Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 384: What to do About Eco-Anxiety | Jay Michaelson

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

In the mental health community, there’s a new term: “Eco-Anxiety.” Our guest in this episode, Jay Michaelson, has been thinking hard about climate change for many, many years. Michaelson is a meditation teacher, rabbi, lawyer, activist, and journalist. And he is also a core teacher in the Ten Percent Happier app. He’s covered climate change extensively, and has taught environmental ethics at Boston University Law School and Chicago Theological Seminary. He has also been a leading environmental activist in religious communities. In this conversation, we talk about what Jay thinks some meditation teachers get wrong about climate change, what he calls the “delusion” that individual habit change can make an impact, how we can use meditation to engage more effectively in the kind of politics he says we need to move the needle on a systemic level, and how to use meditation and deep breathing to handle eco-anxiety.See 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. Hey, gang. Before we dive in today, some personal and professional news. As you may have heard, I recently left my job as an anchor at ABC News to focus full time on 10% happier, both this podcast and our companion meditation app. I had 21 amazing years at ABC News. I got to travel all over the world and witness history in real time. I'm also beyond grateful for the fact that my bosses supported my wacky little

meditation side hustles so robustly and then graciously agreed to let me step aside when it was clear that that was the right thing for me to do. I'm incredibly excited to triple down on all things TPH. We get a lot of notes from all of you about ways we can up our game in various ways. We've been listening and so we're working really hard on things like creating more meditation challenges, bringing our podcast guests into the app to teach you how to apply the insights you hear on the show, and a few other things that I can't share just yet, but I'm pretty sure you're going to love. One thing you may notice here on the podcast is that we will continue to run ads, including

some different kinds of ads, some of them read by me. The goal here, as you might guess, is to make sure that this recent turn in my career trajectory doesn't end up with me living in a flop house in Duluth. That's an in-joke for anybody who read 10% happier. Anyway, as a reminder, you can always get the ad-free version of the podcast over on the 10% happier app when you subscribe. I feel incredibly lucky to get to continue this work, and I want to say thank you to you, our listeners and subscribers for being here and making it all possible.

Okay, let's get to today's episode. I don't know about you, but the recent headlines about wildfires, hurricanes, and heatwaves have me increasingly concerned about the climate crisis, especially given the dire warnings we're hearing from scientists around the world who are really screaming from the rooftops and who also issued that quite grave report from the United Nations recently. I know I'm not alone in this. In fact, in the mental health community, there's now a new term, eco-anxiety. So how do we handle this?

What is the best move for the planet and for our own minds? In my case, I sometimes notice myself getting so freaked out that I just decided to stop thinking about it. It's too hard. Of course, I know that's somewhat dysfunctional, but how to avoid this. My guest today has been thinking hard about climate change

and eco-anxiety for many, many years. His name is Jay Michelson. He's a meditation teacher, rabbi, lawyer, activist, and journalist. He's also a colleague of mine here at 10% happier. Jay has covered climate change extensively for the daily beast, where he was a columnist for eight years and has taught environmental ethics

at Boston University Law School and Chicago Theological Seminary. He's also been a leading environmental activist in religious communities. While Jay has written extensively on how meditation can help us be more effective and more resilient in dealing with climate change, he's also pretty outspoken in disagreeing with almost every other meditation teacher about how exactly this works, including in an article published this week in our newsletter, the 10% weekly which Jay oversees. Some of you may also know Jay as the host of Teacher Talks, which are bite-sized, recorded talks about 10 minutes or less available in the 10% happier app.

Teacher Talks feature many of the teachers you know and love from this podcast. In fact, Jay has actually recorded a special new teacher talk about how to cope with the stress of climate change without becoming either overwhelmed or passive. So if after listening to this interview here on the show, you wanna learn more from Jay, just download the 10% happier app, click on the Podcasts tab

inside the app and then click on teacher talks to find Jay's most recent talk, which is called confronting eco-anxiety. In this conversation, we talk about what Jay thinks some meditation teachers get wrong about climate change, what he calls the delusion that individual habit change can make a huge impact, how he can use meditation to be more effectively engaged in the kind of politics J believes we need to move the needle on a systemic level, and how to use meditation and deep breathing to handle eco-exhiding. This is actually part two of a special series we started last Wednesday.

If you missed that episode with Andreas Weber, go check it out. It's actually quite fascinating. J is going to respond to some of Weber's comments in this conversation. That said, you don't need to have listened to that episode in order to get this one. Okay, we'll get started with Jay Michelson right after this. 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. It's your girl, Kiki Palmer.

I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur on my new podcast. with the show. you get your podcast. Hi, Jay Michaels. Pleasure to be here. Tell everybody where here is where in a very advanced recording studio located at Dan's secret bon flair in Westchester County. This is the first in person podcast I have done since the pandemic. And you know, the last inperson podcast I did was me with LeWanda Marques. Yes. Yeah, back when we said don't worry about coronavirus

point of information. We didn't say that. We said here's how to manage your worry about coronavirus. Exactly. And we're now here to talk about how to manage our worry about something Exactly. And we're now here to talk about how to manage our worry about something even worse. Yeah, even worse, even worse. Before we dive into the practical, I just want to establish your bona fides. Is that how you pronounce that? Is it bona fides, bona fides? Depends if you're a Latin snob or not.

Okay, if I was a Latin snob, it would be bona fides. Okay, so I want to establish your bonafides on climate change because this isn't like something you've got kind of recently interested in from a contemplative standpoint, you at least according to what I've seen published in Oracle about this in an academic journal back in 1998. So why did your ears perk up on this particular issue so long ago? Two things. First, that this was this incredibly significant major challenge. And second one that we were failing to address completely. And it seemed as though there were structural failures that were very hard to get past.

