Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 241: Crisis Advice from "Meditation MacGyver" | Jeff Warren

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Jeff Warren is someone for whom I have a special affection. We chronicled our friendship in a book we co authored, called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, in which we took a gonzo cross-country bus trip to help people overcome various obstacles to establishing a meditation practice. On that trip, I started calling him "Meditation MacGyver," because he is a loveable, excitable meditation nerd who can seemingly come up with practices for any person in any circumstances. He even got my wife meditating (after years of refusing to do so because I had been so annoying when I pestered her to practice). So, who better to turn to in this crisis? By way of background, Jeff is a meditation teacher, based in Toronto, where he helps run a group called the Consciousness Explorers Club. He is also featured in many of the courses and guided meditations on the Ten Percent Happier app. He is brilliant and hilarious and, as you will hear, very open about his own personal struggles. Where to find Jeff Warren online: Website: https://jeffwarren.org/ Jeff on Ten Percent Happier: https://10percenthappier.app.link/jeff-warren Social Media: Facebook: Jeff Warren / https://www.facebook.com/jeffwarren.org/ Instagram: Jeff Warren (@_jeffwarren_) / https://www.instagram.com/_jeffwarren_/ YouTube: Jeff Warren / https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUOpVNy60LTCmAwfZ6zOroQ Resources Mentioned: Shinzen Young / https://www.shinzen.org/ A Common Language / https://jeffwarren.org/articles/a-common-language/ A Night Practice / https://jeffwarren.org/articles/a-night-practice/ Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace / https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316066524 Consciousness Explorers Club / http://cecmeditate.com/ Watchmen Sharon Salzberg & Joseph Goldstein Retreat: https://www.dharma.org/joseph-goldstein-sharon-salzberg-shelter-for-the-heart-and-mind-an-online-retreat/ Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Health Care Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jeff-warren-241 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. Hey y'all is your's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from.

And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer, on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, buddy. There's this closet. I'm the, this ain't my closet with these handbags. It's going to be very hard to take you seriously. But, but that implies you took me seriously ever. Very true.

I don't know if I've told you, Dan, but the past year, people have been sending me in. All these really very beautiful, very short little descriptions of the things they do. In a sense, their meditation and actions. And I just thought if you were into it, but that it might be kind of interesting to everyone so while I'll drop in one of these, I could read out one of these brief little practices. Right. Love it. This is the time to kind of honor the practice you already do to be more deliberate about being your own teacher.

It's like how to adapt a meditation practice to an emergency. Exactly. Because the real question of a meditation practice is how to adapt it to a life. Yeah. The life you're living. And that's just an interesting point, but it just gets me thinking about something that's been on my mind recently that it feels like life is on hold, but it it isn't like this is still your life. And so do you want to be living for this 12, 18, 24 months, as if you're on deep

freezing, you just can't wait to this thing to be over or do you want to maximize this situation in all of its horribleness? Because like this is still just a portion of the limited portion of living you get. Dude, I could not agree more. I said such a deep, important point. I mean, that's the kind of opportunity of this moment, even though it sounds perverse to talk about it in those terms with all the suffering and challenges. You know, it's forcing us to

look at our lives and in a relationship to the planet and to each other and it's a time for practice. I just wanted to know that a single tear rolled down my teeth on the foot. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. As you can probably hear from that pre-show banter, Jeff Warren is somebody from whom I have a special affection. We actually chronicled our friendship in a book we co-authored called Meditation for Figuity Skeptics in which

we took a Gonzo cross-country bus trip to help people overcome various obstacles to establishing a meditation practice. And on that trip I started to call him meditation Maghiver because he is a lovable, excitable meditation nerd who can seemingly come up with practices for any person in any circumstance. He even got my wife to meditate after years of her refusing to do so because I had been so annoying when I started practicing and began pestering her to practice. So I thought who better to turn to in this current virus crisis? It's a great episode.

And by way of background before we dive in, Jeff is a meditation teacher based in Toronto where he helps run a group called the Consciousness Explorers Club. He's also featured in many of the courses and guided meditations on the 10% happier app. He's brilliant and hilarious. And as you will hear hear very open about his own Personal struggles. So here we go Jeff Warren. You want to just dive in Jeff? Let's dive in then your son Well, thanks for coming on. Appreciate that

Of course, so I actually was thinking about this when I saw you the other day I guess I have to use that term saw in quotes because I saw you on video when we were doing 10% happier live. Not to be all schmoopy on you, but I really miss you. And I was, I realized that it was so fun to talk to you. So I'm excited that we get to do it again. Oh, me too, man. I mean, too. It's rare to rare to have a, someone you can nerd out about these subjects kind of get ridiculously excited about. I guess I think it's like, is there a better friendship when you're interested in what is the nature of how we connect to reality and how can we connect other people with that in a way that helps them? And that becomes the basis of

your friendship, but just makes everything really extra sparkly. And then there's just the fact that I like you too. Mm-hmm. Why is it that friendships formed or... I've really noticed this in my life, the friendships formed around something as, the 11, 12 year ago version of me would have said meditation just sounds supremely boring, but actually when friendships are built around something as actually what turns out to be as

vital as meditation really are supercharged in some way. Yeah, I think about that too. Well, I think partly it's because meditation is about engaging with who you are in the deepest way at the deepest level. And so that's where you learn to come from and to practice. That's sort of the practice. Doing that with another person, it kind of strips out all those superficialities of things.

You're there in the raw realness of stuff, which is what a practice is. You see the other person from that place, and they see you from that place. There's a kind of intimacy that gets built there. And I guess also there's just anything when we do anything together, it's sort of a common cause. You share a purpose or a mission, you share an experience.

Actually, it's what's happening now. It's kind of one of the silver linings, I guess, of this really challenging time is that we're all being brought into a common experience. We're all sharing this. There's sort of common cause. There's a common enemy of them. Maybe that's an archaic way of putting it. And it's very unifying that. It kind of puts everybody on the same page. You brought something up that I've been wondering about in terms of you because you know, having known you for a while, I know that a big emphasis for you and your life and in your practice is community much more so than it is for me.

And you know, you've been running this incredible group for many years, the Consciousness Explorers Club in Toronto where you do meditation and community service and dance parties. And I know you run retreats and you sit retreats. So meditation is a team sport for you. And yet we can't do it together in person anymore. And so is that a source of angst and pain for you? I mean, I missed the live stuff, no question, but I've been, you know, I've just shifted it to a lot of online stuff. I did two weekly live streams through YouTube and it's amazing to me how much it has felt like a community because everybody chimes in on the chat.

I see all the names, the patterns of interaction. Everyone doing the same jokes or they have the same. You see that you start to learn the personalities of people, people type in reports and questions. And it feels very much like you're just like these things. Like when you do the live stream rather, the 10 or so half of your live, it feels like you're sitting in company, which and I was very surprised by that at the beginning, I thought it would feel more disconnected. Now, I'm not saying it's the exact same. I think there is something about doing it live, being in the same place, seeing people, you know, there's that definitely something there.

In fact, I'd love to, there's a lot that can be set about that part of why I think about the practice of guiding the practice of sitting in community is itself a practice that can be really deep and transformative. But the online piece is, it's pretty amazing. And I think that's one other cool thing you're seeing is all these teachers and not just from meditation world, but in all kinds of kind of healing and therapy modalities, you know, trauma work modalities, they're now because of the circumstances, they're being forced to suddenly do what they do online. And that is scaling up access because it's now accessible for a lot more people in a way that's a lot less expensive.

