Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 261: Can Faith Be Useful - Even for Atheists? | Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

Faith is a loaded word in some circles, but in this episode, Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel makes her case for it - in ways that might surprise you. We also discuss: what she means by the phrase "being realistic," the power of exploring open questions, and how sitting like a log is the new activism. She's been practicing for 35 years in the Tibetan tradition. She is the retreat master of Samten Ling in Crestone, Colorado and has spent over six years in silent retreat. She’s the author of The Power of an Open Question and The Logic of Faith, and host of the new podcast Open Question.   Where to find Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel online:  Website: https://www.elizabethmattisnamgyel.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/EMattisNamgyel Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ElizabethMattisNamgyel/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabethmattisnamgyel/  Books: The Power of an Open Question - https://www.elizabethmattisnamgyel.com/the-power-of-an-open-question The Logic of Faith - https://www.elizabethmattisnamgyel.com/the-logic-of-faith  Other Resources Mentioned: Thinley Norbu Rinpoche - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinley_Norbu Faith by Sharon Salzberg - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AG0BRCE/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1  Shantideva - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantideva Mahayana - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahayana The Way of the Bodhisattva - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006L8SE58/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche - https://www.mangalashribhuti.org/VDKR Open Question podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-question/id1507249383  Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care  Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/elizabeth-mattis-namgyel-261 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

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the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. happier podcast, Dan Harris. Faith is a loaded word in some circles, but in this episode, Elizabeth Madis Namgil makes her case for faith in ways that might surprise you.

We also discuss what she means by the phrase being realistic, the power of exploring open questions, and how sitting like a log is, she believes, the new activism. She's been practicing for 35 years in the Tibetan tradition. She is the retreat master of Samten Ling in Crestone, Colorado, and has spent more than six years of her life on silent retreat personally. She is the author of the power of an open question and the logic of faith and the host of a new podcast called Open Question. Here we go, Elizabeth Madis Namyul.

Well, thank you again for coming on, really appreciate. It's nice to meet you. Thank you, Dan. It's really nice to be here. Yeah, I've heard a lot of great things about you and the research that my team sent me about you. There's so many interesting things that come up, so I'm excited to talk.

Let's just start with what's going on with you right now. How's this pandemic treating you? You know, basically, fundamentally, I'm doing very well. I think I'm busier than I'd like to be. I think it's a big shift to not travel and move your work online. And I'm not too technologically savvy, but I do have

help and you know, it's happening. For me, I live on the western slopes of the Sungard-Echrisso Mountains in a very, very rural, you might even say, wilderness area. So this idea of having a home shelter, I mean, I often spend time alone. It's a very sparsely populated area with a near a very small town, with like a gas pump in a credit union and a bank in two stores. So for me, you know, this, kind of the quiet of this time,

of course, I appreciate that very much. But then, of course, there's a whole other side to it that concerns me very much, you know, and I have friends in New York and all over the world that I'm I worry about and I'm worried about the economy I'm concerned and you know, it's a it's a very poignant time in that way too. So I feel very connected to that, but also there's all this spacious time that I'm having and then lots of work too.

So you said you spend a lot of time alone, but you, from what I understand, do you have a family? Are they with you? Yeah, well, actually, here near by me, about three miles away lives my mom in her house in She's in hospice right now. Yeah, I was just thinking this morning, you know, the past four years, my brother and I have been taking care of our parents. So two years ago, my father died. So we took care of him for two years before that.

And the minute my dad died, we started taking care of our mom. And our mom's been on hospice since September. She's been on 24-7 care. So it's been a very interesting time, you know, because there's all this stuff going on in the world and then you walk into this house and there's something, you know, you're hit with a human condition in this very raw, poignant, direct way. And it's like a microcosm of the human condition, you know, and you're reminded of your own mortality, you know, and it's right there with your own, you know, mother. So it's

been a very poignant time, but I'm so happy to be here, to tend to her and love her and care for her. It's hard. It's both in its beautiful too. You know, I think the aging process and the dying process is a beautiful process. It's very mex. There's many things about it. What is beautiful about it? Yeah, you know, it's so hard to put that into words, but I've noticed this many times, because I've been around many people as they've died. My best friend passed, and I was with him every day for a month, as he went. Everything extraneous falls away. Everything that's not really important falls away. And I think with my best friend, we even did what we call dying practice.

He was a Buddhist practitioner also. And this is an interesting story. So he wanted every day to pretend like we were both dying. And we would actually just let go, which is really what you do in practice anyways. It's kind of like letting yourself die, letting everything you're holding onto you die. And we would just let go. And we did this every day for a month. And one day he said to me, let's really do it.

I think what he meant is, let's really let go this time. And we both really let go that time. And it was palpable like you could feel some sort of, you know, what I can use to describe this, but grace or this spacious, open kind of feeling of humility and beauty in peace in the air. And so by the time he actually let go, it felt very natural. And I feel with my mom, oh boy, she is so tenacious with my mom,

like she has so much life force, but she's weighing in at 75 pounds. And sometimes it looks so hard, in it's hard to bear witness to that kind of pain. And sometimes her face, her cheeks become rosy and there's this kind of beauty to her presence because there's a feeling that she's letting go, that you can really feel.

