Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 206: Finally... The Joseph Goldstein Episode

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

One of the first American Vipassana teachers and the co-founder of Insight Meditation Society, Joseph Goldstein, is a highly recognized name to many in western meditation. He has studied and practiced various forms of Buddhist meditation under world renowned teachers from India and he has led, and continues to lead, numerous insight and loving-kindness meditation retreats worldwide. Goldstein shares his abundance of knowledge on insight meditation, the confusion between attention and mindfulness, ethical frameworks and provides clarity on various terms such as the awakened mind, checking the attitude of the mind, in-order-to mind and more. Currently, Goldstein is a meditation teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts as well as on the Ten Percent Happier app. He is also the author of numerous publications such as Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening and One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism. Plug Zone Insight Meditation Society: https://www.dharma.org/teacher/joseph-goldstein/ Joseph Goldstein Courses & Meditations on the Ten Percent Happier App: https://10percenthappier.app.link/x9Q0TCy36Z New York Insight December 5th Event: https://www.nyimc.org/event/an-evening-with-joseph-goldstein-and-dan-harris-staying-sane-in-a-crazy-world/ Bonus Meditation: Be Simple & Easy: https://10percenthappier.app.link/6WVKqYJV6Z Jeff Warren November Meditation Retreat: https://jeffwarren.org/event/fidgetyskeptics-northcarolina-2/ ***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. 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. Finally, it's been, I don't know, like three years since we've had this podcast, finally, Joseph Goldstein is on the show. I feel a little bit like Big Bird talking about his best friend, Snuffa Luffagas, because I've been talking about Joseph Goldstein on every other podcast, episode since we started rolling low these many years, and yet he's never come on. But finally, we got him to sit down here in the studio and take some questions, and it was awesome as you are

about to hear. In case you've never heard of Joseph, since we dive right into questions about meditation and how to practice and how to bring it out into your world in this episode, we don't dive too deeply into his background. So let me just give you the 30 second version of that. Joseph went to Columbia University, graduated in the 60s, and that was when the Peace Corps was getting started. He ended up in Thailand. He was a philosophy major and sort of got interested in going to a local monastery, a Buddhist monastery, in Thailand to talk to the monks about Buddhist philosophy and they ultimately got him meditating and 50 years later at age 75, maybe more than 50 years later. He went deep, deep, deep, deep into the practice, spent years and years in Asia as a younger man, studying intensively, came back in the 70s and along with Jack Cornfield and Sharon Salisberg, started a place called the Insight Meditation Society in Central Massachusetts, which is a fantastic retreat center where Joseph

now lives and teaches and works. He has also in his later years, from my opinion, distinguished himself as one of the guiding teachers on the 10% happier app. He and Sharon are both the founding and guiding teachers on our app. And Joseph has created a ton of content on the app. He's really along with Sharon, kind of a heart and soul of the thing. We've done all of these amazing courses where I've gotten to sit down and talk to Joseph and his wisdom for lack of a less grandiose term kind of just oozes through the frame. And so I think one of the areas of them of pride for me and then there are many in this app is that I'm bringing Joseph's awesomeness out into the world,

both through the videos that we've done and also the hours and hours of guided meditations that he's done for us that are up there. By the way, just a little plug for the app if you want to check it out and you haven't, you can get seven days for free. One housekeeping note about Joseph is that he and I are actually doing a public event together on Thursday, December 5th in New York City. It's a benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center. Full link is in the show notes. I encourage you to come check it out.

Another item of business related to Joseph is that in a few days we're going to post a free guided meditation from him in this podcast feed. Check it out. Another item of business related to Joseph is that in a few days we're going to post a free guided meditation from him in this podcast feed. Final thing I'll say before we dive in here is that I've had an extremely privileged life on many levels, very lucky dude. One of the luckiest things that has ever happened to me in this very lucky life is meeting Joseph befriending him and having him as my meditation teacher personally. He has had an enormous impact on me. Much of what I do in the world is directly a result of the work I've done with him.

So Joseph, I love you and thank you for coming on the show. Here we go. We've had more than for coming on the show. Here we go. We've had more than 200 guests on the show. Celebrities, athletes, scientists, meditation teachers. We're fine doing it. All of them been willing to come on the show. I haven't had to twist any arms. And for all that time, I haven't been able to get you on the show.

So I guess my first question is, why do you hate me so much? Yeah, that's the reason. I had to overcome. Now I'm really happy to have you on the show. I've talked about you all the time on the shows are obviously going to be pleasantly surprised to finally have you been like the snuff

a luffa guess of this show. Normally I start by asking people, how do they get into meditation, but I feel like I forced you to tell that story many times. And earlier today, I, we had Jack on and for the listeners, that will actually be several weeks ago before they hear your, your interviews. So several weeks ago, we had Jack on and I started and I started with a question that was recommended by two people Independently one is Both in the 10% happier universe one is Jay Michelson and the other is Kara lie. Oh, yeah, yeah, so their question was

Very interesting. I'd be I'm really interested to hear your answer this. What in the teachings? is really interested to hear your answer to this. What in the teachings is for you right now the most challenging? Where do you have the most trouble applying mindfulness, aside from your distaste for me? I think that within the Buddhist teachings there's a list of ten qualities which are called the parameys or the perfections of the Buddha, you know, so that these qualities of mind that all need to be developed, you know, for awakening. Things like generosity and love and kindness and wisdom and concentration, things like that. But the one, the one power may that needs the most work for me, I think, is the part of renunciation.

And so that's where I see, you know, when different desires come up in the mind, and they can be just small things, or, you know, big thing. The tendency of my mind is, oh, that looks great, let's go for it. And so those moments, no, I don't really need that, or I don't have to do this, you know, that moment of seeing the desire and actually practicing renunciation, that's the one that I'm working on, I think, a lot.

You know, and every time I do actually not go for the second whatever or whatever the desire is, it feels like this great moral victory. You know, Mara. I've conquered you for this moment. Anyway. So you just what who's Mara? Okay. So Mara within the Buddhist teachings is kind of the embodiment of ignorance of delusion. And so often represented as the

temptor or that force in the mind that wants to seduce us into attachment and clinging. You've pointed this out many times in your talks. I've listened to your talks and talk to you directly so many times that I'm pretty sure I'm plagiarizing you non-stop. I don't feel any guilt about it, but I'm just saying it. Just saying. Yeah, just saying. You have said many times in your talk, you've pointed out that the Buddha who we all think of as, I guess, maybe perfected or something like that is in the scripture, right there in the scriptures, which are his purported to be his words, saying

Mara I see you. And others are the temptation is still arising for him in his mind. Well, this goes to a point of controversy among, certainly among contemporary Western Buddhist teachers. I think not quite sure how our Asian teachers would have viewed this, but Maura can be understood in two ways from the point of view of the classical teachings. And that is the forces of ignorance in the mind, but also actually as a being. So this is the traditional explanation. You know, that that Mara is kind of the king of the highest heaven realm.

And his mission is to keep all beings ensnared in the round, in the round of sense, the lights and sense pleasures. So the class, they don't make it to his level. No, they could be reborn there, but that's not awakening. That's just a nice vacation, you know, in a pleasant realm. And so he's fine with that, or she or whatever, whatever gender. Again, this is the sort of this the closest religious schema. Yeah. So in that case, you know, when the Buddha says, Maha, I see you, from that interpretation, it's actually in reference to a being.

You know, so it's not the force of craving or desire in his own mind. So that, and this, you know, among contemporary, certainly Western Buddhist teachers, there's a division of opinion about whether it's really like that, whether it's just, Maura is just, you know, a representation of what's in our minds. So that's one way of understanding it. Where do you fall in this? I tend to lean towards the

classical view since that's my general leaning anyway of Mara as a particular being, but I could also imagine, but this would be a very interesting and subtle point to engage with someone about. Whether there's a possibility of, for example, desire arising in the mind, but with no hook at all, as if it were just another thought, where there was no inclination and no conditioning to go for it or to act on it, which is a little different, and it's different than how some people have interpreted it. Desire arises in the mind, but the Buddha didn't identify with it. So that's one explanation of that, Maha. I see you. But I see a subtle distinction between desire arising in the mind with their Israel desire, but it's not identified with

being different than desire just as a thought, but there is really no desire in it. There's no there's none of that greed even embedded in that thought. You know, so this is a very subtle distinction and of course there's no way of resolving this Showed if having a conversation with the Buddha. They ask, okay, what what really is going on in your mind? Of course we could ask you You know that might that might illuminate this topic. I don't Desires fully charged the battery is charged

My desire is fully charged. The battery is charged. That's right. That's right. For you, it's so interesting for me to hear. I mean, I guess I kind of knew this. But for you, the desire comes up and there are, you take the base occasionally. Oh, yes.

What are the, again, I think I know some of this, but what gets you going? It could be anything. And, but, gets you going. It could be anything. But you once told me you can't resist the shoe salesman. I can resist the salesman. I can resist the shoes. Oh, it's really of like a guilt thing. Completely.

