Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 3 Buddhist Strategies for When the News is Overwhelming | Kaira Jewel Lingo

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

A former nun explains how to deal with doom-scrolling, despair, and rage in the face of world events.Kaira Jewel Lingo spent fifteen years as a monastic in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village tradition. She is now a lay dharma teacher and is the author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons for Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption.In this episode we talk about:How to stop doom-scrolling and what to do insteadWhy it’s more important, not less, to take care of yourself in times of crisisHow to take concrete action that reduces sufferingStories and lessons from the life of Thich Nhat HanhFrom Plum Village:An open letter to President Biden, guided meditations, and other resources Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/kaira-jewel-lingo-newsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody, a lot of people have been wondering how to keep it together in the face of the relentless and really horrifying headlines out of the Middle East. Never mind all the other headlines coming at us from all over the world. So on our side during this period of time, we've been wondering how we can help you deal with all of this. So today, we're going to do a kind of experimental episode where we're going to lay out three Buddhist strategies for handling all of the doomscrolling and despair. You're going to be hearing from a great meditation teacher by the name of Kyra Jewellingo, who spent 15 years as a nun in the Tiktok Han plumb village tradition.

She's been on this show before, so you might be familiar with her. You're also going to hear from DJ Kashmir, our senior producer on the show, and it's all coming up after this quick break. Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now, join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. If you've ever stayed at an Airbnb, you know that it can be a fun and affordable way

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DJ Cashmere, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Dan Harris. No, I call you by your full name. You don't call me that. That's not in the script. Hahaha. Sometimes people on the team just call you dad, but I thought that would be weird. So, yeah, yes, I know.

I know that that's the first time that happened in my presence. I was like, oh my God, I am old. Well, we went to that fast casual place that one time and they charged you for my food because we were standing next to each other and they assumed you were my dad. Is that why you think that happened? Oh, for sure.

Oh, really? Yeah, you know what I think so? I didn't layer that meeting on top of it. Yes, just for people listening, DJ and I were going to a fast-catchable fast food place and we both had our orders next to each other and the person rang it up for both of us without asking, which is fine.

I'm always happy to buy DJ Lutch, but I just thought it was a random error, but you're saying that person thought I was your dad, which is horrifying, but mathematically hard to argue with. Yeah, you would have been a young dad, but it's possible. How old are you? I'm 36. Okay, yeah, so I would have been 16. Yeah, yeah would have been a young dad, but it's possible. How old are you? I'm 36. Okay.

Yeah. So I would have been 16. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, you look younger, obviously. No. Yeah.

Well, you have to say that or else I'm like it fired. So yeah, I get it. So we're having like talk right now, but we have a heavy subject today. Yeah. Can you just explain everybody what we're doing and why? Yeah. So every time there's some big global crisis or some big national crisis, we're always having conversations as a team about how to respond and whether to respond directly on the show. We're not a new show. There are other people who do that and who do a great job of it.

But there are times when we have the feeling that there's some way that we could support people as they're dealing with crisis, some way to reduce suffering. So after the attack on the capital on January 6th, just to give one example, we did some rapid response episodes with some Dharma teachers. But there have been plenty of crises where we haven't responded directly. So when we started seeing these horrifying headlines and images coming out of Israel and Gaza, we had a bunch of conversations on the team about, what do we do?

Do we do anything? We ultimately decided to hold off and not do anything super fast or urgent, but to just give it space and time to see if anything emerged. And that was a complicated decision and we all wrestled with it a bunch. As all that was happening, it just so happened that I had this conversation scheduled with Kyra Julelingo. She's a former nun in Ticknot Hans, a monastic community. She's a Dharma teacher

and an author. She's been on the show, I think three times. And I had a conversation scheduled with her for this sort of experimental side project that I was tinkering with about the life and activism of her teacher, TechnoHanz. And when we actually had that conversation, she said all these really profound things about how she was navigating what was happening in Israel and Palestine, and more broadly, she gave this practical and clear and wise advice about how to be with big crises. And pretty much the second that conversation ended with her consent. I went straight to all of you and I said, hey, this is really, really good stuff.

