Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 265: The Upside of Desire | Cara Lai

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

In Buddhism/meditation circles, desire or wanting is often considered a no-no. But is this line of thinking sometimes taken too far — or simply misunderstood? Can we turn our desires — for food, sex, etcetera — into areas to apply our meditation practice? Today we’re going to explore that notion with Cara Lai. She is a mindfulness teacher, psychotherapist, and artist. She is also a coach on the Ten Percent Happier app. (Side note: shout-out to all the coaches on the app. The fact that we have these highly trained individuals standing by to take your questions is yet another reason to subscribe!) Anyway, back to Cara. I first encountered her when I was on a retreat last year, and she was one of the teachers. She gave a dharma talk that was incredibly funny and shockingly honest. And, as you will hear, she brings that same spirit to this conversation. Where to find Cara Lai online:  Website: http://www.caralai.org/ On the Ten Percent Happier app, you can chat directly with living, breathing meditation coaches (including Cara), about your meditation questions. Once you've downloaded the app at tenpercent.com, you can navigate to your profile, then click "Ask A Question" under the coaching section to be connected with one of our experienced coaches. Other Resources Mentioned: Dukkha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du%E1%B8%A5kha 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/cara-lai-265 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. Hey y'all is your's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from.

And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. How's your nerves level now? A little better. A little better. Yeah. Is there anything else we could do to address it? You want to sit for a couple minutes? Sure. Yeah. That'd be nice. I love that. Do you want to guide me? We don't have to end this, Kenny. I could, I would, that would make me really hungry. That would make me a cuff. Oh, good. Now, then we would both be uncomfortable and that would be okay. Let's say for a couple minutes and maybe that'll, I don't want

to make the nervousness bad. Actually, sometimes the nerves are actually can really, in my experience, really help perform it. It's like your body getting ready to act. That's true. But maybe just to, I don't know, ground us a little bit. Sure. Yeah. I don't know how we'll know when we're done.

Do you want to tell me when we're done? Yeah, I'll do it really abruptly and aggressively. Scream, yes. Yeah. from ABC. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, in Buddhism and in meditation circles generally, desire or wanting is often considered to be a no-no. But is this thinking sometimes taken too far or simply misunderstood? Can we turn our

moments of desire for food for sex, et cetera? Can we turn these moments into areas in which we could apply our meditation practice in a really interesting and fruitful way? Today we're going to explore this notion with Kara Lai. She's a meditation teacher, psychotherapist and artist. She's also a coach on the 10% happier app. Side note here, shout out to all the coaches on the app. The fact that we have these incredibly qualified individuals standing by to take questions from subscribers is yet another reason to subscribe.

Enough plugging back to Kara. I first encountered her when I was on a meditation retreat last year and she was one of the teachers and she gave a Dharma talk one night that was incredibly funny and also sort of shockingly honest. And as you're about to hear, she brings that same spirit to this conversation. So here we go with Kara Live.

I'm thinking back to that first time I ever encountered you in person when I was on a meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. And it was a three month retreat, but I was only there for nine or ten days. And you were giving one of your first ever Dharma talks. I just happened to be in the audience. And I loved it. And I'm not easily impressed. And I loved it because you were doing what I have spent the last decade trying to do,

which is to talk about the Dharma with unaffected enthusiasm but with a sense of humor, and you were just open about how you were nervous, you were taking, you were like, fanning yourself with your sweater because you were sweating so much. Even though you were in the room with like some incredibly, they had to be really nice people.

They were on a three month retreat. But you were really open about your nerves, and then you talked a lot about how you got into meditation and it was just a great talk. Yeah, I don't have a question, but what are your memories of that evening? Thanks, yeah. I was super nervous and I think that was, well, you know, when you give a Dharma talk on the three-month retreat and it was towards the end of the three-month retreat when all these people have been sitting for,

I don't know, nine weeks, 10 weeks or something like that. And when you have sat that long, you notice everything. You know, and the mind just can scrutinize even more in a way. And yeah, they were really, really nice. I was really nervous and I didn't want to make that not part of it because I want my dharma talks to be just as much a part of the practice as anything else. And so that doesn't mean pretending to not be nervous or pretending to be feeling something that I'm not feeling.

Plus the talk was about humility. So I couldn't sit up there and for a 10 like I had my sh** together when I just so did not. That would not be very humble. But that's just like a holistic embodiment of the practice as I understand it, or at least in some important aspects of the practice. You know, you're getting up to teach

but you don't feel like a teacher or there's some sort of imposter syndrome stuff going on there. And yet it is such a wise and also clever way to own what you're feeling while also being of use to the audience. That was my feeling when I walked away from it. Thanks Dan, well, yeah, I give a really bad ass drama talk. So, you know, one of the things you did in that talk that I loved was talk a little bit about your background and speaking of bad ass, your history of, you know,

long distance running in your bare feet and sort of, it seemed like you just had a long history of pushing yourself. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like one of my things. It's just one of my personality traits is that I tend to dive headlong into things and really take them to the extremes. So I think in that talk, I mentioned the long distance running. I'd bike across the country one time. I rode my bike from Boston to the Catskills in February with all my stuff. Yeah, I think it was just this way that I was trying to defend myself against the world

to like beef myself up so that I wouldn't have to feel vulnerable. And I didn't realize that that was what I was doing until not really until I started meditating and then started to see the ways that it was so painful to feel like I had to do that all the time to feel safe. Where do you think that was coming from? Was there something about your personal background that led you to this, to go to extremes, to protect any sense of vulnerability? Well, I mean, I think I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is my mother,

