Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 243: Can You Be OK With Uncertainty? | Jack Kornfield

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

On this episode, a bad news / good news situation. Let's start with the bad news: human beings are not wired for uncertainty. It short circuits our system. The mind wants to plan, to work things out - and, in a pandemic, that is basically impossible. The good news: meditation is perfectly designed to take the edge off, if not more. Our guest this week is Jack Kornfield, a pioneering meditation teacher, prolific author, a former Buddhist monk, and a clinical psychologist. We talk about: how to use meditation to embrace uncertainty, the importance of getting in touch with your own "tainted glory," and why we shouldn't fear the schmaltz. (That last one was mostly for me.) Where to find Jack Kornfield online: Website: https://jackkornfield.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackKornfield Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jkornfield Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jack_kornfield/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5JayBKk-Bynk6XnUnU7vLA Other Resources Mentioned: Lady Gaga Kicks Off ‘One World: Together at Home’ With Performance of ‘Smile’ / https://variety.com/2020/music/news/lady-gaga-smile-together-at-home-1234584282/ Spring Washam / https://www.springwasham.com/ Ram Dass / https://www.ramdass.org/ Neem Karoli Baba / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neem_Karoli_Baba Wangari Maathai / https://www.greenbeltmovement.org/wangari-maathai Preah Maha Ghosananda / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preah_Maha_Ghosananda Dolly Parton’s Poem / https://www.instagram.com/p/B-xdJu6FCR9/ Insight Meditation Society / https://www.dharma.org/ Jack Kornfield’s Meditations / https://jackkornfield.com/meditations/ Tara Brach / https://www.tarabrach.com/ 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, Grocery Store & Food Delivery Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jack-kornfield-243 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 did 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. I was going to ask Dan sort of where we're going but I might just have to wait and see. Well I don't have an answer to that question. I love it. This is called the practice of uncertainty. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, you were just listening to the great Jack Cornfield team up in our pre-show, Banta,

what emerged, really is the theme of our conversation. We'll get to that in a moment. First, one announcement. As you may know, we've been offering free access to the 10% happier app to healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses, techs, custodians, EMTs, folks of work in administration, and more. We've had nearly 30,000 people sign up, which we're really, really happy about. And now we want to expand free access to people who work in grocery stores or in food delivery. If you

fit that description go to 10% dot com slash care to learn more. That's the same website by the way for healthcare workers. And if you know somebody who fits that description, please send them the link. And for people in both of those fields, thank you for your work. We would not survive this thing without you. Okay, now to the show and a bad news, good news situation. Let's start with the bad news. Human beings are not wired for uncertainty. It short circuits our system. The mind wants to plan to work things out and in a pandemic, that is basically impossible. The good news though is that meditation is perfectly designed to take the edge off, if not much, much more.

Our guest this week is Jack Cornfield, a pioneering meditation teacher, prolific author, former Buddhist monk, and a clinical psychologist. We talk about how to use meditation to embrace uncertainty, the importance of getting in touch with your own, quote unquote, tainted glory, and why we should not fear the schmaltz. That last one was mostly for me. Here we go, Jack Cornfield. So thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. I'm delighted to be talking to you again. And so thank you. My pleasure. You know, before we started recording, you said you're interested in talking about how this situation is an initiation. And I have no idea what you mean by

that, but I'm really curious. What do you mean by that? What I mean is that in every human life, if we are to grow in consciousness and understanding, We will go through what are called initiations and sometimes they're deliberate and sometimes they come to us as a blow, as in Greek they call on a kata boss where all of a sudden you get a cancer diagnosis or someone close to you gets in an accident and dies or your business goes belly up and you have to deal with that. And in traditional cultures, a young person wasn't considered ripe or wise until they'd gone through an initiation. So in the Masai people in East Africa, they would

traditionally send a young man out into the wilderness with a spear to bring back a lion and show that he had the stuff to be considered an adult. And of course for young women, the great initiation was actually to give birth, which was both magnificent and dangerous in that time, and to become a mother from being a girl. And their initiation is in cultures all around the world for people to prove themselves. And we long for it as young people. Even if you look wisely at the elements of street gang life, a lot of it is trying to prove that there are a man or woman try to be initiated into something,

to show that you belong to something in a very strong way. And it turns out that of course, in this case, we could call the coronavirus what we're going through a worldwide initiation. And if we do it wisely or if we do it consciously, there's some things that we can learn from it that we almost couldn't learn any other way. And I want to read you a passage, a bit of a paragraph from a Zen teacher named Calfridurkheim. He says, the person who's really on the path, when that falling upon hard times will not as a consequence, turn to those

friends who offer comfort and encourage their old self to survive. Rather, they will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help them to risk themselves so that they may endure the difficulty and pass courageously through it. Only to the extent that a person exposes themselves over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lies dignity and the spirit of true awakening. And we see this in the healthcare workers who've chosen to go in the nurses and doctors knowing that they and their families are at risk, but also saying this is what I took my oath for. When I was a young medical student or a young nursing student, this is the oath that I took to protect and now let me live up to this. And it will change them in profound ways as it will

all of us, if we take this as a place to grow in heart and spirit rather than as something that's simply being done to us. Does this make sense to you? It does. I have a million questions, but it does make sense. I just noticed, maybe it's because of the digital connection here. Maybe I'm reading something into it that wasn't there, but it sounded like you were getting emotional when talking about the sacrifices made by the healthcare community. I was. You know, and I watched the other day, Lady Gaga's eight hours of performers and musicians around the world raising money for the WHO among other things. And I do have to say that in time of pandemic to not fund the WHO, just boggles my mind. But in any case, the parts that were most moving to me were the videos of people on their balconies in New York,

cheering the healthcare workers at the shift change, were the videos of the physicians, or it didn't matter the truck drivers and the people stocking the supermarkets and all of those that I found to be humanity stepping up in a way that we can and must do this together. And somehow in the midst of this tragedy, there is also something new that wants to get born. And it's both outward where we see that we're an interconnected world in ways that we had not been willing to acknowledge and we have to feel it. And globally, whether it's the climate change or the health care system, but equally so inwardly that we have to grow in new ways in our heart to feel connected with something deeper about what matters to us.

