Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 242: A Buddhist Approach to Money Worries | Ethan Nichtern

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

No matter what your economic situation is, you have likely experienced some money worries during this pandemic. I know I have- and I say that as someone who is in an extremely fortunate position. So many people have lost businesses, lost jobs, had salaries cut- or we are worried about one of these things happening to us. Given the massive insecurity and uncertainty abroad in the land, we wanted to explore a Buddhist approach to financial concerns. It's not like the Buddha never said anything on this matter. He wasn't expecting all meditators to live in caves with shaved heads. There's a ton of useful stuff in Buddhism on the issue of money, and there are a lot of meditative techniques for handling our financial anxieties. So we brought on a great Buddhist teacher by the name of Ethan Nichtern. He's been on the show before. He has written a few books, including one called The Road Home. He also hosts a podcast by the same name. We had a great chat, and I'm excited to bring it to you. Free App access for Health Care Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Where to find Ethan Nichtern online: Website: https://www.ethannichtern.com/ Social Media: Twitter: Ethan Nichtern (@ethannichtern) / https://twitter.com/ethannichtern Facebook: Ethan Nichtern / https://www.facebook.com/EthanNichtern/ Book Mentioned: The Dharma of the Princess Bride, by Ethan Nichtern / https://www.amazon.com/Dharma-Princess-Bride-Buddhism-Relationships/dp/0865477760 Other Resources Mentioned: Sharon Salzberg / https://www.sharonsalzberg.com/ Bodhisattva / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhisattva The Eight Worldly Winds / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_Buddhism#Eight_Worldly_Conditions Joseph Goldstein / https://10percenthappier.app.link/TEXKruciQ5 Buddha’s Brain, by Rick Hanson / https://www.rickhanson.net/books/buddhas-brain/ The Road Home podcast / https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-road-home-with-ethan-nichtern/id1392813061 Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright / https://www.amazon.com/Why-Buddhism-True-Philosophy-Enlightenment/dp/1439195455 Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives by Adam Grant / https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986 Invisible Hands / https://www.invisiblehandsdeliver.com/ Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/ethan-nichtern-242 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, really fascinating show this week. Before we dive in, I just want to remind you that if you're a healthcare worker, if you know somebody, we want to have your back in this tumultuous time, we're giving free access to healthcare workers to the 10% happier app. And by healthcare worker, we define that term broadly. So if you're a nurse and a nurse practitioner, a doctor, a tech, if you work in administration, if you

work in ambulances, if you work in if you're an EMT, I think you get where I'm going with this. We define this broadly. And we want to help you out, as I said, in this tumultuous time. So go to 10% dot com slash care. 10% dot com slash care. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And if you want to send that link around to the people you know who work in the industry, please do. We've already had, I think, more than 25,000 people sign up.

So we really want to keep this going. Okay, let's dive into the show this week. No matter what your economic situation is right now, you have likely, I suspect, experienced some money worries during this pandemic. I know I have, and I say this is somebody who's in an extremely fortunate position. So many people have lost businesses, lost jobs,

have had salaries cut, or worried that one of these things might happen. Given the massive insecurity and uncertainty abroad in the land, we wanted to explore a Buddhist approach to financial concerns. It's not like the Buddha never said anything on this matter. He wasn't expecting all meditators to live in caves and shave their heads. There's a ton of useful stuff and Buddhism on the issue of money. And there are a lot of meditative techniques for handling financial anxiety. So we decided to bring on a great Buddhist teacher by the name of Ethan Nick Turn. You might be familiar with that name. He's been on this show before. He's written a few books, including one

called The Road Home. He also hosts a podcast by the same name. He's done some pretty deep thinking on this issue. And we had a great chat. I'm excited to bring it to you. Here we go. Ethan Nicktern. All right. Well, nice to see you. The listeners won't be able to see you, but I can see you through this recording program. So I see you're in your daughter's room. It's good to connect with you. Yeah. Nice to see you in your closet and you have what looks like Smiley face on your shirt, which is more than 10% happier. That's like a 50%

half-year smiley face. Yeah, the sweatshirt. I'm wearing his wayoff brand. It's got a full-on smiley face We'd like to go with these sort of Buddha half smile the Mona Lisa, but I got the sweatshirt Which has a mixture of camouflage and a smiley face. And yes, I am in my wife's closet, so surrounded by high-end footwear and bags. So speaking of that, because all of those things cost money, let's talk about money.

I know you've done a reasonable amount of thinking and writing on this subject, we're at a time where I think with deep justification, people at every level of the socio-economic spectrum are concerned about finances and their future. And so I wanted to see if we could get at this from a Buddhist perspective. So I'll just ask an open-ended question to start. What's your take on this issue from a Buddhist perspective? Yeah, I don't think it's one take because I think you know Buddhism is a very over its 2500 year history has a lot of different aspects of looking at

money and I think in class of Buddhism the primary way of looking at money is just in terms of the path of one's individual awakening. So that's, I mean, when we're talking about money, we could talk about larger issues like how money links us into a society or an economy, things like that. But the primary issue is how is one working with one's own mind, one's own liberation from suffering, one's own stuck places. And I think especially at a time like this, the thought of money, even those of us who are still kind of stable in our employment or relatively stable in our financial situations,

brings up a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety because nothing like this has ever happened before, at least not since 1918. And so, sort of, how do you actually face that? I think the first thing from a boost standpoint is to actually spot the states of mind that thinking about or working with money bring up in us. And I think right now, fear and anxiety tend to be the dominant ones.

Like, am I going to be okay? And so whenever I think about this, I like to tell a story about my mother actually, when my parents split up, which happened when I was 10 years old, so this is the late 1980s in Manhattan, in New York City, she was really nervous about being a single parent in New York City, and she had been an artist and had a cooking business, but the notion of having to hold a whole household brought up the same notion of fear. And she actually asked to bet in Lama, or to bet in teacher. And I can't remember who it was that she asked, but what she should do with working with this fear. And the teacher supposedly told her, go home after this and gather up all of the change and loose dollar bills in your home and go out and give it all away.

And you know, at this time she lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which has changed a lot since the late 1980s. But if you walked up and down Broadway in 1988, 1989 on the Upper West Side, there were multiple homeless people on every single block of Broadway. And what my mom reports is she did exactly what the teacher told her. She gathered up all her loose change and single-dollar bills and walked up and down Broadway and gave it away until it was gone and she felt better. Now obviously what's important about that story is the teacher didn't say, now go empty your bank account, max out all your credit cards. But there is something

and this is the classic teaching is that the practice of Donna or generosity, and my understanding is that the Polly and Sanskrit word Donna is actually linked to the English word donation or donate linguistically, that this practice is a way of actually, obviously it's a way of helping others, but primarily it's a way of slowly liberating the mind from this kind of small-minded fear of the holding on that happens and often leads to not the best decision making around money or around holding onto resources. So Donna can have a liberating factor that also leads us into actually maybe seeing more clearly what we need to do to take care of ourselves and others.