which I probably talked about in maybe even in that Dharma talk, but in some Dharma talk, I talk about my mom, and she's, she's also a badass and she was born in extreme poverty and worked her way to move to this country and become an infectious disease doctor and she's just a huge inspiration for me and I think she's really powerful, and witnessing her, and having her be the person who raised me. I think I was tapped into that part of myself that's really powerful,

and wanted to be really engaged with life in a way that wasn't fearful. The story about your mom growing up in Malaysia, I believe. I think that was told in another Dharma talk, because I know this because after I heard that Dharma talk, I got in touch with you and said, like, send me everything that you've ever done because I want to listen to it. There was another Dharma talk in which you talked about some swindlers who took all of your mom's family's money when she was a kid? Yeah, when she was really young,

I'm guessing she was probably for something like that. My grandfather who was at retirement age, which was young there, I think he was in his 50s, and he had to retire because he had this government job and they gave him a pension, and he chose to take the whole pension at once instead of taking it month by month. And then these swindlers came and convinced him that they were going to invest it for him.

And all the kids knew that something was wrong, that these men were up to no good, and they were like yelling at them and poking them from underneath the porch with bamboo shoots. and poking them from underneath the porch with like bamboo shoots. And it didn't matter because then my grandfather gave all the money and then they were totally destitute from that point on. I mean, they already were poor, but then they were really dirt poor and there were 14 kids to raise. So it was a big deal. And so my mom grew up in really extreme conditions.

But that's a kind of vulnerability that you might imagine growing a thick skin to cover. I'll put a link to that first armotuck that I heard. It wasn't the first armotuck you ever gave, but it was among the first to him. I'll put a link to that in the show notes so people can hear from themselves. But in the Dharma talk, you talked about how and why you personally began your meditation practice. Can you just give us the short version here? Yeah. Somebody gave me a book when I was in my early 20s. It was called Seven Minute Meditation or something, Eight Minute Meditation, some small number of minutes meditation. And so I

started meditating for seven or eight minutes a day. And started to have just from that short amount of time I started to have some really profound experiences in just a few weeks of that. And then for two years I was reading and practicing on my own. And then eventually I had this really, really profound experience where I just felt totally open and fearless. It was just something flooded into me that I felt really fearless and really connected to everybody and a large amount of social anxiety that I had was just had just disappeared. And I was riding this high for a couple days of just feeling, I don't know, enlightened,

to a certain degree. And then there was this enormous crash. And it was just like, well, everything sucks again. And but it was like even worse because that thing that I thought that I had was gone. And so I started, I did a Google search for meditation retreats and I happened to be living about an hour away from IMS at the time in Simonitation Society. And so that was the first thing that came up and I sat one retreat there and then that

same year I sat two more retreats. And then I sat the three month retreat because that's what I do. I just do it all. And since then, I just have sat a ton of long retreats. I love long retreats. And you're about to go do a year. Yeah. I love long retreats so much that I'm going to do a year.

Well, I'll see if I still love them after the year. But is that daunting to you to do a year? I mean, you made it through three months, which is daunting, really daunting to me personally, but the notion of a year is terrifying for me. So how is it for you? That's terrifying. Okay. I find that comforting in some way.

Yeah, okay. Good. Yeah, it's totally terrifying. I mean, loneliness, I mean, that's a thing that I've been exploring a lot right now because it's so up for me that I'm aware of how lonely I'm going to be. And so every time I experience loneliness now, my mind just goes right to this is what it's going to be like for a whole year. And it's super scary. It's super scary to think about what to really confront this idea, this like really deep belief that I think that a lot of us have that we can't handle being alone. And we're afraid we're going to die alone. So why spend so much time alone if that's what's going to happen? So yeah, it's super scary.

So why put yourself through this? Well, because I think what's stronger than the fear is just this extreme amount of curiosity, like what's going to happen during the year? I mean, it can't be just that I'm going to wallow in a pit of despair for a year. I've had enough experiences on meditation retreats to know how incredibly profound and how how transformative and how there's nothing else like a meditation retreat that I've seen so far that can help me access that level of deep ease, happiness, clarity, interest, extreme joy. There's nothing else like that. And so to do that for a year, I can't imagine what will come of that. Of course, there will be loneliness, but I think

it's worth the trade-off for all these other things. In terms of the loneliness, just to make clear to people, you're not going to a retreat center with lots of other meditators because those places are basically closed. I don't know if any that's open. Maybe there are some, but I'm not aware of it. You're going to, it's Tara Mondela's. It's called. Yeah, that's what it's called. Yeah, it's a Tibetan retreat center in Pagosis Springs, Colorado, which is about an hour and 45 minutes away from where I live now. I was originally gonna do the retreat at IMS

at the Forest Refuge in Simonitation Society, which is, you know, it's communal living, people live in dorms, you eat all your meals together, and that's closed now. I was supposed to start it in June, but now I've been postponing it till October. This other retreat center, they have six or seven private cabins.

