Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 370: How Do You Love Without Being Attached? | Kevin Griffin

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

Today we’re tackling some thorny dharma questions. For example: How do you love someone without attachment? How do you love yourself when the self is allegedly an illusion? Kevin Griffin is both a long time Buddhist practitioner and also a 12 step participant, and in another previous episode we talked to him about the nature of craving and addiction. In this popular episode from the archives, Kevin talks about his semi-skeptical take on loving kindness – that venerable if somewhat misunderstood Buddhist concept and practice. His book is being re-released this month, with a slightly new title Living Kindness: Metta Practice for the Whole of Our Lives. In this conversation, we talk about:Loving kindness versus living kindnessThe dangers of modern loving kindness practice The idea that you don't have to feel love all the timeAnd we talk about a Buddhist text called the Metta Sutta. Content Warning: The interview includes brief references to addiction and other forms of suffering.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/kevin-griffin-370-rerunSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast, I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, we're tackling some thorny Dharma questions on the show today. This is stuff that can trip a lot of us up. For example, how do you love somebody without being attached? Or how do you love yourself when the self is allegedly an illusion? We're going to get into these questions and much, much more with my guest today who's a repeat customer, Kevin Griffin. We had Kevin on a few months ago. I enjoyed that conversation

so much as apparently did you, the audience, because the numbers were great. We had Kevin on a few months ago. I enjoyed that conversation so much as apparently did you the audience because the numbers were great. We all loved it so much that we decided to bring Kevin back. Last time as you may remember we talked to Kevin a lot about the nature of craving and addiction. Kevin is both a long-time Buddhist practitioner and also a 12-step participant. This time he's back with a semi-skeceptical take on loving kindness that venerable, if somewhat misunderstood, Buddhist concept and practice. Our conversation really centers around a book he wrote called Living Kindness, Buddhist Teachings for a troubled world. In this conversation we talk about loving kindness versus living kindness. The dangers of modern

loving kindness practice. He argues that if it stays on the cushion, it's focused on a feeling, and feelings are impermanent. The idea that you don't have to feel love all the time, but can still seek to handle situations with, and this is the very much not muleflouist Buddhist way of saying it, non--will. And we talk about a Buddhist text called the Meta Suta. I do wanna note that the interview does include references to addiction and other forms of suffering. We'll get to Kevin in a moment. First though, this item of business,

it's actually very exciting, I think. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you've probably heard me talk about our companion meditation app, which is also called 10% happier. The app is a place you can go to practice what we talk about here on the podcast, and you can do so with meditations that are led by some of our most popular podcast guests. It's sort of like science class in college. The podcast is the lecture, and the app is the lab.

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Those few milliseconds between closing the podcast app and firing up the meditation app are rife with possibilities for distraction, you know, a new email, a breaking news alert, the temptation to doom, scroll on Twitter, whatever. That's why we are now trying something new. This show, the 10% happier podcast, is now available inside our companion app so that you can go seamlessly from listening to practicing, learning to doing. When you subscribe to the app, you'll also be able to seamlessly transition to meditation right after listening to the podcast, not to mention you'll receive access to our courses, sleep meditations, and podcast episodes. Add free.

This is available now on iOS only Android. I promise it's coming very, very soon. So to get started, download the 10% happier app in the Apple App Store and then tap on the podcast tab at the bottom of the screen. Okay, here we go now with Kevin Griffin. and then tap on the podcast tab at the bottom of the screen. Okay, here we go now with Kevin Griffin. Kevin Griffin, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for having me back. I'm amazed. I assumed, you know, I'd be on the black list after my last time.

I always assumed the worst of. That's me. Oh, that might be a subject for discussion. We could do it another time. Oh, that might be a subject for discussion. We could do it another time. So we're talking about loving kindness today and I know we're going to get into your view of what some of us may kind of get wrong about this. But before we get into what we may get wrong about it, for the uninitiated, how would you describe loving kindness or meta-MeTTA practice?