And I feel quite fortunate and blessed to be able to watch this process and be around her and be there for her as this happens For those of us who are not Now in the dying process. I mean although we're you're in the dying process as soon as you get born Yeah, but not as far along in the dying process. Let's say How do we let go now? especially since this I mean, I find myself doing a lot of

clinging right now because what's this pandemic going to do to everybody I love, what's it going to do to my job or jobs in my case? And I can see a lot of clinging to my own stuff coming up. And so what's your advice about, I don't mean to put this in a crash wave, but I was going to say sell us on letting go. Like explain why letting go is useful. And then how would we do it? Yeah. You know, when I say letting go or letting things be or it really means being relaxed around your experience, or another

way to put it would be like bearing witness to what's happening for you right now. It's really hard to bear witness to pain. It's really hard to bear witness to beauty. But I think in some way, I never really like the term in letting go that much, because what do you actually let go of, because you're just artificially grasping onto something and not allowing yourself to have a full experience of what the object of your awareness. So we have these kind of grand ideas

of what something is like death. And death is like a map. But if you start to walk the territory or if you're experiencing around death, so many things, you notice so many things, for example, like moments of beauty, moments of honesty, moments of, you know, like with grief too, feeling the love of that person, then there's sometimes there's darkness or a feeling of separation, like it's so alive with experience. So sometimes I think even now during this pandemic time when we watch too much news, we start to reify or concretize our experience

and we look at everything through the lens of really concrete thinking process rather than allowing ourselves to have a more nuanced experience. You know, like for example, sometimes I think I wake up and I look at my date book, I still have a calendar and paper one, you know, and I look at it and says, I should do this, this, and that. And then by the end of the day, I said, oh, I accomplished all the chores that I said I was going to accomplish. So there's not that much uncertainty, but actually from the moment you wake up, you never know what the light's going to be outside. You wake up and you see like a rabbit run across your porch and like the other day I drove to the town and a rocket that my windshield and cracked the glass.

And then every time I walk into my mom's house too, I don't know what's going to happen. The other day I walked in and she and my brother were sitting on the edge of the bed looking out the window and the light was, the sky was kind of a purplish color and there was a crescent moon and there was just like this moment. So there's always so much uncertainty and then sometimes when we, it's like we just relate to the map but when we start to walk the territory of our day, it's filled with surprises and beauty and difficulties, and it's not like one thing. And sometimes I think that the fear around the pandemic is arises because we're concretizing

and fear comes from reifying something that's happening, but maybe there's something more nuanced. So I think, for me, when I do my practice, when I sit and watch the kind of natural vitality of my mind express itself, the whole point is to be able to relax and let it kind of reveal itself rather than putting a lid on it or trying to stop it or wanting something to be, you know, wanting to be someone else, somewhere else, having a different experience. Actually, it's so much more nuanced. So we're trying to move out of the map and look more at the territory of our mind and our experience, you know, mind and experience. And what we encounter

during our daytime, our life is it's all changing and moving and very interesting. Yes. So I completely understand what you're talking about, the difference between, I heard a number of points in there that there's a difference between looking at a map and walking the territory. And if you walk around thinking we're in all caps pandemic right now and that's just blotting out the sun for you intellectually mentally, psychologically. You're missing the actual ups and downs, the ugliness and the beauty of your lived experience moment to moment, whether you're in a pandemic or not. And I heard you talk about a related note that allowing in practice whatever's happening in your mind, good, bad,

ugly, indifferent to express itself and to be able to let it come and go naturally without clinging onto it or fighting it, then you take that into your life and you're actually seeing what's happening right now, which gives you an opportunity to enjoy the moment with your brother and mom looking out at the purple sky as opposed to having a plan in your head for, oh, no, no, it's dinner time right now. That's what we ought to be doing, etc., etc. Yeah. I think practice requires a tremendous amount of curiosity, because when we look at something and we assume we know what it is, we don't actually allow ourselves to have a full experience of it. So, you know, when we sit with our agitation and we want it to go away, we never really

get to see what it is. And so when we see what it is, that to me is a liberation. That feels like liberation. Forget enlightenment is some sort of far away remote abstract concept, but there's a certain freedom in seeing that things are not what you thought they were. And to me, it practices very much about that. You can actually learn to enjoy your experience if you can learn to bear witness, which is maybe another word for practice for me.

Bear witness to both your own pain and beauty. Because you can't push away pain and feel healthy. No pain is part of the human condition. And it's interesting. And beauty is interesting too. I think beauty also creates a lot of agitation for us. Like it's really hard to bear witness to beauty sometimes for us. Putting myself in your shoes,

walking into the room with your brother and your mom. And just how it might be for me that I would want to, I would want this beautiful little respite in what is a difficult dying process to just last. Longer, I'd want to eat every scintilla of pleasure out of it. That's just me projecting. But to me, that's how beauty can sometimes be painful because I go into addiction. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think it was beauty. I often, I feel this myself too. I'll go to a beautiful place in nature. And immediately, I want to take a photo of it.

I want to capture it. Or when we fall in love, we either want to capture or flee. You know, it's so hard to just, in that beginning period, it's so kind of we're open and curious, and it's so mysterious and interesting, and we're riveted by it, but at some point, we've start to feel uncomfortable with what's happening, you know. I'll tell you one story that's, I think, a very humorous. So I was driving with my teacher many, many years ago through the mountains of

Colorado. We had just moved here. And I'd never seen the aspins in the fall, but here in Colorado, when the aspins turn like golden, you know, like it's like little coins, their leaves are round. And so we were driving through the mountains and I was so astounded by the beauty of it. And I kept saying, wow, this is so beautiful. Wow, I've never seen anything like this.

And I started to feel actually little uncomfortable. And he turned to me and he said, what is it, too beautiful for you? You know, and I had to kind of reflect on my own minds, the state of my own mind. And I thought that was very humorous, but it was a good reflection on clinging to beauty and not being able to really fully enjoy it. Do you think that's what's going on with you reference before that some people when they fall in love, they want to flee? You know, some people dive in and want a smother.