I think we should find a way to bring it to the audience. And so in the spirit of experimentation, which Yuan-Varisa talked about on the show last week, we decided to pull some clips from that conversation I had with her. And what we're going to do is you and I will play some of those clips and talk them through. And the hope is that this will feel supportive to anyone who's worried about any of the huge crises plaguing the world right now. So you might be glued to what's happening in Israel and Palestine or Ukraine and Russia or Armenia and Azerbaijan or the Sudan or the latest mass shooting or climate change, the US House of Representatives, whatever it is, there's no shortage of crises. I just was blown away with what she had to share

and the depth and the clarity. So we decided to try to bring a few pieces of that to the audience today. This is great. I'm glad you took the initiative. We're going to talk about her three you took the initiative and we're going to talk about her three strategies. But maybe talk a little bit about her a little bit and her background before we play these clips. Sure. So, Kairajul Lingo ordained in Technat Hans Plum Village tradition as a nun. I believe in 1999. She was a nun for 15 years and she continues to teach

the Dharma at places like Spirit Rock and IMS and other places. She wrote a book called We Were Made For These Times. She's got this really grounded calming presence and she also has an activist background. Like her parents were very socially engaged. I believe her dad actually worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. And so her advice is coming from a personal lineage and also from Tick-N-T-Hon's lineage.

And we're gonna play three pieces of what she shared. The first is about mindful consumption, which is like, what are you letting in? What information are you taking in? And how are you taking it in, and is that helping or hurting? The second is about self-care and coming back to the practice before you try to take action in the world, and then the last is how to actually take action skillfully. And I think because she has this deep personal connection to these questions, and because

her teacher is known for basically coining the term engaged Buddhism and because his practice was forged in the fire of the Vietnam War, everything she says for me comes with this level of like gravitas and credibility that really help it land for me. Talking to her was the first time since these headlines began coming our way a few weeks ago where I felt like I had some way to orient myself to this current crisis and also some way to think about orienting for the inevitable next crisis. That's going to come our way. Can you say a little bit more about Ticknoth Han and who he was. You were working on something about Ticknoth Han when you talked to Kyra Juel Lingo and she

delivered these nuggets of wisdom. Yes. Tiktok Han was a Buddhist monk. He died quite recently, but he was born in the 1920s in Vietnam. He really rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s and became quite famous for really bringing Buddhism into the 20th century and taking it out of the monastery and down from the mountaintop and into the trenches of a war zone. He was very, very directly engaged with providing aid to villagers, with training volunteers

to rebuild bombed-out villages, providing healthcare, providing schools, providing homes to folks who had no homes, and traveling the world advocating for peace. He befriended Martin Luther King Jr. who went on to nominate Tignat Han for the Nobel Peace Prize. This was not a popular thing for Tignat Han to do. He made enemies on all sides,

because he was a neutral voice for peace. He had students who were assassinated for calling for peace. He had colleagues and students who self-immolated, who sat in the lotus position and lit themselves on fire as a way to try to bring attention to the war and to call for peace. He had attempts on his own life as she explained to me in this interview. He was eventually exiled from Vietnam and couldn't go back for almost 40 years because he would have been killed if he'd gone back. Once he went into exile, he continued his humanitarian work. He coordinated aid for refugees.

