Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 245: The Other Side of the Pandemic | Rev. angel Kyodo williams

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

What will we be like when this thing is finally over? Will we be even more fearful and divided? Or is there a realistically rosier scenario? This is just one of the subjects we explore in a wide-ranging conversation with Rev. angel Kyodo williams. We also talk about the disutility of guilt in the face of all the horror we’re witnessing in the time of COVID, and how to reclaim the word "love" from the land of hopeless cliché. I really enjoyed this conversation, especially how it warmed up as it went. By way of background, Reverend angel is the author of such books as Radical Dharma and Being Black. She is the second black woman to be recognized as a teacher in the Japanese Zen lineage. One of her main areas of interest is how to apply meditation to social issues such as race, climate, and economic inequality. A lot of people think meditation and activism are two separate things, but Rev. angel argues that "without inner change, there can be no outer change." In this chat, we start with big-picture issues, and increasingly move toward more personal stuff. She's one of those people who gets even more fascinating the more time you spend with her. Where to find Rev. angel Kyodo williams online: Website: https://angelkyodowilliams.com/ Twitter: angel Kyodo williams (@ZenChangeAngel) / https://twitter.com/zenchangeangel Facebook: Rev. angel Kyodo williams / https://www.facebook.com/zenchangeangel Instagram: angel Kyodo williams (@zenchangeangel) / https://www.instagram.com/zenchangeangel/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ZenChangeAngel We've been nominated for two Webby awards. If you love and want to support our work, please vote for us via links in the episode description. Vote for us in the health & fitness app category / https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2020/apps-mobile-and-voice/apps-mobile-sites-general/health-fitness Vote for us in the voice category / https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2020/apps-mobile-and-voice/general-voice/health-fitness-lifestyle Other Resources Mentioned: Tonglen Practice / https://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-practice-tonglen/ James Doty / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Doty_(physician) All About Love by bell hooks / https://www.amazon.com/All-About-Love-Visions-Paperback-ebook/dp/B078GL796R Loving Kindness Practice / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitr%C4%AB Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide We want to deeply thank and recognize teachers, warehouse workers, grocery and food delivery workers, and healthcare workers for the essential role that they play in our lives. For FREE access to the app and hundreds of meditations and resources visit https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/rev-angel-kyodo-williams-245 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. Yeah, just that very, very persistent and powerful and expansive capacity that we have as human beings to connect and to let that connection be real and felt and vibrant and alive, and we can tone our nervous systems to actually even be able to feel love in a moment and experience and not have to take anything with us. We don't have to take the person away with us. We don't have to marry them or date them or even become friends with them. We can just love them right there at the grocery counter.

And that be it. And then we become love. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Alrighty, hello. Two little announcements before we dive in. First, don't forget TPH live, 10% happier live, which we do every weekday, three Eastern noon Pacific. It's a quick sanity break to break up your day. We do five minutes of

meditation, suitable for absolute beginners or seasoned pros. We bring on a great meditation teacher every day to lead the meditation and then we take questions from you all live And then if you don't want to watch your live you can watch it anytime Inside the 10% happier app or on our YouTube page just search for 10% happier on YouTube or go to 10% calm slash live All the links will be in the show notes. The other announcement is that as you may know from listening to the show during during the pandemic we've been pretty focused on offering free resources and we started by offering free access to the 10% happier app to healthcare workers then we rolled it out to people who

work in grocery stores or are involved in delivering food. This week we want to expand it even further to teachers who are doing unbelievably hard work to educate our children under deeply strange and suboptimal circumstances. So if you're a teacher or if you know somebody's a teacher, you can send them this link. The link is 10%.com slash care.

T-E-N-P-E-R-C-E-N-T.com slash care. Again, that link will be in the show notes. Okay, let's do the show. What will we be like when this thing is finally over? Will we be even more fearful and divided or is there a realistically rosier scenario? This is just one of the subjects we explore in a wide-ranging conversation with Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams. We also talk about the dis-utility of guilt

in the face of all the horror we're witnessing in the time of COVID. And we talk about how to reclaim the word love from the land of hopeless cliche. I really enjoyed this conversation, especially how it warmed up as we went. By way of background reverend, Joel is the author of such books as Radical Dharma and Being Black. She's the second black woman to be recognized as a teacher in the Japanese

Zen lineage. One of her main areas of interest is how to apply meditation to social issues, such as race and climate and economic inequality all salient right now in the in the era of this new coronavirus. A lot of people think meditation and activism are two separate things, but Reverend Angel argues that, and this is a quote here, without interchange, there can be no outer change. In this chat, we start with some big picture issues, and then we increasingly move toward more personal stuff. She's one of these people who gets even more fascinating the more time you spend with her. So here we go, Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams.

Thank you for doing this. Really appreciate it. It's nice to see you over this internet connection here. Yeah, it's good to see you. Good to be here. you and good to be here. And yeah, it feels like some some it feels like this has been a long time coming and fascinating to be here in the midst of this time. Yes, we've been trying to get you on the show for a long time, and I'm glad we finally did. And we couldn't be in a more urgent time. Let me just start by I'm curious, how are you doing with all of this to malt? I Split time between California and New York and I was in California when it really got going and actually just left New York Not too long ago

So we were one of the first ones to go into the shelter in place and I was also in the midst of preparing to move. And so it started out with this really surreal sense of like, what is happening? I felt like I was, you know, in Jello or something. Time was doing this very odd thing. And yeah, I really feel this persistent sense of a kind of, I've been saying it's like a co-on, it's like a riddle of, you know, of very, very opposite kinds of feelings, like a dynamic tension between both like, I'm really fine. And you know, blessed and grace to have a space that I'm in and so aware of how many people don't. I'm in California and I'm in New Yorker and so I feel the sort of open space and all of that of, you know, where I'm

located here and really feel the tension and awareness of my hometown, you know, just in such pain and, you know, watching the news and briefings and so on. I'm a New Yorker at heart. My family is in New York and, and so I'm just feeling this tension of a kind of somewhere like I look out my window and it's almost idyllic. And I'm concerned for my older parents and family and the world and yeah, I'm in the tension. I really see a lot of myself in that. Obviously, there are massive inconveniences to being locked up, but it seems even crass to even point that out when I take in the fact that my life, our life as a family is quite comfortable we're healthy, we have everything we need and I look at the news and I, or I report the news as a newsman and I see people who are waiting online for hours to get food. You know, from food pantries or I see frontline doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals getting sick.