And in a way, Dan, as a meditation teacher, people think meditation in some way, maybe it quiets the mind, it helps reduce stress, which all the neurosides shows, it helps with emotional regulation and stress reduction and so forth. But it's really an invitation to something deeper, which is to remember what truly matters in us,

and to live from that place of presence and a kind of inner courage and dignity and love, no matter what. You may have answered the question I was going to ask, but I'm going to ask it anyway, which is in response to the first question about initiation, one of the things you said was, if we go through this wisely, I believe, with the term you used, then it is a chance to grow. So what do you mean by that? If I hear something like that, I say, yeah, I want to go through this wisely. What do you mean specifically?

Let's speak both collectively and then individually because I know when I meditate at the end of the day, and I've gone through my day doing teachings and podcasts like this and, you know, tending the house and all the things that we have to do. When I sit in quiet myself, I find that underneath that quiet, there are some very deep feelings, there's fear, there's a kind of grief, there's a sadness that's there. If I really tune in, along with a deep love and a caring, all these kind of powerful emotions and a lot of it held in my body, which is kind of picking up the environment of this epidemic and going into fight flight or freeze, like being chased by some foe, which we are in some strange way

and invisible one. And when I let myself sense that I'm part of a greater whole and can allow myself to hold that with mindfulness, with mindful loving awareness, things open up and settle down, and I feel a more steady and timeless way to be present for this difficult passage, this initiation that's both personal and it's also collective and universal. But if I don't do that, and I just let it build up in me as fear and anxiety and anger about it and loss and become reactive, In some way I'm not taking the lesson, I'm not going deeper. We don't do it collectively, then we blame whoever it is. The WHO or these people are that, the Chinese, we blame people who are closing the country down,

or this are opening or whatever they're doing because we can't bear the fact that things are out of our control. We can't bear the loss or the emotion or the reality of things the way they are. The neuroscientists call the development of wisdom in part that you asked about as expanding the human window of tolerance. And I love this phrase because it has a kind of double meaning, if you will. It means that we're able to tolerate our own uncertainty, tolerate our own uncertainty or own insecurity or own vulnerability. And there's no one listening who is invulnerable. As the poet Rilka says something like, ultimately it's upon your vulnerability that you depend. We depend on the healthcare workers and the people carrying our groceries to the store.

And we depend on the people around us who are sequestering themselves or are keeping a social distance. We depend on each other to survive. So we're vulnerable. And when we can tolerate our vulnerability, then we don't project it out on others, but we become more stable and steady. And in the end, we actually become more loving because we're able to be present for what Oscar Wilde called the tainted glory of our humanity, our full humanity, with all the joys and sorrows that make us a human being. So it's outer tolerance, where otherwise we blame other people. And I guess I have to

say this politically, because it's important. James Baldwin wrote at one point, He wrote, he believed that one of the reasons that people claim to their hate and prejudice and racism so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone, they'll be forced to deal with their own pain. And so we have as a culture periodically, the enemy de jour, when I was growing up, it was the communists. You know, they're coming back around. That was a good enemy. But then the Muslims, or the immigrants, or the Mexicans, or the Gays, or the Blacks,

or whatever, because we can't deal with the fact that the economy of the world is changing or that the world we knew it is not the world of our childhood and new things are happening, many glorious things and difficult things with our own insecurity. And if we can then we don't blame it on others, but we take our seat if you will with some dignity in this life and become able to be present for it with a loving heart. So let me pick up on that term you used about taking your seat. Because I heard you describe your meditation

at the end of the day, and tuning into what's happening with you, use the term loving attention, all of which can produce a kind of tolerance that can change the way you show up in the world. I'm gonna channel of an early stage meditator or a meditation curious person who might ask, how do I actually do what you just described? And it's a little unfair because you've been doing this for 50 plus years. So it's second nature to you. But for a rank and file meditator, how do

we tune in in the way you described? I love your phrase rank and and file, meditator. Those who've just joined the union or the team or the, or a trial. They don't even know whether they want to join the damn team, but they see people out on the field as they are at what the hell will try at. I mean, it's a really important and kind of essence question. So you take your seat and of course meditation isn't just sitting. I mean, it's a really important and kind of essence question. So you take your seat, and of course meditation isn't just sitting, you can do walking meditation,

eating, you can do a meditation, a mindful presence with another person in the world, but in this case you take your seat. And the first task is just to bring your attention to where you are to bring the body and mind into the same place. Because one of the descriptions, one of the meditation masters I studied with, we asked him, well, how does the modern world look to you who lived in the jungles and the forest for your whole life? And he said, lost in thought, you know, that we wander around, but we're not actually where we are.

James Joyce wrote of one character, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. So the first task is somehow to bring our body in heart and mind into the same place if we're going to be present for this life and respond in a way to its magnificence and its troubles. And that means you sit quietly and you find a way to inhabit your body and it might be to feel you breathing. That's one very common meditation practice and to sense it over and over for sometime. And as you do, as you feel the natural rhythm, you don't, it's not to become a good breather, but as you feel the body breathing it. So then you notice in

the background, the thoughts rise and fall and the emotions come and go, and you feel how the breath breathes itself in the middle of it and things begin to settle and stabilize. But there are other practices too. You can do a practice of scanning through your body, relaxing each part as you do. And again, whatever you use to steady and bring minded body together, all these other things will come and go as waves around them. Then once you've begun to quiet yourself a bit, you have the opportunity to turn that capacity of mindful attention, what I'm calling mindful, loving awareness, to begin to notice what's cooking, what's happening, and it might be emotions, a fear or longing or love or anger or disappointment

or impatience. Or it might be sensations in the body where your body is accumulated in your jaw and your shoulders and all these places, all the tensions of the day or the week, and then the meditation doesn't make it worse. But what happens is they display themselves. They show themselves and you go, oh, my shoulders, there's pain in there, in the back, and then it's so forth. So then the next step is to bring this mindful loving awareness and say, all right, let me hold this with attention and kindness and see what happens if I, instead of running away or being busy or ignoring or hating it,

I want it to go away, I don't want tension, I don't want fear. You know, I hate all this judgment, but what's that? It's just more judgment and more aggression. So instead you say, all right, let me actually be brave enough, courageous, simple enough to take the seat, then after calming myself a little bit, to go first to my body and say, what's in here, what am I feeling? And invite it to actually open.