It's completely codependent. If the salesman actually bring, I may be because my size is so big, it's heavy to carry size 14 shoes out. I feel they did all this work. I feel compelled. So that's why I like online. But it could be anything. It could be, for example, even on retreat or off retreat, just something smaller, that's all

come up, you know, cup of tea would be nice. So it's just not a significant desire, but the force of desire is there. And I can watch my mind just be aware of it, let it come and go, let it come and go. But it's almost like a blade of grass pot shoot, you know Growing up through concrete The four even with a small desire the force of it can be very persistent and so I've noticed so many times You know watching the desire come and go many times and then it comes once more and I act on it So it could be something you small as that or it could be anything. I don't get to New York that often. So walking down, you know, just window shopping, seeing either gadgets or some

piece of clothing or that would be nice. And mostly they just come and go. But occasionally, they hook the mind. And it's interesting just to watch. What's lacking. And one of the interesting things I've learned in watching my mind, in relationship to desire, is the one piece that seems to be lacking a bit at those times when I just go for it is the quality of energy. And this is a recent of energy, and this is a recent kind of understanding that I'm actually feeling a low energy, and so the mind is more susceptible, at least in my experience. It's more susceptible to the

elure of the desire when the energy is low. So that's been interesting. You know, that jabs with what I've sometimes heard from folks in who study human behavior, especially around willpower. So willpower is extremely ephemeral, quality, vulnerable in the face of, there's an acronym, HALT, HANGER, ANGER, LONELYNESS, or being tired. So that the T there seems to jive with your exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you talked about this ability, this skill that you've developed over time for, for the most part, to be able to

see a lot of these desires come without fighting the hook. I love that you've talked again, another quote, I'm quoting you back to you about the Buddha talking about the terrible bait of the world. I love that. Yeah. Fighting the bait all the time. You've gotten, you're a smarter fish at this point or a wiser fish now. Would that have even though you've been meditating since 1862 or whatever, but would that have been true in your 30s, even though you've been meditating for a while then, or have you seen, are you getting better at this over time? Even now? Yes.

I think I'm getting marginally better. No, I think I am getting better. I'm seeing it more clearly, you know, and even what I just mentioned about recognizing, oh yeah, the mine goes for that more frequently when I'm tired. So just really noticing that, and so then when I'm tired when I remember, I keep something of an eye out for the desires, knowing that, oh this is this is where I can really get caught. And sometimes it's successful sometimes not, sometimes I still go for it. So there's been a learning. And also one of the things, whether it comes from just all these years of meditation or

just, you know, the aging process, I think I'm less seduced by the belief that whatever it is will really make me happy. So I can still go for it, but I'm not very often deluding myself into thinking, this is going to be the answer to everything. You know, it's more the playing out of just this very deeply conditioned habit of mind. So there's a deeper understanding of really the empty nature of desire that's not really going to fulfill, you know, one's aspirations for happiness. Here another Joseph is, I mean, this, this, this idea that whatever it is we want, once we get it, we're going to be good forever. Is this kind of five minutes? But is this subconscious, often subconscious primordial lie that we

re up all the time? That, you know, as soon as I get this promotion or as soon as I am able to get married or get that slice of cake in the other corner of the room, like then I'm really going to be happy. You've talked of this is the Josephism I was getting it before. You've talked about sort of giving a rehab to the word disenchantment. I love the positive, that disenchantment can be very positive. As can another word that you had used earlier,

another word that can be seen in the most positive light, it often isn't, is renunciation. Exactly. And the phrase that helps me with renunciation is reframing it in terms of non-addiction. Because when I think of renunciation, especially earlier on, a lot to some extent, still now, it does have that almost a connotation of deprivation. Okay, I'll renounce this, that will be good for me. But it kind of contains within it the affect of omnipriving myself of something.

Whereas when I frame renunciation is non-addiction. So then the connotation is really a freedom. It's not deprivation. And so that often commune inspiration, to actually practice a little non-addiction. There's another subtle point which I have just been exploring very recently. So this is kind of the latest in Joseph's breaking news. Registration exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

So I was watching Desire in my mind and seeing myself, you know, act on it. And very classically, you know, the Buddha taught that this was in meditation. Yeah. Yeah. Very classically, the Buddha taught that what conditions are desire, pleasant feelings. You know, we want something because of the pleasantness that we think will come from it. So a big part of the teaching is just realizing the impermanence of pleasant feeling. So even if you know what we want does bring some pleasure, it's pretty fleeting.

And the more we understand that, so the less addicted we become. So that was the ongoing understanding that I was operating under. But just recently, as I've been watching my mind, Recently, as I've been watching my mind before the fulfillment of the desire, but while I was still having the desire in my mind, I noticed that the anticipation of getting what I want had a certain kind of pleasure embedded in it. And that's actually what was more seductive to me than the thing itself. I was almost like, I don't know if I'm using the right word here, but maybe it's something analogous. It's almost like the thought of what I want,

the very thought gives a little endorphin hit or whatever the chemical is in the brain. A pleasure hit. Maybe dope, I mean. Yeah. And so then I realized, yes, so I keep thinking about it and one thing and even acting to keep the current pleasant feeling going. It wasn't even so much, I'll get this thing, and then I'll feel happy or good. It was right in the very process of desiring that I was triggering that response. Is that clear? Yes, to me, at least. So that was really interesting for me, and it helped bring my awareness closer to the arising. It was focused more on actually

the hook of the desire itself in the moment, even before the acting on it. What is it that keeps feeding it? Why do I keep being seduced by it? And I said, oh, yeah, this pleasant feeling associated with this, as a thought, I want more. I wanted to continue. That was really interesting to me. The hook isn't just the consummation of the desire. The hook is the anticipation of the consummation. And the pleasant feeling in the anticipation. That's right.

Yes. Yes. But that goes, I think, back to what I was saying, I about the upside of disenchantment, which is the spell, again, I'm exactly quoting back to you. I'm going to do, it's not going to stop. We're operating into this spell that all these things we want are going to, this is happiness. Yes. And the breaking of that spell, the disenchantment, is quite liberating. Exactly. Actually, liberating is the word, the very word you would use. The very word.

And the Buddha, there's a little phrase he uses, which to me encapsulates this whole discussion when he said that the highest happiness is peace. You know, and so there are, you know, there are different levels of happiness, and one kind, easy to happen is we get some sense pleasures. So the Buddha's not denying that they bring a certain gratification they do, which is why we're enamored of them. But there's a downside to them as well. And that is, they don't last. And so, if we keep thinking that that's going to be the source of our happiness, then we're on this endless treadmill.

Because it's never completely fulfilling, you know, or satisfying. But it's not to deny that it has its own level of happiness associated with it. It's just there's much greater happiness. And in meditation, even if it's just for a few moments at a time, when we actually can experience the peace, the peace of not wanting. And we, we, we taste that for ourselves. Even for a few moments, that opens up a whole new possibility for us in our lives. You know, that can, if we really see that clearly, even as we continue with the habit of wanting and fulfilling the wants, that habit goes deep, it's not going to end just from some understanding

that it's impermanent. But even if that habit is continuing still the insight or the experience that there's a greater happiness, that really can reset the direction of our lives, which is why meditation practice all along the way is good. Even at the beginning when people are having a lot of struggles or difficulties with it, you know, and seeing a lot of desires or eyes in the mind, that's all part of the process, but we get glimpses. We get glimpses of a possibility, and that they can be really transforming. I have three things to say. I've written them down because both of us have terrible memories, and so we'll get lost, but I want to say all three of them, and then I'll make sure I'll make sure

we get to all them first is just a clarification And I think you said this we are not in this discussion of renunciation and disenchantment saying don't ever have a piece of cake We're not saying don't you you should be abstinuous now and forever neither of us correct Okay, so that's the first thing box chance second thing and third thing is that you have two really interesting practices that I think can be, it have been very helpful for me and might be helpful for people listening. So I want to get you to talk about both of them. I'll name them both and then you can do them both or do one at a time, whatever you want. One is, and I think we talk about this on the app. Letting a desire pass.

So, and the other is this little phrase that you invoke the moment ago of not wanting can be that phrase, not wanting, can be dropped into the practice in a way that is very interesting. So, can we talk about both of those? Right. Well, who's the first one again? You know, the second one pushed out the first.