And there's this horrifying story about a ER doctor who took her own life, who, you know, my wife used to work with that woman. And my wife is a physician who's not currently practicing. So yeah, what do you call detention? For me, it feels a little bit, and maybe this is gonna speak to my lack of meditative attainments here, but I feel guilty at times.

Yeah, I feel like it's a dynamic tension. Guilt, I think, maybe that's practice, and I don't know if it's a meditative attainment, but a lot of drilling in of the uselessness of hanging out in that particular motion, and I don't hang out in the joy. And ease either, so I'm living in the tension. And I feel like that feels true to so many scales, you know,

are amazing of like really my little tiny world and experience and right here outside of the window and, you know, right out into the big world. And so I feel that tension. And I feel that tension, not not only my own feeling of tension, but I feel like I have a I'm generating some tension for myself to and the way that I see that play out for myself is I'm so relieved for the earth and the impact that we have on it. And really seeing the truth of clearly we have an impact because we can see so much of

nature and earth, you know, arising and returning. And you know, there are amazing species I hear that are, you know, showing up on the coasts of Thailand and all these kinds of things. You can see mountains that you've been not been able to see. So I feel like, what a relief. And also, that means there's for people that live day-to-day, getting their income and their ability to eat from day-to-day, like how that's so terribly painful for them. So I want us both to be in this suspended state,

someone called it a time out, I call it like compulsory retreat. I want us to be in there long enough to lose the muscle memory or forget the muscle memory of just turning back to what it is that we've always been doing. So we can just look and see and say, whoa, this is us. This is what we're doing to our habitat to the ecosystem that we live in. And I also know that that is suffering more suffering for more people. So I've been saying that it's like, I feel like I'm praying for suffering. I'm both praying for the awakening of those of us that can do something about it and shift how we live

and what we ask for of our governments and institutions and so on. And I also know that that suffering bears on particular people more strongly. Like what it will take for those of us that are moving and shaking and have this ease that you and I are talking about and access and convenience and relative health,

what it will take for us to wake up is likely to bring more suffering on the people that can't take anymore because it was already too much. When you say praying for suffering, what do you mean by that? Because I know you don't want vulnerable communities to suffer. So what can you unpack that?

Yeah, the praying is the praying for the awakening of those of us that are less vulnerable to wake up to the suffering. And that means that the time that I fear I hold or I suspect it would take would bring more suffering onto the more vulnerable communities. And I live in this tension a lot of the difference between the immediate and the long game, if you will, right? What is happening right now and needs to be tended to and how people are impacted and advocacy and so on. And as a practitioner, the long game of doing the deep inner work where we are transformed from the inside out,

there's a luxury, if you will, a privilege in even being able to have that view. And it is part of my view that the work that we need to do that I think that ultimately transforms how we live and operate in our lives and our own lives and therefore society tends to require, in my experience, in my practice, a longer path requires work. We have to go in there and do the work in the meantime. Things are burning. What's your, I'm gonna put you in the uncomfortable position

of asking you to prognosticate, but do you think we're gonna come out of this with the privilege to among us having undergone the aforementioned awakening, or do you think we're just going to revert back to our old ways and we won't be able to see those mountains again and the species off the coast of Thailand will receive etc etc. I think some of us already have and will change whether it is enough of us as the question and whether we are those of us that have that kind of shift our

whether we are those of us that have that kind of shift our positioned, how we're positioned, has a lot to do with how much we will go back. I don't think there's any such thing as going back. I think we're forever changed in all sorts of ways that we can't even imagine at this point. Do I think that we will leave space for the dolphins to come to the coast? No, I don't, I think that the muscle memory of our habits of comfort

and access and privileges and the way that it was are too deep for it to have an immediate impact with that we can see, but I also trust in more than, you know, my lifetime, so to speak, I think that it will make it indelible impression. And it already has on so many of us that we will no longer be able to live quite as free, carefree of the idea of how much impact we are having and that we can do something about it, especially politically. I was saying to someone, there was one day,

and it showed up on an article, I think it was the Times, and the Fed was saying, the printing press is open. And I was like, wow, of my whole life, I've been told that that's not possible, you can't do that, right? For whatever complex economic reasons that I don't understand. But why can't it stay open for people that are sheltering in place with no shelter? Why can't it stay open for people to have access to food and housing and health care and

all of the things. So I'm living with that in a more immediate way that I don't think I'll ever be able to get out of my body and I don't want to. Right, but the question is, I mean, you were already pretty aware of you had a global view going into this that may have been accentuated or heightened, but there was a lot of people on autopilot in the world. And I just wonder, I'm just curious, I think about 9-11. This change is everything we said. Changed a lot for me. I became a war correspondent after 9-11 and it definitely changed my life. But I don't know, aside from

the airport security and maybe some Islamophobia, what were the deep structural societal changes that came about from that? Right. Yeah, I think that the sense of where power is located has everything to do with it. And if the people that are in that kind of middle space, I think that there are a lot of people that aren't necessarily predisposed. Something happens with silence and quietude.

