Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 224: Tara Brach: Making it RAIN

Episode Date: January 29, 2020

Being open to the feelings of anxiety and fear can be terrifying, but Tara Brach, a clinical psychologist and founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, has a method to guide us through our most difficult emotions. In this episode Brach details how her method, which goes by the acronym R.A.I.N., provides steps to help us face and process our own emotions. She has made strides within the meditation community by weaving together western psychology insights with meditation to begin the emotional healing process. Brach received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology and completed a five-year Buddhist teacher training program at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center. She leads silent meditation retreats, has numerous publications and a weekly podcast. She is the author of Radical Acceptance, True Refuge, and her most recent publication, Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of R.A.I.N. Plug Zone Website: https://www.tarabrach.com/ Podcast: https://www.tarabrach.com/talks-audio-video/ Books: https://www.amazon.com/l/B001KE8BHO?_encoding=UTF8&redirectedFromKindleDbs=true&ref_=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1&rfkd=1&shoppingPortalEnabled=true Radical Compassion Challenge: https://www.tarabrach.com/calendar/radical-compassion-challenge-free-10-day-online-event/ 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. Hey guys, just as I get started here shout out to Conor Kessler who's in the room with me. He's the four year old adorable son of Ryan Kessler who produces the show, Connor. I'm looking at you, you're a good boy. So if you hear somebody playing with Gumby and Poki, who's Gumby's horse's name? Poki. Yeah, if you hear somebody playing with Gumby or Poki,

that's Connor. Anyway, let's do one item of business and then dive into the episode. This is a huge episode. But before we go into the episode, and again, if you hear a child screaming in the background, that's Connor. Here's the item of business, the quick item of business before we dive in. I don't know if you know this, but 10% happier has a newsletter.

We've talked about it briefly on the show before, but a good reminder now we're into the new year. You should sign up for this newsletter. It's completely free. It features original weekly content from huge teachers. Jeff Warren, Sharon Salisberg, Seven Eyselassie, Jay Michelson, who is the primary editor of the newsletter. And it comes out once a week. You can sign up for it for free. 10%.com forward slash newsletter. 10%.com forward slash newsletter and as my other producer

Samuel has asked me to remind you we are not going to share your email address with people who are trying to sell you Habiscus-centred meditation candles or anything like that all we're gonna do is send you this newsletter okay let's get to the episode tar Brock is a giant in the meditation world and deservedly so she's got a PhD in clinical psychology. She treats people one-on-one in a psychological or therapy setting. She also has done deep Buddhist teacher training and has gone on to found the insight meditation community of Washington, which is an immensely popular community center in Washington.

She has an extremely popular podcast and she's got a new book. It's called Radical Compassion. So that's her bio, but I before we dive into the actual discussion, I want to read you a little bit of what I wrote about her in my first book, 10% happier because it's gonna tee up a lot of what is interesting about what follows in this conversation. So I first encountered her when I went to my, this is before I even really started meditating that much. I went to a meditation event here in New York City and she was up on stage and I had a bit of a negative reaction. Here's what I wrote. The opening speaker was a woman in her 50s named Tara Brock.

She had long brown hair and pleasant, semitic features. She was holding forth in a creamy, clawing tone. The style was astonishingly affected, artificially soft and slow as if she were trying to give you a rakey massage with her voice. She exhorted us to love our selves. Quote unquote, invited us to close our eyes and trust in the oceanness, in the vastness, in the mystery, in the

awareness, in the love, so that you could really sense nothing is wrong with me. I couldn't bear to look over at Jason, that was the friend I brought to the event, who I imagine must be silently cursing my name. Brock closed with a poem that a dramatic pause and finally a self-serious Sato Vocce. Thank you. So that's what my first impression of her was. I then ended up going back to the event the next day

and to my surprise, Tara ended up explaining something that was deeply useful to me. I was aware of the basic theory of how mindfulness could work, that you could view your feelings non-judgmentally, but I didn't really understand how to apply it in my life and she explained it in a way that knocked it out of the park. So let me read that section. To my profound surprise, the person who unlocked this mystery for me was Tara Brock, driven

by some unfathomable, masochistic urge, and even though I knew Mark, my friend Mark Epstein, wouldn't be speaking, I had dragged myself back to the ballroom for the second day of the conference. At first Brock was driving me nuts with all of her ostentatious head bowing, bell ringing, and namaste saying, but then she redeemed herself. She nailed the method for applying mindfulness in acute situations, albeit with a somewhat dopey acronym, RAIN, R for Recognize, A for Allow, I for Investigate, and for Non-identification. Recognize with self-explanatory.

Using my David Weston example, David Weston was my boss at the time. In those moments, after our even into best light, quite ambivalent meeting, job number one was simply to recognize my feelings. By the way, I had recently in this in this story had a meeting with my boss that was my then boss that was semi successful. Job number one was simply to acknowledge my feelings. It's like agreeing to pause in the face of what's here and just acknowledge the actuality said Brock. The first step is admitting it. Allow is where you lean in.

The Buddhists were always talking about how you had to let go, but what they really meant is let it be, or as Brock put it in her inimitable way, offer the inner whisper of yes. The third step, investigate, is where things got truly practical. Sticking with the Western example, again, he was my boss at the time, after I've acknowledged my feelings and let them be, the next move would be to check out how they're affecting my body. Is it making my face hot, my chest buzzing, my head throb? This strategy sounded intuitively correct to me, especially given that I was a guy whose undiagnosed post-war depression had manifest itself in flu-like symptoms.

The final step, non-identification, meant seeing that just because I was feeling angry or jealous or fearful, that did not render me a permanently angry or jealous person. Those were just passing states of mind. The Brock Plan seemed eminently workable to me, and as grading as she had seemed at first, I now found something comforting about her manner. She was, after all, a trained professional in both Buddhism and psychotherapy. That's Connor. Who had spent her life helping people? I realized with a hot blast of self-directed appropriation that yet again, I had been unfair. Okay, so you're going to hear me talk to Tara about her feelings about what I wrote.

Yes, Connor, I'm almost done, I promise. You're going to hear me talk to Tara about her feelings about what I wrote. And then over the course of the interview, we're going to come back in ways that were very meaningful, I think, to both of us to how I reacted to her feelings. And we're also going to talk about a lot more, including her new book about how to use this rain technique in your own life. So now to the delight of Connor, I'm'm going to shut up and here is Tara Brock. Nice to see you. And you.

I think this is the second time we've met. The first time we met in my memory was backstage at some meditation event. And I remember being a little hesitant because I saw you there and I thought I made fun of her a little bit in my book And I didn't know how it was gonna go, but then you gave me a big hug So where are we with that? Are you are you mad at me for? It was it was actually a really great experience for me because you know every it's fame and distribute and You know and you made fun of me some and you also appreciated the thing that most mattered to me which is the practice of rain and I figured you know I can survive this. Well I've talked about this a lot on the

show so my apologies to folks who've had to hear me hold forth on this too much but I got a three you know the 360 review is if you ever heard of yeah yeah I got one. And basically all the people in my, or many of the people in my life anonymously commented on my strengths and weaknesses. And one of the weaknesses was being judgmental. And I actually called myself out for that.

I just reread the passage where I described you in the book. And at the end of the passage, I basically say, wait, she's introducing me to this incredible technique, which is called rain, which we'll dive into. And look at me, what a judgmental jerk I am. But you, I think, were really an early victim of mine on the score in the meditation world.

And there was a message for me in it, too, because I'm basically out to wake up and be able to present things in a way that are going to reach people. And I suspected for you, my way was, had too much of a kind of uigui, too sweet flavor. And I realized, oh, there's going to be a mess of people like Dan, that that's the way they receive it. And I think as we keep growing, we just get

more flexible in ways we present things. So there was room for that. Yes, I agree. I think, yeah, you have a way of talking about this that works for hundreds of thousands of people. My way of talking about it or thinking about it or acting it out in the world is very different. And that's the importance of having many folks out there talking about the Dharma. That's where I land on this. Me too. Me too. It's really exciting to me actually. And it's exciting when the dialogues happen because basically we're free when we all stretch. Say more about that. Yeah. The more, first of all, as a teacher, the more flexibility I have and how I present things

in the more sensitive I am to the different ways people receive things, the more effective I can be. And as a practitioner, for instance this morning I was talking to my husband about a book that right now I'm rereading for the 20th time and it's I am that by Serena Sargadatta. And it's a book about non-dual reality, about seeing how really constantly looking at how am I getting identified right in this moment. moment, like really seeing past the coagulation of self and recognizing, okay, I'm not this particular personality, I'm not this body, and recognizing a larger sense of beingness. And so we were talking about that, and then I just said, you know, that is fantastic when my mind is quiet enough.

