Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 222: How to Become a Regular Meditator (and More) | Alexis Santos

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

While in medical school in the mid-90's, Alexis Santos found himself in the midst of a spiritual crisis. At one of the top medical schools in the country, he felt unfulfilled and disillusioned by the stress and unhappiness around him and in his fellow students. After two years, he changed course and travelled to India, where he was first introduced to insight meditation on a 10-day retreat in the S.N. Goenka tradition. Interested to deepen his meditation practice, he happened across Sayadaw U Tejaniya, an unknown meditation teacher in Burma at the time. Recognizing his good fortune, Alexis decided to stay on, where he ordained as a Buddhist monk for two years. At the encouragement of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Alexis began teaching and in 2016 he completed the Spirit Rock/Insight Meditation Society teacher training program with Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and others. He now teaches meditation retreats at centers throughout North America, Europe and Australia. In this episode, the conversation gets an interesting start with Alexis sharing his views on sleepiness and meditation, and then moving on to his time in Burma with Sayadaw U Tejaniya, the masculine and feminine approach to meditation and habit formation and how to use all our waking hours to practice meditation in daily life. Website: https://www.alexissantos.io/about Alexis courses in the app: https://10percenthappier.app.link/Alexis-Santos Alexis Santos on Dharma Seed: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/525/ Podcast Insiders Feedback Group: https://10percenthappier.typeform.com/to/vHz4q4 Ten Percent Happier Discount: www.tenpercent.com/2020 Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, this is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, before we start an item of business, a little bit of a special offer around the 10% Happier app. I know this is something that the app that comes up quite a bit on the show and it's something I have been

dedicating a huge chunk of my life to. It's why I'm incredibly proud of the team we've built and the teachers, the extraordinary teachers we've recruited. We now have on the, and the four or so years that we've been around, we now have more than 500 guided meditations on topics ranging from anxiety to parenting to focus, a lot of stuff on sleep, a lot of whole section dedicated to sleep, we have a whole section dedicated to sort of mini podcasts, we call them talks of bite-sized little bombs of wisdom that you can listen to on the go, and then of course our signature product are these courses that we do, which combine little video segments, two to five minutes long followed by guided meditations, and we have a ton of

data that show that people who use these courses on the app, it really helps keep them engaged and to help them form an abiding habit. So the offer is that because it's new years and people are interested in forming new habits this time of year, we wanna give you, if you're new to us, 40% off your subscription to the app, you can redeem that at 10%.com slash 2020. 10%.com forward slash 2020. If you don't wanna write it down,

you can just look in the show notes, there'll be a link there. And I also wanna say we do hear from people who worry about the cost. And so I want to mention that if you can't afford this or you know somebody who really could use this but can't afford it, just send us an email to access at 10% dot com. Access ACC ESS at 10% spelled out TNPR-N-P-R-C-E-N-T.com. We'll put this email address in the show notes as well. And, you know, if you don't have the means,

you still have, I believe, the human right to be able to train your own mind and we want to help you do that. So access at 10%.com and let us know. Okay. Our episode this week, latest installment in this series that I'm really psyched about, that we put together around the new year, around forming healthy habits in a way that involves a lot less shame and self-flogulation. This week we're focusing on how to boot up a meditation habit, but our guest, Alexis Santos, has quite a rangel mind. I love this guy, and I consider him a friend. And so I say that really as a compliment that we were able to touch on a lot of issues throughout the course of this interview, including how to form a meditation habit,

but also how to approach the habit formation generally, which he comes at from a really deep, Dharma perspective that added a layer to this often superficial process of habit formation, you know, a little life hacks, et cetera, et cetera. He adds a layer of depth that really kind of threw me back in my seat a little bit as it is incredibly interesting. We talk about the relationship between meditation and sleep. We talk about his time in Burma where he became a monk after having dropped out of med school. And we talk about how to weave meditation

into your daily life. Here we go, Alexis Santos. I was gonna tell you, actually, what, as I was walking up to record this with you, Ryan was telling you something, Ryan, the producer of the show, I was gonna tell you that actually a lot of our app users

are talking to me about how much they love listening to you. And Ryan was in the hallway just rapsodizing about how he uses you to fall asleep and he uses your meditations with his kids to fall asleep. So I don't know if you hear about this from people out in the wild, but I hear about you from our users all the time. That's nice.

I actually do hear from a lot of people, and it's particularly around falling asleep. I think that's a particular skill I seem to have. And it's, it also is the case on retreats as well. And I, I wonder if I'm doing something wrong because people tend to feel pretty at ease. And, you know, in that line between what is real relaxation? And when are we drifting into non-awareness that then goes towards sleep? And it's a fun line to

explore. And it seems like I help a lot of people explore that edge at night. So it's good to hear. So you find that when you're giving Dharma talks, the evening talks during long meditation retreats, that you notice people nodding up? Yeah, or the guided meditations, which is, you know, and that's an interesting place because you're trying to encourage a little bit of the wakefulness. And I think the way in which I like to approach awareness is a real sense of ease and gentleness. In fact, I just was teaching a day-long retreat, and the organizers sent a blog post that someone wrote, wanting me to just read what someone wrote about the day, and one of the things that highlights for them was I encouraged everyone to lie down and to explore being aware of all lying down. And this writer expressed amazement that this would be okay to do in a retreat environment

that you can in fact not only lie down and fall asleep, but even if you're snoring, that that's part of our experience in that moment. And that level of invitation for her was so good to hear. So I hear that kind of thing frequently. I didn't plan to go here first, but since we're here and we're going to be talking about how to form a meditation habit, one of the concerns that I hear from people, one of the many concerns I hear from people who are struggling to boot up a meditation habit is I keep falling asleep.

Right. And we have all these guided meditations on the app and other apps have them too that help you fall asleep through meditation. So what is it? Is sleep bad or good? Right. But the interesting thing is the very same phenomenon of sleep when we're trying to stay awake, for example, on our meditation cushion or on a retreat.

During a sitting, the phenomenon of sleep can feel aversive. We get reactive to falling asleep, and then we sit there and struggling. Then at night, when sleep as a phenomenon isn't happening, you have the opposite reaction, why isn't it happening? And the interesting thing to explore there is just the framing in our mind about and experience conditions our reaction to it. So, this is where I really like to encourage folks when they're practicing, for example, in a more formal way, and you're sitting on your cushion, and you begin to fall asleep, rather than struggling with a sleep, begin to explore, what are my ideas that are operating in the

background that make me resist this experience of falling asleep? What is it like just to experience sleep as, well, maybe the mind and body are tired right now? Can I just feel the sleep? And then on the other end, we're in bed and we're not falling asleep. See what happens when the mind starts to wonder about how much sleep am I getting? How am I going to be tomorrow? What happens when we have those thoughts versus those are actually pretty peaceful to let the body lie here in the warm bed, or fortunately, if you know, to have those kinds of conditions. What does it feel like to be here, lying down, and just the reframing of the views behind the phenomenon of either sleep or not sleep?