So I really like that story about go home and give away all your change. And I do still think that that's true in the coronavirus world that we're in now. There are ways that we can actually offer resources to others that are probably actually in a worse situation than we are, that might actually help liberate some of the fear and bring about a sense of resourcefulness or kind of basic equanimity or okeness that can change our mind state around these anxieties around money.

Yeah, I mean, I like that a lot too. I think it's very powerful, even if you feel an overwhelming sense of insufficiency or impoverishment right now, a small donation, or even just an act of kindness to somebody else can help turn the volume down on the

shouting, screaming, inner voices of, you know, not enoughness. But I have a statement and a question based on the story you just told the statement of fact or what I hope is fact is that you were raised in a Buddhist household. So it wasn't like your mom randomly went to a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and said, how do I deal with this? She was already in the, what's known as the Shambhala tradition, the Buddhist tradition founded by the spiritual teacher, controversial spiritual teacher, Cho-Gim, Trunkba Rinpoche.

Yes. But that was not who she asked this question of. But yes, I was born in 1978. She had been studying Buddhism since about 1973. My dad a little bit longer than that. So they were both Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, if you can call people in one New York Jew and one Episcopalian from Arkansas, living in New York City, Tibetan Buddhists, but in the lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, before I was born. Okay, so that was the factual assertion. I just wanted to get out there.

The question is, and you kind of hit that at this in your answer, but I want to get you to emphasize it a little more strongly, going out and being generous as a way to sort of counteract some of the tendencies in our minds toward insufficiency and abyssalment can have really saliitary psychological effects, but they're not going to answer the questions of what household budgetary cuts should you make.

What shifts should you make in your allocations and your investments, et cetera, et cetera. So what would you say to that? Yeah, I think for, we often talk about mindfulness as a meditative practice, which it is, or it's a faculty that we develop in certain meditation techniques. But I think if you expanded the notion of mindfulness in general to include just everything we're doing in our life, you arrive also at this more still a very personal, but more expanded ethical or in every day life way of looking at mindfulness, which is mindfulness begins to have qualities of discernment and kind of knowing what in some

of the Tibetan systems they talk about, knowing what to accept and what to reject, right? So I think about that as related to a budget, you know, which I think for me, like making a budget is actually, I really like doing that because one, it gives you at least some relative sense of grounding and some sense of like, here's what resources are available to us. And then you can start to see how you allocate energy and resources and you start to make choices

based on what's actually available to you. Now, the thing about this time, though, is it's really, this virus has literally swept through our life and through the economy, so a lot of people really don't know what's going to be available to them a few months from now. But I do think within that there is a real sense, the thing about knowing what to accept and what to reject, is a real sense of prioritizing and seeing what actually is valuable to us. Right? Because that's really the notion of money from a Buddhist perspective.

I think about this in relationship to, I mean, money is completely holographic. That's the other part of this. It's an agreement that we've made. My daughter still likes to play with coins and dollar bills, etc. In fact, the other day before all this happened, I gave her a dollar bill and she wanted to share it with her best friend. So she ripped it in half and tried and explained to her. That's not how that

works was an interesting conversation. We should say your daughter is nearly three. She's nearly three. Yes, that would, yeah, my daughter is 25 and she's getting up. But it was a great act of, the intention was Donna, right? So it was a beautiful practice in terms of the way her almost three-year-old mind was working with the situation. And it was a very sweet moment. But for most of us, money is numbers on screens. And then we have credit cards and different accounts that move things around on screens. And we agree, okay, this is how much we have, this is how much you have.

And so money from that standpoint, when something is that mind produced, it's energy. And I think more so as we move further into the 21st century, that way of looking at it as energy that we're allocating, you know, brings up the question, like, what am I allocating my energy to? What am I allocating my resources to? And, you know, I think there's a lot of fear and panic because we don't know where all the energy is going to, nobody knows what the world is going to look like. Three months from now, six months from now, 12 months from now, and so to plan a budget for 2021 feels very,

you know, almost imaginary right now. But perhaps what this is doing and some of the people I'm talking to, we are seeing the places in our budget that we are allocating resources to either things that we don't need or don't bring us happiness or don't help others. So there is a real clarifying moment of the value of where we're allocating resources. And I think it's important for mindfulness practitioners to actually go through that and say like, oh, okay, I'm allocating resources here there, you know. And I think sometimes this is hard for Buddhists because, you know, we want to talk more about ultimate truths. Like there is no solid self or everything is impermanent or all phenomenon are

empty. And I have one friend who said, you know, he was studying Buddhism in college and grad school. And all the teachings on emptiness and non-self actually did is he got himself into a lot of credit card debt because he wouldn't even open the envelope and you would just say, you know, these are just numbers on a page, you know, they're empty anyway, which is not exactly mindfulness practice, right? Because you have to actually look into what's going on to see that it's not that solid. You can't just look away and then say, everything's empty.

Therefore, I'm not going to pay attention to the debt that I have, et cetera. It's also overlooking one of the most important parts as I understand it of meditation or a Buddhist practice, which is the interweaving of, I'm going to get a little jargon-y here, but I'll unpack it for folks. The relative and the ultimate. So on an ultimate level that crib, I think it's a crib behind you or a baby bed that I see behind you on an ultimate level, there's nothing there. It's all spinning subatomic particles and it's mostly empty space. So if we took a super strong microscope to any item, the chair in which you're sitting, etc., etc., it's empty. It doesn't

have some inherent substance. But on a relative level, it's a chair, it's a bed, you can trust that it's a chair or a bed, you can sit in it, lie in it. And so we need to have both of these things in mind as we progress through the world. On a relative level, I need to make dentist appointments and put my pants on. On an ultimate level, there is no graspable globule of dam somewhere between my eyes that I can, you know, count on. So as mindfulness practitioners, as Buddhists, it's important to understand that no matter how seriously we take ultimate truth, which I still think sounds like a poorly named punk band that some teenagers may form in the garage, but no matter how seriously

we may take ultimate truth, we still have to do the basic blocking and tackling of being functional human beings in a modern economy. Yeah, I mean, I would even take it a step further that would say that the only way to actually have an experience of ultimate truth is through a close and very precise examination of the actual nuts and bolts relative phenomenon that make up our world. So it's only when you actually look closely at your budget, for example, that you begin to really touch this notion of money not having a solid form, etc. But the other part of the ultimate truth that the Buddhist traditions talk about is it's not just empty. What they usually say is it's empty yet luminous. Empty yet it takes form in some energetic way that's actually very precise because it's

just the toddler's bed is just a collection of particles that have a lot of space between them. That's what allows actually it to take shape in its current form. So there's this constant go between between the fact that it's not solid and it's very precisely what it is. But you can't actually see that it's not solid until you look very closely at what it is. That was the mistake that the friend I talked about made. It's like, you only see money is empty when you're like, oh, okay, I'm in $6,427 of credit card debt, which is different than being in $2,000 of credit card debt.