But if I'm caught in some anxiety, for me to say, oh, I'm not this anxiety, actually is a subtle way of pushing it away. And what's more important is for me to feel the wave of anxiety. And in some way say, okay, this belongs. You know, this is part of, this is a wave in the ocean, you know, and to actually feel it. And in opening to it and not resisting the identification actually dissolves. So the pathway taught in the book that I'm riveted by right this moment isn't the pathway at any given moment, and are will it work for many people when they're stuck in a certain way? So it's just having that, keeping the whole domain of practice fresh, so in any given moment there's a, an intuitive way to respond to what's arising now that actually deepens freedom and not

going by road really is, is actually what works in the most deep ways. So you talked about sort of implicitly a change that I've seen you make in my observation of you as a teacher over since the first time I saw you speak until reading your most recent book. So in the teaching of rain, R-A-I-N, which we're going to walk through in detail, the first time I heard you speak the N stood for non-identification. The first time I heard you speak, the N stood for non-identification. Now you teach it as nurture, which in your last answer, I think I heard you say that nurturing leads to the non-identification. If you can be cool with whatever's coming up, and you've mentioned anxiety,

and you've talked about personally the only thing that's in your own life, if you can be cool with the anxiety, if you can be warm in the face of this unwelcome visitor in your own mind, that can ultimately, if I'm hearing you correctly and you'll correct me, if I'm wrong, lead you to seeing, oh yeah, this is just a visitor, it isn't me. That's exactly right. And if we bypass the nurturing,

and it's not like every time something comes up, we have to put our hand on our heart and offer all sorts of phrases of self-compassion. But there are times that bringing a kindness and a warmth to what's there softens the resistance in a way that we're embodied and yet more spacious. And if we skip over it, if we go too quickly to saying, oh, this isn't me, I'm not identified, it's actually a subtle kind of dissociation. We're not really embodied. So the more full freedom is to be with the wave

and realize your oceanness through the process of being with the wave, which for most of us take some quality of kindness or compassion. We're sort of getting ahead of ourselves by getting to the end of rain before we've even done the R, but I just want to, I want to get back to our discussion about my first encounter with you and the way I wrote about it. You used a phrase that comes right out of the Buddhist canon of fame and disrepute, and I didn't want to let that go by without letting you talk about it, because just to remind listeners if they've lost the context, you said when you were

reading what I wrote about you, you had this thought of, oh, this is fame and disrepute. This is part of, and you'll correct me because you're the Buddhist teacher here, but in my understanding of Buddhism, they talk about this thing called the eight wins. And I've always been fascinated by this because it's pain and gain and loss, fame and infamy. And I don't know, there's a bunch of them, you know. But the peace on fame and distribute is a really interesting one to me because we are all pretty conditioned

to want to look good, to to get approved to be liked. I mean, it's so deep in us as social creatures, we are rigged to connect love with being impressive, achieving, and so on. And so how we looked at others really matters. And so for me to be scanning my own psyche and seeing how when people love what I'm teaching and tell me how I'm changing their lives, I, you know, there's a swelling up and a feeling good and just to note that. And also to notice that some people are giving me feedback of using a poem that was incredibly

insensitive to a part of the population are teaching something that for a traumatized person actually could make things worse and then the sinking the contracting and To really become awake and free in the midst of that inflating deflating is Absolutely essential for the ride if we're going to find any real peace Well, what I like about describing them is they eat wins, and I can't remember all like that. Because you get blown by them.

You get blown around. It's also impersonal. The wind isn't you. There are times when you're going to have fame. It can be big fame, like the truly famous person, or just sort of a good reputation in your circle of friends. And there are going to be times when you have a bad reputation. And if you're, it's going back back to your thing about non-identification.

And that, to me, there's freedom in viewing things that way, I think. It's the reason I often talk in an evolutionary way also, is that we take so personally all the different emotions that are absolutely wired into our nervous system and have an intelligence. And yet, you know, we feel fear and it's my fear, and I feel too much fear, rather than realizing we'd be brain-dead without fear, and that every single organism on the planet has a version of it. So it's the same thing with the worldly winds, whether it's gain or loss, fame or dispute or feeling fear or anger,

they're not personal, but it takes a lot to pay attention in a way that gets it. I mean, one of the things I'll often do in a workshop is I'll have people sit in a circle and write down three things they're really afraid of, and fold the paper up and put it in the center and we'll mix the pile around, and then people just pick from the pile, and they just read them out loud, and everybody just listens as each person's reading. And the realization that comes out of that really is,

I'm just getting, it's not my fear, it's the fear, that sense of it just not so personal, which is why I really feel like we need to do these practices with each other. Because it's not until we start sharing what's going on that we realize that what we've been taking so much as mine, I, self, is really part of our shared inheritance. Okay, so I'm gonna further delay the diving into rain because you've done I suspect this is a habit of yours You say interesting things and then I'm I'm gonna force to follow up on it Doing the practices with each other. I can imagine in my you know endless skills of empathy That's sarcastic For my, that some people out there listening

are thinking, well, I'm meditated on my own, I listen to some app or I have a practice that I, you know, it's been part of my life, but I'm in my living room doing this. I'm not doing it with other people. So does that mean I'm doing it wrong? No, when I say doing the practices, in a way I'm saying doing the path and what I mean is I meditate alone many days of the week, sometimes I meditate with my husband, but it's more sharing the unfolding with each other, sharing what's happening, being vulnerable, real, with both the, you know, what were the insights and also the blocks. And that's what enlarges us. And I'll add something. And this is going to be, again, tossing our sequence completely, it's crashing at a little bit. But one of the beauties of rain is that more and more people are

doing rain partners, where they're doing rain together, which I think just catalyzes a whole other level dimension of waking up. So I can speak more to that at some point, and I can direct people to the website. But we have people in our training programs, we have people in our local community, actually all over the globe right now, are in pairs doing rain partners, and there's different levels of how you can do it. And finding that, first of all, keeps them with the practice. It's like when you do something with somebody else, you're more accountable.

You kind of go through the whole process rather than drifting and dropping it. And the in makes a kind of container that's safe and friendly and conducive, and then in the sharing pieces, it actually when you start naming out loud, something that's happening, you become more aware of it. It brings it more into the light of awareness. So that's another piece of practicing together. I mean, the most obvious is go to classes, have small spiritual friends groups or clusters that you meditate with. But more, it's do the path together

and do some meditations together. I think interpersonal meditations are part, they're going to be the wave of the future because we spend a whole lot of time getting more intimate with our own heart and mind, but we don't practice intentionally how we speak with each other. So when I'm talking to you right now, am I actually in my body? And when you speak, am I really listening, putting down my ideas and taking it in. And when I speak, and I speaking from as much of a place of heart and presence as I can.

So we don't practice that that much. It's hard. I've done some of this work, die-ad work, where you sit and have to stare into somebody's eye and then like a death stare. It's hard, I agree. The resistant ones call it a death stare. There was a thing to everything. You just scale that to the rest of this conversation. Yes, it's really, really hard. And yet, actually, I did find that it somehow reduced for me

this sort of sitting there in the aforementioned death stare with some stranger. I actually think the first time I ever did it was you made me do it at this event I went to that I ended up writing about and I was so mad at you I didn't know you but I was really mad at you for making me stare at this nice young woman who was sitting next to me but I didn't know. But over time as I've been in other programs where I've been forced to do the diet work, it does kind of whittle away a little bit in my case I'll just speak for myself at the inherent awkwardness that I've felt in myself of dealing with other people because you're really kind of whittle away a little bit. In my case, I'll just speak for myself at the inherent awkwardness that I've felt in myself of dealing with other people, because you're really

just mainlining wordless connection. That's exactly right. And it builds your tolerance almost for the discomfort. Yes, that's right. It's affect tolerance. It's really being able to stay present and not have it matter so much that it's uncomfortable. And then you start sensing, once you relax a little, you can start looking and seeing vulnerability. You can kind of see the vulnerability. You are too busy in your mind to notice. And you can see the goodness, which is what's so beautiful. And see the sameness. You can start sensing that that, which is looking out

through your eyes, is the same basic awareness as mine. And that kind of catapults you into another place. But just to say, when I talk about rain partners, that's actually not a eye-gazing process. People do it on the phone, and they do it it online and they do it in all different ways. It's more has to do with moving from an inner kind of contemplation to sharing, to inner to sharing. Oh, let's dive into how that works in a minute. Let's finally walk through rain. As discussed, I had never heard of rain before.

Her you speak at an event here in New York City and it really is a profoundly useful schema. I don't know, acronym, whatever you want to call it. So can you just talk through your history? How did you, I think it was Michelle McDonald's who came up with it, the great teacher Michelle McDonald's has never been on the show. She came up with the acronym and then the first...