And I think that's a very significant thing that's happening. And if you're interested in sort of the democratization of mental health and creating better access to practices and to support structures, I think the online piece is really coming into its own. And it's going to be a vital part of whatever that structure is going to look like. So, yeah, and these are some of the things that I've been thinking about during all of this. And watching this happen, watching it happen in my community is people are sharing resources. I mean, it seems like everyone I know is suddenly putting an offering out online.

And while that can be overwhelming, I'm sure there's like, you got to separate the week from the chaff. It's also this incredible active-sert collective service, you know, people are kind of stepping up to a solutions-based response to what's happening. And I'm super inspired by it. What do you mean when you say democratization of mental health? So I think it's just a word or phrase to describe what's already happening, which is the dramatic increase in access to practice and practices, and not just practice also support structures. So the rise of meditation and mindfulness is part of that.

The rise of yoga earlier was part of that of TM. The rise now of all these trauma informed approaches of trauma research more generally, all the proliferation of psychotherapy, styles and somatic bodywork practices and healers. And I mean, I think that so first of all, there's just this dramatic proliferation of techniques and an understanding that practices can help us. So that's one part of it. This more access to these practices and support structures too, because they come with often with communities, with groups that can hold each other.

But then the other piece is it's less and less top down that it used to be. You know, it's hard to, there was a time when we kind of, it was very easy to locate the authority for your own health outside of yourself, especially for your own mental health. You got to go to an expert. You got to go to the expert teacher or the expert psychiatrist or psychologist or therapist to help fix you. And I think that there's still a role for those professionals, no question.

But what I see happening more and more is an ethic of kind of bottom up empowerment where people are learning that actually if you're given a practice and you can find a way to kind of customize. The practice to work for you, then you can kind of be your own teacher and you can check in with a community checking with a more practice experience practitioner and it's important to do that. But that were the ones sort of in charge of what our practice looks like. but that were the ones sort of in charge of what our practice looks like. So that's what I mean. It's a combination of more access, more empowerment, removing barriers to access, barriers that had to do with authority or cost, and that what we're looking at is a world where everybody knows, increasingly, everybody starts to know that it's not like you just get to be born in coast, that there

is this moment of taking responsibility for your own health and your own mental health that's very empowering. And when we do this, it changes how we live our lives. We start to live in a different way and we start to empower other people around as to take their own mental health seriously. And it's such a huge thing. And I guess also it's not just so partly about finding the practice that works for you and realizing that you're the one who's going to be, needs to pace yourself and be responsible for that. But also that your health is connected to everyone else's health and the planet's health. So also, you know, for me, it's sharing a particular ethic of practice that's

about sharing it. That's about sharing it. That's about empowering people to find their own thing. You guide someone in the practice that you like. They guide you in their thing. This is something we do as a community, the communities, the teacher. We learn from each other. It's much more horizontal than it is vertical. And then you create this culture of real empowerment of seeing that the,

the act of finding a practice and building a practice for yourself is this incredible privilege, this incredible creative act you can do, and that's sort of now we're describing what life is in a way. This is what it is to be a human being. So I think coming into that understanding, I feel like that's the time we're living in, or at least that's what I hope we're moving towards, and that's what I try to put all my energies into doing. It reminds me a little bit of the advent of punk rock, which was a reaction to overrot rock stardom.

They demolished the stage, they put the band on the same level as the fans, they got rid of guitar solos, they got rid of actually knowing how to play an instrument. And there was some great stuff that came out of that and also some just utter crap. And so that that gets me to the one issue that comes up in my mind when I hear you talk about this democratization that you see happening in envision expanding is, how do you separate wheat from chaff? How do you, there is, as you said,

a role for authority and expertise. And so, and this, letting a thousand flowers bloom or whatever the expression is, is there risk? Yes, because what we're describing is life. There's risk in life. There's risk when you exercise you can twist an ankle But that's the process I would say that the process of living is the process of figuring that out It's a process of learning what works for you in life like where how to deepen your engagement with it

And there is a kind of learning you go down Coldess acts and you come out and you make a different choice. And it's not something you need to do alone. I mean, I empower people to try to think about it individually in terms of what their practice can look like based on the details of their actual lives as they're living. But it's very important to also be sharing that in community and with peers and with professional level teachers with people with more experience. I mean, I don't even like the word teacher. What I would say is there's just being human

and then there's humans who've been around longer, who spent more time looking at their experience, they have more life experience and they can give us important feedback. And that's why we need our elders, that's why we need experienced teachers and practitioners within different modes. So there's still gonna be those relationships.

I think it's dangerous to put the onus for your own development onto somebody else. I guess that's what I'm saying, that that seems absurd to me. And actually it leads to all of the problems that you see in spirituality, where you have all of this power concentrated at the top, and then you have inevitably these abuses of power.

And then in more subtle ways, even if you don't go to the more exaggerated, in subtle ways you have inevitably these abuses of power. And then in more subtle ways, even if you don't go to the more exaggerated, in subtle ways, you have the problem with teachers is they teach often their own way in. And then you're constantly comparing the ideals of that teacher to your own experience, which may be very different. Your experience might look very different and you're the way you're deepening in your life is going to look different than the way that teacher did. And as long as you're holding up an ideal of that other teacher over your life, you're going to actually create more suffering and confusion for yourself. So it's about locating the center of our own authority in our own lives.

That's where the center should be. And so yes, there's going to be, that's a learning process, you know, but we're talking about life. You end up at a point where when you're talking of practice, you realize you're it's no different than talking about what it means to be a human. So if I'm here, you correctly, the a lot of excitement around being able to again, democratize mental health, be able to explore lots of different practices, empower people to teach other people their practices. That doesn't mean there's no role for experienced teachers or experts.

If you just see it, you want to have a more robust mix and throw a lot of the onus back on the individual to do the exploration to take this seriously and to occasionally check it with experts. Exactly. I mean, The role of experts is more important than ever. I'm basically saying it's not like there's a binary choice between either you're a practitioner or you're a professional teacher. These are the two buckets. I think it's much more gray that there's that. That's partly why I've about to launch an online course next week, actually, on how to guide meditation.

And it's really in that middle ground that I envision. I'm trying to empower people to understand, look at their own practices, get empowered to understand how they work, and then out of that create their own practice, they can guide someone else in. And then in turn, pass on this ethic of looking of that person who they guide it to finding their own right practice. And to me, this is neither strictly being a passive receiving practitioner, or your turn pass on this ethic of looking of that person who they guide it to finding their own right practice. And to me, this is neither strictly being a passive receiving practitioner where you're

receiving from the top, you know, a practice and you're just doing it, nor is it quite being a professional teacher where you have a ton of experience in this and you're guiding people in that. It's something in the middle. I just want to make the conversation more realistic around this like there is no binary black and white. That old structure of student teacher anyway was partly an illusion. It's a much more elaborated, rich, gray field, and we need everyone to feel empowered in

that field, including those experts and those teachers. I should say, too, the more you do a specific technique, let's say look at Vipassana. If you're going to choose Vipassana as your primary practice, the more you do a specific technique, so let's say look at Vipassana. If you're going to choose Vipassana as your primary practice, the more you engage specifically with the form of Vipassana, the more you're going to need someone experienced in that specific form. Because techniques create technique-specific effects, the technique you do is going to shape the form of how you're engaging more deep with your life. It's going to shape your enlightenment if you want to put it that way.