This is a kind of deep trauma work, quite honestly, in which you allow the energies and the tightness to show themselves, and as you open, and let them not to get rid of them but say, all right, show me what you're holding. You discover that the loving awareness itself, that spaciousness allows them to untangle in their own time, allows the body to soften and you can even say, thank you, thank you for trying to protect me with some compassion. Thank you, I'm okay for now. And you go to your heart, you notice the emotions and there's the fear or the grief for the loss of your business or the person

that you know that's died. You know, and all the judgments of others or the judgments of yourself, and with mindful loving awareness, you say, oh, tears, grief, you can name it gently, and let it open, say, let me feel you fully. Let me know what's inside, and the tears may turn to a whole ocean of grief, or the fear may turn into panic, and you name fear, panic, restless, running away, and you name each thing gently to acknowledge as if bowing to it, and you become the loving witness of it. Because what you discover is that you can become what my teacher called the one who knows. You can be the wise one that knows what's going on in this body, the difficult things, and the beautiful things. You can know what's going on in the heart,

the grief, but also the love and the longing and the creativity and the beauty, and you become the knowing. And as you do, this is expanding the window of tolerance, you become the space of loving awareness that can then engage in the world and respond to it from a place of steadiness and from a place that's not so overrun or lost in everything that arises. That was a very long answer and I could certainly teach it as a meditation in the podcast or I have it on my website. You probably do too in your website practices of steadying heart, but that's the beginning of how one might practice.

You're in a welcoming, safe place for long answers, so don't hesitate there. You know, to pick up on a thing phrase you've used a bunch, this loving awareness, which I feel like, and I can't remember if I've mentioned this to you in any of our prior conversations, but I feel like part of my prejudice blinded me to the power of that expression because I found it to be schmaltzy. So what I was doing, I noticed in my own practice, and I really didn't notice this until I got deeper into love and kindness meditation in large part through your student spring washroom, the great meditation teacher spring washroom, that my mindfulness had a certain clinical,

cold, it's aversive flavor to it, because I was looking, I would sit, watch my breath and then notice whatever came up, but it was, I didn't realize wasn't that excited that the panic or fear or a lot of selfishness was coming up. And it was only when I started to sort of warm up my inner weather through loving kindness practice that I started to realize how important loving awareness as opposed to just awareness is. And if you don't like loving awareness, you can call it

friendly awareness. Friendly awareness, kind attention. Those are fine. I mean, it is a little bit schmaltzy, but it turns out to be the reality. Because without it, mindfulness not only becomes dry, but what you point out is it can become unconsciously a way of judging. Oh, there's fear. I don't really like that. There's a, you know, anger, I shouldn't be angry. There's judging. Oh, I should stop judging, except what's that?

It's just another judgment. And what we found over decades of teaching, especially here in the West, is that there's a tremendous amount of self-judgment, along with judgment of others. And then it becomes impossible to actually see what's true, because you're always saying, I like this, I don't like that, and you're at war with the experience of your life, rather than actually open to it.

So there comes a kind of, you could call it kindness, you could call it compassion, even a forgiveness. I love this poetic phrase from an old Tibetan mama, he says, my old faults like snow falling on warm ground. It's a description of seeing, you know, our follies, but not clinging and not judging them, just saying, yeah, there we are, we're all human. And you can feel the warmth of his heart saying, yes, just as if you're with some friend that you really care about, maybe they've gone through a hard time and you're there, and you're not judging them, you're saying, hey buddy buddy, you're, hey, sister, you know, here we are. Here we are as human beings with kind of brailing our way. We can't see the future, but we have to feel each moment like braille.

And there's some deep respect and with it, there comes a kind of inner, not just inner warmth, but inner well-being, which is partly what we kind of grow into or seek and find in meditation. One of the things that's helped me recently with my own tendencies toward a version, toward my own, you know, the uglier aspects of my own, you know, emotional repertoire, is captured in the way you sometimes talk about our difficult emotions, which is to look at it as the organism trying to protect you. Yes, absolutely. And then you can thank it. You know, fear is trying to protect you. You know, anger or aversion, they're trying to protect you. Thank you for trying to protect me.

I'm okay for now. But you see all these judgments and one of the things that people find when they're neophytes, when they begin to meditate, they're there for a long time, but they become more shocking at the beginning is how many judgments there are in their woe. I'm judging all the time. And I kind of remember talking with my friend, Ramdha, who was otherwise known as Richard Albert when he was the Harvard professor and, you know, spiritual teacher. And he was with his guru in

India. And his guru gave him these very, very simple instructions. But deep, he said, Ramdas, tell the truth. You know, God, that's something we really need now a lot. Tell the truth, Ramdhas. And then he would look at Ramdhas and he'd say, Ramdhas, love everybody. Ramdhas love everybody. And Ramdhas says it was driving him a little crazy because he was surrounded by a group of other Westerners who had heard about him, especially when he published that book, be here now, that was a big special kind of best seller at the time, and some people had come. And he said, all these people came and they're full of themselves.