I'll have a cabin to myself and they have a system set up where I don't have to see anyone. They'll drop my food off in a bear box in the woods once Once a week, I'd go to the bear box, pick it up. And I literally will not have to see a single human being for the whole year if I don't want to. Yeah, so you're either gonna come out enlightened or like with the unabomber manifesto. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Either way, it'll be really interesting. Yes. Now, you have a husband, so how does he feel about this? He's amazing. He's amazing. And it's really sad. He is an excellent amount of sad and supportive. He's just, I think, from the very beginning of our relationship been such a huge supporter of me and everything I do and he doesn't meditate. He's not a practitioner, but he does understand without having to have that experience for himself. He totally understands and in some ways I think that he understands what I do better than a lot of other people who are Buddhists or who consider themselves to be Buddhists or meditators. It's going to be really hard.

We're really going to miss each other, especially after having spent so much time together during a quarantine. But there's nothing else I'd rather be doing. We have such a strong relationship that, of course, we'll come back together and it'll be okay no matter how I've changed. And I think that's something he's afraid of because I'm gonna be a different person when I finish this retreat.

There's no way that I won't be a different person. But I do my best to assure him that the ways that I change are only gonna be helpful for our relationship, only gonna increase the amount of care and love that's in it. ways that I change are only going to be helpful for our relationship, only going to increase the amount of care and love that's in it. I believe that for sure. I mean, having done small amounts of meditation, it's not like, yeah, you're a different person,

but you're training the mind and some would say the heart. And you're doing these ancient techniques to reduce things like hatred and aversion and greed. Right. So, you know, I don't think you come out of the year long retreat. There's been a serious malfunction if you come out of the three month retreat, a raging jerk. Yeah.

But we do all have our areas of ignorance. And I mean, there are ways that you could be so developed in some ways, but really not developed in other ways. So maybe that's one of the things that's a little bit edgy or dangerous about doing a retreat totally by myself, because I'm not going to have much by way of guidance except for my own, I have so many years of meditation practice and so many days of meditation retreat under my belt that I'm hoping at this point I have enough of my own inner intuitive sense of the practice to guide me and help me see those places of ignorance. The lack of support is an interesting question because I mentioned the word Quite things can go wrong, but the path also in visions

really tough portions of the meditation experience that would not be considered malfunction. That's actually part of the deal. Sometimes referred to as the dark night or the duke and yanas to get even more nerdy. And so to do all of that without support, yeah, that's I can see why that would be an issue. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm in the duke and yana's right now, actually. I just told you this before we started recording that a couple months ago, I found out I've Lyme disease and my body just feels like a constipated, plato factory all the time.

And it's so unpleasant. Practicing with this is really helping me see that I can go through a lot. I can get through anything that I want to get through. And it's not that I'll have zero support because I can call my teachers. If I want to, I could call my mentor if I wanted to. I just, I haven't really decided what that's gonna look like, and I probably won't until I get there.

And a big thing for me right now is that I feel really interested in exploring this practice in a way that's guided from within me and not doing sitting meditation and walking meditation in all the ways that you're supposed to do that. I'd like to feel free to have practice, extend beyond those things. And, you know, if you see someone, I am asked people when they eat a meal, you see everyone eating so slow, super slow. And if someone's eating really fast,

I'm like scarfing their food, I gotta notice, you're like, whoa, that person's not being mindful. But I don't know, I don't know if they're not being mindful. And me, it's like, sometimes I feel like scarfing my food, but I don't want to do it because I know that everyone can see me. And if I go to this retreat, where there isn't this expectation to look any kind of way to make practice look any kind of way, then that means that I can really practice in a way that feels right for me, you know, I want to be able to burp and fart and chew really loud and ugly cry. And then I'm going to write a book about it afterwards. It's going to be called My Year of Loud Mouth Sounds. Yeah, I mean, there is the performative aspect of being on a meditation retreat.

Yeah. There's like kind of an onstage and offstage. You know, when you're in your room by yourself, you actually start moving faster and the room might be a mess or whatever, but as soon as you walk on stage where all the other yogis can see you, maybe you go back into slow motion and you eat slowly, etc, etc. Yeah, totally. I was on a meditation retreat, I don't know, a year and a half ago or something like that at the Forest Refuge for three months and really started noticing and really disliking the fact that I was feeling obligated to button myself up like that.

It just felt really suppressing. Like it felt, and I think I'm extra attuned to feeling suppressed from my position as a woman of color. I was just so hyper aware. I would sit in this room and have my eyes closed and I could hear people come in and I would always know if it was a man or a woman, or what I perceived to be a man or a woman once I opened my eyes, based on how they were kind of clomping around. The men men would kind of clomp in and like flick the light on and make a lot of noise.

And the women would sort of tiptoe. And if they turned the light on, they'd be like, oh, and then turn it off once they saw me meditating in there. I'm not trying to condemn male behavior with that. I wanted that. I was jealous of that. I want to be able to do that.

And I don't necessarily think that it should be the case that a place like the Forest Refuge should make a lot of permission for people to be weird and loud and distracting, because I like that place and I like having the quiet of that environment. But I also need to have a space where I can fully express myself, because I think that the practice really, it's not about pretending to become until we are. It's about fully feeling and using every aspect of our human experience towards freedom. And there's nothing that's left out of that. There's no difficult emotion or powerful urge that's left out of the path. And I think that there's a way in which it gets

framed as if, yeah, we got to escape the suffering, we got to get out of it, we got to transcend these afflictive emotions, but really I'm just trying to explore the concept which I really like, that it's all intuitive and it's all part of it. Everything that's in the practice is included in our human experience. Everything in our bodies, everything that we feel leads us towards liberation in some way. Can you unpack that further? Everything in our bodies, everything in our experience leads us toward liberation in some way. Well, one thing about it, I like using wanting as an example because wanting often gets a bad reputation in Buddhism. It's like, you we call it greed, which it has some negative connotations. That's so.