And that is the tension of the prayer for more time that would result in more impact. Because without the access to the same kind of busy making, we as human species, I think, begin to glimpse things that we hadn't glimpsed before, whether it is sustained long enough for that to happen is I think the question that we're really dancing around. And I don't think it will happen. It'll be long enough for

enough of the right people to do something meaningful immediately. But I do think it will change the debates that we have about what is possible and what is not possible, what we impact and what we don't impact. We can't put it back in the box and lie to ourselves and say, we are not causing the climate change. You know, we're not impacting the climate. There is not a severe amount of inequity that results in certain people. Even though the virus knows no borders and knows no bounds, it knows how to flow along the structures that we've created in society so that it burdens particular people more heavily. And I do think that there's enough of us with the conversation about

you know, something sort of leaning towards a socialist democracy like, you know, Bernie Sanders brought about, I think, more of us are aware of those conversations. Black Lives Matter, all of the things we've been primed. So, you're saying, I've been primed in particular, but I also think that we've collectively been primed, not everyone, right? And it's never everyone, but enough people that it will change the conversation. You were talking about, I think you phrased it really nicely about how I've heard the virus described as a great equalizer, but it's not.

Yes, we're all in a vacuum somewhat equally vulnerable to the, depending on our health status to the virus. But we're exposed to different degrees, depending on our level of income or where we live or whether we have a house at all, etc., etc. And as you said, the virus has been flowing along the structures that predated the virus. And so that, to me, strikes me as an area where I hope we don't go back to sleep on that. And I suspect, as somebody who's, I don't know if I would call myself an optimist or a pessimist or a realist or a journalist or whatever,

but the conversation that's happening now around inequality seems to be heightened in a way that I hope will be useful. What is your thought on that specifically? Well, I think those conversations are happening at different strata. There are different prisms of that conversation happening that is going to keep the conversation. So an example is the way in which large national corporations are taking advantage of the loan program that was meant for small businesses.

It's not the kind of conversation that I'm having necessarily, but it is about inequity. It is about almost the reverse, right? The way that the structures have allowed for the resources to flow upward, rather than to rest with the people that they were intended for. So I think this question, and the whole system being laid bare

for all of us from our different political stripes and locations to see and go, oh, this inequity thing really makes a difference. The wealthy folks that can run off into their second homes onto an island somewhere or out wherever the wherever is and bring their caretakers and so on. And those of us that are stuck in our homes with our children. I don't have any children I'm just really like bowed to the people that you know are in homes with children that have to go to school. But I'm saying that wherever we are we can see that the inequities

create conditions in which the things that we thought were even and they could just, you know, it's a virus and it can touch all of us. I just don't think we'll be able to tell ourselves those stories anymore. And I don't care what our political persuasion is. I think that that has been laid bare. We will do different things with it depending on what our political, you know, ideological orientation is, but I think we will not be able to tell ourselves the myth that our, the structures that we have,

and that we have created, and the systems that we have made, create an enormous divide between the haves and have-nots. And I think that people people from all sorts of perspectives will feel more intolerant of that reality. It's a giant, I hope you're right. You know, I think a little bit about loving kindness meditation,

which I don't think they really have in the Zen tradition of a Yulealiyah correct me if I'm wrong about that. But in loving kindness meditation, you systematically envision beings in different categories like, you know, yourself, mentor, a close friend, and one of the categories is a neutral person, somebody you often overlook. And I feel like the neutral people are really being thrown into stark relief in our consciousness in a powerful way during this pandemic because it's the people manning the cashiers at the grocery store or delivering your food or delivering your packages or delivering your mail who are really in danger and we rely on them to survive right now.

And so that, to me, is a kernel of optimism that there's a certain amount of waking up happening around these people who may here to for have been neutral. Yeah, I think that's right. I'm practice agnostic in many ways. So I love incideness, sending and taking from the Tibetan tradition, I'm fond of exploring the different practices. And so definitely, Tonglin has been a big part of my own practice. And I think of my practice and relationship to practice,

not so much about my tradition and what we did in my tradition. It's great to reference those things. But really, what are the tools that are available in the whole toolkit of meditation and awareness and embodiment practices that allow me to be more present to, you know, the reality that I'm facing. So I love Tonglin. I love loving kindness. Can you describe Tonglin for folks who might not be familiar with it? Yeah, it's sort of often called sending and taking in sort of translated to the notion of sending and taking.

And so it is this exchanging of oneself for others in terms of positionality with the same quality of people that are far from you and people that are near to you and people that are neutral. And so I think a lot of in the West in particular, a lot of the practices have fused together so that we don't necessarily have quote unquote such pure practices anymore. And I don't think we should. We are a fusion. And so loving kindness and Tonglen have

kind of merged in many ways. But the core ideas are the same of this sense of, I think that what Tonglin brings is this exchanging oneself. So it's not just sending. There's also taking, like, taking on people suffering and taking on their positionality and taking on their location and, you know, sending them positive energy and, you know, health and well-being and all of those things but also taking right, taking on and I really appreciate that especially for that kind of acute awareness of what other people's location is and I have to say that I'm prone to understanding for myself that it's important for me to put myself in other people's shoes, right? Not just to position myself as a practitioner, as a teacher, as a meditator, as a person that has access to these practices as just the one that is giving and can send something

but also that I can take on some of the suffering of the world. So the practice works if I haven't done much of it where you breathe in on the in-breath you're breathing in somebody's suffering on any out-breath you're breathing out The wish for them to be free from suffering is that how it works? That's right. Yes So we're talking about meditation right now, but we spent a big chunk of the beginning of this conversation talking about politics, societal structures, the pandemic. And I suspect there are members of our audience who might be thinking, well, I come to this show, not for politics, but for how to be happier, you know, for some Dharma, for some, for meditation. And I've heard that, that beef many times. What do you say to that? Yeah, well, I did I say that I didn't even recognize us as changing any