We really did discover why we're reacting out of habits of greed and aversion. So wanting a resistance. Yes, wanting a resistance to of the most noxious things you can bring to the meditation party, to the party generally in your mind. But what is the alteration of view that we would bring about? Is it that if I'm sitting and meditating, I'm going boot up my meditation, I'm gonna have a good, whatever, good little boy in my case, and I fall asleep, maybe, or I'm starting to fall asleep,

maybe my view ought to be the background my overall framing of that experience should be, well, if I fall asleep, so what? Right, so what and why isn't it so what? The reason why it isn't so what is because we personalize sleep as something that we don't want to be experiencing or we want it to be happening rather than seeing what is happening as a process that we can be with. That's our whole meditation practice.

How do I be with the changing experiences that we are inevitably going to experience? Right, and we talk about, you know, in meditation practices, we're going to experience the range of pleasant and unpleasant gain and loss, experience, loss of family and there's so many things that we experience.

So our practice isn't about getting what we want. And yet we often think that's going to be something that we're going to be tested when the real test comes. And yet reality is happening all the time. Meaning the reality of this moment, awake or asleep, is another, in a way, training ground to see how am I relating to this moment. Is there really a problem with not falling asleep or if the mind is having a problem at night with not falling asleep, how do I how do I simply be with that? Right. And that's our practices. How do I be

with what is actually happening? And as we understand that attitude in the mind, it opens up in a way, this is where that deep invitation to relax with whatever we're experiencing as the natural unfolding of our practice. And it doesn't mean we don't do anything, but it does mean we begin to have a more skillful relationship to what is arising. And it may just be not falling asleep or falling asleep when we don't want to be, or maybe other challenges in life. And that's what we discover where our edges are, like where do I get triggered, where do I get overwhelmed and reactive.

So in a way, the principles are the same. And yet, oftentimes, we think same. And yet oftentimes we think, well, meditation is about doing something particular, being awake, when in fact, we're really uncovering these deep roots in the mind that become resistant or reactive to this flow of experience, right? The flow of natural phenomenon.

It seems like you're saying, if we, the attitude we should have deliberately, cognitively, in our mind towards sleep when we don't want it, like when we're trying to formally meditate, is no big deal. And the attitude we should have in our mind when we want to fall asleep at night and can't is, there are levels here, but the attitude is the same. It's like, all right, well, maybe I'm not going to fall asleep. What's the worst thing that could happen? And then the deeper move, it seems, in both scenarios is, let's get curious about what's happening in the mind, V's of V,

the presence of something we don't want, or the absence of something we do want. Right. Yeah. And in a way, this touches on the wisdom level of the mind. What do you mean by that? So the, an understanding, our understanding that as we look at our experience over and over again, we do start to have these insights. And in meditation practice, one of the main insights we talk about as seeing our moment to morning experience as phenomenon, as a process that's unfolding. So we normally, when we walk around, could say we're on autopilot to some degree or we're in the sort of sounds judgmental, but we're in like the trans of our

life. So hearing and seeing our thoughts, our body all kind of presents in a story-type way, where we're not really awake to the unfolding processes that are going on. And it's so easy to just miss it. A remarkable thing is it's actually not that hard to notice it. And this is where we often think meditation practice requires hard work. When in fact, and I've always appreciated that it's really just the remembering that is not a habit. When we make remembering to notice the present moment as a habit, we begin to realize, oh being aware actually doesn't require a lot of striving, doesn't require pushing, right? And so that steady awareness

allows us to see this moment to moment phenomenon. And then we start, this is where I was trying to get to, which is that understanding of our experience through the lens that our personal experience are aspects of this mind and body process that are unfolding. We tend to see it through the lens of good and bad. The more that we personalize something, then we want everything to go good and we want to get rid of everything bad. The more we see it as an unfolding process, that we can be aware of worry, of anxiety, of falling asleep, of staying awake, when we

want to fall asleep, and we can see those rhythms as different things that we can actually meet with awareness, see the habits of a version resistance to them, they begin to lose power as something that's going to then take us over as, you know, kind of throw us into a reactive, you know, bad mood or just get upset by whatever's going on. So this is where you see it, you know, as the mind gets a little bit more settled, you see people get more comfortable actually with allowing themselves to fall asleep. And I, one of my personal goals is to be able to be teaching over a treat. So there's

me, you know, the teachers on the day's platform teaching a group, however many people that are there. And maybe I'd be teaching and during a long sitting and giving some guided meditation and then actually be able to fall asleep, myself fall asleep, because that would be a real sign of okayness, right? Because that's one of the things in my teacher that I said within Burma, because he gets translated, there can be these long pauses, and then in between the long pauses,

sometimes you'd hear this deeper breathing and you kind of open your eyes wondering, is he still awake? And then you hear the snoring coming, and there's something really beautiful about seeing someone so at ease, you know, not trying to get it right, but just being with their own reality. I just want to go back and clarify something. Again, this is just for my own understanding. You talked about how we kind of walk around in the world in our traditional mindless mode,

which we're all sort of, we come by honestly, because we have all for it. We're just, the world just looks solid and it's all a movie. It seems like one solid reality. I'm here, you're sitting across the table for me, it's all, and everything's through the lens of my habitual sort of self-centered mode.

Right, right. In meditation, what we're doing is actually getting curious and picking apart the present moment in a really interesting way. mode. Right. Right. In meditation, what we're doing is actually getting curious and look, picking a part the present moment in a really interesting way, like, oh, wow. So there's a lot going on right now. If I pay attention, I can feel my butt on this chair. I can hear the sound of my voice. I can notice maybe there's an arising desire for a pretzel. Right. And picking it apart in that way non-judgmentally is what I think produces the okeness that allows you to fall asleep.

Because then you're not so longer caught up in the story of, oh my God, I'm not sleeping. I'm screwed tomorrow. I have this big presentation. I'm gonna be so tired. I'm gonna screw up the presentation. I'm gonna live under a bridge. That's it.

Right, it's over. So the story disintegrates because we're kind of just getting curious in a really gentle, non-judgmental way about what's happening right now. And there's something, there's a deep relief in that that may produce the aforementioned OK-ness. Is that a bit of summary? Sounds great, sounds great. And I just add that every time we do take care of our mind in that way, that

we're meeting whatever experience that's at night, not able to fall asleep, when we're meeting that. And it is a receptive awareness because picking apart can sound a little dominating or the sport saati. The saati is the poly word and that has a feminine actually in that language kind of characterization. So it's this beautiful, receptive knowing. We know things as they are. We don't have to get in there and necessarily tease them apart. That's what being awake allows us to do is we know where we are knowing what we're experiencing

as we're experiencing it. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up this thing about stereotypically masculine versus feminine approach to things because I'm not an expert on that. But I know that in my own meditation practice, when I'm leaning into hard and trying to be a good clinical meditator. I run into trouble. And when I finally relax or as Joseph Goldstein, my teacher, talks about surrender and just receive whatever is arising, and it sounds a little touchy feeling. It is what it is. Like when you're meditating, if you can just relax and just notice whatever comes up with

a kind of warmth and non-judgmental nature, you're not in if you can just relax and just notice whatever comes up with a kind of warmth and non-judgmental nature, you're not in there trying to pick it apart the way I used traditional masculine language, which I'm glad that you clarified, then somehow the whole thing kind of opens up for you. There's a little expression on the wall at Insight Meditation Society where you use to work. It says something like when you drop. Yes. It says something like, when you drop your expectations, the whole practice opens up for you or something along those lines. Yeah.