So you need professionals within specific techniques who have expertise in how that's going to look as much as ever. However, or maybe and you might also want to do a technique that looks only like your technique, the Dan Harris technique, you know, it's darning mothballs, mothballs in the closet. And you're doing it in such a purposeful and open way that it becomes this deep way to engage with your life. And for that, you could look to other knitters, other donors for advice about how this can deepen your engagement and absolutely you should. But you should also look to what your life is teaching you. So, you had this idea of reading some of the practices that people in your community have sent you.

I think that actually is a useful thing to do now because it'll put some meat on the bone in terms of giving people an idea of what specifically you're talking about. These practices that you're sharing with us, these are from folks who are connected to you through your newsletter and website. Yeah. I mean, I basically put out a call about a year ago. I wrote a post about practice in the bigger wider sense, and I gave some examples, and then I asked people to share their practice, to write them into me. And actually, that would be an invitation I'd make to your

listeners, too, if they want to. I could just go to my website, chaffworn.org, and there's their practices to write them into me. And actually that would be an invitation I'd make to your listeners too if they want to. They could just go to my website, chafforren.org and there's in the contact forum. There's a thing where you can put practice report or practice description and just plug them in. And so people responded, you know, I've been getting tons of them. It's unbelievable. So I'm hoping we can I can read out a few of these as we go. Maybe we can kind of comment on them. I'll just read a couple now. So here's one someone sent in and their practice is film. I'm just quoting, I'm going to just leave all of these anonymous because some people have said I can use them and I haven't gotten permission from everybody. So I'll just keep it anonymous. So this person did, though.

So here's a little practice about filming, this person's a filmmaker. One thing I like to do, she says, when I'm shooting is I choose a frame that's interesting. I set up the camera, I start rolling, and then I wait for something to happen, for something to enter the frame, to cross through it, to bring movement, as opposed to chasing after everything that moves, always being a step behind, trying to catch up with the action. When I do this, it's a practice of stillness of attentiveness. So that's a practice that this woman filmmaker does. I'll give you another one. Here's a someone who makes jewelry. I make jewelry. I use mostly metal and stone to make earrings, bracelets, sometimes

necklaces. As hobbies go, it doesn't require a lot of time or space, and it makes me feel connected to something ancient. I think it was our first stuff as a species, something beautiful without function, accommodating our transient lifestyle. Most of the pieces are okay, but a few I really love. Some I've kept and some I've given to friends or donated to charity. It's not so much about the result. It's about the creation process, which requires focus, patience, humility. It's good for my sanity.

I'll just give one more. I'm making read more through the thing, but here's one is the professional actors. This is acting. I'm an actor and currently on tour with a Broadway musical. I take in the sound of the awaiting audience, close my eyes, hand to my heart, and I say, thank you for this opportunity to tell this story.

Please let me live up to my potential and use my gifts wisely, open to receive and open to express. And thank you for bringing these people here safely. I find this practice puts me in the center of the present, even when I'm tired or nervous or not in optimum health or a frame of mind. It reminds me of the possibilities within this very moment, which is part of what makes doing live theater so unique and awesome. I have hundreds of these and they're extremely beautiful. I love to read out a few more, but when I hear these, I mean, I'm curious for your response, but when I hear these, I hear practice. I hear someone who's doing this thing, whether it's jewelry, or it's acting,

whether it's looking through a camera. And in a sense, they're living a kind of meditation in action. And it's as if meditation got unmondled and taken off the cushion and is being realized in these people's lives. I guess the key thing for me is I think we all do this. I think we all have little hobbies or habits or rituals that we do that are deepening our engagement with our life and it's just about honoring that they're happening and being a little bit more deliberate about them. Anyway, I'm interested in your thoughts. Well, one thing that comes up for me is when you and I were writing our book a couple of years ago, we took a

tour across the country and talked to people who were interested in meditation about putting up a practice and what the obstacles were. One of the trends that we observed, you and I, was that people who come up to us and say, well, I don't need to meditate because knitting is my practice or jogging is my practice. And we had mixed feelings about that because there's a way, you know, if you run the way I run, you know, I'm planning all the mean things I want to say to my boss and or I'm listening to music and pretending I'm a drummer and a successful rock band. It's fun.

And I think it's really good for me in many ways, but I don't know that I would call that mindfulness meditation And so when I hear you say all these things I simultaneously agree those what you just described I'll sound like really healthy Practices and develop healthy habits of mine and then I wonder what is the connection to meditation? Is it important? Is it a prerequisite to have a formal practice that undergirds those practices? So I'll stop talking and see if there's anything

in what I just said that you think is interesting. There's a lot I think is interesting. Well, I would separate it into two, I guess I don't wanna say two things. One is I wanna talk about what is special about a sitting practice, which I can do and want to do, because I think there is something very special about a seated practice and stillness. But then the other thing I would say is just more commenting on these practices in actions,

because when people say running is my meditation or knitting is my meditation, I actually think there's a kind of progression of how that could be true that I love to just sort of share because I think it relates to what everyone in their life is already doing. What I mean by that is I sometimes think about practice in life as having three tears. Each one is deeper. The first tier is, there's just an activity that we like to do. Call it unconscious practice.

I like to play frizzy with my friends. I like to go for a run. I like to take my cup of coffee in the morning and just spend a minute sort of gathering my thoughts. So it's a practice, but it's not super deliberate yet. It's sort of just this thing we do. And in doing the thing, it helps us shift our state in the moment.

And so we might feel a little bit more subtle, a little bit more relaxed. So it has this effect of shifting state in the moment. And so we might feel a little bit more settled, a little bit more relaxed. So it has this effect of shifting state in the moment. That's super valuable. So this is legit. We all have lots of those little things that we do. And I would say that that practice gets a little bit deeper.

It goes down to tier two when it becomes conscious. So an in-mare already be conscious in a lot of cases. It just means when you're suddenly now deliberate about doing it. You say, oh, I have this thing I do. And I know it's good for me. And I'm going to try to make sure I do it every week or every day.

And so there's just a little bit more deliborant to it. And that is more than that starts to create more than just a state shift, although it does that. It also starts to create a trait change. So that's the scale of months and years that starts to create new habits,

that change creates new behaviors. And so this is when a practice is now getting more supercharged. So that's the scale of months and years that starts to create new habits, that changes, creates new behaviors. And so this is when a practice is now getting more supercharged. It's a way of building a habit of relationship to your life in a way. But there's a third tier. And the third tier is kind of the hardest to talk about, but I would say it's sort of the tier of your whole life. And that's the tier of when a practice begins to actually change your relationship to reality,

to transform consciousness, however you wanna put it. And that, to me, is when it really becomes like a contemplative or a spiritual practice or like a meditation practice. And it's because you're using the practice, and it has to do with the way you're using the practice. You're using it, not now just as a thing to give you a little bit of respite or to even create a good habit.

It becomes a vehicle in which helps you engage more deeply with your life. It's a vehicle in which you're learning. The practice is teaching you about the world now. You're sitting down and you're knitting and you're not knitting just to kind of pass the time away. You're knitting in a way that is teaching you about not knitting just to kind of pass the time away. You're knitting in a way that is teaching you about what it means to be peaceful in the world or what it means to be engaged or what it means to be humble. It's sort of the level where you, so this is the scale of your whole life.