What is it? So meta-practice, I suppose, to just meta itself. Either, or both. Well, I mean, see, that's even a really important distinction for me. So there's a traditional meta-practice, we call it traditional. The Buddha did not teach it, but it comes from, I think, about 500 AD, the Vasudi Maga, so, okay, the path of purification, which was a commentary on the teachings of the Buddha, and in that we find this practice,

which really was made most famous by Sharon Salisburg who I know, you know, well. And it's a very intentional way of trying to develop loving feelings and it uses phrases where you repeat phrases. Typically, may I be happy, may I be peaceful, may I be safe, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may I be safe, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be safe. And there are many other variations on the phrases, but along those lines, so they're just noticing that they are not sort of exactly prayers, and they're not demands, but they're sort of requests. The systematic part besides the phrases is that we go through different categories

of people starting with the self, not necessarily, often starting with the self, some people prefer to start with something easier like your cat, you know, which is not a person, I guess, but it can be a helpful, easy one to feel love towards. So we kind of start with the easy ones and then work with our dear ones. And then work with what we call neutral people, which is just sort of like everybody that you don't know essentially. And then into difficult people and often it's just you pick one difficult person. And so after you've gone through those categories, repeating these phrases, and kind of feeling the breath in your body, and feeling the breath in your heart center, in the middle of the chest. So you're trying to kind

of connect with this feeling. And then once you go through those categories, then you do a practice they call radiating to sort of radiating, loving, kindness out to all beings, ultimately. And I like to do that in sort of a almost geographical way, imagining where I live, my neighborhood and then my city, and then outward, you know, around the planet. And you can do the whole universe if you're ambitious. So it's very systematic and fairly simple in terms of how it's done. And one of the things that's very appealing about it is that it gives us something very specific to do. Because a lot of times when you're just trying to follow your breath, they're just trying

to be mindful, it's hard to figure out what am I doing? The breath seems so ephemeral. You're kind of drifting around. So the meta form really helps the mind, I think, to stay focused, which is, again, one of its values, one of its peripheral values. So that's the practice, but you made a distinction between the practice and the quality of mind. Yeah. So my book, Living Kindness, kind of goes through this is, what was the Buddha really talking about?

And are we getting it right? And in what ways are we getting it? I don't even like to say wrong, but are we missing something? And so just the, you know, the word loving kindness or the compound loving kindness is a sort of awkward to start with and confusing because if it's love, why do you have to add kindness to it? And then of course, we realize well because in our language and our culture, love can mean a lot of different things that aren't about kindness.

They can be about sex, they can be about desire, they can be about food, or you know, you latest Netflix show. So we add kindness to clarify that. So, okay, that still sort of doesn't explain too much to me. So I go back to the sutras, they're early Buddhist teachings, to try to see what the Buddha's talking about. And this is where, for me, it becomes interesting, because so much of what the Buddha talked about when he was talking about loving kindness was not loving kindness, was non, what he would call non ill will. And so you have a typical, like, we run into these phrases in the sutras that are sort of,

what, what's he mean by that? Why is he even saying that? Why doesn't he just say love? And that then opens up a whole kind of area to think about. First of all, that the heart of the Buddhist teaching is about letting go. So if he says, you should love people, it's sort of creating the potential for craving and for attachment. So instead of that, he says, just don't hate people. It's an interesting distinction because I find it difficult to get that motivated, necessarily, to love everybody. I can have compassion and kind of a broad sense of caring for the world, but again, this word love sort of suggests that I'm supposed to feel something, kind of juicy and warm and affectionate.

You know, and that comes and goes. So if I'm supposed to be feeling love, well, number one thing we know about feelings is that they are impermanent. So I'm putting myself into this sort of losing proposition already by saying, I'm going to cultivate loving kindness for all beings, and I'm going to feel love for all beings. It means that a lot of the time I'm going to feel that I'm failing, that I'm going to be coming up short.

I'm not going to be able to feel that all the time. So then what do I do? Do I feel bad about myself? Then I'm doing the opposite of what I'm supposed to be doing, right? So if I put that aside, necessarily as my goal, and just say, what if I can practice non-eal will? Oh, well, that's about letting go, right? And that's more natural to me in my practice, because it's kind of what I'm taught from the beginning of my meditation practice is to let go. It's there is something kind of like, oh, you know, I'm taught so much about letting go

and then somebody comes in and says, oh, now we want you to add this thing, cultivate this thing. I mean, it's a beautiful practice and it can have, you can have beautiful experiences with it, but we can't hold on to those experiences. So I think it's really valuable to do the loving kindness practice,

but then to take it beyond that and use it really as an insight practice. That is what you see through doing the loving kindness practice is what you want to carry with you. That isn't so much impermanent. You know, our insights or things that we can sort of arouse in a moment just like, oh, how do I want to think about this? How do I want to handle this situation?