He helped connect donors to folks who were trying to resettle in other countries. Once he went into exile, he continued his humanitarian work. He coordinated aid for refugees. He helped connect donors to folks who were trying to resettle in other countries. He began the Plum Village community and ordained hundreds of monastics and trained thousands of lay people and built mindfulness retreat centers and monasteries all over the world. He also continued to stay politically engaged and eventually did make it back to Vietnam and died there quite recently. And so he had this just incredible life and I was reaching out to her because I was really curious about the arc of his life and the ways that his engagement and his activism changed over time. Sort of like the Dalai Lama who's been dealing with this conflict with China for so

many decades, it felt to me like Tiktok Hans thoughts about what we can and can't do to change the world, carried a certain kind of credibility. So that was the seed of wanting to have this conversation and that sort of deeply informs everything that you're about to hear from Carajul Dingo. So just to put a fine point on it and by the the way, if you hear purring, it's because I have a cat in my lap. But just to put a fine point on it, you were interviewing her because you're working on some TBD piece or project for this show about the life of Ticknot Han. Then she says all of this incredible stuff that's directly relevant to the conflict we're watching unfold on our phones and on our televisions. And you thought, all right, let's turn this around. Let's put this out there for people to hear. So am I summing that up correctly? Yeah, that's exactly right. Great. I'm glad you did. And again, just to apologize for the fact that I've got a 20 pound perring cat in my lap. And I hope that

noise is calming as we talk about this stuff stuff rather than annoying. So let's do the first clip. Anything to say before we hear it. Yeah, I'll just frame this first clip briefly. She's talking about doom scrolling basically. How easy it is to get sucked into the vortex of bad news and how that habit has healthy elements to it. We don't have to judge ourselves or be ashamed of it, but bringing mindfulness to what information we consume and how we consume it is really important.

And one other thing to say here is, for me, when I hear her talk about this, there's a part of my conditioning that just feels like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, when do we get to the part where we fix things, you know? So I just want to like, if anyone is feeling that coming up when you're hearing her, I just want to like remind listeners that we are going to talk about how to take action later. We're starting here for a reason. And so the invitation is just to slow down.

And so here's her talking about mindful consumption. I totally understand this feeling of like knowing something so horrible as unfolding and feeling like if I'm not following all the updates that I'm somehow letting people down by not staying current. I mean, there's a wholesome quality of that impulse, which is just to say to people who are suffering I'm with you, I'm following what's happening to you. I'm not forgetting about you and you're suffering.

I know that's how I feel right now with the war, well, the many wars. And I think we do have to really register what is the effect of a feeling of helplessness on the cells in our body, on the mood, in the mind, on our level of energy. It's so human, it's so natural to feel this deep care, to want to be responses, to want to be able to do something. There's such a wholesome thing, actually. It's a reflection of the fact that we are completely interconnected. We couldn't be alive as an individual or as a species if we didn't have that innate knowing. as an individual or as a species if we didn't have that innate knowing. And we have the negativity bias.

There's some kind of fascination in us that wants to stay in this place of like kuiper arousal when things are so difficult. I mean, if we are personally impacted by this, it's a completely different story, right? Of course, you're going to be glued to the news or always wondering about your loved ones. I mean, that's so natural. But for the majority of people for whom that's not the case, we really have to ask ourselves the question, am I watering wholesome seeds when I do mscroll? Is it helping me be any more effective in relieving suffering?

And if it's not, we need to be honest with ourselves, and we should really look at how to put our energy into something more useful, more supportive. Yeah, I love that. It really reminds me of that great Joseph Goldstein mantra or slogan or phrase that he recommends to people, is this useful? He often says that a certain amount of stress and worry makes sense, and then at some point it's not useful anymore, and that's just a great little question to hold in your mind

when you're looking at these incredibly awful stories. Is this the right dosage or a bioverdost? Absolutely. Yeah, I thought about Joseph's, is this useful mantra when she was talking about this as well? And I really appreciated the way she talked about this impulse that we have to to whether it's on

social media or on TV or what have you to just sort of keep getting doses of what's going on and how there are, you know, she uses the word wholesome. You could also maybe say like, there are healthy elements to that, right? We want to see informed. We want to be in solidarity. We want to be responsible citizens and what have you. But she also points out like there are other elements happening too. We have a negativity bias. There's some part of us that gets hooked on being in a state of hyperarousal. And at some point that isn't helpful anymore. And you know, it might be that you read three articles or five articles,

but when you're on the 74th comment from the third video, there might be a level at which that's no longer helpful. And I think her version of Is It Useful is, she says, is this helping maybe any more effective and relieving suffering, which is not as pithy as is this useful. But I think it's a good way to orient ourselves. And I can name lots of times in the last few weeks, where I've been sitting down for a long time and learning a lot of horrible things and didn't get any better at reducing suffering in the 30th minute of that than I would have been in the, you know, third minute of that. Do you ever see the movie The Bridge of Spies? Is that that Tom Hanks? Yeah. Yes, yes.