I was really pessimistic in the 90s. And yet also optimistic that when the effects of climate change began to be felt, that we would make a difference. So it's like, well, this is going to be too late. We're going to have to wait until the 2010s or 2020s for there to be action on climate change because people don't respond well to threats that are invisible. Little did I know that even having visible effects of climate change would not be enough to motivate action. Because we have visible effects right now. Clearly, it's exactly fulfilling what the more dire prophecies were in the 90s, increased floods, increased weather events, hottest years on record, breaking up of Antarctic and Arctic ice, all of the things which were science fiction when I first started writing about this issue are now fact. And yet, as we see, it's still

very difficult to sort of marshal the political will and defeat the opposition that's necessary for meaningful climate action. So it's been at the nexus of my kind of activist and meditation lives for a very long time. And I'm now particularly interested in how a lot of folks who are allies, people who care about climate change who are deeply concerned, are really hurting and how some of the ways in which we're hurting are actually making us less effective. What are you seeing out there? A lot of pain, a lot of what's now called eco-anxiety and is now recognized by the APA is an actual thing. That sort of this underlying dread that the world that we're leaving our children will be fundamentally different from the one that we inhabit and worse.

I feel that we at 10% happier get email about that all the time, but it's also a very difficult subject to address, because at least in my take, and I know others have a different view, it involves politics. It necessarily involves politics. For reasons we can get into, I don't think we can individually,

virtuously change climate change. We just can't. That's what the scientists say. No amount of individual action, even if all the good people in the world did it, would be enough to make a difference. We need systemic and collective action. So that makes it hard for 10% happier and for other folks who are interested in helping people cope with eco-anxiety because it's

hard to talk about this without talking about politics, and that's divisive. You have said that you disagree with pretty much every other meditation teacher out there on how to approach climate change. Is this the area of disagreement that you think other folks maybe not every single one, but other folks are preaching a gospel of individual agency. Which makes sense if you think about what meditation does, right? So we are going to ask like, well, how can I transform myself in order to transform the world? And in some problems, that's natural. So you did a series of podcasts episodes on racial injustice and seeing internalized racism,

seeing how we all carry unconscious bias. And that's a critical piece of the puzzle that won't solve systemic racism, but that's a huge piece of the puzzle to see how I personally contribute through my own conscious and unconscious biases to this problem. So it's natural for meditation teachers to focus on individual psychology.

And there are a lot of good books out there by really smart meditation teachers who take this view about climate as well. If I look at my own conduct and I see how I'm consuming too much, how my life is not sustainable enough and I then make changes, that will change the world. That's just not what the scientists say. That's what some meditation teachers say. That's just not what the scientists say. That's what some meditation teachers say.

And then there are other truly brilliant thinkers, including Andreas Faber, who was on the podcast recently, who say that our sort of philosophical, personal relationship to nature is the problem, and that's what needs to be solved. I partly agree with that, but I'm also so pessimistic that that could ever happen in a realistic time frame that it leads me to a place of despair, which Andreas Weber himself said that he feels, when he was on the podcast, he feels the sense of despair that it's a lost cause. And I just refuse to accept that. I just think that the tools that we need to make it not a lost cause are very challenging tools,

political tools. Fortunately, I think that meditation, for me personally, I used to be an activist, not in the climate change sphere, but in the LGBTQ equality field. I think meditation enables us to be more effective citizens and more effective activists. So I think there's a lot that meditation and mindfulness can do to help, but yeah, it's different from what

almost every other meditation teacher says. So just to go back to Andreas Weber for a second, he, if I understood him correctly, was saying we should all rethink our relationship to nature. He calls for the word he uses erotic relationship to nature. You could just add the word in meshed, intimate in there. I don't think he's arguing that's gonna solve the comic crisis because he's not, he's still pretty pessimistic. But you're saying yes, I agree with him

that an erotic intimate relationship with nature would be good for us and are just day-to-day lives. And you're not as pessimistic as him because the answer is something different. It's politics, not your individual relationship to nature. I guess that's right. I sometimes having had these conversations for many years now, I get pegged as the pessimistic one because I say individual actions really can't do a lot.

But first of all, it's not just me. I mean, that's the drawdown project. That's all sort of leading scientist expert. But actually, no, right? Exactly as you point out, I'm actually the optimistic one, because I do think there's a possibility for realistic collective action. And we should say just for folks who didn't listen to that episode, Andreas Faber isn't talking about erotic in the sense of sexual relationship, but seeing ourselves, as you

said, as in meshed with nature, seeing nature as other beings, not as mechanical. I think if I really felt that climate change were lost cause, I guess I would just have to use different meditation tools for, you know, living in the end times. But I don't think that way. You know, I think if you look at sort of the map of what Americans think about climate change, there's about a quarter of Americans who are very concerned. The Yale Center for Climate Communication, which is maybe my favorite climate change organization, calls us the alarmed. Those of us who are really alarmed about climate change of that 25%, there are still almost a third who aren't really doing anything about it.

So they're upset but not active. For that part of the population, a reorientation such as the one that under Ace Vabre is talking about could be game changing. It could change their lives and it could make a big difference. But that's a sliver of the overall population and that's nowhere near the sort of amount that's necessary for action. And 40% of Americans are conservative Christians. They're not going to go for this kind of neopagion erotic relationship with nature. Like that's just a non-starter. And so I'm interested in

what can actually move the needle and change whether it's increasing carbon sinks or decreasing carbon emissions actually change the situation. And again, you know, I went to law school and wrote about this and I ran the Environmental Protection Clinic in law school in the 90s. And so this has been an obsession of mine for a very long time. But I think for me, a lot of it is this kind of polarity that you and I, I think, hold, that it's possible to be committed to meditation, mindfulness, transforming the self, upgrading the mind, but also have a consciousness that's very real-world, practical, political, kind of nuts and bolts. To me, this is very similar. Like, I want to hold both of these sides. I do see the subjective nature of this problem, and I kind of have a hard-nosed view

of what it might take to solve it. I wanna talk a lot more about meditation and mindfulness and how that plays a role here, but just on the individual versus systemic, is there nothing an individual can do? You used to drive a Prius, now you drive a Tesla. I stopped eating animal products, although I did that not primarily for environmental

reasons, but because of animal cruelty. Is there nothing any of us can do that will move the needle in any way? There is no individual behavioral change that you can take that will make any difference in global climate change. So I mentioned the drawdown project. It's a consortium of scientists and others who are taking a very close look at what is causing climate change and what it's going to take to reduce it. So just a couple of numbers. The average Americans carbon footprint is 16 tons of greenhouse gases a year. That's much higher than any other country. But even that, if you were to reduce that, you would get 0.0000003% of a reduction in global greenhouse

gas emissions. That's one 300 billionth of the total. That is not enough to make any difference. And that's if you got to zero, realistically, you can of course get your missions to zero. So A, no, no individual action will do it. B, not enough people are virtuous enough to be persuaded. Now, it's not that individual action is pointless. There are other reasons to do it. First, it reflects your ethical values, right? I just, I feel I don't want to be part of the problem.