Oh, I want to handle it with kindness. I want to handle it with non-eal will. And so I don't have to necessarily feel love towards someone, but I can act then more skillfully, which is why I came up with this term, living kindness. I think it might be worth saying more about this distinction that exists in your mind between living kindness and loving kindness. Yeah. So, the first distinction is this distinction between doing a meditation practice and then the rest of your life.

Which again, we know it can be great to meditate and hopefully it's not always, but you know, you can have these wonderful moments. But the real challenge for most of us is what do we do with that at the end of the retreat or at the end of the sitting when I put the spiritual book down and walk into the kitchen and face a pile of dishes? How do I take this practice into my life? That's realistic. Because for me, it's not realistic to just walk around, I love everybody,

everything is peace and joy. I've had those moments, they come and go again, and so it's, how can I apply this? And so then there are these simple ideas, maybe simple, I don't know, sometimes very challenging, but the ideas that the Buddha is putting forth, there's a beautiful one in one of the sutras, where the Buddha is asking one of his monks how he practices, he kind of in a harmonious way with these other monks that he's living with. And they kind of want to retreat like the three of them out in the forest. And the Buddha saying the phrase is, how do you blend like milk and water? And the monk, Anaruda, says,

I think to myself, why not put aside what I wish to do and do what these venerable ones wish to do? Well, that kind of epitomizes like living kindness to me putting aside my own desires in the moment and doing things for someone else and I actually came upon that Suta when my daughter was just like a toddler and I thought, oh, this is parenting. This is exactly what you do as a parent, put aside what I wish to do, and do what this venerable one, this venerable two-year-old needs me to do.

And that was very inspiring for me because, you know, if you're a serious meditator and you have kids, which I think you've had this experience, they can kind of intrude. They might seem to be intruding on your practice. And when you realize, oh no, my practice is to take care of this venerable one, is to put aside what I wish to do, that I am practicing loving kindness when I do that. Oh, that's a gift to me. It's like, oh, okay, right, because we tend to turn our practice into this precious little thing of like, oh, it's this meditation and I'm in these particular states. I'm feeling all this love. That's my practice. The rest of my life, not so much.

The way the Buddha talks about love or loving kindness, and I guess we could parse those words might be worth doing that at some point. But the way he talks about meta, at least, seems, at times inaccessible to me, you have a quote from the Buddha that you've highlighted At times inaccessible to me, you have a quote from the Buddha that you've highlighted in your book, where he said, even if your limbs are being sought off by bandits, if a thought of ill will arises in the mind, you are not practicing what I teach. One of my favorite lines, just because it's so,

I don't know, I guess I'm kind of perverse in some way. It seems so ridiculous. And it certainly will undercut any spiritual pride we might have, you know, any spiritual ego. If we think we have evolved to the point of being enlightened in some way, all we have to do is ask someone to start sawing off our limbs and see how we handle it. So, I talked to you one of my monastic teachers, Ajahn Pasino, who actually was really kind enough to help me with this manuscript. And he takes more of an attitude of this is more symbolic,

that it's not literal. And maybe, I mean, he should know more than I do. But it was interesting when I was teaching this Suta to some college students at a Catholic college where I sometimes do a little teaching and in the middle of offering it, I realized, oh, this is kind of the story of Christ on the cross. I thought, that's really interesting. What am I going to do with that? Because before that, I thought, well, no one could do this. Then I thought, well, that's actually sort of an archetype of Western spirituality,

of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of this person being crucified and saying, forgive them, Lord, they know not what they've done. I think he also has some complaints to God after that, or not sure which comes first, why have you forsaken me? But we do have this deal here. So maybe it's not so unrealistic. There's another story of a Chinese monk who was attacked by the Red Guard. I guess this was in the 60s. And he was like in his 80s or something. And all his students ran away and he stayed in the monastery. And the Red Guard came and beat him nearly nearly to death and when his students came back to the monastery They found him and they said and they were saying to him It's okay, you know, it seems like you're trying to hang on to to your life and don't hold on to your life for us and he said

I'm not holding on to my life for you. I'm holding on to it for those red guards because the karma for them would be just too terrible if I were to die. And so he recovered and apparently lived quite a few more years afterward. So another sort of model of this just unimaginable compassion and forgiveness. I try to take the Buddhist teachings as literally as possible and accept my own shortcomings in regard to them and say, whether the Buddha meant this or not, I know I can't do that. I can't be that person, but that's okay. I don't have to be that person. That's, I'm not perfect. I'm not enlightened. I have this vision.