So anyway, I just wanted to throw that in. Yeah, that's great. That quality, and it does, it can sound a little, wishy-washy or not, like what's the power of that, but that receptive quality of awareness that becomes more like a mirror or this awakened attention that is able to be with something really just as it is, is the absence of striving.

It's the absence of wanting. It's the absence of needing it to be different. And the way my teacher in Burma and Joseph's also one of my teachers, but this teacher and Burma aside all, he often would tell me, you know, if you're mind, if you are practicing in a balanced and clear way while lying in bed, the body is getting its rest and the mind is getting its rest as well. So then the whole notion of needing to fall sleep begins to change because you can actually feel that sense of ease. And the more you begin to trust that that quality of mind is a really special in a way, it's normal, but it's very special in that sense because now you're getting that taste of what is a moment of freedom, a moment

of deep ease really feel like, and that's restful. So that's why when I'm lying in bed and I, if I'm practicing in a way that feels balancing, I really can, not always, but I can for the most part lie there and be pretty contented and then watch out for those energies when they come in, those habits of worry, which is then my mind starting to think about time, resistance to the being awake or not falling asleep. And I just watch that when that begins to settle down again, what's left behind is a mind that's really peaceful. So is it true that if you practice like that for an extended period of time and don't get that much sleep, it really is totally fine or is actually what he's done is tell you something better.

Right, he's tricking me. Yeah, he's tricking me to being so okay with whatever's happening that you do fall asleep. Yeah, test it out. Because yeah, I don't want to say too much about what can happen on deep, long retreats, but our view of how much sleep is necessary can be a little bit different. I think then what we experience, and this is different, when you're in retreat environment, you're not, the mind's not as stimulated in getting as exhausted. So I want to say that really does apply a little bit more to a retreat environment, but what is a retreat environment?

It's a place where you're giving yourself the opportunity to pay attention in the present moment in a skillful way as you can in a lot more moments during the day. Nothing really prevents us from doing that during our daily life, but it's harder because the container around us life around us the people we're talking to are in supporting You know just because that's not what we're doing, but the environment doesn't remind us. Hey notice what's happening right now But the more that becomes our internal habit You can feel that the day becomes more smooth in a way. There's a sense of being in a certain way greater in greater ease during the day, not as exhausted and overwhelmed, you know, by the time you get to the end of day. But that's a learning process in each day can become in a way a new opportunity to just explore. Let's see how much awareness comes in, you know,

during this next day. I want to go back to something you said earlier because it really ties into habits, which is we get this sense, this actually ties together a couple threads that have come up. We get the sense that meditation needs to be hard work. I'm kind of quoting you here. And that in part is kind of the masculine approach. And this is men and women and everywhere in between all gender's fall into this. All genders fall into this.

The masculine approach of trying to like win at meditation. Right. And yet, all it is on some level, and you kind of got to experience this in practice at yourself in order to get this, is remembering to wake up. And that remembering, by the way, you invoke the word sati, which is the ancient language of Pali from the Indian subcontinent, is the original word for mindfulness, which actually has lots of different translations. But one of the translations is recollecting or remembering.

And there's, that's what's happening as I experienced it in the mind. It's like this, you just get better over time at creating the habit of waking up. And this happens on the cushion. You notice you've been distracted for a while and you wake up in some magical way. And there you are again, you're back with your breath or whatever it is you try to meditate on. And this also happens in life. You're standing online at the supermarket and you're realizing with your breath or whatever it is you try to meditate on. And this also happens in life. You're standing online at the supermarket

and you're realizing you're compulsively checking your Twitter and you're like, wait a minute, actually I can put this away and just tune into whatever's happening right now. So that seems like the habit of mind par excellence. Absolutely, yeah, there are, we can, you know, oftentimes we hear the word habit and I think the associations tend to be somewhat negative

and what your habits and yet any quality of mind, mind and heart, the factors of our mind that are going to be supportive in our life as they are used over and over again and allowed to arise again and again. In a sense, they just become strengthened. So we refer to them as habitual. They're habits of the mind. So if I were to try willfully to follow my breath from the moment I wake up to when I go to bed at night, impossible for me.

I just is no way I can do that. But if I try to support the conditions that allow awareness to continue to rise so that I can sense inwardly, what does it feel like when awareness is present? And then during those periods where I'm more caught up into experiences, the thinking mind or just lost very little awareness present. As I recognize that, so there's a knowing and a familiarizing myself with the presence, the absence of awareness or what enables awareness to come back and really appreciate the difference when awareness returns. Trusting in that process that as awareness becomes natural in that sense of having momentum,

I can feel it. Then awareness more and more likely can follow me wherever I go. I walk and then the awareness starts to follow. You're seeing, and if you've made a little bit of a habit of being aware of seeing, then awareness can be there as you see or as you hear, you mentioned hearing the sound of your voice, whatever it is that you begin to include in the awareness, increasingly that becomes the habit of the mind. And there's a, I think there's a phase, could be a phase shift in our practice where you

need to put in some personal effort to remind yourself Well, maybe I need to return to the breath or the body to reconnect with something clear and Then I think what happens as you get more comfortable with that to really explore what is needed what conditions are needed right now For awareness to return and I think that Is where we start to mature in our practice. And again, that's a little bit that wisdom factor that understands what conditions are necessary. And as you were mentioning that masculine or dominating striving energy that so much of us have taken in because of our times, our culture, which is unless I'm really striving

and trying to do something, it's not going to work. And this understanding actually is an understanding of what are the conditions that are needed to drop into the moment, like one drop of dye into a clear glass, one drop, and it just seeps into the whole container. So in the same way, the mind is like that as well. One reminder can be enough and then let go and just see what happens now that I've brought in the conditions and it may be just allowing the intention to be aware in the present moment and the awareness returns.