It's different by this empty yet formed amount. So there's a precision to ultimate truth that without that precision, it becomes what different psychologists and psychotherapists that were influenced by Buddhism, I'm thinking specifically of John Wellwood, who's passed away, would call spiritual bypassing, that the notion of like, I'm not even going to look at relative reality because I just want to go towards emptiness, that's kind of actually bypassing the nuts and bolts of a being in the world or in any world, actually. So, those of us who are firmly aware of relative reality of conventional reality of where most of us spend most of our time

operating of bills that arrive in the mail that must be paid. You referenced, I think, a big source of anxiety for folks, which is not only that for some of us, we no longer have the funds to pay those bills, but on top of that, we don't know when we'll be able to get out of the house to earn the money to pay those bills. This I think is such a huge source of anxiety, and I wonder what your thoughts are on how we can manage this uncertainty. Yeah, it's interesting, too, because the other aspect of working with this uncertainty which, you know, I think, you know, brings any state of uncertainty actually brings us closer

to what reality is. Because we often have times in our life or times in our society where things feel very routine, very reliable, etc. But because reality is so fluid and so impermanent and so ever-changing, like actually not knowing what's going to happen next is an experience where we actually move closer. It becomes more apparent to us what reality is. So that can be a very powerful experience. Sorry, we got interrupted by my son, his opening the door. You want to say hi to Ethan? Come on in here. Say hi.

Hi. How are you? Hi. He can't. He can't hear you because I have headphones in. But he likes to make his presence known once in a while. Sorry about that. I think you were in the middle of making a really interesting point, which is just to put

you back on the path there. The uncertainty is a fundamental fact of existence and this situation, which is really horrible and terribly inconvenient, is putting us in touch with that truth. At least that's what I thought I was hearing from you. Very much so, and it's interesting because uncertainty is also this kind of space where things can shift, where there's actually kind of a gap in the habitual routine of our individual way of navigating our lives and also the more collective or communal ways that we navigate our lives. And so that's whenever there's

a space of uncertainty, it's terrifying because we're really not humans, like the human nervous system, is not really great at navigating uncertainty. And so the first thing I think is it's really important to note how we narrate uncertainty, because there's two basic directions it could go when you're in like this space of like, I don't know what's going to happen here. The first, which I think is the slightly more popular, or much more popular, is to get very negative, nihilistic, you know, make very over generalized statements about your life. Like, I'm screwed. I'm going to be homeless. The world's coming to an end, you know, all of these sort of globalized negative statements

about a kind of dark certainty, right? And then the other way, which I think is slightly less popular, but it's still problematic from a mindfulness or Buddhist standpoint is to get overly positive and be like, don't worry, it's all gonna be great. This is happening everywhere. So everybody's having a spiritual awakening about how interconnected we all are.

And when this is over, we're all just gonna to be taking care of each other, and we get overly positive. And so to note how you're narrating the uncertainty is interesting. But within the uncertainty, there's actually a space to say, like, I don't know what's going to happen, so what do I want to cultivate? But I don't think we can have total uncertainty. So I think if somebody is really in a state in this uncertain moment where you really don't know how next month is going to be okay, meaning like to stay in your home, etc. I think it's really important that we practice asking for help. I think that's a really important donna or generosity is actually a two-way street.

So sometimes you need to be actually willing to receive. And that's part of the notion of generosity from a Buddhist standpoint is you practice offering or giving because it makes the mind more flexible and just more open to the energetic exchange and at the same time as you practice offering you become more available to receive. So there's a lot of people who are really in dire circumstances and might actually be with a lot of the students I work with are often afraid to actually ask or request support. And then those of us who are or requests support. And then those of us who are feel on that relative level more grounding, like we actually know,

okay, I have my home, I have enough food, et cetera. This is a really good time to think about how am I feeling anxiety and could I actually transform that anxiety into an act of offering to somebody who might be struggling more than I am. As a way to both help them and as a way to kind of liberate the same experience that my mother had, liberate from that sense of like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this or I don't know if things are going to get bad in some undetermined future, you know, because we are, we are often really trying to narrate the future and in the time of uncertainty

it's really a gap in the habitual chain as we like to say and it's a time to practice cultivating the qualities that we really want to live our life by. You know, that's actually more important than anything else from a mindfulness perspective. I want to get back to uncertainty in a second, but just because you brought up giving and receiving the power of giving there's a lot of research behind this, what the psychological, reputational benefits to being a certain type of giver I recommend the work of a former guest on the show, Adam Grant. He wrote

a book called Give and Take and it's really, really great. But on the receiving end, you know, that's, you know, asking for help. That is very hard for a lot of us. You referenced it right there. It's really hard. So what advice would you give for people who need help but are struggling with asking for it? Yeah. I mean, I always view, for those of us who have a meditation practice, I always view meditation as sort of like the cockpit or the kind of home base for how we're working with our mind that then we take out into the rest of our life in the world.

And I think since you've dedicated so much of your life to furthering mindfulness and meditation in the public consciousness that I imagine you would agree with that. So I think in meditation, that's the first thing is actually to practice asking for help. So a few of the meditations that I've posted online, this comes from a few different Buddhist traditions, but in a lot of those practices, you would actually start a meditation, including like a loving kindness meditation or a compassion meditation,

or different visualization practices, or just if you're working with mindfulness of the breath, you would start the meditation by actually invoking your benefactors, your heroes, your mentors, your lineage, as a sense of like, come be with me and offer support. And I find that that feeling of just gathering, I don't think it's too woo, you know, that feeling of like gathering your support,

like the people you look up to, the people you look to for confidence or fearlessness or just generosity into the meditation space with you and just say, like, hey, you know, we get by with a little help from our friends. So that's, you know, in the loving kindness teachings, bringing forth one's benefactor or somebody that you feel has given you love and support is very important. And I think that soothes a little bit of anxiety right there because you don't feel like the other part of uncertainty is when you feel like you're completely alone in your uncertainty.