Tom Hanks, Mark Rylands, he's a great actor, British guy. Mark Rylands plays a, Abruction Spiesman captured. And Tom Hanks is his, I guess, US government appointed lawyer. I don't even know if Rylands playing a spy or an accused spy, but let's just allow him to mangle the details

in order to get to the useful part. There are several points in the movie where Tom Hanks, Ryland's lawyer will say to him, you know, why aren't you freaking out about this? And Ryland's will say, would it help? It's such a great response. It's such a great response. You know, I think I feel up duty personally to face

these awful images and stories coming out of the Middle East. I did it in person for much of my career. I feel very compelled to take it in and not look away. But on the show, we talk a lot about striking a balance. There's healthy anger and unhealthy anger. There's healthy conflict conflict is necessary for human relations and then there's destructive conflict sometimes called high conflict. There's healthy stress You know, we need some stress and then there's destructive stress that leads to burnout and Can kill you really and so this is another balance the balance that Kyra Jule Linko is pointing to, which is, you know, we want to stay engaged, but we also don't want to tip over into overwhelm. And you have to draw the line for yourself. And that's the tricky part here. There's no magic formula.

This is where a meditation practice can be very helpful, because if you can have the kind of self-awareness that we call mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition, if you can have that, you've got a real leg up when it comes to figuring out the dosage. How does all that go down with you? I think that's exactly right. I'll add that she had a second suggestion that also relates to wisely consuming, where she said, if you feel the need to consume more, you can actually make some counter intuitive choices about what you're consuming. Because only focusing on the worst of the suffering isn't necessarily useful. And so her suggestion is we can take the Middle East as an example. If you feel compelled to learn more about what's happening, you can watch documentaries about the

history of Israel and Palestine. You can immerse yourself in the art and culture of's happening. You can watch documentaries about the history of Israel and Palestine. You can immerse yourself in the art and culture of that region. You can read and listen to stories and music from the people who live there. You can go out of your way to learn things about the folks who are right now providing direct aid and care and working toward peace. What she said to me was, all of those beautiful things are just as true as all of the tragic things. And she exhorted me and by extension, all of us to stay connected to a sense of humanity,

to stay connected to things that can inspire us because doing that allows us to, as she put it, be in touch with suffering and stay afloat. Yes. And I just loved that because that means I can keep looking at my phone if I really want to, but it doesn't have to be the stuff I've been looking at. No, I think it's really smart. I think it's really, I mean, she's incredible. I think it's really smart.

There are two things in there. One is the history. I think that history has this effect of, in a very useful way, making you feel small, you know, understanding that we're part of a much larger, longer running system. And we know it, but we forget it. And there's this kind of presentism, this bias, that the present moment is unprecedented in some way, but history can really click us out of that. And then the other advice of looking at the people who are on the ground helping, that shows us that, yes, suffering is real. Horror is real.

But beauty and altruism is equally real, if not more real. None of this is to look away from the brutal facts. It's just a widened aperture to take in more facts than the news business serves up. You know, I'm speaking from the belly of the beast I worked in the news business for 30 years. And as I have said to you before, DJ Mike, the one of the little expressions in the news business about the news business is we don't report on the plane that lands safely. We just don't do that.