Other people are just scared by the beauty of falling in love with somebody else. And so there's a flight impulse there. Right. And you think it's because maybe you want it so bad that it's scary or what's going on there. Yeah, it's a really good, good question. You know, I think for the most part, we have a tendency to want to either grasp or reject. We talk about grasping and rejecting comes from the inability to bear the kind of natural

expression or the rich energy of the mind. It's like we want to either believe or doubt. We can't bear just staying open. It's just how we're wired, I think. And I think that's what part of this training is about. It's like, what do you do when something arises and you don't understand it? Or that's why I say curiosity is a very powerful

characteristic of the human mind, curiosity, openness, because when you're curious about something, when you're asking an open question, your mind is protected from belief and doubt. I think it's the most intelligent way to poison the mind. This is my experience. Like, we often think in our culture in particular, that we need to know something in order to kind of capture the truth.

But when is anybody ever captured the truth? You know, what is true? What is untrue keeps changing? And, you know, it's very subjective. So, in the realm of science, even, the truth keeps changing. What is true keeps changing? So, a mind that's really responding

or kind of in sync with the nature of how things are would also have to be kind of open and flexible and changing and dynamic, just like the world is. So you know, this aspect of being open and curious, whether you're in practice or you're moving about the world, is a really intelligent place to be. You were talking about the dichotomy between belief and doubt and you've kind of led us to the one of the more provocative arguments that you make about the dichotomy between belief and doubt and you've kind of led us to the one of the more provocative Arguments that you make about the f word you call it the f word faith

I want to go I want to go there in a big way But let me just just make sure we close out this letting go discussion because I want to go back to the beginning of that discussion you very healthfully clarified something I've and I written about this, and it's a really, for me, I heard in Buddhist circles a lot, this emphasis on letting go. And I never really understood what it meant until people described it as letting be, as you did, just being cool with whatever comes up in your own mind, anger, restlessness, whatever, and approaching it with some curiosity and seeing that it will come and go. But there is another way to think about letting go, specifically within the context of old age,

illness, and death, which is all around us now during the pandemic. And that is just realizing that all of the people and things and achievements you care about are subject to the non-negotiable law of impermanence. Yeah. And so I would just like to hear your thoughts about navigating that dynamic at a time when the things and people we care about are genuinely under threat. Yeah. Well, the world that we live in and move about in is conditioned.

So we live in a contingent reality. This is just a reality. And I think that Buddhism, I never think of it as religious in any way. I think it's a very realistic, healthy look at the way things are. And the foundation of all Buddhist practices, I hate even just to use the word Buddhist, like the human experience. If you really look at it very clearly and very honestly, we see that things are all, because things are interdependent,

they're always changing, and things are impermanent, therefore, and then we're gonna die. And so this is a hard truth when you're grasping very strongly to your life and to who you think you are But I think the whole foundation of the wisdom of this tradition is to move from like I am suffering to there is suffering

You know this is what being around my mom reminds me because it's not just I'm about to lose my mom But it's a reminder that wow, we all going to die. This is so like, I'm the next one in line in my family. You can my brother and I are like, we're the next generation, you know, so these kind of thoughts are coming up. And so that could be petrifying, but if you think of it, this is really just the natural way of things. And I find moving from this notion of just cleaning to eye and mine, to there is, there's something very liberating about that idea. And I've watched people die, and I really have to say,

there's some kind of grace in the whole situation. I don't know, and this is hard to put a name to it. Besides grace, grace means nothing religious, but being in harmony with how things are, grace is just a word in the English dictionary that means how to be in relationship in a way that's graceful or gracious. So I, just something very palpable and very powerful

to be around that kind of situation. And the whole point is we want to learn how to relax with that. And I think that I don't like the term letting go, somehow. Letting be is better, but I also think just open, curious, in all of things, not feeling like we have to know what's next, we can train ourselves for this kind of thing. We think uncertainty is a negative thing, but if you think of it, okay, uncertainty can evoke depression and anxiety, no doubt, and it doesn't all of us, I'm sure. But it also allows us to feel surprised. Creativity comes from, you know, not knowing,

new ideas. This kind of fresh mind also can come. A lot of powerful things come from the fact that things are uncertain. So, you know, we're trying to habituate ourselves or familiarize ourselves with not shutting down in terms of grasping and rejecting. I mean, that's what the practice is for. I think it's a preparation for death, and it's also a preparation or a way to help us live and enjoy our mind in the deepest kind of way.

And so interesting. So, you know, this has been a theme of a lot of the Dharma teachers I've been talking to during the pandemic, but you're talking about I think in a nice way that the freshness as opposed to the staleness that can set in when we're stuck on the map instead of actually walking the the terrain, the freshness. So the uncertainty that we're all in, which none of us invited, we'd nobody wanted this virus,

but here we are. You know, we've talked a lot on the show about relaxing into the uncertainty, navigating, surviving, the uncertainty, but you're also, I think, putting it in the light of, like opportunity in some ways, this is a real opportunity to see how things actually are. Yeah, let life reveal itself to you.

You won't see it if you want life to be different. If you have a lot of preferences, I mean, it's natural to have preferences and we have to make good choices in our life, but just in terms of resting with our mind or being able to relax around how things are, I think that preferences can be very difficult because they could be an obstacle

for us to actually explore what's actually there. They can obstruct our ability to see things as they are. So grasping and rejecting, get in the way of that. So let's go to the effort. Okay. Why has faith been such a big focus of your teaching and your own personal studies. What is it about faith that grew you in, especially given that you're well aware that a lot of people, especially in the meditation community, react very negatively to it because I think a lot of people in the meditation community

came to meditation because they are actively rejecting the Western religions. meditation because they are actively rejecting the Western religions. Yeah, yeah. It's a very provocative word. And I think that's why I was interested in it. Like, why did it provoke me so much? Why did it agitate me so much? At the same time, I think I have a lot of faith. So I started to think about it.