They want something, they're needy, they have big egos, you know, they're showing off, they're grasping, whatever. I hate these people. I loved it when I was just here with my guru and a few people. I hate them, but that's the truth. And then Niem Kauroli Baba's teacher would say, Ramdas, tell the truth. Ramdas love everybody. And then one day, Niem Kauroli Baba looked at him with the eyes in India, they call it the glance of mercy. Thomas Merton, the Christian mystic, talked about it as seeing the secret beauty. When somebody looks at you with so much love that it goes in somehow, you don't deserve

it, you can't understand it, but it rewires your cells. And he looked at him with so much love, every part of him. And he said, Oh, I understood what he was teaching. And I looked around at all these neurotic Westerners that were annoying me. And I saw them as children, you know, grown into whatever pain. And he said, and I loved them. And I realized that I could love them, that I could love myself, and I could tell the truth. And it was a different truth than a deeper one. So this is something that starts to happen.

And people get worried, well, I'll be soft. I live in New York. I don't want anything schmaltzy. I mean, this is a tough, tough town, right? You got to be on your guard. You got to, you know, get one up on everybody. I don't know. Nelson Mandela says, it never hurts to see the good in someone. They often act the better because of it.

To see the secret beauty in another being, it affects them. And yeah, some of them will still try to take advantage of you, but what you have is your integrity and your vision and your truthfulness, and no one can take that from you. So when you meditate in some way, you start to be able to hold all of this with your mindfulness, with your kind attention, if you will, and say, yes. This is our humanity, and I can be steady and compassionate. Thank you for all the ways you're trying to protect me, body, and mind, and live from that place. More 10% happier after this. Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean?

How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists,

scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs, and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it?

Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering app. Do you ever get to times when you're on meditation where it's too much to take it all in? Yes, I do. I get overwhelmed at some point where it's too much. And I have to get out and take a walk. I think it's really healthy. People make everything like either it's too precious

I got to meditate and have some meditative state or they turn it into a grim duty. All right, you know I worked out I got my trainer to work virtually with me and I'm on a diet and I Get my virtual therapy and we've kind of all the whole self-approvedment game and so forth It's not that now Now I'm going to meditate in some new self-improvement, grim duty I have to do. Even though it can be difficult, it's primarily an act of care. It's primarily an act of love. And it's an art. So if I sit and I get really overwhelmed because my daughter calls me and her first responder husband who's a paramedic and firefighters, says a number of the people in his department have the virus and I go what will happen to him and their family.

And that's hard to hold. And I get some tears and some fear. And I get up and I go walk out and I get some tears and some fear. And I get up and I go walk outside under the trees a little bit and get a bigger perspective. So of course, they're times. That's just how we are. And I think we can trust our organism and our understanding if we do it with kindness, to learn how to use these practices, these things that people have been doing for thousands of years, because the gift is that we actually can direct our attention.

And when we go to school in our culture, in the Western culture, we learn about outside things, we learn mathematics, and. We learn mathematics and we learn geography and we learn science and we learn literature and so forth. But we have very little instruction about the inner landscape. In fact, when I went from my Ivy League education, because I still had a lot of emotional pain from a abusive and really violent father who would beat my mother black and blue and was just, you know, terrible in many ways to us.

And various other things. And I had this great education, but I didn't know what to do with my fear or my anger. I didn't know how to be in a close relationship. My parents certainly didn't model it, or they would fight all the time. I needed a whole other part of education. I didn't also know how to even deal with my mind when it would get upset and go in circles and get wild and so forth. And so this was the second half of my education where I was taught how to know what was going on in my mind

and hold it with kind attention and discover that it could be observed and with kindness and settle and how to do that with the heart and the emotions and with my relations with one another. So we have this amazing gift as human beings of being able to direct our attention amazing gift as human beings are being able to direct our attention. And when we do in meditation, we direct it within ourselves. We can not only start to learn what's going on more deeply, but we also come to a well of or a deep place of steadiness and greater understanding and less kind of unhealthy criticism and more compassionate heart. And that's born into us.

You know, of course babies can be selfish. I want that or little kids. But all the early childhood studies show, you know, from Yale and stuff where they study pre-verbal infants and that if somebody's in trouble, the babies want to reach out, the young kids want to help them. It's wired into us as a species, into our consciousness. And we can return to that to care for ourselves and one another. So you could call the practice of mindfulness really the practice of care. Just for the record, I'm getting much more comfortable with the schmaltz.

Well, yeah, you put it on, I mean, in New York, you go into a dollar to test it and they say, hey, you want mayonnaise or you want some schmaltz on the sandwich, you want it a little tastier. I mean, it's a condiment in New York, right? It's not just a bad thing. I think I'm going to call my next book, 10% Sappier. There we go. I'm getting there. You know, it's not blanking Sappie. I could use a French word that I won't hear. It's actually the damn opposite. It's the courage that it takes to care. It's the courage that it takes to love. You want to talk about courage. Look at Nelson Mandela coming out of 27 years in Robin Island prison with a magnanimity that takes your breath away and with a compassion for the world.

compassion for the world. That's courage. You know, you look at somebody, some of the Nobel laureates, the Kenyan woman, I think her name in a moment, who got the Nobel Prize for the Green Belt in East Africa and started planting one, two, three, ten, a hundred, a dozen trees until they ended up planting 51 million trees trees and she was thrown in prison which these days of course is a good sign for somebody who's doing something worthwhile in many cases as an activist. That was courage. So love is actually an act of courage. It's not schmultzy.