It's like if you were to look back after a life of doing little carpentry projects or doing this regular knitting thing and you would ask yourself, what has this taught me about who I am? What has this taught me about life? And there will be things that you could say. That's the scale, that's what a practice really, to me, gets super charged. And at that point, I don't know how that practice is any different than the deepest meditation practice. Meditation is about exploring your relationship to what's real, to your life, to how you're connected to everything else. And anything can be a vehicle for that. If it's done with enough deliberateness and humility, and you spend enough time with it.

And so the way I unpack it is, are the skills there, the concentration, the clarity, the equanimity and the care of the four I talk about. The concentration is the commitment to doing this thing over time, which starts to yield this particular kind of fruit. The awareness is being aware of what it's teaching you about yourself and the world. It's the clarity of having that wakefulness, being present to it. The equanimity is the surrender quality to it, being so open to the practice that it's teaching you that you're not driving it forward. It begins to, and you hear this all the time, by the way, and creative people talk about their process. It begins to teach

them. And then the care part is, are you engaging with this thing in a way that is like bringing out the most heartful part of you? Are you doing it well? Are you treating someone well? Like are you that's this incredible heart training that practice can give us so to me when those four things are there and Are really truly there. I don't know that that practice now of Standing on stage and being present for your audience of engaging with material with your hands, of looking through a camera, I don't know that that practice now is any less deep than the deepest meditation practice. Except the one caveat, the danger of a practice like that is that it becomes a silo.

It's only this place where you go into the silo for the good thing to happen in your life that where you deeply engage, but you haven't spread it around to the rest of your life. What's wonderful about mindfulness practices and meditation is, and I'm on the teachers who teach it, is there's continually this invitation to spread what you're learning on the cushion out to the rest of your life. And that's what I feel like needs to be made more explicit with these other practices. We all may have a habit that's a soulful way of engaging with our life, but until we just deliberately choose to learn from that habit and try to spread the good of that habit out to the other parts of our life,

then we truly don't have a fully, a practice that's filling our whole life, do you know what I mean? And it kind of happens anyway, it percolates out, but there's a way I think to be more deliberate about it to supercharge our lives. So now you're starting to see what I'm talking about, when I talk about a life of practice of being your own teacher. This is what I mean.

I mean, going to your life as it is now, empowering your existing habits, supercharging them, and letting them become a vehicle for deep contemplative learning about who you are. You've thought about this so much, with so much more depth than I have. So, and I come at it with the prejudice of somebody who's spent, you know, a little over a decade, really focused on meditation. And so, it probably has some annoying zeal of the convert.

But I just know for myself that I would have trouble engaging with any like an artistic practice in the way in which you describe if I hadn't been taught how to wake up through meditation, you know, I wasn't even aware of meta cognition, you know, mindfulness, which allows you to see what's happening in your mind without being owned by it. Sort of step out of your habitual thought patterns and neurotic programs to see them in action for an nanosecondent time and as a consequence not be yanked around by them all the time. Or how one can deliberately cultivate focus by trying to focus on your breath or something like that and then every time you get lost, start again, get lost, start again. So for me, it's very easy to see how an existing meditation practice can then supercharge

these idiosyncratic or artistic habits or practices we've been engaging with throughout our whole life. I have more trouble understanding, at least for myself, how it would be possible in reverse. Yeah, it's an absolutely brilliant thought. I kind of agree with you. I think it happens spontaneously. You know, I mean, I spend a lot of time

talking to people from other traditions and worlds. So talking to poets and writers and actors and filmmakers and artists and I'm often struck when I hear them speak many of them are not meditators that the kinds of experiences that they're having the kind of insights they're getting are very meditative insights so I think that you don't have to have a meditation practice to be able to find these insights to be able to be working on those skills I really believe that on the other hand I think that that's what I was going to say is special about a seed

in meditation. I think it's the single best place to cultivate the skills because it's the most simple. It's where you're sitting down and everything is paired down. There's no distracting motions you need to do. There's relatively less going on in the outside world. It's the place where you get clearest about your baseline. And I guess the way I would say it is the place we get clearest about where the dials are in your consciousness. Where's the concentration dial? Where's the clarity dial, the equanimity

dial, the caring dial. You know when these things are activated and when they're not, and you're learning deliberately how to build up that skill in a super, paradigm framework. And you're given continually encouragement to then apply that in elsewhere in the rest of your life. So, I basically think a seated practice would be amazing for most people, and it would help super-charge the rest of it. I just don't want to leave anyone out. And there are some people who are not going to want to do a seated practice.

Then the question for me is, can I unbundle the good of seated meditation, unbundle it into concentration clarity, equanimity, care, and then help them apply it to what they already do? So I've still encouraged them to do a seated practice because I do think, like I said, it's the simplest medium to do this exploration. But if then becoming happier and more fulfilled in their life is contingent on a seated practice, that's the situation I think that is bound to leave a lot of people out. So we have to work smart as teachers and give people, so that's why the first thing I do

and I teach the kind of how to guide courses, I basically, and even when I teach anything, I teach a longer like meditation for physical skeptics, I unbundle the practice of meditation into these basic skills, which shins in young my teacher taught me how to do. I say, these are the basic, this is sort of like the common language of practice. This is what we're training here, and this is what each of these skills feels like, and this is where the dial is to turn this up and to turn this down. This is how you know your constator nod or economist or nod or clear or not. And they learn what that feels like. And then empowered with that understanding,

they can begin to apply that everywhere else in their life. And that's what I think people have done anyway in these other modes. They just haven't put language to it. They've just let it happen on its own. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So the practices that you read before

from the jewelry maker, the actor, the filmmaker, are those people who, I mean, I assume you know them. So are those people who have seated meditation practices and then are just talking about how they're applying that in special areas of their life? I think so. I know at least one of them does. The other two, I expect if they're

on my newsletter, they're interested in consciousness and meditation. They probably do. I mean, I've got, can I read a couple more? Yeah, of course. Okay, here's another one. Handwritten letters. I enjoy writing handwritten letters to people. There's a stillness and contemplative aspect to it that slows me down while reaching out to somebody else. In this busy world of fast technology, writing maybe old school, yet I found it to be therapeutic. It helps me live. Here's one. This is a person who's blind, actually. I'm blind, so I travel with a white cane. Before I leave for work in the morning, I take a second to run my hand

along it, reminding myself how elegant and sleek it is, how quickly and freely I can move through town with it. Lying these thoughts on my cane like this before I go, it sets up a kind of sphere of calm around me. It doesn't stop people from grabbing me or shutting directions at me or asking stupid-ass rude questions, but my magic calm sphere gives me a moment to breathe before I respond, choosing how I'll react. When I get to work, I'm not quite as pissed at humanity. I'm a little redder to be present for my students and colleagues. Or here's one. Every night I go outside before bed, sometimes I have so many clothes on on I wobble out. I

sit in a deck chair and make sure all the lights are out. I live in the country so it can get pretty dark. I sit for at least 30 minutes and listen to the wind. It makes me focus on something transient to impress how a moment feels. The wind at first feels or seems very simple, but the more you listen, you can feel how multi-dimensional it is. The volume, speed, direction, you can hear what's in it, rain or leaves, where it's going up into the universe with my thoughts, or maybe down skimming the surface of the land, loud with other beings. The wind has life, it is life. I breathe the wind.