The first one was this, this thing, the new, the design, breaking our mind through the moment after it desire passes. Yeah. Okay. So this is interesting to watch. Because desires come up all the time. They come up all day long. Big ones, little ones. But in meditation, you know, we're sitting and we're having this time when we're consciously not acting on them. You know, it's giving us the framework for just sitting and observing the mind rather

than being totally caught up in the mind's activity. So it gives us a chance to really experience what it's like when the desire is in the mind. And if we're just meditating, being mindful, being aware, at a certain point the desire is going to go away. It always does because everything is changing and impermanent. So it gives us a chance to experience directly what it's like to be ensnared by the desire and then what it's like when the mind is free of

desire. So going back to what I was just saying earlier in watching the quality of the mind when the desire is there, there is at least in my experience, there is some pleasantness involved, that anticipatory pleasure. But especially when we look at that experience in contrast to the mind. That is let go of the desire or the desire has simply passed. And we experience the ease of no desire, the ease of the mind, you know, not one thing. So then from that perspective, even though there was a pleasure involved in the desire,

we can also experience its contracted nature. There's a certain feeling of contraction or tightness or something. We're imprisoned. We've created perhaps a comfortable prison, you know, in the pleasant, the pleasantness of our anticipation, but it's still an imprisonment, which we can really see clearly in that moment, if we're just sitting and watching the desire, it's there, it's there, it's there, and then it goes away, right in that moment. It's very interesting to pay attention to that feeling of relief. You know, I often

describe it as it feels like we've been let out of the grip of something, that the desire was gripping us, and then we're released from the grip. So that's very interesting to watch those two mind states, which happen in that which we can see clearly in that moment when we're going from being in the grip of desire to that moment when it just changes and disappears. And special circumstances are not required to practice. Not at all. Not even sitting meditation. Right. That's what I'm saying. Well, they long. Right. Just, you're walking down the hallway,

you notice the urge to whatever put a pencil in the eye of your coworker, whatever. And you can't be there. The real band has this coming out. I never hide this. It's all right here. You, whatever desire, cake, would it? Anything. And if you just, you know, like a modicum of self awareness

I yeah, I catch okay. They're here. I am. There's another one That if you miss this one there will be another one 30 seconds later and then just pay attention Yes, don't you're not feeding or fighting it. You're just what watching yes It will go away and I found in my own experience that that is enormously satisfied. Yes. Yes That's that victory over Mora. Yes. Mora, I see you. No.

And it is satisfying. And it is strengthening. You know, that those moments throughout the day really are strengthening or meditative practice. So they're not, this is not insignificant. I think this is a really powerful practice to incorporate just in our ordinary everyday lives. And I just want to make a linguistic point. I suspect the language of Mora I see was chosen, I suspect deliberately.

The passana, the kind of meditation you you teach translates roughly into insight meditation This is all about the clear scene of our own inner processes So that we're not so yanked around exactly Just you can keep some next retreat then you're doing great Just if you say yes exactly to every, all of my utterances, you can come back as much as you want. Although you didn't want to come, so I don't know if that's much of a enticement.

So not wanting as a phrase to be dropped into our meditation. You've been suggesting this to me in our teacher student relationship for a long time. Can you talk about how that might work. So it's the same principle as we've just been talking about seeing the piece of not wanting. Recently in my practice, I've been seeing more and more clearly,

both in myself and in working with lots, lots of meditators. Even when we're just in the simplicity of the mindfulness practice, we're just sitting, feeling the breath, feeling different sensations, thoughts coming going. This is very ordinary, straightforward sitting practice. Still very often there's a tendency to be leaning into the next moment. So it's watching the in-breath with a slight leaning into the out-breath, or with some sensation, maybe a painful sensation in the body,

and we're with it in order for it to diminish. Or there's very often a subtle in-order to mind. So I call that leaning into the process. It's a kind of wanting, even for the next moment's experience, not necessarily a big wanting of something outside. It's the wanting that is often right there in our meditation, which often goes unnoticed. Because it can be really subtle. So I found that dropping in that phrase as I'm sitting, and again, this can be a very ordinary sitting. We don't have to be in any kind of deep concentration.

We just drop in the phrase occasionally, oh, not wanting. And for myself, anyway, maybe you had the same experience in that moment of reminding ourselves not wanting can often feel the mind drop back from that leaning into the next moment. And we get a taste, we get a real taste on a subtle, quite a subtle level in the meditative process of what the experience of not wanting is, you know, not wanting even the next moment, something to happen. And that really is a very vivid experience of what the meditation practice is really all about.

And this is often misunderstood, you know, because, and especially as people are beginning and, you know, they come to meditation from a whole variety of motivations, which are all fine, you know, whatever brings people to the practice. But it's often framed in terms of some kind of wanting, which can be a useful motivation, maybe wanting more calm or wanting to be less stress or wanting peace or wanting something. As I said, I'm not saying that that's bad, you know, and it actually brings us to the practice. But then as we settle into the meditation itself, and we have these experiences of, oh, not wanting, not wanting anything, you know, that dropping back from leaning into the next moment,

from leaning into the next moment, that really illuminates, this is what the practice is about, because we get a taste of that piece. It's quite profound, even if it's just momentary. We get a real glimpse of it. So this is a kind of meditative application of watching desire come and go.

So that's on the more, what we're talking about early is more on kind of the everyday level of our lives. What we're talking about now is really the meditative moment to moment experience. So I've tried this and sometimes this may just be more evidence as if it was needed to what a terrible meditator I am, but there are times when I try dropping a meditator, here I am, whatever is happening in my meditation, I'll say, oh yeah, remember that Joseph

told me to do that thing, saying the phrase not wanting. And I've found on occasion, when I can remember to do this, that I don't know if you're probably haven't, but there were these famous primetime pieces, news pieces that my colleague, my then colleague, Chris Cuomo did, where he would go into hotel rooms with a black light and shine it on the bed or at all over the place, and all sorts of disgusting things were on there, right? And I find that when I point and I drop not wanting in just like Chris in his black light, all of the wanting that was there is all of a sudden illuminated. I'm realizing, oh wow, I thought I was like meditating nicely here, but there's just a ton of wanting that's

happening here. Instead of, perhaps instead of of, in my case, often getting a momentary glimpse of the not wanting. Okay, so this points to an instruction that... I give a lot on meditation retreats. So there's a less subtle analogy, you know, to what we've been talking about. And that is, it's very common when people are sitting, of course, a lot of thoughts come and very often we're carried away by thoughts, you know, until we wake up and we realize we're thinking and then we're back to awareness of the body or the breath, we're even aware

of awareness itself. The tendency that many people have is once they wake up from being lost in thought, they judge themselves for having been lost. That's the first reaction. You know, lost, lost, lost, and then, oh, I've been thinking, oh, there I go again, I'm thinking again, there are so many thoughts. And so then the mind just is getting caught up and being lost again. So what I, that's happened to me 75 million. Exactly. It's common. So my suggestion for people

in that moment of waking up from being lost in the thought. And again, it's practicing it so we remember to do it. It's not hard to do. It's just hard to remember. In that moment of waking up from being lost, to actually focus the attention on the experience of the wakefulness, rather than the reflection back on having been lost. Because as many times as we get lost in thought, exactly that many times do we wake up in big loss?

Right, right, right. So I'm not focused on the awakening aspect. Because actually the waking up is a victory. Yes. You once advised me and I may be, is misremembering a word, I don't know, I might be remembering it incorrectly, that there's a Tibetan phrase, a maho.

A maho. A maho, which means how amazing. And that you could, if I'm remembering this correctly, that you could invoke that phrase upon waking up, like, wow, actually actually look at that. How amazing it is. I can actually be awake.

I can stop sleepwalking. There's that, but even more to the point, or maybe using those thoughts as an impetus to actually become mindful of the experience of the wakefulness, not just the comment, oh good, I'm awake again, which is good, I mean that's a good support, but you don't want to stay in the thought level about the wakefulness. You really want to take that opportunity and it could be just a few moments, but we take the opportunity of having awoken from being lost to taste that

moment of freedom. So we have a clear and increasing clarity of, oh, this is what awareness is like. And it's very real first because it's our experience. It's not theoretical. It's not what somebody taught us. Oh, this is what wakefulness is. And it's very vivid in their moment, because we've just come out of being, of having been asleep. For people who are sort of still getting into meditation, there are a lot of words you just use that might benefit from, exploitation. Words like, waitfulness and it's connection to freedom or awareness. Can you say more about all of those? Well, I think one of the easiest ways to really understand the meaning of those words is being mindful of precisely what we've been talking about.

In that move from being lost in a thought to becoming aware that we're thinking right there. The difference between being lost and being aware is very vivid because we've just gone from one to the other. And so that's a very easy way to get a feel for a taste of the nature of awareness, because we're experiencing it in that moment. And this happens many times. It happens as many times as we're lost and thought. Like, as I said, for as many times as we're lost that many times, do we eventually come out from being lost, But mostly people just overlook

that moment. They're not reaping the benefit that they could, if they would pay attention to what that feeling of wakefulness is like in that very moment. Let me say a bunch of words and you can fact check them. So awareness in this context is... Mindful most. Yes. A non-commenting, non-judgmental, not adding or subtracting, wanting or rejecting awareness of whatever is happening right now,

which may sound super theoretical and it is tough to describe because it is a little bit, which may sound super theoretical, and it is tough to describe, because it is a little bit, to use a cliche here, like, dancing about architecture. It is better to experience than to describe. But if you meditate enough, it's not a, again, it's a very down-to-earth, it's not a special state we're trying to achieve, and it is not something you can be in, at least for a beginner, non-extraordinary beginners. And I put myself in that crew,

not something you're gonna be impermanently. Meditation is about this ongoing process of noticing usually we anchor on our breath, the feeling, the raw data of those physical sensations that they are rising and falling of the breath. And then you get lost in a million thoughts. on our breath, the feeling, the raw data of those physical sensations, the arising and falling of the breath, and then you get lost in a million thoughts, and then you wake up your back with the breath and over and over and over again. And in that way, we get these little tastes of what lies beneath our thoughts.