I think the fear is that we'll be seen as weak, but it's actually the only thing that will counter hate. You know, it's the force that has mothers lift cars off their children. And I remember my colleague and teacher, Gosananda, who was the Gandhi of Cambodia and nominated for the Nobel Prize many times. All 19 members of his family were killed. His temple was burned, just tremendous devastation in that genocide. For 15 years, he led refugees who fled the country to camps back to their villages. He said, we can't go back in a bus or the back of a truck or

take a train. You have to reclaim your village and your land and your life step by step. And so he'd have a thousand, two thousand people behind him and he would ring a bell and they'd walk through the killing fields or skirt the mine fields, and he would have them chant with them the whole way. Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. And talk about schmaltz. This is not schmaltz, baby. This is the real deal. 1000% agreement over here. And it actually brings me to a question that I had on my list of things that I wanted to talk to you about because as we sit here several weeks now into this pandemic, regrettably, but not surprisingly, even a virus can become a partisan polarizing

issue. And we're Americans, we know how to misuse anything. And I can sense from some of the comments you made about the WHO where you sit on the political divide. And I'm not particularly interested in getting into the politics. Sure. But I am, I am interested in getting into how can we use the caring courageous love that you just spoke about so eloquently at a time when we're yet again at each other's throats at a time when we ought not to be. We really need each other.

Well, in this case, I find something rising in me. I'm going to blame the media. Go for it. You have to indulge me for a moment. Sure. Consider yourself indulged. You know if it leads, it leads. That in fact, both whether it's the demonstrations of people say, open it up or even, you know, lock her up against the governor or Michigan or something like that because she wouldn't open things soon enough. There's a lot of anger in the culture. And a lot of it's understandable.

There's tremendous economic displacement. There are people who's either long before the virus, who either lost their job or got really low paying jobs. And if we look, honestly, the economic disparity is enormous. The opportunity isn't there. The social safety net is shredded in different ways. And I'm not talking as a liberal or conservative. This is the reality of it.

And so there's a lot of despair in the country. And there's a lot of sense with that anger and despair that what we have to do is fight back in some fashion or other. The problem is that because those outer kind of statements, which are really in part, at least right now with the virus, they're in part a minority. And in some cases, it's a kind of small minority, but they get a lot of airtime, because that's what's exciting, you know? And what's not as exciting are the 89% of people

that are caring for their neighbors and protecting each other by wearing masks in solidarity, not for themselves, but for everybody else. The internet and media as it's grown then becomes an amplifier, as you know very well, and sometimes it becomes an amplifier rather than a truth-seller. So I think in terms of our polarization, that two things I sort of want to get quiet and reflect and say something that's useful and maybe even meaningful. The polarization is always going to be here because we're human beings, we have different views. That's true, but a lot of what's fueling it is loss and fear and grief not just from the virus, but loss of a dream really impossibility and until we attend to that collectively in some

Honourable way it will continue, you know, whatever you wherever you are on the Political spectrum and some people think well, we should just go back to the land, you know, get a cabin and get our guns and get the revenues out of our way and stuff. They're sort of that American myth. But the virus is showing us actually that we're all in it together in a new and remarkable way. So that's one part of an answer. way. So that's one part of an answer. I think another part, maybe is a visionary part that rather than focusing on the differences whether they're partisan or otherwise, to recognize that it's time for each of us to bring our medicine to be the uplifting music, to be the lamp in the darkness or a carrier of hope,

because it's humanity's enormously creative. And we're now in a time where things are getting broken apart. When we started with initiation, that's part of it that you descend into the underworld, things die, things get torn apart, in ways you couldn't imagine, you face destruction. But that's not the end of the story. It never is. When things break apart, something new will be born. And I think it's really important that after this hardship, as life refreshes itself, you know, as it is now, you've got the spring crocus blooming in New York and the plum trees. And I see the newborn fawns out here in the spring, wandering in the fresh grasses. And within you, in every cell and fiber in the depths of your heart, is a healing power, and the unstoppable power of renewal.

And that is really what's asked of us in this time, to focus on what we can bring and how we can vision, caring for one another and be building our world from the lessons that we learn. And to me, then meditation becomes a way of quieting the heart, quieting the mind to begin with, the first step is quiet the mind and tend the heart. That's like breathing in and then breathing out with this place of presence and steadiness, then to go out into the world, you know, and add your beauty and your gift. In Zen, they say, there are only two things. You sit and you sweep the garden, and it doesn't matter how big the

garden is. It's the garden of the world. So you quiet and demand and tend the heart and steady yourself with courage and compassion. And then you go out into the world in your own way, even if it's virtually as we're doing, and you say, what can I add and what vision do I have and what is it that wants to get born that something beautiful or meaningful or important coming out of all of this. We may have when we watch TV and we see people from the other side of the political divide or we see these demonstrations which I agree with you, you know, they're small and scattered at least now and don't represent the public opinion you see in the polls. We may have various feelings about the people

with whom we disagree, but if we want to be productive and useful citizen at this time, it sounds like you're saying, ask yourself the question, how can I help and then go do it? How can I help and then go do it? And when we see others on a different part of the political spectrum do it. And when we see others on a different part of the political spectrum and see their anger underneath anger is often fear and pain. And hurt and loss, those kind of things often fuel anger. And so we can see them with a little more compassion and understanding and say, this is their expression. They're trying to protect themselves in the way that they can. And sometimes it's misguided. We human beings have misguided ourselves in many occasions. But we can hold that with some understanding of compassion and then still add what we can

that has integrity and true compassion. And I would say that taking useful action, even if it's really simple, small, it doesn't have to be accompanied by string music. It really is the antidote to, in my experience, to what is most painful, at least in my own mind. So the two things that I see in my own mind that are the most painful these days,

one is selfish thoughts and antidote to that. I've said this before, but I can really see the difference in my own mind between what the flavor of my mind is when I'm thinking about how many likes I got on my most recent tweet versus when I'm running errands for my elderly neighbor. Those are two very easily comparable mine states in the latter is much more pleasant. So I've noticed it's an antidote to selfishness and the other mine state that I want to talk about here that I think is very common these days and then certainly one that I experience a lot is uncertainty. The two mine states that I noticed myself falling into that produce the most

unhappiness is one, the aforementioned kind of selfishness. And the other is, and it's not unrelated, projecting forward into the future, trying to map out how is this thing going to go? When's it going to end? What's the world going to look like? What's my world going to look like? What's my son's world going to look like? And doing something useful and helpful is a great salve on that. But I wonder if you have any other thoughts about handling look like, what's my son's world going to look like? And doing something useful and helpful is a great salve on that. But I wonder if you have any other thoughts about handling uncertainty. The first thing to say is it's uncertain, isn't it? And no amount of mental manipulation. I mean, we're wired in some way for our survival needs to predict the future.