We report on the bad stuff. And it plays right into this very human tendency that you already describe, which is the negativity bias. We latch on to the negative because it was adaptive. It helped us survive. You could be surrounded by a thousand flowering lilies and that's all nice. But if there's a saber-took tiger hiding in there, you want to be able to focus on that because that will help you get your DNA into the next generation. So, the negativity

bias makes sense and it doesn't always suit us. It doesn't always help us. Yeah, so her advice is quite brilliant on several levels. Yeah, she told me that someone had forwarded her hours and hours of, I want to say it was like chanting and various forms of music and also recorded stories from the region. And she spent some time consuming that and felt a sense of connection and a sense, I think also, a reminder of why we might want to seek peace, what it is that we might be wanting to preserve. And it's just a whole other layer on top of taking in the violence and destruction. And I think her point is, if you only let the suffering in, you'll drown in it.

And frankly, that's what I did for the first few weeks of this, right? Like the only thing that came through my aperture on this crisis was the suffering. And I didn't do anything useful with any of that. And I'm not saying that to like beat myself up or be self-lass or anything, but it's just interesting to see how we go to these things that on some level are not only not useful, but are kind of subtly comforting and easier than making some of these wiser choices, but not more helpful. Well, you brought us, I think, quite skillfully to the second of the strategies, which is, I don't know if I love this term, but self-care, just taking care of yourself,

doing the basic maintenance that will prepare you to be as useful as possible. Right. The term self-care can be a loaded one. I'm not actually sure she used that term, but I've sort of framed this next section as being about self-care. This advice that you're about to hear from her is really about coming back to the breath, taking care of yourself, taking pauses,

finding moments of solitude, and retreat, doubling down on sleep, and eating enough food in times of crisis, instead of doing the opposite. And I got to say that of the three pieces of advice we're talking about here, this is the one that comes least naturally to me and the one that I feel the most resistance about. Because again, it's like just get me to the part where I fix it, right? And this place out in large and small ways, I feel this way about global conflict, but I also feel this way when my kid won't put her shoes on, right? Get me to the part where I fix it. I am constantly

skipping the part where I notice what I'm feeling or take a beat or slow down. And the reason for me that this piece of advice landed traces back to what we talked about at the top of the conversation, which is that it's based in this lineage of just immense suffering, right? So during the Vietnam War, Tick-Not-Hon suffered from chronic insomnia. He was hospitalized for deep depression. He wrote a letter the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. And one of the lines in that letter is, I have the impression that I cannot bear the loss. And so this is someone who suffered so much fear and loss. And through all of that,

he kept practicing. So in the early days of the war, he was working with others to build this rural retreat center in Vietnam where he could go into sitting meditation and drink tea and write poetry, even as he was also going into bombed out villages and cities to train volunteers and provide direct aid. And he found this way of coming back to himself in order to go out into the world and do good. And after the war as a reference earlier, he started building more and more of these retreat centers all over the world. And he took some heat for this. He had some activist friends from the 60s who had come to him and say, dude, where'd you go? Like, you should be out here marching in the streets with us. And his, his response was, this is the work too.

I'm creating spaces where people can come back to themselves so they can be more effective in the world. And he and his fellow menastics would lead retreats for educators and police officers and business people. And also they led multiple retreats for Israelis and Palestinians. And the purpose was to say, look, if you're going to do anything good in the world, if you're going to create any kind of peace that has to start with peace within yourself. And he saw that activists from the 60s were not taking care of themselves. We're not taking care of their families. We're burning out.

And so this hard one wisdom that we need to pause and come back to ourselves and come back to our breath is not advice that's coming from a place of disengagement. It's coming from a place of wanting to be deeply engaged, which is where we'll go at the end of this conversation. So what you're about to hear is Kaira Julelingo talking about why it's important to come back to the practice, why it's important to put on your own oxygen mask first, and you'll hear her call Tick-Not-Hon Thai, which means teacher in Vietnamese.