Yeah. And it's also the case that if we didn't want anything, then it's hard to imagine what human life would be like without wanting things. Because every time we do anything, then it's hard to imagine what human life would be like without wanting things, because every time we do anything, it's because we want to do it. You know, I move in my chair because it makes me feel more comfortable, and I want to feel more comfortable. And I practice meditation because I want to be free, and is there really anything wrong

with that? And so to carry the idea that everything is useful for practice to its end, it would mean in theory that every single thing that we want, somehow points to liberation, even if it's something like that is an obvious at first. If we look deeply at the source of what the wanting is really about, it's about really wanting to be happy and really wanting to be free. And there's a wholesomeness in there. And so if we listen deeply to the wanting and we make a lot of space for it and we give ourselves permission to feel the wanting, then the wanting takes us to freedom. To find what you mean by freedom.

That's a great question. First I'll say what I don't think it is. I don't think that freedom is escaping human life or escaping difficulty. I think freedom is fully allowing ourselves to be exactly as we are, fully allowing every bit of our human experience, every emotion, every difficulty, every part of our personality, emotion, every difficulty, every part of our personality, letting that have space, letting that be honored, respecting all of it. And that's, that comes with the release of the belief that we have to escape something

that we can't handle human experience. It's when we don't feel limited anymore. We don't feel limited in what we're capable of. We don't feel limited in who we are. So I know I'm not gonna play in the NBA, is that me and I've got too many limits? Well, I think everybody has a purpose. And we are unlimited when we are in our purpose.

So being unlimited to me doesn't mean you can do whatever you want and whenever you want. It means you're fully in your purpose. Does that answer your question? What is fully in your purpose mean? Well, I don't know. This is probably different for different people. I could tell you what my purpose feels like, which is something that I've only really, it's actually just been a process of getting to know that more and more over the course

of spending more time with myself. But I think that my purpose, at least right now in my life, is to meditate a lot and to explore my own heart and mind. Not even to be a teacher, not even to be a meditation teacher, but just to practice meditation. And that might be very different from somebody else's purpose. You know, maybe your purpose right now, actually I'd be curious, what's your purpose right now, Dan?

Somebody asked me this, normally this question would leave me utterly flummoxed, but I've been asked this question recently, and I think the answer I came up with, which really sounds right to me as I think about it, and I'm about to articulate it is to use storytelling to help people be as happy as possible while also having the highest quality relationships with people around me. Can I add a suggestion to your purpose? Please. My purpose could always be edited. Okay. My sense of at least of what you're doing right now is you are bridging the gap between between this kind of like Buddhist, maybe only meant for a few privileged people. This world of Buddhist meditation that's up here, you're bridging the gap between that and the masses.

You're bringing that to the masses in a way that's relatable and approachable and that can really be heard. And you're doing so much of that that I can't help but feel like that must be part of your purpose right now. Absolutely, I mean, that's just another way of saying the first part of. Okay. Yeah, when I said use storytelling to make people

to help people get happier, the mechanism is really basically rip off the Buddha and everybody who's teaching Buddhism and then add the F word a lot and tell embarrassing stories. But that's why I love that. It was so taken by you the first time I saw that Dharma talk us, that's what I saw you doing.

I said, okay, well there's somebody who, you didn't know I was gonna be in the audience, I don't think, even though you were already working for 10% at that time. So I knew who you were, because you were one of our coaches. But we hadn't met. But you were, it was seem to me like really doing exactly what I've been trying to do for so long.

So it seems like we share a purpose in some ways. Yeah, I love ripping off the Buddha and seeing the effort a lot and doing a lot of other things that push boundaries. Okay, so back to boundary pushing, we were talking about desire or wanting and how it does get a bad rap very explicitly in Buddhism all the time. And so you were telling me before we started recording that you really want to explore wanting in this retreat. Can you say more about that? Well, I mean, yeah, part of it is I want to just be able to like do what feels good. Like if I want to rub a tree with my face or roll around in the grass, or I don't know, just do weird things that feel good,

like a child, you know, that's what children do. I want to be able to do that. And I also want to explore sexuality. I'm not clear exactly on what I mean by that, but it is a practice of mine to engage with that. And there's a huge amount of power in our sexuality that I think it's like this enormous field of experience that goes unexplored because traditionally in a meditation retreat, no sexual activity whatsoever. And, okay, I think that's really valuable in a lot of ways because then we can explore

that energy without acting on it, which has a ton of value, and I've gotten a lot out of that. Because to me, that's like the ultimate want, the ultimate wanting for many people. And it's like the whole body is expressing wanting with sexual energy. And I'm not saying that I'm going to be touching my hoo ha the whole time, but I'm also not saying that I'm not. And so the question for you is, is this make me a bad Buddhist if I'm masturbating on a treat? You said masturbating. Yes, there was something to say. But I was going to say it. There was some question.