Yes. And especially if we're paying attention in that moment of coming out from being lost. Because as I say, people very often just skip over that and either go into some judgment about having been thinking or rush back to whatever their object of meditation is. It's like, okay, I've been lost back to the breath. Yes. Without actually taking that moment to experience the mind of wakefulness. And with your tail between your legs a little bit, whether you're not, so hence the power of a phrase like, Amahoe. Amahoe.

Amahoe or welcome back or some little phrase to mark the occasion. And so then the tail starts wagging in the light instead of between one's legs. Yes. I like that image of you. There's going to be this image of Dan wagging his tail every time he wakes up from being lost and thought. Well, and I should be careful because who knows where this is going to go. We can also have the image of you rolling up a newspaper and smacking out the snout.

So many possibilities here. So one of the hallmarks of your teaching, and we've, people may have noticed this by now, is the use of these illustrative, illuminating phrases. There's little phrases that we use in our practice and in our life. We've built entire courses around this on the app, and these phrases come to me all the time. But there was one you used earlier, and another that I was reminded of, that I think are worth looking at. You use this earlier, but you kind of skipped over it which is the a

mind state that you refer to as in order to mind which is we are mindful with gridded teeth of a pain in our knee while meditating but it is not really mindfulness because it's suffused with aversion in the form of I will be mindful of this in order to make it go away. Yes, but just a comment on that. Sometimes it is, we are with something with grittity. Sometimes it's without grittity. Sometimes that in order to is a very subtle. So it's, there's not going to be necessarily the big signal of, okay, I'm enduring this, you know, so it'll go away, which happens often enough. But at a certain point, we get over that more obvious kind of resistance and wanting to just very subtle levels. And so it's just helpful to be aware of that.

I'll just give you an example. So there's one teacher, his name is Ut and spending way too much time with you. So, and by attitude, it just means to check how we're relating towards happening. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right Chris Cuomo is there showing how disgusting the budgets are. Maybe it's not horribly disgusting. It might be something real. You're talking about somebody else's mind, because that's not the way it works here. Just as an example of my experience of using that phrase, so one time I was just sitting and feeling my breath was very simple, common, ordinary sitting, just feeling the breath

come in and out. And then I remembered that question and said, well, what's the attitude in the mind? And it's not even, it's not even that we're asking the question for an answer. Very often it's the simple asking of the question which affects the change. And so this is what I noticed. I'm just sitting there feeling my breath. Okay, what's the attitude in the mind? And in the moment of asking the question, I could feel my mind settle back from a wanting that I didn't even know was there. It was so subtle, just as I say, that slight leaning into the breath of maybe a subtle wanting for more concentration, or I'm watching this in order for calm. But nothing, nothing,

this wasn't in big, you know, this wasn't a lit up marquee, very subtle, but still there. And then often just in the asking the question, we can, that itself is all it's needed for the mind to drop back for those moments, you know, feeling the breath without any one thing. So just to clarify, I, this is going to sound defensive because it is defensive. I like to highlight the, the, you know, fent has magooric nature of the mind because I, because it's funny and because I think it makes people feel better because, because it's funny and because I think if it makes people feel better because realize to normalize this stuff. But actually the the the

the attitude check that we're talking about now does do that for me. Like I know I see the negativity but I am almost immediately released from it because while I didn't see that was there before, but that's kind of interesting. And poof. Yes, exactly. He's just got an A. Oh, thank you. Appreciate that. I appreciate that. That's all I really care about.

So we've talked about many phrases as far as Aimoho in order to mind checking the attitude, not wanting. And we'll talk about more, but a question before we go further. By the way, I'm flying without any, I don't have a plan for this interview, so I'm just making it up as I go. But I know we'll undoubtedly hit other phrases in the context as we continue this discussion.

But I just want to make clear, because I am intuitive potentially some nervousness on, or confusion on the part of listeners that, oh my God, you've just thrown so many little tools at me. How do I know when to use them? What would you say to that? I think mostly I would say just become somewhat familiar with some of these phrases, the ones that resonate for whatever reason, you know, that when you hear the phrase something clicks in the mind. So just to review the phrases from time to time and then trust that

the right phrase or that phrase will come up in the meditation at the right moment. So I wouldn't try to have some plan. Oh, I'm going to, you know, repeat this phrase five times in the sitting or I would, I would think it's much better just to to become familiar. So it's in there, you know, it's in our minds. When you say become familiar, it means just like listening to the podcast. Yeah, listening to the podcast. And maybe even reflecting a little bit on what the phrases mean for each person, you know, and because different ones of us may resonate with one or another of these phrases, you know, just intuitively they make sense to us. So simply to go over and and we do go in on the on the app, we do go through quite a lot of these phrases

and what they mean. Yeah, so just to familiarize oneself and then in a way let them go, trust the process. And I think as we reflect in your own experience, they do pop up in the mind. And the more that happens, the more access we have, you know, to the possible liberating effect. Yeah, so I'll just say a little bit about how this is work for me with your phrases or any other, you know, I sit and talk to a lot of teachers. Don't get a fact. You use other people's phrases?

You didn't check that with me. Every other teacher in the world is willing to come on the podcast so you know hey sorry um by the way just in Joseph's defense he's not been avoiding me just haven't been able to schedule it for four years so what are you reading to that whatever you want um anyway my point is that I I have had times in my practice where you and I so the way our teaching relationship works I'm not explaining this to you, I'm explaining to you. The listener is, we get on the phone every month to whatever and talk about my practice.

And sometimes I'll walk out of an hour long discussion with you like a plan for something I'm going to explore in my practice in the ensuing weeks. And so I will sometimes take a phrase and say, yeah, I'm really going to work on this for a period of time. So that's one way to approach it. The other is that I've just been kind of swimming in this material for long enough that it is absolutely true in my experience that what you're describing of the phrases just popping into your head at an interesting moment, it just seems to happen. I don't have an explanation for why it is.

Okay, you get another A because your first comment I think is very helpful. So if there's a phrase that we do want to explore for whatever reason, you know, because we just intuitively relate to it or it seems puzzling to us and we don't quite understand that for whatever reason, I think it can be valuable, as you just suggested, to make a decision, okay, for this sitting or for this week, however long, I'm going to drop this in and explore it. But I think both of those approaches really are helpful. So thank you for clarifying that. My pleasure. Stay tuned. More of our conversation is on the way after this.

Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup,

why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship. Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany.

Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. One of the questions that came in from one of our teachers, Devon Hase, who is a really special person and she asked a question that I think is relevant to the discussion we've been having, which is kind of your thoughts about the, I guess, this is an ethical question about the business you and I are involved in, as through 10% happier, through this podcast, through the app, or whatever, through books that you unwillingly, you know, I steal all of your wisdom for, of kind of, for lack of a better term, a kind of a secular Dharma, you know, where, are we, you're a Buddhist teacher, and

yet we don't emphasize the metaphysical claims of the Buddha. We don't use a lot of, at least on the app, a lot of the lingo. We use some of it, but not a lot of it. We're not putting, we're not hiding, booties in my, I don't think, but we're also not, there's no boota, Buddhist iconography all over the app or anything like that. And is that a, is that a watering down or in any way a disservice to the Buddha's message?

Because, you know, I, I call, oh, quite openly, call myself a Buddhist. And yet I don't, I do have some worry about presenting the app as a Buddhist app, because I think it, people might scare people off. That's a lot to throw at you, but I'm just curious what your thoughts. So I make a bit of a distinction, and this is totally subjective and idiosyncratic to me, so I'm not suggesting that other people would even think in the same way. But in my own mind, I make a distinction between being a Buddhist and following or exploring the depth of the Buddhist teachings. Because becoming a Buddhist in one way is just another identity.

And the Buddhist talking about letting go of all these identities which we create. So even for myself, who's dedicated his all life to these teachings, you know, I might say and have said from time on, yeah, I'm Buddhist, but I don't really feel that terminology to represent really how I feel. But I do feel completely committed to the fullness of the Buddhist teachings. So in the question you asked, yes, it is possible to present the teachings

without any kind of requirement, you know, that wouldn't become a Buddhist at all. But it's also helpful to kind of explore, okay, are we really exploring the full range of the teachings, or are we exploring some part of the range? So that's the piece that I would look at. And I've discussed actually with some people from the app. I was just floating an idea and this may be something that neither you know anybody else is interested in doing, but I was wondering whether on the app itself, whether on the app itself, there could be a Buddhist corner. For people who may not be attracted in the beginning to that, who really just want to learn the tools of mindfulness and the benefit of convening and really getting benefit from

it, but some percentage of people might then be inspired, well, what else did the Buddha have to say? What is the full range of the teachings? It's profound, you know, and there's so much. And so I was wondering, what if they were a Buddhist quarter, where that was its explicit purpose? And then people could choose to either go to that corner of explicit purpose. Yeah. And then people could choose to either go to that corner of the app or not. You know, I'll give my first impression, which is, I'm very open to it, because I mean,

I just think about my own progression. If you would, so I started getting interested in this stuff, 2008, 2009, the idea of becoming a Buddhist was repulsive, right? I didn't know anything about it, right? But I knew that it seemed like joining a religion, which I was not up for doing. And by the way, I'm still not up for doing. It was because I didn't really understand

that, and this is a great quote, I think it's from Stephen Bachelor, but Buddhism isn't something to believe in, it's something to do. And this is a vast treasury of deeply practical practices for the mind, exercises for the mind and philosophy as well, and great stories and like savoring our idiosyncrasies,

like the delicacies they are, and also a community of people who are interested in taking these practices seriously. There's just a ton of stuff there that I think when positioned correctly is can be very, very interesting to people who still consider themselves to be secular or who consider themselves to be secular or who consider themselves

to be practicing Jews or Muslims or Christians, whatever because properly understood this is just a set of tools to make you happier, more compassionate, friendly person. Yes, I completely agree with that. I think just to clarify, or it might be even simplify, kind of for me, what would be the essence of this Buddhist corner, which again, is that for myself also, it was not about becoming a Buddhist. It's about the expression of the Buddhist teaching. Yes, yes.