But I'm under no delusion that that action is making any difference whatsoever. It's not. And I recognize that that can lead to a sense of helplessness, but that's where meditation and mindfulness come in. We can work with that sense of helplessness. We can be with it and not let it control us. We can do all the things which meditators always do

and then focus on actions that do matter instead of wasting our energy on actions which maybe make us feel better or maybe give us a false sense of agency but actually don't change anything in the world. It's also, and this is also from the drawdown project, it's also helpful to engage in these actions to communicate your beliefs to others. People often have a very distorted sense about where Americans stand on climate change. It can seem like 50-50. It's not 50-50. Again, back to the Yale Center for Climate Communication,

only 10% of Americans are total climate deniers. Another 12% are doubtful that the scientific consensus is true. That's only 22%. And that includes people who are like, well, maybe, but it's not as serious. I'm not so sure. It's actually four to one. It's 80-20 practically in American public opinion.

So communicating your values, whether it's your austere lifestyle choices or my curious and dubious automotive choices, that has a value. Because that makes us feel like, okay, I'm in a community and people care about this issue. And just talking about it makes a difference, especially in religious contexts, or in social context, places where it's not always talked about

because it's sort of taboo or something like that. That does make a real difference. So individual actions are important, but no, they will not make any difference in global climate change, even if all the good people did it. And I can drill down more into the numbers, which again, I've pillaged from scientists if that's important. So 25% of global climate change is due to the production

of energy, not how much we use, but how we produce it. So we need to shift the grid to renewables, solar and wind. If I personally turn off the lights every time I leave a closet, it doesn't do that. First of all, there's always excess electricity generated. That's how it works. But second, that doesn't actually do anything. It doesn't lower any carbon output whatsoever, and it certainly doesn't make the systemic change that needs to be made. It's pointless. It may make me feel good. It may communicate my values, but it's pointless in terms of reducing climate change. That's a systemic collective issue. That's politics, right? Our previous president said he loves coal. If we love coal, we're killing the planet. And until we move as a

society from fossil fuels to renewables, that 25% of the entire picture will not be changed. So that's just one of many examples of the collective issues that have to be addressed, and individual action is not effective. How can we use meditation to be more effectively engaged in the kind of politics that you would like to see to move the needle on a systemic level? So I actually have five, but maybe I won't do a five at once. Oh, I love a list. One of the, all right, a good list, here's five ways.

One goes back to eco-anxiety. People are freaked out. It's not helping anyone for us to be immobilized by fear and frozen and terrified. So sometimes fear and anger and emotions like that can motivate us to activism. Again, I think maybe to the racial justice example, you got to feel a little angry to get motivated. But in climate in particular, the data is that people are withdrawing. One of the most important thinkers in the subject

is Joanna Macy, who's a noted climate activist and meditation teacher and Buddhist teacher as well. And she says, and I tend to agree with her, that the sort of the pain of climate change is so great that it pushes us to a place of denial. We can't handle how painful it actually is to think about. And so we don't think about it, or we deny that it's us to a place of denial. Like we can't handle how painful it actually is to think about. And so we don't think about it, or we deny that it's even real.

Or we take actions which make us feel better, but we don't actually do anything, which we mentioned before. So for her, for Joanna Macy and her work, a lot of it is just feeling into the reality of this tragedy and not being okay with it, but being able to coexist with it so that we don't have to make it go away.

And again, listeners can't see you nodding, but this is a very familiar meditation move. This happens over and over, whether it's your feeling anger, or feeling anxiety, or fear, or self-judgment, any of those kinds of difficult emotions. The move is to feel what's true, acknowledge that what's true is true,

and then hopefully have a little mental spaciousness so that it doesn't drive the bus. We're not trying to repress our feelings, we're not trying to make them go away. The goal of meditation is not to repress your feelings, it's to feel them, but not be controlled by them. So that's number one, meditations capacity to enable us to recharge, to tame our own eco-anxiety,

to tame some of the rage that we might feel, and that I think is a profound benefit. Second, we can endure more political work when we're able to be with these difficult emotions. So it sucks to do politics. How many years did you cover politics as a journalist? You know, and me too, right? It does not increase your faith in humanity to do that.

And it sucks to do that. It's easier to just compost more, right? And that feels a lot better, and you're connected to the earth more. But if the work is to be involved in the political sphere and we can talk about what that means in detail later, to be able to endure more of it is a meditation superpower. That's what the word you used, right? You can be in a complicated meeting and somebody shouting at you and you don't respond.

That's the meditation superpower and that is valuable for climate. So, that's number two. Third, meditation helps us act more effectively and shoes where to put our energy, right? As opposed to things which might just give us a sense of agency, we can communicate more effectively. Fourth, meditation can help us let us know when we've had too much. So, we've talked and I know you've talked with other guests about the term pendulation around trauma, like you go to what's difficult. And then when you realize you're like, okay, this is too much, I need to pull back, you pull back. And I think that's true for any kind of political engagement. If I'm wasting hours on Facebook having annoying arguments with people and trying to persuade people who aren't persuadable, it's helpful

to have mindfulness just wring an alarm bell like ding. This is not helpful This is not productive actually now I am going to take some time and meditate and recharge and relax and do what I need to do So that I can be more effective and finally there's something again from the drawdown project I think is so helpful and also the podcast how to save a planet which is so what does action look like so you can think of it as a Venn diagram of three circles. What the world deeds, what I might be good at, what I could bring to the table, and what brings me joy. So doing a kind of activism that's joyless and unsustainable

is not going to long-term be effective. Maybe it's contacting people in my community. Maybe it's doing voter registration. Maybe it's some kind of hard-nosed political activism. Who knows what it might be? Finding that in that Venn diagram. Mindfulness for me is like the main ally I have in those discernment processes. Like what brings me joy in the work that I'm doing and what feels really important. Those are things that mindfulness helps me discern. That was a long list of five items. It's not a long list, It's a great list. Yeah, yeah. What's the longest Buddhist list? There's the 108 attributes of the Buddha. 108, a lot of things.