Michelle came up with the acronym, oh, probably early 1990s and I began using it then and loved it and both for myself and students, there were a couple of blocks or problems that people would run into and talk to me about. And one of them was that they said, well, what is not identification? Like, how do you, how do you non-identify? And I had to explain that non-identifications actually, the fruit of what happens. It's like you pay attention in certain ways on purpose. And then the fruit of that is this realization of, oh, I'm not that. So it's not a doing.

So that motivated me to shift the acronym around a little. But the other piece was that they couldn't really, when they were investigating, they couldn't really get in touch with fully in their body with what was going on and it really needed the nurturing to fully embody it. And so compassion was the missing piece. You know, if we think of awareness as having the two wings of mindfulness or seen clearly what's here and compassion holding it with kindness. We need to bring in that wing of kindness not just as a kind of background mood but in an explicit way because we are so programmed to actually be turned against ourselves. So it does need to be explicit. So one of the there's an attachment therapist, Luis Cozolino, and he says that it's not the survival of the fittest.

It's the survival of the nurtured. Hmm. Survival of the nurtured. Yeah. And so, learning a pathway to self-nerturing, and it doesn't have to be, I am sending messages to myself, to nurture myself, or touch, I'm right now, touching my heart. It could also be the pathway to nurturing, could be by imagining and sensing nurturing from some larger source. But finding some pathway to feeling nurtured helps to actually soften the self-identity. It actually allows us to relax and open

and sense a larger belonging. I'm feeling a little bit like a failure as an interviewer because we still haven't done the R of rain. We've talked a lot about that. So this is the background to how come I shifted the letters. But here's how the letters go. The R is recognized. And that simply means that when you're in some way in reaction

and suffering, you pause and notice, okay, something's going on. It's an attentional, okay, something's here going on, what's going on here? Is this you've referred in your book to something about taking a U-turn? We're not there yet, but we get there because you turn a fabulous understanding of it. So you recognize what's happening and the A is allow, which means rather than what we typically do, which was we go into fight fight freeze, in other words, we in some way try to fix it, change it, ignore it, judge it, we do something. It's like a pause where we say, okay, just let this be here right now. I use the language of yes, saying yes to what's right here.

Not yes, I like it, or yes, I want it to always stay here. But yes, this is the actuality of the moment. This is truth telling. So yes, let's let it be here. That's recognizing allow. That creates enough of a pause or a space to actually deepen attention. Then we kind of make the U-turn and we begin to investigate. So you have to kind of pause the action and then you make the U-turn. That just means instead of moving into the reactivity, you go from that pause to, okay, so what's really happening? If recognize is the first step, the third step, which is investigate is saying, okay, what's really going on? Let's recognize even more deeply. And do you imagine people doing this on the fly, like in the middle of a conversation, if I start feeling myself anxious, if I start feeling that I am anxious as I'm talking to you, would I do the rain while I'm

maintaining the conversation with you? And is this also a formal meditation practice? Both. Yeah. And so once you've kind of got in your cells, the sense of how it works, and it can become very, very like a light rain. I feel like I'm doing a light rain a lot. And it's an informal practice you can weave to the day at any moment, just noticing and letting be what's happening, but just sensing, okay, feeling it here, okay, be kind, and then just sensing a little bit of a shift and you move on. So it can be quick. So now there's a few things with the investigating that are always misunderstood and really important to know.

And that is, it's not cognitive, or at least 98%. It's not cognitive. 98% it's really getting somatic. It's you're investigating and bringing the attention to feeling the throat, the chest, the belly, how is this experience expressed in my body? So the investigation isn't, oh, I bet my mother's always saying mean things to me because X or Y happened in her personal history.

So the investigation is, oh, what is anxiety actually like? It's a tightening in my chest. That's right. What is this? How is it showing right in this moment? Now, there are some skillful ways that can support that are investigating. Like if I am in a really bad mood, I'll sometimes ask myself, well, what am I believing right now?

And generally, I find, oh, I'm believing that I've failed in some way, that I'm falling short, that I'm not okay, I'm not enough, or I'm believing that somebody else isn't liking me, whatever. But seeing that, bringing that into consciousness actually helps get back and touch more directly with what's happening somatically. So that can be a useful piece. Another part of investigating I like is, let's say I'm feeling anxious in this interview and I pause enough to say, well, how is that anxiety really expressing even in my face? You know, if I can, and just let my face take

the tightness of the feeling and let my body kind of, so when I'm guiding people in workshops, I'll actually get them to sculpt it. Because we are so, yeah, with their bodies and their face, like actually let their bodies and face take the full expression of the mood they're feeling. And the reason why I did it is that most people are,

most of us are pretty dissociative from our bodies. And it takes some intentional, extra fine tuning to really draw the attention fully to what's going on. And if there's been trauma, it's really, really hard. And so there might just be, instead of going into the body, there might, with trauma, I really encourage people to go right into nurturing, to not even do the sequence of rain, to nurture first and find the pathways to self-sue thing, to safety, to, you know, get the parasitic going, calm down down before they actually do the real

somatic investigation. And that can be for weeks or months. It's not that useful if there's trauma to go right into investigating. Why not? Because you can retraumatize. Unless there's sufficient stability and resilience and safety, going and right to where the feelings are can overwhelm, and then you just have another round of feeling powerless and unable to deal with it.

So, you want to take the time to do other styles of meditation that are more loving kindness, the nurturing domain, in order to build up enough sense of resourcefulness to then do the kind of investigating and unpacking that Reyn does. So we do find, now I think we find ourselves back in order on N. We did it. I think there's a reason energetically intellectually intellectually, we kind of leaned in and early and are now coming back to it because it is so important. So we started with recognize just seeing clearly what's happening, a, allowing or accepting, yep, it's not saying I'm psyched that I feel like just right now, you're just saying, this is the truth. I is investigating, again, that's not a cognitive process, most of the time, although as you describe, one can skillfully use thought to direct you to the direct experience, but it is more of a sort of feeling what's actually happening in your body, and then we land

at end nurturing. And there's a couple of final pieces on investigating that actually set the grounds for nurturing that are really powerful that I like to teach about which is there's certain questions you can ask yourself like what is how does this place want me to be with it right now? Like if I'm feeling hurt or if I'm feeling shame or I'm feeling anger or whatever, how does this place want me to be with it? How does the anger want me to be with it? Yeah, how does the fear or the shame want me to be with it?

Or another way of saying is, what does this place need? What does it need right now? Because nurturing is really a response to vulnerability. And when we investigate and finally contact, we're vulnerable, we're afraid, whatever it is. If we really feel it, there's a natural upwelling of tenderness. And that really is the dynamic of compassion, which is compassion is a response to feeling the vulnerability. So investigating gets you in touch with the vulnerability and those questions help you do that. What does this place really need right now? And often

I invite people to ask that and put their hand on their heart at the same time, the kind of thing that would have freaked you out a number of years ago and still might get you like that. So, for the part of the population that is drawn to it, you're actually beginning to create a kind of nurturing atmosphere even when you ask that question. And then that question will invite forward what's needed. And for one woman I wrote about this in the book, who is really afraid of CEO and her organization and before she could go, she'd go into meetings and have brain freeze and she was really qualified brilliant woman,

but his temperament intimidated her. And so I had her doing rain before she'd go into the meeting and she got to that anxiety and she felt it, she felt the clenched in her chest. And then she asks, well, what do you need? And the anxiety basically responded, I need you to be okay that I'm here. Just to let it be okay that I'm here. So she just sent the message, you know, it's okay. The spbalongs, it's okay, the spbalongs. And there's a real power to the message, the spbalongs. Because in the moment that we, this belongs. And there's a real power to the message this belongs.

Because in the moment that we say this belongs, it's metaphorically we become the ocean that has room for the waves, rather than another wave fighting a wave. This belongs creates just the space we need. It wasn't like the anxiety dissolved. It was more that there was just more space and she wasn't as in the grip. That was her end, just to send that message. So there's a lot of different ways that nurturing emerges. For some people it does include one hand on the heart or two hands on the heart. Some people put their hands on their cheeks. For others and it can be a combo, there's a set of words that really are the message

that a part of us most needs to hear at that time. Sometimes for me, at times, when I've everything I've tried in terms of self-nerchering hasn't worked, I finally get down to this place of, please love me. I'm just kind of asking the universe, please love me. And there's a sense in some way of something larger, some presence that is compassionate and tender and washing through me. So it's when I get very vulnerable and call out that I can feel that. And then I realized that that presence wasn't outside me. It just appeared to be outside me. It's just part of my own heart.

But at the time of being stuck, I needed to call out. So sometimes for some people, just kind of in some prayerful way asking for nurturance helps. Some people have a friend they'll imagine holding them. So there's many, many different ways. But the nurturing tends to soften as we were talking about in a way that we actually feel enlarged no longer hooked or identified. So if it was anxiety, I'm not the anxious self anymore. I'm kind of that space of tender

wakefulness that is aware of and kindly towards the anxiety. That is what I call after the rain, and I put that in quotes because people tend to after they do the end, just go back into whatever's next in their lives, but not notice the shift that's happened. And for, on the path of waking up, noticing the shift in identity, this is where non-identification comes in, actually deepens our familiarity with who we really are beyond an ego itself.