So when you hear Thai, she's talking about her teacher. So this is that clip. It's just so important. What our frame of mind is when we do engage in attempting to relieve suffering around us. We really need to be clear where we're coming from. It doesn't mean that we need to practice for years and years and get everything perfect and be enlightened before we can make a difference in the world, not at all. I always think of it as the infinity symbol, this teardrop on the left, and then flowing into a teardrop on the right, and how when we come into caring for ourselves and healing

ourselves, that naturally leads us into caring for the world, into being part of healing the world. And as we do that, that naturally leads us back, because we see, we see where we're not as effective as we could be. We see where we're stuck, where we have discrimination, where we have hatred, where we have violence. And that takes us back into the other side

of the infinity symbol to really excavate those things inside of us that need to be healed, that need to be seen. The more we can see those, the more we can release those, whoosh, back we are out into being able to be of service in this new way, in this deeper way, because we've liberated something inside of us. So for me, it's like a constant movement in between the two. It's not like, oh, go to the monastery, get it all together, and then you can do all this stuff.

However, I mean, if you just look at Thai and look at the Dalai Lama and look at people who have committed huge portions of their life to deep inner transformation, how much they're able to offer to others and how much of a clear, pure impact they can have in terms of relieving suffering in the world is because they have spent so much time and energy on healing themselves. Again, it's not that those two things are separate, but you do need some seclusion to do this inner work.

I think it's my opinion, you know, or you obly true. Reminds me a little bit of the NAP ministry. Trisha Hershey's work, we've never had Trisha on the show. Trisha, if you're listening per chance, you're invited. She, I think her slogan is rest, is resistance. And she's particularly focused on activists. And I believe, especially focused on black activists and the ideas you really do need to take care of yourself.

You need to work on one side of the infinity symbol so that you can go out to the world and engage. Yes, I would love to have her on the show as well. I hope that happens. I read this story about Tick-N-A-Hon in the 1960s. He was the co-founder of this organization in Vietnam called the School of Youth for Social Service. Basically what he and others did was they trained all of these

young people in a sort of domestic peace core. And they would go out to these villages and help provide schools and homes and health care. And there's this one story I read in Jim Forrest's book about Tick-Not Han, where one village in particular was bombed to the ground and the volunteers went and helped the villagers rebuild. And then it was bombed to the ground a second time.

And they went and helped them rebuild. And it was bombed to ground a third time. And they went and helped them rebuild. And the fourth time that this village was flattened, the volunteers and the villagers went to Tai and said, we think it's time to give up. And he said, nope, we're going to rebuild it the fourth time. So there was that fierceness and that clarity, but he also insisted that these volunteers take a day of mindfulness every week. And he himself was doing that, taking a day of mindfulness every week.

And if they could do it in the middle of a literal war zone, then maybe we could do it too. Maybe we could find that kind of time too. I'll share one more brief anecdote. This is something Kairajul Lingo shared in a Dharma talk a while back that I found online. She was with Tai on 9-11, and they were on a bus heading to a talk he was going to give in Berkeley in California and they got the news about the Attacks and the monastics all sprung into action and came up with all these Things that they were going to do and draft a press release and do this and do that and so that night they went to Ty and presented their plan and

He just said nope, we're not doing any of that. And the next morning, he took them all to the beach, and they played at the beach on September 12th. And then after that, he gave the talk, and then he went to New York City, and he gave a talk at Riverside Church, and he responded very directly to what was happening. But he was really insistent that they first come back to themselves, and a sense of peace and calm and to their breaths and to the community so that they move from a place of groundedness instead of from a place of fear, rage, anxiety, etc. And I think if you had told me that story about going to the beach after 9-11 and I didn't know all this other context that might sound kind of like not cool, man.