Yeah, that's a sort of magic Buddhist number, 108. Well, yours was considerably shorter. Much more of my conversation with Jay Michelson right after this. Like the short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, you're on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast.

Life is short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs. And sometimes more importantly, the lows

of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is Short, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or wonder yeah. The bottom line, if I'm hearing you correctly, is that you can use mindfulness to not be

owned by your fear or rage. And hopefully it will allow you to navigate toward figuring out what kind of contribution you can make that will actually make a difference and that you can uniquely participate in based on your attributes and affinities. That's right. Sometimes when we talk about climate, we get angry messages from folks who are more conservative politically. But if they're a conservative folks listening who care about climate change, you guys are the MVPs. We need to shift the Republican party away from this really backward looking reliance

on sort of fossil fuels and so forth. There's a great organization called republican.org, republicen.org, which are sort of pro climate action Republicans. They favor things that Republicans favor, market mechanisms and things like that. They don't like a lot of regulation. Fine.

That's a really valuable place. If you find yourself in that Venn diagram, I'm not a conservative dude, but if I were, I'm a conservative dude, I like conservative things, I like market mechanisms, that's where I vote, Republican if I can, great, that's a great place to fight, this doesn't have to be a partisan issue the way that it is.

So wherever you find yourself, if it's politically, socially, whatever, right, I think meditation can help see where your individual work can make a difference, not again, and changing your own behavior, but in raising awareness around the issue and making this one of the most important issues that Americans vote on. You seem to think that in meditative contemplative circles, there's an aversion to the quote unquote dirty work of politics. If that's true, why do you think that is? No, it's a bummer. I think there's a couple of reasons.

You know, one is like, for a lot of folks, meditation is really valuable as me time and as a relaxation time. And I don't want to denigrate that. I don't think that's the best, most productive thing that meditation can do, but that's valuable. We're still living in very challenging times. And if meditation is what enables people to have some more resilience getting through this period, that's important. And I'm glad that we do that at 10% happier and we enable people to do that. But yeah, when you bring in things like politics, it's not as relaxing. And it's deliberately bringing in

challenging emotions. I talked about this in a piece that's in the newsletter, the 10% happier newsletter, that bringing anger into your meditation may seem like ruining your meditation. But my suggestion is that is the training ground for the mind. Like that's where the mind can learn to be with these difficult feelings so that we can confront them in daily life. So I think that's one is that it's a bit of a bummer and two, there is this orientation that some folks have and I don't know what percentage of meditators have, but that the solution to every problem must lie within. And if we all transform ourselves, that that's what will inevitably, eventually, change the world.

That might be true eventually in some hundred year horizon, but not in the horizon that we need for climate change. I just don't think it's the case that the solution to every problem lies within. We live in community, right? We live in society. The solution to shifting agriculture practices does not lie within. Even if I farm at home and even if I'm on subsistence for myself,

the rest of the world is not. And that's another 20% of carbon emissions comes from agriculture. It's not going to stop deforestation in Brazil if I change my personal behavior and I meditate and change my personal attributes. So I think there's just a kind of built in bias that a lot of us have when we spend a lot of time with meditation, that that should be the solution. And some of the best selling books on meditation

and climate change and social justice issues have political agendas that are at best wishful thinking. And I'm not talking like Bernie Sanders socialism. I'm talking way to the left of things which have never happened in human history and are not just left-wing political views, but utopian political views where everybody is meditating. And so we reach agreement on these difficult issues and there's no more greed, hatred, and delusion. Even the Buddha didn't think that was going to happen. If you could get tactical about how we can meditate in a way that would allow us to

deal with the various emotions that come up in the face of climate change. I think anxiety is maybe the easiest example because it's one that so many people can relate to. So there are two ways working with any anxiety, I think in meditation one is to kind of put an antidote and reduce it and the other is to kind of be able to coexist with it. So a lot of folks suffering from anxiety, whether it's ecological anxiety or any other kind, you just need an antidote. You need to find a way to calm down. I remember you and I in the heat of the COVID pandemic, I was teaching box breathing, which is a great breathing technique that can really just help calm anxiety. So that's like the first step. The second and maybe more interesting or at least more subtle step

is to allow some of that anxiety to be felt and to just investigate it. See what's there. So one example I outlined in the newsletter article is see what it's like when you're either doom scrolling or not doom scrolling. You're making a choice either to look at the news or making a choice to not look at the news and just see what's present. And what are you feeling? So you read some depressing article about wildfires and these articles are depressing and they are accurate. And you're reading some of the data about what coastal areas will experience if the sea level rises x inches or 12 inches or whatever. What's happening in the body at that time? Is it possible to feel those feelings unpleasant as they are and just acknowledge them?

I sometimes use the phrase right now, it's like this. This is how it feels. This is how it feels in the body. Here's what the heart rate is like. Here's the muscles that are tensing. I can relax those muscles a little bit. I can also just be with what's happening and not be so freaked out that I need to run

to get away from it. Because running away from it is the root of so much of this problem, as with many other problems. I can't deal with this, I don't wanna deal with it, it's too much, I can't handle it, I'm gonna just do something else. And I get that, I feel that all the time. The move, the meditation move is to,

in the lab of meditation, formal meditation, where you're sitting and you're allowing these things to come up. Or if you're just like I said, a moment of mindfulness while you're on your phone, there's that moment of mindfulness. It's like, okay, here's the feeling of fear. I'm not controlled by the fear. I'm aware of the fear. And for folks who are starting out in meditation, this may seem like baffling or like there's no distinction, but again, you're nodding. You've been in this situation. It's sort of an amazing Revelation when you first that have this experience of metacognition. I'm aware of the painful feeling or I'm aware of the rage that I'm feeling toward this

population or that that rage again sometimes can inspire us. It has its place, but for me at least it's generally corrosive and so if I can see the rage that's there, I don't have to give that voice in my writing or in my teaching or in my activism or whatever, and I can just be with it and not try to make it go away. You mentioned box breathing, and this is on the antidote side, the little less subtle side, which is, I'm freaking out, I need something to just calm me down before I can be with any of this. What is box breathing? Box breathing, I encourage folks to check out our resource for it, which is on YouTube