In that way, you're starting to trust the quality of awareness to work, rather than me being aware, you're beginning to trust awareness to actually function and let it do its job, which is to be awake to know, to know our feelings, you know, our moods, to know our body, whatever it is, you know, in the present moment. And I, what I like to often say is, it's actually not that hard to know your mind, for example. Most people know generally if they're feeling agitated, overwhelmed, stressed, or at ease, or even just not knowing that, not very clear what their emotion is, that's also easy to know. That's why like so many people can die, die are so well. And then they sit down to meditate because you've kind of put in

to a box what awareness should look like. And then the sit down to meditate because you've kind of put in to a box what awareness should look like. And then the mind starts to struggle to know when in fact knowing is a very natural function of the mind. We can know a lot about our own experience. So I'd like to invite in that sense of ease of knowing what's happening and that it doesn't take that hard work. But we forget. So we get caught up and caught up and experience basically means the awareness begins to diminish a bit. And you can feel that as you go about the rhythms of a wear or not a wear, all right? It just keeps going up and down. You, this emphasis on natural awareness that I'm hearing from you that that just simply knowing what's

happening in one's mind right now or just being in a aware and a raw way of whatever you're feeling in your body without getting caught up in the story around it being aware in a non-judgmental, com receptive way of the fact that there is a version right now you're experiencing a version in the face of a feeling of sleepiness on the meditation cushion that you might want or the lack thereof when you actually do want sleep. All of that can happen and be separate from being caught up in the story of experience that we're so often which is wrapped up in our monkey mind, the voice in our head. This emphasis that you have on the effortless nature of just being aware.

It seems to me that you got this from the aforementioned sciadah utesiania. Yes. Yeah. I'll be interested. Maybe that's just a way for us to dive into how you got interested in meditation, who this burmese, how do you hook up with this burmese master and how that informs the way you teach generally now. Yeah, so let's see, I have far back to we wanna go. Your call. Yeah. H2. Two, so two, I had just moved back from Brazil.

I was born, so anyways, and then the next 45 years I've been here. So you're 47 now. I am 47. You're your young man. It would compare to me by one year. I am curious though when when when post two and pre 47 did you get interested in meditation and how did that lead you to burn? Yeah, so my main interest started to happen around the time. I was in medical school in my 20s and could say was experiencing somewhat of a medical school in my 20s and could say was experiencing somewhat of a that sense of spiritual crisis where in my words now would be like really asking some of those questions like what, where am I going? And even seeing some of the role models that were ahead of me and just wondering is that

the life that I'm wanting to move towards? And I didn't at that time, I just didn't see a tremendous amount of wisdom or clarity settledness. And I think there was just an under, there was a sense of, I really want to understand what is it that brings us a sense of fulfillment and happiness. And I began feeling that even being in medical school just seeing that system of like a revolving door of healing to some degree, but then not getting to some deeper roots of real suffering. And I didn't have that framing at that time. I didn't know about the dormant. So I left and

met up with my two brothers that were having similar journeys at that time, not exactly what my parents had planned for us. And we met up in India. And that's where through searching, I came across meditation. That was the first exposure I had to attend a retreat in the Gwankha tradition. It's a certain style of... S.N. Gowenka, Indian businessman,

who learned how to meditate while doing business in Burma. And then created a worldwide, he's now deceased, but he created a worldwide network of free meditation centers, which, you know, he teaches basically through video and audio tapes. Exactly. Exactly. And it was a really significant first retreat. And I spent the next two years really deeply immersed in that style of practice. But because it's taught through the video and audio, I didn't, I wasn't really able to ask the questions that were coming up in my mind. And I needed, I really needed to hear from someone who had their own personal practice and could share their wisdom.

So when I was in India at that time, someone told me about a teacher in Burma who had just passed away, Shwaiwum inside all, and he had left behind a primary student who was a young teacher, and that's Saito Artesania. And when I heard a brief description about him and his life, he had been married, had one kid, had been a business person, and then became a monk, but it was mostly through his practice and daily life where he gained his insights. And I was really curious about practice as a way of living. How do you actually integrate these teachings?

So it's not something that gets compartmentalized in a certain time of day. But how is it something that we engage with so that our insights and wisdom are growing all the time? And that's, there was just a little description of him from this person I met and I thought, I'm going to go there. So I went there, became a monk with him for a couple years. And then it was after that that actually I came in touch with the insight world back when I came back to America. And then a couple years later, he was really discovered Utesiania, Sido, Utesiania was discovered and invited to come to the US. And it was his coming to the US that I then went to insight meditation society and very mass and that Joseph Goldstein, for

example, and then slowly moved into the teaching as well. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, pure honor, and what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you.

But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly the lows of their careers We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff Like if you had a sandwich named after you what would be on it? Follow life is short wherever you get your podcasts You can also listen listen to ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Million questions I want to ask based on everything you just said. Okay. One of the questions

are you... Pick two. No, I'm going with a million. The, you talked about the insight world. The insight world is just basically, I think shorthand for American, TeraVada slash, insights, slash of a pasta, a teaching in the United States. The rereading lights in that are Sharon Salisbury, Joseph Goldstein and Jack Cornfield. They've set up two meditation centers, one in Barry Massachusetts,

where you worked and the other in Marin County called Spirit Rock and Sharon Joseph for now the founding teachers on the 10% happier app in the world. Right. So you worked at IMS, and I understand that one of your jobs was to answer calls that came in over the red phone. Yes. So the red phone is like the panic phone for people who are freaking out.

Yes. And for a while, you were the person of the other end of the line. I was. And actually, Joseph Goldstein, he wanted to be able to abuse that system. So if he was out on a bike ride, he could just pick up, call that number, actually. And so he could just feel secure that wherever he was, he knew that someone was on the other end of that phone and come to his rescue. But my real responsibility was shared with someone else was in the retreat environment,

to be available for folks that may be experiencing some challenges as they were deepening in concentration, for example, that could trigger some sense of instability or fear and just needing a little bit more human connection to help stabilize and normalize that process so that there was a sense of ease again. So that's part of the support system that's there for these more in-depth retreats. Thank you for answering that. The other thing I wanted to dive into, I'm actually only going to pick two, is the emphasis

that Uteja Nia, the Burmese teacher, and let's just let aside the set aside that in fact you became a monk for a while, that's kind of a big deal, I'm sure your parents were freaking out about that. Yeah. He was doing so great. He was in med school. He shaved his head and moved to Burma, or moved to Burma and shaved his head.

I'm not sure what the order of events was. I actually tried to keep all that quiet. And both of my brothers eventually came and became monks as well. Really? They did. And we didn't tell them until probably two years after. What do they think you're on a cruise?