Not the time I get. Not the beach, right? But it's coming from this place of having a real on the ground, understanding for decades and decades and decades of what doesn't, doesn't work when you're trying to respond to ongoing crises. There's a great quote. It's been mentioned on the show before Joseph Campbell Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world and yeah, that's that's a paradox You can build your life around and it's tricky and it does bring us to the third and final strategy

from chirogeolingo and that is yeah, once you've taken some care to moderate your consumption of the news and pay attention to your own needs and taking care of yourself, then you can get to the other side of the infinity symbol and engage wisely. Yeah, that's exactly right. I'll just say one more thing before you play that clip because she will call me out if I don't. When she gave me all this advice, I repeated it all back to her. And the one thing she said that I skipped in my summary

was to take care of your feelings. And it was quite telling to me that that's the part that I chose not to hear because that's the part that I don't want to do ever. And so I just, I want to make sure to include that in this. If we're in kind of the second act of three acts here, I think the way to wrap up this second act is just to say, as you take the time to take care of yourself, it's not just about rest, food, water, play, meditation, you also have to actually feel what you're

feeling. And that doesn't mean being owned by it, and it doesn't mean trying to make it go away. It just means making space for it. And she pointed out that like one of the reasons we do mskrull to get back to the earlier conversation is that that's a way that we don't actually have to feel what we're feeling. And she argued that in processing these emotions,

we liberate energy to support us to take constructive action. And so that's what this next clip is about. It's about how taking care of ourselves and taking care of our feelings specifically relates to going out and taking care of the world. And she's going to offer some really concrete advice now like we promised about what you can do outside of yourself. And so that's this final clip.

And so this practice of daily mindfulness, nurturing joy, nurturing connection, having community, caring for our bodies, caring for our minds, resting, claying, singing, creating art, we know like the future is made of the present moment. When we think about what we want life on Earth to be like in the future, we better keep alive elements of joy and beauty and connection and care and stillness and silence and deep peace if we want that to be part of the future. If we just focus on all the things that are going wrong, that's going to be our future, because that's our present. It doesn't mean we don't focus on the suffering. It just means that we, you know, this beautiful phrase Ty would say is, you don't have to do

everything. Just do what you can do in your own little corner of the planet. So we take care of ourselves and we take action in whatever ways we can write where we are. We don't have to fix everything everywhere that's impossible. We can be in touch with that suffering, we can have compassion, we can allow it to break our hearts open, to make us care, to really be there for what's, you know, real and needing our love. And yet we also need to stay grounded and rooted in what's right here, you know, gardening, caring for the dog, caring for parents, caring for nieces and nephews, spending time with friends, caring for the neighbors.

I think the key is balance, moderation, and really seeing that this teaching from the Avatamsaka Sutra, the one is in the all and the all is in the one. If we live our life well, our one little life and our one little place on the planet, if we live deeply, if we live lovingly, if we live compassionately, that affects the all. We are caring for the whole cosmos when we care for one breath, when we care for one bite of food, when we look lovingly into the eyes of someone right in our home or on our block. You don't have to go to a war torrent area to bring more love and compassion and transformation into the world. We do need to care about those war torrent areas. We do need to

hold our countries accountable for the injustices our governments may be enacting that have a global impact. But if we can be peaceful, if we can care for our own energy, then the way we show up, the impact we're going to be able to have will be much greater. And we need to be taking good care of ourselves because we're going to be needed for the long haul. This is just the beginning. It's bad now, but this is just the beginning. And so if we don't take care of ourselves, we're going to be a mess when we're really needed, when it really counts. I'm tempted to just say, Amen. I mean, in Buddhist circles, we say, Sadhu, S-A-D-H-U, it's just like well-spoken. Yeah. There's this line in what she just said.

She says, we are caring for the whole cosmos when we care for one breath. And I've been thinking a lot about that sentence. There's this part of me that loves that and hopes that it's true. And there's this part of me that scoffs at it and wants to push it away. It feels, I don't know, soft and gauzy and too poetic or something. My way into that these last few days

is I've just been learning more about Tick-N-T-Hon's life is to go back to that time in the 1950s when he was hospitalized with deep depression. And one of the things he said about that period is that the thing that got him through that, the thing that saved him, was the practice of walking meditation. If you look at that, if you take that at face value, if you believe him, then you can think about these moments where he was deeply depressed and he was in the hospital, and he was taken care of one breath. And by doing that, he got himself through