It intensifies the anxiety and the fear. So I think actually invoking one support in meditation practice is a good start. And then you can actually sort of imagine mentally, oh, I'm gonna, I can invoke my friends in real life once I get off of the meditation seat and say, hey, you know, it could be as simple as saying like, hey, I'm in one of the vulnerable groups for coronavirus. Would you mind going to the store for me? You know, I know that there's some great organizations that I've donated to, like,

invisible hands here in the Tri-State area that's setting up delivery services for those who are older or more vulnerable to the virus, so it could be, like, actually requesting help, or it could just be checking them with a friend and saying, like, hey, I'm really freaking out. Can you talk to me? But I do think we all need to practice asking for help. I think that's actually part of awakening because what we're trying to do and from the Buddhist traditions that I've studied and inherited,

the kind of most awakened mind is one where there's a flexibility to both give and receive, both care about the benefit of others and care about the well-being and happiness or contentment of oneself. And so there's an interdependence there, and part of that interdependence is being willing to receive. And you know, it's so many people I know nowadays, even people of relative privilege have a hard time Saying that they're having a hard time or doing Loving kindness meditation for themselves or a compassion meditation for themselves Which is why so many of the people who are making inroads in the mindfulness and

Buddhist inspired worlds are focusing on self-compassion because it's just, it's really hard to receive loving energy, you know. And then I think the other side of that is in our world, loving energy actually takes the form a lot of the time of money. So you actually, if you're willing to receive loving energy in meditation, and you also need the loving energy of money because you don't know how you're going to pay your rent or your mortgage this month, then we should be willing to ask for it. I think that next happens on a communal level. And then, you know, I would also argue that that also can happen on a political level, but that opens the scope of this discussion to a much vaster array. So maybe it's better to just stick with the individual well-being level of receiving

and then giving support. Just a point of clarification. So when asking for help, it doesn't have to mean asking your brother-in-law for money. It can mean just asking your friends to lend a sympathetic ear. Although there is the issue of some of us may need to actually ask for money, the government or our friends. So that's very painful. I don't think we need to sugarcoat that. That was just a clarification I was looking to make.

I just want to go back to the idea, because this may be not very familiar to some folks who are new to meditation or even who haven't just haven't done this kind of meditation before. The idea of invoking support at the beginning of a meditation. Can you, this is not like praying for some sky god to make it rain, ones on us, it's much more subtle than that. Can you just describe that in a little bit more granularity so that people understand how to do it? Sure, sure. I mean, I often think of this. So like in Buddhist terms, when one is doing like

formal Buddhist practice, not just secular mindfulness, you would often start a meditation session by like doing a chant that invokes the lineage of the great masters and teachers who have come before you in that lineage, right? So, you know, which isn't necessarily any different than Luke Skywalker invoking, you know, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi, when he goes into his full lotus meditation, what was that in Star Wars Episode 8? I don't know that he invoked them, but I imagine that he did, because the Jedi's are a lineage. He definitely did a lot. He defeated the bad guys by baking himself a hologram. Right. I don't know that that's an accessible power to most of us,

but it was impressive. But the idea is that he exists in kind of a lineage and he has the support of the force ghosts who have come before him, right? So we all kind of want to believe in that. It could be ones like grandmother who is always kind to us if they've passed on or is still here. It could be one's like grandmother who is always kind to us if they've passed on or is still here.

It could be the various spiritual leaders that you connect with. It could be like imagining if one loves the work of our friend and one of my mentors Sharon Salzburg, you could imagine like, oh, let me just imagine Sharon smiling face for a moment at the beginning of meditation. Just to invoke this sense that I'm not alone. You know, I've heard you talk about a lot about the notion of the fallacy of uniqueness. And so sometimes I think when we're in a state of anxiety or feeling insufficient, we also feel that like I am alone in this experience. And one of the ways to actually help that is to imagine, just bring your benefactors

and mentors and heroes forth. And if one has a religious practice, it could be more spiritual beings. It could be angels, saints, bodhisattvas, etc. There's no reason it couldn't be that, and that could be quite useful. But it's what gives you a sense of support in your meditation practice. And that's something I think a lot of people have been getting something out of, especially working with the anxiety and isolation that COVID have brought about for a lot of people. So I just think it's more of an energetic of actually receiving support, which then transitions off the meditation seat to maybe also being willing to say like, hey, we're all in this together. Yes, I can call my brother-in-law and say like, hey, we're really struggling here.

And I think you could also, those of us who aren't familiar with asking for support could say. And also, if my brother-in-law ever needed help, I'm going to set an intention to be there for him, you know? Well, said, let me just go back to uncertainty because you said something a while ago that kind of stuck in my head that the human nervous system is not well designed to deal with uncertainty. That strikes me as a significant design flaw because we are, as you said earlier, living

in a universe that is characterized by impermanence and entropy. And so how would you recommend we, through meditation, deal with this design flaw, where we don't handle uncertainty well, and yet we're now having it broadcast into every neuron in our brain. Yeah. I mean, this is also why I've really gotten a lot out of the work of not just people who take a more neuroscientific approach to looking at mindfulness and its applications, but

an evolutionary biology approach. You know, folks like Rick Hansen, who wrote Buddha's brain, folks like Robert Wright, who wrote why Buddhism is true, that looking at how we have inherited these nervous systems that basically are on the lookout for predators and are used to engaging with that sort of a structure where it's like the Sabre-tooth tiger is coming to get us. You know, I've been thinking about this also

in terms of the way we tell stories. Like the flu of 1918 supposedly killed as many people if not more than World War II. It's actually the biggest event that happened on Earth in the 20th century, but we don't even know how to tell a story when there's not an enemy, you know. So that's kind of of interest to me, right? So we're used to saying like, who's the bad guy? How do I keep the bad guy away? If it's a saber-tute tiger or if it's a mean boss or it's a politician we don't like, etc. or an abuser, etc. And that's what our nervous system is good at,

you know, and it sends certain stress hormones to deal with that. So we're used to this kind of state of like being on the lookout for things to go bad and defend against that. So we're used to this kind of state of like being on the lookout for things to go bad and defend against that. This is a very different situation because if there is a bad guy, it's a virus, you know, which there's some debate whether or not that's actually ascension being or not from a spiritual or even a biological perspective. And so I think this is a huge part of what mindfulness is sort of here to do. And I also think this is my theory is that there's a reason that mindfulness began to develop in the world