Well, I have said it to not, I mean, you can't say it. Oh, no, no, I was just excited that you said that first before I did. I guess a question for you is, does this make you a bad Buddhist in some way? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I feel pretty divergent. Although I maybe really, I feel pretty divergent, although I maybe really at the essence of Buddhism, the answer to that might be no, but Buddhism, it must be kept in mind that Buddhism has been passed down by a lot of men for many generations. And the view of sexuality really is, I think, a male-oriented view of it feels like we have to escape it or transcend it somehow, rather than what might be considered a more feminine approach to it where we really feel and we land in our human experience. And we include that. And part of, I mean, that's what the Buddha

taught, you know, the Buddha did teach that we honor this body. This body has everything we need to wake up. That's something that he said. And so I might be considered a bad Buddhist by people in modern times. And I'm okay with that. I don't even necessarily go around claiming to be a Buddhist at this point in my practice because of how divergent I feel right now. And I love teaching in secular circles. I love teaching at 10%

because I feel like I actually can say more of what I wanna talk about in those settings. When I hear you talk about sexuality and making that part of your practice, I start thinking, okay, so you and I both come out of TeraVada Buddhism, the old school Buddhism, but one of the later schools, Tibetan Buddhism, Vajrayana, or Tantric where they have these Tantric practices,

if I'm coming out of that school, I'm listening to this conversation and saying, wait a minute, this is what we've been talking about all along to use these energies. Yeah, that's totally such a good point. And it seems appropriate that I'm doing my retreat at a Tibetan center, actually, for that reason. I've heard this about Tibetan Buddhism

about the tantric sex practices and other things, but I don't know that much about it. I've been so steeped in the world of teravada for so long that that's like what I think of when I think of Buddhism, but it's definitely not the only definition or understanding of what Buddhism is. More of my conversation with Carlisle right after this.

Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle. and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Disantel, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds 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 Lin spears. When Brittany's fans form 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 podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. For those of us who are not going to do a year long retreat and so therefore probably not going to be in a situation, sexual activity is forbidden. None of us is gonna go on a retreat anytime soon,

frankly. What about in daily life? How can we use and explore the wanting and desire and greed in a way that, from your experience, from where you sit, could be useful in service of waking up? Yeah. Well, part of my reason for being so interested in this right now is because of the quarantine and how weird we get with the stuff we want when we're in the situation, when

we're isolated. I mean, I just, at least for me, I noticed a lot of just quirky habits coming in and going to the fridge a lot and watching a lot of Netflix and cleaning a lot. And they are all these expressions of wanting, right? Anytime we want anything, even if it's like a cupcake or something, there's something going on there that that kind of more surface level wanting is connected to. And as I explored it, I would find that, yeah, I would go to the fridge when I felt lonely. I felt like I was feeling some shame or fear that I just wasn't wanting to feel, and it felt nice to change what I was feeling, or it just felt so, life just felt so out

of my control. And it felt really good to be able to have the sense of control over my experience. If I know that if I eat this cupcake, I'm going to have the sense of control over my experience. If I know that if I eat this cupcake, I'm gonna have a pleasant moment. That's so nice. And if I paused before I went and got whatever I got, and just felt what's going on for me right now, is there something that I'm not wanting to feel?

There would always be a lot of stuff that I not wanting to feel, there would always be a lot, a lot of stuff that I was wanting to feel. My body just was uncomfortable to be with. And over the course of time, I could really start just to get more and more glimpses of that and ask myself and challenge the limiting belief that I can't handle that, and just feel those feelings. And the more I was with those feelings, the more I could see, yeah, it's not only okay to feel these feelings.

These feelings are actually leading me towards self-compassion, towards self-love, towards letting go of that belief that I'm not good enough or not able to handle what I'm feeling. And just through these little mini pauses and feeling my body, whether it's before I'm engaged with the thing that I want or during or after, it doesn't matter when. Is the wanting something that leads you towards self compassion is self love. Even if you have the cupcake or do you need to stop and look and not

have the cupcake and that's when you get the. No, anytime, anytime in the middle of the cupcake at the end of the, at the end of 50 cupcakes, you can always have that. Because in any of those scenarios, you're touching into some feelings that are going on that are deep. So maybe afterwards, maybe during its greed, we're just like, oh, I want this so bad. And the wanting kind of points to,

we're really just wanting a hug, you know, and we can have compassion for that. We're giving ourselves a different kind of hug with a cupcake, but we're really just wanting a hug and we can really care about that in that moment. And then maybe afterwards, there's shame. I'm not saying that that's what happens for everyone, but there might be shame after eating 50 cupcakes. And that's a really uncomfortable feeling to be with, but we can be with even that feeling. We can open to, okay, wow, that's a really hard feeling. And there's this belief here. If we look into it, we can see there's this belief here that I've failed somehow that I'm out of control, but I'm not okay. I'm not going to be okay. I don't

know how to take care of myself. I'm alone. I'm the only one who's in charge of being okay in this life, and I'm screwing it up. And if we see that, and if we be with those feelings, and they're not consuming us, they're not capturing us. We're not believing them. We're seeing them, and we're seeing how painful they are. And when we can see that, oh, there's the compassion. We can really care about how hard that is.

The self-compassion, the self-love you're describing is not magical or particularly hokey. It's just making room for and being okay with whatever you happen to be feeling at any given time and wanting is a way to guide you to that. Yeah. And for the longest time, I had the belief that compassion was something that you had to kind of layer on to your experience, like a pliet.

Like I'm going to put my hand on my heart, and that's compassion, and I'm going to feel better. But compassion is really just the result of meeting difficulty with open hardiness. When we actually just meet our difficulty and don't judge it, then compassion is there. It's a natural and intrinsic aspect of the heart. And because wanting can be so difficult, it is a great way to get you there.