And in thinking about it, I realized that as an experience, faith was very important to me. As far back as I can remember, I never called it faith, but a feeling of being at ease, it being resolved, it not worrying about anything, feeling connected to life in a bigger way. I think I might even call that feeling of faith for me, But that's just an experience. But as a word in our culture, it's come to mean fundamentalism, doctrine, dogma. You know, we look at faith as something that's not examined. So I had these two kind of opposing understandings of faith. And then faith comes up actually a lot in the Buddhist teachings. Sharon Salzberg and I taught on faith last year because I wrote a book

The Logic of Faith and she wrote a beautiful book on faith. I don't know 1520 years ago. I don't know when but I would recommend that because and also listen to it on Audible because she reads it so beautifully. But anyway, we both kind of connected and we thought, we're really into faith. Let's do a weekend and it was great. But anyway, so I had these opposing views and I wanted to explore it. So I thought, maybe I'll take this out into the world and when I go teach, which for me, it's not really teaching. I just want to talk to people and see what they think and kind of open it up, you know, with other people. But no one was interested, it kind of agitated people.

So then that's why I started calling it the F-word, and then people started to want to engage it, because people like provocative things. So I started to look at, you know, that there's so many different definitions for faith in the dictionary. And one, I was reading everything I could about faith, and I looked in my tradition, and there's this one teacher he's passed now, but Timely Norbert and I looked at what he said about faith.

He said something very profound in one of his books. He said, cows have faith in grass. And I thought, to me, I think that's a very profound statement because I think what he's saying is that we depend on the world in which we live and there we have no choice but to faith. We have no choice. You know, faith implies that we don't know. If we already know, we don't have to have faith. And yet it also implies that there's some kind of relaxation around not knowing.

So I was really thinking about that. And I was thinking all these words, like fundamentalism, dogma, doctrine, or also more positive words for faith, maybe I don't know, even when you look it up in the dictionary belief, if you look at the root word, now I'm not remembering, means something like to love, you know, or to be loyal to. You know, these are very positive words and I was thinking of my experience of faith with that felt like to me. And I thought, what these words, they all have something in common. And that is that they're all kind of grappling with the fact that we can't know. Because I think fundamentalism by its very nature is the inability to bear complexity.

We can't bear that we don't know, so we shut down around our belief system. So, faith for you is the opposite. It's an openness, a curiosity, and a trusting that you're part of this interconnected world where you can't know what's really going on. Yeah, I mean, we can read patterns, of course. We can read patterns. And it doesn't mean that to have faith renders you kind of or disables you're a discernment. But I think that faith, I mean, I'm not saying that I can define faith because words are not determinate structures and they mean different things in different contexts at different times.

But I'm just exploring it and opening it up. Like faith can mean whatever we decide it to mean. I love language. So I was looking at all these words and I was thinking, wow, you know, we have no choice but to faith. And what was interesting is both Sharon and I concluded that faith must be something that you do, not something you have. But to be able to faith means to be able to bear witness or relax with the fact that

we can't know anything for certain. It's a challenging idea. But if we look, we, you know, even with another human being, we might think we know them in a determinant way, but nobody is one way. Even in terms of our relationships, like for example, you're a father in relation to your son, right? You have a son, I think. I do.

You're a husband in relation to your wife. You're a son in relation to your parents. When you go to a doctor, your patient, when you go to the store, your customer, like, we're not one thing. We can't find a singular permanent entity that we call ourselves. So I always think, you know, the greatest respect we can have for anyone is not to decide that we know who they are in a determinant way. And yet we can read patterns.

We can look at people and see characteristics and under, we have to survive. Like we can see if we plan to seed, a sprout will arise. And that's how the advent of agriculture came from the reading of patterns. And it functions powerfully and beautifully. At the same time, there's always this mystery. There's always an aspect of life because things are interdependent.

There's we can never know anything. We always only ever see a little little piece of things. And that's very interesting. But this is where we are. This conditioned reality. Sharon's book is called Faith, the book you're talking about, and I read it a long time ago, but if... So I'm going to struggle to remember the central thesis, but one of the things I took away from it was you could also call Faith Trust. And for me, I thought, okay, so I have faith in meditation in that I trust that if I keep doing this thing, even if it sucks uncontrollably sometimes, that if I keep doing this thing, even if it sucks uncontrollably sometimes, that it has, you'll pay off in some way, I can't predict in what way, but it's worth doing.

But your definition seems a little different if I'm hearing you correctly. No, I don't think so. I agree. I think we can have faith based on our own direct experience. Like you've practiced, right? And you must have seen because your life brought 10% happier or more, that there is some value in this. You saw that from your own direct experience. Therefore, you can have confidence and trust it. But it doesn't mean you can say what's going to come up in terms of your conditioned reality. You're going to sit down. Sometimes it's going to and as you say, soccer, it's going to be pleasant or it's going to be unpleasant.

Like the way things arise, things arise based on causes and conditions and we don't have total agency about what we're going to experience. And that's why we find agency in our ability to relax with whatever it is. And we can trust that process, but we can't trust what's going to arise in our mind. Like trust, this is a very interesting thing. Because in a way, we can trust people in a certain way, but you know, you can trust that people are going to be who they are. That's why there's so much conflict. Because sometimes there may be not how you want them to be, but people have their own motivating forces in each moment. And of course, there's patterns like I'm saying, you know, there's people who

seem more trustworthy than others or what have you. But, you know, we can pretty much trust the sun's going to arise, but I don't know. I planted a garden two weeks ago, and I'm still waiting for things to come up. I have a feeling I didn't water it enough. So you don't know for sure. More of my conversation with Elizabeth after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court.