as the world was moving out of its nomadic existence into a more grounded agrarian existence, that mindfulness is here to actually kind of update the nervous system, update the mind into a way of like actually noticing that the primary experience we're having is not an experience for most of us where a predator is about to try to eat us,

but the primary experience for most of us is, I have no idea what's gonna happen next. Things seem to be where I left them or not, but I don't really know what comes next. And so I think the way we work with that in meditation is just you spot the experience of not knowing over and over and over again, and become more familiar with saying like,

hmm, I'm still breathing, I'm still thinking, I'm still aware. Oh, yeah, I'm afraid of not knowing what's going to come next. And you just spot that experience through different techniques over and over and over again until you familiarize yourself with it enough not to lose the more rational, cognizing mind, right, the prefrontal cortex, when you're in an experience of anxiety and fear. So that mind then could come in and say like, yeah, you know, I have no idea what happens next. And that's the terrifying and

beautiful part of this experience is we have no idea what the world is even going to look like six months from now. And I imagine that October 2020 is going to be a pretty crazy month on the United States and on planet Earth. But that could just me trying to be certain about something, you know. And so you just say, how do I want to show up, not knowing? What do I want to do? How do I make the best choices knowing that I don't know and can't know? Right, right. So that's perfect. That's just to put a fine point on it. The mindfulness, the sitting with the uncertainty, doesn't make the uncertainty go away,

doesn't solve all the problems, but it does hopefully provide you with enough comfort and familiarity in the discomfort and the unfamiliar, so that as you navigate it you're doing it from a place of sanity rather than unbridled fear and therefore making better decisions and being kinder. Right, right. I think the sanity of like just actually saying like I can work with this because I've been working with it and working with my mind and then I think there's a further step of actually curiosity, like, oh, isn't this fascinating not to know

what's gonna happen next? I mean, that's the other thing is from the part of my mind that goes a little bit more woo or gets more astrological or more into the cosmos, like something bigger than us is happening right now, just from the standpoint of like a global event. We don't have to get too woo to say that. And then you really can out of that curiosity, you can start to say like, what do I actually want to cultivate? And you can actually think about

growing more creative in terms of ways that actually help, help yourself be 10% happier. I would go, help, help yourself be 10% happier. I would go, I like Robert Thurman, who translates, the Awakened State is a state of complete bliss. So he goes really for the whole enchilada there. It's not just about being 10% happier, but it's about being really, really joyful, more like your smiley face on your sweater. And then also, what can I do to benefit others?

You know, I mean, I think that's, if we were going to get into a political discussion, the bad news here is the same as the good news, is like we are seeing so much of our shared situation that doesn't really work, and you only see that when the infrastructure is sort of laid bare and there's a real opportunity to actually build a more caring world out of this. I don't know if that's what's going to happen, but when the mind is familiar with the uncertainty and willing to navigate it, you start saying like, oh, things could shift here, you know. This is not the end of the world. I'm just in a state of uncertainty. I may not know what comes next,

and I'm going to have to figure that out moment by moment. But I could actually contribute something very, very positive, very kind, very compassionate here. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ more 10% happier, after this [♪ Hey, I'm Aresha, and I after this. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families

and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon Ru Paul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. So we've talked about many useful things like mindfulness as a way to better navigate an uncertain world. We've talked about generosity as a way to shift the mindset and really important ways. We've talked about the willingness to ask for help. Does Buddhism have anything to say about, you know, you invoked making a budget before, but does Buddhism have anything to say about the kind of decisions we should make as we enter a time of increased scarcity and uncertainty about what kind of work we should be doing, what kind of decisions we should be making on our finances, where we should spend our money, et cetera, et cetera?

For sure, I mean the classic Buddhist teachings and the teachings that spread throughout Asia, right livelihood or contemplating how we make our living, how we earn our currency, our energy is a huge discussion. Now, when you asked that the hard part there is that the person who's talking about right livelihood was a renunciate, In other words, he did not have a job other than he became a spiritual teacher who was a wandering mendicate. We're talking about the Buddha here. The Buddha, yeah, yeah.

So he did talk about right livelihood and thinking about a way to work with earning one's resources that doesn't contribute to harm in the world and also that doesn't cause the mind to go into a state where it can't be mindful, can't be compassionate, can't practice loving kindness. And there's some interesting, specific career choices that are put on the ancient list, including like one should not be a fortune teller, which I always found kind of, I guess that's

because that's sort of peddling in entertainment or something like that. I'm always wondered about why that was on the list of wrong or harmful livelihoods. Dan, I think there's a lot of discussions in the modern world of what is right livelihood, but the discussions get much more complicated when you're not living in a small city, state, agrarian society, but you're living in a global economy

where everything is interdependent, where anytime you think of what you're contributing to the world, it's interlaced or interwoven with all of these different peoples work. So all of our work is that way. My work as a teacher, receiving resources from the world is completely interwoven with all of the ways that my students, et cetera, the audience that I work with or the organizations

that I work with receive their resources. Your work is interwoven with a wide chain of events. So it's not clear that in this vast interdependence, you can choose one livelihood and say, this is the good livelihood, that's the bad livelihood. I mean, obviously right now, we are seeing, you know, the notion of essential worker, the healthcare space, how important that is. And so maybe right livelihood in this space brings up questions of like, who am I supporting and how? Because I also think a question of the right livelihood is a question of consumption.

Like, what am I consuming and who am I supporting through consuming? But even that is a very complicated question, you know? And I was thinking about that. I saw this horrible story on CNN.com about people ordering instant cards and promising huge tips, you know, like $50 tips to lure the delivery in and then when the delivery was made, setting the tip to

like a dollar or zero, that even though you're the consumer in that situation from a Buddhist standpoint that has to be considered wrong livelihood because one, you're setting up a lie for how much person is going to receive but you're also not supporting the people who support you. And I think that's, from a Buddhist standpoint, that is very, anything we talk about right livelihood is linked to that. But I think there's a lot of different things you can do to be a benefit in the world. And I'm not sure that the question is what you do, it's more how you do it, you know. Yeah, I

don't know what would be specifically innately considered a wrong livelihood from a Buddhist perspective in the model world. Maybe weapons manufacturer, it's possible. I don't know how badly you and your wife have been impacted financially, but as you guys make decisions about where to cut back, whether to cut back, how much to spend on what, is that informed in any way by your meditation practice and by Buddhism? Sure. I mean, it's definitely a question of both out of wanting

to be a benefit to others and wanting to make sure we're safe. We are both relatively stable. The work that I do as we commented before going on is like more people are asking for my help right now. Some of the people I work with are obviously in financial trouble so the ways they can contribute are lessened and you have to figure out how to work that out and still be a benefit. But yeah, I'd say, for example, we have child care, we have a nanny share that we haven't been using for the last, I guess, little over a month at this point, but we've