Now, they knew where we were. Uh, and we were at, that we were in retreat environments. But I think giving that information probably would have been further away from the truth in their minds. I see. Because it would have been filled with all kinds of ideas that actually would have been even less true than just Describing in a general way what we were doing which was the real essence of what was going on Right, they would have thought you were like Franciscan monks or something. Yeah, or just I mean Some cult I mean, so I'd really joining really lost, you know really really lost Because there's because there's no, there's

no, can, no framework for them to understand what is a Buddhist monk and why would one do that. Or to know that you can ordain, take the robes for a temporary period of time and then wear your hair back and back in the daily life. Day of the life is where I wanted to do that. Yes. So I'm, you became very interesting in the idea, although you became a monk and were doing deep retreat, you also were really interested in the idea, although you became a monk and were doing deep retreat, you also were really interested in his emphasis on daily life. And I wanted to say a couple things about that. One is, you teach an excellent course inside the 10% happier app on meditation and daily

life. I call it a sort of free-range mindfulness where you're waking up in the midst of doing things like driving, even you taught how to be awake while using your iPhone or Android, which I think is not interesting. So all that can be seen in the app. But I wanted to just have you hold forth on that a little bit here, because eventually I will be a good interviewer and bring us to what we're supposed to be talking about, which is habits. But when forming this habit of meditation, the idea that you can practice off the cushion in your life and take it into the world of you. I think it's a really powerful one and can support your formal practice too. There's a kind of double helix self-reinforcing thing in my mind.

But can you hold forth on that? Sure. I mean, this is actually one of the things that, again, from Utagenia, side-auutagenia, what he would say, he would ask this question to people, let's do a little bit of math. So let's say you, let's see how many hours a night do you sleep? I'm not good enough. Best case, seven. Seven, seven, eight. Okay, and then you used to do, I don't know if you're still doing it, how many hours are

you practicing? I used to do two, now I do one. Okay. So that leaves how many other hours in the day? Yes, 16. So what are you doing with your mind during those 16 hours? Checking Twitter. Exactly. Great. So you've probably gotten really good at Twitter. It's like you can do it almost in your sleep, right? Yes, I can, I might have. And it's nothing wrong with that. That might not be called what's a phrase onward leading, right? That sense of then we all have our things that we do and

there's nothing wrong with checking Twitter and doing our life obviously we live in rich lives. But how we're using our mind during the day has an influence. And this is why oftentimes you see this almost everyone they come on retreat as a retreat teacher, you know, it's a privilege to then see the nature of the mind, anyone's mind. When it's cold from daily life, you come on retreat and you spend the first few days kind of like lifting up the carpet and just looking what's under there and say, oh, God, I don't know if I want to look there.

And this is where it's a lot of doubts come in. The momentum of awareness is pretty, it's a cold or not, not really going yet. It's inevitable if you just are in that kind of environment and this is a retreat environment, but any situation we are allowing awareness to arise again and again, awareness gains momentum. That's what developing the habit of awareness is really about. So when we say formal practice, what we're really doing in formal practices

we're setting up the conditions that the quality of awareness can keep arising more frequently than it otherwise would have, right? So then what is it that enables us to do that during these other 16 hours during the day? For me, one of the big changes was even just being told as possible, because my practice had been really about a very specific, very disciplined way of using my attention, which was tracking my body sensations. Which is the tracking of the body sensations or body scanning. A body scanning is the one of the hallmarks of S.M. Goenka's style. Exactly. And there's so much you can learn from that. And it's a very effective practice.

One of, so just as an example, what was happening at one point in my practice was I was tracking really well the body sensations. But in the background, I began to get a little bit depressed. This is in the midst and I hadn't really suffered from much depression, but there was a sense of really deep despair. And I'd gone through some challenges because throwing up, you know, throwing my life into complete disarray with no direction. When everything was so clear and certain in medical school, then you let it go for what? I didn't even know what I was looking for. I had fortunate enough that I found really what was at the heart of what I wanted to find.

So there was a time in my practice where I was practicing diligently, but lurking in the background where these other qualities of my experience, but they weren't a way of being blocked because it wasn't what my quote unquote practice was about, which was tractive sensations and be sweeping through my body, scanning. And when I met Utejaneo, my teacher, one of the many things that he just said right away, was allow the awareness to be more natural. You already feel confident in being aware, let yourself know the feelings of depression

as a mental energy, notice more. So in a way, let the awareness open. Don't keep it constricted. So even just hearing that we can do that. So if we get good at being with the breath, good with being with the body, and then you begin to notice something else, the way to work with that is just in a way begin to appreciate that you're knowing more. I think that even Joseph says something like this, rather than being a distraction is now I'm noticing something more.

You can still return to the primary thing, but as you let the awareness continue to know more and more, over time what it begins to feel like is that awareness is accompanying our life as we're going through it in a really natural way. Not some heavy handed top down doing it, but actually awake and inside our moods, our motions, our thoughts. And that's an unfolding process. I can speak about it easily. Obviously, that just takes, and all these things are always easier said than done. It's a practice.

Don't we need to go through the phase shift you mentioned before? It seems like at the beginning of a meditation habit, it's going to kind of suck. It's, you know, I sometimes joke it. It's a skill. If I had to do a flute right now, you're not going to be playing jethro tall right, unless you had years of practice, but you haven't had years of practice, you're going to make weird high-pitched noises. Right. And so with meditation, you sit down, there's going to be some efforting and some awkwardness. And but I think at some point, I think what you're saying is you realize

that this ability we have to be aware, not cut up in our stories, but just kind of aware of whatever's happening right now, just starts to arise naturally. Yes. And by the way, you happen to pick the one instrument I did play for a long time, not quite at the level of Jath the one inch mint. I did play for a long time not quite at the level of jathurotel But I did play the flute

But yeah, so like that like anything that we're we're gonna get more and more familiar with You know, and it's going to feel awkward at first not quite sure what we're doing This is why we often start with something really grounding like the body, like the breath. My encouragement and what really helped me so much was, as you continue to do that, in a way to frame in your mind, the possibility that the awareness can know whatever parts of your experience starts to present itself. So we don't have to think, I have to come back to something. You can recognize what is it that I'm actually experiencing right now.

And it may be that the mind is spinning in doubt. It may be that it's struggling with staying awake or, but as we begin to include that experience as well and then return to something that feels grounding. We get more and more used to the sense of, oh, actually, I can generally, in a general way, notice if I feel relaxed or agitated. So that was one strong encouragement that the my teacher would offer. Me and other students was, it's not that hard to know your general state of mind. You could use that as you're moving about the day and how many times might you notice

that. It's meaningful because you can really feel some way in which maybe you're getting tight mentally and the body follows, body's feeling agitated and the mind gets triggered. If you notice that and then just notice what happens next, there can be this sense now of awareness meeting this moment and sometimes those clenched aspects of our mind can soften. But basically, what I was really trying to emphasize in just in this encouragement is to just see the possibility in those moments, any moment that you have during the day, is it possible to bring in just one more moment and one more moment.

Like that, if we keep doing that, you will find over time there are so many activities where awareness starts to creep in, right? And so that's the framing. And it just needs encouraging. I think the more we hear that that's possible, and the more parts of our experience in a way that gets named, that you can be aware of your hearing, you can be aware of seeing, you can be aware of the mind

that is worrying and anxious or doubting or joyful, you can hear the sound of your voice, as you mentioned earlier, anything that allows awareness to arise again is the development of our awareness. And the more awareness shows up, the more skilled we are at actually recognizing what are skillful habits of our mind and what are unskillful. And we just need to be present enough to feel that, right? And that's the whole transformative power of the practice.