location. I think that these are the same conversations to me that I think of when I think of people for instance that perhaps weren't will not wake up and not become aware and they're not paying attention to the fact that the postman is in danger and the person at the counter. I send wishes for their liberation, really, for their awakening so that they will become more aware and not in a way that is about having to experience devastation in their own lives, but just that there's a kind of breathing into, wow, I just hope that whatever it is that's keeping you on autopilot will just drop for a moment so that you can really be present to what's happening and what's around you. Because I can't imagine

that that walling off is not a result of some fundamental pain and some fundamental conditions that have made it too difficult to face reality, to face life as it is. I'm not talking about within ideology, just face a human, there is a human and they're behind a counter and their life is in greater risk because they're doing their job

and have to feed their children to serve you. And for me, that is a meditation. Meditation is not just the thing that, you know, I pull out a cushion for, you know, my practice is threaded and woven throughout. I don't think that I would have the same, if one wants to call it political, you know, outlook or orientation, if it wasn't for meditation, these are just one thing for me. So I'm hearing like an inseparability between meditation slash't know, think so much about it as Buddhism.

I really distinguish my Buddhism from my Dharma. So I distinguish my Zen from my Dharma. I think of a Dharma in this more comprehensive space of life that is unfolding and the way that we meet the truth of that, of our experience, near experience, far experience. So universal truths that we're all just in this experience together and how we function in that experience together and how we show up whether we're present or ill-present or checked out, whether we are ready to confront our own lives and whether it is that we are awake

or numbed out, that's my practice. But all of those things, yeah, they're just one thing. I can't imagine that there's some kind of part of it that's outside of the realm of my practice relationship to truth. I think of the, you know, Dautama as the truth. And so what like outside of the realm of my practice relationship to truth. I think of the Dharma as the truth. And so what is outside of truth? I don't mean facts not fact, right? What is outside of truth? There's nothing outside of the truth of all of life that is unfolding just because I don't like it. It just goes outside or because it's not convenient, for instance, to have aligned relationship to how I relate to other people, even if I really disagree with their political operating in the world.

They do not escape my Dharma. Well, you say I separate my Zen from my Dharma. What does that mean? I mean, I separate the construct of like a particular tradition or a particular religious or spiritual belief system from the more comprehensive idea of I'm just walking this path of life. And I use this particular lens or I have used or I was my formal practice unfolded with this lens, but I understand that it is a lens. And I don't take that lens to be the entire thing. I don't take Buddhism to be the entire thing. As a black woman growing up in the U.S., there's no way that I can not be also simultaneously immersed in Christian understanding,

Baptist, you know, all the practices and church goings, and not goings of my family, and all the people around me. So, you know, I'm complex, and I hold all the complexities, and I don't mistake, though my particular, you know, it's like my preferences, you know, vanilla is just not the only flavor.

I or chocolate chocolate chip, is not the only flavor there is, it's just a flavor, it's not my preferences. Vanilla is just not the only flavor. I or chocolate chocolate chip is not the only flavor there is. It's just a flavor. It's not ice cream. It's just a flavor of ice cream. And so Buddhism is my, you know, maybe my flavor. It's a flavor that I chose for my unfolding. But I often think of this idea that I read somewhere along the line of, you know, it's very much in the Buddhist thinking, is that once you cross, take the boat, right, and cross the other shore to liberation, you leave the boat behind. So the Buddhism is the boat, and I don't need to carry the boat around with me. So I'm not walking around telling everybody to be invested

in Buddhism. I'm telling people to get in touch with the truth of their life and in whatever form that takes. Here's another question just based on specific word you chose. What do you mean by liberation? Yeah, I mean, we could really go somewhere with that. For me, when I say liberation in that context, when I'm talking about spiritual life, or, spiritual life is not even separate from mundane life. But I think of spiritual life as when we turn our attention intentionally towards how am I doing this, right?

How am I doing this, right? How am I doing this life thing? And in that regard, I think of liberation as being able to distinguish and have choice around the difference between experience and how we think about experience or how we feel about experience. That there is just experience and it just is. But what we often do with our experiences is we conflate them for who we are, and so we become our experiences, we become our emotions, we become our thoughts. Liberation is

to get free of the tyranny of those fabrications of the mind. However, those fabrications unfold. of the mind. However, those fabrications unfold. And so the fabrication, I am in the relative, especially social world that we live in right now in this particular reality, I am black. And I'm also not black. I'm just this human being that has all of these reflections and thoughts that come about from being raised inside of a social construct that tells me that I'm black and tells me what I can and cannot do, who I can and cannot love and be connected to, what I can achieve and not achieve. And all the ways that I push back against those things as well,

but even the ways that I push back are also just as much constructs and ideas. And when I get on a cushion and I just rest in my belly and my breath, I'm not black or female or independent or liberal or Republican. I'm just awareness and spaciousness. And I don't walk around being aware of this in spaciousness all the time. I bring that knowing and the experience of that that lives now in my body to how I relate to other people, how I relate to life. So liberation, if I'm hearing you correctly, is part of it at least is seeing that all these thoughts and emotions, whether they be

culturally injected or handed down from your ancestors or whatever, random, you don't need to be owned by them, you can see them as you can see them kind of warmly, non-judgmentally as phenomena arising that you don't have to just act out politely. Exactly. I don't even know if I see them as warmly, just like is, okay, okay, yeah, that too, I think of it as that too. And for me, liberation is being able to distinguish that, oh, that is just experience. And I now know the difference between experience and my reaction or response to experience. And then I get to have choices about what I'll do

with the experience. So I don't recede often to the background and now do nothing about nothing, just because I understand that those thoughts and emotions and experiences are not who I am. I think of the liberation quite specifically as the combination of both the awareness that I'm not those things and therefore don't have to respond to them and also the choice to respond or not respond and to do that out of the place that is free from the imagination or the projection or the delusion, you would say in the classic

language, the delusion that I'm those things. More 10% happier 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 RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success