kept trying to pay her what we can so that she can take care of her family, et cetera. So there's definitely a lot of like, we're not buying a lot of like extra items, you know, we're buying food, and we're taking a wait and see attitude with a lot of the extra items, you know, we're buying food and we're taking a wait and see attitude with a lot of the non necessities. You know, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I went to see my barber right before all this happened and she said she was, you know, really worried about how it was going to impact her and the barber shop set up a go-fl fund me for the barbers, you know, but then my next haircut I bought a pair of clippers, $20 clippers and did it myself

with my daughter's help, which is what I used to do all through my 20s. So yeah, little like tricks like that. And I think it's some combination of actually simplifying one's life and still trying to use the surplus to actually help others in your family or in your world is a good strategy right now. That's the way I think about that simplifying, you know, which is always I think a Buddhist practice. Another Buddhist concept, I don't know, you know, we come from different schools of Buddhism, but I don't know if what I'm about to say is something that you've spent much time thinking about. But the eight-worldly wins are you familiar with?

I found that to be really interesting to contemplate as I worry about the uncertainty and around our own family finances in this time that they worldly wins, or I'm not going to be able to produce all of them. I don't know if you can, but you can. Okay, so why don't you go for it? So yeah, you have the concept of the eight worldly wins is it's odd that these were called worldly because everyone faces them. These are originally coming from the Buddha who kind of separated himself from the world at a time when you could still do that. So the way I like to think of these are the eight traps of hope and fear.

But the notion is you go into society, you go into the world and you're constantly like blown back and forth between hoping for positive outcomes in the short term and fearing negative outcomes. So the closest to home of these is pleasure and pain. Well, there's also gain and loss. Gain and loss, yeah. And there's fame and ill-reput and I don't remember what the other two are. Yeah.

Health, maybe something around health? Yes, it's, wait, why am I, because they're translated differently. I'm going to get it in one sec from my notes. I'm actually writing something about the worldy wins right now. Yes. We're competitive the winds right now. Yes. We're competitive googling right now. They are pleasure in pain, gain in loss, praise and blame, fame and shame.

Yeah, so fame, the other way of looking at, so these are four couplets basically of how the mind kind of goes back and forth, looking for a positive outcome or a fearing a negative outcome. And looking at the positive outcome is like the experience of hope, which you know, is not the way Barack Obama talked about hope. This is more like, I really need this to happen. From this standpoint, the hope is really just a hidden fear because you're just afraid of it not happening. And then the other side of the couplet is, what am I fearing here?

Gain and loss, I think, would probably be the most to home when we're having this discussion in terms of, like, I hope I gain wealth. I'm afraid of losing my wealth or my comfort or my security or even my safety. And so I think watching the mind go through those couplets and I think it's also interesting for me to watch how the mind always looks at gain and loss in terms of like what I have now. Like for example, if you looked at Dan Harris from like say 15 years ago, he's probably not afraid of the same notion of loss or you know his sense of gain is at least in terms of career my guess is is where Dan

is right now. But Dan right now's fear is like oh what if I you know lose a little bit of my security or what if saying you could say the same thing about Ethan, I'm just, you're just more famous than I am, so I'm your thinking you as an example. And so it's, we find some relative ground and then we want that to grow even more stable and we're afraid of losing it. So fame and disrepute, or I like fame and insignificance just because you can be famous as a controversial figure in this world. And what is the fear side of fame is sometimes not wanting to be unknown or not wanting to be known for the wrong reasons, a good go in either direction.

But yeah, so noticing how the mind is kind of blown back and forth by these winds and the teaching on equanimity or upeka in the insight tradition, is this notion of being able to rest in watching the mind, being like, I really hope this works out for me. I'm really afraid it won't, right? I really hope they like my new book. I'm really afraid they won't. I really hope this is pleasant.

I really hope this tastes good. I'm really afraid It's going to be painful, you know, and just actually watching the mind Be windy that way. It's a very windy day here at New York City So this is a good day to work with just watching the mind be blown about and and being able to hold your seat That's the way it's often said in the shambhala teachings within all that. That's the quality of equanimity. And sometimes equanimity just means I'm able to be aware that I'm not holding my seat. Like I really want this, I'm really afraid of that.

It's amazing for me to watch just what you described in my own mind of the fear in these economic circumstances of losing things that I didn't even have five years ago. And the tightness in my chest that arises as I contemplate, well, what's this going to mean for my contract at ABC News or what's this going to mean for the financial health of the 10% happier company? And yeah, the me of 15 years ago, 20 years ago, of course, you know, wouldn't even have dreamt to worry about this. And yet I can see the clinging so prominently.

Yeah. And that's also why I think it's important in those moments. And I think this is why, you know, loving kindness meditation, the first phrase of loving kindness meditation is, may I be safe? May you be safe? And it's, I really interpret that as kind of The Buddha and Buddhist teachers knowing that our nervous system is in this state of like Who's gonna kill me who's gonna take away all my security and actually just starting with like okay? You're safe, you know Let's establish that first and then we'll get into what happiness or deeper mental well-being actually means. So I think that's a really good practice, like just to contemplate, like, am I safe right now? Well, if I was a good Buddhist, wouldn't I not care about losing whatever I've managed to scrape together?

I think you're describing a good robot. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, so you probably work with this and name this a lot. I think that's a big misconception about mindfulness and Buddhism is like to be a good Buddhist or be on a path of waking up means you're waking up to what it is to have a human life and a human body. So that means to have lots of emotions, to get caught, you know, from time to time in and to also want happiness, you know, that's as the Dalai Lama likes to say, that's the thing that connects us all, all ginger beings together is the wish for happiness, you know, and so if we're gonna wake up, it's waking up to that. It's not waking up and becoming a more automaton like no personality, no emotional states, no wind. You wouldn't want to live on a planet with no weather. Some people don't like New York City, but I like it because we

still, even with climate change, we still have four seasons. So you can really appreciate the weather. And that's, I think that's what being a good Buddhist is, is you actually learn how to live in the weather of your own mind. Right, but the notion of letting go, which is bit of a nuanced term, but it is letting go is venerated, to say the least in the Buddhist tradition. So that's on my mind as I noticed myself clinging so hard to things I've managed through luck mostly to accumulate. So I then end up adding a layer of bad Buddhist self-laceration on top of that. Yeah, yeah.