So after the rain, are those moments when we just notice, oh, who am I right now? You know, it's not no longer stuck in that small hooked place. And there's usually some quality of spaciousness or openness or tenderness, more freedom. So I invite people to pause and rest in that and just really get familiar with it. That's kind of the instructions in the Tibetan tradition is when you touch a moment of freedom, just get familiar with it. All right, so there was a lot there on the end part. I have a bunch of questions. I'm just trying to order them correctly in my head. One of them is,

so you talked about some of the ways we can operationalize the nurture part of rain. What about for somebody like me who does have it? I don't, it doesn't resonate much with me, the idea of putting my hand in my heart, although I have spring washroom, who's a great teacher, who's been on the show a couple times, mutual friend. She's had me do that before and I'm embarrassed to admit it did kind of work, but I was in the middle of a deep, I was on the like the seventh day of a meta retreat at that point So it was not it's a little bit different from my regular life

But generally speaking that I think I'm not alone and feeling like that putting my hand in my face or my heart or whatever It doesn't immediately jump out at something that I want to do and the Ask in the universe to please love me too. Doesn't land for me is something that I want to do and the asking the universe to please love me too. Doesn't land for me is something that I would do. So how could I do the end part of rain? So then I would ask you, when in your own experience have you found that there is something that you pay attention to that warms you, tenders you, softens you. Toward myself?

In any way, like, with any person, in any situation, with nature, you know, is there, is there anything that, when you think of, it just tenderizes you? Yeah, my son, our, our cats, animals generally. Yeah. We were talking before, we started rolling about all the animals that are dying in the fires in Australia, which are going on as we record. Yeah, those types of things I do put it in the language you used before. I do see the vulnerability and then I think the compassion, another way of saying that would be just the desire to be

helpful arises uncontrived. That's right. So that's an example of how connecting with vulnerability brings your nurturing towards the world around you. Now what happens when you're cut off in some way from feeling good about yourself? I mean, do you have times that you get caught in self-judgment and you get turned on yourself? Do I have times? I would say I have occasional times when I'm not. Okay, so when you get hooked, what helps you? What helps you on hook?

Rain. You know, I mean, would you talk me 10 years ago? I mean, I think it's become second nature now, but I've been doing it the way you taught me low these many years with non-identification. Now, I have to say, I don't have a history of trauma that I'm aware of. So it's not triggering for me to go into non-identification instead of nurture.

But maybe there's a certain coldness in that too, which is also... So let's look at that for a moment. Who is it? Is it your son or is there anyone else that when you feel them loving you, you can let it in? Yes, definitely my son. Your son. When the cats love me it's a little annoying.

I'm kind of working. They're jumping on my desk. My wife, my son. Your son. When the cats love me, it's a little annoying. I'm kind of working, they're jumping on my desk. My wife, my parents. Okay, so, and how old's your son? Five. Okay, so when you see your son and he's loving you and you're letting it in, what's he doing, how close is he, what's the expression on his face, what actually lets you feel love and actually receive it.

We chase each other around a lot and he gets a mischievous look like you can't catch me and then I go catch him. So yeah, something like, or will we in order to tire him out, I make him do wind sprints in the hallway of our before bed. And so sometimes we'll be running up down the hallway together and I'll see the hill look up at me with a look of like, wow, this is awesome. It's totally fun. Yeah, yeah. So if you even right now, just, and I can tell you, you were accessing it some as you were

visualizing it, see him looking up at you and just so appreciating the fun and aliveness and just the good stuff you're bringing into his life. And how does that feel? Very good. Yeah. So what you would do just to translate this is that if you're feeling really stuck and you're feeling down in yourself and you've done the investigating and you wanna nurture, you might in some way imagine and sense in the background your son and just that energy and just let that add more information to your heart. It's like when we're down to ourselves,

we're kind of, our attention is very narrow, it's very fixated on what's wrong and that's like widening the lens to something that's really good and letting it in. So you're just adding a certain dimension of loving kindness into the mix to soften where you've hardened against yourself. I think that's great. That I could access. That's that I have no block with that.

It doesn't remind me of a conversation I've had, I had while doing love and kindness practice with Joseph Goldstein. We were talking about Wynita, who was my nanny when I was growing up. And Wynita, no longer with us sadly, was one of these just sort of infinitely affectionate human beings and Would hug everybody she met and then after she stopped working for us because we went to high school Didn't need a babysitter anymore. She started driving a School bus for kids with special needs and every kid who got on got a hug first thing in the morning

And that's just how her approach to the world was arms open. And Joseph loved that. He was like, can you just add wanita in to your practice, especially when dealing with somebody difficult, mostly yourself? That's beautiful. And it's if when you bring wanita to mind and you imagine her hugging you and hugging everyone else. Is there a visceral sense of that? Like, can you actually feel the goodness of that or the warmth of that? Yes. At times, though, I feel a little like, I'm not up to this. Something's wrong with me. But, I mean, as you're trying to access it. Yeah, I'm thinking, well, I don't have what we need to has broken. That does happen, but I can get caught in that eddy.

Yeah. Generally, yes, it does feel relaxing. Yeah. So in a part, I'm imagining right now, you're thinking of we need in terms of, oh, that would be a quality at that hugging of others, but I was thinking of more of you receiving the hugs. Yes, yes. And it may be that was thinking of more of you receiving hugs. Yes, yes.

And it may be that your son is more of a direct access because it's more of an ongoing experience right now. Here's the thing, Dan, is that most of us actually have trouble letting in love. Most of us have very limited number of people that we can even begin to let it in. And even the people we think we let it in, we don't in a very physical, somatic way,

actually let our body know, get washed over. It's just not what we do. And yet, when we're really hardened, that's exactly what we need. It really needs, I mean, the issues are in the tissues. They really are, you know. And you know, for most of us in our parenting, there was some, we might have had great parents, but there was some lack of really being seen or really being unconditionally, tenderly embraced.

And we all need that. So to the degree, there was a lack, there's a kind of spiritual repairanting that we're doing with meditation that actually helps us to process that so we can inhabit our wholeness. And so each need to find where in our life is there even a tendril of what we needed to experience that we can build on because whatever you practice gets stronger. So for me, if I, you know, ten times a day imagine that washing through of love from

some formless being, are you ten times a day, sense through your son or your wife just kind of letting in, there's something our, you know, neurons learn about. There's new pathways that grow and we have quicker access to it. And in a sense then, by channeling that, look, my son gives me when we're running down the hallway, I'm teaching myself through him how to provide this for myself. That's exactly right. Because we are using a bridge. I mean, in some way we're using wherever it comes through in the universe as love.

We're using that, but ultimately it's inside us and everywhere, and we're just trying to access loving kindness in as direct away as we can. I'm gonna see if I can unpack that, because I think what you just said is interesting to... I want to see if I can restate it. Because part of me was thinking, well, if I'm using my son's love for me, which is not always there because a lot of the time,

he thinks I'm annoying. But in those moments where it's really obvious, there's a lot of love in the room or in the hallway right now. I was thinking, part of me was saying, well, that's external, that's not me having love for myself, but you're, I think saying, well, love is just sort of a force in the universe. However, you get it into your tissues is fine. Right, and there's no self loving a self really. I mean it's we're just accessing love

and it appears to come through our minds make it that it's your son or yourself or I might call the you know beloved of the universe and it's all just like those are ideas. The thing we know is that there's some tenderness that's vast that that's really my sense is the source of who we are that we're coming home to. And so use whatever pathway you use because you're not going to get hooked on those images of your son. In fact, the more you, as you use that, you'll find yourself receptive to love from many sources. And, you know, I can do something that'll totally get you, which would be, you know, I walk

in the mornings and I'll often pause and see a tree and say, we are friends. I'll just use the phrase, we are friends. And it brings the reality of an affinity with, I just read the over story, which was fantastic. It's a Pulitzer Prize winner about trees and connectedness. And I do it now with people. I do, I want, you know, a clerk at the supermarket. I'll just mentally say, we are friends.

And all of a sudden, the reality of our interbeing becomes more evident. So I figure use whatever we can to open ourselves to something that's always and already here, but in our strash and our tightness, we don't notice. Comment and a question. Comment is something, a quote is coming to mind from a previous guest on the show. I don't even know if we've aired her interview yet, but this person was telling me about something that a

teacher said to her when she was complaining about how cheesy love and kindness practices and the teacher said, well if you can't get comfortable with cheesyness, you can't be free. So I think is really for me that really lands. The question is you said something like the love is the source of who we really are. What does that mean? I knew that wouldn't go by on question. Well, my experience is that when I'm not caught up thinking about a self, when I'm not inside thoughts about a self. There's a changing, changing flow of experiences that's happening. And the sense of what it's all happening in is an awareness that is tender.