Right, and that in itself is a habit. Right. So let's talk habits for a second. Yeah, great. I want to go deep, you have, because in recording this course, the new course, the old one is the meditation in real life sort of off the cushion stuff. But the new course, you're one of the stars of is our habits course.

And recording this, you actually brought my understanding of habits to a really much higher plane. Before we go into the kind of deeper stuff, let me just ask some really basic blocking and tackling questions around people, for people who are looking to boot up a meditation practice. Because I get asked these a lot, I know what my answer is, but I want to hear what your answer is. So how much should I do if I'm looking to start a meditation habit?

Is there a time of day I should do it? Where should I do it? What do you say to those sort of basic logistical questions? Yeah, I tend to. I mean, everyone's personality is different. And we are all, so we all, in a some way, tend to articulate the things that have worked for us or we know the other person.

So it's good just to listen to a lot of different advice and just see what resonates and play with that. So I tend to encourage in some ways like really low expectations, or to set up the conditions so that you get these, I think maybe use this phrase, of these small wins. So let's say at the end of a retreat oftentimes people wonder, how do I keep going? This feels so good now. How do I keep going? And there's all these expectations, while I'm going to practice, you know, an hour in the morning, an hour at night, or long periods of

time. And I like to just generally recommend, even just think 30 seconds, even one breath. Like have a spot where you can just go and that little bit of touching into a practice where you can just begin to settle on, even if it's just 30 seconds. What I find, and I've heard this from a lot of people, is that tends to set up the conditions where there's nothing blocking you from going to do that. So when our awareness doesn't, when practicing mindfulness or awareness feels like a chore, the mind's not happy to really go and do it. When it feels that it's something that I want to do this, because I feel really good, it

gives me a moment to just check in, Not is something I've got to accomplish. That kind of momentum can keep building day after day. So that's one big thing. At the beginning, isn't it always going to feel like a chore? No, I don't think so. I don't think it has to. I think there's ways in which you can approach the practice with the knowledge that it's okay for the mind to think, to drift, to feel agitated. If we normalize that, not normalize in the sense that it's just normal, but that you know this is the nature of the mind.

And this is the essence of the practice, is this is your discovering, wow, look at this. I thought this mind is something I can just control. When in fact, when I sit down or lie down to do some practice, it just slips off into wherever it wants to go to. So when we have that understanding that that's actually the practice, and then when the awareness returns again, you appreciate the experience of being aware again, in a way that takes off the pressure. And it's natural.

Yes, it's natural that as we begin to engage in anything, we bring in these old habits of striving, of doing it as a chore. Those are just the habits that we can actually recognize and see. Because there is a way of allowing and inviting ourselves to do, to practice being aware in the present moment, without it feeling like a heavy-handed, heavy thing to do. We're going to bump into heaviness and struggle. That's habits of mind, that's natural. But the basic framing is, awareness is a really pleasant experience, and it allows us to know the present moment. So how do we approach it in that way? You said set the bar low.

If I'm listening to this and I've never meditated before, but I've, everybody's telling me I should meditate or I've long wanted to meditate. I've heard about the science. So are you saying the bar is as low as one, try to pay attention to one breath a day or would you amp me up toward a minute or two minutes? Yeah, let's go with, let's do at least, I think everyone can deal with a minute. And we have a lot of one minute meditation on the app, yes.

Yeah, the idea is not to be triggering the aversion that's in the mind that then would not lead us to want to do it again. But if you sit down and just experience a little bit of, oh, this is interesting. I can watch my mind for a few seconds, and then it runs off. That's fascinating. But then you're not pushing yourself to make it happen,

where then you maybe start struggling and feeling like this is, you know, you just get tied up into a knot. For some of us, that's fine. It's sort of, we love the challenge. For other people, you know, it it's like I already have enough struggle I don't I'm not practicing in order to create more stress and you know overwhelm So this is where you know partly going back to that sense of D.B.s The invitation to relax, you know, I like to encourage people really

Allow yourself to just lie down and if you're really deeply tired let yourself fall asleep Fall asleep, when you wake up, then allow the awareness to return. Then see if you drift out away again. As you get that kind of rest, the mind has its own natural wakefulness, and that starts to show up. So that sort of relationship to being aware, I think brings a sense of ease and curiosity that doesn't become a burden, like, of something else I've got to do and get right. I think I'm told. Great.

What about issues around time and place and all of that? Right. Some people are quite militant about first thing in the morning. I don't believe that to be true. If you're a morning person, great. Yeah. But what's your take? I agree with you. I think I love when people say that. Yeah, you know all this stuff. I could be asking the questions. So I think just knowing yourself,

when do you have that little bit of time to take a few minutes? It could be in the morning, right when you wake up, it could be in the evening. A lot of people talk about that using the bathroom, if you're like a mom in the only place, or dad, or you know, stay at home, dad, where you need that moment, just yourself, some people in the bathroom is like their refuge, just go hide out in the bathroom for a few minutes, time to check in.

I think there's so many small moments during the day that can be used skillfully. And it's not about doing something intense. It's just actually taking advantage of that particular situation. You're riding into that elevator or standing in line, shopping. Any of those moments where the mind isn't just being drawn into the doing mode, it has a chance to be more clear and awake. It's a great opportunity.

Yeah, so I mean, I definitely agree with, and this goes back to our discussion of best sort of on the go meditation as opposed to quote unquote formal meditations, tough word because it makes it not a little more daunting than it needs to be, but and that everything else is informal. Yes, and not real. Of course. Right, so that's a, not maybe the best sort of dualistic structure, but anyway, I still have the view, but I want to see if you think I'm right about this, that in order to bring meditate, mindfulness, awareness out into the world, it really does help to have a quote unquote formal practice, if only a brief one.

Yeah, I mean, it, right, it helps mean, it helps the steadiness and the stability of the mind. When you're sitting still lying down, eyes are closed, there's just less triggers on the conceptual mind. Stories about what we need to do, what our responsibilities are. All of the I, quote unquote, I'm making, me making me making mine making like my chores, my responsibilities, my family, my job, my bills, so much of the minus gets kicked up that it triggers our reactive tendencies. When we're settled, eyes are closed, we're not interacting with the world around us.