Is that what you're saying? Well, that's part of what I'm saying. But another thing that's more exciting about it is that wanting can be really fun and exciting. And if it wasn't the case that wanting was just bad and something we should get rid of, which just invokes a lot of shame, then we could use the energy and the excitement and the joy that can come with wanting and direct that energy towards what we really want. If we're with the wanting in a mindful way, then deep beneath the surface, the wanting is what it's really wanting is a deep kind of ease.

It's wanting a deep kind of self-compassion. It's wanting to be present and fully allowing ourselves to be who we are. And so if we ride that wave of energy that it brings, because wanting is this vibrant energizing thing, and we don't tamp that out, but we ride that wave, then it will lead us towards something really, really deeply satisfying that we really want, that we want more than the cupcake.

I had a teacher named Mingyue Rink Pache on this podcast a couple of weeks ago. He was making, I think, a similar point if I'm understanding you and if I understood him, that if you look at the root of any desire, any desire, no matter how socially unacceptable is love because you were trying, it because you were trying to protect itself. Yeah. Yeah, looks like I'm on par with Mingur Rinpoche. You finally did it.

I'm done. And the Buddha taught that too. The Buddha taught that there's something called Dhamma Chanda, which is wholesome desire. Desire for liberation, desire for freedom, desire for kindness, and desire for love. And all desires are connected to that kind of desire. Dan, can I ask you a question? Yes, of course.

I like talking right now about these like weird quirky habits that people have during the quarantine that we pick up. I don't know if you have these though, because you're so busy, but since we're all kind of secluded more than normal, we tend to get into these weird habits. Do you have weird habits like that? Weird habits that don't predate the quarantine. In other words, weird habits that are really kind of cropping up to these circumstances. No, they could predate the quarantine, but they maybe got magnified in the quarantine. I have a lot of weird habits. I'm just trying to think of any of them as gotten magnified. Certainly gone through a lot of like mindless eating

Which is something I've been working on for a long time, but that's not particularly new or interesting or quirky because I think it's a lot of if it's quirky It's a universal quirk So the ones you described having you know the cupcakes and the Netflix Check check both Not so much cleaning you described having, you know, the cupcakes and the Netflix check, check, both. Mm-hmm. Not so much cleaning. Mm-hmm. Much to the chagrin of people who live with me.

Um, but I don't know if there's anything quirky. Okay. That's been magnified. Well, I mean, I think eating, eating is a huge one for a lot of people. Yes. Yes. Yes. I don't think it gets talked about enough, especially on meditation retreats. Like I said, people, you see, I mean, eating super slow during this pandemic, I've really

come to appreciate voracious eating, like elbow deep and a casserole. But so it is such a painful part of my life, the inner dialogue around food. So I'm intrigued by this notion of kind of harnessing this wanting energy to direct me towards something that's healing. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a lot of shame. We have a really complicated relationship with stuff that's really pleasant because there's so much shame that goes alongside it. It's like we can barely even fully enjoy it because we're constantly feeling ashamed the whole time and we feel like we have to eat really fast so that we don't feel the shame. And part of my exploration was voracious eating or just like letting myself want and have and wrap my whole body around that food is like it forcibly undoes that shame and it intentionally challenges the shame.

And then the wanting is more free to express itself. And then oddly enough, we end up having more agency with the wanting because we didn't really have control because we were being the wanting because we didn't really have control because we were being controlled by the force of the wanting and the shame that we're battling itself out within us. But when there's more space, when we allow ourselves to just be wanting it, then there's more space. And then we can choose whether we actually want that. We can listen to, there's just more space to hear what we really are wanting. So, it doesn't lead to perpetual elbow deep and casserole. It's just, but giving yourself permission to do it if you truly want it means that you're better able to sort of disambiguate between signal and noise

as we swim through this sea of quotidian wanting all the time. Is that an accurate reflection? Yeah, and I think a metaphor is like you're in a room and the door is locked and you're stuck. And then all of a sudden you realize you can open the door and walk out whenever you want. But now that you're free to leave, you don't necessarily have to. Because you have a choice now. And it's like once we lift off that shame, that's like opening the door. It's like, okay, I can let myself want this

and that I can leave whenever I want, it's okay. And that's kind of how I feel about how we approach human existence. Sometimes it's like, I just wanna escape this really difficult experience. I just don't want it to be so hard. And so a lot of times we approach meditation practice as if the whole goal is to get out of human existence, to get it over with, to not be feeling so crappy all the time.

And I just want to feel good. You know, I just want to feel good. It's so simple. But if the door is open, if we see that I'm making a choice, I'm making a choice to be a human, I'm making a choice to live in this life, if we decide that it's a choice that we have, I can walk out anytime, then human life becomes way more fun. It becomes way more interesting. It becomes way more okay to be with the difficulty, because that was my choice to be with the difficulty.

Can I go back to the casserole for a second? Yeah. And it's not just casserole. It can be any object of desire for any of us, whatever cigarettes, beer, wine, gambling, sex, Netflix, whatever. I think a lot of us fear, I think I know I fear that if I get rid of the shame and just inhabit the desire that I'm going to, there'll just be no end to the consumption. Well, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this exploration to people who are first starting

out. I wouldn't say no, don't do it, but this isn't what I would normally teach to someone who is just starting meditation practice because there has to be a certain level of steadiness of mind and a certain level of ability to pay attention and be present. And without that, it could just be received as this huge amount of permission to go for whatever you want, whatever you want, whatever you want, which is really destructive. And it's taken me a long time to come to this place that I'm at now

where I'm really wanting to explore this and feel safe exploring. And it's been microdoses. It's been a little bit of a time of opening and opening and opening. One of the things that I did as a part of this exploration was I noticed over a lot of time spanning with my body, I noticed that I was always sucking in my belly. And I think this is probably something that a lot of people do.