So I mean, you know from the teachings of some of your teachers like Joseph Goldstein who's an amazing insight lineage teacher that part of what you're talking about is just that quality of adding on an extra layer of and it's interesting the extra layer is usually a narration that has a lot of self-judgment to it, right? So if what you're experiencing is tightness, then the practice of letting go is just noticing tightness. It feels tight right now. And I don't really like the translation let go because it implies that the feeling or the experience is definitely going to go

somewhere. I like maybe just because it's a great Beatles song, but I like Let Be, you know, because the mind just notes what's happening and is just like, okay, this is what's happening, I feel tight, you know? And I do imagine the layers of self-judgment in a Dan Harris or in an Ethan Nick turn of like, wait, I'm way better off than I was 10 years ago and I was fine 10 years ago, and

I don't even want to go back there. And meanwhile, you know, unemployment rates in the United States are the highest they've ever been, maybe since the Great Depression. And I'm worried about like going back to something I had five years ago. So all of that is this extra laceration. And the mindfulness practice is just anxiety. I'm afraid, you know, fear is arising, tightness in my chest, you know,

to actually just know what's happening and then say, can I actually notice the mind doing this extra narration? And can I just soften that? Can I let it be for a moment? Not rejected, because that's the other aspect of letting go is it's not about rejecting the experience. It's just the way you would open your palm, literally. You know, you just go from it's I'm holding on to I'm opening my palm.

It's that feeling. I mean, I get a lot more out of physical practices in this like practicing yoga. Like sometimes you just have to know what a muscle feels like when it releases a little bit, to know what letting go actually feels like. It just means that something softens and eases, you know, and so we practice softening. And that's what I think mindfulness and loving kindness do. Maybe it's worth disambiguating two things that potentially we've conflated here, or maybe maybe we haven't. But in my mind, there's a difference between the moment to moment handling of anxiety, that I feel tightness because I'm launched into some phantasmagoric projection into the future about living under a bridge as a consequence

of every source of revenue I have evaporating. There's that, the moment to moment handling of that kind of anxiety, and sort of the overall overarching attitudes I may have toward money. And, you know, I just wonder on the ladder, if you agree, those are different things, whether, I mean, the Buddha, as I understood it hung around with kings and wealthy merchants and they helped contribute to his Sangha, his core of monks and nuns and their accommodations, etc. etc. So I don't know if I recall from a Buddhist perspective, it's not necessarily bad to be quote unquote successful,

or is it? I don't know. I have conflicting feelings about some of this. Well, no, I don't think it's bad to be successful. There is a question of like, what does one do with one success? And then there's also the question of can one be successful and then just actually be successful? I mean, our world sets up this state where we are always in a kind of competition. Like, there's no sense of like, what is enough, you know, which would be a basic like Buddhist question. I'm not saying that there should be a universal numerical categorization of what is enough,

but that experience within oneself of saying like, of actually noticing that like the striving for the benefit of just like personal granddizement or personal safety or personal achievement the striving in and of itself doesn't bring about happiness, right? If there isn't a deeper intention to also like actually liberate from some confusion or achieve something that's actually to the benefit of oneself and others. So I think there is an overarching view in Buddhism of whatever one achieves should also be to the benefit of actually liberation from suffering and when one can benefiting others. And I think that's the other thing is I think we live in a world

with a lot of unhappy successful people. And that would be the beginning of the Buddhist exploration in my mind is like, and the Buddha did things like this. He said he would go to a king and say, okay, you're you have vast riches and a kingdom, but have you liberated yourself from suffering? And that's a really powerful question. And then, you know, for somebody like you or me who, in different levels and different but related fields, are successful in our fields, you know, for me, that's a daily contemplation

of like, because, you know, for one thing, I've, I've wanted to be a writer since I'm 11 years old, and I've written three books. None of them have been best sellers. Two of them have helped a bunch of people, but so I'm like, am I not a good enough writer until I write the best seller? For you would be like, okay, I have to write a book that does even better than 10% happier.

It's like, so you get trapped in these mine states that just lead deeper and deeper into that comparative mind and anxiety. And meanwhile, the question like, what actually makes me happy or what benefits others doesn't come up. And I think that's the real Buddhist beginning of this discussion is, when do you get success, which is the eight-worldly wins, and when do you actually say the point of success has been achieved, and now I want to actually be a benefit? Yeah, and I think another fact you're here that's really important, because I've spoken a lot about this with the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein, whose name you invoke to

a while ago with my meditation teacher. I called him in the middle of the pandemic and with a little bit caught in a cycle of self-criticism around just noticing that there was an increasing demand for the work that I do and that are mostly, frankly, that our team does at the 10% happier company and that I am the public face of. And also just noticing in my mind, like what is my motivation here? Am I taking advantage of the situation somewhere?

Am I operating out of fear that this is all gonna go away? And I need to make sure we're doing okay or what, but shouldn't the motivation be to help other people? Isn't that what really should be motivating me? And yes, I feel that, but am I feeling that is that salient enough in my mind? And so I've really strapped in a cycle about around this. And Joseph was, I think I'm going to restate what he said accurately. I think I am.

First of all, he said something to the effect of what you said, which is you're not a robot and we're all a mix. And that's just the truth and you have to be okay with that. And the other thing he said is what you said, which is you're not a robot, and we're all a mix, and that's just the truth, and you have to be okay with that. And the other thing you said is, you know what, you might wanna do a specific kind of practice, corona practice, you know, compassion practice, where you specifically envision people who are really suffering right now,

so I can bring to mind the videos from inside hospitals, I can think about my elderly neighbor, I can think about any number of people who are really suffering right now and work on the wish that they be free from suffering. And to try to do that daily, maybe many times a day to knock myself out of the self-centered fears that I think many of us find ourselves in. And if only for a nanosecond into a place of wanting to be useful to other

people. Yeah. Does that all land for you? For sure. Similar, you know, the teachings on corona related, if you get into the later Buddhist schools, especially like the Tibetan Buddhist school, the notion of the Bodhisattva, which is the being who's on the path to awakening, and trying to train primarily through compassion and seeing the interdependence of self and other. A lot of those teachings are about developing compassion for others, but the real, the most evolved state of the Bodhisattva path, and I think the real take it

to the bank about questioning our own actions or our own livelihood, et cetera, or our own choices is that the highest actions are actually for the liberation of both self and other. So, the idea that you have an inspiration to offer the podcast, the app, your work, bringing in all these people to the mindfulness space, I mean, the idea that you benefit from that and other people benefit to me, that would be the mindfulness space. I mean, the idea that you benefit from that and other people benefit to me, that would be the sweet spot. On the worldly winds, to me,