now, is just a way of changing the way that you breathe. If you think of the breath actually having four parts instead of just two parts, there's the part before you take an inhale, there's the inhale, there's the part when you're full of breath before the exhale, and then there's the exhale. Normally, especially when you're anxious, we're inhaling more than we're exhaling, and we're paying no attention to those other two parts of the breath. Sometimes box breathing is called box breathing because you can imagine it being a box with four equal sides. So you can take four seconds on each of those four parts of the breath. The inhale, four seconds, waiting before exhaling for four seconds, exhaling for four full seconds. You can even cheat and

do a little extra exhale. And then waiting before the next inhale on four seconds. And this thing, at least for me, works like a charm. Again, you know this, but in early COVID, I was dealing with a lot of anxiety. In fact, for listeners, they should know that you made it worse. I called Dan in my hour of need, and I was like, Dan, I'm feeling a ton of anxiety. Other people don't seem as freaked out by the pandemic as I do. I'm just afraid of . . . I went into a lot of details about what seemed to be happening, and Dan's your response was, well, you're more freaked out because you're right and you're seeing stuff that other people aren't seeing. And if they could see it, they'd be just as freaked out as you.

So this threw me into a cycle of total despair and anxiety. And thanks for that, thanks for that tip. Can I just defend myself slightly? I'm not saying I didn't say that because I did say it and I remember saying it. But I was trying hamphistedly, clearly, to validate your emotions. Because one of the most damaging and kind of violent things

that can be done to somebody who's anxious, in my experience, is for people to say, calm down, just relax, or you know, you're immediately going to solution mode, and I was trying to be like, no, no, you're not crazy. Like, I get it. You're totally right. But yeah, no, it was meant well.

But, right, no, I was just hoping that I was seeing something wrong at that time. Obviously, we were all petrified at that time, but I seemed uniquely petrified much more than my partner and then others. And I was like, I must be missing something here. And remember in the early pandemic, we thought that surfaces, you can touch anything. We thought we didn't know that outside was safe. We didn't know, you know, we didn't know anything. We literally were sterilizing our groceries at that point in time. And we didn't know that outside was safe. We didn't know anything. We literally were sterilizing our groceries at that point in time. We didn't know that there were going to be vaccines only 12 months away.

It just wasn't clear what the future was going to hold. That's where I learned box breathing was at that point to just sort of, again, center enough to do this other work. We shouldn't kid ourselves. People are feeling that way about climate change. A lot of the sort of scientific studies about people's psychology is that this low level anxiety may just be always there in the background.

And sometimes it pops up and sometimes it doesn't. But there are a lot of psychiatrists who think that this is a chronic condition. And again, I mean, if you think about the pandemic, as I said it again, in the New Yorker article, the pandemic was a picnic compared to what's ahead. In terms of the amount of dislocation, the amount of death, the amount of disruption of the economy,

2020 might end up being one of the really nice years compared to 2030 or 2040. So how bad do you think it's gonna get and when? Well, I'm not a climate scientist. So I just fully am just following what the consensus is and the scientific consensus. And I mean, now the sort of drop, I want to say, drop dead here, but the threshold

here that a lot of the scientists are saying is 2035, at which point the warming enters this kind of death spiral. And we've already sort of seen that. You know, warming leads to more warming. So example, ice, which, you know, sort of white reflects a lot of sunlight, that sunlight gets reflected back out off of the earth when that disappears. It's that much more heat that's trapped.

So it's a vicious cycle. The more ice melts, the more ice is going to melt and other effects of climate change. But we're already in the death spiral in a lot of ways. We've normalized living with unprecedented hurricanes, wildfires, and floods, and droughts. We've normalized the idea that each year is going to be worse than the previous year. That, to me, would have been unthinkable when I was starting writing on this 25 years ago. I naively assumed that when things got visible, that action would then be obvious, that that would be necessary. And it is true that the number, again,

that's sort of the Yale Center statistics, more and more people are in the alarmed category. Climate change wasn't even on the list of the top 10 electoral issue in 2008 and 2012, and it's now toward the top of those who identify as liberal. So, there has been a change. But if you look at just the raw number of emissions, no, I mean, it doesn't look like 2035 will be, you know, like an apocalypse movie, you know, like one of those. It's just

going to be a steady creep. And what I find most disturbing, I think, is that we seem to be putting up with it so far. Like, we're actually living in this kind of strange matrix-like world in which things which were completely unprecedented only 10 years ago are now third item on the news cycle. Well, I mean, Al Gore called it in 2006 and inconvenient truth about the frog sitting in the pot of water that's slowly coming to a boil. That's right. That's right.

It's not, you know, the frog would jump out of the pot, or this is this well-known metaphor if it was super hot right at once, but it just gets a little bit, a little bit, a little bit hotter, in this case, literally. And it does seem as though there's more consensus for action now. One of the very good bits of news, again, from Project Rawdown, is that most of the technology that we need to make the biggest changes is present. Again, I'll just not all about when I was writing in the 90s, but back when people were thinking about this 30 years ago, solar and wind weren't nearly as feasible as they are now. Now they're feasible, but they're in trench interest in Washington and elsewhere around the globe that are fighting it. So, you know, the fate of our world may depend

on a single senator from a fossil fuel producing state that has a lot of coal mine. So it's kind of terrifying to think about, but that may be the reality that we're living in in this particular moment in time. Well, how are you doing personally with all this? Because I'll put myself in the alarm category for sure, especially after this summer. And I notice in my mind all the things you've described is this is an urge to numb out, and then an urge to freak out, and that feeds my urge to numb out it on and on. So I think that where are you with all this and what do you do to kind of keep some balance. So one reason the early pandemic was so challenging for me was that I'm much more of an anger person than an anxiety person.

So I could get the press or I can angry. And the anger level, I feel anger around the pandemic, the moment that we're in now, that's a different podcast episode, but I've also written about that. And I feel anger around this too. And again, it's not that kind of anger that propels me to action. It's the kind of anger that freezes me in action or makes me really unskilled person to do the activism. It's hard to have these conversations. But I do have an optimism that in this coming 2022 election, who knows how it goes, the United States, but there are a lot of issues,

and there's a lot of time between now and then, but climate is becoming a key issue. And it's literally, I mean, I don't want to be naive and say that politics can solve every problem. But if the balance were different in the United States Senate right now, we would already have, by far, the boldest climate action in the history of our country would have already been passed. So I'm actually short-term, maybe cautiously optimistic.