It's not appropriate to have a big belly in this culture. It's offensive, or it's just like unpleasant for other people to see that. And it looks like you're taking up a lot of space, which is rude. Well, what if I let myself take up space? What if I open that up and just let my body be the body that it is and not somebody else's idea of what a body is supposed to look like. This is me. This is my body and I belong here. I deserve to be here. I deserve to take up space just because I was born. It's just my birthright. And it's not like harming anyone for me to take up space. And that was something actually that opened me up to my wanting because a lot of wanting,

I mean, everything that we experience is felt in the body. And without me opening up that part of me, I couldn't really get in touch with the wanting that deep, intuitive kind of wanting. And it was a difficult and painful process to open myself up in that way. And it was really vulnerable. And sometimes people asked me if I was pregnant, which, you know, what's wrong with being pregnant. But that was a way that really helped me untangle myself from the belief that I have to be a certain way. And then to listen to my own inner guidance here, because that's where all your power is,

that's where all your intuition is, that's where all the wanting comes from is in the belly. So what did that look like for you, like unbuttoning your top button on the regular? No, just like, relaxing my belly. And that, because I just like have a belly that can kind of stick out, I think probably everyone does, but most people don't let it stick out. And I just like, relaxed and let it hang out.

And, you know, it's like you see little kids at the beach and none of them are second in their values. It just got these like roadtomble things walking around. That's what we all look like. Yes, I know. It's one of another painful thing in my inner dialogue around, you know, like why is my belly bigger than I would like it to be? But I could use a little permission to let it hang out.

Yeah, and I mean, it was so freeing when I did that because I just got to really escape from this constant I need to be this way. I need to be a certain way. And into, well, who am I? Who am I? Really? Because I don't get to tap into all of who I am if I'm trying to constantly fit myself into a mold. Let me just go back to the desire practice that you've been talking about here. You said that this isn't necessarily something that you would recommend for total beginners. But can we think of a way that we could give people

a practice that would be accessible at whatever stage of practice? Yeah, definitely. One thing that I do teach a lot is so if you're a beginner meditator and you're noticing a strong Any feeling really but let's use desires as the. If you're feeling a really strong polar desire, put your attention on something that feels kind of grounding, like your feet or your butt or your breath or something. And then just let that wanting course through you and let the imagination run wild with it. Like you could imagine yourself just like having all of the junk food in the world and putting your whole body into it, but you're still sitting there and you're letting that energy horse through you and you're opening up to it and you're making a lot of space. You're giving it a

wide pastor to play in and run around in. And you're staying with some perspective because you're using this place, like your feet or whatever anchor you're using to keep your mind tethered to the present moment so that you don't just run off into fantasy land about all the things that you want. Because then that's not super helpful. We just kind of spin out and it turns into the wanting actually takes over us. But if you can stay present and open to the wanting in that way,

then it can really reveal a lot to us about what we deeply want. And it can also get that energy moving, which has been kind of clogged in us. And we can breathe these year because we've been respecting the wanting. can also get that energy moving, which has been kind of clogged in us. And we can breathe these year, because we've been respecting the wanting. The wanting has needed some air time. It's needed our respect. It's needed to be honored,

and we're doing that for it. Yeah, I was just doing it while you were describing. I was kind of just using that paragraph. You just uttered as a kind of quick guided meditation. And I was sitting here feeling my body sitting in this chair And then imagining eating the what are those candy bars they were around when I was little like a thought a hundred thousand dollar bars or something like that 100 grand. Yeah, something like that. That's still a thing and I was just imagine just pounding those while

Being in touch with my body and so And I like what you said a lot about respecting it, giving it a wide pasture. But in the end, what does that mean? So like, do I get up and not eat any candy bars or do? So. Yeah, that's a good point. And so it's important to not put pressure on yourself

to do any particular thing after that meditation. The goal of the meditation isn't to control your behavior afterwards. The goal is just to be in that moment with the wanting. It's even helpful to give yourself permission to go and eat the candy bar afterwards because then it's not about that. It's not about the shame. It's not about control. It's not about the shame. It's not about control. It's just about being with the wanting. Would it be safe to say that sort of getting to know, I think you've

probably already said this, but I'm just going to recapitulate, getting to know the wanting by giving it the wide pasture, by giving it the respect, by giving it the compassion, which is sort of coerizing with the giving it of the space, then when one thing comes up as it does all throughout our life, you can not be so owned by it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, for me, when I've done this meditation with things I want, it becomes clear not every time this happens, but sometimes it becomes clear that's actually not what I want. It becomes clear, not every time this happens,

but sometimes it becomes clear, that's actually not what I want. And I don't want it anymore, because I could see that the wanting was actually about something else. It was actually, I just don't want to feel lonely. That's what's going on. And then I can also see that eating a cany-bar

is actually just gonna make me suffer even more Because now I'm going to feel like guilty for eating the candy bar and still lonely Because it's not going to do it for me Yeah, then you get loneliness and shame. Yeah, awesome co-morbidities. So Marissa are one of the new producers on on this who's producing this show, The Mighty Marissa Schneiderman. Sent me a note before the show said, this is great, you're gonna talk about desire, but let's also talk,

because there's some of us who are more prone to aversion than desire. So, what are your thoughts about working with? Because there's plenty of going on in the world that would quite reasonably give rise to a version right now. So do you have any thoughts about how to practice with that? Yes, actually the first time I did this practice was with anger and it was, I was on a meditation retreat and I had just come from some like family gathering thing and I was just, and I was practicing as a therapist at the time.