If we saw this Abertouth Tiger in that part of the forest, we want to be able to remember it and predict, oh, in the evenings, the Abertouth Tiger swings by this way, I better remember that, right? So we're wired to anticipate that, which might harm us in some way. And so you can notice that, you know, whether you call it selfish or not, it's also self-preservation. And even when you're there you are, as in front of all large room, in this case, it's the virtual room counting the house and seeing how many people are there paying attention to you and so forth. It's sort of underneath, all right,

I want to feel important, that I want to feel useful, and I want to feel that I matter. I mean, if you look underneath that, that I actually do, so you could say, oh, it's ego, but it's something deeper than that. I want to feel that who I am matters. And that's why when you're taking groceries to your elderly neighbor, you do know that you matter, that there's some way in which you actually, you're touching that place that lets your life feel like it's being buoyed up by that value that you do matter. But the reality and my meditation master used to love to talk about uncertainty. We'd ask him all kinds of questions. Periodically, whatever question you would ask him, he would smile and say it's uncertain,

isn't it? And it is the wisdom of insecurity, of knowing that this is actually our human lot. And while our brain mechanism is wired to try to predict the future, in fact, things are uncertain. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, to you or to me or to the world around us. We have good guesses, but honestly, don't know, simply don't know. And then what happens if when you speak of this, is that you can begin to tolerate uncertainty if you bring mindfulness to it. And you go, oh, this is uncertainty.

And with that uncertainty kind of married to it in some form of a twisted marriage is fear. Well, if I don't know about the saber-toothed tiger, I don't know what's going to happen. How will I start my business? Even more? How will I feed my children? How will I?

All those things that are very genuine or when will this end? How will I be able to do this or that? And you see all those thoughts and they're trying to help you and protect you and help you figure out how to manage. But in some way underneath it is a fear. And you say, oh, this is uncertainty. And you name it, just as we've talked about mindfulness, recognizing what's present, and you make space for it and you hold it

with compassion and you say this is this is the reality that things are uncertain and you begin to sense what is it like to acknowledge uncertainty while you're seated here listening to these words feeling your feet on the floor, your butt on the cushion. And you realize also that with that uncertainty is a whole spinning of the mind. Yes. And there's a different reality. What is certain is that you're here and you're present and you can ground yourself where you are and you say, the truth is that things are uncertain. I wish they weren't, I wish I could know, but actually we never do. I want to figure it out. Well, I'll do a little bit of figuring, but after that, I just been in circles. Let me see if

I can hold uncertainty also with kindness and say, all right, this is part of what we have to bear as human beings is uncertainty. And when you sense that you can bear it, it doesn't go away. It actually becomes instead a different kind of understanding. All right, it is uncertain. And now what I'm going to do is get groceries for my neighbor. Now what I'm going to do is arrange my next podcast or do my work for the studio. Now what I'll do is take a step at a time and a day at a time, but you do it in a steadier place because you're comfortable with uncertainty. You found your relationship to it, not as fear or struggle, but as a bow and say, yes, this

is the way that new main incarnation is. It is uncertain. And that comfort with it, say, yes, then you live in a different way. Just you're getting me thinking about a conversation I had the other day with an old friend. He owns a pair of, well, he there are two very successful nightclubs. The nightclub business ain't come back anytime soon, most likely, and he was basically saying, both of these places are likely to go out of business, and I'm likely to be broke.

And I was very surprised because I did not detect a lot of desperation or fear or despair, I guess despair and desperation, same thing. I didn't detect that in him. And he said that there was something liberating about just surrendering into not knowing what the hell is going to happen. Well, but we can fight with reality. Well put well put yeah We can fight with reality No, or we can say well this is this is the truth of what's happening And who knows what will come out of it? He might start an entirely different business or maybe he'll take the little bit of money as and get a ticket to

Thailand and go live in a sailboat off one of those islands, you know, and work in a little nightclub there. So who knows what he's going to do with his life. It's almost like you're pressing the reset button. Now I don't say this glibly because I am truly concerned about families who are not going to have the money they need to pay their rent or to feed their children. And this is an enormous difficulty that we face and maybe even a tragedy. So I don't want to make light of that in the slightest. And that becomes if we want to do something, if things are uncertain,

that becomes more our responsibility, whether it's our actions in our community, our immediate ones, helping with the food bank giving money, or our actions in what we support politically, more in other fashions and non-profits. Then again, that's a way to deal with uncertainty and bring in just what you described the kind of care, where you feel different. certainty, and bring in just what you described the kind of care where you feel different. Yeah. He was saying he tries to show up and be, you know, right there and attentive and caring with his employees who are, you know, hundreds of them who are freaking out, but he can't make any promises and all he can do is just put one foot in front of the other.

Here's Nelson Mandela again. I don't think I used this passage. I was talking about him. He says, do not judge me by my successes. Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again. And we have that in us. There's a kind of human spirit and resilience that we see all over the world in extraordinary ways. The other thing I was thinking to discuss with you because you're an interesting person because you combine many decades of really deep meditation practice, but you're also a psychologist. Yes. Many of us are locked down with our family members and that can be complex. There have been predictions of, you know, a wave of divorces coming out of this thing,

or maybe in the midst of this thing. I just wonder what thoughts you have about family relations. I do have some sort of, right? They've said somehow that there is going to be more babies born and more divorces coming out of this. And I'm actually looking for the lyrics of a Dolly Parton's home that I put somewhere nearby here. I can see you rooting around on the floor there. Dolly pretty surprised. Where did that thing go? Dolly, where did you go, baby?