In other words, it's awareness, it's pure awareness, but when that, and I'll use the ocean wave metaphor, when that ocean perceives particular waves, the natural response is tenderness. So that when I'm free from self-occupation, there's a natural love or compassion towards whatever is experienced. And that's what I mean by the source. When we're not identified in a fear-based way, there's a pure awareness that naturally responds with love. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life.

But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown all are, we will be your resident not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there.

We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. You have a PhD in psychology. Is that in any way back is this feeling you have in any way backed up by psychological research or anything about the mind?

No, and I wouldn't go at it in that way because it's really an experiential path. All we can talk about is, you know, we're talking about now, like, what is absolute truth? And there's not going to be science or research. It's going to point to, you know, what's the very nature of our beings. I can point to the most, the perennial philosophy that underlies most spiritual and mystical and contemplative practices points to a oneness that it's not like the mind is in the body, it's like there is an awareness that is the source of all creation but because the perneal philosophy says so that doesn't mean it's proved by science. But even the Buddha said, look I'm going to say

a bunch of things, don't take it on face value and come to see for yourself. Exactly. A. He Paseco. It's really just to keep turning the attention to what's right here in the present moment and to what's experiencing what's here in the present moment. And to have the intention to do it with kindness makes it a lot easier. So for me, I get that there is this awareness that's beneath all of you know, it's I don't know, I don't know if that kind of spatial positioning makes any sense, but I know I'm having thoughts and most of them are self-centered, but that if I dip below that level of discursivity, there's this pure awareness of whatever I can hear at the sound of my own voice right now, I can see you involuntarily,

right? There's this awareness that just undergirds, whatever is happening in my mind. So I get that, but that awareness is naturally tender, I get a little lost on. My experience is that when I'm not caught in fear and grasping, and I would not identify it this self, then when awareness encounters something in that encounter, the natural The natural response is a sense of we and a sense of care. Connectivity. Exactly. It's everything's connected. Yeah.

And there's some, if you look at the development of the species, if you look at human evolution, our brains are designed to perceive separation. We're designed to experience a self in here and a world out there and the primal mood of the separate self is fear. I mean, the fight flight freeze comes out of that. And so for millions of years, we were in these small groups and perceived other out there, you know, any group that wasn't part of our in-group was, you know, the enemy and bad and different and not as human as us. And in-group there was growing sense of collaboration because that's one of our defining features. That went on for millions of years and it's only been the last 10 or 20,000 years that we've expanded beyond in relationships and felt a sense of we.

But that's our trajectory. So this is actually what gives me hope, is that, and I ask groups a lot, I say do you believe that consciousness is evolving? Because I'm curious to see what people believe, that I feel like the consciousness in our species is evolving from a sense of separate eye, completely self-centered and reacting out of the limbic fears to a sense of we that

not only is collaborative, but actually cares. Like, you are part of me. I care about you, not because you're over there, but you're part of my heart. We're part of the same essence. And I think that's the direction we're going as a species and meditation facilitates it, because meditation awakens the parts of the brain that need to be integrated and awake. So it moves us from kind of our limbic hijack place where we're really in reactivity to where we can kind of go meta to what's happening, become mindful of it, and respond with compassion. And there now is research that shows that meditation does wake up and integrate our brain in that way. And that gives me hope.

I'm looking out right now today, Dan, where we are in the news. It's been so disturbing what's going on in our world. And you can see around the world how much the fear and the limbic hijacks happening means, not just United States with, you know, a tendency towards, you know, fear and right wing. And, you know, that whole thing, it's, you know, many countries around the world now. And, um, whether it's the wildfires or the conflict in Iran, when humans don't face their fears, when they're run by them, we've come incredibly dangerous. And so the only way out of tribalism really is training our hearts and minds.

It is the way out. And I feel like we're doing, as individuals, we can kind of sense that, that we expand and become more able to care about each other. And I feel like we need these kind of trainings brought into our group interactions. And they already are. This isn't, I mean, whether it's truth and reconciliation, our restorative justice kind of activities,

our insight dialogue, or whatever. There's all sorts of group modes. But to me, that's the hope is changing consciousness that way and that's what these practices do. Related to the question I asked you before about, you know, love being the source of all, you know, of who we are, there, you talk a lot in the book about Buddha nature, that we are inherently awakened and loving, but it's obscured by the ego, the sense of self,

the greed and aversion and all the stuff we also evolved for. And I have an instinct that that's true, just based on my own personal experience, but I don't know if there's any evidence for it. As far as I know, there are at least two ways to think about this, probably more. There's the Buddha nature argument, which again, I don't know if there's any, you would know the evidence better than me because you're trained not only in the Buddhist tradition, but in psychotherapy. And then there's any, you would know the evidence better than me because you're trained not only in the Buddhist tradition, but in in in psychotherapy. And then there's the two wolves idea that we have a wolf of, you know, greed and hatred. And we have a wolf of sort of compassion and generosity and the one that wins and that

fight is the one you feed. So give an idea, give give you a sense that you can train up the the better angels of your nature, take them to the gym as it were. And then there's also then the Christian view of original sin that we're actually fundamentally, that seems to be the spectrum, you know, either fundamentally good to it's a mix and it's what you train to fundamentally bad and we can only get to the good part by accessing God. So, I think I know where you are on that spectrum, but like, so what's your sense of where the evidence points? It's kind of what you asked before. It comes back to come and see for yourself that it wouldn't matter what belief system I have. And I'm not, and I'm not as interested in talking about at least what is more primary, is love more primary. I don't think that serves as much as saying, look, we've all had tastes of when we're more who we want to be. Everybody has. We know what it's like when

we're caught and we act in ways that we regret and we know what it's like when we feel generous or kindly are creative or joyful. We just know and it's more we feel more at home with our being when we're more who we want to be. And there are ways of paying attention that can cultivate that. And that that's I'm so I'm ultimately much more pragmatic. I mean, I could, we could get off the air and I could talk about the cosmology, but I don't think that's as useful as, can we, I mean, my big inquiry, Dan, is how do we wake up caring more? I mean, our world's in trouble. How do we wake up caring?

Because more there's carrying in a sense of it's all of us on the oral response. So that's... Wake up in the morning carrying or wake up the sense of carrying that's inherent in every human being. Wake up the sense of carrying in all of us. Yeah. How do we expand that? And how do we widen the circles of our carrying? Because as Einstein said, it's generally pretty limited to those in our tribe. And that feels like the most compelling question for all of us. And if I'm hearing you correctly, the root, you can have them at a physical debate about what do we like at our core? Do we even have a core? Is there a Buddha nature or are there two wolves? Is there a original sin?

Yeah, fine. We can get into that. Or you can ask yourself a very simple question, what feels better when you're a jerk or when you're not? Yeah, what feels more true or at home? Where do you feel most at home? What do you want? Who do you want to be? And we can be encouraged by the trajectory of evolution.

I mean, I loved reading sapiens and I love reading evolutionary psychology because it does show that we are not quite as much controlled by our limbic system. We have more choice. There is less violence in the world. And where we see it, it's very gripping and painful. And so how do we keep waking up from that?

One of the things you also talk about in your book is I think this is a quote, one of the most challenging blockers for us is the belief that there's something inherently wrong with ourselves. After my 360, I struggle a lot with the sense that I'm inherently selfish. I know you've talked about, I think this is a phrase you've used, the trance of unworthiness. So how universal do you think, because I was caught in this thinking of, I'm actually uniquely selfish, which is total, you know, naval gazing and getting caught in the

self. How universal do you think this suspicion that there's something fundamentally wrong with us is, and how do we deal with it? I think it's super pervasive. I'm not an expert on cross-cultural comparisons, but everyone that I've worked with, and, you know, I'm doing teacher training with people from, you know, 50 different countries and so on, everybody I've worked with has, that's an element of what people struggle with. In some sense of, I'm not okay.

Is that, does it take many flavors? Like, I'm inherently a bad person or I'm inherently sort of not up to the job? Are there a bunch of permutations of this? Yes, absolutely. Some, it's like, I'm fundamentally flawed and it's disgusting and shameful. It's got those kind of twists to it, to smell, you know, shame. For others, it's like the chronic never enough and the striving and the frustration, but it's not as deep a twist in the psyche.

And I think that partly, you know, parenting, you know, it all comes from whether we have a basic sense of trust and belonging early on. And so our culture right off the bat is a set up for not belonging because to be part of anything, you have to meet these standards that are imposed by the culture, including have a certain kind of intelligence. I mean, our school, our, we worship a certain kind of intelligence and we have a huge percentage of our kids that go through school and they don't have that kind of intelligence and they come out feeling like they're stupid and that is really, and that's, that really saddens me. Well, that's just one level then we have the kind of body a

woman's supposed to have or we have, you know, the, just basically, then we have the kind of body a woman is supposed to have, or we have just basically looks, or we have the most insidious level of messaging from the culture, which is like racism, like this grouping of people is inferior. And that message gets sent through every institution to African- Americans that you are less than and that creates a huge, huge grip of something's wrong with me. So it's like Tony Morrison said, you know, to be American means being white, everyone else has to hyphenate. So all our non-dominant populations on some level are getting the message less than.