But that depends on folks who are in the alarmed or concerned category, making it a priority issue, raising it as an issue, caring about actually getting people out to vote, fighting voter suppression, where it's been rolled out so much. We don't think of voter suppression as a climate change issue, right? We think of it as a sort of racial injustice issue

and an anti-democracy issue, which it is, but it has major consequences for climate. And just thinking about that lens as we relate to politics, I find actually somewhat empowering, because the solutions are no longer beyond our reach, the way they were decades ago. The solutions are within reach,

but it's so far they're not within our political will. It's empowering because you feel like there are things we can do about this. We can work hard and change our politics. Yeah, I mean, that's not like rocket science, like get involved in politics, right? Whereas again, if we're thinking about this scope of this insolvable problem,

or just think about cars, you know, right? Just the idea that there would be electric cars that would be sustainable or low emission cars. You know, so now it's just mustering the political will to kind of get back whatever short-term subsidies are needed and stop subsidizing inefficient vehicles, stop treating SUVs like they're trucks and not regulating them for having sex. On the systemic level, these things will make a difference. And if all of these seem too big to folks, getting involved in one's local politics can make

a huge difference. It made a matter of I change something about my personal behavior, but if New York City does, or a smaller town does, if Northampton does, that makes a huge difference. Even there are towns that are switching to solar grids for their local electricity, that makes such a huge difference. If a lot of towns do that, that actually will shift it. That needs collective action. There are so many solutions that have been proven to work

and that are within our reach. Much more of my conversation with Jay Michelson right after this. We should actually feel like this is an arcapacity to deal with it, but not by, again, retreating into our kind of me, me, me mindset. I couldn't have done the activism that I did professionally for 10 years without meditation when I did it. So I feel like I have some sense of that power of being able to be more effective as

a communicator and not go crazy every time something terrible happens, because terrible things are going to keep happening. Well, let's talk about that because if people are listening to this and feeling like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm going to maybe de-emphasize obsessing over my individual carbon footprint and instead start to engage politically from whatever political background that happened to emerge. What did you learn in your 10 years of LGBT activism about how to engage sanely that might be of use for folks now? So, this is kind of a Jewish thing to answer a question with a question.

Dan, what do you think has been shown by people who study this kind of thing to be the most effective way to move someone from, let's say, doubtful about climate change to cautiously agreeing that this is a problem that needs addressing? What's actually worked the most? I think I want to take this educated guess, which is if memory serves what worked in canvassing or deep canvassing for LGBTQ rights was simply sharing people's stories and then listening clearly.

And so an individual will go to order door and listen very deeply to the people with whom they were speaking and then share their story as opposed to finger wagging. So that's exactly right. When it comes to climate change, what's been shown to be the most effective strategy, moving someone from doubtful to concerned, has been to actually ask them stuff and listen to

them rather than preach to them, which may sound like common sense, but if you think about how this issue is usually talked about, you know, sometimes the opposite, like we get shamed for using a plastic bag or plastic straw instead of a paper straw or something like that. So, for folks who are more doubtful, so people listening, maybe it's their relatives or people who they know in some way or another, so asking them if they've seen any changes in their local, we might not use the word local ecosystem, but in their local ecosystem. So for example, yeah, I fish in this pond and now there's fewer fish or I hunt in this thing or I'll give it a personal example You know, we're recording this in the autumn and there's an autumn Jewish autumn festival called Sukot which involves eating outside a lot and

Sukot when I was growing up we put on our ski jackets to eat outside and This year Sukot's happening as we're recording this and there's mosquitoes out and it's hot recording this, and there's mosquitoes out and it's hot, right? And I see the clear difference in my own life. Unfortunately, the reality is that most folks who are on the doubtful side do not respond to California wildfires or floods somewhere else or the melting of the polar ice caps or even those images of the polar bears. The polar bear is a uniquely ineffective image to persuade someone that climate change is a problem. They don't relate to it. And it just doesn't work for a variety of reasons.

What works is to ask them their personal experience if they have noticed a difference between now and in the past and just listen to them and to listen to what their doubts are. Well, there are all these scientists, people are saying this. And then often, again, this is from the Yale Center for Climate Communication, the doubtful will then go to some solution that was forced on them that they didn't want to do. Maybe I'll use the paper straws example because everybody hates paper straws. You know, they were like, well, I felt that they would tell me I have to do this or they

told me I can't fly airplanes anymore, I can't take my family on a vacation or they told me I can't do this or that. And it starts to bring up all these wider cultural issues around political correctness or whatever it starts to bring up all these wider cultural issues around political correctness or whatever it means to folks. So it's listening to that maybe get it, agree, disagree, whatever, and then talking about what we're actually talking about. Well, what if there was no difference to you, but the electricity grid wasn't powered by coal or something like that or back on the effect side, you know, here's what's going to keep happening to your favorite hunting or fishing spot,

most likely according to what people are saying. That tends to actually move folks. It doesn't move them to be card carrying liberals, but it moves them on this issue. And it is very similar to, again, what I saw working as an activist 15, 20 years ago, that not shaming people for having the wrong views, but listening to what their actual concerns are.

And then sharing back then, it was sharing personal stories. Now it's kind of sharing stories of how this has impacted our lives already. But easier said than none, because it's quite easy to lose it in conversation with somebody who's spouting what you believe to be nonsense. And you've had some pretty traumatic experiences of people saying things to you when you were an LGBTQ activists that were just way out of line. Man, yet literally all the time. So one example is I was talking about the sort of possibility

for intimacy and love and connection and a same sex relationship and somebody interrupt me and asked about bestiality. Well, if it's too men and why, I know I'm not, you know, bestiality as well. So on the face of it, that's clearly a very deeply offensive comment saying that I can't tell the difference between love and lust and that my love for a husband is no different from the lust that someone might feel for an animal. But the very sort of defensiveness of that comment actually triggered some installed software of meditation or mindfulness in me and