I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy

pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans formed the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery app. What's the role do you think of faith right now in this crisis that we're in? How could we make use of this

question, this inquiry you're suggesting we enter into around faith in our current circumstances? Yeah, you know, to me that's a question about kind of about agency really, because in certain ways we have so much agency, I think, is human beings. And in other ways, we don't have agency. And I think for me, what the Buddha taught is really about that. You know, we look out at the world and we really wish we... It's very like, especially when we're seeing something that's painful, like a virus, and there's so much uncertainty. I always think, well, there's three ways we generally react to difficult situations. Either we want to fix it, in other words, bring it to kind of a static state of perfect

equilibrium. It would be fixing it. Or when we find out we can't fix it, we fall into despair. Or we just check out. We kind of tune out or withdraw our watch TV or whatever, helps us deal with it. So, the fixing is really interesting to me. Because actually, and I don't mean that the world is broken necessarily,

but nothing is, like you said, nothing's permanent. Things are always changing because things are interdependent. They're contingent. So what will happen? Will it all depends? That's what interdependence means. It all depends on how the chips fall. So, you know, I think in a certain way,

we have a lot of angst about wanting to fix the world. And I think that there is an aspect of our experience that we need to accept. It's like we need to accept that we're going to die. We need to accept that if we're lucky enough, we'll get old, even. We need to accept that some things that are not favorable are happening.

But of course, that changes, too. All kinds of things are happening right now. And we don't know what's going to happen. It all depends. And so that we don't have agency in that bigger kind of way because I would say the world is rambunctious in the sense that it doesn't always fit our preferences. It doesn't always work in accordance with our preferences, but at the same time, since we're a part of this interdependent system, we have so much, everything we do matters.

There's ways that we can relate to people, there's ways that we can relate to ourself, relate to our mind, that we can influence and create goodness everywhere. And that's why I think the basic mantra we should all say is how can I serve? What can I do to make things move in a better direction? So we have agency in terms of how we work with our mind, working with our fears, working with our uncertainty, and accepting that in fact we can't fix it, but we can influence. We can make huge changes. I think practice gives us tremendous agency to be able to work with our mind because you

might notice that the virus keeps going on. The virus is going on, but sometimes we feel maybe it is. Other times, we don't feel it is. That goes to show that our subjective mind has a lot to do with what's happening. You know, we have agency around our well-being, creating well-being for ourself. And when we create well-being for ourself, we're not traumatized and we're able to respond to others in a very intelligent way. Intremendous creativity and compassion arises.

I mean, look what you've done. You've created a podcast to reach out to people. I'm sure it's serving so many people. So creativity can come from this. There is agency, but we need to be realistic about what does it mean to have agency or power because in some ways we don't. And that's kind of the foundation.

This is why the Buddha talked about suffering first, the nature of suffering before anything else. I want to actually, since you brought up that word suffering, I want to read you a quote from you and get to to talk about it. In this age of spiritual materialism, it is a strong tendency for all of us to use spirituality as a way to make ourselves comfortable. We tend to pick and choose aspects of our spiritual traditions that substantiate our ego and reject the things

that challenge our habitual reactive mind. I can't imagine how such a path would be transformative and it sometimes makes me wonder if the Dharma will withstand the test of time. I'd love to hear you. Since you talk about the Buddha leading with suffering, how does that seems like a logical next thing to discuss? Yeah. Well, I think that it's a natural human tendency to try to substantiate this kind of very comfortable, like I say, we want to be somewhere else, someone else somewhere else having a different experience, like we want to be comfortable. But that's our demise.

It's all based on fantasy because wanting to be the world to be as we fantasize about it in a world in which things are always changing and moving, and the nature of interdependence and change and impermanence doesn't care what we think is like a recipe for stress. We want things to be a certain way in the world. Many beautiful and surprising things happen, but also many painful things happen, and death and we lose people and we get what we don't want and we don't get what we want and all those kinds of things also arise. So how do we work with that? That's the question.

I don't think you can find a happiness through pushing away suffering. We always think there's happiness as opposed to suffering, but I think when we talk about happiness in this tradition, we're talking about our ability to accommodate or bear witness to all aspects of our experience. Because if you just stuff it, you're always afraid of it. It's like having a monster under your bed. And then your mom comes in and says,

look, there's nothing there. We have to be able to accommodate all of it. And I think, you know, we say in our tradition, the tradition I practice, you could say, is the Mahayana Bodhisattva path. The biggest fear of the Bodhisattva, the practitioner, is to be separate from the world of suffering.

Can you imagine not being connected to the suffering of the world? Like the Buddha in his younger life, he was surrounded, his father wouldn't let him go out of the palace, because he was afraid he would become a renunciate, and he wouldn't take the throne. So he kept him isolated, and this made him super depressed, because it's like this suffocating world that can't because it's like this suffocating world that can't connect to and is not touched by the human condition. This is a huge teaching, this aspect of this life. So I would feel suffocated as much as I, I wouldn't wish suffering on anyone.