In a way, that is a training for awareness to get stronger to be with our experience as we're having it. And yet, if we only practice in that way, we never really get skilled at noticing, what is our mind doing in conversation? When we're moving around, seeing other people, what are our mind doing, you know, in conversation, when we're moving around seeing other people, what are the different biases, prejudices that come to our mind, which are natural as we see different people. Mindfulness allows us

to be aware of that, to grow from it, to learn about all these different aspects of our mind, right? And there is just so much to learn about during the course of one day. I mean, literally if we had to take this sort of like that Groundhog's day scenario in our own life, that movie, you know, we just live the same day over and over again. If we just had our own day to live again and again,

it's amazing how many things that we would really deeply discover about one day that if we were to live it with more awareness the next day and the next day and more wisdom seeing, you know, the nature of experience and cause and effect processes that are going on how one thought leads to an emotional reaction, how the emotions lead the body to feel a certain way. There's so many rich experiences that are happening, but it all happens in a way that leads to an emotional reaction, how the emotions lead the body to feel a certain way. There's so many rich experiences that are happening, but it all happens in a way that we're

not deeply awake to them. Yes, we're stuck in the story. Exactly. So, you bring this same, I think, really helpful attitude to this course we've just done on habits. By the time this posts, the course will be on the app already, but as we're recording this, I've just finished working with our team to write the scripts, and so I'm kind of deeply immersed in the material. And

what I love what you have brought to this along with a Kelly McGonacol, who's also teaching on the course, is you've elevated a process habit formation. I think is usually characterized. I'll speak for myself. Right. I think it's somewhat universalizable. That's not a word, but whatever. It's usually I think characterized by a lot of frustration, feelings of futility, humiliation and shame.

And also, maybe it's superficial. Like we're picking habits, you know, just because of my case, maybe I want the abs. I had my 30s or whatever. Yes, I'm sure you can relate to that. And then maybe we're taught hacks on how to do it. And can you do the four minute workout and all this stuff. But actually, this course is taking it and really there's so many ways in which you and Kelly

make it a deep dive that is fascinating, invigorating, and scalable, maybe on habits, just like to the rest of our lives. So one of the things, there's an exchange in the course, at least I hope it makes it into the course, where you and I are talking about the shame that often kicks in when we fall off the wagon. And so, say, for example, for me,

I've been working on mindless eating, although I've actually gotten quite a bit better as a consequence of doing this course at mindless eating. And I noticed, he said to me something like, you know, it's important to see at its root that these habits are all impersonal patterns and forces in the mind. And I was like, well, dude, when I eat a bunch of Oreos,

and I've got it all over my face and on the ground, and I look around, and I feel the shame and disgust, that feels really personal. What would your response, I don't wanna make you re-answer exactly. But I would love to hear you hold forth on how actually, no, no, we can look at these patterns of shame as like impersonal patterns.

Right. Yeah, I mean, this is, in some ways, pointing at the very reason why we can be so deeply unhappy with ourselves or with life is because we do take it to be ourselves. And I think that whole framing of, as we see it as habits, that the habits of greed, of wanting, of craving, of a version, resistance, judging, comparing all of those, when we see him as habits, and we frame it that way, and I know it to be true for myself, is actually get curious. I get interested in how powerful they are, how easy it is, even when I have the intention,

we can say this right now, by the time this launches, it's gonna be, I think, the new year, so happy new years. And everyone can, we have this idea, of the new years, let's have a new year's resolution. So it's so easy to make a resolution. And if we were in charge of our mind, you just need to make one resolution. It's done. And yet, it just doesn't work that way. Because these are grooves that are worn into the mind. They're patterns. So when the conditions are there, they get triggered.

This is why if there's someone that you, let someone that you've had a difficult experience with someone, all you need is the image or the word, one little thing in the mind and the mind goes into that dynamic. That is conditioned. Because of the past and the relationship that groove it could say gets put in place. So when you have a personality that gets triggered into anger, mine has been historically, and I still carry some elements, but a lot of fear of public speaking. We've talked about this a little bit. Now it's personally, we've talked about it. Yes, personally.

And that fear has turned, that's going down, and now it's more the anxieties of how are people going to see me? In approval, am I just an imposter? So those kinds of patterns are there. When I see them as patterns, they're actually totally fine. When I don't see them as patterns, and I'm doing this, I'm trying to improve myself, I'm basically meeting these qualities with a version, with judgment.

And that almost blocks the nature of insight to arise. Hard to be really deeply curious and to be aversive at the same time. The nature of insight. Right. What do you mean by that? To be able to see something as it is. To see that it's impersonal. To see that it's changing. To see that if you actually look for the pattern itself, you're not

going to find anything deeply there. Any kind of understanding, any seeing something clearly is an insight. Just even recognizing that it has an arc, it has a rising, start small, maybe gets triggered quickly, arises. We tend to think when something is really strong in our experience, that it's now who we are and it's permanent. And yet, when we're not paying attention, it goes away, and now we're into our next identity, our next self.

We're at a party and things are different or, right? And when I even see these rises and falls of experience, that we get so swept up into patterns of shame, of cravings, of whatever it is that we experience, they become these identities and we miss the insight that they actually do just when the conditions are there they boom like they rise and Then when the conditions change they also go they're not an identity and right away you see them as as impermanent as well So having the curiosity about the nature of it allows us to have less shame about

What they truly are. I've been around teachers in Burma and in Thailand as well. I don't know how kosher this would be in the Western world, but we actually have had teachers encourage people who drink too much. Alcohol, and they encourage them to mindfully. I want to be careful around this because I know these patterns are very deep They're very very difficult to work with but then and those can do those settings If they're already doing it. So let's say one is already doing it. How do you bring awareness and interest? To it if you're already going to do it

So instead of the shame and just rushing through it and trying to hide it from yourself, how do you be right in the midst of it and crumble the Oreo cookies all over your face and you know and do that process. So one antidote to shame that we talk about, I mean it's a the dis-utility of shame is a huge theme in this course that we've just posted. And one of the antidotes that you talk about, I think with it, I should say, this is going to key right into your pattern. You did a great job talking about on the course. One of the antidotes is curiosity, really just being willing to check it out.

Another is deliberately kind of sending yourself some warmth. This phrase, self-compassion, which some people, myself included, have a little bit of a problem with, just because it sounds maybe soft or gauzy, but in fact, it's incredibly powerful. So can you talk a little bit about the utility of self-compassion within the context of habit formation? Yeah, well, and to be transparent, it's not something specifically I've used in my own practice directly,

or framed in those terms. But if I look at how I was relating and how I was encouraged and being taught, right by my teacher at that time, it was completely infused with self-compassion. And that, so that is that relationship that whatever is happening, that it really is okay. And so the framing that I was being really encouraged to use was just really see it as nature. Nature. Nature, a natural process, an average

normal relationship to nature, right? And oh, it's nature. It's like anything that exists in the natural world are, are heart-mind processes, right? The habits that are there, they's nature. It's like anything that exists in the natural world are our heart and mind processes, right? The habits that are there, they are nature. They are natural processes. That's a radical idea. I mean, it's, I think, inorugably true. How could it not be nature? It's all nature, right? But we think of our own hidden idiosyncrasies, thought patterns, and we may be kind of half aware of as absolutely in no way related to an oak tree. Exactly. But thinking of it as nature, that brings it right back to depersonalizing it.