For me, the essence of that corner, you know, if we ever did anything like this, would be to really focus on the awakening aspect of the teachings or the liberative aspects of the teachings in the deepest way, not just the teachings which make us tend to present happier, or are life more easeful, or better, more fulfilled engagement with the world, whatever our aspiration is, and they can be wholesome aspirations, but not necessarily considering, well, what does enlightenment really mean? You know, we hear that phrase often associated

with the Buddhist teachings, and he got enlightened, and then many of his disciples became enlightened. Well, what's that about? You know, what's liberation about? So that's the level that I think we could explore in greater depth. And we do reference it. And you know,

many of the teachers on the app, I think do refer in one way or another to the freeing aspect, but not really as far as I know it, and it's fullness of what, what awakening really is about. So that's, that's a profound aspect of the teachings. And that's, that's the piece that I think could be explored in greater depth. Let's do a little bit of it now. For folks who are new to this idea of their beginning meditators, the interest in the idea of being 10% happier because that seems doable, the liberative aspect of the practice, what does that actually mean in the simplest possible terms? Okay, so there are different ways of describing that with varying levels of simplicity to it.

So the most pragmatic description of what we might call the awakened mind would be the mind that has freed itself from the habits of greed and hatred and ignorance. So we're talking about the actual uprooting of those deeply conditioned tendencies in all of us, the potential of uprooting them from our mind streams. is in all of us, the potential of uprooting them from our mind streams. So that's one, that would be one meaning of liberation, of awakening, that purification of the mind to that extent. So that's one way of framing it, just freeing the mind from greed and hatred and ignorance. Even from the very beginning, we engaged in that process.

So even people who are not concerned about final liberation still in doing the practice, they are weakening those forces. So and weakening those forces, by the way, that doesn't just make sure you people aren't confused. This isn't some mystical, well, I guess it is mystical, but this is not some metaphysical, like, deep dungeons and dragons. You're weakening it just by seeing it and not acting over and over and over. Exactly. As we were talking in the beginning. Yes. Not buying into each desire. Yes. This is very down to earth. Yes. So when we talk about the deep end of the pool here, it's a straight path from the shallow end. Yes. Yes. Not some. It's not a different pool. Yes. Yes.

But as we go deeper into the pool, we start to get more and more subtle understandings of what it is that has and continues to feed the habits of greed and hatred delusion. So one example of that, and this is getting more into some of the subtle aspects, is we deeply habituated to the view of self of I. So my thoughts, my body, my emotions, I'm this, I'm that. It's like all of our experiences for the most part, are self-referential. We've created a notion of self behind all of these experiences.

These experiences are happening to me. So we've created this notion of self, of I, that's really at the center of our lives, our lives revolve around gratifying the self, or defending it, or aggrandizing it, or in some relationship to this concept of self, of I, one of the very radical understandings that comes through the Buddha's teachings, not becoming a Buddhist, but just exploring the teachings, is to see that this very notion of self-or-I is a construct. It's a concept which we've created and doesn't actually refer to anything in and of itself. And so the deeper end of the pool is beginning to explore what does selflessness actually mean.

And we all have a sense of its meaning on the shallow end of the pool. So we already have some taste. For example, I think if we said of someone or of ourselves, oh, I'm or that person is very self-centered. So that's just on a psychological personality level, but we all know what that means. And it's not a desirable quality self-centered. So that's kind of a common experience which we all have. We can take that very experience and say,

yeah, when somebody is not so self-centered, they're happier. They make everyone around them happier. So we can follow that thread to the deep end of the pool to see that the very notion of self in the first place is a construct. How is seeing or glimpsing the illusion of the self-liberative. It's pretty simple, although not easy. That was another phrase, my first teacher, an engineer used to use, it's simple but not easy. The practice is simple but not easy.

So it's not complicated, but it's not easy because of the depth of all conditioning. So it's liver, the idea of selflessness is liberative. I mean, one example is what we were talking about earlier in our conversation. When we can see a desire in the rise in the mind, there's a big difference between feeling it as, oh, I have this desire, this desire, belongs to me, I need to act on it to be fulfilled. That's very different than seeing the desire itself as selfless. The desire itself is just another condition, habitual arising in the mind.

It doesn't belong to anyone. It's just an arising. In seeing its selfless nature, it becomes much easier to not be hooked by it, or not being snared by it, because we're not taking it to be who we are. We're seeing it as just a pattern in the mind. So the more we can see that selfless nature of whatever it's arising is very liberating because we're no longer biting on the bait. So all of this is I liked a really is another A then. I like that that idea of the Lord is a mixed metaphor of the thread

from the shallow end to the deep end. I was in a pool recently because summertime and you dive into the sometimes I like swimming along the bottom of the pool. It's just a gradual path right down to the deep end. But again, you don't have to go into the neighbor's pool. It's a candid with deep end. And that is why I'm open to the idea of a Buddhist corner. I'm gonna be called the deep end.

Maybe without the deep end, yes, right? Because it's not about minting new Buddhists, it's just about exploring what else is there. And there's a lot. Yes. And just a word on, like I do refer to myself as a Buddhist, mostly because it's out of a desire not to hide the ball. I have the same discomfort with it as you do, but I'm practicing Buddhist meditation every day and endeavoring to

infuse it into everything I do with, you know, special possible levels of success here. And so just saying, I'm a Buddhist. It's convenient. It's a convenient short-hand. Yes. In some ways, it's inconvenient because you have to explain it to people. But I'd rather do that than have people suspect somehow that I'm pulling one over on them. That's why, but in terms of the ethics of this, you know, there have been a lot of critics out there who criticized this idea of m mic mindfulness, this idea that something essential is lost when you dumb things down and make it simple and come out of it or

in our case having a profitable business built around it. Do you share those ethical concerns? I think there's a potential for a misuse of all these endeavors, not that they're intrinsic to what's happening. And so it's just to be really watchful, and there are a few different parameters that one could look at. One is just, what's the motivation behind doing what we're doing? And with motivation, and this is a point that I make a lot with different students or other

teachers or teacher trainees, it's not that the expectation should be that our motives are 100% pure, because until we are fully awakened or some kind of saint, they're not going to be 100% pure. There's going to be a mix. And so, for example, with something like the app or many other endeavors, there could be a whole range of motivations. The motivation to really be of service to share the teachings that have been valuable, along with the motivation for the coming to be profitable.

So those two don't- By the way, employees of a bunch of people. Yes, exactly. There are a lot of different aspects. And so just to look at one's own motivation and see which are the leading ones. Are we being led by greed for profit? Or are we being led by a desire to offer employment or to help people understand the practice, even though the other motivation may be there, but it's not the driving force. So I think looking at motivation is really important in terms of the ethics of it all. A second piece, and I'm not sure whether this gets talked about

a lot or not, enum or secular mindfulness approach, the mic mindfulness, is whether or not the ethical framework of the teachings is woven into what's being presented. So I think the potential there for a misuse. And so here I'm pausing a moment because this is leading into some subtle distinctions that people could confuse attention with mindfulness. So within the Buddhist psychology, attention is ethically neutral, and so we can be applying our attention to hold some things, to unhold some things, you know, and so if what's being taught is attention training without any ethical framework, so then there's the potential for just, you know, using it in the service of things that are not that helpful, you know, or actually harmful. Mindfulness is a certain kind of attention,

and at least within our particular tradition, different traditions kind of frame this a little differently. But mindfulness is always wholesome, which means it's a kind of attention that is not suffused with greed or a version. And so when it's really mindfulness that's being taught rather than attention the ethics is built is already built in but I'm not sure that this distinction, which is quite subtle.

I don't know to what extent that is really explained. I think it's worth diving in on ethics, because it's another word like renunciation or disenchantment that can come off as not super attractive or fun. Right? But ethics, as I understand it, which is somewhat argued quite limited, my understanding, in the Buddhist context, really is actually attached or approached through the pleasure centers of the brain because doing good feels good.

And harming other people yourself feels bad if you're paying attention. And so the ethical guardrails I've always found to be, I can, I feel comfortable sometimes this is going to sound paradoxical, viewing them through a sort of selfish lens. Yes, I think that generally is true. Although, for me, the basic definition of ethics, and I don't know if this is what stand up in some college philosophy course or not, but in my use of the term, kind of the essence of ethics is non-harming, non-harming of ourselves, non-harming of others.