And I think spiritual teachings are often about an idealized vision. Enlightenment itself is a kind of idealized vision. That really, what is it? Is it real? I think one of the things that keeps us motivated on our path is to have these visions of some kind of perfection, and maybe the humility of knowing you're not achieving it is something healthy.

So we can look at enlightenment, which is classically defined as the uprooting of greed, hatred, and delusion, or we can look at loving kindness, which the bar has been set by the boot of, not feeling any ill will while somebody's sawing off your limbs. We can look at this as we might look at the speed with which Michael Phelps swims a lap as part of the extreme end of the human repertoire, but shouldn't discourage us from trying to swim. Oh, yeah, fair enough. I think that's a good analogy. I also like to come back to something very simple, which is why I like this idea of

just non-ill will, you know? That's a nice sort of ideal to live toward is, can I just not have ill will? There's one of the interesting pieces in the Visudimaga that I talked about that where this form of meditation comes from, you know, when you get to the meditation, sending loving kindness to the difficult person. Many people obviously have trouble with that, and the Vasudi Maga actually suggests rather than trying to feel love for this difficult person or this enemy, they sometimes call it, just try to make them into a neutral person.

And I like that one too, because it's again, kind of like, oh, here's something I can do. I can just stop hating that person. I'm not going to want to go and embrace them. You know, and it's hard for me to wish for them to be really happy and have everything that they want. But I can maybe let go of hatred for them and just make them like a neutral person. So, you know, it's interesting. I don't know if I'm talking about out of both sides of my mouth, but on the one hand, suggesting, oh, it's great to have these ideals. And on the other hand, suggesting, oh, it's great to have these ideals. And on the other hand, saying, let's have achievable

tasks as practitioners, as meditators, as people on some kind of, I guess, spiritual journey. You know, one of the other models that I really like, the Ikuanalia, one of the great scholars and translators of the text, sort of the next generation. He was a student of Biko Bodhi. He says that just following the five precepts of non-harming to not kill, not to steal, not to lie, not to harm people, sexually, not using intoxicants to the point of heedlessness. Just to follow those guidelines for living is an act of compassion, because you're being non-harming. And, wow, that's another one of those moments, like the realizing that taking care of my daughter was an act of loving kindness.

It's another one of those moments when I realize, oh, I'm already doing some of the good stuff. Already, yeah, it is an active compassion. And I think that when we get interested and excited about spiritual practice or Buddhism, and we start to have these ideals, you know, we see these goals and enlightenment and let's say you're saying, like not, you know, not being angry with people who are And we lose sight of the fact that if something as simple as taking the precept to not steal, is actually a big deal. You know, that can we imagine if everybody in the world followed the precept of not stealing or of not killing, the world would be a completely different place. As individuals,

we might not feel that we've done anything particularly special because we haven't gone out and murdered anybody today. But when we know that people are being murdered and killed both through individual hatred and through state violence constantly. And we realize, oh, that actually is a big deal. If I do that, I actually, I'm participating very much in a communal act of compassion. I want to go back to this non-ill-will notion for a second. I'm pleased. My concern about it is that it feels a little neutral, a little dull in some way, a little cold.

I'm attracted to the notion of, I talked about this a lot on the show. I don't want to pretend this is an original idea. I've stolen it from smarter people. But I'm attracted to the notion of defining love down to just the human capacity, the mammalian capacity to care. It can range from slightly north of neutral to, you know, you complete me, Tom Cruise, uttering famous you know, famous love lines in a movie. But Nanyl Will seems really firmly in neutrality. And I get that anything

north of neutrality could be clinging or attachment and contrary to the Buddha's primary goal, which is non-attachment, letting go. How do we compute all of this? Because caring seems to be pretty important in terms of the survival of the species. Well, absolutely. I think what I'm trying to suggest is let's have a baseline. Let's have our baseline be non-eal will. It's definitely not the end point.