When I started this practice, I was just aiming to sit still. Then it developed the sounds, and after a few months, hours would pass. I'm connected to life. That's the beautiful one. I mean, once here about painting,

singing, swimming, walking the dog, knitting, being with plants, this painting one is nice. This person says they'd learn to draw and paint as an adult, no experience at all, and finds that just like meditation, there's days when it's easier and days when it's harder, it's always rewarding. At its best, it's a mental cleanse, my mind getting a vacation from its more typical uptight verbal existence. At these times, I swear I can feel the shift from doing to being. It's also pretty beautiful that I can end up with something to hang on my wall and give to someone. It helps me to learn to be a more balanced person, to trust my intuition, to embrace my creativity.

I mean, so many. Like I said, over a hundred and I hear these and I'm like, wow, those are meditations. Those are deep meditations that person is doing. And some of them are deliberately practitioners beforehand or meditators, but I suspect some aren't. That doesn't matter. You know, they can inform each other from both directions, the practice out and what we do out in. More 10% happier after this.

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or our just practices writ large to this pandemic, to these, you know, dark times. I mean, that's the invitation right of this moment. Some of us have more time on our hands and all of us are more aware of what it's like to be in a tight container, how the signals start to bounce in on themselves, how we start to get dysregulated. We don't have the usual external distractions, so our patterns of suffering are more obvious. So I think what I get from these reports that people send in is, first of all, look around your life, what are already some things that you do that help shift your state?

So that's the starting with that sort of first tier. What are already things you kind of like to do? I like to have a bath. I like to walk my dog. I like to talk to my friend on the phone. So notice what those are and decide to become a little bit more deliberate. See if you can move that practice, which is already a practice, into tier two,

into becoming more of a habit. So you're more intentional about doing it. You respect the practice more. You pay attention to how it's helping. You know, I would say that, in a sense, you're taking an existential highlighter and you're underlining these things in your life. And then I would say, do this experiment.

See if you can supercharge them with more equanimity, more clarity, more concentration, and more care. What would it mean to take that thing you're already doing and to begin to learn from it? So to turn up the dial on the things that make it a practice, I have a piece on my website called a common language and practice that really articulates what those dials are in consciousness and like, and really dial it up and see if you can turn it into a deeper practice and then guide someone in it, share it with somebody because that's the other thing. That's when it really goes, it's like goes platinum. The equivalent

in the record industry is when you, you do it for yourself and then you become something you're doing to share with somebody else to help somebody else. And you guide them in it, you tell them what you do, you share them in it, and they see if they can get a taste of it. But mostly what you're doing is you're empowering them to look at their own life at their own rituals and quirks and idiosyncratic habits and finding their own practice to supercharge. And that is how practice goes viral to use a very perfect and terrible metaphor for this time. That's what that will look like. That's what the democratization of mental health looks like from the bottom up in my view. Instead of trying to get everybody to do this meditation thing, the angle you're

playing if I understand it correctly is, take a look at your life. Do you have these little, maybe even totally unconscious rituals in your life? And can we use those as leverage toward training the mind, toward all these states that we want for ourselves and for the world? Exactly. I mean, I'm saying meet people where they are. What do they already do in their life and then build out from there? Instead of having a top down injunction of you should do this, it just seems more respectful. And it's not to say, I mean, I love meditation, I love teaching it. And for the reasons we already described,

I think it's such a rich practice. I can inform all these other ones. I would definitely encourage most people to do it. But if you don't like seated practice, don't let that disqualify you from the benefits of what practice can bring. It's not that we all need to meditate. It's that we all need to practice. Maybe in a way that's meditative, you know. In these times, and I know you've had your own sort of quirky little journey through the pandemic that maybe you'll talk about. What are the quirky or idiosyncratic practices in your life that you've co-opted or

laddered up to or laddered down or whatever to the tiers that you've described? Well, there's a bunch, you know, as befitting someone with an ADD diagnosis. Well, there's a bunch, you know, as befitting someone with an ADD diagnosis. So for sure, you know, one of them is a communication practice I do is Sarah. So it has to do with our relationship. I wrote about this to my website called the night practice. And it's something we do in the evening where if we feel like we're not connected to each other, like, you know, we're just, you know, on different pages or there's some challenge going on, we'll kind of sit down and we'll do this basically what's called focusing or what's called the felt sense where we will, and it just started just as a more organic

thing in our relationship where we would just check in with each other. And then once we learned about this particular technique, it became a little more formal of a practice. But it's basically where we each sort of describe what's going on in our bodies. Instead of like the content of our problems, just like how our sort of like a meditation out loud with another person. And the act of doing this kind of lets release

is a lot of that stuff. And then they understand where you're at and then they do the same. And all of a sudden it clears the space or clears the air, and we're just more connected in it. It takes 10 minutes, you know. So that'd be one thing I do. Another thing I do is, well, I have a lot of energy challenges, even in this conversation.

I start talking on my energy gets up, I get super fixated or excited. I know you know what that's like with me as your co-author. So to manage that, I have to do movement stuff. I have to discharge energy that way. So I do a lot of shaking or I'll sit and just sort of, if I only have a minute, I'll just shake off, sit and do it. I learned this from Qi Gong just shaking my body. But if I have more time, I'll go for a bike ride, you know, I'll go for a run, and I need that to regulate my energy. I think a lot of people would relate to that. Another one is this is my writing practice, you know, I was a writer before I was a meditation teacher, and I find, like I've been writing these little posts and sending them out to people every couple weeks, and

I try to use it as a practice where I'm just, I'm writing about something. And at first, I don't even know what I'm writing about. And I know I'm sort of in the cliche layer of the thing I'm trying to talk about. But I keep working and I keep writing, I keep exploring it. And as I do, I feel like there's kind of like, I feel like I'm closing the gap between what's really happening. And this is what I think is happening. So in other words, my writing

becomes, my creative writing becomes a way of generating insight, just like an insight, meditation practice, like I start to see what's true in my experience more clearly. Yeah, I mean, those are three, but there's so many I have, I have nature practices where I go and I'm into plants. I read a lot of books about herbalism and I take courses in it and so I like to go out and try to notice the medicines around me, the plants, like what are the plants around me, what are their properties, their habitats, like, and can I, how much of my attention can I put in the world outside me instead of just my own overlay. So can I actually be in this sort of receptive space with plants and trees and nature where I'm

Where I'm learning things about how they are based on not just what I'm learning in books But on how they appear for example Which is kind of a weird thing, but actually funnily enough a lot of Mediator friends who are a gardeners talk about something similar how that happens So those are some of the ways in which so people are always you know some of my meditator friends who know that I don't sit for longer than half an hour a day at most. Maybe I do 20 minutes a day of a formal sitting practice. But that's because I really am doing these other practices. I do think this formal sitting practice is

in a way the most important of my practices because it's the place I know I'm not fooling myself. It's where I check in with my baseline and I can kind of get settled. But these other things, they just help me in my life and they become over the years, they've sort of become really important and cool. And I guess I would say another one is guiding meditation. I show up for people when I guide in a way I often might not for myself. So the more I fill my calendar with places where I'm deliberately having to like be there for someone and guide a practice and the more present you are when you're guiding a practice, the more often people report that they can notice that in some way that helps them be more effective in their sit or have a better sit. So it's very interesting that relationship.

So I feel that responsibility and it makes me super present. And I sometimes think some of the deepest experiences have had, meditation experiences have had have been actually guiding where I've just felt myself to, you know, literally I felt like there's no separation. There's just what's happening. So you get into the deep random stuff, even through something like that.