what I find comforting about the winds, but especially as it in terms of gain and loss, is that the wind is impersonal. And that, I think with financial loss, there's a lot of shame that goes with it. And if you can start thinking, at least for me, around gain and loss as being the result of factors that are way outside of your control,

they're gonna come and go just the way the wind does. And yeah, we have to protect ourselves from the wind. We have to get inside the best of our ability if it's super windy. But there's a lot we can't control, and that can take some of the shame out of it, has been useful to me. Am I understanding this correctly in your view?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the idea of the world he wins is that, yes, there's a concept that certain things are related to the states of mind that we've cultivated. If you lose your job because you curse out your boss and nobody likes to work with you, that's not just a worldly win of loss. That's also something that one personally engaged in

and cultivated a certain habit of anger and aggression. But at the same time, the notion is there's this vast interdependence, right? And being an economy, things sweep through that are impersonal, as you're saying. It's not like nobody is losing their job right now, because they personally did something. And so it's almost like, to me, that's actually helpful with the notion of shame is this is such a title wave event that it's like we're all trying to like navigate our little sailboat in a tidal wave, you know. And so there's a little bit more, I think, ability to alleviate

that sense of like it's my fault that this wind is blowing through when it's happening to so many people simultaneously. It's so systemic. So there is something in personal. You know, I think that's another thing is to always contemplate what we are cultivating through our actions and also what is beyond our control. And, you know, I think with shame right now, this is completely beyond anyone's control. And we're also seeing that when things are happening that are beyond our control, And we're also seeing that when things are happening that are beyond our control, that is the time that we need to try to take care of each other as much as possible. Because you can't say that people are succeeding or failing because of something they did. It's like you're not allowed to work right now in a lot of fields,

at least not the way that you used to. So we need to have a lot of compassion for ourselves and for each other in terms of feeling a loss that's much bigger than any of us. Penultimate question I wanted to ask you is, you know, I'm very aware and I suspect you are too that we're having this conversation as too relatively affluent White guys are there things we've missed? I mean this may be a problem. Yes, what we've missed because of our own biases, but do you think is it worth exploring what we could have missed? based on the Accidents of birth that are present for both of us for sure that the one is that I think if you don't look like us then the different worldly wins or social or systemic wins are going to blow very differently right and are maybe going to remove opportunities from us even

before we get to the point of a pandemic and by maybe I say definitely so I think the need to actually acknowledge that and acknowledge relative privilege is really important. And also that's why I think it's important for two relatively privileged white guys to really take a step back. I think there's one way of narrating the Buddhist teachings from a classic sense,

which is to look at one's own life situation as the outcome of one's personal karma, meaning the personal actions and habitual patterns that one has implanted or cultivated or developed, and to really look at the world as a kind of social karma set up. And right now, this is hitting different communities differently. Like Louisiana, I know the stats are 32% of the population of Louisiana is black or African-American,

70% of the COVID deaths are African-American. So yes, as people of privilege, we need to acknowledge that. And that is where I don't think Dan that there's any way to acknowledge that without opening up to a political discussion of why do the worldly winds blow so strong for some of us and for folks who look like you and me are often just a breeze that gives us some anxiety. And then we can call Joseph Goldstein or Sharon Salzburg or a therapist and work through set anxiety. So I think there needs to be an awareness and I think from my approach to Buddhism, the personal always has to intersect with a study of the social.

But I think that's a much longer conversation about why the world Lee wins look the way that they do for some people in our world. Yeah, and then maybe discussion we need to have on this podcast. Probably with somebody who doesn't look like me though. Yeah, yes. Well, actually we have some guests coming up who might be perfect to address this.

Let's end on a relatively sweet note, which is I'm of the view, and I don't know if you share this, that while I don't want to sugarcoat things at all, this sucks uncontrollably, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. I do think nonetheless there is a role in all of this for gratitude.

So I wonder if you agree, and if you do whether you could hold forth on that. Yeah, I really like the way to go back to evolutionary biology. I really like the way that somebody like Rick Hansen talks about gratitude. He talks about taking in the good as a way to note how biased we are towards negativity by our nervous systems and our evolution. And you basically, the notion is we have to force ourselves to see the things that are good and helpful and loving in our world because we are so trained or ingrained by our evolution

and probably by our culture to focus on the negative. So I think this is a time where a lot of people I know and myself are really feeling a lot of gratitude, either for that relative privilege and security or for just our relationships. And we all are feeling like a desire to connect with people we haven't connected with in a while, or tell people we love them. And we're having to do that on these two dimensional screens. So I think just the gratitude for like being able to shake someone's hand or give someone a hug in its absence is so important now. And I also think that

there's a lot of positive change that could and hopefully will come out of this not necessarily in the political arena. Also just in kind of the way we each care about the preciousness of life and feel and appreciation for a moment by moment experience. And I think this is really bringing that out for me and for a lot of the people I'm talking about, just like a real appreciation of having the gift of this human life and wanting to utilize it in the most awakened compassionate way that we can. And I think a lot of people are feeling that. And I'm hopeful that that will keep going as we emerge whenever we do from this pandemic.

Nice place to leave it. Ethan, before we go, just where can people if they want to learn, you reference some of the meditations, you've been posting, if they want to learn more about you and hear some more of your wisdom work and they go. Yeah. EthanNicturn.com is my website and I'm on all the social media things that a 41 year old person is on.

So Twitter and Instagram, EthanNicturn on all of those. And I have my own podcast called The Road Home and I also wrote an overview book on Buddhism by the same title The Road Home and that's probably the best way to get familiar with my work. I also wrote The Dharma of the Princess Bride, which I was on here to discuss, which is a fun book if you want to take your mind off of off of something and just see if Buddhist wisdom applies to the Princess Bride and relationships. So it's up to you. But thanks so much for having me. An artifact of a much less complicated time. Yes.

Ethan, great job. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dan. Always a pleasure. And thanks for all your work that you're doing and spreading mindfulness to the masses right now. Big thanks to Ethan. That was really interesting episode. And a reminder, if you work in healthcare, or if you want to tell somebody you know who works in healthcare about this, we have a program to provide free

access to healthcare workers. It's 10% dot com slash care 10% dot com slash care. Final thanks to the folks who work so hard to make this show a reality Samuel Johns runs point on the show as our producer. Our editor is Matt Boynton from Ultraviolet Audio, Maria Whartell as our production coordinator. We get a lot of input and wisdom from 10% colleagues such as Ben Rubin, Jen Poehat, and Natobie. Also big, big thanks to my ABC guys Ryan Kester and Josh Cohan. We'll see you on Wednesday for a freshy. Hey, hey, Prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music.

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