So we get messages through the culture. We get messages through our parents, you know, be this way in order for me to love and respect you. And we come out of that shaping a self that we hope will get as much love and respect as we can. But in that process underneath feeling like the who I really am, is not okay. And for many of us, selfishness is the big one.

I mean, that, that for me is the big one. Really? I thought it was, I had a sense that there was a little bit more of a male thing. No, well, we're all in droidges in our own ways, but but now for me, it's the self-centeredness. It's, uh, has been a big one. And because it's, you don't come off as self-centered. Well, thank you. That really boosts me.

I'm surprised. Okay. I've some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway.

I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big up to do anyway. I have some big so interested in that. You have some fundamental suspicion that you're incurably selfish or self-centered? Well, I mean, as I do. I know that this ego by nature is selfish.

I mean, ego by nature is concerned with ego. So what I've come to piece with is that ego is not the exclusive identity of what I am. And so if I can hold it with humor and kindness, I'm okay. Right. By the way, what I just said took decades. I mean, I, you know, my, I got onto the spiritual path. And I was joined a Kundalini Yoga ashram and it had to be the most vigorous yoga around. I was one of these very vain yogis because back then I was super flexible and I was kind of like teaching it but showing it off.

I was up on myself and of course I have a genetic disease that now I can't do yoga at all because I'm too, my connective tissues too loose. So it kind of swung on me, which is really interesting because I was so identified with being good at it. But then I got identified with being good at other things. And but all along, I started realizing how much underneath I felt shame at my sense of importance or pride or self-centeredness or whatever it was. And that's what got me to write radical acceptance was the sense of being stuck in a self I didn't

like. And radical acceptance basically helped me see how it was a trance that most anybody that is identified with their self doesn't like their self. Now they might sometimes be on an inflated self-importance thing, but underneath that there's doubting shame. So if we have an identity with self, we don't like that self, and a part of the spiritual path is seeing that trance of not liking ourselves and with wisdom and compassion opening to something larger.

But transcending the self really. Transcending the identity, but the way it happens is by bringing kindness to the very feelings of shame or self dislike. We're back at end. We're back at end. Yeah. self-dislike. We're back at N. We're back at N. Yeah, that's why for me, radical compassion, the book, it feels so central that any transformation we make requires cultivating a quality of self-kindness. Just to clarify for listeners, you wrote radical acceptance many years ago and the new book

is radical compassion. I just want to make sure. Thank you. You should get them both. I'm clear. One was first. I have a phraseology that came to mind when talking about this in my own phraseology, which you may not like given our differences. The in terms of getting stuck in your own stuff and how that can have so many deleterious effects internally and then externally. The way I've been kind of thinking about it in my head

is the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your... You know, that's just the way I think of it. But I love that. I love that because the other side of it is when we're turned on ourselves, it feels horrible. And the way that I end up working my way out of it is, I'll give you an example, I got sick in my early 50s for about six years, and I was a spiral down and I went from being athletic and very vigorous to really not knowing

there was a way out, I lost mobility. I'm much, much better. What was it, can you say what this is? It had to do with the connective tissue disorder where but I just went into a spiral of pain and fatigue and just, yeah, I just got worse and worse. So I'm telling you this because I would go through all these, I would feel miserable but then I'd get down on myself for being a bad patient like you know here I am irritable and I'm you know in

patient and you know just being down on myself for the way I was dealing with illness and I'm impatient and just being down on myself for the way I was dealing with illness and I would often go into what I do to create this. So I turned on myself. And the way I started practicing down was I would see myself caught and I'd kind of name it, recognize and allow, okay, trans-of-unworthiness, shame. And I'd investigate it and I'd feel just how painful it was to not only be physically miserable, but to be turned to myself.

They call it the second arrow. The first arrow is that I was feeling miserable. The second is I was blaming myself for it. And when I could get really in touch with how many moments I have suffered from being down on myself. And just like think of the landscape of your life and think of how many moments, instead of, you know, appreciating somebody else or the mystery of the night sky or whatever it is, there's been that self-oriented, down-on-self feeling.

It's a real deprivation of life, moments. And so when I could get in that honest recognition of the suffering of being down on myself, that's when I'd start getting tender. That's when I could then say, oh, I'm sorry, I care about the suffering in some way. And that would be it. As soon as I could really directly contact the vulnerability and offer kindness, I was no longer living inside that bad self. But is there like a skitzoid old thing of offering, you said this before, a self can't offer kindness to a self? I think you said something along those lines. How do you say? How does that work? I'm saying I'm sorry to myself.

In a way, what's happening is you've investigated and there's contact with the suffering. So awareness is contacting suffering and awareness and you kind of get enlarged when you can see something And you kind of get enlarged when you can see something directly. And that's the whole power of mindfulness is once you recognize it, you're no longer as identified with it, you're resting in a larger awareness. And when awareness directly sees the suffering as suffering, not, well, I deserve this, or well, you have it worse, but out, this hurts. When awareness gets that, then there's a tenderness that emerges. And then when that tenderness is expressed, and you can just use the vehicle of words,

oh, I care about this suffering, the eye is really coming from a larger place. It's almost like awareness is offering care. And I often think ultimately when I'm meditating, one of the ways I kind of wake myself up is to say it's not like I'm meditating. Awareness is meditating. Awareness is speaking right now. Awareness is experiencing this moment. But it feels like a self for a while. And in the vernacular, we say I'm offering myself kindness, but by that moment, the eye is really resting in a larger space of awareness. This is, I think, one of these things

that if it's confusing to you as a listener, it's just one of these things that becomes clear. You're trying to add words onto an experience that is very hard to describe in words. And so you just have to kind of do practice over time and you get, start getting tastes of the type of thing you're describing. That's right. The type of not thing you're describing.

Well, it's, when it, what it is is that there's a, there's a sage that was once every, people would bring them their troubles and he would swear them to secrecy and say, okay, I have just one question and this question is, what are you unwilling to feel? And when we investigate and actually start to touch what we're unwilling to feel, touch into that vulnerability, directly contacting what we've been pulling away from actually frees us up. It's like when the resistance is gone, the demons are gone. So there is more space and it actually becomes more natural to offer care from that space.

So you can actually feel it. So it's getting me thinking about, part of your book has to do with fear. You write about fear and bringing rain to fear. And that leapt out at me because I've had panic attacks. Quite famously or infamously, I had one on television, but now I get them in elevators. So I've been walking a lot of flights of stairs recently, because I had one, a bad one, about six months ago,

and it kind of messed me up. And I was reading a book recently by a guy named Barry McDonough, it's called the Dare Response De-He's got his own, Dare is his reign. And I don't know if I'm going to be able to reproduce it, but part of his, I think the R is run toward it. And I've been practicing this in elevators. His attitude, and I think it might be a little bit at an oblique angle from nurture.

But his attitude with panic is say to yourself, bring it on, do your worst. I'm gonna count to 10 and see how, these are just gonna be a set of sensations You have a hundred percent track record of surviving panic attacks So invite it in and turn the hunter panic fear into the hunted and I have found that to be in my early Explorations and I've not had him on the show Barry if you're listening you're invited. I have found that to be really interesting Tell me how it goes for you because I'm it fits in with I mean a lot of desensitization listening you're invited, I've found that to be really interesting.

Tell me how it goes for you, because it fits in with a lot of desensitization modalities or just like that. You turn towards it, you usually do it gradually, you ratchet it up, but it's like if a dog's running at you, whistle for it, if it's racing towards you, it's like in some way you're reversing your conditioning and the conditioning has locked into place, the panic. But it also picks up on, yes, what you just said, it also picks up on some things you've been saying

throughout the course of this interview, which is it's like this unwillingness I've had to accept the discomfort, the fear of the fear. Yes. And reframing it as it's going to be a set of physical sensations that you've here to forbidden unwilling to fully experience. But if you not only have a willingness to experience it, but you're inviting it in, saying, come on, let's do this.

If I'm going to have a panic attack, let me just feel it. Instead of feeling the tiniest little bit of it, and then it's spiraling out of control from there because I'm just unwilling to, I literally the other day I wasn't, I got stuck in an elevator in my own building. And I, not a strong person, you've met me, I'm not big. I was able to tear open the doors

because I was that scared. But what if I had just said, all right, we feel this. It would have made it entirely different. But I guess my point in bringing all this up was, is that too aggressive the attitude, the, come on, bring it on, turning the hunter into the hunted rather than nurturing? First, I don't think of them as either or and it's really case by case. For some people, that's exactly what's needed in some way to just fully inhabit your confidence and courage and just go at it is actually the energy that can undo the old conditioning. For another person, it could lead to a panic attack that would increase the feeling of trauma.