So no separation between you and the person you're guiding. Yeah, the people you're guiding, the space you're in, the sense of you being the person running the show kind of drops out and there's just the sense of which, you don't even know what you're gonna say. It's exactly what you hear with musicians or with writers when they talk about the work just coming through them.

It's just happening. There's the things that you're saying and the things that other people are saying and the rightness of everything, it's just all happening as part of a single tablo. And it doesn't feel like there's a pacemaker in charge, it doesn't feel like that's what I mean. It's just, you must have had flashes of batter, flavors of that, inciting or in other contexts and sort of what we're moving towards as meditators.

Very limited actually, if I'm being honest about my own experience and actually, you know, specifically on the guiding of meditation, I have vastly less experience than you do. I've done close to zero guided meditation, maybe a few for the app, but I have during the pandemic, and I've mentioned this before, I can't remember where, but I know I mentioned it before that. I have a neighbor who's elderly and alone. And so she asked me to teach her out of meditates. So we get together every night about teacher like five minutes of meditation. And this is by far the most sustained teaching I've ever done.

I don't know how much meditation I'm doing because I am worrying about the thing I'm gonna say next. I'm worrying about how things are going for her. I'm worrying about, you know, if I don't talk for the next 90 seconds, is she going to freak out and go over, I'm talking too much. And, you know, I know she's an anxious person, just like me. And so, I don't know. So there is some of that.

I guess some of that is like a lowering the barrier, the separation between the two of us. Because I do feel like we're kind of, I'm a little bit sharing her mind in that space, but I also don't know how mindful I am because I am doing some planning of the next thing I'm going to say. Yeah, I'm that's normal. I mean, that's especially at the beginning when you're just getting used to guiding that, that there's a lot of that going on. It's you're trying to make sure you're doing it right. You're trying to remember what to say, all that stuff. But the more experience you get, the more that just becomes automatic.

I guess I would say there's two things that you're doing for that woman. You're guiding a practice, which is helpful and you're helping her orient to things in her experience. And that'll help her settle and feel us anxious. That's amazing. But there's also something else you're doing. And within a contemplative world, they would call it a transmission. And I would just call it more in a social science world, like they would call social contagion, which is that the more

settled you are, the more she will feel settled in a very normal human way. It's like when Alexander comes up to you and is all excited and talking a mile a minute, like as any parent, it's knowing how to kind of drop down and in a super calm way, but your hand on their shoulder and just speak to them in a calm way and embody a calm presence. And that will calm someone down. And that is part of why we look to experienced teachers. Now we're getting into what is true and valuable about an experienced professional teacher. What an experienced professional teacher is doing is not just they have a set of knowledge about

where the technique goes. They are living their own settleness. They're in a natural and authentic way. They're kind of showing up as who they are with equanimity, with awareness, with a sort of quality of presence, and that is palpable. People can feel that, and people feel reassured for it, gives people confidence, it settles

them. And that's part of what we do as practitioners is, I mean, I think it's both mysterious and interesting, and I can, you can talk about it from a mystical point of view, but I also think it's very common sense. It has to do with being a social animal, and having knowing that we have influence on each other in real time and we're sensing where the other person's at. So I would say the more you, for you, it's like, yeah, think about doing the right thing,

but also think about, can you just be settled in that space? Because that's going to have as much of an effect as the actual instructions that you're sharing. And that's what I tried to communicate or teach people when I do these how to guide courses. This is not about a professional qualification for being a professional, a professional teacher or to deal with the different landmarks of practice in that. It's mostly about what I just talked about. It's about how to be present for somebody and available and sit with them and guide them in a simple technique.

And that to me is a basic human skill that we all need to learn how to do. And we all actually do know how to do. A lot of us, people are going to know how they're hearing this and a lot of people are like, I already do that in certain contexts, certain certain ways. I don't know that this is what you're getting. Something that came to mind, just listening to you talk about the value of teaching somebody else's meditation or any sort of practice is there was a line. Did you ever read Infinite Gest? I kept meaning to. I read all those stuff. He's

a big influence on me, DFW, but I've never read Infinite Gest, so tell me. So David Foster Wallace for the uninitiated and a great writer no longer with us. Sadly, it's truly really into him being in. He wrote a thousand-page book with crazy amount of footnotes that you have to keep going back to the footnote section because they're all over the book. And there's actually plot that takes place in the footnote. So you have to, anyway, so sometime in my 20s, I, because, you know, all 20-yearyear-old male white gen extras of a certain socioeconomic status needed to be able to brag about having fought their way through infinite chess. But there are a few things from that book that are with me to this day.

And there was, you know, I think part of it takes place at a tennis school or something like that. And well, it's been like 25 years since I've read this. But the narrator talks about explaining things to younger students and realizing that he didn't know what he thought about an issue until he had explained it to another person. And I wonder if that's part of the benefit you're pointing to in the guiding. I think that's exactly what I'm trying to talk about. And a real person is in front of you that the thing becomes real. I often have an outline for what I want to say and if I'm going to teach, and I've learned

that the best thing to do is be prepared, have an outline, have an idea, but then just be available to what actually emerges. Because someone's going to say a comment that about a real thing they're dealing with, that is the perfect teaching in that moment. And then that's where you respond from. And it's like a learning for everyone. So learning for you, you suddenly in that moment understand the thing that much deeper, because it's not coming from your idea of something. It's coming from the truth of someone's actual experience. I mean, at the CEC, we talk about the community as the teacher. That's what we mean, that the

insophage able to be completely honest about what's going on in your experience, that's a teaching. It's a freaking transmission. And anyone can be honest. And you can hear a pin drop in a room when that's happening. When somebody suddenly shares something vulnerable and raw and real about their experience, it's like it just creates this charge that suddenly everyone's holding their breath. And you know it's real, you know it's a teaching.

There's an authority that that person has in that moment that is transmitted through the whole space. And this is where it starts to get, you know, I wish we had a better language to talk about this because it's so real as an experience. And yet it sounds talking about it, it makes it sound mystical or magical. But I'm just talking about what happens.

I mean, everyone listening to this, I imagine would have be able to think of an example of something similar to that, you know. I just want to get back to the pandemic for a second. I think this is not a new observation or an original observation, but I, we are primarily justifiably thinking about the pandemic as a public health issue and as an economic issue. But I also think it is going to be, and probably already is, the largest mental health challenge to the world since, I don't know, World War II, I don't know what, to have all these people on lockdown and have, you know, just to increase the salience of your own issues in your own mind, because

as you said before, the external distractions aren't there. You're not getting, many of us aren't getting the social interactions we need to feel healthy. Some of us are locked down with our abusers or we're locked down with our children who we love, but drive us crazy. And there are just so many ways in which, or we've got anxiety about the virus, we've got anxiety about the economic situation. So many stressors here, I mean, I can feel in my own life. I started thinking about this when you talked about how my groundedness can be a transmission

or a social contagion with my neighbor. And I'm like, wow, I don't know how grounded I am right now. I can feel like I'm regressing back to like 2003 levels of anxiety because of this situation. And I'm in the point 00001% of the luckiest and very mindful of and very aware of through my role in the news media of the people who were really not that lucky. And so that's me. I'm just wondering for you, have there, have you noticed increased in difficulties

as a consequence of, you know, what we're living through together? Yeah, I have. I mean, for me, this whole period is inseparable from the fact that I'm a new dad too. So this is the first, I'm still in the first seven months of my son's life. And so my wife and I, our life has been turned upside down. And that was true before the pandemic. And as the pandemic has settled in, it's just exaggerated some of the challenges of new parenthood in terms of the isolation, the just needing to be there all the time.