And I was just feeling like everybody needs me for something. And I'm obligated to help everybody, and nobody's taking care of me. And so I was just so angry about it. And so I sat, and I did the same thing that I just explained with the wanting, but I did it with anger. Let the anger course through my body. Let myself imagine all the things that I wanted to do with the anger. Like grow into the incredible Hulk and just smash everything and pick up the Buddhist statue and throw it out the window and watch it bounce down to the hill and shatter into a million pieces. And throw it out the window and watch it bounce down to the hill and shatter into a million pieces. And I could feel the anger just moving through and being so glad to be able to have that much space because anger, we're so quick to judge our anger that we don't even let

ourselves have it. And then we end up being pent up about it or it comes out in awkward or harmful ways or we're passive aggressive. And until that point, I hadn't really fully opened to the anger in that way. And it really helped me see that anger has so much to say about what we deserve, how we deserve to be treated, about fairness, about justice. And it's really clear, it sees problems really easily.

And if we dismiss the whole thing, then we lose all that really important message that it's trying to deliver to us. I'm really seeing a through line here, because, you know, in talking about wanting to be as weird as quirky as whatever, as you, as full an expression of you as possible on this upcoming one year retreat, that connects to what you just said about both a version and desire, which is like Invite in the full catastrophe, right? Because if you don't You're suppressing it. Yeah. So give it the respect. See it all. Yeah Then you have a much different relationship with what is there?

Whether you like it or not totally And I even want to say that to continue with that through line, the only practice doesn't have to just be sitting and letting yourself feel it while you're sitting still. I've also come to love outwardly expressing my anger. So far, I've only done most of it in private, but just like swapping, going on this like a rampage, smashing pillows into the bed and like screaming into the bed, and letting it course through my whole body in a movement way and using my voice and feeling it. I mean, I feel like I can do that because I've had a lot of meditation practice and so I can still be because I've had a lot of meditation practice

and so I can still be really present with myself and not get caught in my head about it. And in a lot of ways actually being with the body, being more engaged with my bodily movement helps me drop out of my mind so much and helps me stop being just in the story. But I shouldn't be mad or I should be mad or they did this to me or whatever.

It's just, no, I'm angry and I'm playing that out in a really primal way. And that's what I want to be able to do on this retreat. I want to have the freedom to express my practice in whatever way it needs to be expressed. I don't know if I'll end up flying into a rage a lot when I'm on that retreat, but I want to be able to. I want to have the permission and the space to be able to do that. Freedom. Freedom. Is there something I absolutely should have asked but failed to have asked? Nothing that I can think of right now. Like I just wanna say,

I allowed how I'm feeling right now, cause that's a thing I do. I mean, I think after this, I'm just gonna be really aware that I just talked a lot, and I said a lot of things. And I'm always wanting to be really clear that. I don't feel like I'm an expert on anything or I know what I'm doing

with any of this or like I'm not even saying that I recommend any of this to anyone. I'm just trying to figure out how to be happy. I'm just trying to figure out how to live life in a way that feels good to me and I don't know if that's right in a Buddhist way or a meditative way or not, but, and I don't know if I should recommend what I'm doing to other people. I'm just, this is just what I'm doing,

and I'm laying it out there, and I appreciate you being interested in it enough to sit with me for an hour and a half and ask me about it. It's a pleasure for me. And I take that in the spirit which you intend to, which is, I think that's very, I say, it's a loaded word, but that's very Buddhist. I mean, there's a provisionality baked into looking at the world through the lens of impermanence

and what do we know? Yeah. So, yeah, I buy that. Yeah, well, we'll see how it goes. And at this point, I've done this, now that I've done this podcast with you, it's like, I have to do a year-long retreat now. I think there's no escape. But I also have to say that I can leave whenever I want,

and I'm not making a promise that I'm gonna sit for a full year. We'll see what happens. I will not hold it against you. I don't think anybody will. Well, thank you for doing this. It's really fun. Thanks, Dan. This has been awesome. Thanks for inviting me. It feels like a huge gift. Big thanks to Kara. And I just want to say another word about the coaches on the 10% happier absence. As we mentioned, Kara is one of the coaches. I just think it's worth repeating that how cool it is that if you're a subscriber, you can chat directly with a living, breathing meditation coach, Kara, Ray Hausman, who's been on the show before answering questions and others chat with them about your meditation

practice, share any questions. I mean these folks are really excited to answer your questions. In order to find your coach, once you've downloaded the app, which you can do at 10% .com, you can just go to your profile within the app, click Ask a Question, and fire away. Thanks again to Cara, and as always, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make the show a reality Samuel Johns, as our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman, is our producer, our sound designers are Matt Boynton and Ania Sheshek of Ultraviolet Audio, Maria Wartel, as our production coordinator.

We get a ton of input from TPH comrades, such as Jen Poin, Natobi, Liz Levin, Ben Rubin, and as always big thanks to my ABC colleagues Josh Cohan and Ryan Kessler. We'll see you on Friday with a bonus. Hey, hey prime members. of bonus. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.