I wouldn't want to. I'm not asking for suffering, but at the same time, we need to be able to be touched by, if it's not our suffering, it's somebody else's suffering. In suffering, we need heartbreak to wake up. We need some kind of heartbreak in order to connect with others and to be able to express tenderness to others and to empathize with others to, you know, a life without any kind of, kind of that heartbreak would be a very, I mean, it's hard to imagine, but it doesn't sound good to me. Does it sound good to you? It's of interesting. Yeah. I mean, on some levels, I do find myself attracted to

turning on the air conditioning, pushing away the heat, watching TV, not thinking about the problems of the world, you know, eating a bunch of cookies. So yeah, I feel the tendency to numb out. But it's not sustainable. And it puts me in mind of the final scene of that great, I hate kids movies. I end up watching a lot of kids movies. But there's one, oh, yes, I'm in my five year old, but there's that movie Wally. And at the end, it envisions a world that we've polluted the planet so much that everybody's living on these giant spaceships, orbiting and they're all in these, they're all morbidly obese eating turkey legs and drinking gallons of Coca-Cola in their scooters with the personal entertainment systems hooked up to their, you know, in front of them.

And that seems to be the logical extension of trying to escape suffering all the time, just numbing out. Yeah, that's a very humorous and strange example. And what are they showing kids, you know? But I, yeah, I didn't see that with my sense 31 now. But yeah, there's something about that. I understand, I like cookies too, you know, but I'm not, you know, we should enjoy life. I really, I'm a person, I like to enjoy life. I'm not a person like renounce everything and suffer at all.

But I don't think there's too happiness available to us through pushing away suffering is what I'm trying to say. You know, I think that actually the pain of the world kind of opens us up and opens up our heart and helps us connect to others and makes us less afraid. Because if you're always pushing away away things that you don't want, that sounds very fearful to me. So I think it's not like the extreme of now you don't have to.

You can't enjoy life or eat cookies or whatever, but I think that there's no true unconditional happiness available to us through pushing away things that we're unfamiliar with or rough unwanted experiences. Now this is true in meditation. This is the purpose of meditation is to train us to be able to relax and see what's there instead of just assuming it's bad and pushing it away. Because a lot of times the hardest things we go through actually reveal to us give us depth, make us less afraid, and make us more compassionate. That's my experience.

And I suspect that I will confirm that that's what you're driving at with faith. You know, so I said before I have faith or trust that meditation is worth it, but I think you're from what I'm hearing from you, and again, you'll confirm whether I'm hearing this correctly, argument is more nuanced, which is a you. There's a act of faith to just opening up to the whole, as has been said by other meditation teachers, the whole catastrophe of life, all of its ups and downs. And that's the only, if you're looking at things realistically That's the only sane way to live but to do that requires faith

Yeah, I think it requires faith and I think you know this is also you know faith is not a stupid thing It's too faith, you know, I'm talking about it again as a verb. That's what I came to faithing I'm talking about it again as a verb. That's what I came to. Facing. Facing. And Sharon says to faith, which I think is actually prettier, but another thing you could say is to bear witness. Another thing you can call it is meditation practice.

That's really what I'm defining is meditation practice. How can we poise the mind to relax around our experience so that we can actually see what it is, because again, what makes us so fearful is that we make everything a map. We don't allow ourselves to see what's really there, but that map is not the territory. And so when we start to look at the territory, life becomes so much more rich, we begin to see that actually we're not so intimidated by our own mind. We're not so intimidated by our own experience. I'm not saying this is always easy. It's so hard to be a human being sometimes.

You know, I say that for myself, I'm very humbled by my humaneness, you know. But at the same time, this way of living is extraordinary because you're not grasping and you're rejecting, you find this place of being and you could call that faithing. But I think faithing is a realistic response to the way things are. It's in accord with reality. Because to me this is all practical stuff. Meditation is not some like trippy out there thing.

It's practical. We all long for happiness. We're all kind of, you know, I always say like a plant that's kind of leaning toward a sunny window. We long for happiness, but we don't know how to bring that about. This is kind of like a map or a directions path to bring our actions together with our intention for being free, for being relaxed and open and to enjoying our own mind, actually. That's what I would say. I agree with everything you just said, not that matters, but it just happened to agree.

So I got a question submitted by one of my colleagues at 10% happier. Her name is Ray. We have these coaches on the 10% happier app. These experienced meditators who are available to answer questions from users. Ray is one of the coaches, but she also runs that whole division and also I'm in the habit of doing whatever rate tells me to do.

So I'm going to ask this question. She sounds impressive. She's forceful. This is a quote from you and then I'm going to follow it up with the question. In our quest for wellbeing, we spend much time focusing on our individual needs, forgetting that our emotional and physical health is inextricably linked to the world in which we live. As we awaken from our self-absorption, we will see that there is no way to identify where we as individuals and the world begins. We will see that we are in fact inextricably linked. As we begin to notice the world around us are longing to let life touch us, we'll increase, and we will respond naturally to others with a sense of kinship and tenderness.

That's the end of the quote. The question is, this pandemic feels like it has the potential to wake us up to our interconnectedness. How do you think we could use this experience as an opportunity to become more aware of how connected we are and to develop a sense of kinship slash tenderness? Many of us are feeling a lot of anger or fear as a result of what's been happening. How do we use these emotions as a support in developing this tenderness? Well, so this is a question about interdependence, I guess. And I was asking in that quote, yeah, it's very hard to see where does one end in the world begins because what we think of as ourself is full of imprints of the world that we encounter.

So there's this kind of dance between self and other, this very tender and that's why and it's very powerful. And that's why we have agency and that's why we need to observe our actions very carefully. And I think that a big part of practice and not just in the Buddha's practice, but in all spiritual traditions and not even in spiritual traditions, it becomes very important how we are with other people, the impact we have on the environment, how we organize ourselves as societies, everything we do creates, it has an effect and it has an impact and it has an influence.