The continual need to kind of be with this kid, you know, and when your sleep is just shot to hell, I mean, we haven't had a good night's sleep and this is probably before he was born. So already there was a sort of attrition happening. And now with this added extra stress for me worrying about my parents, my friends who are doctors and those industries. And also my friends who have small businesses were falling apart, who've lost their jobs.

I feel like I'm talking to a lot of people like that and trying to support a lot of people. So I do feel that I'm working at 50%, 60% maybe. But for me, it's just been that much more. I've also practicing more than I ever have probably in my life. It's the call to practice is so much more obvious. And I find that the practice I have done has massively helped me. If this happened to me five years ago, even, I think it would have been a different story. It would have been much more, I would have been much more volatile and dysregulated, but it's even five years ago. But to pass five years, my practices really dropped down to a much

deeper level. And so I feel much more capable of being with this experience and being able to be present for others. And I'm less regulated than I. So even though I'm not nearly a full capacity, I still feel like it could have been much worse. And I guess that's what I would say about this time. It's like, you have to just meet yourself where you are. It's going to be much more challenging. And it'll be harder to get the benefits of practice that you once did in some ways, because there's just more intensity. But all the more reason to do it. And the muscles you're developing in times of challenge,

they actually accelerate the development. You can build equanimity much more quickly working with discomfort than just being in neutrality because the intensity is that much more. So the opportunity of this moment is this opportunity to be with our own, be with this challenge and this not knowing and this all the painfulness and the suffering of it

and the grief of it and to actually be present for that and to try to have equity with that and that is going to deepen your relationship with the world in all moments in the future. That is we're in the grist of a profound transformative practice and it has to do with how much you can be present with that intensity and not have to escape. But the motion is appendulation. We go into the intensity, we open, and then when we get to our edge and we feel like we're getting overwhelmed, we need to be able to swing back into simple restorative rest type practices where we can just allow ourselves to escape. So that's when we do hit the Netflix, and that's when we just go outside and lay on the ground,

or whatever we need to do. So that, to me, is the motion of an intelligent practice. It's moving between a practice that's about opening to what's going on around us, so we're building capacity, and everyone now in a way has this opportunity because there's so much intensity. And the more we do that the more We learn to be present the more we the more wisdom the more ground in us

We have for for the future to respond intelligently and then there's this motion of Moving away and just letting ourselves take care of ourselves and and just resting and curling in double ball and laying on the floor and just blowing saliva bubbles I'm not doing and not needing any agenda. And you mean that's my prescription for practice for this moment. Swing between those two things. Let yourself be completely lazy and fall apart and then have periods where you're trying to be to work on your equanimity and your presence and sanity. We said enough about what the role

of the kind of practices that you've been reading to us, you know, the guarding the painting, the acting, the filmmaking, the role of the sort of more informal idiosyncratic practices could play at this time for us, you know, you talk just there about the pendulation between formal practice and saliva bubbles toward the ceiling something I've not yet tried, but that's great. I'm going to do that this afternoon. Have we talked about because there seems to be a third space here

at least around the sort of informal practices that have been the guiding theme of this discussion. How can we avail ourselves of those opportunities in this time? Yeah, look at your light. What do you already do? What do you already do that you, that kind of gives you respite in your life? I'm talking on a phone to a friend or to reading something, whatever it is, like, it's just about being more delivered

about it. Can you just now see, recognize what you're doing, honor that as something valuable, respect it, boost the signal on it, put it into your schedule. Okay, I'm going to do it more regularly, make an intention, do it a little more offered a little bit more regularly. I mean, for me, it's just like, can you march the unconscious practice that you do up the scale or deeper into becoming more of a practice? Can you make them more deliberate? Can you turn up the equity meeting on them? You know, that's to me the call right now. Can you turn your life into starting with those little medicines, those little rituals, those little things?

Can you turn them more deliberately into practice? And yeah, do the meditation practice too, but experiment with that and then tell someone about it, share it with somebody. but experiment with that. And then tell someone about it, share it with somebody. So let's just get granular for a second. So for me, it is, I don't know if this counts, but you mentioned it, so the Netflix, although because I work for Disney, we're gonna substitute Disney plus

into this discussion instead of Netflix, horrible Netflix. So watching TV, I like to take 60 to 90 minutes at the end of the day and watch TV, but I in no way, I don't think there's any part of me that's turning it into a practice deliberately. So what would I do to turn that into a practice? Well, I would say actually I would disagree with you.

It's already a practice of rest. It's already a deliberate thing. I mean, so it's just about knowing why you're doing it. So this is about putting a consciousness underneath it. As soon as you know why you're doing it, let yourself have an hour to watch Netflix. You make it a practice by keeping a conscious in it and knowing when it's no longer serving you, when it's actually starting to be a problem. So you're honoring it as a coping strategy. You're letting it be this place where you can rest and just disengage, and that's fine. But you're keeping awareness around it

that knows that's tracking when it starts to actually become more of a problem. Because it will. I mean, that's the problem with screens with TV. The more you, you can just get sucked into it for hours at a time. And now it's really working across purposes. It's creating less resilience in you.

It's creating, you know, it's just, it's having a negative effect on your nervous system. So I mean, I think it's like, we're talking about a continuum. We're on one side. There's just the medicines you need to do to get by. You're coping strategies and we're just saying, Hey, can you be a little bit more conscious about those, but still let yourself have those because we need those. And then on the other side, there's like taking certain practices and honoring them with more deliberateness, more intentionality weaving in those skills. And generally, that's not going to, maybe you can get enlightened watching TV. Maybe it's possible. I tend to think it has to do with more

engaging with what's actually here in the moment. Now TV is here in the moment. It's kind of a coin for me. It throws me off the whole question of TVs and movies, because I know in some ways they're so bad for us, but I don't think anything in human life, I think there's nothing in human life that can't in a way be a vehicle to bring us more fully into life if we know how to approach it. I just don't think most people watch TV in that way.

I am consciously trying to be unconscious. I'm trying, I don't know how to boost my consciousness while I'm actively trying to just throw my brain into neutral. So don't try to, I mean, that's the rest side of it. Like you need a place where you have to just let go of any attempt to better yourself. I mean, it's like that's when self-improve

and become super oppressive. You need to be able to just do all and not feel guilty about it. Because the feeling guilty about it is just gonna make you feel worse. So I say give yourself permission to say, okay, I'm gonna take this hour and just do absolutely nothing in value.

In fact, I'm gonna reverse goodness in my life through doing it, but the act of giving yourself permission to do that is a goodness. Yeah. I mean, actually, I have a, what's called the dynamic care grid, I call it that. I just, I worked out this model for thinking about this because I was thinking a lot about

these things. Like, what are the things we do that's good? And what are the things we do that aren't? And what's self centered and what's more service based? And I came up with a grid of basically a simple, simple grid. It's like, you know, you've got, the horizontal is self and then world. And then on the vertical, you've got act or change and then you've got rest except and we need all these quadrants.

What that means is sometimes we're focusing on improving ourselves on expanding capacity and we need that and then sometimes we're just accepting the lazy crappy person we are and we need that and then sometimes we're focused on trying to change the world and help the world and be more of an activist and be engaged And sometimes we have to just accept the world as it is and try to learn from what it's showing us instead of Just trying to force the world to come around to our own agenda and that that's what a balanced life of practice and life Looks like all those are forms of care. You know, they're all forms of care and There's a place for all of them So there's a place for just being completely

the unproductive. And we need to, that's how we're gonna get through this time and part is just letting ourselves do that too. Yeah, I'll tell you one thing that comes to mind about how I've turned my Disney plus habit into a little bit more of a practice or a little bit more sort of like useful sloth is I don't keep my phone with me.