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I wanna go back to two comments that you made separated by many minutes and see if I can tie them together. Early on in the conversation, I told you that I was feeling some guilt and you said that that's probably not a useful thing to feel. And then you later talked about the fact that there are many people overlook, quote unquote, neutral people, you know, the folks who are so often around us, but we may not pay much attention to them, the delivering food or delivering mail or working a cash register. And you said that there may be some pain that people are trying to avoid by not seeing these people. And I wonder if guilt

is what people are trying to avoid or what your thoughts are on all of that. Yeah, I think we don't know how to feel. And so guilt is where we go. Like guilt is, I think, a response to a sense that whatever the experience that you have shouldn't be the case, right? And we have a lot of those, and depending on our position, like this shouldn't be the case. And so we go to anger, this shouldn't be the case. And I'm in the upper hand or upper, you know, the better location. And so this shouldn't be the case. Therefore, I go to guilt. I think what we're avoiding is the pain of just letting it in that there is this separation,

that there is this brokenness, that there is this terrible inequity or whatever it is that we're feeling guilty about. I think people avoid feeling guilty, and so they numb out. And I think further the reason that we avoid the contact with people is because the guilt will bring with it the experience of pain about the truth of that, right, that that is so, that this is the case,

that these are the conditions. And it's not a big political analysis that we do. There's just like, oh, this is like this. And we don't want to feel that. So guilt is the thing that we put in between, oh, I just feel their pain. I just suffer with them. I feel with them. And the paradox is that that is exactly from whence compassion arises. The guilt is a tightening up against the direct feeling of the suffering of the pain. It's the direct feeling of like,

in a way, guilt just makes it about you. That's exactly what I was going to say, but I was going to give a few seconds before I turned that around. Because it is, it's, I mean, guilt moves us away from our direct experience and makes it about how we feel about that experience. And so it's not the direct experience. We're not actually, guilt is not the experience that we have. Guilt is the response that we have to experience. And so that's what I mean about liberation.

That liberation is the will force, if you will, to actually experience life as it is, to be in the pain, to be struck with like, oh, this is so. And then our brain doesn't go, it's imbalanced, it's just we feel the pain, it's just raw naked, like, oh, and we don't want that. And so we stick guilt in there. And then we have something to distract ourselves from the immediacy of feeling that pain. And then when we don't want the guilt, we numb out completely,

so that we neither have guilt nor do we have feeling with suffering, which though the flip side of that feeling with suffering is compassion. I mean, feeling with is compassion, you could say. That's exactly what compassion, if you break it down to its roots, means. Yeah, well, it's particularly feeling with the pain, feeling with. So it's not just the feeling of any kind of feeling with, you know, that would be more along the lines of empathy, right, that we have a kind of feeling with, you know, that would be more along the lines of empathy, right, that we have a kind of resonance with, so we can resonate with happiness and joy,

and we can resonate with anger and aggression and all kinds of things. But compassion is quite specifically, James Doty told me this in neurosurgeon and author. It's quite specifically feeling with pain. And embedded in it because empathy can be very painful to the empathizer and disempowering in some ways, embedded in compassion and what we, he's actually a desire to be helpful. That's right. And so it is therefore an enobling and empowering state. And it doesn't even mean you have to do anything in particular, because it can all be playing out in your mind

in a meditation session, either doing loving kindness or the aforementioned tongue lens, but it puts you in a position of not just feeling it, which is what we're so afraid of, but feeling it and really wishing that the person who's paying your feeling not to feel the pain. That's right. And you know, you're feeling not feel the pain. That's right. And you know, you said enobling and empowering.

And I would say it is enobling. It may not necessarily feel empowering because you may also feel the deep tragedy of not being able to do something about it. And I think many of us fear that that will become overwhelming. It is enobling though because it deepens our sense of capacity for more difference, more feeling, more connection with humanity.

And so our fixation tends to be, oh, if I want it to be different, and I don't want them to feel that pain, I should be able to do something about it. And so if I can't do something about it, then that's not gonna be empowering to me. And so we avoid that experience on top of it. So it's not that feeling suffering with and wanting something is going to give us, you know, the magic key to do something about us

and then we'll feel great. It is that it will deepen our human relationship. We will be deeper in our relationship with all species really. We'll just, the feeling of that actually gives us access to our own greater humanity. Just the fact of it. So I don't know if it's empowering it in the ordinary sense

that we think of empowering, like we think of empowering as being something about us that it's going to give us something like, whoa, but it does empower, if you will, our humanity. It deepens us. It makes us more available. That's exactly what I was driving. Let me give you a small example. So this morning my wife and I went food shopping and I think my normal move as a frosty New Englander totally you know self-obsessed checking his phone all the time is just to just ignore everybody because that's just how I'm wired and I'm not proud of it but I'm being honest. Now done a couple of years of like pretty steady, loving kind of meditation,

much of it under the tutelage of our mutual friends, spring washroom, the great meditation teacher is also in the West Coast. And I just noticed that there was a subtle difference this morning when we were checking out with the cashier, I was just chit chatting with her. And I was aware of luckily she's got a plexiglass barrier and a mask. And I was aware of, luckily she's got a plexiglass barrier and a mask. But I was aware of, you know, this is a not an awesome situation she's in. I can't fix it for her. But I can look her in the eye and ask her how she's doing. And to me, that feels much more powerful than the sort of infebling retreat to just what about meanness.