And so it's just to see what actions of our body, speech, mind, cause harm, the evitaurs or to ourselves. And ethics is refraining from those kind of activities. I would tweak what you said a little bit so this gets to be like a B-plus. Fine, better than I didn't call it. There could be some situations of doing harm, but that brings us a certain kind of pleasure in the moment. So just as one example, it can be all too common.

So among the basic ethical precepts, you know, within the Buddhist teachings, this is just one example of, there are, there's, you know, certain precepts of refraining from sexual misconduct, refraining from wrong speech. So sometimes, you know, lust is a powerful force, very powerful as one teacher described it, I love this, said, lust cracks the brain.

It does. You know, I mean, we can go crazy. So that there could be some of real enjoyment in that on a certain level, even as we're doing harm. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't, that's, but there's an quote, the Buddha back at you, like anger, he said, has a honey tip, but it's always in the horse. So yes, I get it that gossip, sexual indiscretion

can feel good in the moment. Yes. But if you're paying attention, there's a vast reservoir of pain accessible to you on the back. No, that's... So I stand by myself. No, I'm upgrading myself back to my day. I still think that was the right one. Well, so the question is, so when...

Well, let's negotiate this grade. You can bribe the teacher. It's quite true, and I love that phrase of the Buddha, anger with its poison source and honeyed tip, but it's really the honeyed tip can be much more apparent than the poison source. So yes, if we're really paying attention to the whole experience, we will discover that. But often the honey tip camouflages the poison source. And so that's why having explicit ethical framework is a protection. It is true that, you know, with enough practice, we will see it for ourselves, but to have it explicitly stated, it would be wise to refrain from

sexual misconduct or, you know, useless talk, things like that. That's a real support, because we often are missing the harm that it might cause. Yes, yes, and. And I think that the true enlightened self-interest, I'm just going back to the way. I'm just going back to the way. Yes, yes.

You can live a whole lifetime bathing in the honey tip of you know, just do all this stuff that feels good momentarily day trading through your whole life, right? And feel I Guess happy on some level, but there's something operating in the mind nonetheless that creating pain, whether you see it or not. Yes. And enlightened self-interest is to widen the lens, so that you're capturing it all and realizing,

no, no, no, there's been a pain here all along that I haven't noticed, like a teenager wearing braces, who is acting like a jerk, because she or he doesn't know that actually they're in pain from the braces. One of the things I love about the Buddha is you can often trace everything back to the pleasure centers of the brain. It feels good to do this stuff no matter how counterintuitive it may seem at first. I'll go with that. No, I want you to argue with me. I mean I'm hoping to be a part of the world. No, I know. What you said is absolutely true. I might just...

Now I'm playing with you. I might just tweak the phrase instead of in line self-interest. How about enlightened interest? Because... Just in the words we use and the terminology... on some very subtle level, and I wouldn't obsess about this, but just in using that language, it can reinforce the sense of a self,

whereas it could be helpful to see that both the pleasure and the suffering are impersonal. So neither one belongs to a self is just, you do this and there's good feeling that comes from it. You do this and there's suffering that comes from it. And none of it belongs to a self. Right. I agree with you. It's just that as you know, I'm an inveterate salesman and performer. And so I'm coming from a public

positioning, marketing, WC fields type of situation where we have to ride this flood horse all the way to we need to ride the flood horse in the door. In other words, I got to frame it as self-interest and try to get you in and make you realize that there's no horse in yourself in those antichlas. Right. Right. No, that's fine. That's why to have the deep end in the, so, okay, riding the self-interest horse into the field and then you start exploring the field in a deeper way. Oh, there's no horse. There's no self-riding on the horse. So that gets interesting. Yes. Yes. Let me just

go back to something before you said a while ago about motivation. This is actually something you and I have discussed in the past because I'm when I get visibility on my own motivations often very humbling. And it is for all of us, just to know that. Thank you. In fact, there you go. Because sometimes I feel like uniquely horrible. Every one time I called you after my 360 review, listeners may remember I had a 360 review.

A lot of people in my life gave anonymous feedback on how i'm doing on a various levels and it was came back about thirteen fourteen months ago and i was devastated by the results and i called you and i said it kind of exacerbates this fear i've had that i'm just irrevocably rodden and i was really like opening up to you and you've laughed in my face

Which was actually the wisest move like took all of this like I was really selfing there You know I was like in this story of myself and who's 100% anything right? So yes, so having said that motivation I Think is such a rich area to play with and so on i try to be mindful of my own motivations about the app company the whole ten percent the enterprise you know is was this just some you go trip among our right to try to make a bunch of money well what's going on here what am i really trying to do

uh... and there's a lot when i look there's a lot of stuff in there i don't like to see uh... but there's a lot of stuff in there I don't like to see. But there's stuff in there that makes me really like as emotional as I'm capable of getting. So how do we work with this? How do we look at it? I haven't really figured out exactly how to clearly see truly what's going on here with my motivations and how to feed the better angels in these situations. So do you have any advice there? Well, I'll just give you a few examples when I noticed the range of motivations in my own mind. This goes back, you know, 50 years or so to my India days when I was just getting into the practice, but I've been doing it for a few years.

And then in the hot months in India, those of us who were practicing, we'd go up to the planes in India, we'd go up to the mountains because the hot season really hot on the planes. So we rent these very simple cartridges up in what they call the hill stations, about 7,000 feet to serve in this beautiful view of the Himalayas, some beautiful surroundings. And because I had been practicing for some years, then, and there were a lot of people new to the practice. So just for this small community of Westerners who were living up in this little hill station,

I would give a talk every week. And before I had become an official teacher, I was just trying to share or wanting to share my understanding as far as I went. So every week people would gather at my little cottage and sit on the lawn and I'd give a talk. And then I noticed that every week before the talk, I would start counting how many people came. Oh, this week, five people came. The next week, 10 people came. But then only seven came.

What, you know, maybe they didn't like. And so my mind would just be doing that. So at a certain point, it became obvious to me that that's what my mind was doing. And it still kept doing it. It's like every week, I'd count how many people were there. But once I saw it clearly, it didn't bother me that it was there because I was not feeding it.

I was an acting on it. I wasn't condemning it. I wasn't judging it. We're just simply another way of feeding it. This is what people often don't realize. So then just seeing that- People in that mine state might, for example, wonder whether they're irredeemably rotten. Exactly.

Instead of just saying, yeah, this is just a habitual thought pattern. It comes and goes really no different than a sound. And so when we can relate to the unwholesome motivations that we're seeing in that way, we're not identifying, we're not buying in, and we're not condemning ourselves and not judging, we're just seeing clearly, and letting them come and go. So then they don't have much these, these less than holds of motivations. Don't have that much of an impact. And I'm not saying that we're totally freed

from them. You know, it's still maybe part of what is actually motivating us, but it's much diminished because we're seeing it clearly. We're not deluding ourselves into thinking, oh, I'm doing this totally from pure motivation. I think that's much more problematic than actually having a very clear honest view of what's going on. Because then we actually have the ability to see it and let it go. If we're not seeing it,

it's like an underground stream that keeps influencing us in ways that we're not even aware of. Hence all these teachers abusing their students? Yeah, there's so many examples of that. So I'll give you one other example of mixed motivation, which was very illuminating to me. I mean, then this was back to my early days in India. And for people who have been there, they know that there are a lot of beggars, you know, just on the street. So I was in Bodhaya, which is a small town, but where the Buddha was enlightened, so it was an important place. And I was just in the Bizarre buying some fruit, and this little beggar boy came up, and his hand was out.

And so without much thought at all, I just took an orange that I just bought and gave it to him. And it was not—it wasn't that I had the thought, oh, I'm being so generous, so nothing like it was a very ordinary and just took the orange and gave it to him. But then something really interesting happened. He just walked away without any acknowledgement whatsoever, not a smile, not a nod, nothing. And that register. It's like, and I certainly was not expecting a fuse of thanks for the orange, but in the absence of it, I realized that there was some little hidden motivation or wanting, something, I mean,

it was even something really small, like a nod of the head. And it's an absence, I said, oh yeah, that motivation was, I didn't even, I would never have even realized it was there if there hadn't been the absence of it. So that was just really interesting to me, but I didn't, it wasn't like I got down on myself for it. It was interesting for me to see it, you know?

And so that's the quality that we can begin, can bring to this exploration of motivations. So, you just described a couple of situations where you saw something mildly embarrassing and treated it with not condemnation, but interest, and that is a way to decondition it. I mean, being humor. Yeah, humor, humor. But then you're not feeding it as much, right? So it doesn't metastasize through the mind, and that's actually why you're doing the thing now.

But so for example, with me, and we've talked about this before, quite a bit, you know, with my various endeavors. So it's not only that I want to see when greed or self-aggrandizement is coming up in my mind, but also to feed the more positive motivations to... Brick and me have your salary. That was too intense. No, I thought it was going to go.

How do you feed it? So one of the things I like about... I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go.

I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go.