I put that in another room because having a quote unquote two screen experience is not relaxing. And so I'm not checking email while I'm watching TV. I'm just chilling. Yeah. So that actually does help. And I would actually, you know, just to honor screens for a moment or at least television for a moment,

let's honor our narrative art for a moment. There is something beautiful about surrending yourself to a kind of particular narrative. I'm not talking necessarily terrible TV, but to read a really good book, to get pulled into the narrow, to be immersed in a really great movie. Like I just watched the Watchmen series.

I love that series. I thought it was awesome. Like I I just watched the Watchmen series. I love that series. I thought it was awesome. Like, I feel like that was not time wasted. I feel like the direction, the artistry of the acting, especially Nicole, what's her name, the one director there who directed three of them. She, her ones were so good. I feel like that wasn't necessarily, that was restorative,

but it wasn't time wasted. There was a real, there was some richness there. So you have to also, you know, this is a big gray area. It's one thing, you know, yeah, there's super stupid, we can be absorbed in. And what we want is just the absorption and the break and that's okay. And then there's being absorbed in stuff

that has this creative merit and value that I think is actually can enrich us, you know. I like that a lot. It makes me feel good about my inherent snobbery. While I do respect the value of watching total crap on TV, I have noticed in this time in particular that watching something that's really good is that's in some ways where I'm able to sort of keep track of whether watching TV is useful or not for me. If I'm just lying there watching something really stupid, actually I'm not sure how much

value, but if I'm watching something great, I just finished watching Dev's on Hulu, which I can invoke because it's also owned by Disney. We own everything, but shows that are really super creative and really interesting. It's not I'm not saying that's all I watch, but I can really get a sense that it is time well spent. And there is something primordially appealing about a yarn. I mean, we've been communicating to each other in this way for a long time. I am sensitive to your time.

Jeff, is there anything that I, any area that you wanted to explore that I didn't give you a chance to? Just one thing that occurred to me while we've been doing this that I've been noticing and you have noticed before and you is, you know, I would say one of your deep practices is interviewing people, you know, I've learned a lot about that from you. As you have a style that's really about, you get out of people's way and you really give them space and you really listen. And that is, to me, a practice that I really see that in you and I value it.

And I think that, I guess that's kind of what I'm trying to say, that we all have things like that in our life, like these wheelhouses that we don't even really think about. They're just this thing we do where we're a little more natural and free-flowing inside it where we show up in a particular way and and those are practices. So what are those things that you do out? Ask people and I would, you know, even put it to you like do you realize how much interviewing is a practice for you? What is the experience of interviewing for you? I mean, I know there's a part where you're anxious and trying to say the right thing and, da, da, da, da, da, but I know that's not the whole story

with you, because I can see how part of you drops out during an interview and you become receptive in a particular kind of way. And I just be curious to hear your experience of that because it would be an example of what we're talking about. Yeah, I think that's really perceptive and actually very useful for me. I don't know if it's useful for anybody else, for you to have said that very kind.

You know, I think you're right, and I don't think I've thought about it enough. You know, a couple of things come to mind. Hopefully this will be useful in some way to say, but you talked before about one of the dangers of these idiosyncratic practices, they can become siloed, and that a real sign of a maturation of an idiosyncratic practice into a more formal profound practices

if you're spreading it around in your life. I think I've siloed the interviewing, or at least until recently, and you took part in the 360 review that I did a year and a half ago. I'm going to be coming up on two years now where I've got all these people to sort of give me anonymous feedback on how I'm doing in various aspects of my life. And one of the most painful things that I read in the 360 was this idea that people felt like the version of me that was showing up on the podcast was not showing up in

regular life and I read that as wow, I'm a fraud But actually what I think people meant now that I've my amygdala is not as activated around the 360 as it once was that I was just siloing my practice. I have the capacity to really listen to people, and to be patient, and let people's points and stories unfurl, but I wasn't always doing that in the interstices of my life, in the interstitial moments where I'm in a rush, or dealing with somebody, and so it really,

just to bring it all home to your central point here, is it's very useful for me to hear you say that because it helps me it reminds me again to take these skills that I may take for granted because I've been doing interviewing professionally for 27 years now and think of it as a practice so that I'm applying it to my kid as soon as I leave here this interview with you and he wants to talk to me about his Scooby Doo obsession. Beavily said, man, I would say that that's the natural progression. He develop a competency in a particular area and it starts to deepen your relationship with your life in some way or you start to, you feel like this is a place where you're

really natural and really present. And that you, we want that. That's the training ground. That's what we do in meditation and a sitting meditation. then the question becomes what am I doing when that's happening and how can I bring that into all the other parts of my life. So the question for you is if you do feel like there's a way in which you're present when you're interviewing when you're not interviewing think about that remember that and deliberately try to bring to draw on that quality in the moment with other people.

Because what you're doing, I would say, is it's clear to me, you have equanimity, because you're open and available to what someone is saying. So there's a kind of getting out of your own way. You're concentrated, so you're focusing on what the person is saying. You're very clear. You're aware, you're noticing the larger context of what's going on, what's going on inside you, what's going on with them. And I would say you're caring. You have a basic disposition of, in a sense, wanting the best for your guests.

All those four, to me, are the, those are the primary skills that are developed in any practice. So noticing that, how can I, in a sense, boot those up in these other contexts? And that is what, that's the question. Every single meditator on the planet is facing. It's what every single meditator on the planet does. Eventually, they start to see where that there's a disconnect between what they're doing on the cushion and what they're doing the

rest of their life. And it becomes so painful or so discordant that disconnect that they know they need to begin to address it. They have to start to live their life as though there's there always the same person. They're not this different person behind the camera or there's person over here. They're always, they're living consistently in the same principles in the same way. And that's what it means to turn your life into a practice. So beautifully absurd to have an epiphany while sitting in my wife's closet recording this podcast. Jeff, just, you know, I love you. So I'm so happy to have you on the show and so great to talk to you. Really appreciate it. I love you too, man.

Big thanks to Jeff. By the way, there's a link in the show notes that will take you right to Jeff's meditations and courses in the 10% happier app. So go check that stuff out. It's all really, really good. Before we go, big special announcement. Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, along with Joe's and Timori Gibson and Elita Tangui, will be offering an online retreat from Monday, April 27th to Friday, May 1st. An online retreat, this is really designed to help support you and your practice during this tumultuous time. You can go to the Insight Meditation Society website. That's dharma.org to learn more and register. DharmaDHARMA.org.

There's also a direct link in the show notes. Big thanks to the team that makes this podcast possible. Samuel Johns is our Hefe producer, Matt Boyton at Ultraviolet Audio is our editor, Maria Wartell is our production coordinator. We get a ton of useful feedback and input from 10% happier colleagues like Ben Rubin, Jen Boyant and Nate Toby and of course never want to forget my guys over at ABC Josh Cohan and Ryan Kessler. Big thanks to all of you for making this podcast happen. Big thanks to everybody who

listens and we'll see you right back here on Friday with a bonus meditation and then we'll be back on Monday with another proper episode. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at 1dory.com slash survey.

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