What need you? But anyway, if I find it in a little bit, I'll read it. This becomes one of the other tasks for us as human beings in this time. We now have to live close to one another. And in living close to one another, we get the good stuff, but we also, we irritate each other.

And I mean, I'm not even talking about the issue of abuse, which in some cases is really a problem because people are stuck together in a relationship that's been abusive. But even, you know, here, Trudy and I are these long-term, I beloved Trudy, wife, and long-term meditation practitioners. She's also a great teacher and started inside L.A. That has all these followers.

We can get irritated with one another, you know? And then I have this little secret practice that I do when I do get irritated. And so forth beside acknowledging that irritation is just being human. It's just part of the dance of within skinned in some part. And we get touched in different ways. And when we're close together, it happens the more my practice is to look at her and see her as a girl a

young girl or you know Young teen or something and to see that original innocence and goodness that was in there and Know that it's still there to see her in this beautiful way. And when I do, it's almost like, you know, we can change the channel. That's one of the great gifts of mindfulness and consciousness. And we can choose what will follow with our own mind and heart, going out as a Buddhist monk with my teacher Ajahn Chah in the early mornings with our alms bowl crossing those little dikes in the rice patties and out across the rice patties with this great big older Ajahn Chah said, monks is that Boulder heavy? And we said, yes, it is, you know, being bright young monks.

And he smiling, he said, not if you don't pick it up. And one of the gifts that's also possible for us, even when we see, you know, stuff going on and we get irritated, we don't have to go down that channel. We can acknowledge it, see it, oh, this is irritation and usually the irritation or the, or even the conflict, because we want different things, it's painful. Can we tolerate that and not just get into an aggressive cycle or a judgmental or, or totalize and say, oh, because that person said that that just means I can't be with them. I, that's that moment in that day. And somehow I think we're called not only to feel our connection with the world in some deeper way,

but also to deepen the love, the capacity for love, for all those around us. You're looking for Dali again. I'm looking for Dali. Come on, Dali. Where did you go? It's in my last try. Yeah, he's gone. But it was great. Can you paraphrase? Oh, God.

Yeah, paraphrase it. You know, it's a virus.'t get you, then the family will. That's the last line, you know. She said, yeah, anyway. So, what I want to say for people who are stuck together and having trouble take as much time apart as you can, even if it's the separate bed, one in the kitchen, one in the bedroom,

or make quiet time. Do things together that where you don't just relate to one another, watch movies that you both can share. Look for things that we talk about being practical, and ask each other, what will help us get through this? How do we do this? You know, what do you need? What do I need? And it's that kind of interest and kind of curious care that because when you get in a conflict and this really has to do with intention, one of the things that you learn in meditation practice is to become aware of your intention,

as you become more mindful, and intention flavors everything. So if you're in a conflict with someone and you say to them, what did you mean and you're angry and so forth with that tone of voice, it will escalate. But if you say the very same phrase, what did you mean because you want to understand, not with blame or judgment, but a kind of curiosity and openness, you get an entirely different answer. And so what you can do is to pause when there is friction and conflict. Just take a breath or two and then ask yourself, what's my best intention? What's my best intention? And usually if you asked, what's my best intention? The heart will answer and let's say, I want

to get along with this person or I love this person or my best intention is to get through this, you know, well for all of us or something. If you ask what's your best or highest or, you know, that kind of intention, it only takes a few seconds to get an answer, but it changes the channel. And that change of the channel means everything. I don't know if you noticed this, but our ace producer Samuel was able to find the Dalley-Pardon lyric and text it to us. The final line of the Dalley-Pardon poem is, and Lord, please find a vaccination in the form of a shot or a pill

because if the virus don't kill us, the staying home will. Yeah, there you go. There's a lot of other very good lines in there. Thank you, Dalai. Yeah. So we talked about the uncertainty. And living with it and honoring and saying, it is is uncertain and here my feet on the ground Here's the light coming through the window the sun has risen again and As the South African poets said the viruses come the sun rises and every day we see the numbers climb But one day the sun will rise and the numbers will not climb And this is also true One day the sun will rise and the numbers will not climb. And this is also true. You know, it's uncertain,

but what we do know is that this will come to an end because everything does in its own way. And so somehow we see the light, we feel ourselves, we're present for this life and not just living in our fears and our fantasies in our head. Well, that's exactly where I was hoping to go, but then this might be a great final area to discuss here is, is patience?

Because it's relevant to living with uncertainty because we want to make sure we're actually living our life now, not living our life only to get to the end of this, but it's also relevant to the irritation that we may feel if we're locked down with other members of Homo sapiens. Yeah, so I'm not a big fan of the word patience myself partly because I'm a kind of impatient person. So my temperament I moved quickly and I remember Long some years ago. I was leading a long retreat at our center in Massachusetts at the Insight Meditation Society And there was a person who'd come from some great distance to come and practice because they'd read one of my books path with heart or something

And they came to see me and they complained they said you know I read your book and even I hear your words and they're so good. But then I watch you go by, Mr. Speedy, and you're going up and down the stairs like some kind of Italian shoe salesman, trying to bring the product out before the customer leaves. And I thought, hmm, Italian shoe salesman, okay, but there was something about they captured it. So I'm impatient. Although I have learned under how sad as we are to be more impatient, I prefer a different word because patience somehow sounds like you're going to steal yourself and get through

it. Finally, I'll get there. I'll be patient. And that doesn't work for me. A better word for patience is constancy. Is that ability to come back and say, well, where I am actually is here. I mean, where are we going? In the end, and what matters in the end?