Yeah. You know, in Buddhism, there's a term duke, and I'm sure many people have spoken about duke. And I translate duke in modern times to help people to really understand what we're kind of getting at is contraction. So you talked about like that in feebling experience of getting small kind of withdrawing, tucking yourself away into your own numbness. And that's a contraction. We move away from life rather than what you did this morning is you presence yourself to life as it is with no imagination

that what it means to be present and what it means to be human is that I can fix people's everything everywhere I go. And that is especially over time, deeply empowering. It is deeply empowering. It doesn't give us some kind of magic wand to fix everything that happens, but it is deeply empowering to know that what I can offer in any situation is my presence and my connection. I'm going to throw in an even more loaded term. I've been talking a lot

about this because I'm sort of testing my ideas about this, but I'll throw in the word love. So I think love is just often used, misused. I mean, it's, or it's only used for a narrow band of what love can actually mean. So we talk about love pretty much as romantic love or familial love. Big, all caps love. But why not think about it as just our innate human evolutionarily wired capacity to care about other people and ourselves, given that I think that love is omnidirectional. So, did that track for you?

That's exactly what I talk about. I stole it from you, probably. No, I'm sure, I mean, I think that that's what's happening is that we're coming to this, right? And we're this sort of expansive the notion of love. I mean, Bell Hooks does is brilliant, a job is any one that's speaking about love. And seizing love back from just this kind of, you know, mushy, very, very narrow, as you said, place that is about, like, how I feel about other people and what I'm going to get out of that romantic relationship, or, you know, even Philly O'Love, you know, parents and so on. But yeah, just that very, very persistent persistent and powerful and expansive capacity that we have as human beings to connect and to let that connection be real and felt and vibrant and alive. And we can tone our nervous systems to actually even be able to feel love in a moment and experience and not have to take anything with us, that

we don't have to take the person away with us. We don't have to marry them or date them or even become friends with them. We can just love them right there at the grocery counter. And that be it. And then we become love. We become these walking embodiments of the principle of love. So we actually become more human. We become more true.

We talk about that. I talk about that as radical Dharma, right? It's like a whole truth. The whole truth is that we, this is what we are when we allow ourselves to feel with other people. When we allow ourselves to feel our own cells and feel what we're actually feeling. That is what happens, which I think is in some ways what we're afraid of. Yeah, I mean, I don't know like you just talked about this, you used that phrase, becoming love. I feel like I'm intermittently becoming love because a lot of the time I'm still like looking at my iPhone or like wondering how many likes I have in my most recent tweet or

whatever stupid obsession I'm dealing with at the moment. So I mean, I feel like I have my moments of having some generosity of spirit, but it's certainly not perpetual. Well, I think that that's what the nature of practice is, right? It's sort of like blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip,

blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, and they begin. So the combination of the practice and the feedback loop of you having the experience of like, being, you know, the waking up and feeling like completely alive in that moment of intermittent love becomes its own feedback loop that is like a little bit more like, Mel, maybe I'll put the phone down this time and maybe I'll put the phone down this time. So it creates this momentum and the same way that we have momentum towards, you know, all sorts of absurdities, including checking our likes, we can develop with practice of momentum towards being love. And of course, it will drop out like everything else

drops out because that's also part of how we're wired as well. But it becomes more of where we inhabit, more of where we abide by than less. Yeah, there's neuroscience here. I mean, I think about the way my friend, Dr. Judson Brewer, who's been on the show before talks about the feedback loop, which is that he talks about what's the term, BF Skinner sort of, uh, operant conditioning. You put a rat in a box, a Skinner box, and it will figure out how to avoid the electric shock and go to the food. I don't know. I'm probably missing this all up. But anyway, the brain learns what feels better and

optimizes for that. And I can tell you from my experience that it feels better to talk to the woman at the checkout counter that it does to check Twitter. And so over time, with it fueled by formal practice in my experience, the brain learns to tune into what to do and to tune into what feels better. Yeah, and I would say that the fact that it feels better is telling of what our essential nature is, because why does it feel better to do that than to contract or to pull away or to just, you know, check out and say, like, I don't want to, I don't want to feel that. In many of our minds, we've created the idea that that that wouldn't feel good. And so it's easier actually to check out and is easier, but it's not necessarily consistent with our nature.

And we know it's our nature because it does feel good to us. And that is very, very, very, very, very hopeful that there is some kind of, it's not just neutral. That that sense of connection is not neutral. It's like that actually feels better to us as a species. Yeah, as I said, that's telling of how it is we're fundamentally wired because there's no good reason that little extra work of talking to the person across the counter should feel better other than my nervous system. My wiring says yes to love, yes to connection, yes to care, yes to compassion. So why then do we often fall back into apathy and or outright violence if that's not essential to us too?

We have two sets of core conditioning. So there's like how it is that we respond to our environment in order to continue to live as a species. And that wiring then brings about certain impulses to avoid things that are painful and to grasp on things that give us pleasure and so on and so forth, to resist people that are different and are not familiar,

that they don't mirror the way that we, in some ways, we see ourselves. And so difference becomes something that we respond to with rejection because it's not as safe if something looks like me or something, you know, sounds like me and so on. Then that is something that I can recognize. I can recognize when I can't recognize it, then I am going to experience that is less safe. So that is operating and going on.