I mean, radiating kindness over the entire world, that's the line from the metasuta. Absolutely. I mean, beautiful. And something to practice and to pursue. I just like the idea that on my bad days I can practice non-illwill. On my good days I can radiate kindness over the entire world. And so not to, certainly I don't mean to suggest that that's the end point of practice. And I'm really actually pleased that you use the word care, because that's actually what I came to as I was, particularly addressing the question of self-love, was care.

And I would suggest that care is living kindness, because care is active, right? If we're talking about caring, not just I care about you, but I take care of you. I take care of me. I take care of the world. That's actually my translation for meta is care. And it's not an accurate translation at all. It's not a translation of the poly, but I'm completely unsatisfied with the translations that say, well, it's more like friendliness.

Like, that leaves me kind of cold, but care, because this question of self-love, which is a persistent one in our culture and in the mindfulness community and in the Buddhist community, especially when people are challenged to do loving kindness for themselves, I really like the idea of, okay, again, I don't have to feel all warm and fuzzy necessarily. Often when we're asked to practice self-love, there's an immediate problem of grading ourselves or trying to ask ourselves if we deserve it, if we've earned it.

And I don't think that's what the Buddha means by loving yourself. Oh, check your spiritual resume. Are you a good enough person? But rather, can you take care of yourself? And that comes back to very basic daily actions, behaviors. Do I feed myself? Do I rest when I'm tired? Do I exercise if I'm feeling a spiritual hole? Do I seek to fill it with something healthy and nurturing? Or do I harm myself? Then I don't have to be grating myself and, no, do I deserve love? I don't know. You know, but I do care about myself and I do take care of myself.

And that's what I think in practical terms, that's loving myself. That's meta for myself. How do you compute the seeming riddle of caring for yourself or others without attachment? I'm glad you saved that one. Because that's a hard question. So my immediate response is kind of in the same way that if we see someone fall down, we just go and help just pick them up. It's not because we're attached to them that we help them to get up. So if we treat ourselves as just

anybody, rather than as ourselves, just as we retreat another human being, and maybe even hopefully even just another being, then there's a spontaneous response to suffering or to need for care. And there doesn't have to be any attached to myself or I'm doing this because it's me, but if it were someone else who was hungry, I wouldn't give them food. I think that's what comes to mind. That might not be the most profound answer. Let's assume it's not the most profound answer.

I guess what I'm getting at those is not just how we feel about ourselves, but any being about whom we care. Let's take your then toddler, and now I assume somewhat older, a daughter, and now I've got a son. I am very attached to my son, oh yeah.

And so how can I love my son or my wife or my friends or my cats without clinging or without attaching? I would say you can't. And I have a chapter on this sutra called Born from those who are dear. And it's another sutra that I discovered around that same time. My daughter was a small one. Yeah, she is turning 23 this week. And I saw the title of that suitet, and I thought born from those who are dear,

oh, this is gonna be about loving your children, and how sweet and wonderful it is. No, not so much. What the Buddha says is born from those who are dear is suffering. He says, yes. So exactly what you're pointing to, attachment causes suffering. It's in the Sutta, a man comes to the Buddha and his son has just died. And he's going to the Buddha for some kind of help,

like bring my child back to life, or what am I supposed to do? And the Buddha says to him, Assar-o, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are born from those who are dear. Okay, well thanks for that. It doesn't really seem like it's offering much hope. He tells this man, come to your senses, which I think is a very telling line. No, it reminds me of John Kabat's book, Coming to Our Senses, I think it's called. And, you know, that's a common phrase in our language,

come to your senses. But, you know, if we think of it in mindfulness terms, come to our senses, means come into your body, come into your experience of your body. So, he's trying to calm the man down by just telling him to be present with his experience. But as I've reflected on this Suta quite a bit, first of all, it's quite apparent that that's true, and the Suta goes on to kind of argue for the truth of that, that if we

are attached to people, at some point we will have suffering around that attachment. It's not suggesting that having attachment to people is just continuous suffering, but that inevitably things will change. My daughter is living across the country and I miss her and that's painful. But what I think the Buddha is talking about is have insight into the truth. And that if you have insight into the truth, then you don't experience duka. You can still experience pain, but it's not confused. You can remember, like, this is natural.