For many people, surrounding it with nurture, and nurture again, can be something, a message in, look, you've done it before, you can do it, you've got the, you know, it's the message that our heart and mind needs in the moment. And I think of the same thing with loving kindness, that there's not a loving kindness practice. It's whatever way we pay attention, that in some way wakes up our heart, opens our heart, softens our heart, gives us courage. So for you, it sounds like it could be a real match. Yes, for this particular takeaway. Yeah. Yeah. So another thing in your book is, for you, it sounds like it could be a real match. Yes, for this particular story. For this, yeah.

So, another thing in your book is, and again, this is probably phrasey algebra, I wouldn't use, but nonetheless, it's meaningful to me, which is discovering your deepest longing. Can you talk about that? Yeah. There's one of the stories I tell in there is of a pay-lead of caregiver who reported that the greatest regret of the dying was I didn't live true to myself. And in a way, that's not just the dying. I mean, it's like, I think I run into a lot of people that in some level are disappointed

in their lives. Like they feel like they're skimming the surface, they're just batting away at the problems, but they're not arriving and really living couldn't do who they know they can be. So that chapter on really discovering your true longing is that question kind of like if you were at the end of your life looking back, you know,

what would really most matter? What would most matter today? What would most matter with you and I speaking here together? Like really what would most matter? And so that we get aligned with what we care about and not hijacked by the habit of kind of chasing after immediate gratification or defending ourselves or avoiding what we're afraid of. So it's a very powerful inquiry and in the Buddhist tradition, connecting with aspiration, connecting with what your heart really longs for is really what energizes on the path. It's what will have us stay with meditating because we'll remember it's not a discipline that's

punishing or something, it's because we love waking up, we love truth, you know, we this fascination with what's real, I love love, you know, it's like remembering that keeps us so that our days are really aligned in a meaningful way. There's a section in the book about rain in relationships. How does that work? In the same way that rain helps us face and process and wake up through our own fears or hurts or whatever, because that's what it's really doing. It's having us be with the stuff we don't want to be with but in a way so that we can find out Discover a larger sense of our own presence

Stuff comes up between people that needs the same attention So for instance with my husband with Jonathan Who's sitting in the room? Who happens to be listening right now? You know, we we have certain dynamics or patterns that will replay where we get stuck and one of our practices is we'll do the timeout, the official timeout, where we each do rain inwardly in our own way, where we'll you know feel where we're caught since the beliefs that are going on, breathe with it, bring care to it, and just hold it ourselves so that we're not speaking out of a stuck place.

And then when we start naming what's going on for us, it's without as much blame. The other person can hold it. There's more of a container for us to do it together. So if we're doing rain together, we might both be sitting together, working inwardly, and then we can exchange what's going on in a way where we have a lot more resources. We have a kind of a joke, which is the first person who can roll reverse wins.

And what that means is that can really see it through the other person's eyes, that can say, I get why that hurt you. I get why when I set it with that judgmental tone that would have made you pull back and not want to do what I want to do. It brings empathy and compassion to do rain together. I feel like we could do a whole separate interview on this subject, which reminds me you should come back more often.

That's sweet because I'm passionate about what we can do in relationships and we started much earlier talking about rain partners. And again this comes back to the state of the world then is that I feel like we. As long as we're living from fear of defense we're going to keep on hurting each other as individuals and globally. And learning to do these kind of practices with each other creates a sense of we that then ripples out. And so, rain partners is really powerful for that because then you can start moving through the world and one of my favorite lines, and this is from Ruby Sales, she's a civil rights activist, older woman, icon. And she has this phrase, where does it hurt? And she moves through the way she feels like she brings it to white America, the white America that's most caught in the grip of racism and asking, where does it hurt? And she senses a kind of a sense of meaninglessness and spiritual pain

in certain segments of white America. But moving through our lives and being able to see somebody who's in some way just see where does it hurt. And one of the metaphors I love the most is if you imagine walking through the woods and seeing a dog who's by a tree and you go to pet the dog and the dog lures at you, you know, like, fangs, bared and so on. And then, you know, you get angry at the dog, but then you notice that the dog's paws in a trap. And then everything shifts. And you don't necessarily go really near the dog because it might be dangerous, but you're hard to shift it, because you see that the dog's suffering.

If we can learn to move through the world, and when somebody acts in ways we don't like, instead of locking into our judgment, fight, fight, freeze, in some way ask, where does it hurt? The world would be a different place, really would. Let me say one final thing. I've realized I've actually had some anxiety during this interview, and I've kind of landed on me midway through why it was, and I think it was

that you described that I hurt your feelings and that made me feel bad so I want to apologize for that. Wow, so I want to slow down here because I'm mostly I feel touched and I want to say thank you. Thank you for coming on the show. Yeah. No, it's, there's something beautiful about, like I wasn't even going to go there. I wasn't going to bring up the past.

And the fact that you did is modeling really what we've been talking about, which is to go into the elevator or go towards the dog that looks dangerous. You went right towards where it was most vulnerable, but in so doing, you created more connection. So thank you. Here's the beginning of an ongoing relationship, I hope. I'm on for it. Thank you. Final thing before we let you go. We force all of our guests to shamelessly plug. Many

of our guests don'tly plug many of our guests Don't like doing this and I sense you're probably one of those people But can you just list the books you've written including the new one and give us the name of your podcast and your website where we can learn more about you Just so that we have it all. Okay, I told you I was I had myself a self-important self So I'm not actually minding it all. Okay, great No, in fact, I love to invite everybody to tarbrock.com and That's my website and I have a weekly podcast that I give a talk Wednesday night in Washington DC area and You can download it from my website or you can go on to Facebook and

Downstream and just become part of live stream become part of the week weekly event. So that's one thing. The books are radical acceptance, which was 2003, which is really had a really see the trans-of-unworthiness and wake up out of that. True refuge, which was 2013, which is when I got really sick and how do you find a way to face when life is most difficult and find peace and joy and freedom in the midst, and then most recently radical compassion, just a few weeks ago, which is really learning to love ourselves and each other into healing, and it's really for the rippling out for our world. So those are the primary things to plug right now. The last one, I don't know how soon this will come out.

When is this coming out? Radical Compassion Challenge. Radical Compassion Challenge. If you go on my website, you'll see it's a 10 day free online event and we've got like 45,000 people already signed up and it's, I would have got wonderful guests on it and every day it's, it'll give you assignments, action assignments that help to increase caring and help you to widen the circles of love in this world. We'll put links to all of this in the show notes so if you didn't have a pen out don't

worry, it's right there on your phone. Thank you again for doing this. Thank you. Totally mine too. Thank you. All right, big thanks to Tara Brock. Yeah, that got me thinking a lot about the impact of what I write. So I really appreciate her coming on and I very much hope it's the first of many visits

because she has a lot to offer. So let's do some voicemails. Here's number one. Hi, Dan. I recently finished a course on creating healthy habits with Kelly McGonigal. Thank you so much for that. It's really been invaluable to me.

I have a question about that inner voice or that inner critic that you and her had talked about. I recently discovered after reflecting on all of this and all the things I've learned from listening to you and her talk is that when I'm working out I can actually hear myself just be raiding myself and judging myself so harshly. Like I'm not good enough, I'm not running fast enough, the person next to me is better. I can't lift weights like that person and I've never really even realized that before. I'm realizing now that that might be why it's so difficult for me to get to the gym.

I have to force myself to get to the gym. In the course and in the interview with her, Kelly had mentioned that finding joy is really important in creating those healthy habits. I'm realizing now that it's just not joyful for me because I'm constantly judging myself there. Anyway, I was just wondering if you have any advice about silencing that inner critics or being compassionate towards that inner critic,

and I was hoping you had some insight to that. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks again for everything you do. Great question. Good on you for having that realization. That seems like a big breakthrough, just to see that. I mean, that's what we're trying to cultivate is the capacity to muster some self-awareness

so that we can then work with what's there. If we don't see it, we can't work with it. So as it happens, I think intimately familiar with this phenomenon you're describing. So I'm going to give you four ideas. One is just to follow up on you. You mentioned that Kelly McGonagall who leads this new course we've posted on the 10% happier app about forming healthy habits, she recommends when it comes to exercise that you find a form of exercise that you really love because if you're getting joy out of the thing, you're much more likely to do it. So you notice that, and yet you're noticing that you're engaged in a lot of self criticism.

