that my next book

should be called 20% happier. I think I'm going to get out of the math business for now. But thank you so much for those kind words. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. It was so cool to sit with Jack. I mean, the man is, you've heard it.

So I don't need to come into anything, but he is a giant. Thank you to everybody who makes this show possible. Samuel John's Grace Livingston, Ryan Kessler, Mike Dubusky's working the boards as I record. As I close, I wanna make an ask, which is, I know we always say, rate us, review us, share us on social media,

every podcast host says that it's really helpful for us because we always want to grow. And I just on the sharing tip, if you know maybe find an episode or two that is particularly meaningful to you and share that with your friends or a friend, I think that's a great way to get the word out there. We care a lot about what we're doing. We think we can be useful to even more people. So if you want to help us with that, I and the rest of the team would be super grateful. Even if you're not up for it, no worries. Either way, I'll see you next

week. 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 slash survey. Perfect.