This is what's supposed to happen. And that, for me, again, a lot of what the Buddha is saying is meant for me to understand the truth. And then if I understand the truth, and then if I understand the truth and I hold that with wisdom, with acceptance, and yes, with compassion, then it doesn't create duke. Because duke implies ignorance. It implies and you don't understand reality. And that's why it's particularly painful because there's nothing quite so painful as going through an experience that doesn't make sense to you that hurts. Whereas when you go through something that makes sense to you that hurts, you can be with that, you can hold it. Okay, they're going to stick a needle in my arm right now. It's going to hurt. That's okay. I'm doing that so that I'll become vaccinated. Ouch, that

hurt. Okay. But I'm not suffering, right? It's not duke. So that to me is, it's just a really critical idea because everybody, including ourselves, is going to die. You know, hopefully we'll get old beforehand, you know, which is also difficult. How do you hold that? And that's just for me, especially as I get older, these are the really important questions about my practice. How do I hold these experiences? They're inevitably going to be difficult. The Buddha's not offering us a rose garden. That's not the promise of the Dharma. The promise of the Dharma to me, I know the ultimate promise is, oh, I'm going to let go of all attachment. But, well, I've got it. Well,

I've got attachment. To me, the promise is that if I understand the truth, I will not experience duke. I will still have pain, but I will not experience duke. Does that make sense to you? It does. I might be worth explaining the word duke for folks who are new to this. Right. So it's the term that shows up in these early teachings. And it's one of those words that's just, it can't be translated into English, you know, directly, which says something about both what the Buddha was teaching and the culture he was in. It's literal meaning, is something like an axle that or a wheel that's on a bent axle. So I like

the image of the grocery cart with the bad tire and when you're pushing it doesn't work. It's just feeling that things aren't right. It's this discomfort in the world. And I think it does really imply this confusion about reality. It is the pain of life. And that's kind of how the Buddha defines it. It's all the physical and mental pain of our existence. And yeah, fundamentally, he says that that's caused by our attachment. So maybe I'm exaggerating when I say that if we're not confused, we won't experience

Dukha. Maybe we have to be fully enlightened, not to experience Dukha. But to me, the real problem of it is when we're confused and we just don't understand why does this hurt? But I could see it being a turn-off for some people, and maybe even me, if the end point of this path is we're not going to love the people that we love the most in the same way. In other words, we're not going to be clinging. We're not going to be attached.

That feels like a certain amount of fragility is creeping into the relationship. Are you picking up what I'm putting down here? Absolutely. I think the Buddha is portrayed in this way, and the Sūtas has really not having emotions about people. And I don't believe that. I believe that it is a creation of the people who put together the Sūas, that they wanted to create the image of this sort of perfected otherworldly being who was not affected by anything.

And I don't think that's true. And I don't think it's really what the Buddha is pointing to. I can. That's like, but we have to distinguish. I mean, first of all, let's distinguish attachment from love, right? There's two very different things. You know, when we're talking about attachment, and of course, again, we have to kind of define terms. I mean, we're talking about an unhealthy kind of attachment, a needy attachment. I need you to be the way you are and I need you to stay the way you are. Right? I need, which is like the problem, like I don't want my kid to grow up and leave me because she's abandoning me.

You know, that's really unhealthy, right? And that's the kind of attachment I'm talking about. But love and caring for others, I mean, we see the Buddha as spending his whole life after awakening, just giving, acting, it said that his 45 years of teaching were an act of compassion. But to make it a little personal about the Buddha, there's also this image that I like to call upon where latent is life. They live to be 80. Lateness life, his best friends have died. And you can imagine this guy has now got all these followers. And a lot of them are young and some of them are kind of annoying and behaving badly. And he has to deal with that. He's got this big organization now, you know.

And I'm embellishing here. But this part I'm not embellishing. In one of the sutures, he says that the assembly of monks feels empty to him. And then he names a couple of his dear old friends. Right? And then he quickly in the sutra says, I'm not suffering. I don't want you to misunderstand. I don't worry. I'm okay. I'm not suffering, you know. But I kind of go, yeah, who put that part in about how he's not suffering? Because I believe the first part. I believe that he is sad. I believe that he misses them. I don't think it belittles the Buddha. I think it makes him a greater teacher if we see him as having human emotions, because he was a human, you know, and he was a father,

and there's suit as where he's teaching his son, his son ordains. There has to be the motions going on there. So I don't think that we are not supposed to love and care for people. It's that we have to watch out for the ways that our attachment creates suffering, and our attachment creates suffering if we expect them to stay this one way or if we expect them Never to get sick or for us never to have a conflict with them or for them not to leave us It's challenging no doubt