And I think that as you're saying, like that's something that we move around in the world with. And so we go towards that for survival. But underneath survival is this core sense of how it is that we thrive. And I think that that is the fundamental nature. So even, I would say, even the wanting to survive and the ways that we go to violence, they rest on some kind of love. go to violence, they rest on some kind of love. They rest on a love that is perhaps corrupted in terms of how it is performed and how it is sought after, but it rests on the love for protecting our families. It rests on the love of wanting to have our way of life. It rests on the love of wanting to be safe so that we can continue to thrive. So I think that love sits

underneath all of those other impulses that get us in trouble. If I'm hearing you correctly, even our unskilled behavior is rooted in a caring, often of caring about ourselves, the organism trying to protect itself. And practice helps you kind of disambiguate and get closer to what is underlying all of it, which is that we are wired from an evolutionary standpoint to take care of one another and to take care of ourselves. That's right. I think that practice lets us, and that's what I was saying about the liberation. That's what I was saying about the liberation. Practice lets us see, oh, this thing that I'm calling anger is actually about, I really want that person to notice me, to hear me and to connect with me, and they're not connecting

with me, or they're not understanding my needs, and my needs are not getting met, and I really want that. And so anger is what comes out. But underneath there, if I sit with that in practice, what I get to is like, oh, you know, I want it to be connected. And I feel the not-seeing-ness that's so necessary in my human species, right? That the sense of being seen is so incredibly important of belonging, of having other people care about our needs is very, very powerful for us. When we have a practice formally, meaning we're not in the moment, in the hotness of the

moment, which distracts us. So what formal practice gives us is a place in which these things can course through us without the kind of, like, we're not on stage at that moment and forced to perform for the sake of our survival We know that we're relatively safe sitting on our cushion or chair or whatever it is And so we can let the scenarios play out and go oh, you know what the scenario where I contracted or I looked at my phone Didn't feel as good to me as the scenario where I connected and chatted for a little while. It's interesting you said that about anger.

Now, I'm going to bake it all about me. So I apologize to everybody. But I see a lot of anger in my own mind coming up. And I've heard it described as a secondary emotion that it's a knock-on effect of some more fundamental emotion. And it's only slowly, because I'm a tough case, starting to dawn on me, that that's true. So I may get angry because somebody says something about me, to me, that I find totally unacceptable.

And so I'm telling myself a story, but that's unacceptable. That's an outrage. You can't talk to me like that. But on the deeper level, it feels like what they've said is a not seeing of me or an abnigation because what they've said sort of nullifies your existence. Simplifies. Yes, nullifies my existence. Well, that's what they've done. They've threatened your existence. Simplifies. Yes, nullifies my existence. Well, that's what they've done.

They've threatened your existence. It's a fabrication of your existence. And that's what you get to see in practice, is that it's all a fabrication. But in that moment, you're experiencing the threat to your existence. And the loss that occurs there, the loss of connection, right? The maybe I'm not, you know, here, real, right? It's like, I'm not true if that thing is going

and so we respond in anger. It's like the truth of me is being, yeah, cut off. That was really a very, very important discovery for me in my practice is like, oh, underneath the way that I said it, and I think I still say, that there's grief underneath all anger, that there's grief. And the grief is some sense of not having one sense of what one needs met, right? And so we can be, you know, really quite heartbroken that comes out as rage. I feel like this is a very rich topic now

that many of us are cooped up with our family members. Oh, and I don't know anything about your family structure. Are you alone? Do you have family? What's going on for you? Yeah, I live with my partner I don't know anything about your family structure. Are you alone? Do you have family? What's going on for you? Yeah, I live with my partner. And yeah, the level of intensity, we both work at home when I'm not on the road, but

I'm often on the road. And so us being in the same space together, really in this very sort of, we have to figure it all out way, just raised all of the intensity bars on what it means to be together. Yeah, so what advice do you have to people about navigating interpersonal relationships in this time, especially based in your own experience of trying to do it. You know, we had a little conversation before and it was really what I came down to is it's very counterintuitive that I think the most important thing that you can start with is to be clear about what you need for your own self-care.

What is it that you need? Do you need to go on more walks? Are you like sitting behind the screen watching Zoom for untold numbers of hours? And your nerves are just afraid to the thinnest possible thing that they can be. And so your partner, your children, your parents just set you off.

So figuring that out and really being committed to carrying that out, the best you can in the conditions, to take more care of yourself gives us more space and more capacity. And to be kind, because we are all under these strains in different ways. And that was the thing that was really potent for my partner and I is just like, oh, we're in strained loss of income, livelihood, uncertainty, who knows when this is gonna end, so on and so forth, and the remembrance of,

and she's going through that too, was very, very necessary for us to hold each other in a kind of way in the face of being here. Yeah. I find sometimes that it's hard for me to be, I can be at my worst with anybody, but I find that the quotient of me at my worst is higher with the people with the people you love. Yes.

Yes indeed. It's great because it's in the same way that I was saying that the fact that we feel better when we're in care and in connection with people tells us something about our fundamental nature, the fact that we let it all hang out with the people that we love tells us something about our love, right? We're allowing ourselves to be seen and letting parts of ourselves that we usually keep under wraps and you know,

tucked away and tightly wound. We let it out with our partners and our people that we love. And it's in some ways a way of saying, please see the whole of me. Please see all of me. It's not necessarily the most skillful, you know, in terms of how and so we can find better language than tantrums or, you know, yelling for that core need and that was the last thing I was going to say is to find our places of yearning and our place of yearning at the end of the day when you drill them all down is to see and be seen. And so if we can when you drill them all down is to see and be seen. And so if we can remember, right in these times, that even though we're all on these little screens

and all sorts of things, that actually, we are in less contact with people and having that like, you know, the juicy pings of like all sorts of, you know, parts of ourselves being affirmed, just to acknowledge to ourselves that we wanna be seen and that we have needs, and then we can find words to communicate them or ask for what it is that we need.

And if we can do that, rather than receding into the place where we feel guilty about what we need, or we feel like we don't deserve what we need or what we're wanting to, you know, feel a little better, you know, maybe I need a massage because I've, you know, been sitting at this chair for too long. And so ask for that rather than harboring some unmet needs down there. It doesn't mean I'll get what I want, but it does clarify how I communicate the sense that I have something that I need.