So I think, you know, there's two things. There's two aspects, maybe, to practice, this is what I would say. There's one aspect that this bearing witness aspect, like how can you relax around your experience? Because if you start to grasp it experience and reify experience then you become reactive. This idea of looking at something and making it a map like you look at another person for example and you decide who they are then they become this one-dimensional thing and then it's hard to get angry at someone if you see their humanity and you think of them as the

complexity of who they are. But when you kind of shut down around the object of your perception, you start to get reactive. So what practice is about is how can we relax with the experience without reacting? When we react, the kind of activity of our reaction is grasping and rejection. You want to get it or get rid of it. That's how all the negative emotions arise. So the reason we meditate is to habituate the mind or familiarize the mind with not being reactive. The second part of this is that we have to then be very careful how we are in relationship to other people.

If we're not reacting, if we're able to learn to bear witness more, we're naturally not going to be reactive. But sometimes we could be feeling reactive, but we can see we have to start recognizing, I mean, this takes training. That's the thing. It all takes training. It takes training and meditation, and it takes training and kind of sorting out your thoughts and seeing what happens and how you get burnt every time you get reactive with someone. You know, there's this one very great teacher named Shanti Deva in the Mahayana tradition, and he wrote the way of the Bodhisattva, and he says, if something comes up and you're starting to feel anger, like if you can't just relax with it, just

Be like a log say like a piece of wood. Just don't do anything. You know, just refrain Just refrain. I need to tattoo that on my arm. Yeah, he's so simple, but you know It's like you have to look at the connection between seed and fruit but you know, it's like you have to look at the connection between seed and fruit, cause an effect. That's part of what all of this practice is about. Like, we have a lot of power and agency and how we create our life to be. So does it serve us and does it serve others to be reactive? No. And if you're not at the place where you can just relax and bear witness to the situation and be creative and kind, then just stop. Time out. You know that one.

You have a young one. Time out. Just do a time out. What do you mean by tenderness? It's like this very, I think, natural characteristic of the human mind that, you know, my teacher at Contrometer, he talks about tenderness a lot. And it's like a pre-love almost. Like love has some concepts often mixed in with it. But it's just that natural warmth, like a spring that comes up from the ground.

It's just a raw, a strong visceral response to the world. Like I think sometimes I think of a mother and a child, you know, when you have your child like an infant there, and you look at your infant and the infant kind of smiles and it creates a warmth in you. And then you smile back and because you're expressing your warmth and then the infant looks back at you and begins to cool and then you know the mother or the father really gets filled with tenderness. This kind of relationship with the world if you express warmth, warmth will come back at you. And I notice this a lot like, a lot of times, not here where I live in the wilderness, but when I go to see my son who lives a few hours away

and there's a rec center nearby. And so I always want to go, I love to swim. So I go to the rec center and every morning, it's like so crowded, you can hardly get a lane and it's so tense. And whenever I'm in a lane and it's so tense. And whenever I'm in a lane and somebody else wants to come in and they ask you, can I come into the lane?

And I realize how tense that situation is. So I want them to feel welcome coming into the lane. So you, yeah, come on in rather than just like kind of nodding or something. You know, you kind of welcome them into the lane. There's this kind of warmth that's exchanged. It's so simple. And you feel it, and they feel it, and then you know, you just continue swimming. But for hours after that, you feel sustained by that kind of tenderness, that kind of care for someone else. It's just these very simple opportunities that we have all day, long, to be with people. Like Like you get to feel when you're tender toward someone else

and they you feel their tenderness back, you get to feel the warmth of your own mind. You know, you get so much out of it, they get so much out of it. It's such small things that we can do. I mean, we can be activists, the activism is good too, but this is a kind of activism, like a momentary activism. We can be activists all day long. I think activism, like, as a word,

is interesting, like if we don't react or we're able to bear witness, that's a form of activism too. To remain like a log, you know, or like a piece of wood, that's also a form of activism piece of wood, that's also a form of activism against our own reactive mind. So there's many levels of activism. So I think to being out in the world and being able to make a difference is not, it doesn't have to be just this big grand thing, but there's so much we can do all the time. Don't you think? Yes, I love being like a log is a form of activism because it's really true. And also really resonate with the thing about the pool because I swim in a, well, back when gyms were open,

I used to swim in a pool in the Upper West Side here. And man, people get aggro in the pool. Yeah, very weird. And so I've really tried to do that. I don't know that I was doing it consciously, but I've really tried to be cool, or over time I've learned to be cool when people are like, hey, can I share this lane with you?

Yeah. It's just a small thing because it's really, you're up doing it for selfish reasons because it's kind of sucks to have that overhang of resentment as I'm swimming. Yeah, see, it's in a way, it could be selfish. Like the Dalai Lama said, if you want to be selfish, do it intelligently and practice kindness.

I just love that. It's a little twist on selfishness. Yes. Because if we want to be happy, we have our actions and our intentions have to come together. Yes. Why selfishness, he calls it. But so let me just go back to Ray for a second

because I really like the way you're talking about tenderness I'm not sure I love that word of just because it's been I don't know it's a little I don't know maybe it comes off as Tweekly but the way you describe the concept is actually incredibly compelling So the word almost doesn't do the concept justice but but just back to her question Which is you know a lot of us are feelings in much fear or anger, or we're looking at other people as we walk down the street, either as pathogens

or as, you know, we're pissed off because they're not wearing a mask or whatever. So her question was, how do we use these emotions that are arising for so many of us as a way to develop the tenderness that you've described. Yeah, well, you know, I think, you know, for the basis, we need to practice. So that when those kind of irritations come, we're trained to respond to them. So I think, you know, what I'm saying is be like a log of wood or try to use your mind and try to develop some understanding. I think we have a lot of in this small town, we have a lot of cowboys and ranchers and hippies and different people, very strong points of view.