Much more of my conversation with Kevin Griffin right after this Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page 6 or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the 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 Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans formed the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. greater. And yet, it's a very powerful idea. It's had a big impact on me. And yet again, if you're a Buddhist, doing anything that concretizes or builds up the idea of a self is kind of verboten. So, I don't know, what do you do with all of the foregoing? I think it actually helps to maybe start with the external. So for me getting sober was probably the biggest act of self-love I've ever done. And yet it comes in the framework of ear and alcoholic,

taking on that kind of, which sounds like I'd hate myself if I were an alcoholic. I'd hate myself if I were an alcoholic. So the idea that I'm an alcoholic is terrible. That doesn't sound like self love at all. And it's probably one of the reasons people object to having to say they're an alcoholic, which nobody has to say it if they don't want to. But it was, oh, when I stopped drinking and smoking dope all the time,

I was taking care of myself much better. And so that was, as I say, the external. But on the internal, from the meditative standpoint, point. I think it's watching how you are creating suffering for yourself. So when we watch our thoughts and we see the ones that are really not helpful, when we can step away from them and not believe the self-hatred in the thoughts. If you start to watch your mind in meditation, after a while you start to see that the thoughts are just coming. They're just pouring out, and some of them will feel intentional, but then a lot of them won't. And as we establish mindfulness, we start to realize that we have this capacity to just watch, which means there's some aspect of mind that can just be aware, that separate from this, and it's just profusion of words and images and ideas that are pouring out or pouring through the mind. So having that experience allows me then to question the thoughts.

Because I see that the thoughts can be contradictory. One day or one minute, I can have one thought, and five minutes later I can have another thought that's in total disagreement. So if I think that I am my thoughts, how can my thoughts contradict each other? So as I gain that kind of distance from the thoughts, then the ones that sort of embody this negative self image or self-hatred or, you know, the ways that I don't like myself, I can start to just see that, oh, that's just

part of the crap that's being generated out of this. And it comes and goes. It's not me, it's not true. And that allows me then to be more kind to myself, to say, oh, well, maybe I'm not just a loser or a jerk. You know? Maybe that's just an idea. Maybe the highest form of self-love is to see that there's no self at all. And in that, so you described seeing your thoughts and how contradictory they are,

and the inference there is that there can't be some solid coherent self from which they're emanating. They're just getting a little quantum bursts of energy in the mind. And that once you see that there isn't some homunculus of you between your ears that it's just a messy process, often causing a lot of pain, then you can kind of direct some more care in your own direction. Am I anywhere near the point here? That makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. And I think it does somewhat go back to that instinctive response to suffering.

All right. That's not about earning it. You know, if somebody is rolled into the hospital on a gurney, the doctor doesn't go, well, how are you? Are you a good person? So getting back to our individual response, just as you're saying, if we're not judging ourselves, then we're just going to respond as we would to the suffering of any being. I think that that's what the Buddha is saying when he's talking about really unconditional love, meta. It's just not about individuals who has a practice where oftentimes when the Buddha describes practicing loving kindness in the sutras, he just describes it as sending loving kindness in like the ten directions.

You know, it's very, it's sort of, there's no emotion there particularly. It's just, it's, this radiating, which it's kind of a beautiful practice when you can get to that place, when you just sit and you just imagine that out of your whole, from your whole, all the pores and your body and from your mind and your heart and everything, there's just this like beaming rays of love going out and spreading and imagining it surrounding the world. And even I like the image, even upholding the world, you know, imagining that you have the earth and your arms and you're holding it and touching all the beings, you know, it's

really a lovely way to just connect and to feel loving kindness, which I was sort of somewhat discounting. I mean, it's beautiful. I love to feel loving kindness. Again, just I warn against the urge to feel it all the time. Or the urge to make it into some special precious thing that only happens on the cushion, but then you walk around in your actual life

and are a jerk to people. Yeah, no, absolutely. And really, my most common daily experience of loving kindness is when I'm outside, and I look at trees and listen to birds, basically. Those are kind of the things that birds and trees kind of like trigger it for me. I can just like stop. Sometimes clouds, you know, I think nature is evokes loving kindness from us very naturally. It's one of the reasons the Buddha lived outside. He says, Ghost sit under a tree. What does he say? Ghosted under a tree. It's not like a random thing.