and was able to go on to do so much good and teach so many other people that practice. And so I've been thinking a lot about just this idea that taking care of ourselves is taking care of the world and noticing all the ways that violence exists in my own little circles, in my own mind, in my relationships. Again, like when my kid doesn't put her shoes on, you know, sometimes I respond mindfully and sometimes I don't. And when I don't, it's because I'm not taking care of myself and my actions are not wise. And I think there's endless progress to be found in our own little corners as she's pointing

to. That feels really empowering in a moment where it's so tempting to go to helplessness. Or tempting to go to lecturing other people about how shitty they are, you know, because that could be delicious instead of looking at all the little ways in which we're not being so helpful in our own sphere. It's like another escape portal. Yeah. Well, and you see plenty of that right now.

We're in a moment where people are really spending a lot of energy telling other people that they're wrong about things. And I'm not saying that we don't need to be in dialogue with each other, but I've just noticed even in the last few weeks that there are these subtle ways where I, you know, in conversations with my wife, for example, where I have an agenda, you know, and I push that agenda. And there's like a different way to have that conversation,

which is more open and curious and collaborative and feels less violent. And going for that other route doesn't fix what's happening halfway around the world. But again, I'm sort of just leaning on the notion that maybe Kyra Julelin go and Tick Not Han no more than I do. And, you know, if they are indeed on to something with us taking care of our own little corner of the world, that really is something that I can do.

I should also just say for those who may be listening who are still feeling itchy about wanting to take concrete action around some specific crisis, whether it's what's happening in Israel or Gaza or the climate or what have you. Akira Jule did say elsewhere in our conversation that if you've done all these other steps and you really feel like you need to take action on some local or national or global crisis, then you should you should do that. There's a ton of suffering and there's immense need and we have to engage. And that can mean giving time, giving money, writing your congressional representatives. The senior leaders of the Plum Village community actually did something like this a couple weeks ago. They wrote an open letter to President Biden. And in that letter, they called for an immediate halt to the killing and violence. And they asked for a speedy flow of humanitarian aid. I've put a link to that letter and some other resources from them in the show notes.

And here's the thing about taking action. This gets us back to that infinity symbol from earlier. When you take action in the world, the benefits sort of circle back to you, right? This was actually another thing Kairajul pointed out to me. Taking action is a way to, for us, to absorb our anxiety and reduce our feelings of helplessness, which if we wanted to put that in 10% happier language,

we would say there is a selfish case for helping other people. And this is even more true, like so much more true if you act in community instead of acting alone, right? There's so many folks who are doing such good work in all these areas, these war torn areas, areas around climate, politics. If there's some place where you really feel moved to act

or you feel really worried, don't worry alone, don't act alone, join other people, and act together. Really appreciate you bringing this conversation to first my attention and now everybody's attention, or at least everybody's listening to this. That in and of itself was an example of right action, effective action, engage Buddhism, so good on you, DJ Kajmer. Well, I'm lucky that my little corner of the world includes this show. So it gives me a thing that I can do.

Yep, by Phyllis anyway. Thank you, buddy. Great work. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Thank you again to both DJ and Kyra Jule Lingo. I also want to let you know about an event. I'm doing coming up pretty soon, Adarma event, it's coming up on November 14th.

I'll be talking to my friend, the great meditation teacher, Leslie Booker. She is now the guiding teacher for New York Insight. And I'm gonna be talking to her as part of the New York Insight Fall Benefit event. You can watch the event online or you can go in person. Go to nymc.org for more details. 10% happier is produced by Lauren Smith,

Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davie and Tara Anderson, DJ Cashmere, with whom we are now familiar is our senior producer and he did a great job with this episode. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production and Kimi Regler is our executive producer. Alicia Mackie leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts, Nick Thorburn of Islands, Rodar Theme. We'll see you all on Sunday for a bonus,

and then coming up on Monday, we've got a conversation about the relationship between happiness and money with Elizabeth Dunn. money with Elizabeth Dunn.