It may be that the self criticism is going to be there no matter what form of exercise you choose, but I wonder whether there may be forms of exercise where the kind of inner critic is less prominent because you're just having so much fun. So that's just one thing to play with. The other thing to play with comes via Grace Livingston, who's one of the producers on this show, who works quite closely with me on this book I'm working on about kindness with a real emphasis on self-kindness. And she recommended, for me, that when I notice, when I'm working out that I'm pushing myself the way you push yourself, you're not doing a good enough job. The person next to you is doing better. This workout isn't hard enough. You're doing a good and need a second workout afterwards. Just to drop the word gratitude into my mind

stream. Just to wake me up out of that trance and to realize, I'm, that's Connor. Hey, Connor, you're doing a great job, Connor, of being a good listener. Thank you. If you drop the word gratitude into your mental stream, you wake up from this trance of beating yourself up and realize, I'm lucky to have this body that functions well enough to be exercising right now. And I just noticed that dropping that in repeatedly,

sometimes you have to just do it over and over and over again, is really helpful. Third idea is something I talked about in a book I wrote called Meditation for Figuity Skeptics, and it's an idea I took from my co-author, Jeffrey Warren, who talks about having a welcoming attitude toward your inner, toward your neuroses toward the various inner characters who show up at the party sometimes in a rather obnoxious faction. And so for the inner critic, you might just use the little mantra when you notice the inner critic yammering away. You might use the mantra, welcome to the party. I don't think you can silence the intercritic, but you can kind of soothe it. By just recognizing that she or he is there and saying, welcome to the party, I'm not fighting you. I see you.

Come on in, have a seat at the table, the party's for you. That's again, Connor, who's like my little hype man who just kind of yells some of my key phrases after I yell them. I am going out. Exactly. So welcome to I yell. Exactly. So welcome to the party. Try that. I find that it really works particularly well in a meditative context.

But you can try it just in your free range life too. And then the final idea I have is from Kristen Neff who's been on the show before. And I really respect the work she's done around self-compassion, she's kind of the big shot in that particular field. She's got this three-step process that you can do on the go that I've really found that, you know, for example, if I'm anytime walking past a mirror, I get really self-critical. And if I'm with it enough to notice that I'm getting self-critical, I can do her little

three-step process, which is easy to remember. First step is just to notice, oh yeah, I'm suffering right now. This kind of sucks, I'm beating myself up. So that's number one. The second is to kind of step back and just remind yourself that anybody who's human is suffers. That's just part of being born. And maybe there are millions, almost certainly, there are millions of people suffering right now with the exact same mental content that you're

suffering with. And so just to kind of put this in a larger context and to provide some perspective is useful. And then the third step is just to send yourself loving kindness, which I know some of you are sick of me saying what I'm about to say, which is that it can be a little sappy to some, but it can. And yet it really works. And so just to send, you know, may I be happy or may I be free from suffering, just to inject some good, some warmth into the mind stream right there can be really helpful. So those are four steps. One, really finding a kind of exercise that you love,

two, using gratitude as a mantra while you're exercising, three, using the mantra of welcome to the party, and then four, using Kristen's three part exercise, which again, if you wanna learn more about dial back and listen to the episode we did with her. Great question. I really hope what I said in response helps. Here's voice mail number two. Hello Dan and the 10% team. I just want to thank you for the great podcast and content that you provide us. I stumble upon your podcast through Sam Harrison, Joel Rogan's podcast and you quickly become the top listener in my podcast app.

I especially love hearing the guests who talk about mindfulness in terms of the workplace. I really think that it bridges the gap of a meditation practice and mindfulness during every day life. My question to you is based off the current struggle I have in my life, which is about stress from my job. I struggle with stress that my job brings and have to constantly unwind with meditation. I also have to constantly remind myself how grateful I should be of my job. I struggle with stress that my job brings and have to constantly unwind with meditation. I also have to constantly remind myself how grateful I should be of my situation. I make great money and have great responsibility, and for this I am truly a lucky guy. But it's hard to see that daily, and the possibility of leaving my job to get rid of the stress across my mind a lot. I guess I have a hard time deciding if my job is actually toxic to my life

or if it's just the human nature of this satisfaction that I need to continue to work on. Where is the line where you can see a situation in your life is worth working through or for moving unneeded stress is a better approach. I just took a much needed three-week break from work through the Christmas holidays and decided to get ahead of my emails a few days back before going back in. A few hours I spent sorting emails but being to an anxious state and again I had to meditate and focus on gratitude to get out of the phone. How can one tell if something is too toxic and needs to be removed from your life or if it is the nature of life to feel the grass as green or elsewhere? Any insight into this would be much appreciated and thank you for all that you do.

Let me answer with a personal anecdote and see if that's useful. First of all, let me say, I want to just point out that I think you're taking a lot of smart steps by focusing on gratitude and by recognizing that there is dissatisfaction inherent in being alive and that it's probably gonna show up in whatever situation professionally, you find yourself. But the anecdote that comes to mind as I listen to your story is I went on a retreat about a year and a half ago, was actually a loving kindness meditation retreat

with the great teacher spring washim. And after the retreat, I turned my phone back on and started looking at my emails and my schedule. And I started to feel really anxious and unhappy and dissatisfied with the structure of certain parts of my life. And that contributed to a big decision I made about six to nine months ago where I shook up my professional responsibilities. I walked away from anchoring a show that I loved called Nightline, and I walked away from covering Breaking News for ABC News, and I really cut back to anchoring just weekend, good morning America, doing investigative reporting, and then focusing more on writing books, doing this podcast, and working at the 10% happier app. And so what I really, what I did was to focus on the things that I love,

and it was helpful for me to use mindfulness in that process, using the mindfulness, and especially in that moment where I had a lot of mindfulness at the end of the retreat, I could see that having too busy of a calendar, having requests on me to do things that I didn't want to do, made me unhappy. And it started to become clear to me through self-reflection, but also through having the mindfulness that we get through meditation, to watch my own mind in various situations. It became clearer to me, what are the things I really love,

what are the things that really made me feel good, and what are the things that actually just gave me a lot of stress in my life. And so I can't tell you if your job is toxic, but I can tell you is that by using meditation to examine what's happening in your mind as you work, you might be able to come to a more firm conclusion about whether this is a healthy environment for you and to get more clarity on what it is that you love to do. Here's one of the most trite things I can possibly say. You only get one shot at doing this life thing as Connor, who's living his best life, can attest.

So you don't wanna spend all of your time at a job that's making you miserable. So I would spend a decent amount of time focusing on what do you actually love? How do you want to spend your days? And then going for that. And I do think meditation can be a huge part of it. It may be that you are doing the job you love and that it's just the pace of it or the inherent dissatisfaction of being alive that you're dealing with

that's giving you the stress, or it may be that you're in a toxic situation. But ultimately, you're the one who's gonna have to decide. I think the good news is that you're already availing yourself of one powerful tool that will get you closer to making that decision. What is the one? Conor, you've been so patient.

Can we turn your microphone on? Can Daddy turn your microphone on? Yep. What was the question? Conner, you've been so patient. Can we turn your microphone on? Can Daddy turn your microphone on? Yep. What was the question you just asked me? So. You said, what is the... What? What is the most powerful tool?

What is it? Yeah, so I was just talking about this powerful tool that I was recommending to the guy who just left us that voice mail and you said, what is the most powerful tool? It's a starting. No, it's meditation. Which you do. Oh. Don't you do meditation at night sometimes? Yep. To help you fall asleep? Yeah. It's a powerful tool right? Yeah. Tell me what you like about

it. So I like about it about the boys. The boys what do you mean by that? Because I like about it about the boys. The boys, what do you mean by that? Because I like the boys. The boys who do the guided meditations, you mean? The boys' voices that... Yeah, and the elaxis and the... The lexus. Yeah, and the sit in this chair.

Yes, so Alexis Santos is the teacher you like the most and he sat in the chair in which you're sitting a Few weeks ago because he was on this show and now you're on this show But I'm not doing a meditation Now we're just chatting. Oh Do you want to do a meditation? Yeah, okay? Go for it. So When people get tired, when people put put in meditations on, that means to get even more tired. That's one way you can use meditation. You can use it to help you fall asleep. But there are other ways you can use it, you know. Yeah. We couldn't use it.

So, when... Yeah, we could use it so when we could also use it like a lullaby. Yeah, that's actually not that's that's actually a really good point. You can use it a little bit like a lullaby. Yep. And that's happened some of times. And also some times people get treats for the dogs, undercats, and for the cell. That's true. It's a bit of a non-sequitor, but it's totally true. Hey, can I tell you something? Yep. Thank you. Thank you for being here while I'm recording this. I really appreciate it.

I also want to thank your dad and all the other people who helped me do this show like Grace Livingston, Sam with Johns, Tiffany Omaha, Lauren Hartzog. Thanks to all of you guys who do so much work to make this show great. Hunter you're the best and I'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye, buddy. Bye, buddy. Hey, hey, Prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

at Wondery.com slash Survey. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.