Yeah. And then it's much more interesting way of engaging. And it's much more skillful and wise way of being what truly is a cause and effect process. There is something going on, moment to moment, and then greater rises, or shame arises, or wanting. Whenever pattern comes in, seeing it as that is deeply compassionate. Because our normal response is, I should be different. I don't want experiences. I want out. I want it to stop. Here I go again. God, I can't do this with all my best intentions, which is still that's that whole tendency that all of us have. It's universal. We personalize

it as our identity. We don't see it as a process that's unfolding. So my invitation then is, in whatever way for anyone, for you as a meditator, then is, how do you explore being with your own tendencies of mine? Here we're talking about the, those habits of mine that are rut, you know, that lead to suffering. How do you be with them so that you can actually accompany

them as long as they're there, as long as they're going to be present so that you can learn about them. Each time there's a little bit more awareness alongside a deep rut. What's happening is you're building a new, a new pattern. And if you continue to let that deepen,

at some point, they're on par with each other. The reason why we fall into habits that we're not wanting to fall into is that when those conditions are there, the factors of mind that would be stabilizing, our awareness, our clarity, are not yet able to match that. So that's why it's gonna take a lot of patience. And the more you understand this,

just gonna take patience, that whatever it is that you're caught up into, if you continue to be curious and bring some awareness to it. Patients, awareness, see that it leads to suffering again and again, slowly our own wisdom starts to choose differently. It's inevitable in a way when you really pick up something that burns with enough clarity and enough times,

you'll start to recognize this does hurt. But that needs to be done also with these other factors that there's an alternative. What can I do? If all we do is experience the activation with shame, we just keep deepening the desire to get out. Then we get out by diving back into the very habit. Oftentimes, we want to escape because it makes us momentarily feel good. These little satisfaction that we get from things that we're craving or just spacing out. We'll cover it in vast amount of territory here. Before we go, if people want to learn more about you, spacing out. We'll cover it a vast amount of territory here, which would be awesome.

Before we go, if people want to learn more about you, how can they do the obviously they can go check out the app because you're all over that. Where else on the interwebs can we learn about you? The main place is my website, which is eluxicantos.io, which I have never used, really. So there's nothing there other than my retreat schedule. Well, that's valuable. Right. So much my retreat schedule is on there and then 10% happier in terms of listening to my

meditations. And Dharma seed is that. Yeah. Dharma seed.org. We'll put a link to this. If you go on there, it has all these Dharma talks from retreats that are run at centers all over the place. If you type in Alexis's name, you can a bunch of his Dharma talks will come up and you can check them out. Just in closing, big thank you. I know I'm going to trigger

your pattern a little bit here, but you do a great job with this and it's really fun to sit and talk to you and lucky to have you on the app and as a friend. Mike, why stand? Great to be here. Big thanks to Alexis. And check him out. He's actually one of the stars of this new course we're doing on the 10% happier app around healthy habits. And it's a whole course dedicated to how to approach making life changes in a way that

takes it out of the realm as I was discussing in the intro, out of the realm of sort of life hacks, superficial stuff, and brings it into pretty deep water. And also, I talked about this earlier, too, because it reduces the amount of self-flatulation that often is part of changing habits, at least in my case. Great course, really, really proud of that work, and proud to have a Lexus be part of it. Let's do the voicemails. Once again, this week, we've got a ranger, Ray Hausman, who's the head of our coaching team at 10% happier, very experienced meditation teacher. So she's gonna answer the questions. Here we go with voicemail number one.

Hey, Dan, it's Tracy. I have a question. So how come in my insight meditation center that I go down to or some of the online podcast, the Buddhist never talk about sex? Do they have sex? Is it good sex? I'm down to or some of the online podcasts, the Buddhists never talk about sex. Do they have sex? Is it good sex? I'm curious to know.

Thanks, bye-bye. Great question. And I agree with you. This is not a commonly spoken about topic. For sure, Buddhists have sex. I'd say that there's some reason to suggest that Buddhists may even have more potential to enjoy sex, simply because we're practicing being aware of our experience as we're in it.

So, as we're engaging in sex, we may be more aware, more present for it. With regard to your question, you may find Martin Aill words, talk the Dharma of Sex to be a good resource in your explorations. So you can find that by looking up Martin, M-A-R-T-I-N, A-L-W-A-R-D, and the title is The Dharma of Sex. I hope that's helpful. Thank you, Ray. Here's voicemail number two.

Hi, Dan. My name is Lauren, Ray. Here's voicemail number two. Hi, Dan. My name is Lauren. Thanks for taking my voicemail. This morning I was meditating and a coughing fit came over me. One part of me kept thinking that I should push through and keep meditating. And another part of me was thinking, this is crazy. Let's take a break, get a lozange, try to get a little later. My eyes were watering.

There was the incestent tickle at. My eyes were watering, there was the incisent tickle at the back of my throat even after the cough subsided, it was really distracting and uncomfortable and I was wondering what would you have done? Thanks. This is a great question, thanks for asking. And what's fundamental to understand here is that when we're practicing meditation, it's ultimately not about the breath or even being able to pay attention to the breath. We're interested in observing our experience just as it's arising in the moment, whatever that experience is, may be a coughing fit, and seeing how the mind relates to it so that we can learn and ultimately begin to make more skillful choices as we navigate our lives.

Coffing is natural. It happens as we go about our daily life and it can happen when we are practicing meditation. What happens in the mind when we cough? How many of us have explored that? Do we relate to coughing as though it's a distraction from what we think we ought to be doing? Coughing is the experience that's happening in the moment. Just as a thought or a breath is an expression of nature, coughing is also an expression of nature.

We can learn to relate to coughing and experiences like it, as opportunities for exploration in the practice. If we're having a coughing fit, we don't want to try and have a more contained breath so that we can return to our meditation practice because we're supposed to be paying attention to the breath. We want to let the body have its natural expression and observe. Coffing in the after-effects of coughing, like having a tickle in a throat, are often uncomfortable. So the mind's tendency might be to try and get away from these experiences. When we have a practice-oriented attitude toward our experience,

we can fold aspects of our experience that may initially seem like distractions into our field of observation and learn from them, and the mind's reactions to them. What does the body feel like when it's coughing? What happens in the mind when there is a tickle in the back of the throat? What does the body feel like when it's coughing? What happens in the mind when there is a tickle in the back of the throat? What is the experience of the mind like when we feel like we are distracted from our real practice because we're suddenly having a coughing fit?

These are all potential areas of exploration. And I hope this is helpful and offers you some ways to explore this experience going forward. Thanks again for your question. Big thanks to Ray for pitching in this week. Really appreciate that. And before I go, I just want to say, as I always do, thanks to our team. And I hope this doesn't come off as a pre-functory.

This is, I really feel, a lot of gratitude to the people, incredibly incredibly smart people who do a lot of hard work making this show better than it deserves to be given who the host is on a weekly basis. Ryan Kessler Samuel John's Grace Livingston Lauren Hartzog, Tiffany O'Mahundro, Josh Cohan, thanks to all of you. We'll be back next week. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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