I just immediately went to thinking tactically there were about a hundred people when this happened in person. I was giving a speech and I just didn't take the bait, you know, I was like, okay This guy may not be able to persuade one way or the other, but there's a hundred other people here. And so what can I do in this moment to be helpful? And I'd done some activist training. So it was clearly like, okay, I'm just going to take the high road, right? And I'm going to actually speak to my truth and not actually engage with this person. They were also making a religious argument because of biblical verses around B.C.ality and stuff. I wasn't going to go into any of that. And it was just going to speak my experience and my truth. And I can definitely say that's one isolated little example. And I was pretty

safe in that moment. I wasn't physically threatened. There are other moments where I've reacted less skillfully where there was more of a threat. But again, just that one moment, there was enough mental spaciousness in that moment that I could choose what was obviously the right response as opposed to like wanting to punch the guy in the face, which is definitely what I wanted to do, or at least manifest a lot of anger in response to that. And here again, you know, if we're having that conversation and someone saying global climate changes, conspiracy from China or something like that. So part of it is also knowing who you're talking with, both in the LGBT example and in racial

justice and now and climate as well. There's that 10% that's dismissive that I mentioned before. It's not worth talking to those people. They're just, they're not gonna move. I mean, that's the data anyway. If somebody's a hardcore conspiracy theorist about some issue, almost nothing that somebody from the other side, so to speak, is gonna say,

is gonna move them. So it's just not worth focusing on that, whether it's the uncle who's political views you disagree with or in this case. But again, there's 12% who are doubtful, there's another 5% who are so-called disengaged. I think they don't really just know about this issue, they don't have an anti-view, but they just haven't heard about it. That number is so small because climate change is now so contentious. Or there's about 20% of Americans who are concerned but are very cautious about messing with anything. Like there's a lot of jobs at stake

and there's a lot of things to worry about and we have to do a balancing that kind of view. Those are the ones who are amenable to having a conversation. And they may still say things which we find really challenging we if we're true believers, but that's where it's up to us to rise to the occasion. And for me, I'm gonna reach for any tool

that enables me to do that. Helplessness or feeling of helplessness just leads to unskilledful action and rage just leads to unskilledful communication. So I wanna be able to do better because I am freaked out. And we both have young children. And I mean, that's almost a cliche.

Like, I worry about the world that I'm leaving my children. But I literally worry about the world that I'm leaving my child. Yes, me too. And I look at the news again, especially this summer. And I extrapolate out to what it's going to be like when my kid is 30, 40, 50. And it's terrifying. There's a data point that I think it's about 55% of Americans under the age of 30 think that humanity is doomed.

And even if we allow some percentage of that for being like teenage, youngster, whatever, that's not all 55. I mean, that's a lot of people who really believe that or at least say they believe it in response to a survey and that Should really give us pause and they might not be totally wrong I mean, that might be wrong that humanity is doomed on the whole But the idea that things might get a lot lot worse and I you know I've shared this before I there are times where it's very personal for me like I really just wonder about my career choice

like what am I doing teaching you know meditation and writing and being a journalist? I should just be out doing something, find that Venn diagram. Maybe I'll repeat it. That diagram of what makes a difference, what I'm good at, and what brings me joy. Maybe I should just be redoing that. And just being a professional climate person. Fortunately, I'm in a fortunate social location where I think some of what I can do can help people be more effective in finding their own places to work. And so that's what I do when I have the opportunity like now. Yeah, I actually think you're, if I think about the Venn diagram, you are making a difference

literally right now. I hope so. I mean, I really, really want to inspire people who are interested in mindfulness and meditation to use it for this purpose and to see that it can help that it can make a huge difference that they can be happier while doing this work. You know, sometimes the only way to be happy about climb, you know, in the context of climate change is to just totally forget about it. And I'm on board with that, right? Sometimes.

Sometimes. But it is also possible to be happy in the sense that we like to use the word happy, not like joyful, thrilled, but like I can be basically okay, even while thinking about the profound terror of climate change. And that feels like something that I'd love to help people do. Is there a meditative technique that you would recommend where we actively call to mind worst-case scenarios and then monitor mindfully our physiological and psychological reaction to it? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't even have to be worst-case scenarios. It could just be this

summer's news. So let's say I'm meditating. I've set aside this session to do this work. It could just be not informal meditation. Maybe like I said before, you're looking at your phone. So yeah, I'll bring it in. And it's bringing in this very difficult, challenging subject. And my goal in that is not, it's certainly not masochism. It's not to just make myself feel worse.

It's, I guess it is to make myself feel worse a little bit, but it's to relate to that difficult feeling in the ultimate safe space, right? Meditation, kind of, I'm safe, I'm physically safe, I'm doing this deliberately, to enable the mind to not freak out when it touches that subject. And then when it comes up in a podcast conversation, talking about it, I can feel the constriction, I can feel that fear or anger or whatever I'm feeling, but I don't hand at the microphone, necessarily. Unless I decide this is the voice I want to hand the microphone to, but I don't do it reactively. So yeah, bringing it in, and that does mean that that meditation sit will not be peaceful and restoring in that way.

But what does it feel like? And you can get really curious for people who have a little more experience with meditation. You can really nerd out on it. So what is fear? Like what's the heart doing? What's the body temperature doing? You can get to know it as a present moment experience. Again, not to like revel in the darkness, but to just, okay, it feels like this. I got it.

Yeah, that feels like that. Don't like it, just, okay, it feels like this. I got it. Yeah, that feels like that. Don't like it, you know, but it feels like this. And to stay on that present moment experience rather than spin the catastrophe experiences. So this could be like this. And then in J.C. said 2035, I'm only going to be this year's old and my child and they're going to be just going off to college. And you know, like, it's easy to go into the story, what meditation teachers call the story.

And don't wanna not do that too much, it'll just be like, okay, here's this present moment of experience, it's coming from a place actually of love and concern and compassion, whether it's love for my child or for humanity and non-human animals as well. Or for yourself. Right, ends coming from that place of concern.

And I can be with it without freaking out. And I can go back to my personal Venn diagram. And I can donate more money if I have the capacity to do that to people and organizations who are working on this and trying to shift politics around it. Or it may be I have time, but not money. And I can think about ways to spend time.

And again, there's plenty of resources online, draw down projects, my favorite, you know, a million actions that you can take. Again, not like switching your toilet to low flush toilet, but actually like getting involved in the political process that will make the systemic changes so that every toilet is a low flush toilet. And so that it happens on a systemic level. I think there are at least three ways that I can think of where this practice, even though it's difficult, this meditation practice of reading some horrible headline

in the newspaper, or actually just conjuring it in your on the cushion formal meditation time and being with the emotion. I think there's a reason three, at least three ways in which you can actually feel good. One is doing it successfully, you know, quote unquote successfully, being with you're actually being mindful.