And yes, we can accomplish things in those have their place. I think it's Aldous Huxley, who said, an idolatrous religion is one that substitutes time for eternity. And so the question is not the future of humanity, but the presence of eternity in some way. Can we be connected with something right where we are that is the turning of the seasons in this moment, each breath coming in and out, like the breath of spring that arises after winter, each day of the sun rising and setting and so forth. And so it's not trying to be patient, but it's dropping back into a steadiness that's

saying, let's take this a day at a time, let's be a breath at a time, because where we're going actually, we're not going from here to there, we're going from there to here. We're going in the end to use Ramdha's face to be here now, to be where we are. And as we let ourselves become more alive where we are, then even when impatience arises, because it will, certainly in my case, we can notice it with some humor and say, oh, yeah, thank you, We can notice it with some humor and say, oh, yeah, thank you. Thank you for trying to make everything work out. Thanks for, you know, your part in this. I'm okay for now. I'm here where I am and I'm doing, you know, what matters.

And so in all of these, there comes a sense of the turning of seasons or the Dow or something and the things will unfold and open and that we'll be able to respond better actually because we're present rather than just lost in our impatience and fantasies. I name it. It comes and I feel it in my body. There's an energy and a tightness. I go in patient, in patient, show me how big you are. I hold it and let it open with loving awareness, impatience, impatience, and as I do, it starts to soften. And I realize, ah, I'm just here, and that was a state that came. It wasn't something I have to believe.

I don't have to pick the boulder up of impatience. And I also know there's a line from Tennessee Williams where he writes, the violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. know there's a line from Tennessee Williams where he writes, the violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. That some of the most important things that happen don't happen in the time scale that we measure them by. The development of our life or our relationships or our heart, they're in a more mysterious time scale. And our constancy is just to

tend them the way you would tend a garden. You can't pull the plants up or make them bigger. You can water them or take care of the pests or something. But in some way, we're here for the unfolding more than that we're in charge of it. And that helps me, along with just holding it all, with the compassionate attention. This has been phenomenal. I'm just wondering before we close, is there something that I, you know,

an area that you would want to explore that I didn't give you a chance to? One thing I want to say in a different way is that we've talked a lot about meditation and mindfulness and described how you work with it. For many people, it's really helpful to have guided meditations for a time until they do it on their own, like training wheels on a bike or something. And if you go to my website, checkcornfield.com, there are a number of guided meditations studying the heart and the time of coronavirus, compassion, healing and vision and the time of coronavirus.

And there are 10, 15, 20-minute practices. There are many, many other good teachers. There's Sharon Salzburg and Spring, Washington, Joseph Goldstein and Tara Brock and Trudy Goodman so many others Which you can find but I want to commend those things to you Because it's one thing to talk about it, and I also enjoyed the conversation It's another To get the support really in some regular way to try it. And I find again that starting the day with a little bit of quieting, letting the quiet or the

stillness stenny yourself before you go through what you have to do or taking little mini pauses in the day or sitting at the end of the day can make a really big difference, almost more apparent because we are stuck. It's like a magnifying glass to our life. And then you start to see the possibility or the benefits that come from it. Yeah. And just comment and then just another comment, which is the conversation I think is a great support to practice and the two can interweave really well. But I in my experience, I think it's both are make, you know, the learning and the practice that really can support one another. And then also speaking of the content that you've been creating, yes, I recommend people go to your web page. But also content that you've been creating, yes, I recommend

people go to your webpage. But also I believe you've done some stuff with your frequent partner and crime, Tara Brock. I believe there was a day long retreat of that you did. There are a number of retreats that you can do. There's half day retreats day long. There is a mindfulness daily for free where you get 40 days of training, 15 minutes a day. And then for those who are interested, we also have a really wonderful online teacher training program for people who want to learn to teach mindfulness. So all that's there. And of course, I haven't mentioned what's on 10% happier, but I know you too have the whole array of meditations and podcasts and things that people can be a part of.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I actually really a big believer that people should try a lot of stuff and then ultimately settle in one lane for a little while, but everything I just personally can highly recommend what you and Tara are doing. And so I think people should go check it out. And also your amazing wife, Trudy Goodman, who is on our live meditation show. We did the other day, TPH live, and she's incredible, too. So all the people you list, I strongly endorse. So then a last thing to talk about. There's a beautiful poem by Thomas Centollella and The title is also the first line in the evening. We shall be examined on love and it won't be multiple choice

In the evening when the sky has turned that certain blue the blue of exam books We shall climb the hill as the light empties and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city. We shall be examined on love like students who don't even recall signing up for the course and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once from the heart. from the heart. And I think about it when a baby is born, our first response is love. And when a deer one dies, the hand we hold is a gesture and an act of love. Timeless love and awareness is who we really are underneath at all. And it is the great power actually that the world is both longing for and expressing and needing. And you could say that an act of attention when somebody says, could I have your attention? It's not a small thing. Could I have a little

of your attention? It is also an act of love. Mindfulness itself is a way of being present for this world, for ourselves and for the people that we're with and the world around. And understand how much those come together maybe would be the takeaway from this conversation. Yes, and that is not schmaltz. Or if it is, it's on a really damn good New York sandwich. Jack, thank you so much. It's still always a pleasure. And I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. And it's my pleasure to take care of my friend. Talk to you later. Thank you. Big thanks to Jack again, a reminder, go to 10% dot com

slash care for free access for health care workers and also now for food delivery folks and people who work in grocery stores and please do not hesitate to send that link along to folks you know who work in either of those fields free access to the 10% happier meditation time and again thank you to all of those folks for the work they're doing. Thank you for listening. And a big thank you to the folks who make this show possible.

Starting with our lead producer, Samuel John, who works his tail off to make this show the best it can be while dealing with me all the time. Thank you, Samuel. Matt at Ultraviolet Audio is our editor. Maria Wartel is our production coordinator. We get a lot of incredibly useful feedback and input from colleagues such as Ben Rubin, Jen Poehont and Nate Toby. Also huge thank

you to my guys at ABC Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan. We'll see you on Friday for a bonus meditation from the great meditation teacher, Seven A. Celacic. 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 Wondery.com slash survey.