I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. I'm just gonna go. for myself, one of the things that I've tried to do, and I don't know if this would fit with your advice, is, so I get a lot of feedback. App reviews, or people hitting me on Twitter, or Amazon reviews, or whatever. And often I've looked at, when somebody says,

oh, you know, this app changed my life, or somebody comes up to me and says that, I look at it as like, oh, well, maybe this app is gonna be really successful because this person said that. Instead of actually taking in, well, this person app is going to be really successful because this person said that. Instead of actually taking in, well, this person might have been really unhappy and this work that I've done in conjunction

with many other people without whom none of this would have happened, right? So this group effort, which is satisfying in and of itself and actually should be highlighted as a positive motivation, but is mattering in the individual lives and to take that in, not as self-grandizing, but is like, okay, this is why we do this thing. Which I'm using not that I'm the most important person

in the world here, I'm not trying to suck up all the oxygen on this question, but as an example of how to highlight the positive motivation, would that fit with what you're thinking? Absolutely, I'll give you another example of an application of that principle, but in a slightly different arena. And so one of the meditations that we do, and you know, is on the app as well, I think, is just the meditation on loving kindness.

You know, and there's a way of cultivating that particular mind, set, and feeling of just wishing well for people. One of the conditions for loving kindness to arise is focusing on the good qualities of people. So there's a particular way of paying attention when we're with others that give rise to this feeling of kindness and appreciation. But often our habit is focusing on those qualities and people that irritate us, or you know, that are annoying, or just the opposite of focusing on their good qualities,

there is often a tendency for the more difficult qualities to jump out of us and that's what we're relating to. And it is quite interesting and amazing, Amahau, to see what happens. So just being aware of those tendencies in the mind and then to consciously, you know, if we're with somebody who's irritating us in some way, you know, and if we can remember this, and just to take a few moments and just to see whether in that moment or maybe later, okay, well, does this person have any good qualities? And almost everybody has some good qualities and making that conscious decision to focus on that, it is quite amazing how that changes how we feel about them. And this is obvious at least conceptually that

when we do focus on the good qualities in people it's gonna make us feel good. We're gonna feel Beneficent towards them, you know, so that's one way of Choosing to direct your attention to a particular set of qualities or experiences or circumstances So in the same thing when people kind of appreciate what they may have gotten from the app and the teachings to see the range of responses that may arise in your mind, but then to choose to focus on exactly what you said, oh, this is great, this really helped this person live their lives in an easier, better way. So it's not that the other motivations or thoughts are not gonna be there,

but it's what we choose to emphasize, what choose to pay attention to. And that choice is very empowering, to realize that we do have that choice. That's tremendously empowering, because then we're not simply subject to the whims of our habitual conditioning. You know, in terms of how we relate to people. And what I found is that it actually has made my mind

much less judgmental about people much more useful and appreciative. useful and appreciative. I want to take some voice mail from our listeners. We gave other podcasts. We have this group of very generous people who we call podcast insiders who have actually volunteered to give us feedback every week. And it's actually, it's incredibly helpful. And sometimes it hurts to read the feedback

but it really helped me do a better job and us do a better job on this work. So we've given those folks a chance to ask questions so I want to get to that and then we'll wrap. But before I do that, just because again, I've always trying to hear the questions of the listeners that they might have. We talked before about liberation and enlightenment. This is a question you and I have discussed many times. But would you call yourself enlightened? It's really interesting.

That question comes up at different times. And it's taken me a while to figure out the response that feels most comfortable to me. But I finally did come up with a response. I'm someplace on the spectrum awakening. That's not even an answer. We're all on the spectrum on that spectrum. not even an answer. That's right. We're all on the spectrum. We are. You are further than you were when you started.

Yes. 50 years ago. 50 years ago. No, 55 years ago. Right. You started meditating when you were 21 or so. 23. 23.

Okay. So 52 years ago. We just celebrated your 75th birthday. It's a lovely birthday. I'll tell you why. Sorry, I'm sorry. You may think that's a bit of a fudge, but it's really not.

And the reason I feel that a helpful response is because as soon as people start making a claim of, you know, I'm in line in there, I'm at the stage of in line, or whatever, it's just a setup for a huge amount of projection one way or another without having any basis for assessing the truth of it. So I mean, people have all kinds of self, you know, express their understanding of their own stages of enlightenment or awakening or whatever it is, but we have no way of knowing. But just to claim an identity in that,

already so, oh, this person's in lightening, so then maybe there's a lot of difference, or maybe they may say that and we think, they can't be in light, there's such a jerk, you know, and one way or another, it just sets up a whole field of projection, not based on anything, not based on anything we can verify. So that's why I think just entering into that whole field, it's not at all helpful. And the Buddha, he actually, there are discourses where he talks about how one should express, you could say one's understanding or attainment. And he said and I really appreciate this discourse, to talk about it without reference to itself, but rather talking about it in terms of what is understood.

Well, of course, though, he called himself the Buddha, right? They were the awakened one. He's entitled to it. So these are rules for other people. Yeah, and I think they're really helpful. So one could say, you know, that in the awakened mind one is three of the view of self. And so one is really expressing an understanding, not a claim. And I think that's a help, it's just a healthier approach. And then it gets open for interesting discussions, you know, about the teaching, rather than about some self-claim.

One way to phrase what you're saying, be, look, you've been out of this for 52 years. And why aren't you further along than you are? You're glad you did it. And it's worth doing. And the rest of us, you consider walking as far as we can on this path, based on your experience. Well, certainly that, but I think one could go even further and talk about the kinds of insights that have come along the way. Okay, this is what I've understood. You know, overall these years of practice and be sharing not only the formal teachings

of the Buddha, but ones on experience. Do you notice that greed and hatred and confusion are arriving, arising less frequently than they were? I don't know. Yeah, a couple of years ago, a couple of decades ago. Yeah, I would say that. And I think maybe even more, there is that, but also more aware of them when they arise. So the mind gets really more finely attuned to what's arising. And also there is a diminishment of those habits which cause suffering. But it's a gradual process. It's not. I will say, and I don't know if this comment is going to maybe be immune to this comment

may bolster any sense of self that remains for you, but I've observed you in many situations up close and working together, having been taught by you, being on retreat with you, being at social events with you, and I don't see a lot of agitation. The times I see you get a little innervated is when you're tired, or you may feel that you're running low on energy or you're a little bit uncomfortable, but I'm always on guard for like, when am I gonna see this dude crack?

And I know it doesn't feel performative to me at all. It just feels like, oh, this is what happened. Some of them may be nature rather than the nurture, but I think the practice seems to be, because you describe yourself as a younger man as a much more edgy, and you describe yourself as a child as prone to wild temper tantrum. So I don't see any of that. Sometimes I see you get tired. I mean, there's one image in my mind of my wife and I walking into, there was some gathering

of the Buddhist glitterati here in New York City. It was a fundraiser for the Pricicle magazine. Right. And it was very noisy. And I was walking and I was saying to my wife, yeah, Joseph's like, they're banging drums in there. And I walk around the corner, and we see this big room filled with all these people around these tables, and there are some drum banging ceremony going on, and you're very tall. And I could see you, I elbow back, I look, look, look. And I could see you standing midway through the room

with your eyes closed, trying to tune everything out. That's as pretty as edgy as I see you get. Right, just to clarify, it wasn't so much to tune everything out, but to what, to drop into a less reactive space to it. Okay, just hearing. But you're quite right. I mean, tiredness is definitely, as I said before, with desire.

It's like when the energy is lower, one is more prone. But I'll give you another example of kind of a very apparent easing, you know, of my mind over the years of practice in my earlier years of teaching. I could get into some, I wouldn't say heated, but forceful Dharma arguments about Dharma points that I felt very attached to my viewpoint thinking that this is the right viewpoint and people should understand it's and how we get into these arguments with friends, you know, like these Dharma discussions, but very very forceful. You and Sam Harris. Well, me and Sam and others, and not limited to Sam. Of course, with Sam, it was equally, we shared the dynamic.

Why do you say some image you guys were flying over? You just do it, retreating, cornered you on the airplane, and click it out. Right, from Australia. It was like a 13 hour. from Australia, it was like a 13 hour. And I see over the years, I am so much lighter in how I hold kind of dorm of views. And just in recent years, I find, I don't get into these kind of dorm arguments. We're going to be having discussions and you know,

if you're sending various viewpoints, but I've really let go of attachment to my view. And that feels, it's so much more relaxing and more fun, you know. Well, I wrote a book that I recommend people read called One Dharma in which you, it seems like in some ways the combination of of this effort to relax around, saying, look, they're, one of the phrases I like to use is once you start talking about enlightenment, you're in an argument because all these Buddhist schools have these different ways to talk about this as a view, the concepts are contradictory in some ways, and you wrote this book, One Darmour, which I really loved, which was about trying to sort of walk us through how you've reconciled these.

Yes, it's a different fuse. Yes, yeah. Okay, so enough for me, I think we have a little time to take how's your energy level now. Yeah, but you're, you're, you'll know when I start getting grumpy. You'll know.