And you haven't freaked out in that experience. Yes. Feels good to being aligned with what is true, even if like, you know, we talk a lot about on the show about awareness of death. In a way, there is an aspect to it that has some pleasant valence of like, yeah, this is really true. And then the third thing is that once you've done that

and then gone back to the Venn diagram and are taking action, that feels good too. That's right, that's great. You just made up your own Buddhist list, though. Spontaneously, that wasn't on the notes people. That was just, I think that just happened. Yeah, what you're talking about, I think, is equanimity. And there is a joy to equanimity.

It's not how we usually use the word joy, but there's a kind of peaceful subtleness that comes in my experience, and in that of my students for many years, that this experience arises where you're kind of at peace with what is. It's not because what is is great or good. The climate change is definitely not good, but there is a sort of very subtle contentment and even happiness with just being with what actually is and settling with it.

And not that you've let go of the resistance to the difficult thing. And it's that resistance that's often the real source of the suffering. So one of our favorite teachers, Sylvia Borstin says that in life pain is mandatory but suffering is optional. So pain of climate change is mandatory. If you're saying what's true, you're going to feel pain and these other feelings around it, but the resistance to the pain, that's the secret sauce. I don't have to feel that. To me, I think it's the letting go of that resistance that can feel so good in a certain way.

I was going to mention the death stuff because you've talked about that before and written about it, that there are traditional meditation practices, Buddhist another, to contemplate death often in very visceral ways, like the process of dying and decomposing the corpse and that there are traditional meditation practices, Buddhist and other to contemplate death, often in very visceral ways, like the process of dying and decomposing the corpse and so forth, and it's not to be morbid about it, but actually to affirm life, to affirm the finitude of our lives

and how much each moment matters and our relationships matter. And I find when I do that, this is not just a Buddhist concept, there's the Western concept of the Memento Mori, Keith Richards, guitarist, Rolling Stones, whereas a ring with a skull on it to remind him of death. I've got skulls here in my podcast, do you think? That's good to know. And that's to be at some degree of peace or equanimity or acceptance with death,

the ultimate fear. And again, I just feel like I always have to repeat. It's not like we're like, oh great, death, that's awesome, more let's have more death, but it's not that at all. It's just to be at peace with what's challenging and hard and true about human existence. And I truly cannot think of anything more challenging

and true about the 21st century than this cluster of issues. And this issue touches everything. It's going to touch, you know, for the ultra rich climate change might not be such a big deal by a new country place and Quebec or something. It's folks who are disadvantaged and who are marginalized who are going to bear the brunt of this, we're going to have up to a billion climate refugees.

I mean, that's just unthinkable. And with a wave of nationalism that's already rising in the world, just think about how that's going to happen when there's a billion refugees, when every citizen of Bangladesh has to leave because the river Delta has completely flooded and that the nation is underwater. And it's just all of the issues that we care about, justice, racial equity, everything, gets so exacerbated by the climate crisis that it's hard to just be with it. But that, I think, for Joanna Macy, is what we're called to do.

I want to be sensitive to your time because you have to leave this house here and was Chester and drive down to... Lair, not house. Lair. Lair, sir. Bond, Lair, Bond, Villain, Lair. And be with your daughter and husband.

Did I miss anything? Is there something I should have asked, but didn't ask? I think I do want to re-emphasize that individual action has a lot of value other than in stopping climate change. That I'm not saying that it's wrong to lower our individual consumption or it's not wrong to compost, it's not wrong to homestead, these are all good things. And they can be good and yet also not for the purpose of stopping global climate disruption. Under Ace Vabor's erotic ecology is good, even if it's not a sort of

realistic policy prescription for ending global climate disruption. There are a lot of reasons to engage in activities. And I recycle, I do turn off the light when I leave the room. I do drive the electric car. I do all of these things as an expression of my own personal ethical commitments. And I do think that's important. And I do think it's important to then be in community

around that not to be like, haha, I'm so great. I drive an electric car. But just to enact our values in how we live. And it's important to have some sense of agency, but it really is delusion and a harmful delusion to think that that's what is changing the world. This is not the kind of problem that gets solved by each one of us sweeping the sidewalk in front of our house.

This is the kind of problem that requires solved by each one of us sweeping the sidewalk in front of our house. This is the kind of problem that requires much harder work, the work of finding a way to coexist with people with whom we profoundly disagree in order to save life on Earth as we know it. And it's funny to end with terms that are that hyperbolic and that extreme, but that really is what's at stake. So let's keep doing those ethical actions that feel good. We should live our values, but the solution lies elsewhere.

Well done, well said. Thanks for coming on again. Thank you. It's at the center of my Venn diagram. That's how people say I love you these days. You're at the center of my Venn diagram. Thanks again to Jay. Always great to see him. Before I let you go, I have been asked to pass along a quick message from our friends over at the Insight Meditation Society, or IMS, one of the great retreat centers in America, if not the world, co-founded by TPH Stahlworth's Joseph Goldstein,

Sharon Salisberg, and Jack Cornfield. Like most retreat centers, IMS had to temporarily close its doors back in March 2020 because of the pandemic. Now as they reopen this month, IMS has a list of on-site jobs they are looking to fill from Housekeeper's Cooks and Kitchen Assistance to Facilities Workers, a Facilities Manager,

and Retreat Support Fellows. Located on 400 wooded acres in the rural town of Barry, Massachusetts, IMS is a beautiful place to meditate. I agree with that. It's a wonderful place to work as well. IMS offers a robust benefits plan, including health and dental insurance, retirement plan, generous paid time off, paid parental leave, and a staff-songa program, meaning that you get to join a community of meditators.

If you're interested in learning more or applying for a job at IMS, visit their website, dharma.org, d-h-a-r-m-a.org, and click the Get Involved tab on the IMS homepage. We'll put a link in the show notes. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Kim Baikamom, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poehont with Audio Engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. We're going to see you on Wednesday for a brand new episode. I really love this episode. It's with Carol Robin and David Bradford

who teach one of the most popular courses at the Stanford Business School, which has to do with my term, not theirs. Interpersonal hygiene, and the students there call it affectionately touchy feeling. It's a great conversation. We'll see you then for that. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus

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