So one of our stores is really careful and everybody wears masks and there's hand sanitizer and the other one there's been a lot of fighting about people not wearing masks, you know. It's so interesting. I mean for myself, every time I wear a mask or I put on hand sanitizer, I feel kind of caring. Like these are the people of my hood and I care. So it's kind of an act of, I don't know, caring for your community, but I think people have a lot of different ideas. I mean, this is what it really boils down to. There's always going to be adversity. You can't make the world responsible for you feeling good. So you know, part of this just being able to accommodate the adversity is just what we

have to do with human beings. You know, this is our challenge. This is our challenge. So there's all these little tricks you could do. You could breathe, you could think, well, this person is somebody's mother or son. You know, kind of humanize them through your thinking process. Or you could stay like a log of wood.

Or you could say something. I don't know, probably not. That's probably not the best something. I don't know, probably not. That's probably not the best way. I don't know if you're not activated, then your creativity will come out around it. But I think it's harder when you also you're in New York. So it's harder. New York is always harder.

Crout in places, speedy places are harder in this way. I think going home and doing some time on the cushion and then just thinking through these things and developing tolerance, patience takes a lot of patience and tolerance. Another word for patience and tolerance, another description is bearing witness. The ability to bear adversity, the ability to bear complexity, the ability to bear beauty, you know, it all comes again down to that. Very witness to your own fear or anger as the two emotions that Ray pointed to in her question, developing some patience with your own, allowing some openness and some letting be with your own difficult emotions,

in some ways that can kind of transmute it and allow you to perhaps, and you'll fact check me on this, perhaps demonstrate the tenderness that you've described. Yeah, I think just to have tenderness when people are doing exactly what you want, maybe is kind of limited. I think we can have tenderness toward our children too when they do things that we don't like or we don't think are good. We have to have some understanding. People are in different places and I don't know we can't kind of make the world be comfortable for us or be how we think it should be. I mean, it's never going to be that way. It's not a really realistic way of looking at life on some level.

I think it's good to recognize that that's not a realistic way of looking at life. It's like wanting the virus to go away too, you know, or wishing that death didn't happen, or wishing that somebody didn't make you uncomfortable in a way, that's where you don't have agency. So if there's something we can't fix, that same person who said be like a log of wood, he said, if you can fix it, if you have this kind of agency to change it, change it. But if you don't, just let it be and work on the things that you can't fix. Don't fix it on those things that you have no control over. It's just not a realistic way of looking at things.

And I know that's easy to say because we all have challenges in working with other people and working with adversity. It's not easy. I mean, this is a kind of million dollar question, maybe, in certain ways. But that's what the training is for us to provide more tolerance, to provide more skillfulness. Sometimes I think I notice that when people are kind of prickly with me, sometimes I can turn the whole situation around, are the ladies at the post office here are very prickly

sometimes. I hope they're not listening. I know I've just made me should edit that up. Okay, let me say, let me say that again. I really love them, but they're so prickly. Yeah. I know. They're not listening to listening, man.

That's fine. Okay. So, you know, the other day, just one woman was just so persnickety with me and she wouldn't give me my mail and she's making all these demands. And then I just started talking to her in a really nice way and I understand, you know, you must be going through a lot here sorting out the mail in this new way. And there's this big curtain in front of everyone and you can't. It's just awkward.

Everything is awkward. I said, that must be really hard for you. Immediately her attitude turned around and I could tell she felt bad that she was super quickly, you know. So sometimes there's ways that we can turn it around. And sometimes there's ways that we might turn it around and sometimes there's ways that we might even Inflame it if we try to so it's all I think we should look at this is all a lot of play the nature of interdependent relationships Is to play with and be creative with and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't work but to see it as kind of this

playful exchange and See how we can finesse it. I mean, to be skillful with it, can we finesse the situation? Or do we have to walk away? Would that be better? Sometimes we have to walk away. Should we engage it or should we disengage it? How can we be creative? I mean, there's a lot of opportunity in these difficult situations.

And this is how we mature as a human being and as a practitioner. This has been really interesting and fun. I wonder are there subjects that you would have wanted to explore that I failed to bring us to? No, you pretty much covered everything. I don't know what else. We really covered a broad spectrum of things. That's good because it's getting hot in my wife's closet here. Yeah, I can imagine. The only other thing I love, am I allowed to say because my team will be mad at me if I don't announce my programs. Oh, yeah, no, no, that's great.

We actually like to end with what I call the plug zone. So, uh, plug, plug everything because people who've listened to this may want to get more from you, so tell us where we can. Okay, well you're very kind. So, what I'd like to plug, first and foremost, is my new podcast. And it's called Open Question, a call to inner brilliance. And basically, it's a tribute to the human experience of curiosity and openness and responsiveness. The best part of our mind is a tribute to that. I interview people from many different traditions.

I actually, this season, probably quite a few indigenous people, but many different traditions. And also Buddhist friends of mine that I think have some really valuable things to say. So, that's my podcast. And then my website, which is ElizabethMadisNomGel.com. Great. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Big thanks to Elizabeth and big thanks as always to the folks who work incredibly hard to make this podcast a reality Samuel Johns is the main man our producer our sound designers Matt Boynton and Anya Sheshik of ultraviolet audio and Maria Whartell is our production coordinator we get a ton of incredibly valuable input and guidance and wisdom from our TPH colleagues such as Jen Poion, Nick Toby, Ben Rubin, Liz Levin, also a big thank you to Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan from ABC. We'll see you all on Friday with a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery

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