I'm going to ask for a massage as soon as this is over. I was, you know, as soon as I said, I was thinking to myself, I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to like, thank forgiveness from your wife. It's not gonna go well, let me just tell you that. But we, less feeling seen, being seen, sound in any way lofty to people, just look at Instagram and how the reversible camera has unleashed a bottomless well of narcissism and the human species.

So this is not an abstraction. We really have this deep need for validation. Yes. Yeah. And I think that, you know, when we go back to formal practice, that's also one of the things that happens for us is how we are affirmed shifts. You know, we're we're affirmed in the deep breast of this very being that we become comfortable with ourselves as we are, like we make friends with ourselves as we are with all of our flaws and foibles and, you know, the way that you're at, really generously talking about, you know, this is how I am and I'm a hard case. And, you know, even though you're saying those things, there is a friendliness with yourself that is expressing itself.

And that also has a show up in the world differently. We can talk about how it is that we are and become more comfortable with that. And as we become more comfortable with ourselves and acknowledging our complexity and our weirdness and our strangeness, we actually allow for more complexity, weirdness and strangeness with other people. And it turns out that people are pretty weird, strange and complex. And so it's a good thing to have capacity for it. This has been a great conversation.

I had no idea what we're going to talk about, but I'm happy that we talked. Are there areas where I should have steered the conversation that I didn't or are there things that you wanted to talk about that we didn't get a chance to talk about? You know what I would love to talk about? There's so much meditation you've mentioned Instagram, and I was thinking about how much meditation is actually being used.

It's kind of the go-to, it's become a real go-to. I mean, there's zoom and there's meditation and there's meditation on zoom. And so it'd be great for a moment to just skim past the how people are, yeah, like how it's become, I mean, celebrities are just offering meditation. It's just become the thing. And that it is entering into our mainstream lexicon in the same way that virtual meetings are is amazing. And I think worthy of noting. Do you think that I agree with you? Do you think just to bring it full circle that meditation is becoming increasingly prominent can fuel some of the optimism that you, that careful optimism that you articulated at the beginning of this conversation about us coming out on the other side of this thing,

perhaps a little bit more sensitized some of the inequalities in our community? Yeah, I think this is, it's funny because actually what I think is happening is the fact that people are seeking meditation is already telling of a yearning to be more connected with oneself and to get a hold of oneself in the face of the... So, the seeking meditation is its own acknowledgement and then there's the what comes out of meditation. So, the very fact that so many more people are actually seeking out meditation, people are seeking out meditation trainings and wanting to become meditation teachers and I'm known with Dona Bialoia, I want to be a meditation teacher.

I think that that is saying that we are waking up and we are waking up in some very, very critical ways that will give rise to with practice. So if people find their way to meditation, to some kind of formal practice, that yes, it will give way to increasing levels of untenability with imbalance in our own selves and therefore the world. That's just how that works. What about the the McMindfulness critique that yeah, people are getting interested in meditation,

but they're using it like a, you know, a Xanax or they're just trying to, it's a self-improvement game. It's not about, you know, being a better citizen or a better human. You know, sort of using meditation quite specifically to figure out how you get laser focus to shoot someone off in a drone. I don't really care what how people come to meditation, frankly. I think that if you trust, as I do, that at the very bottom of it, that our fundamental nature is one of love and connection. However, you get there, whatever boat train automobile,

if you flew in on the narcissism plane to meditation to deal with your anxiety, I think if you maintain a consistent practice that where you arrive is your own true nature. I think that that true nature is love. I still have my boarding pass from the narcissism plane trip that I took to meditation. I don't know, frame that. Before we go, but you're still gonna get to the destination, right?

You're still gonna get to it. If I, yeah, yeah, it's exactly, exactly, fair enough. I hope. So before we go, can you, for people who I suspect are gonna be a lot of people who are gonna want to be able to learn more about you, connect to you in some way, can you list off things you've written, your website, where people can get more reverend angel.

Yeah, sure. Angel Kyoto, that's with the D not a T. AdenoJol Kyoto, Williams.com. And you can just put my name in Google and Google will find me everywhere. I think especially for this audience, I wrote a book called Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love, and Liberation.

And if you can imagine those three things being in a title, then you can imagine the complexity of what we're talking about. And maybe most important is I work with a small studios in New York called Mindful, M-N-D-F-L, Meditation, and we're doing a mindful certification. So if you feel like you want to figure out your own practice, you can check out Mindful MNDFL or Mindful Certification and learn more about deepening your own practice as someone that shares meditation with people in your immediate life. You don't have to want to go and do anything special with it,

but just to show up. We'll put links to all those resources in the show notes. So if you don't have a pen handy, we got you. Revenue angel, this has been a real pleasure. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for spending a lot of time with us. Thank you. That's great questions.

And I hope everyone just really take care of yourself. We have work to do to take care of the world. So right now, let's do the best we can taking care of ourselves. Well said. Speaking of liberation, you are now free for us. Big thanks to Reverend Angel. That was a great chat. And again, we want to thank all the teachers who are doing such hard work during this pandemic. Go to 10% dot com slash care 10% dot com slash care to get free access to the 10% happier meditation app. That's also the place to go if you're a health care worker or if you work in a grocery store or if you deliver food, we want to hook

you up because you're doing so much for us during these times. Well, I'm thanking people. Let's thank the people who work incredibly hard behind the scenes on this show. Samuel Johns is our producer Matt Boynton at Ultraviolet Audio is our editor Maria Wartell is our production coordinator. We get a huge amount of incredibly valuable input from 10% colleagues Nate Toby, Jen Poient and Ben Rubin. Also big thank you to my guys from ABC News Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohen. We'll see you all on Friday with a bonus meditation. Hey, hey, prime members.

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