Okay, I'm gonna go bang some drums in the corner. Do you mind putting these headphones on so we can hear the question? All right, let's do voicemail number one. Hi there. This is Liz from New York City. I'm a podcast insider and I'm very grateful that you took my voice out. So my question is about my informal mindfulness practice. I worry I'm practicing mindfulness techniques too much off the cushion and that I'm missing

the present moment. For example, when I notice my mind wandering and walking, I'll attend to the feeling of having feet, and when I notice I'm judging others in the subway, I switch my attention to watching my natural breath. It feels like I'm making these transitions dozens of times a day, and the process of catching myself all day long can be exhausting. Is this constant movement from recognizing suffering and attending to something more stillful, actually pulling me out of the moment, or is this the practice? Thank you so much, and thank you for everything you do, Dan.

You're an inspiration and a positive influence on myself and on millions of others. See, she was talking about me not you there. I just want to get it. I noticed. I'll try not to take it personally. So what do you think? That's a really interesting question. Yeah, very interesting.

So I think that one of the causes of perhaps the mindfulness fatigue, you know, that was being described, was the sense of redirecting the attention to something else. So, you know, kind of lost in thought and then, okay, let me come back to the breath. Let me come back to this. And so, moving the attention back to something, that if one is doing that very frequently during the day, I could imagine it feeling tiring. So this is a subtle difference, I think, but it's what came to mind as I was listening to the question, and it would be an interesting exploration, is when one finds the mind is

wondering, and one has awakened from it, as we were talking about earlier, instead of the mind jumping back to some other object of meditation, to actually rest in the awareness of the awareness. That's like, we've been lost in a thought, and then all of a sudden we wake up. We don't have to move away from that moment of having awakened, of being awakened. And then we're just open to whatever's arising naturally in that moment. And so first, we might become aware, and I would emphasize this, to become aware of the sense of having awakened from being lost just as we were talking earlier.

But then to really be relaxed and simply to be open to whatever is being known and it might be just seeing. You know, we wake up from being lost and we're walking down the street. And then we're just back in the whole field of what's being seen or maybe it's the sound, but without the sense of directing the mind to anything in particular, but rather being more receptive

to whatever is presenting itself. And I think that might take that edge of effort away from those moments of reconnecting, and we are reconnecting with being present without any choice. It's a choiceless open awareness to whatever's most obvious in that moment. So that can get very useful. It's just like going from being asleep in the thought to being aware, without having to do anything specifically, just to rest in the awareness and notice what's being known. Sometimes the phrase, it's already here. Yeah, that in terms of the awareness, yeah, that can just be the reminder to relax into that receptivity. I've initially heard that phrase as it's all right here.

You can also say it's all right here. You can also say is it's all right here all of them accurate. I Give you an A Let's do voicemail number two Hi, my name is Dan and I'm calling from Washington DC One of your podcasts insiders And I wanted to ask about this concept of spaciousness. I hear it a lot in your podcast and in different talks about mindfulness and meditation. And I can understand it in a conceptual or an intellectual level, but I don't know experientially if I know what is meant by that.

I don't know that, you know, I get the idea that you sort of see your skies or mind and the clouds or your thoughts or clouds that pass by, but I find myself focusing so much on that and how is it that it feels very forced. I don't know if the spaciousness is what it feels like, you know, to know that I'm feeling spaciousness in my practice when I sit. is what it feels like, you know, to know that I'm feeling spaciousness in my practice when I sit. And I don't know if there's a very from person to person, is spaciousness for me going to be different than spaciousness

for you or for somebody else. And I guess, you know, is the presence or the lack thereof of this feeling of spaciousness in my practice, or a sign or a mark of where I am in the practice does it come with more practice, understanding more from the experience standpoint than an intellectual standpoint. I've been just practicing for just over a year now and I would love to hear your thoughts on this and I appreciate everything. And then once I can go under, understand how much this has meant to me in my life and how valuable this has,

practice the meditation and being able to listen to the guidance and everything has meant for me. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Keep on listening. Thanks, final. Thanks for the question and the kind of words. Now somebody who can actually answer it. OK, so there was a lot in that question. This could be a whole hour dormant talk, which it won't be. So an interesting question.

First, to just address the question of how I might taste the experience of spaciousness, to get some sense of, OK, what's being referred to by this word, I think one of the easiest ways to settle into that feeling is through meditative listening, just using sound as an object of meditation. So it's just to sit back and be very open and simply let sounds appear and disappear,

you know, in the awareness. That creates a feeling of spaciousness because it's very obvious. We don't have to be doing anything in order to hear. If our ears are working and sounds are in the environment, they're going to be heard. So because it doesn't take any particular effort to know the sound, to know that we're hearing, it's actually quite easy to relax just into that quality of openness, of spaciousness, of mind, and the image of the sky, I think, can be a good one. We just settle back, and the sounds are rising and passing. It's generally easy with sound and with thought, because for the most part, sounds, unless they're exceedingly unpleasant or exceedingly pleasant, it's pretty easy to be quite neutral

with regard to hearing. It's just a sound coming and going and without a lot of reactivity in the mind. And so we could understand spaciousness as being the lack of reactivity. Kind of just to say something that I think may amplify. I think this I might have just made this up myself, but after hearing you talk about the effortlessness of awareness, you sometimes will say, move, just wave your hands slowly from one side of there. How much effort is there in knowing the sensation?

I will actually use that in my practice as a little mantra, especially as like, I noticed maybe I'm leaning into hard, trying to hard, just effortlessness. And then you see, my God, this is just happening. I, all this knowing of hearing or feeling or whatever, just happening, the, the me feeling is just another thing arising in this soup. And that is, that really makes me feel spacious.

Yeah, no, I think that that's another good example and something that I do like pointing out and people find it pretty easy to understand how a simple movement can be known, you know, without any effort, with just moving our arms and feeling the movement. So that would be another way of dropping into that feeling of spaciousness. So there are different levels of exploring what spaciousness means. So what we're talking about is one level of just dropping back into the mind space of being aware of something that's really simple and easeful to be aware of like sound or like the simple movement you know of our arm.

you know, our arm. But on a deeper or a fuller understanding of spaciousness, it really has to do with what I just mentioned, the non-reactivity of mind. And so, it's possible to be spacious in a certain way, even when the mind is cluttered, if we are mindful of the cluttered mind. So, okay, we're seeing all these thoughts are going through, and on the surface it might seem, I'm a long way from spaciousness. But if, in fact, we understand spaciousness as meaning,

just non-reactivity, then we could be non-reactive to whatever is arising, what we could be non-reactive to a perceived lack of spaciousness. It's already here. It's already here. But that, we often miss that because the mind can be focusing on the content of what's arising. You know, or the fact, for example, that there are a lot of thoughts which are carrying us away, rather than focusing on how we're relating to what's arising. That is, are we caught up in it? Are we aversive to it?

Are we just being with all the thoughts as if their sounds passing through? So how we're relating to whatever's happening in a way is a more significant measure of spaciousness than a mind-free of thought, which is its own, that's its own feeling of spaciousness, but it's not limited to that. And so I think we can really practice getting a taste or a feel for a spacious mind by focusing on the relationship to whatever is happening in, and practicing as best we can in the non-reactive being with whatever it is. And so this is one of the benefits, one of the tools that we've talked about.

I think you use in your own practice at times, is that tool of mental noting, where we simply make a simple mental note or label of whatever it is, a hearing, thinking, seeing an image, pain. We were just noting a very gentle, whispering kind of way, you know, I might not just acknowledge this, this, this, this, this. That mental noding really is a methodology for dropping into that non-reactive spaciousness of mind.

So thinking, thinking, thinking, when we're doing that, we're not being tossed about by our thoughts, but it doesn't mean the thoughts aren't there. Thank you for answering those questions. Thank you to the insiders for asking me questions. This is the point in the show where I talk about how great it was to have you here answering those questions. Thank you to the insiders for asking me questions. This is the point in the show where I talk about how great it was to have you here as a guest. I always meet it when I say that, but I meet it especially this time. I would say to you know, it's come become, I hope not, I hope not, something people feel they have to say when they leave these voice mails of it, people say, you know, thank you

for what you're doing or whatever. If listeners you appreciate what I'm doing. This is the guy who helped me do it and continues to help me do it. So I'm very grateful to you on many levels, not just for finally coming on the podcast, but for being comprehensively awesome. So thank you.

That's been a pleasure. Okay, big thank you to Joseph. A couple reminders. I'll repeat myself from the beginning of the show. We've got a bonus meditation from Joseph coming up in a few days that will land in your podcast feed. Another is don't forget that event. I'm doing if you're in the New York City area or if you feel like traveling December 5th. It's a Thursday night Registration is now open. Oh, I also want to mention that my friend Jeff Warren with whom I wrote the book meditation for fidgety skeptics. He's hosting another Meditation for fidgety skeptics retreat, which is going to be November 22nd through 24th. It's in North Carolina

There's a link to that in the show notes as well If you like what we're doing, please share on Twitter or text the episode to your friends or a group of friends. It's a great way to help us grow and we're always looking to do that. As always thanks to the team Ryan Ketzelstein, Mille Johns, Grace Livingston, Lauren Hartzog, and Mike Dubusky, who records all of my intros and outros when I do the Monsatting mornings. And I totally derail him from doing his regular work.

Thank you Mike. I will see you in a couple days with Joseph's meditation and then after that, following Wednesday. Bye. 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.

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