And he became enlightened under a tree. And supposedly he was born under a tree. And then he died under two trees, two solid trees. So, you know, I think there's a whole story about the Buddha and nature that we don't tell enough. I think I misspoke about self-love now that I think back at it, when I say the highest form of self love is to see there's no self at all, I guess I think what I really should have said was more that it's kind of an act of mercy to yourself to see that there's no solid self there to hate or to be pissed off at all the time. Just stop taking yourself so seriously,

that seems like an act of self-love. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I like that it's an act of mercy, yes. I think that's right, that, you know, it's an insight, the understanding of how we create self is an insight. And when we have that, and we realize that it's a creation, then we are letting go of the attachment to self, which is ending suffering and ending suffering brings happiness, which is another way of talking about love.

Can you get enlightened doing loving kindness practice? Because that certainly seems like it would argue that yes, you can. And yet, it's often that there's a concept of many listeners will be familiar with this, but just for those who aren't, there's a concept of relative versus ultimate. You know, and what is ultimately true is that nothing is really solid and stable. Everything's changing all the time. Nothing has a true essence, including you. What is relatively true is that you, Kevin, exist and I exist.

And we have to put our pants on in the morning and make appointments for ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. This practice of loving kindness is often described as a relative practice. I am sending good wishes to you. And so, would seem to be precluded that you could get enlightened doing this because you're failing to see the ultimate truth, perhaps. Well, anything I say will just be my own opinion. I have not become enlightened through doing this practice. So I prefer to speak from personal experience, but since I'm on a podcast and being asked a question, I'll try to say something useful. It's full. I think it does point to, first of all, that the Buddha is not talking about love in the

sense that we conventionally think of it, and that in fact it is a practice of letting go, and that when we are radiating kindness through the entire world, there is a letting go of self in that. There is almost a kind of merging. So there is this kind of oneness that we are trying to work toward in this practice. It's not really meant to be a dualistic practice. It's probably one of the things that I don't love about doing it in that formal way. May you be happy, may you be happy, and think of individual people and trying to project out to them. It feels much more natural to just sort of radiate love or be love.

And in that sense, yeah, I think that there's an awakening that can happen through that. You know, Jack Cornfield has a great essay. If you've never read it, it's called Enlightenment's plural. I think it's one of his books bringing home the Dharma, something like that. And in it, he makes the argument that enlightenment takes many different forms. And then he talks about the Dalai Lama as sort of the embodiment of compassion and some other teacher

as the embodiment of emptiness. And then another teacher as the embodiment of just mindfulness. And so he kind of says, then enlightenment isn't one thing. Of course, the different schools will tell you that no, enlightenment is what we tell you it is. And the teravodins have a very specific kind of map for it. And as you refer to, I guess we've talked about a little bit. And as it says in the Sutta, there's something fundamentally about letting go of greed hatred and delusion. So it seems like loving kindness practice is a practice of letting go of greed hatred and delusion. It is that it doesn't let go of greed for the feeling, if we're practicing for the feeling that we are staying attached there, and it can be also not letting go of delusion

because we can be trying to hold on to that feeling. So clearly it is letting go of hatred. But I think the metasuta is trying to point to all three of these things. I think the practice, if done, really in its essence, absolutely is a path through awakening, a certain kind of enlightenment, you know, and the enlightenment of loving kindness. This has been great, as always. Before we go, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and any other books that are worth mentioning that you've written and where we can find you online, etc.? Yeah.

So yeah, the book I've been talking about is living kindness, Buddhist teachings for a troubled world. And my website is Kevin Griffin.net where my five other books get talked about, this is the one book that is not about addiction and recovery. So the others are. And yeah, I'm doing zoom classes right now. Hopefully, I'll be out and about at least next year, maybe even drop into New York. May it be so. Yeah. Thank you very much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks, Dana. I really appreciate you highlighting this and being interested in it. It's great. Thanks again to Kevin.

Great to talk to him again. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartel, and Jen Poient with audio engineering by Ultraviolet Audio, as always, a hearty shout out to by ABC News Comrades, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohen.

We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus meditation from a new teacher to the TPH. Multiverse. Her name is Don Mauricio. That's coming up on Friday. She's great, by the way. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.

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